by David Drake
At the moment, villagers were running toward the church from the common wheat field and from the garden plots terraced up the hillside. Black-faced sheep were blurs on the crest above, but the herdsmen must already have joined the general flow toward the tower.
The one exception was a man in a black robe which fluttered as he kicked his donkey toward the newcomers. As the villager approached, he tried to keep his left hand raised. The gold or gilded cross which he held wavered and jerked as the donkey beneath him trotted.
“A brave man,” Gaius commented as he watched the envoy. The courier glanced up at the outcrop from which they had been spotted initially. The rock was behind them now and he, like Perennius, was wondering if the lookout was still hidden in their rear.
“Three years ago, friends of mine were burned alive for refusing to sacrifice,” Sabellia said grimly. “Then the Lord chose to spare me for his future works, so I wasn’t requested to sacrifice to idols when others were. Why do you think Christians would fear death by bandits when we go to our pyres singing hymns of praise?”
“At least they’ve got donkeys to sell,” remarked Sestius, possibly to put a cap on the present discussion. “I’ll be damned glad to get off my own feet. Especially with the load of metal we’re carrying—not that I’m complaining.”
“Yeah, well,” said the agent. “No reason for any of us to talk about what we picked up from the pirates. I don’t doubt these folk are religious—” he nodded to the Gallic woman, keeping his face still and his eyes serious—“but there’s no advantage to our putting temptation in their way. We’ll offer them fair prices and as much more as it takes to get the animals … but we don’t need to tell them just how much bullion we’re hauling around.”
The agent was a little worried about Sabellia. Her faith had not been a secret before. Not from him, at least. He was used to the point of reflex to correlating data—expressions, gestures; the scraps of personal details that come out inevitably when a group of people live in each other’s wallets for weeks at a time. If Perennius’ mission had involved ferreting out Christians, he would … but the agent’s mind shied away from that thought in which business conflicted with something more personal and less common to him. In any case, Perennius had little enough use for gods that he could not get concerned by the foibles of those people who felt differently. If Sabellia refused to sacrifice to the Emperor who served and represented the Empire—then Perennius also served and represented the Empire. The Gallic woman had saved his life, and that was already more of a benefit to the Emperor than a pinch of frankincense on a charcoal fire.
But they were all under stress, even the ice-calm Calvus. If being catapulted into a community of fellow-believers put Sabellia off on some unforeseeable religious tangent, it might cost the party her services. It might cost Perennius her presence … and Perennius looked away from her, toward the man on the donkey, to avoid the direction his thoughts were taking.
The rider reined up noisily, ten feet short of Perennius’ party. The five of them had shifted instinctively into a ragged line abreast. All of them were looking determinedly non-violent. The agent had grounded his Gothic spear point-first in the soil. The shaft was taking much of his weight. His right thigh throbbed while he walked on it but when he stood still the feeling became agony if the limb had to support his body.
The man in the dark robe raised his cross. Most of his scalp had been shaven, though the hair surrounding the tonsure was black and bushy. “If you come in peace, travellers,” he said, “the blessings of the Annointed and of Dioscholias his servant be upon you.” Surprisingly, the man spoke in the local form of Syriac instead of the Greek Perennius had expected even this far back in the hills.
Stumblingly, the agent answered in the same Cilician dialect. “We are peaceful travellers, sir. Traders who expect to pay well for the food and beasts of burden we hope to buy from you.” Sestius was Cilician, and the Illyrian was fairly certain that Calvus could speak the language with the same facility that she had shown with every other tongue they had encountered. Perennius did not trust them to carry on the negotiations, however; and he had learned never to use an interpreter if there were any possibility of avoiding it. At best, an interpreter added a third personality to the discussion in hand.
