Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  They were routes open to the talented poor as well as to the rich, since the Empire itself and many individual communities provided schooling by accomplished rhetoricians. Perennius could have fought his way alone to a position as a high-placed jurist, the way the poet Lucian had. Or he might have accepted the private tutoring that Navigatus had offered to pay for early in their association. Perennius had been handicapped; but the Goth, Theudas, had started as the agent’s apparent superior also.

  The system of choosing administrators for the Empire was fair enough, to the extent that anything in life is fair. Perennius refused to become involved with it simply because he saw the process as the greatest and most ineluctable threat which the Empire faced.

  There had been threats to the borders ever since Rome was a hilltop settlement of bandits. The Germans, the Moors, the glittering host of the Persians … all could be turned back or slaughtered by the Imperial forces—if the latter were intelligently marshalled, competently led, and supplied in accordance with their needs and the Empire’s abilities. Venal officials were a problem as old as government. The damage they did was inevitable; and, like that of caterpillars in a fruit tree, was supportable under all but the most extreme situations.

  What was far more dangerous than graft was the increasing number of administrative documents which were unintelligible even to the men who drafted them. Archaic words; neologisms; technical terms borrowed for effect from other disciplines and then misused in a number of different fashions—all of these horrors were becoming staples of the tax laws and the criminal code, of reports on barley production and the extent of flood-damage on the Pyramos. Civil servants were affecting Tacitean variation without the brevity Tacitus had prized equally; fullness beyond that of Cicero without Cicero’s precision.

  And not a damned one of them could add his own household accounts, much less figure the income of a province. Slaves did both, and both badly.

  But Perennius’ mind that saw the Empire talking itself in declining circles toward destruction was by that the more fiercely determined that Gaius would succeed. The darker the shadows over the general future, the greater Perennius’ need to emphasize his closest approximation to personal continuance. Thus the tutors he had not suggested but rather forced on his protégé. Even now, listening to a series of glosses on Homer and Hesiod which were as impressive as they were pointless, the agent could not wish that Gaius had been apprenticed to a mule driver.

  The younger Illyrian paused. Sestius, in the shade further along the wall, said, “Around here, we always said Typhon came out of the earth in Cilicia.” When Calvus turned, the centurion made a languid east-west gesture. “All along the Taurus here, there’s straight-walled valleys, hundreds of feet deep … and sometimes a mile across.”

  The tall woman nodded in understanding. “Sinkholes,” she said. “Your rocks are limestone. When the water eats them away under the surface, there’s enough volcanic activity to collapse the shell covering the holes.”

  Sestius shrugged. Beside him, Sabellia appeared to be more interested in the sounds their hobbled donkeys made foraging on the other side of the wall. All members of the party were too tired to act animated. “Whatever,” the centurion said. “Anyway, some of the gorges have caves at one end. The one that’s called Typhon’s Cavern, the one you need to go to—” Sestius had not been told the full purpose of their mission, but he had seen the tentacled thing from the balcony and must have had suspicions—“is … well, nobody knows how far that cave goes. There’s a path into the gorge along one of the walls. I mean, the place is big, there’s trees and sometimes they pasture sheep down in it. And you can get into the cave itself easy, it’s got a mouth like a funnel and it just keeps going down, getting a little tighter and a little slicker each step of the way.”

  The Cilician paused and shrugged again. “Some people think it leads all the way to Hell, sure. There’s a chapel built at the throat of it, of stone and real old. And I suppose some people even believe that Typhon crawled up out of the cave. But though the place has never had a good reputation, this latest stuff about a dragon is new. And it isn’t a myth.”

  “Your Guardians?” Perennius asked with his eyes closed against the shimmering road.

  “I doubt it,” Calvus replied. Her voice drifted out of the tawny blur. “More likely it’s another result of my arrival. We hadn’t any experience with the process before my sibs and I were sent here. The side effects of the process—” the catch in the tall woman’s voice might have resulted from nothing more than a dry throat—“were not things that had been foreseen. At least, not things that we were warned to expect.”

