Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  Gasping, Perennius worked the arrow out of the ground without haste. He knew there would be no more shooting. Edges of flame were cutting from the nearer arrow slits. They left their own stains of soot and caustic across the face of the church. Thatch and wooden beams roared inside, shaking the stones as hymns had never done.

  “We’d best move away, Aulus Perennius,” Calvus shouted over the voice of the fire.

  The agent looked up at her. She extended a hand to lift him from his splay-legged seat on the ground. Perennius stared past the woman to the church. The outer cylinder had begun to act as a chimney, drawing air through the slits and the part-blocked door to feed the Hell within. Everything must be ablaze by now. Not only roof members but clothing and furniture, paint from the walls and gases driven from corpses that were being reduced to calcined ash. There could be no screaming now, not that voices could have been heard over the roar.

  “Right,” Perennius said. He accepted the offered hand and rose slowly. As they walked away from the funnel of fire, he said, “I wonder if they drained the bath. I’d really like to get clean.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “All right, let’s see your papers,” demanded the commander of the detachment at the west gate of Tarsus. “Dis-mount, dammit.”

  “Hey, you’re not checking them,” said Gaius. He waved toward the stream of traffic into the city.

  Sestius was already off his donkey. He grimaced, only partly at his stiffness from the ride. It was for Perennius to say, “Gaius, let me handle this.” He walked over to the officer. The agent’s hand was in his purse.

  The ride on a donkey’s narrow back had left Sestius with a limp. Perennius could imagine what similar punishment would have done to him. Instead of riding, the agent had walked, leading his donkey. The miles had left his wound afire, but they had also worked his thigh to suppleness again. It had been a punishing two days, but now the agent did not limp. Under other circumstances, he might have ridden anyway so as not to delay his companions. Because of Calvus, that question had not arisen.

  Gaius rode splendidly and loved it. His only objection was that a donkey was not a fit mount for a cavalry decurion. Donkeys were what was available in the valley they had depopulated, however. The small-holdings they passed later had nothing better, so Gaius had made do. Sabellia, like Perennius himself when the agent was healthy, had no great affection for riding, but she did it adequately when the need arose. Sestius was scarcely adequate—he had fallen several times and under unexpected circumstances—but he was too much a soldier to put any weight on his own feet that could go on others’.

  Calvus had been awkward the first few days on shipboard. Mounted, she was a disaster. When she made an effort to cling to the donkey with her knees, the animal stumbled and fell from the crushing grip. When Calvus attempted to mitigate that vise, she inevitably fell off. There could be no question of the traveller’s strength, but she did not have the instinctive control needed for some very ordinary tasks until she had practiced them for days.

  They did not have days to spend on this. Calvus walked.

  “Yeah, sonny,” said the guard commander, “it could be that we do let local people through without checking them. What’s it to you?” He tapped his baton on his left palm as he walked toward Gaius.

  The gateway thrust out from the wall. Pillars supported a groined vault over the intersection of the road that Perennius and his troupe were on and the north-south road along the outside of the city wall. The guards were a detachment of heavy infantry, Syrian Greeks by the look of them. Even an argument between their commander and a traveller left them disinterested.

  “Of course you’re right to question us, sir,” Perennius said. “Gaius, get off that donkey! Sir, we’re travelling in cotton. Other fabrics as well, but I’m told this is the time and place to make a market in Cilician cotton.” The agent slipped his right hand palm-down over the commander’s upturned left. The baton hesitated. “A terrible thing, this disruption,” Perennius continued smoothly. “But of course that means profits for a man who’s willing to take a few risks … and profits for men who do their duty as well. I trust our papers are in order? And do forgive my bodyguard, you know, he’s young.”

  The fact of the coin did not surprise the officer of the guard. The light weight did, especially after he spread his own enfolding fingers and saw the sun wink on gold, not silver-washed bronze. The pirates’ loot had more than made up for losing the bank drafts with the expedition’s gear aboard the Eagle. “Hermes!” the commander muttered. He covered the aureus again as quickly as he had exposed it. “Yes sir,” he said. “Well. I’m sure a gentleman of your experience can imagine how careful we need to be, what with the Games and all the talk of portents—dragons in the countryside! And they say the Borani have been raiding near Ephesus again.”

