by David Drake
Gaius snorted. “You’re convinced of that?” he gibed.
Perennius looked from his friend to Calvus, standing beside the young courier and showing no concern at the conversation. “I’m always convinced that what I’m told to do is necessary,” the agent said. He laughed. “I only get into trouble when I come up with ideas myself.”
Gaius started to laugh with the older man, but the question on the surface of his mind made the laughter thinner than he had intended.
“Who are these, then?” asked Calvus. He pointed to a separate contingent marching down the quay toward the Eagle. There were scarcely twenty of them. They carried arms—spears and belt gear, with helmets and plain shields slung on their field packs—but they showed no more capacity to keep step than the sailors had. The section leader was at the left front of the short column of fours. He gave a sharp salute to the officer in charge of the detachmen of Household Cavalry. That worthy ignored the salute after a disdainful look at the newcomers.
Perennius swore with a bitter fury. He leaped to the main deck with the lithe twist of a cat charging. Officers were trying to organize the milling seamen, sending rowers below to their benches to clear the vessel for casting off. The agent slipped through the mass behind the point of his left shoulder, making as little contact with the other frustrated men as was consistent with the swiftest possible progress through them to the stern gangway. Gaius followed, using his greater size to make up for his lack of finesse. His chest and shouted threats cleared a path for Calvus, behind him, as well. By the time they caught up with Perennius, however, the agent was already reading the diploma handed him by the leader of the section of troops.
“By the icy shades of Hell!” Perennius shouted. He slapped the wooden tablet closed against a palm no less hard and handed the document to Gaius. “Read that,” he snapped. “How in the…” The Illyrian’s voice trailed off as he glared at the contingent of troops. The tight-lipped leader of the unit had made two attempts to defend himself against the agent’s fury. Now he was staring straight ahead. His men were describing a series of variations on “At ease.”
Aloud, Gaius read, “‘Master of Soldiers, West, Bureau of Assignment, to Commanding Officer, Liburnian Eagle. April 14. This order transmits Draft 737, twenty effectives under a watch-stander, as Marine complement of said vessel. In accordance with instructions 12th instant, Director of Administration.’” The courier looked up from the document to the troops. “But Aulus,” he said, “you said there’d be a full eighty men including the ones that’d be getting off with us. And none of these are missile infantry.”
“None of them are goddam infantry at all!” the agent snapped.
The troops were an assortment more varied than the sailors had been. One in the front rank was a Nubian from well below Elephantine. His head had been shaven, but the hair was beginning to grow out again in tight ringlets against his sepia skin. By contrast, several of the others were Germans—tall and blond and sunburned to the point of blistering. The remainder of the draft fell between those extremes with a certain bias toward eastern physiognomies, Syrians and Cappadocians predominating. The closest thing to a common denominator among the troops was the prevalence of shackle-scars on their ankles. In some cases, the marks were fresh enough to be bleeding.
“You,” said Perennius to a blond man. “How long have you been a soldier?”
The fellow turned to the man beside him and whispered a question. Without waiting for the other to translate, Perennius switched from Latin to Border German and repeated, “How long have you been a soldier?”
The blond man drew himself up proudly. His exposed skin was pocked with sores, and a sunburn gave him the complexion of an over-rouged corpse. “All his life, Hermann has been a warrior,” the man said. He spoke in heavy Schwabish, the dialect of the tribe which had grown to the point of calling itself the ‘All-Men,’ Alemanni. He gripped the pommel of his standard-issue sword. It looked absurdly small beneath his huge, bony hand.
“But Hermann’s leg irons got struck off some time this morning, didn’t they?” Perennius said bitterly. He turned to Calvus. “Our so-called Marines are a draft of freed slaves,” he said. “The orders were clear, so somebody’s playing games in the Ministry of Soldiers. Well, we’ll send these back and start looking for the whoreson who’s getting in my way!”
“How long will that take?” the tall man asked.