  “Would you have come anyway?” the agent asked the world beyond his eyelids.

  “Yes.” The word seemed too flat to convey a loss of siblings which was more traumatic than a multiple amputation. “But I’m not sure they knew that we would come. I’m not sure the technicians realized how well they had raised us.”

  “Well, if we’ve got dragons as well as Guardians to deal with,” Perennius said, “we’ll deal with them. At least the bastards don’t seem to be able to track you down while we’re moving.”

  The appearance of another variable did not distress the agent. Rather the contrary, and Perennius knew himself well enough to guess why. The agent was practical and experienced enough to make all the preparations possible under the circumstances. He could never be comfortable risking failure because of his own laziness. That would have been as unthinkable as refusing to take a useful action because it might involve his own injury or death.

  But when it was impossible to plan, when Aulus Perennius had to react to what the moment brought … when success or failure balanced on his wits and a sword’s edge—that was when life became worthwhile for its own sake. If the mission were entering the mists of chance more deeply as they approached their goal, then so be it. They would deal with what came. He would deal with what came.

  “Time we got moving again,” the agent said aloud. “According to the itinerary, there’s an inn some five miles farther on.”

  “It may be abandoned,” the centurion suggested. “Cleiton said there isn’t any traffic past the gorge any more.”

  “There’ll be somebody there to serve us,” Perennius said unconcernedly, “or we’ll make do with what they left behind.” The agent began to stand. He used his hands in the chinks of the wall behind him to support his weight until he was willing to ease it back onto his legs. The spear wound was warm to the touch, but it seemed to have caused less swelling than even a bruise usually would. Again he wondered whether Calvus could influence muscles as well as minds.

  “And tonight,” the agent went on, “we’ll talk about what we’re going to do when we get there. When we get to Typhon’s Cavern.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Well, there’s somebody home,” Perennius commented as he watched the thread of smoke. Because the inn was half-way down the slope to the ford, the party had a view of the stables within the far sidewall of the courtyard. There were no immediate signs of activity there, but three of the stable doors were closed as if they were occupied. The smoke was from a flue of the vaulted common room to the rear. The structure could easily sleep a hundred men on straw pallets, but the evidence of the single fire suggested the handful whose beasts might be in the stable.

  “Part of the estate,” Sestius said. There was a low tower on one corner of the common room. The bath and the gatehouse, on opposite sides of the gate in the front wall, looked as if they were adapted for defense also. The centurion added morosely, “They may have got a caretaker to stay on when Kamilides and his crew lit out.”

  Gaius had bent to tie his donkey’s reins to a bush. He straightened with a puzzled expression. There was a piece of bone in his hand. “Aulus, look at this,” he said, stepping closer to the older man.

  Perennius glanced at the bone. “Part of an ox thigh,” he remarked. “What about it?”

  “Camel, I’d guess,” said Sest
ius, peering at the courier’s find. “Ox would be—”

  Gaius ignored the technical discussion. “Not what it is, but look at it,” he said. “Here, at the break.”

  The thigh had been worried by dogs or jackals, then nibbled by rodents who had hollowed out the narrow cavity completely. There was deeper scarring on the dense bone than either of those causes could account for. “Chisels,” the agent said with a frown. He rotated the bone. “Somebody cracked it with pointed chisels to get the marrow out.” At the broken end, among the jagged points left when the bone snapped, were cleanly-sheared surfaces reaching over an inch into the bone from either side.

  Sabellia had noticed something which the men had not. As they talked, the Gallic woman picked up an object a foot or two from where the thigh-bone had lain. Perennius glanced over at her and saw what she held. He swore softly.

  “Here,” she said, handing the object to the agent. “I think it’ll fit.”

