Birds of Prey (28 page)

“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.”

The village priest bowed to him. “We regard strangers as God's gift to our valley, the opportunity he gives us to repay the agony of his sacrifice by which we all are saved. Enter, and join our feast of love.” Father Ramphion's broad gesture within had a compulsion to it as real as if it had created a suction in the air by its passage. Bemused and still uncertain, Perennius obeyed.

The interior of the spire was lighted primarily by rush-candles—pithy reeds dipped in grease. There were good-sized windows in the building's upper levels. Because the sun was low, the windows could only throw rectangles on the curved surface of the wall across from them. The church was designed much the way Perennius had assumed from the exterior. Eight thick columns supported the second level; four separate columns reached up the full forty feet to the base of the third. The belfry which was perched on top of even that must have been constructed of wood, because there was no evidence of the additional bracing which that structure would have required if it were stone. Though the church looked massively large from the outside, the columns filled its interior and gave it a claustrophobic feeling despite its volume.

What Perennius had not expected—though it might have been the norm for Christian churches—was the fact that all the stonework inside had been brightly painted. The porous limestone provided a suitable matrix for the paint, and the rock's natural soft yellow color was used both for backgrounds and for the flesh of the figures. Those figures were painted in stiff, full-frontal poses which seemed to reflect local taste as much as they did the crudity of the efforts. While the paintings were not the work of trained artists, their execution displayed some of the same raw power that suffused the architecture of the church itself. The bright colors and the depictions of calm-faced men undergoing gruesome tortures affected Perennius as real events were not always able to do. The agent kept remembering Calvus' face and the way it retained its surface placidity during her multiple rape.

It was Calvus herself who shook the agent from his grim imaginings. “How would they have gotten high enough to do that painting?” the bald woman asked in Latin. She gestured with a flick of her chin instead of raising her hand.

“Ah, that?” the agent said. “Scaffolding.” He had to swallow the “of course” that his tongue had almost tacked on. Calvus did not ask questions to which the answers would have been obvious if she had thought. There were surprising gaps in the traveller's experience, but her mental precision was as great as her physical strength. “Would have needed it just to build the walls,” the agent went on. He wondered how on earth the tall woman had thought the stones had been lifted into place. Perhaps there were people—where—she came from who could make stones fly. She had denied that she herself could move anything of real size without touching it, but … “You're right, they seem to have built this without so much as a staircase integral to it.”

Perennius was thinking as a military man. Any tendencies the architect—if that were not too formal a term—had toward military design were exhausted when the bottom level was pierced with arrow slits. A rope ladder served as access to the belfry, adequate for religious ends and as a watchtower. If there was no easy way to use the height of the upper levels against putative assault, then there seemed to be no reason to do so either. The thick walls, with the modicum of offensive capacity which the slits gave, would suffice against raiders. A real military force would make short work of an isolated tower, however strong it was individually. The waste of capacity still prompted an inward sneer. The agent thought that perhaps it was that from which arose his growing sense of unease.

“Herakles, Legate,” Sestius called cheerfully from behind him, “This isn't the sort of place I expected to find out in the sticks. Or the kind of spread I thought we'd be offered, neither. Hey, what do you suppose they've got for wine?”

“Quintus,” the agent said. His voice was as flat as a bowstring. “Bag it. Pretend you're at a formal dinner given by the Emperor. We
need
the help of these people.”

The centurion winked and clapped Perennius on the shoulder.

The thick columns had trefoil cross-sections which increased their resemblance to walls. Perennius had the impression that he was in a spacious maze. Ramphion himself guided the strangers to a table beneath the belfry. There was no aisle from the door to the other side of the circular building. Those entering the church had immediately to dodge one of the outer ring of pillars. There was another such pillar in alignment across the room. It might be barely possible to see from the outer wall at one point to the equivalent point across the building, but the focus of any mass services would have to be the center of the room rather than the side.