by David Drake
Navigatus reclined on the other side of the drawing room. He faced three-quarters away from the agent. Unexpectedly, one of the other heads within was turned toward Perennius rather than toward the Director. The man staring at the agent was six feet four inches tall, but much thinner-framed than the norm of protein-fed barbarians of that height. He was starkly bald with only a hint of eyebrows like those which regrow after facial burns. The eye contact surprised Perennius. Its intensity shocked him, stiffening the agent with a gasp which convinced the guard to get involved again.
“Hey there,” the soldier said. He set his left palm at the lower end of the agent’s breastbone. “Get the hell back, I—”
Perennius gripped the other’s wrist with his own left hand and squeezed. There was no emotion in his response. That part of the agent’s body was working on instinct. His right hand slapped the wooden tablet three times against the sill. The sharp rattle of sound cut through the buzz of concurrent conversations. It drew all eyes toward Perennius, as it had been intended to do. That was no longer an intellectual act either. The agent’s conscious mind was focused on the bald, spare man who looked at him and looked away, just as Navigatus shouted, “Aulus! By Pollux, everybody make way for my friend here!” The Director rose to his feet with a touch of awkwardness because in reclining he had slowed the circulation to his left leg.
Perennius laughed. “Say, I’ll come through the window,” he called, “if it won’t earn me a foot of steel up the ass.” He released the guard, looking at the man with interest for the first time. Perennius’ grip on the soldier’s wrist had paralyzed the man as small bones, already in contact, had grated closer. “Christ the Savior, you bastard!” the soldier hissed as he massaged the injured limb with his good hand. Perennius had been distracted or he would not have squeezed so hard. Still, no permanent harm done, the agent thought as he swung himself over the waist-high sill to meet his superior.
The two men clasped and kissed, to the amazement of most of the others in the room. Navigatus was not, all things considered, a particularly arrogant man, but he had a strong sense of formality. He wore his toga on all public occasions. His subordinates and those outsiders seeking audiences with him had learned early that if they wished to be recognized, they too had best don the uncomfortable woolen garment. Even then the Director tended to keep his distance; though so far as Perennius knew, Marcus had never gotten to the point of greeting everyone through his usher as if direct verbal contact would somehow soil him. Seeing Navigatus embracing the agent and his travel stains was more of a surprise than word of another attempted coup would have been.
Much more of a surprise than that.
Navigatus continued to hold the agent by one hand as he turned to his head usher. “Delius,” he said, “clear this—no, Aulus and I will go out in the garden, that’s what we’ll do. Close that—” he pointed at the window opening into the garden—“and see that we’re not disturbed.”
“Just one moment, your Respectability,” begged an intense young man with the broad stripe of Senate membership along the hem of his tunic. The Senate itself was a debating club rather than the governing council of the Empire, but those who debated there tended to be rich and powerful men in their own right. The young Senator reached out with a scrolled petition in his right hand, while his left hand tried to clutch at the Director’s sleeve.
The usher thrust out his ivory baton. The broad stripe saved the man who wore it from rapped knuckles, but it did not bring him any nearer to the response he sought. “Later, Felix, later,” Navigatus grumbled over his shoulder. “My goodness, Aulus, you’re looking so fit that it makes a used-up old man like me jealous. And how’s that boy of yours, Docleus? Pleased with his appointment, I trust? You know, we sent him to bring you the recall orders because we weren’t sure you’d accept them from anybody else.”
Perennius looked sharply at his superior. The guards in the passage were pushing the civilians among them back into the peristyle court. Navigatus had a bland expression as he stepped out of the drawing room and led the agent away from the confusion. “Gaius is well, thank you,” Perennius said cautiously. “He does indeed appreciate the favor you’ve shown him; and of course, I appreciate it as well. His father was a friend of mine until I enlisted. When he drowned, I sort of—tried to look after the boy, you know.”
“Of course I know,” agreed Navigatus as he stepped out into the sunbright garden. “No children of your own—just like me. Though of course I married, at least. Would you like some wine, Aulus? I’ll admit we didn’t expect you for another several days at best.”
