Its head was not that of any dog or wolf the agent had ever seen. It was outsized, even on a creature with the bulk of a small lion. The jaws were huge, and the red tongue lolled over a serrated row of teeth as the beast paced its narrow cage.
“Killed everything in the cave they were using for a sheepfold,” Cleiton continued. “Forty-three sheep and a
boy, way I heard it. They rolled a wagon across the mouth to hold it till people got to them with nets. Mean bastard.”
“It’s a dire wolf,” Calvus said. She was watching the animal with an interest which longer association with her permitted the agent to read beneath the calm. “It shouldn’t be here, of course. Now. Like the tylosaurus.”
“In Rome,” Perennius said as he watched the great wolf, “I saw the head of a lion with fangs longer than my fingers. Did that come from the same place as these others?”
“In a way,” the traveller agreed. “A sabretooth – ” she looked at the agent. “It must have come the same way, the way I came and the result of my coming. Aulus Perennius, I was not sent to interfere with your world, but my coming has done so.”
There were more horns and marching feet in the boulevard below, drawing cheers and echoes. Perennius glanced toward the parade. He jerked back to look at Calvus because of what he thought he had seen there. There was a tear at the corner of the tall woman’s eye.
The agent’s mind worked while his muscles paused. It was as if he had walked into a potential ambush, where the first move he made had to be right or it would be his last. Perennius did not curse or blurt sympathy. He had seen the traveller accept multiple rape without overt emotion. All the agent understood of the tear now was that it chilled him to see it on a face he had thought imperturbable.
Perennius reached out. Only someone who had experience of the agent’s reflexes would have realized that there had even been a pause. He touched the traveller’s wrist with his fingertips. Then he turned back to face the parade without removing his hand.
“I had four sisters,” Calvus said in her cool, empty voice. “Like the fingers of your hand, Aulus Perennius, five parts and not five individuals. And now I am here alone in your age, and along the route I travel there are anomalies … but not my sisters. Not ever my sisters.” She squeezed the agent’s hand with a wooden precision which bespoke care and the strength beneath her smooth skin.
The crowd gave a tremendous roar. Behind the infantry, a pair of fine horses pulled a chariot. The vehicle’s surfaces were gilded and embossed. In the car stood two statues, probably of wood but again gilded and glittering and draped with flowers. The statue placed behind was of the Sun God, crowned with spiked rays and himself holding a laurel crown over the figure in front of him. Perennius did not need the signs being carried before the chariot to know that the leading figure represented Odenath. The statue stood taller than the agent remembered the Autarch to do in person; but that was to be expected, and the statue’s expression of arrogant determination was real enough. Odenath’s statue was draped in the gold and purple of triumphal regalia. Its left hand held a sceptre and its right a sheaf of wheat to symbolize the prosperity its victories had returned.
More cataphracts rode behind the chariot. The leader carried Odenath’s war standard on a pole. A bronze dragon’s head caught the breeze through snarling jaws. The crimson silk tube attached to the bronze neck swelled and filled. The gold-shot tail snapped in the air twelve feet behind the pole that supported it.
“The Dragon from the East!” people shouted in the street. “Hail the Dragon from the East!”
Perennius spoke because he was the man he was, and because he himself found concentration on the task in hand the best response to grief. It was with that motive, and not in the savage cruelty with which the words might have come from a less-directed speaker, that he said, “If you had four sisters, Calvus, then I wonder what we can expect to see besides the three we have.”