Birds of Prey (35 page)

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.

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.”