Perennius had not really expected a response to his diatribe. He paused in mid-stride and looked back at Calvus. His mind was assimilating the implications of the question. “Two, maybe three days,” he said carefully. “Do we have a deadline you haven’t told me about?”
Calvus glanced down the section of Marines. The agent made the same calculation simultaneously. He walked along the quay toward a lighter unloading hyenas destined for the amphitheatre. Gaius frowned, but this time he did not follow the other men without being summoned. Perennius had a useful vocabulary in a score of languages, and the traveller had proven his fluency in still others. Neither of them were willing to bet that they had a language in common which was not shared with at least one of the newly-conscripted Marines, however.
“I haven’t made a point of this,” said Calvus against the backdrop of growling beasts, “because I knew you were acting as quickly as possible. But the—” he swallowed—“Guardians located me once. By now it seems evident that the one you killed was here by himself and that there will not be another attempt until another can arrive from Cilicia.… But even if they must rely on—locally-available transportation, every day makes the second attempt more probable.”
Perennius sucked his lower lip between his teeth. He turned. “Longidienus!” he shouted down the quay. “Watch-stander!”
The leader of the Marines braced to attention. He at least was a trained soldier. “Sir?” he replied.
“Get your men aboard. We’ll be sailing as soon as the captain tells me he’s ready,” Perennius ordered. In a low voice, he went on to the traveller, “I suppose you know how the bug found you?”
Calvus lifted his forehead in negation. “We hadn’t expected anything of the sort,” he said. “They—you see, we’re used to dealing with th-them in a different aspect. It’s easy to underestimate them, because the individuals are treated as so many blood cells, so many flakes of skin. But the gestalt…” He turned his palms upward. “My arrival here would have caused an enormous shift of energies. We didn’t think they would be able to detect it. Obviously, they detected something. Perhaps it was that.”
The hyenas stank with a feline musk which made the agent’s stomach turn even in the general reek of the harbor. He stared at the spotted, scabby beasts while his hands rested lightly on the weapons beneath his cloak. There were a dozen of the hyenas, each of them a man’s size or larger; and Perennius thought he understood the frustrated rage with which they glared out of their crates. “How are chances that they can keep right on tracking you?” the agent asked. He spoke toward the beasts.
“If they simply located my—point of arrival,” Calvus said, “then they have no more way of following us when we leave the vicinity that anyone else in this age would have. They will be waiting, of course, but you will still determine how and when to strike.” He paused as if to take a deep breath; though in fact, Calvus’ breathing was, as always, mechanically regular.
“That’s one possibility,” said Perennius to the hyenas.
“Yes,” Calvus agreed. “And yes, they may be able to locate me at all times, wherever I am, whatever I do. In that case, I see very little possibility that our mission will succeed.”
“Yeah, that was how it looked to me, too,” the agent said. He met the tall man’s eyes again. Neither of their faces held any particular expression. “Let’s get aboard,” Perennius said. “We’ll assume that they’ll lose us as soon as we get under way.”
* * *
The three and a half hours of unexpected delay which followed would have grated on Perennius even if Calvus
had not given him a specific reason to fear delay. He tried to react as he would have done if he were simply waiting for a Bay of Naples ferry to cast off to take him back to base from a brothel. The stocky Illyrian stood in a curve of the poop rail, letting his senses absorb the confusion around him while his mind saw only the dance of sunlight on the murky waters.
The problem was the oars. Perennius was not familiar with the process of fitting out a large warship—nor, for that matter, were many of the crewmen and dockworkers involved. Because the liburnian was decked, there was no practical way that the twenty-two foot long upper-bank oars could be inserted from inside the seventeen-foot wide rowing chamber. Instead, each oar handle had to be thrust through its port by men on the quay, then grasped and drawn in by the oarsmen inside the vessel. The oarsmen were experienced sailors and generally used to the shattering drudgery of rowing, but the Eagle’s cramped rowing chamber was new to them and thus chaotic. Most merchant ships—all but the monstrously largest ones—carried a few pairs of sweeps to maneuver them in harbor or to make landfall when the inshore breeze failed at evening. Such work, and that of trawling with a dingy, were just as hard as anything the liburnian demanded. The Eagle ranked over a hundred men in blocks of six, with four feet separating oars horizontally and only one vertical foot between the ports of the upper row and the lower.