  The object was a triangular tooth three inches long. Both its cutting edges were lightly serrated. The tooth fit the “chisel marks” in the thigh bone perfectly. Perennius tossed the bone away. He handed the tooth back to Sabellia. “I think,” he said as he unhitched his donkey’s reins, “that I’d as soon be inside walls for a while—” he nodded down toward the inn—“until we learn a little more about what in blazes is going on in these hills.”

  Perennius clucked to his donkey. The animal obeyed without the usual struggle. The five of them kept close together on the fork leading from the main road to the inn three hundred feet from stream-crossing. They all, even Calvus, spent far more effort watching their general surroundings than they did in watching the road or the inn which spelled safety at the end of that road.

  The inn was built around a courtyard. The gatehouse in one front corner doubled as accommodations for the manager and special guests. The common room across the rear was for drovers and others without the wealth or prestige needed for one of the private apartments in the gatehouse. Both sides of the courtyard were lined with stalls which could also be used to store merchandise. The corner tower in the back, and the arrow slits in all four walls, were not merely decoration. The building had been designed with an eye to more than the casual banditry.

  As the party neared the inn, Gaius kicked up his donkey to reach the gates before the others did. Still mounted, the courier pushed at the center of the double leaves. When they did not budge, he began to hammer on them while he shouted, “Gate! Gate, damn you, we want to get inside!”

  Nothing happened before the others had joined him. “I don’t suppose they’re expecting guests, whoever they are,” Perennius said dryly. “One of us can go around to the back and try shouting into the common room, I suppose. It’d probably be simpler to shinny over the wall here, though, and—”

  The sound that broke over the agent’s comments came from back along the road the way they had come. It was not a bugling or a roar in any normal sense. The sound it most reminded Perennius of was that of a cat vomiting. It was a hollow, chugging noise, followed by a horrid rattling. The sound was so loud that, like a waterfall, it provided an ambiance rather than an individual noise.

  The inn wall was eight feet high. Perennius’ face went blank. “Lucia,” he said to the tall woman, “give me a leg up like you did before.” It was the first time he had used the feminine form of her assumed name, as if she were a woman of his acquaintance.

  As if he were acquainted with her as a woman.

  Calvus cupped her hands in a stirrup. “Yes, Aulus,” she said. Her donkey brayed and turned in a tight circle when she dropped his reins. Sestius’ beast was restive also, though the other three donkeys seemed to be rather calmer than their human owners.

  The centurion hammered on the gate with his spear-butt. “Hey!” he shouted. “Herakles! Open the fucking gate, will you?”

  Perennius knew this time to expect the lift which the woman gave him when she straightened. The agent swung over and down into the courtyard in a single arc, his right hand pivoting on the top of the wall to swing him past. It might have been smarter to pause for an instant and make sure that the wall was not faced with spikes or sharpened flints. At this juncture, the agent thought he could better afford the injury than the loss of time. He hit the ground upright with his knees flexed against the shock. There was some motion across the courtyard, but he ignored it as he ran to the heavy bar of the gate. The—call it a roar—was sounding again. It was noticeably louder, even through the thick timbers of the gate.

  “Legate! Perennius!” Sestius screamed. Gaius and Sabellia were shouting something too. “Legate!”

  Perennius put his shoulder under the bar and used his knees to lift. The bar was of iron-bound oak. It was not really meant to be worked by a single man. In his present state of directedness, the agent could have lifted it with one hand.

  The leaves of the door knocked Perennius backward. They were driven by Sabellia’s donkey, bolting through the first hint of an opening despite anything the rider could do. Perennius’ own donkey and Calvus’, the latter streaming the tags of broken reins, slammed in after the Gallic woman. Gaius followed. He was actually controlling the donkey he rode. He had drawn his spatha in his right hand and was looking back over his shoulder.

  The dragon that was charging them drew Perennius’ stare also. The agent threw his weight against a gate leaf even before Sestius and Calvus had run inside. The mass of the panels meant a delay before even Perennius’ strength could start them swinging closed again. That alone was more delay than he liked to think about.

