Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  Suits of gilded chain mail. Tiny steel bucklers whose surfaces were silvered or parcel gilt. Long curved swords whose watermarked blades impressed Perennius more than did the precious stones with which some of the hilts were inlaid. Peaked, chain-veiled helmets … Two full wagons of such military hardware. Then came loads of silk garments, dyed crimson or purple and shot with gold wire, to demonstrate that the Palmyrenes had captured some of Shapur’s personal baggage. That was a useful datum to file mentally and to check against Odenath’s official account of his victories.

  But Perennius was tired, and he was not really interested even in the paraphernalia of battle and victory. The agent was almost dozing when the animals for the beast show were rolled by next in their cages. A dozen gazelles leaped nervously and clacked their horns against the bars. Wild, straight-horned bulls followed. Each was tethered between a yoke of draft oxen which dragged the intended victims along despite their efforts to break loose and gore. Two russet, angry lions snarled past in iron cages. Their manes were torn short by the scrub of northern Mesopotamia where they had been captured. There was an elephant from the Mediterranean coast of Africa, smaller and more docile than the Asian species whose importation had been ended by the renewed power of Persia across the trade routes. Even so, the elephant was too valuable to slaughter in a local affair like this. The beast was fitted with a howdah in which four archers sat. The men showed more interest in overhanging buildings than they did in the cheering citizenry.

  The last cage held a—

  “What in blazes is that?” Perennius demanded aloud.

  Cleiton had followed them onto the roof. He was sitting in the group around Sestius and—Sestius’ woman, that’s what she was—but he heard the question. Leaning toward the agent, the innkeeper said, “Now that’s something isn’t it? Not from Palmyra, either. Some shepherds caught it right here in Tarsus, not a mile from the wall. I figure it must be a dog, don’t you? But a portent, like if it had been born with two heads instead of—” He waved.

  The beast could almost have been a dog … and as the innkeeper had suggested, animals are born misshapen on occasion. Unlike human monsters, monstrous beasts became tokens of the gods instead of trash to be tossed on the midden while they still wailed with hunger. The creature looked more like a wolf than a dog, and a damned big wolf besides … though a wolf so close to a bustling city would itself have been cause for some surprise.…

  Its head was not that of any dog or wolf the agent had ever seen. It was outsized, even on a creature with the bulk of a small lion. The jaws were huge, and the red tongue lolled over a serrated row of teeth as the beast paced its narrow cage.

  “Killed everything in the cave they were using for a sheepfold,” Cleiton continued. “Forty-three sheep and a boy, way I heard it. They rolled a wagon across the mouth to hold it till people got to them with nets. Mean bastard.”

  “It’s a dire wolf,” Calvus said. She was watching the animal with an interest which longer association with her permitted the agent to read beneath the calm. “It shouldn’t be here, of course. Now. Like the tylosaurus.”

  “In Rome,” Perennius said as he watched the great wolf, “I saw the head of a lion with fangs longer than my fingers. Did that come from the same place as these others?”

  “In a way,” the traveller agreed. “A sabretooth—” she looked at the agent. “It must have come the same way, the way I came and the result of my coming. Aulus Perennius, I was not sent to interfere with your world, but my coming has done so.”

  There were more horns and marching feet in the boulevard below, drawing cheers and echoes. Perennius glanced toward the parade. He jerked back to look at Calvus because of what he thought he had seen there. There was a tear at the corner of the tall woman’s eye.

  The agent’s mind worked while his muscles paused. It was as if he had walked into a potential ambush, where the first move he made had to be right or it would be his last. Perennius did not curse or blurt sympathy. He had seen the traveller accept multiple rape without overt emotion. All the agent understood of the tear now was that it chilled him to see it on a face he had thought imperturbable.

  Perennius reached out. Only someone who had experience of the agent’s reflexes would have realized that there had even been a pause. He touched the traveller’s wrist with his fingertips. Then he turned back to face the parade without removing his hand.