Perennius ran an index finger down the side of a young fig tree. The bark was as gray and dry as the skin of the lizard that scuttled around the trunk to where it could no longer see him. “Why did you recall me, Marcus?” the agent asked softly. “I was perfectly placed, perfectly.” He looked up at the older man. “Marcus, I was helping plan the attack. Personal representative of the Emperor Postumus of Gaul—oh, they were very pleased, they’d been planning an embassage themselves but it had been let slip in the press of other business.”
The Director sighed as he bent over a bed of russet gladiolas. “It’s come to that, then?” he said. He clipped a stalk beneath its spray of blooms, parting the pithy stem with his long thumbnail. “The Autarch of Palmyra is disloyal to the Emperor after all?” He lifted the regal blooms to his nose and sniffed.
“Marcus,” Perennius pleaded, “Odenath was never loyal. He’s a jumped-up princeling who fought the Persians because they wouldn’t accept his surrender. He won because he knew his deserts and because he’s a sharp bastard, a really sharp one, I give him that. But he didn’t save the Empire; he saved his ass … and now he figures that fits him to rule the whole business in place of his Majesty, the Emperor.”
“Well, we can use him, I’m sure,” said Navigatus. “Such lovely flowers as these, you’d expect them to have a marvelous odor also.” He laid the spray against the hem of his toga. The russet blossoms were almost identical to the pair of narrow stripes that marked the Director as a Knight. “But instead there’s nothing, only the color.”
“Damn it, Marcus!” the agent cried. He slammed the heel of his hand against the fig. The lizard catapulted through the air, twisting madly until it hit the ground and scurried off. “Can we use Postumus too? Is it to the Empire’s benefit that Gaul, Britain, Spain all claim they’re independent now? Can we make clever policy out of the fact that every field commander with a thousand men thinks he ought to be on the throne instead of Gallienus?”
A large carpenter bee with a black abdomen lighted on the gladiola spray in Navigatus’ hand. The Director’s attention appeared to be concentrated on the bee as he said, “Aulus, we can’t worry about every little thing that goes wrong. We have to carry out our assigned duties as best we can, and we have to trust that other people do the same.” He sighed again. “Now if all my personnel were like you … are you sure I can’t convince you to join me here in Rome? There’s so many things…”
“We’re not talking about little things, Marcus,” the agent said with dispassionate certainty. “We’re talking about Franks raiding from the Rhine to the Pillars of Hercules, while Goths and Herulians spill through the Bosphorus into the Aegean.”
“Well, I know that, of course, but—”
“Do you know that we were damned near caught by those German pirates when we sailed from Sidon? That they were this close—” Perennius snapped his fingers—“before a little storm blew up and separated us?”
“I’ve said how much I appreciated your haste in returning, haven’t I?” the Director said. The spray in his hands was trembling so much that the bee retreated from its flower cup and hung an inch or two away in the air, buzzing querulously.
“Marcus, sir,” the agent went on, “everywhere I go, I see the big landowners shutting off their estates. They grow for themselves, they manufacture whatever they need in house, they’ve got their own armies … and the good gods he
lp the tax gatherer who dares to set a foot on their lands.”
“Aulus, there are agents assigned to that duty—” the Director began.
“Then they’re doing a piss-poor job!” his subordinate shouted. “Piss poor. And the coinage!” Perennius reached into his purse. “Have you tried to get someone to take a recent denarius, Marcus? Without feeding it to him at the point of your sword, I mean?” He found the coin he wanted, a freshly-minted piece with the bearded visage of Gallienus on the obverse. The stocky agent strode to the fountain in the center of the garden. A marble boy held a marble goose on his shoulder. Water spurted from the beak of the goose and the penis of the boy. Gesturing with the coin like a conjuror introducing a sleight, Perennius then rang it leadenly on the stone curb.