The villager slid from his donkey and knelt. He folded both his hands in front of him over the stem of the crucifix and prayed. “Thanks be to Jesus the Anointed, font of all blessings, and to his servant Dioscholias who first brought his teachings to our valley.” The man stood again and said in a more businesslike tone, “Strangers, I am Father Ramphion, a disciple of the blessed Dioscholias, and his successor when he was translated to the throne of God. The Lord has blessed us by sending you into our midst. Come, join us in the love feast that is being prepared in your honor and in God’s.” Ramphion gestured toward the huts.
“Father, we thank you,” the agent replied. “I am Aulus Perennius, and these are the companions of my journey.” He introduced the others, giving their real names—or in the case of Calvus, the false male name that was all Perennius knew her by. “We will be glad of your hospitality.” He smiled. “I had expected your fellows were engaged in another sort of preparations, after the warning gong.”
“Oh, here,” Father Ramphion said, offering Perennius the donkey’s reins. “You’re injured. You should not be walking.”
“Actually, I think it’s better for the leg that I do use it,” the agent said. “But perhaps Sabellia…?”
The discussion degenerated at once into multiple refusals of the offer. The donkey, unconcerned, tugged from Ramphion’s hand to the roadside to crop grass growing between the track and the wheat beyond. Abruptly, Sestius ended the nonsense by accepting the charity and mounting the beast. Perennius felt like an idiot for having wasted time and let matters get out of hand in such a ridiculous way. The agent never knew how to deal with generosity.
Perhaps he was fortunate that generosity was so rarely to be met with.
Father Ramphion had not forgotten the question Perennius had earlier implied, though. As the two men plodded after the mounted centurion, Ramphion said, “Of course, we’re prepared to defend ourselves if needs be. To help God defend us, I should rather say.” He gestured toward the church. There were unglazed windows in the second and third levels of the stepped tower. The agent could now see that the only openings in the twenty-foot high base cylinder were the front door and a circuit of arrow slits at shoulder height in the stone wall. A proper military force with artillery and battering rams could take the structure without serious difficulty. A band of raiders like those the Eagle had fallen among would have turned away after an abortive assault or two against the stone. The church would preserve the villagers and such movable property as they could get inside it.
“But that has not occurred as yet, thank the Lord.” Ramphion continued. “All of those strangers who have come to the valley since Dioscholias brought God’s teachings here have been like yourselves. Men of peace, wanderers … some poor souls displaced and brutalized by the scourges that wrack the sinful world beyond. May they all find peace in God.”
The valley itself certainly appeared to have found peace. Stacks of hay still remained from the previous year’s harvest, though there must have been fresh pasturage for the village’s flocks for over a month now. The common sheepfold was extensive; a gray, freestone structure adjacent to the human habitations. Smoke drifted above the valley wall, but Perennius could not pinpoint its source against the blur of rock and dull green vegetation. The valley was the sort of place that Sestius had described as being his dream and prayer of finding in his native province.
With that thought in mind, Perennius asked the villager. “Ah, are you all Christians here? That is—the church looks as if it would have been an enormous task, even with everyone in the village concentrating on it.”
Father Ramphion nodded. He appeared to be older than the agent had at first believed him to be; perhaps even in his mid-fo
rties. His limbs were strong and his fringe of hair had a youthful luster. “Not quite all of us, no,” he said. “There are two brothers in the village, Azon and Erzites, who follow the appalling idolatry of their father. The rest of us, yes, we are followers of the Anointed.”
Ramphion raised his eyes toward the spire of the church. What must be most of the populace of the village was lining up in front of the structure, men to the right of the doorway and women to the left. “It was a marvelous work, barely completed when Dioscholias was translated to heaven five years ago. Only the Saved had a hand in the building, of course. Azon and Erzites are victims of a particularly foul error. They claim to be Christians also, but they worship the Anointed in the form of the Serpent of Eden.”
“Ah, Ophitics,” agreed the agent. “Yes, serpent-worship is more common on the Black Sea coast than it is this far in the south.”