  “I had four sisters,” Calvus said in her cool, empty voice. “Like the fingers of your hand, Aulus Perennius, five parts and not five individuals. And now I am here alone in your age, and along the route I travel there are anomalies … but not my sisters. Not ever my sisters.” She squeezed the agent’s hand with a wooden precision which bespoke care and the strength beneath her smooth skin.

  The crowd gave a tremendous roar. Behind the infantry, a pair of fine horses pulled a chariot. The vehicle’s surfaces were gilded and embossed. In the car stood two statues, probably of wood but again gilded and glittering and draped with flowers. The statue placed behind was of the Sun God, crowned with spiked rays and himself holding a laurel crown over the figure in front of him. Perennius did not need the signs being carried before the chariot to know that the leading figure represented Odenath. The statue stood taller than the agent remembered the Autarch to do in person; but that was to be expected, and the statue’s expression of arrogant determination was real enough. Odenath’s statue was draped in the gold and purple of triumphal regalia. Its left hand held a sceptre and its right a sheaf of wheat to symbolize the prosperity its victories had returned.

  More cataphracts rode behind the chariot. The leader carried Odenath’s war standard on a pole. A bronze dragon’s head caught the breeze through snarling jaws. The crimson silk tube attached to the bronze neck swelled and filled. The gold-shot tail snapped in the air twelve feet behind the pole that supported it.

  “The Dragon from the East!” people shouted in the street. “Hail the Dragon from the East!”

  Perennius spoke because he was the man he was, and because he himself found concentration on the task in hand the best response to grief. It was with that motive, and not in the savage cruelty with which the words might have come from a less-directed speaker, that he said, “If you had four sisters, Calvus, then I wonder what we can expect to see besides the three we have.”

  In the street the mob boomed, “Hail the Dragon from the East!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “What I don’t understand…” said Perennius. He dipped his bread into the pot of lamb stew which had been brought up to the roof for Gaius, Calvus, and himself—“… is why they sent a woman. Your—government, I mean.”

  Gaius nodded vigorously around his own dripping mouthful of stew. The group’s baggage was stacked around them, along with straw-filled leather mattresses. The agent had suggested the roof, despite its ten degrees of slope, in preference to being crammed into one of the common rooms. The family’s own apartments were more crowded still, because the members had doubled up in order to devote half the space to paying guests in the present glut. The roof gave the party a measure of privacy and protection from thieves that they would not have had inside under the present circumstances. They would be better off under a tree if the weather broke, of course; but at the moment, it was a pleasant evening.

  “That wasn’t really a matter of choice,” Calvus said. “We—my sisters and I…” She paused for a moment, but her eyes showed nothing until she continued, “We are female for the same reason that workers ants are female, or bees.”

  “They are?” the younger Illyrian asked. He felt the thought which Perennius did not express even by a glance. Mumbling an apology for the interruption, Gaius took some celery from the condiment tray and began to concentrate on it.

  The traveller nodded placidly and took more stew herself. Calvus ate with a quiet neatness that suggested boredom with the process. “Sterile females, myself and my sibs. With a … common lineage.”

  Calvus paused again. �
��I don’t have all the words I need to explain,” she said, spreading her hands. “But I don’t mean only a common parentage, or that we five are as close as twins from the same egg. We are one. The thoughts I think, my sibs think—all of us.” The tears suddenly brightened the tall woman’s eyes again. “We were one. We were one.”

  Perennius ate. He refused to look at Calvus beside him. If she wanted to steer a practical question into emotional waters, it was her doing alone. Tarsus climbed a few steps out of the sea behind him, so that there were façades facing the agent against the further background of the Taurus Mountains. Higher yet, clouds covered the sky like etchings on silver. Every shade of gray and brightness was represented in swatches which blended imperceptibly with one another. Like life, like the Empire … and sunset was near.

  “One effect of sisterhoods like mine,” Calvus continued in a dry voice, “is that the birth group is more important to the individual than her self. The species as a whole is worthy of the sacrifice of the self; and this by nature without any necessity of training. You will have seen ants react when their nests are broken open with a stick.”