  Sestius started to say something, but he managed to restrain himself. It was very difficult not to make yourself a center of attention by blurting out facts that everyone nearby would want to hear. At the moment, however, Perennius needed to gather information rather than to give it out. And the gods knew, it did not matter in the least to these folk if they were about to be raided by Germans rather than by Scyths.

  The agent nodded toward the stream of people still making their way into the city. Whole families were travelling together, but without the impedimenta that would suggest a panicked flight from the countryside. In families wealthy enough to have slaves, the latter preceded the father to clear the way. The children were strung out behind their father in descending order of age. Then came any older members of the extended family; and last, the wife and mother. Submissive womanhood was by no means a virtue universally accepted among the Cilicians. It was noticeable that in families which owned a single mule or donkey, the wife was as likely to be mounted as the husband was. The women wore their finery under travelling shawls. Coiled earrings dangled nearly to their shoulders. The jewelry was gold if they could afford it, silver or brass if they could not. Sabellia, aware of her own battered appearance, glared back at the bold-eyed women as they passed.

  “All the traffic’s for the Games, then?” Perennius said to the officer. “Who’s giving them?”

  “Our lord Odenath,” the commander replied proudly. “Holding a day of supplication all over the province in thanks for his victory last year over the Persians. His latest victory. You know—” the men had not been speaking loudly, but now the officer bent closer to Perennius and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“there’s those who say a dragon appearing here means the same thing among princes. The one in Rome replaced by one from the East. I don’t know about that … but between you, me, and the bedpost, I wouldn’t mind if they were right.” The officer straightened and swept his hand out. “Who’s helped us while other folks loll around, screwing their way through all the titled sluts in Rome?”

  The agent nodded in false agreement. Blazes, he’d heard worse. It was not Gallienus to whom Perennius’ loyalty was given, whatever that current holder of the office might believe. Besides, the last gibe amused the agent. The Autarch of Palmyra had his virtues, to be sure; but there was nothing in the scores of beautiful women entering Odenath’s seraglio to suggest that one of those virtues was chastity.

  “You’ll have Hell’s own time finding lodgings today,” the commander called after them as they entered the gate. Perennius waved back with a smile. He knew from experience that gold would get them food and lodging as quickly as it had gotten them entry to Tarsus. Money was never necessary. Its effective use, like that of violence, involved more subtleties than many folk realized. But money smoothed most paths if one were willing to use it.

  * * *

  Tarsus was an ancient foundation. It had grown under the direction of various peoples, all of whom found the Roman fascination with straight streets to be unaesthetic and dangerous. Why go out of your way to make the key points of your city accessible to an invader? Let every branching be a potential cul-de-sac to t
rap him under the fire of rooftops on three sides. Let his spears if leveled jam in narrow turnings and if vertical catch in the second-story overhangs. And besides, who ever saw a straight line in nature?

  The maze did not concern Sestius, nor was it intended to do so. It was local knowledge of the convoluted streetscape which made the maze so useful. The centurion had not been in Tarsus for five years or more, but the pattern of alleys and “boulevards” scarcely wider might not have changed significantly in five millenia.

  Because of the crowd, all five of the group had to lead their donkeys as Calvus and Perennius had done during the whole journey. Even with training, most animals will not try to force their way through a mass of humans, though they could do so easily. If the crowd parts for their bulk and sharp hooves, well and good. But infantry with shields locked and spear-points advanced is proof against the finest cavalry in the world—proof even against elephants, unless the beasts are already blind and maddened by previous wounds. Sestius, in the lead, made better time with his own shoulders and elbows than the keel-like breastbone of his donkey would have done if the centurion insisted on riding.

