"David Drake - Birds Of Prey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

A pair of armed guards stood in the entrance alcove of the building. Their round shields, stacked against
javelins in opposite corners of the short passage, were marked with the blazons of a battalion of the
Palatine Foot. The Palatines were one of the elite formations the Emperor was forming as a central field
army. All the Empire's borders were so porous that there was no longer a prayer of dealing with hostile
thrusts before they penetrated to the cities and farmland of the interior. Because the Palatines were an
elite, it was all the more frustrating to Perennius that the younger of the guards had not bothered to wear
his body armor.

Both of the uniformed men straightened when they saw that Perennius and Gaius were not sauntering
toward the apartment block at the end of the court. The lower floors of that building seemed, from the
advertisements painted on the stucco, to have been converted into an inn and brothel. The guard who
called out to Perennius was the older of the pair, a man not far short of the agent's own forty years. "All
right, sir," the guard announced with no more than adequate politeness, "if you've got business here, you'll
have to state it to us."

"Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, straight-leg?" snapped Gaius in reaction to the tone.
The young man flopped back the edge of his cloak to display his chest insignia, medallions of silvered
bronze. Gaius had been an aide in the Bodyguard Horse before Perennius arranged his secondment to
the Bureau as a courier. The morning before, when they had reached Italy - and very nearly the limits of
friendly territory - the younger man had unpacked and donned his uniform trappings. That was harmless
enough in itself, a boastfulness understandable in an orphan from an Illyrian village no one had ever heard
of. What had sent a chill down Perennius' spine was the realization that Gaius had been carrying the gear
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when he arrived in Palmyra to deliver an urgent message to Perennius.

The situation between Gallienus, who styled himself Emperor of Rome, and Odenathus, who claimed
less but perhaps controlled more, was uncertain. The two were not friends . . . nor, at the moment, were
they clearly at swords' points. Perennius travelled as a spice trader, but that was only a veneer over his
claim to be a secret envoy from Postumus, Emperor of the Gauls. Given what the agent had learned in
those paired personae, there was very little doubt as to what the Palmyrenes would have done if Gaius'
vanity had unmasked the pair of them as agents of the central government.

Of what liked to think of itself as the central government, at any rate.

The older guard reacted about the way Perennius would have reacted had he been on entrance duty.
"Don't worry about how I slept, sonny," he said. "Let's just see your pass." The guard wore a shirt of iron
ring mail over his tunic. The metal had been browned, but the linen beneath his armpits bore smudges of
rust nonetheless. It was that problem of maintenance which led many men to prefer bronze armor or even
leather despite the greater strength of the iron.

Of course, a lot of them now were like the younger guard who wore no armor at all. Blazes! See how
comfortable they'd be the first time a Frank's spear slipped past the edge of their shields.

The agent reached into his wallet and brought out one of the flat tablets there. It was of four leaves of
thin board. The outer two acted as covers for the inner pair. "These are my orders," Perennius said,