  “Some run,” the agent said softly to the sky.

  “Some run,” the traveller agreed, “to assess and repair damage, and to carry the young of the nest to places of greater safety. Because they were raised so that their natures would cause them to do so for the good of the nest. And some bite the stick, or swarm up it to bite the hand wielding the stick.… We were not all raised to patch walls and carry babies, Aulus Perennius.”

  “If we had some time,” Perennius said, “I’d teach you to use a sword—if I thought I could find one that would hold up. I’m not complaining, Lucius Calvus. I just wondered.”

  A slave popped up the ladder with a mixing bowl of wine held in both hands. He switched it without comment for the bowl which the three diners had almost emptied already. From below, where Sestius and Sabellia shared dinner with the innkeeper’s family, came a burst of laughter and an order which the house slave appeared to understand. He grumbled a curse in Phrygian. Holding the bowl, he disappeared through the trap door again with his body vertical and his back to the ladder.

  Perennius gazed after the slave with amusement. “Nice to meet somebody who’s good at his job,” the agent said.

  “Well, that still doesn’t explain why you pretend to be a man when you’re really a woman,” Gaius said. His tone and the frown on his face suggested that the tall woman’s words had not explained very much else to him either.

  “When I’m really neither, you mean?” Calvus asked, and she had to know that the courier had not meant anything of the sort. “Think of me as a mule, Decurion. What the pirates did mattered as little to me as it would have to a board with a knothole.”

  Perennius turned. Calvus would not meet his eyes. He touched her cheek and guided her face around until she was looking at him. “They’re all dead,” the agent said. “Every one of them. Now, do you want to tell the boy why you passed yourself off for a man, or shall I?”

  The face that Perennius could not have forced to turn now softened into a smile. “You tell him, Aulus,” the woman said, “if you can.”

  “Blazes, what do you think I spend most of my life doing?” the agent grumbled. “Chopping weeds?” He patted his protégé lightly on the knee to return the discussion to him. “Look, Gaius,” the agent said, “how many six foot four bald women have you met in embassies to the Emperor?”

  “Well, he could have worn a wig,” the courier mumbled through his wine. He was startled enough to have continued to use a masculine pronoun.

  “Fine, how many six foot four women whose wigs slip in a breeze or a scuffle—have you forgotten what we went through before we met the Goths? Blazes, friend—” Perennius had to catch himself every time so as not to address Gaius as “boy”—“who takes a woman seriously? Oh, I know—Odenath’s tough, but his wife Zenobia could eat him for breakfast. And sure, there’s been some at Rome, too. But not openly, not at Rome. Queens are for wogs, and lady ambassadors would be an insult, however—” he looked at Calvus—“persuasive she might be. There are limits.” Perennius’ voice lost its light tone as he repeated, “There are limits.” In the agent’s mind, Germans knelt and laughed and grunted. “But those things can be worked out too,” he concluded.

  With a barking laugh and a return to banter as he looked at Calvus, Perennius added, “Damned if I yet know how you managed it, though. Manage it.”

  “I was raised to have control of my muscles—and bodily functions,” the tall woman said. The agent was beginning to understand that “raised” was a euphemism for “bred” when the woman applied it to herself. “And as you know, I can be persuasive. There are many things for sailors to look at at night beside details of who’s squatting at the rail.” Calvus laughed. It was the first time Perennius had heard her do so. She twitched her outer tunic. “Full garments help too, of course.”

  There was again a bustle at the trap door. This time Cleiton himself climbed through ahead of Sestius. Sabellia followed the two men. Her red hair was beginning to curl into ringlets as it grew out.

  “Quintus has told me where you were planning to go,” the innkeeper said, gesturing as soon as he no longer needed his arms to haul him onto the roof. “This is impossible now. Besides, Typhon’s Cavern has a bad reputation at the best of times. I’m not superstitious, but…”

  The centurion broke in on the sentence whose thought, at least, had been completed. “Cleiton says the story is that there’s a dragon in the area around the gorge, now. Some people are saying it’s Typhon himself, released from Hell.”