  Sestius stopped at an archway. He began trying to pull his mount through the narrow opening into the side of a building. Perennius, further back by the donkey’s length, had just passed a doorway into the same structure. The entrance was gorgeously tiled. The interior of the building exhaled echoes and steam. The agent dropped the reins of his animal. It had nowhere to wander to in the crowd anyway. The Illyrian squeezed forward to Sestius and asked, “A bath? We’re staying in a bath?”

  “The front of the building’s an inn,” the centurion said. He waved the hand which was not tugging at his recalcitrant donkey. “The Mottled Fleece. Run by a family from my district since, oh, well … forever.”

  Perennius nodded. There was a fleece hanging at the far corner of the building where the street they were following debouched into a broader one. There was no way of telling what color the wool had been originally. The lower portion of the fleece had been polished to the leather by the shoulders of every man and beast to turn the corner sharply. Even the upper part was black with the grime of ages. The fleece was mottled for the same reason that the family of the inn proprietors were countrymen of Sestius: historically, that had been the case.

  Perennius’ party had entered Tarsus through the Jewish quarter. It was a street of sailmakers who sat in their shops, whole families in order of age. They pushed their needles through heavy canvas while they chattered to one another in Hebrew. They would deal with customers in Common Greek, but the present holiday crowds were only objects and a hindrance to trade. Adjoining the Jewish quarter was apparently a quarter of native Cilicians. Elsewhere in the city there would be Greek communities, and Armenians, and a score of others: Kurds and Scyths and Italians. Some of the groups would be no more than a dozen or two souls, and yet they would still look to the welfare of their own national community before troubling about the welfare of the city. Even so, Tarsus ranked far higher in their minds than did an abstraction like “the Empire,” though it was from that Empire that the peace and safety of them all depended.

  It was daily realizations like that which drove Perennius to wild frustration or the narrow focus of a knife edge. The impending disaster itself was beginning to weld the disparate strands into a unity which no deliberate policy had been able to create. But that disaster would have to be delayed longer than the agent believed possible, or the Empire would run its course before the unifying process could.

  For now, the knife edge. Perennius gave the centurion’s mount a judicious kick in the ribs. The animal bolted through the archway. Perennius’ own donkey followed, without urging and so abruptly that the agent had to jump out of the way. Perennius’ fingers were touching the handle of the sling he had retrieved from the gear jumbled in the pirate camp.

  The courtyard they had entered through the arch gave onto the inn’s stables. The area was already crowded with beasts and men. An ostler saw the newcomers and began waving them back angrily. Someone should have barred the archway, but that had been neglected in the confusion. Sestius ignored the directions. Sabellia was leading her mount through the narrow opening with the other two behind her, so the centurion could not have left even if he had intended to do so. Sestius began talking to the ostler with a series of sweeping gestures. The other man’s face cleared. He embraced Sestius, both of them gabbling in a conversation which seemed to consist primarily of proper names and relationships.

  At last the centurion broke off. He waved his companions to a flight of stone steps into the three-story building. “In here,” he cried. “Zenophanes’ll take care of our animals and baggage.”

  Perennius let Sabellia precede him up the stairs. Gold was a good general key, he thought, but the networks of families and nations which riddled the Empire were themselves a better entree for those who could tap in on them.

  “My god, Quintus,” a white-haired man was crying to Sestius in the hallway. “They quarter eight soldiers on us—Arabs, can you believe it?—and now you come home. What we’ll do, I can’t imagine, but we’ll manage. But my boy—aren’t you supposed to be lined up already for the parade? The others left hours ago!”

  “Ah, I’m—” the centurion began. He caught Perennius’ eye and went on, “I’ve been discharged, Cleiton. My friends and I have some business in the area, and then my wife and I’ll be settling down.”

  “Oh, well, then you’ll want to watch the parade,” the innkeeper determined aloud. “Come on, quickly, up to the roof with you or you’ll miss the start.”

  Sestius looked at the agent. Perennius in turn looked at Calvus and then shrugged. They obviously would not accomplish a great deal more in the present confusion. “Why not?” the Illyrian agreed. He began climbing the ladder that served as access to the inn’s upper floors.