“No difference but shape between this and a sling bullet,” he asserted with bitter accuracy. “Even the goddam wash on it—” his thumb kneaded the shiny surface—“is tin, not silver.”
Navigatus said nothing. Perennius took a deep breath. In a voice much quieter than that of his last diatribe, and without meeting the Director’s eyes, he said, “Marcus, you say ‘trust other people to do their duty.’ Nobody does their duty but you and me, and the Emperor. And when I see this—” he spun the coin expertly off his thumb. It made a glittering arc over his head, then splashed down in the fountain where the two jets merged—“I swear if I don’t think I’m giving his Majesty too much credit.”
“You don’t want to say that,” Navigatus murmured, correct in a number of ways. The bee had left him, but the spray of blossoms was still again in his hand. “You know, Aulus,” he said to the flower, “I’ve never meant to be other than a friend to you—”
The agent paced quickly to the older man’s side. “I know that, Marcus,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
“—but I sometimes regret what I’ve done,” the Director continued, quelling the interruption by raising his eyes. “If I hadn’t—pushed you, you might be much happier now, one of Postumus’ battalion commanders and married to that little girl of yours.”
“Nobody makes another person into something he wasn’t before,” said the younger man quietly.
“I often tell myself that, my friend,” said Navigatus. He let the gladiolas fall and took Perennius by the hand again.
The agent stared at something far distant from the clasped hands on which his eyes were focused. “Besides,” he said, “Julia ended it herself. Her—emotional state was causing conflict with her duties as a priestess.” As old as the phrase was in his memory, it still had edges that could tear. “That’s why I accepted the transfer to Numidia with you, Marcus. Not because of the promotion.” He smiled at their linked hands.
“Ah,” said Navigatus. “I, ah.… Well, of course, there’s still the matter that forced me to recall you from Palmyra, isn’t there?”
“Indeed there is,” agreed the agent as he led the other man to one of the stone benches against the back wall of the garden. “When all else fails, there’s always duty.”
“You see,” said Navigatus as he fished a slim scroll from the wallet beneath his toga, “he came with this, which isn’t something that I see every day. Even here.” He slipped off the vellum cover and handed the document to Perennius.
The agent read the brief Latin inscription carefully. “Can’t say it’s not to the point,” he remarked as he rolled the document again. It had read, “The Emperor Caesar Publius Licinius Gallienus Pius Augustus to Marcus Navigatus. The bearer of this rescript, Lucius Cloelius Calvus, is to be afforded the full support of your Bureau. All his requests are to be executed as if from my lips. When it is necessary to accomplish the tasks thus imposed, you may apply for assistance from my Director of Administration, Aurelius Quirinius.”
The damned thing was in vermilion ink, Perennius noted, and it didn’t look to be in the handwriting of a professional scribe either. Blazes! “All right,” he said as he handed back the imperial rescript, “what does he request?”
“You, Aulus,” said the Director, meeting Perennius’ gaze steadily. “He wants you.”
“Blazes,” the agent repeated aloud. He had an urge to wrap his cloak around him again, even in the sunlit garden. “He’s the tall one in there, isn’t he?” Perennius added in sudden certainty.
Both men glanced toward the drawing room. The window was lined with the faces of men waiting with an impatience which bid fair to master their senses of decorum. In the center was the bald man with whom Perennius had locked eyes earlier. He was the tallest of those watching and the only one who looked calm. His face was as still as a statue’s as he watched the men in the garden.
“Why yes,” said Navigatus in surprise. “You know him, then? Frankly, I haven’t been able to find anybody who did.”
Perennius grinned at his Director. He wondered briefly whether an appearance of omniscience might not be worth cultivation. Not with Marcus, though; not with family. “Don’t know a thing but what I can tell by looking at him,” the agent admitted. “Must just have been his name.” But the cognomen Calvus, Baldie, could have come from generations before. There was something in his easy identification that bothered Perennius in a way that hunches generally did not.
