again.
The agent stared at something far distant from the clasped hands on which his eyes were focused. 'Besides,' he said, 'Julia ended it herself. Her - emotional state was causing conflict with her duties as a priestess.' As old as the phrase was in his memory, it still had edges that could tear. 'That's why I accepted the transfer to Numidia with you, Marcus. Not because of the promotion.' He smiled at their linked hands.
'Ah,' said Navigatus. 'I, ah. ... Well, of course, there's still the matter that forced me to recall you from Palmyra, isn't there?'
'Indeed there is,' agreed the agent as he led the other man to one of the stone benches against the back wall of the garden. 'When all else fails, there's always duty.'
'You see,' said Navigatus as he fished a slim scroll from the wallet beneath his toga, 'he came with this, which isn't something that I see every day. Even here.' He slipped off the vellum cover and handed the document to Perennius.
The agent read the brief Latin inscription carefully. 'Can't say it's not to the point,' he remarked as he rolled the document again. It had read, 'The Emperor Caesar Publius Licinius Gallienus Pius Augustus to Marcus Navigatus. The bearer of this rescript, Lucius Cloelius Calvus, is to be afforded the full support of your Bureau.
All his requests are to be executed as if from my lips. When it is necessary to accomplish the tasks thus imposed, you may apply for assistance from my Director of Administration, Aurelius Quirinius.'
The damned thing was in vermilion ink, Perennius noted, and it didn't look to be in the handwriting of a professional scribe either. Blazes! 'All right,' he said as he handed back the imperial rescript, 'what does he request?'
'You, Aulus,' said the Director, meeting Perennius' gaze steadily. 'He wants you.'
'Blazes,' the agent repeated aloud. He had an urge to wrap his cloak around him again, even in the sunlit garden. 'He's the tall one in there, isn't he?' Perennius added in sudden certainty.
Both men glanced toward the drawing room. The window was lined with the faces of men waiting with an impatience which bid fair to master their senses of decorum. In the center was the bald man with whom Perennius had locked eyes earlier. He was the tallest of those watching and the only one who looked calm. His face was as still as a statue's as he watched the men in the garden.
'Why yes,' said Navigatus in surprise. 'You know him, then? Frankly, I haven't been able to find anybody who did.'
Perennius grinned at his Director. He wondered briefly whether an appearance of omniscience might not be worth cultivation. Not with Marcus, though; not with family. 'Don't know a thing but what I can tell by looking at him,' the agent admitted. 'Must just have been his name.' But the cognomen Calvus, Baldie, could have come from generations before. There was something in his easy identification that bothered Perennius in a way that hunches generally did not.
'Umm,' said his superior. 'He told me nothing at all, Marcus, except that he needed my best agent for a dangerous mission. And then he named you.' Navigatus smiled. 'Not that there was any question in my mind, of course, but I'm not sure I would have withdrawn you from Palmyra if he hadn't been so specific. And while the fellow was polite enough, well ... he knew what the rescript he brought said, didn't he?'
Perennius turned his head so that the other man would not see his expression and grimaced ruefully. Another startled lizard ran spraddle-legged a dozen feet along the vertical surface of the wall. 'I've been doing you an injustice, Marcus,' the agent said. 'I thought you'd jerked me because you were getting nervous again.'
'I didn't want the Palmyra mission assigned to you, that's correct,' the older man said carefully. 'You've paid your dues, and I think it's time you left some of the risk to others. But I've never scrubbed you from a mission which you wanted and for which you were qualified. Which is anything short of a bed-chamber attendant for the Empress, as I well know.'
Perennius laughed. He slapped his would-be protector on the shoulder and said, 'Hell, what good did my balls ever do me, Marcus? But if the well-connected gentleman has been roosting in your chamber since Gaius was sent for me, you'll probably be glad to be shut of him. Let's bring him out here, learn what he needs and then the two of us'll get out of your hair.' He stood up.