  The agent grimaced. Sestius had been told to get information, and the soldier could not help the sort of nonsense he was told. Perennius thought he had heard an undercurrent of belief in the myth Sestius was retailing, however. That sort of crap, like tales of hostile armies a million men strong, buried reality and made a hard job harder.

  Cleiton saw and understood the agent’s expression. The innkeeper straightened. His voice regained for him whatever dignity he might have lost through the gravy stains on his tunic and his wispy beard. “These are not stories, honored guest,” Cleiton said stiffly. “Kamilides, the son of Sossias, sister of my wife’s uncle, manages a villa on the edge of the gorge, Typhon’s Cavern. Something began raiding their flocks over a month ago. Kamilides organized a hunt with dogs and nets, thinking a lion must have crossed the mountains. What they found was a dragon as big as—”

  The innkeeper paused. The best recommendation for his truthfulness was the fact that he rejected as preposterous the simile he had probably heard from his informant. Instead Cleiton went on, “Very big, hugely big. It was a dragon with legs, and when it chased them it ran faster than the horses of those who were mounted. Three of the men were killed. The rest were saved only because they scattered in all directions and the beast could follow only a few. They left the villa just as it was. Kamilides says if the owner wants his sheep, he can come up from Antioch and look for them himself. The monster is worse than the Persians, because everybody at least knew there were Persians.”

  Perennius stood up so that he could bow. “Gracious host,” he said, “I apologize for my discourtesy.”

  Not that the fact Cleiton believed the story made it more likely to be true. Still, the agent had once seen a crocodile arise from its mudbank and chase the horsemen who were trying to collect it with lassoes for the arena. Mud had slopped house-high, and it was only the horsemen’s initial lead that saved them from the reptile’s brief rush. Perhaps, perhaps … and there was that thing in the sea before.

  But there was no choice. They were going to Typhon’s Cavern, myth and the Guardians be damned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The sun was not directly as grim a punishment as was the dust which rose from the road’s seared surface. Perennius swirled the mouthful of water repeatedly before spitting it out. The dark stain on the road dried even as he watched.

 
“I don’t know anything about Typhon,” Calvus said. Her outstretched legs were long enough that her toes were lighted by the sun over the wall against which the party sat. Her feet were slim. The big toes seemed abnormally pronounced by comparison with the other toes. “Tell me about him.”

  One result of the dragon scare was that Perennius had not been able to hire drivers to take charge of the baggage animals. Sabellia was an effective drover. The rest of them had proven they were not, at considerable cost in temper and bruises. You cannot expect to hit a donkey with your hand and hurt the beast nearly as much as the blow will hurt you. “Blazes, what would I know?” Perennius said. “I haven’t had the advantages of a rhetorical education.”

  “Well, I didn’t ask you for it, did I?” said Gaius in a hurt voice. He sprawled against the wall to the other side of the older Illyrian. Gaius leaned forward from the wall so that he could look directly at Calvus. “Typhon,” he continued in the declamatory sing-song that was indeed the mark of the education Perennius had procured for him, “was the son of Tartaros and Gaia, Hell and Earth. Typhon is the Hundred-Headed Serpent, the Hundred-Voiced, who strove against the gods. He was cast down from the very threshold of Olympus by the thunderbolt of Zeus—or, as others have it, by the blazing arrows of the unconquered Sun in his guise as Apollo by which the Greeks know him.”

  Only Perennius’ exhaustion had spoken in his gibe about rhetorical educations, but that was not an excuse he would have accepted from anybody else. The advantages Perennius had had as a boy were intelligence and the willingness to be as ruthless as a task required. The agent saw very quickly that flowery prose and the ability to argue points of grammar by citing minor poets dead a thousand years were the only routes to preferment in the civil service.