  More hands joined Perennius, those of his party and a tall, fair man the agent had never seen before. The leaves slammed against the stop carved in the inner face of the stone lintel. The stranger was screaming in Latin, “The bar! The bar!” It was Perennius who first spun to grip the bar where it had fallen, but Calvus plucked it from his hands and banged it home in the slots. The dragon hit the gate from the other side.

  The really terrifying thing about the dragon was that it looked over the wall at them.

  The creature had stridden down the hillside on its two hind legs. Now its forelimbs snatched at the humans scattering back from the gate. The hooked claws left deep triple scratches in the gate panels and the stone. The beast’s eyes glittered like polished jet. Its scales were black and red—the latter not rusty mottling but the angry crimson of a cock’s wattles.

  Perennius opened his mouth to shout orders, everyone to hide in the gatehouse, lest the creature leap the wall or batter through with its elephantine mass. The dragon’s jaws opened also, wide enough to engulf most of a man’s torso. The beast gave its hunting cry. The sound was felt in its paralyzing intensity by everything in the echoing courtyard. One of the donkeys threw itself on its back and began kicking the air while its burden scattered. Other hooves battered at the reinforced doors of the stables. The dragon’s breath stank like the air of a well-sealed tomb.

  The open door of the common room sucked the humans out of the courtyard like water through a tap. The agent was not sure which of them had led the rush. Perhaps the idea had struck them all at the same time. Running the length of the courtyard was like charging through the zone beaten by hostile artillery, but that hundred foot distance was a necessary insulation. The gatehouse was simply too close to the monster.

  The creature was forty feet long and as vicious, ounce for ounce, as a shrew. Even Gaius went scrambling at the roar. He had dismounted—landed on his feet, at any rate—and brandished his sword in the dragon’s face. The courage involved in the action was both pointless and insane, so the sound that shook the youth to his senses did at least a little good. The six of them, Perennius’ party and the stranger, bolted within the common room and closed the door. The dragon had begun chewing on the top of the wall.

  * * *

  It was close to pitch dark inside to eyes that had been under an open sky. The two men facing the newcomers were only figures in silhouette against the glow of the cookfire
in a wall niche. The agent did not need the details he would get when his eyes adjusted, however, to read the others’ stance as that of archers with their bows drawn.

  “What in blazes is that thing?” Perennius asked. He threw his back to the door in a disarming pantomime of terror at the dragon outside. At the moment, the agent’s greatest concern was for the arrow pointed at his midriff. It would not advance the situation to admit that, however.

  “If it gets in, you bastards,” said the man who had joined them at the gate, “it’s your fault. Jupiter preserve us if it gets the horses. We’ll never get clear of here on foot!”

  “Where do you come from?” demanded one of the bowmen. Like the other speaker, his Latin had a pronounced Gallic accent. The head of his arrow was beginning to wobble with the strain of holding the bow fully drawn. The man relaxed slightly, a good sign but dangerous in case his fingers slipped while the weapon was still pointed as it was.

  “Well, from Tarsus,” the agent said. His companions were extending to either side of him along the wall of the room. The Gaul who had first spoken was sidling to join the archers. It was clear that if the stand-off exploded into violence, the three of them were dead even if the arrows hit home. “They talked about Typhon and dragons, but blazes! I had a wool contract and I don’t make my living by listening to bumpf from silly women. But…” Perennius gestured back with his thumb, then added ingenuously, “You fellows part of a garrison from hereabouts?”

  That the three of them were soldiers was as obvious as their Gallic background. Their professional bearing, bowstrings drawn to their cheeks; their issue boots; the youthful similarity of the men themselves—all bespoke army. The question was, whose army? And Perennius was beginning to have a shrewd notion of the answer to that one, too. The alleyway in Rome and the Gallic voices closing the end of it whispered through his memory.