“It’s more common yet in Hell,” Ramphion asserted tartly. In a more moderate tone he added, “But Azon and Erzites have their place in the valley. They are on Earth to advance the purposes of the Lord, as is every creature which he placed here. Blessed by the Lord!”
As if Ramphion’s words were a signal, the assembled villagers chorused, “Blessed by the Anointed and his servant Dioscholias!” They surged forward, draping Sestius and the others behind him with garlands of field-flowers.
* * *
The next hour and a half were a confused blur of hymns and offers of hospitality. The village had no bathhouse as a settlement a little larger would have. Instead, the villagers led Perennius and the others to a tub quarried from the living rock to take advantage of a warm spring. To the agent, the offer was as tempting as the thought of sex to a sailor. It was only at the last instant that Perennius thought to refuse—on the grounds that he and Calvus had vowed to Hermes that they would not bathe until they reached Tarsus. Otherwise, the tall woman would have been alone in refusing to disrobe. That would not have mattered to the agent—had not mattered or even been noticed in past months—were it not for his present awareness of Calvus’ sex. Logically, Perennius could have accepted without concern a situation which had not caused problems while he was ignorant of it. Perennius—and humans in general, he suspected—were not built to feel that way, however.
Gaius and Sestius splashed and bellowed happily. Their voices were thrown across the valley by the concave rocks. Sabellia sat a few paces down from the tub and waited her turn in the water. Mixed bathing was the norm in large cities—or was at least a common option. Sabellia was a rural woman, however, with a rustic sense of propriety which cropped up unexpectedly. Perennius looked back at the red-haired woman, huddled beneath the bathing hollow. He could remember—he could not forget—her drooling beneath Theudas and the panting Herulian. Perennius’ knuckles banded red and white with the pressure of his grip on his spear. The villagers leading him and Calvus to a hut twittered in sudden alarm at the agent’s expression. Then the moment passed, and Aulus Perennius was again a peaceful traveller, to whom weapons were a necessary burden and no more.
The villagers’ own attitude toward mixed bathing was a surprise to Perennius. They had obviously expected all five of their guests to share the big tub simultaneously. Christ cultists had something of a reputation for straitlaced behavior. There were scores of variant cults, however—the priest’s mention of the two Ophitics living in the valley was an example. Certainly there was nothing about the villagers’ demeanor to suggest that they thought of common bathing as anything more than an exercise in cleanliness. Prurience required a level of sophistication which seemed blissfully lacking in the valley.
“Here, sir,” said one of the women who was guiding them. Father Ramphion was busy elsewhere, it seemed. The woman opened the door of a dwelling. She stepped aside quickly so that Perennius would not brush her as he entered. The shutters were thrown back from the unglazed window. The front room’s southern exposure lighted it brightly. The room was not clean, exactly—nothing with a dirt floor and a thatched roof could ever be clean in an absolute sense—but it had been swept out only minutes before. A haze of dust motes clung to the air, and a heavy-set woman with a straw broom stood panting outside the door. This was obviously an occupied dwelling whose owners had been whisked away with all their personalty to make room for the strangers.
Perennius ducked as he stepped inside. In general, the roof was high enough for him—it would not be for Calvus—but the thatching sloped down from the back where it joined the hillside.
“Beds will be brought shortly, sirs,” a villager said through the open window. Its sill and the door jamb showed that the walls were of stones a foot thick. They had been squared ably with a pick or adze but without any attempt at polishing. The craftsmanship impressed the agent even before he stepped into the room adjoining to the rear and realized that it had been entirely carven into the rock of the hill.
“Look at this,” Perennius murmured to Calvus as the tall woman moved to his side. The agent ran his palm down a wall that was plumb enough to suit a temple architect. Its surface showed that it had been hacked from living rock with a pick. The incredible labor involved had not caused the job to be skimped, either. The ceiling of the back room was high enough that Calvus could stand upright.
