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

"I guess it was a log," the agent said aloud, giving the onlookers a weak smile. Sestius had stepped quickly to Sabellia's side. She took his arm. The woman walked the ship with a hand on her knife, but she was never far from the centurion or Perennius either. Any dangers the agent posed went beyond a bout of unwanted slap and tickle. "Or maybe it was - " Perennius wet his lips - "some dolphins, yes." He glanced up at the lookout involuntarily. The sailor stared back at him in frozen agreement.
By the unconquered Sun, thought the agent, maybe it was all a dream, a mirage. They were alone on the sea with no more than the waves and a single high-flying seabird as company.
"All right, fall in again," Gaius ordered harshly. He liked the authority he got from drilling the Marines; but after he spoke, he looked back carefully to Perennius. As the sailors returned to their own duties, one of the mates said, "His Highness is seeing mermaids. Maybe one of you lads ought to offer to haul his ashes for him before he hurts himself on a knothole." There was general laughter.
Perennius appeared not to be listening. He walked back to the bow. The fourteen-foot long pike was still in his right hand. He carried it just ahead of the balance so that its butt brushed the deck and its point winked in the air ahead of him at the height of a man's throat. The only sign the agent made to show he was not simply bemused at making a foolish mistake was his peremptory gesture to Calvus to join him by the bowsprit. It was unnecessary. The tall man had already turned in unison with the agent. Sabellia followed also, unasked but expected as Sestius went back to his training duties.
"Now, what in blazes was that?" the agent asked. His voice held the fury of Father Sun, reswallowing the life that was his creation in tendrils of inexorable flame. "And don't give me any crap about dolphins!" Even to himself, Perennius would not admit how fearful he was that what he had "seen" was only a construct of his diseased mind.
"It was less like a dolphin than you are," said the traveller calmly, always calmly. "It appears to have been a - " he looked at the agent, his lips pursing around the choice of a word - "marine reptile, a tylosaurus. It eats fish, though it would probably make short enough work of a man in the water. The ship itself is far too large to be potential prey, so I was not concerned."
The fact of identification has its own power over the thing identified. Perennius looked from Calvus to the pike in his hand. "Oh," he said in chagrin, conscious of the woman's eyes as well. He had made a fool of himself in his panic. "I hadn't seen one before."
"No, you certainly hadn't," the traveller agreed. "The last of them disappeared from Earth sixty-five million years ago. I don't think it will be able to stay alive very long in this age. The seas must be far too salty, so that it will dehydrate and die."
In a society that valued rhetoric over communication, mathematics were a slave's work - or a spy's. Numbers - of men, of wealth, of distances - were a part of Perennius' job, so he had learned to use them as effectively as he did the lies and weapons which he also needed. But even in a day when inflation was rampant and the word for a small coin had originally meant 'a bag of money,' the figure Calvus had thrown out gave the agent pause. While Perennius struggled with the concept, the Gallic woman sidestepped the figures and went to the heart of the problem. "You say they're all dead," she said in her own smooth dialect of Latin, "and you say we just saw one. Where did it come from?"
The traveller was looking astern, toward the empty waves past the rope-brailed canvas of the mainsail. Perhaps he was looking much farther away than that. "Either there is something completely separate working," he said "or that was a side-effect of the way I came here. I can't be sure. I was raised to know and to find - certain things. And to act in certain ways. This isn't something that I would need to understand, perhaps .. . but I rather think it was not expected."
The tall man shrugged. He looked at Sabellia, at the agent, with his stark black eyes again. "This was not tested, you see. It was not in question that the technique would work, but the ramifications could be as various as the universe itself. That's why they sent all six of us together . . . and I am here."
"Calvus, I don't understand," Perennius said. He watched his hands squeeze pointlessly against the weathered gray surface of the pike staff. "But if you say that it's all right, I'll accept that."
"Aulus Perennius, I don't know whether or not it is all right," the tall man said. "We didn't have time to test the procedure that sent us here." The smooth-skinned, angular face formed itself - relaxed would have been the wrong word - into a smile. "We did not have time," Calvus repeated wonderingly. "Yes, I've made a joke. I wonder how my siblings would react to me now?" He smiled again, but less broadly. "Contact with you has changed me more than could have been expected before we were sent off."