  The roof already held a number of family members and other guests of the inn. There was a low parapet, less for safety than to collect rain water draining down the shallow, tiled incline toward the front of the building. Drains at either corner then sucked the water into cisterns. Roman administration had brought aqueducts and public water supplies to Tarsus; but the cisterns continued to work and to be used.

  A blare of horns demonstrated that Cleiton was correct about the parade starting. The agent found a spot at the parapet and sat on his folded ankles. He forced his right leg to comply with the posture. The street below was so crowded with onlookers that the marchers had virtually to clear a path for themselves as they advanced.

  Probably for that reason, the front ranks of the parade were infantry marching four files across. All the men wore dress armor. The feather plumes were fitted into their helmet slots. On the leather-faced shields were designs freshly picked out in gilt. Perennius catalogued the represented units reflexively. Elements of the Fifth, the Twelfth … Imperial line formations, as befitted Odenath in his capacity of Restorer of the East. Hobnails clashed in unison on the cobblestones. Then the cornicines with their curved bronze horns and the trumpeters blew a salute. The crowd cheered. Some of the onlookers cheered Odenath as Emperor.

  Two pairs of heavy cavalrymen followed, restricted by the narrow front. They were cataphracts: horses and men both were armored with great scales of bronze which had been polished for the occasion. Instead of combat headgear, the men wore helmets with anthropomorphic face-pieces of silvered bronze. The masks glared stiffly at the crowd. One thought of the mounted figures as statues until a head turned or nodded. The effect was one which Perennius had always found to be disconcerting. Now it reminded him of the stiff-carapaced Guardian he had killed unknowing … and the five more like it he had come so far to face. But the armor also made him think—

  “Aulus!” Gaius whispered. He tugged on the agent’s arm. “I heard people shouting—”

  Perennius touched the younger man’s lips to hush him gently. In the past, the agent’s patience had extended only to the actions of enemies. Clumsy
execution by an ally, ill-timed interruptions by friends, would set Perennius off in a blast of rage. He was changing, and he looked in puzzlement at Calvus on his other side before whispering, “I know what they’re cheering, Gaius. We’re not in that business right now, and this might not be a healthy place to suggest otherwise. Hey? Sit and watch the parade.” The agent’s hand moved from Gaius’ face to his shoulder. He guided the young courier down to sit.

  Calvus looked at the two men. Perennius wondered if she too had noted the change in his temper. Well, he always handled himself better when he was on assignment than when he viewed the world with only his own eyes.

  * * *

  The parade involved only token units from Odenath’s forces. If the officer at the gate was correct, similar displays were going on all over Cilicia today, so the small scale was inevitable. The troops following the four cataphracts were also cavalry—of a sort. They were Arabs in flowing robes and burnooses, carrying long lances and mounted on dromedaries. Though the Palmyrene horses ahead of them must have been used to camels, the odor still made them skittish. Perennius could well imagine the havoc in Persian columns when their cavalry boiled away from the Palmyrene lancers. Now—snorting, aggressive and hesitant by degrees—half a dozen of the big animals straggled down the street. Their dark-skinned riders studied the crowds without affection. The Arabs fingered their weapons as they watched the packed city-dwellers. The troopers managed to give the impression of housewives, testing the edges of knives in a chickenyard.

  Following the cavalry were more foot-soldiers escorting wagons. The wagons carried a selection of loot from Odenath’s victories in past years, along with prisoners and beasts intended for the Games which were to be a part of the celebration. In a traditional Roman triumph, the troops would have worn tunics and wreaths. This was neither Rome nor a triumph. Odenath obviously felt that his own propaganda purposes were better served by men in full armor, their weapons glittering in a hedge about the wagons. Persian prisoners were tied facing outward from stakes in the center of the wagons carrying them. Some of them might have been among the men who had sacked Tarsus before Odenath’s forces harried them back across the frontier.