The room was somewhat less dark than the agent would have guessed. Some light entered from the front room. There was no door separating the two rooms, only an open archway cut in the wall. Besides that, there was a slanting flue cut in the ceiling to exit from the hillside at some point above the thatching of the front extension. The flue was narrow, but it let in enough light to see by, even this late in the evening. The back room had been cleaned with the same thoroughness as the front. Its walls were colored the soft, indelible black of soot from the hearth sunk in the middle of the floor. Not only would the inner room be warmer in the winter, the arrangement avoided the dangers implicit when thatched roofs covered open fires as they did in most rural areas.
“You may leave your burdens here,” one of the villagers called from outside. “They will be safe.” After a moment, she added, “They would be safe anywhere in the valley.”
Perennius had insisted on carrying a pack as heavy as any of the others did—any of them besides Calvus. The suggestion made him feel suddenly as if the straps were trying to ram him into the soil like hammer blows on a tent peg. The process of shrugging off his load was more painful than the carrying of it had been. He had been suppressing the latter pain over many harsh miles of goat track.
“Do you ever feel like settling down yourself,” he asked the bald woman in Latin. “Just saying the hell with it, I’ve done all the job one man can do, the rest can try fighting it for a while?”
Calvus set down her own pack. She was still a little awkward, so the load touched the stone floor with a clank. None of the villagers outside seemed to care or notice. “Sometimes I feel that way, Aulus Perennius,” she said carefully. Her face was in shadow. It would probably not have betrayed her feelings to the agent anyway. “I suppose everyone with a duty feels that way on occasion.” Calvus started to walk back through the archway again.
Perennius’ hand stopped her. “Why don’t you, then?” he demanded. Echoes from the rock deepened his voice and multiplied its urgency. “Why don’t you just pitch it when there’s places like this in the world?”
Most people would have replied, “Why don’t you?” and it was perhaps that response for which the target was hoping. Instead, the tall woman backed a half step so that she could straighten to her full height again. “Because,” she said, “I know that it isn’t true. I’m luckier than many, I suppose, because I will know exactly when I’ve done everything possible to accomplish my duty.” Perennius thought she might be smiling as she added, “Of course, I won’t retire then, in the usual sense. But that doesn’t matter.”
Perennius muttered something unintelligible even to himself as he led his companion outside again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As they followed
their escort of villagers to the church, the agent fingered the garland of daisies and columbines which he had not removed with his pack. Another ragged procession was wending toward the hut, carrying the burdens of the three bathers. Those villagers were singing something more cheerful than any hymn had a right to be. The two soldiers and Sabellia, who must have been hurried through her own chance at a bath, were being led toward the church directly from the alcove. The Gallic woman wore her own garments, but the two men seemed to have accepted tunics of bleached wool in place of their own travel-stained garments.
Perennius had refused a similar offer of clothing because he would have had to give up more than his tunic. The agent had shed his spear and equipment belt in the hut—it would have been insultingly churlish to do otherwise—but he had found a tiny, ivory-hilted dagger in the pirates’ loot. That knife now weighted the hem of his inner tunic, a comfort to his paranoia. Perennius’s groundless fears irritated him, but he had learned that sometimes it was better to feed them discreetly instead of depending on his control to prevent embarrassment.
The bell had ceased its warning from the tower when Father Ramphion met the strangers. Now it pealed again, but with a joyous exuberance in contrast to the measured beats before. The black-clad priest bustled out the door of the church even as the streams bearing the outsiders converged on it. Ramphion raised both hands and cried, “God’s blessing on this day and its works!”
“God’s blessing!” chorused the villagers, both without the building and, mutedly, within.
It occurred to Perennius with some embarrassment that he had in the past been treated with equal pomp—but only under a false persona. Odenath had feted the envoy from Postumus, not Aulus Perennius himself; and there had been similar occurrences before. The agent had spent too many years among lies to be fully comfortable with the present situation. When he reached Father Ramphion, beaming by the doorway, Perennius said in his halting Cilician, “Father, we needn’t be a burden to you. Our needs are simple, and we’re willing to pay.”