Upon consideration, it was not surprising that it took so long to position the port-side oars, then to warp the starboard side to the quay and repeat the awkward process. It was not something Perennius had considered ahead of time, though, and only by excising his consciousness from the events could the agent restrain his fury. Under certain circumstances, he could wait with the patience of a leopard. Now, however, there was no kill in prospect.
“Cast off bow!” a ship’s officer called, and the halves of Perennius’ mind segued into alignment again.
A pair of sailors in the bow were thrusting at the quay with boathooks, while someone on the dock loosed a hawser from the bollard holding it. The cavalry squadron had remounted. It was forming in column of twos, while wagons and stevedores bustled on other quays. The face of one of the onlookers was unexpectedly familiar: Terentius Niger, the tribune who had handled the arrangements with verve and skill. Perennius saluted him. Those virtues made up for any lack of security-consciousness the younger man had shown.
“Where the hell is Sestius?” the agent asked suddenly. He had been ambivalent about the Cilician initially. Now, given the size and quality of the Marine complement, Perennius did not care to miss even a single trained soldier—whether or not the soldier knew the ground where the operation would climax.
“He and his friend boarded just as they were about to raise the gangplanks,” Gaius said. He stood near Perennius, but he knew the agent too well to intrude on his brown study until called to do so. “I thought they’d come back here, but they’ve stayed up in the bow.” He nodded. Perennius, following the motion, caught sight of the centurion in a group of Marines. “I didn’t think you’d want to be disturbed, so I didn’t say anything.”
“Cast off aft!” cried the officer. The shaft of a boathook missed Calvus’ gleaming pate by inches as a sailor swung the tool over the rail.
“Let’s go see him,” Perennius said. He wondered with a certain humor what would happen if Calvus were brained in a boating accident. He had a gut feeling that the whole fantastic nightmare would melt back to the reality of a few weeks before.
Though that reality was nightmare enough, the Sun knew.
“Hope to blazes his friend’s a soldier,” the agent muttered as he stepped down the ladder. “That’s the least of the help we need.”
A drum thudded in the rowing chamber, thudded again, and then the coxswain began screaming curses forward as oarblades clattered together. The officer responsible below decks was trying to ease the vessel out of harbor with a few oars, leaving the rest shipped until the Eagle gained sea room. Even that conservative plan had not proven an immediate success.
“I thought of using a merchant ship,” Perennius said to the tall man. Calvus had not asked for an explanation, but the obvious chaos seemed to Perennius to demand one. “Might’ve been faster, and for sure it was simpler. But I just came from those waters. I don’t see us making Tarsus without having to run or to fight at least once.”
The ship lurched forward as a dozen oars bit the water simultaneously. A Marine stumbled against Perennius and caromed off as if from a stone post. The soldier’s tunic hung over his bones as if from a rack, and he cringed away from the agent as if he expected a boot to follow the contact. “Right now,” Perennius added gloomily, “I’m praying that it’s run.”
The fighting towers were wooden and six feet in each dimension. At one time they had been painted to look like stone. In combat they gave both vantage and a little extra wallop to missiles flung at an enemy from them. For carriage, the towers were knocked down and laid flat on the decking where they would be erected at need. The forward tower thus made a slightly raised table. A number of enterprising Marines had already started a dice game on it. Sestius and others looked on. As he approached the centurion, Perennius’ face began to go blank. Gaius knew him well enough to know the expression was more threatening than another man’s open rage.
“I haven’t met your friend, yet, Quintus,” the agent said in a tone that only a ferret might have thought was friendly and bantering.