“Umm,” said his superior. “He told me nothing at all, Marcus, except that he needed my best agent for a dangerous mission. And then he named you.” Navigatus smiled. “Not that there was any question in my mind, of course, but I’m not sure I would have withdrawn you from Palmyra if he hadn’t been so specific. And while the fellow was polite enough, well … he knew what the rescript he brought said, didn’t he?”
Perennius turned his head so that the other man would not see his expression and grimaced ruefully. Another startled lizard ran spraddle-legged a dozen feet along the vertical surface of the wall. “I’ve been doing you an injustice, Marcus,” the agent said. “I thought you’d jerked me because you were getting nervous again.”
“I didn’t want the Palmyra mission assigned to you, that’s correct,” the older man said carefully. “You’ve paid your dues, and I think it’s time you left some of the risk to others. But I’ve never scrubbed you from a mission which you wanted and for which you were qualified. Which is anything short of a bed-chamber attendant for the Empress, as I well know.”
Perennius laughed. He slapped his would-be protector on the shoulder and said, “Hell, what good did my balls ever do me, Marcus? But if the well-connected gentleman has been roosting in your chamber since Gaius was sent for me, you’ll probably be glad to be shut of him. Let’s bring him out here, learn what he needs and then the two of us’ll get out of your hair.” He stood up.
Navigatus rose also. “That’s an odd thing, Aulus,” the Director said. “He brought the rescript eighteen days ago today. I said I’d send for him as soon as you arrived—he has an apartment in the palace, but nobody there seems to know him. Except his Majesty, I suppose.… But he returned today without being summoned. I was rather concerned because we didn’t expect you, you know, not for a week at least.”
The two men looked back toward the building proper. To their mutual surprise, the door was open and the chief usher was ceremoniously bowing out the tall, marble-bald subject of their conversation.
“Blazing Noon,” muttered Navigatus in the Dalmatian dialect of his childhood. “If he can get around Delius that way…” And then both of them put on false smiles to greet the man whom Gallienus had sent to them.
CHAPTER FIVE
On closer examination, Lucius Cloelius Calvus was a stage more unusual than Perennius’ initial glance had suggested. Calvus’ skin had the yellowish pallor of old ivory, but it was as smooth as a young child’s. The skin’s gloss suggested someone much younger than the black eyes did. Perennius had heard that the Chinese, on the far end of the route by which silk arrived at government warehouses in Alexandria, had honey-gold complexions. He wondered if the stranger could have come from that far away. Like his skin, Calvus’ features were flawlessly regular; but their proporti
ons, their symmetrical angularity, were not those of anyone Perennius had met before. Also, there was something in the slim neck that nagged him.…
“Interesting that your usher reads lips,” said Calvus in accentless Latin as he approached, “but I suppose it’s a valuable ability for someone in his position.” He shifted his eyes to Perennius. “Or yours, sir.”
“Delius reads lips?” sputtered Navigatus.
Only a facet of Perennius’ conscious mind listened for content. Calvus blandly expressed surprise that Navigatus had not known that his attendant could follow conversations out of earshot. The agent did not care about that—Delius, in his position, could be expected to know enough to get his superior hung whether or not he was a lip-reader. What interested Perennius more was the chance to determine Calvus’ homeland from the patterns within the Latin he was now speaking.
With two languages, Latin and Greek, a traveller could wander the length and breadth of the Empire without ever being unable to order a meal or ask directions. From the British Wall, to Elephantine on the Nile where a garrison watched the Nubians south of the Cataract; and from the Pillars of Hercules to Amida across the Tigris, those tongues were in themselves entrée to almost the smallest village. The addition of Aramaic would add textures to the East and to areas of Eastern immigration like Rome itself; but even there, the Greek was sufficient.
But Latin and Greek were not always, even not generally, first languages. There were still farms within a hundred miles of the capital in which nurses crooned to infants in Oscan, for instance. Childhood backgrounds gave a distinctness that went beyond mere dialects to versions of the common tongues. Languages were as much Perennius’ present stock in trade as swords had been when he served in uniform. He was very good with both.