administrator, wouldn't you?' The agent quelled the trembling of his arm by squeezing Sabellia the tighter. 'I'll make a pretty good administrator too, I think. Time I got out of the field.' He glanced at the burnt stone overhead and out toward the sunlit gorge in which a dragon and other things lay. They would be beginning to rot. 'I'm getting too old for this nonsense.'
Sabellia touched the hand on her right shoulder. 'You didn't think,' she said, switching deliberately from Latin to the Allobrogian dialect she shared with the agent's youth, 'that you could survive the frustrations of a bureau.'
Perennius laughed again. 'That,' he said, 'was when we were losing.' He stood up with the clumsiness demanded by muscles cramped in his legs and torso. 'The job's still got to be done. It doesn't have to be a - religion, now that I know we're going to win.'
The woman took his offered hand. She was careful not to put any weight on the battered agent as she rose herself. 'We?' she repeated. 'You and Gallienus?'
'Civilization,' Perennius said, 'as I guess I was raised to mean it.' He used Calvus' term 'raised' in pity and in homage. The image of Gaius in imperial regalia rippled beneath memory of the traveller's calm face.
'Need to convince that Gallic kid,' Perennius said as he and the woman began climbing the path, 'that I didn't kill his mother. Blazes! With the things I've done, people don't need to imagine reasons to hate me.'
'I thought I was coming to kill him myself,' Sabellia said, looking at her hand and the agent's. 'But he was lying there, so young, and I ... If you left him alive, Aulus, I would.'
The agent paused and turned the woman gently to face him. A spray of dogwood overhung the trail edge. It brushed Sabellia's hair with white flowers. 'I've been making an assumption,' Perennius said. 'I've been assuming that you'd want to come with me. As my wife.'
'Oh, thank God,' Sabellia said. She stepped closer, hugging Perennius with a fierce joy.
Perennius nuzzled her red hair. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could feel Calvus watching them with a smile.