The centurion had watched them approach, at first out of the corner of his eye but at last with a stiff smile of greeting. Sestius moved a step toward the unrailed edge of the deck, drawing his companion along with a gesture. “This is my friend, Sabellius,” he said nervously. He converted the summons into an introductory gesture. “He’ll be a lot of help to us.” Froth scudded off in the breeze as the oars feathered. It spattered Sestius’ high-laced boots and the Gallic trousers of his companion.
Perennius paced toward his quarry, past the oblivious Marines and a pair of sailors checking the forestays of the mast. Calvus and Gaius followed him like the limbs of a V. The courier’s face showed a concern which the tall man never seemed to feel. The agent was staring at Sabellius. Shorter than Sestius, Sabellius wore a waist-length cloak over tunic and trousers. The hood of the cloak was raised over reddish, rough-cut hair. The garment’s throat-pin was arranged so that the cloak hung closed.
“Sir, pleased to meet you—” Sabellius began, extending a hand toward the agent.
Perennius reached past the proferred hand and gripped the throat of Sabellius’ drab brown tunic. Sabellius screamed. The centurion shouted in anger and tried to seize Perennius’ wrist with both hands. The agent used Sestius’ weight and his own strength to jerk the tunic down. The blend of wool and linen tore as Sabellius’ knees banged against the deck. The breasts displayed behind the cloak and torn tunic were large-nippled—flat for a woman, but a woman’s beyond any question.
Perennius released his prey. “All right, soldier,” he demanded grimly as he turned to Sestius, “what the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”
The dice game had broken up with a cry of interest. The shooter had raised his eyes from the board to call on Fortune and had caught a glimpse of tit instead. Gaius shifted between the agent and the Marines. His instinct was to give Perennius room to handle the situation whichever way he chose. Help against one man, even an armed soldier like Sestius, was not something the agent would need or want.
“Look, buddy,” the centurion blustered, “we agreed that I’d bring a friend, and Sabellia’s—”
Sestius still held Perennius’ right wrist and forearm, though his grip was loosening as the soldier drew back in embarrassment. Perennius locked the other’s elbow with his right hand. He cracked Sestius across the face with the callus-ridged fingers of his left hand. The shock would have put Sestius among the threshing oars had not the agent held him simultaneously. “Don’t give me that shit!” Perennius shouted. “You were hiding her, weren’t you? Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think
everybody aboard’s blind so they won’t notice the first time she takes a shit over the side? There’s a hundred and fifty of us on this tub. That’s pretty close quarters for a bit of nookie, don’t you think?”
“Sir,” the centurion said. All the hectoring arrogance was gone from his voice. “It’s not that, it was for after—”
Perennius released him. The man slid a heel back for balance. His boot thudded on the coaming. “And you thought if I didn’t catch on before we left port that I wouldn’t put her ashore at the first landfall, is that it?” the agent demanded in a quiet, poisonous tone. Voice rising again, he added, “That I wouldn’t dump her over the side?”
“Sir,” repeated Sestius, grimacing.
Perennius turned his back on the other man. What he saw behind him was a chilling surprise. Not the raucous Marines, not the back of tall, capable Gaius as he acted as a buffer. Calvus was frozen in the concentration which the agent had mistaken for fear that night in the alley. Sabellia was quiet also. She knelt where Perennius had thrown her down in ripping her tunic. The knife in her hand was short-bladed, but it looked sharp enough to have severed ribs on its way to the agent’s heart.
“I don’t think that’s necessary any more,” Perennius said very softly. He did not reach for the knife or the woman, though the weight came off his right boot minusculy.
“Bella,” Sestius said in a strangled voice. “Put that away!”
The sheath was inside the waistband of her trousers, where the fall of the tunic hid the hilt. Sabellia looked at Perennius, not the centurion, as she slipped the weapon away again. “I should have put it in you,” she said. Her throaty contralto was actually deeper than the masculine tone she had tried to counterfeit in greeting. “Then we’d see how tough you were.” She rose to her feet with a sway of cloth and flesh. Calvus relaxed visibly.
One of the Marines had enough Latin to call, “Hey Legate—save me sloppy seconds!”