Sabellia began to laugh. Perennius looked at the woman. "You too?" he said sourly.
Sabellia's hair was beginning to bleach to red-blond after days of sea-reflected sunlight. "It's the idea of anyone getting a sense of humor by associating with you. Lord Perennius," she said. Her giggle made the sarcasm of "Lord" less cutting, though abundantly clear.
"That wasn't quite what I meant," said Calvus. He looked from one of his companions to the other.
But as the agent strode toward the mast to rack the pike again, he too began to laugh.



CHAPTER TWELVE

The sails were to windward of them. That was bad enough. What was worse was the fact that their attitude shifted even as Perennius watched them. If he was correct, the vessels were turning toward the Eagle, not away. In this age, in these waters west of Cyprus, no honest seaman wanted to meet another ship.
"Those two ships are turning toward us," said Calvus, as if to put paid to the hopeful doubt in the agent's mind. Perennius glanced sidelong at the tall man, wondering just how sharp his eyesight really was. "Why are they doing that?"
"Herakles, Captain!" cried the lookout who had given the initial alarm a minute before. "They're making for us! Pirates!"
"That seems to me to cover it, too," said Perennius. He struggled to keep from vomiting. Disaster, disaster . . . not unexpected in the abstract, but its precise nature had been unhinted only minutes before. The voyage had been going well. The oarsmen and the Marines were both shaking down in adequate fashion -
Across the surface of the agent's mind flashed a picture of his chief, Marcus Optatius Navigatus, burying himself in trivia as the Empire went smash. It was easier to think about the way a rank of Marines dressed than it was to consider chitinous things that spat lightning - or the near certainty that he would have to battle pirates with a quarter of the troops he had thought marginally necessary to the task.
Screw'em all. Aulus Perennius had been given a job, and he was going to do it. Not "or die trying"; that was for losers.
There were men shouting on deck and below it. The captain was giving orders to the coxswain through a wooden speaking tube. The agent turned his eyes toward the putative pirates again. They were still distant. Though interception might be inevitable, it would not be soon. With genuine calm rather than the feigned one of a moment before, Perennius said, "It could be that these aren't simply pirates, Calvus. Like the bravos we met in Rome weren't just robbers. Can you protect us against thunderbolts here like you did then?"
"No," Calvus said as he too continued to watch the other sails. The upper hull of the nearer of the vessels was barely visible. It was a sailing ship, and that was at least some hope. "Their weapons - and I can only assume that what you face here is identical to what we knew - their weapons will strike at a distance of - " a pause for conversion. The agent would have given a great deal to know the original measurement - "two hundred double paces, a thousand feet. My capacity to affect anything physical, or even - " a near smile - "mental, falls off exponentially with distance. At ten feet, perhaps, I could affect their weapons. No further."
"All right, we'll keep you out of the way," Perennius said. His mind was ticking like the fingers of an accountant. "Put you on an oar, you're strong, or maybe the cabin's the best idea, just in case we do get close enough you can - "
"Aulus Perennius," the traveller said, interrupting for the first time, "I said that if there are Guardians on those ships, they can tear this craft apart from a thousand feet."
"And if it's just pirates, they can't!" the agent snapped back. "Think I didn't goddam listen to you?" He pointed toward the cabin into which Gaius and Sestius had disappeared at a run. Their armor was there. "I'll have hell's own time finishing this job if you've caught a stray arrow on the way. And if it's your lobster buddies after all, well ... I just might be able to arrange a surprise for them even at two hundred paces. For now, get to blazes out of my way so that I can get on with what I need to do!"
Which was to kill people, the agent thought as he strode to the forward fighting tower. "You two!" he shouted to a pair of nervous-looking seamen. "Give me a hand with these cables!"
It was nice to have a skill that was in demand.
Perennius and his scratch team had three sides of the tower cleated together and were raising the fourth when Sestius and a pair of the Marines staggered forward. The soldiers were in armor and were carrying the ballista. With its base and a bundle of iron darts, it was a load for all of them.
