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 com-
ment 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 protege 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?'
'We'll, 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, / 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.
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.