Navigatus rose also. 'That's an odd thing, Aulus,' the Director said. 'He brought the rescript eighteen days ago today. I said I'd send for him as soon as you arrived - he has an apartment in the palace, but nobody there seems to know him. Except his Majesty, I suppose. . . . But he returned today without being summoned. I was rather concerned because we didn't expect you, you know, not for a week at least.'
The two men looked back toward the building proper. To their mutual surprise, the door was open and the chief usher was ceremoniously bowing out the tall, marble-bald subject of their conversation.
'Blazing Noon,' muttered Navigatus in the Dalmatian dialect of his childhood. 'If he can get around Delius that way ...' And then both of them put on false smiles to greet the man whom Gallienus had sent to them.
CHAPTER FIVE
On closer examination, Lucius Cloelius Calvus was a stage more unusual than Perennius' initial glance had suggested. Calvus' skin had the yellowish pallor of old ivory, but it was as smooth as a young child's. The skin's gloss suggested someone much younger than the black eyes did. Perennius had heard that the Chinese, on the far end of the route by which silk arrived at government warehouses in Alexandria, had honey-gold complexions. He wondered if the stranger could have come from that far away. Like his skin, Calvus' features were flawlessly regular; but their proportions, their symmetrical angularity, were not those of anyone Perennius had met before. Also, there was something in the slim neck that nagged him. ...
'Interesting that your usher reads lips,' said Calvus in accentless Latin as he approached, 'but I suppose it's a valuable ability for someone in his position.' He shifted his eyes to Perennius. 'Or yours, sir.'
'Delius reads lips?' sputtered Navigatus.
Only a facet of Perennius' conscious mind listened for content. Calvus blandly expressed surprise that Navigatus had not known that his attendant could follow conversations out of earshot. The agent did not care about that - Delius, in his position, could be expected to know enough to get his superior hung whether or not he was a lip-reader. What interested Perennius more was the chance to determine Calvus' homeland from the patterns within the Latin he was now speaking.
With two languages, Latin and Greek, a traveller could wander the length and breadth of the Empire without ever being unable to order a meal or ask directions. From the British Wall, to Elephantine on the Nile where a garrison watched the Nubians south of the Cataract; and from the Pillars of Hercules to Amida across the Tigris, those tongues were in themselves entree to almost the smallest village. The addition of Aramaic would add textures to the East and to areas of Eastern immigration like Rome itself; but even there, the Greek was sufficient.
But Latin and Greek were not always, even not generally, first languages. There were still farms within a hundred miles of the capital in which nurses crooned to infants in Oscan, for instance. Childhood backgrounds gave a distinctness that went beyond mere dialects to versions of the common tongues. Languages were as much Perennius' present stock in trade as swords had been when he served in uniform. He was very good with both.
But the stranger had no accent whatever. He spoke with the mechanical fluency of water trembling over rocks. Calvus' voice had no more character than that of a professional declaiming a rich man's poem for pay. He gave the words only the qualities required by grammar and syntax.
'If we sit here with our backs to the building,' Calvus was saying with a nod toward one of the benches around the fountain, 'we can have our privacy. I should explain, Director - ' he nodded in an aside to Navigatus - 'that the reason I have not taken you into my confidence before now is that I felt Aulus Perennius should be informed by me directly. This way he will make up his own mind. There are risks involved, and I understand your relationship goes beyond bare professionalism.' The tall man seated himself on the curved berth, gesturing the others to places to either side of him as if he were host.
Perennius grinned as he sat down. He wondered if Calvus had been told that the agent was Marcus' chicken. Perennius had been a number of things over the years, but not that. Only the Empire had screwed him.
Navigatus frowned. 'I've read the letter,' he said, tapping the wallet into which he had returned the rescript, 'and I understand my duty.'
'Ah,' said Calvus, 'but one owes duty to more than the State, surely. There is one's - ' He paused, his tongue groping for a word that was not there - 'there are friends, that is; and there is humanity as a whole, don't you agree?'