"Drive home that peg!" the agent ordered. He thudded one warped timber against another with the point of his shoulder. Sestius dropped his burden obediently and rapped at the peg with his helmet, the closest equivalent to a hammer. Perennius grunted and lunged at the wall again. Sestius struck in unison, and the pieces of the tower locked in place. The sailors were already completing the task by dogging the bottom edges of the tower into the bronze hasps sunk permanently in the deck for the purpose.
"You pair, lift the roof in place," Perennius wheezed to the Marines. "There's a horizontal stud on the inside of the walls to peg it to."
The men looked at one another blankly for an instant. Then the centurion repeated the order in Greek. With a willingness that at least mitigated their ignorance of every goddam thing, the men dropped the ballista and began lifting the remaining square of planking.
"Do you want me to raise the aft tower while you arm yourself?" Sestius asked. Perennius had stripped off his cloak and equipment belt for the exertion of erecting the tower. Sweat glittered on his eyebrows and blackened the breast of his tunic in splotches. The Centurion looked fully the military professional by contrast. His oval plywood shield was strapped to his back in carrying position. His chest glittered with armor of bronze scales sewn directly to a leather backing. The mail shirt was newly-issued, replacing the one whose iron rings were welded to uselessness during the ambush in Rome.
"No goddam point," the agent said. "We don't have enough men to need this one," he added, levering himself away from the tower which supported him after he no longer needed to support it. It wasn't that he was getting old, not him. Even as a youth Perennius had paced himself for the task, not the ultimate goal. Here his strength and determination had gotten the heavy fighting tower up in a rush that a dozen men could have equalled only with difficulty. It didn't leave him much at the moment, but the pirates weren't aboard yet either. He could run on his nerves when they were. "Get the ballista set up and pick a crew for it - "
"Me?" Sestius blurted. "I don't know how to work one of these things." He stared at the dismantled weapon as if Perennius had just ordered it to bite him. "Sir, I thought you ... I mean, these Marines, what would they . . . ?"
"Good work, Centurion," Gaius called brightly as he strode to the fighting tower. He wore his cavalry uniform complete to the medallions of rank. They bounced and jingled against the bronze hoops of his back-and-breast armor. The armor was hinged on his left side and latched on the right. The individual hoops were pinned to one another in slots so that the wearer could bend forward and sideways to an extent. That was fine for a horseman who needed the protection of the thick metal because he could not carry a shield and guide his mount with his left hand. It should serve Gaius well here, also, in a melee without proper ranks and the support of a shield wall.
Perennius had a set of armor just like it back in the cabin, and he would not be able to wear it - blast the Fates for their mockery!
"I'll take over with this now," the younger Illyrian was saying cheerfully. He lifted the heavy ballista base. "You, sailor - scramble up there and take this! And I'll need both of you to crew the beast."
The seamen Perennius had commandeered looked doubtful, but it was toward the agent and not toward their own officers that they glanced for confirmation. Perennius nodded briefly to them. "Right," he said. "I'll be back myself in a moment."
"Marines to me!" Sestius was calling in Latin, then Greek, as he trotted amidships. He obviously feared that if he stayed nearby, Perennius would assign him to the ballista after all. The centurion was more immediately fearful of the hash he would make trying to use a weapon of which he was wholly ignorant than he was of the fight at odds which loomed.
Perennius slapped Gaius on the shoulder and ran back toward his cabin. Men and gear made an obstacle course of the eighty-foot journey. The deck was strewn with the personal gear of the Marines. They were rummaging for the shields and ill-fitting cuirasses which might keep them alive over the next few hours. There was neither room nor permission for them to store their belongings below as did the deck crew and oarsmen. The seamen resented the relative leisure of men so recently slaves. Now, the rush to packs lashed to the deck cleats had created more incidental disruption than one would have guessed a mere score of men could achieve.
It occurred to the agent that this might well be Gaius' first real action. That at least explained the youth's enthusiasm. The boy had been given all the considerable benefits of training and preferment which Perennius could arrange for him. Gaius had thrown himself into each position with ability, though without the driving ambition that might have gained him a provincial governorship before he reached retirement age.
Or a stage above that, whispered a part of the agent's mind. Perennius hurtled a Marine an instant before the fellow straightened up the spear he had drawn through the lashings of his pack. How many provincial governors had become emperors during Perennius' own lifetime?