Perennius gazed after the slave with amusement. “Nice to meet somebody who’s good at his job,” the agent said.
“Well, that still doesn’t explain why you pretend to be a man when you’re really a woman,” Gaius said. His tone and the frown on his face suggested that the tall woman’s words had not explained very much else to him either.
“When I’m really neither, you mean?” Calvus asked, and she had to know that the courier had not meant anything of the sort. “Think of me as a mule, Decurion. What the pirates did mattered as little to me as it would have to a board with a knothole.”
Perennius turned. Calvus would not meet his eyes. He touched her cheek and guided her face around until she was looking at him. “They’re all dead,” the agent said. “Every one of them. Now, do you want to tell the boy why you passed yourself off for a man, or shall I?”
The face that Perennius could not have forced to turn now softened into a smile. “You tell him, Aulus,” the woman said, “if you can.”
“Blazes, what do you think I spend most of my life doing?” the agent grumbled. “Chopping weeds?” He patted his protege lightly on the knee to return the discussion to him. “Look, Gaius,” the agent said, “how many six foot four bald women have you met in embassies to the Emperor?”
“We’ll, he could have worn a wig,” the courier mumbled through his wine. He was startled enough to have continued to use a masculine pronoun.
“Fine, how many six foot four women whose wigs slip in a breeze or a scuffle – have you forgotten what we went through before we met the Goths? Blazes, friend – ” Perennius had to catch himself every time so as not to address Gaius as “boy” – “who takes a woman seriously? Oh, I know – Odenath’s tough, but his wife Zenobia could eat him for breakfast. And sure, there’s been some at Rome, too. But not openly, not at Rome. Queens are for wogs, and lady ambassadors would be an insult, however – ” he looked at Calvus – “persuasive she might be. There are limits.” Perennius’ voice lost its light tone as he repeated, “There are limits.” In the agent’s mind, Germans knelt and laughed and grunted. “But those things can be worked out too,” he concluded.
With a barking laugh and a return to banter as he looked at Calvus, Perennius added, “Damned if I yet know how you managed it, though. Manage it.”
“I was raised to have control of my muscles – and bodily functions,” the tall woman said. The agent was beginning to understand that “raised” was a euphemism for “bred” when the woman applied it to herself. “And as you know, I can be persuasive. There are many things for sailors to look at at night beside details of who’s squatting at the rail.” Calvus laughed. It was the first time Perennius had heard her do so. She twitched her outer tunic. “Full garments help too, of course.”
There was again a bustle at the trap door. This time Cleiton himself climbed through ahead of Sestius. Sabellia followed the two men. Her red hair was beginning to curl into ringlets as it grew out.
“Quintus has told me where you were planning to go,” the innkeeper said, gesturing as soon as he no longer needed his arms to haul him onto the roof. “This is impossible now. Besides, Typhon’s Cavern has a bad reputation at the best of times. I’m not superstitious, but . . .”
The centurion broke in on the sentence whose thought, at least, had been completed. “Cleiton says the story is that there’s a dragon in the area around the gorge, now. Some people are saying it’s Typhon himself, released from Hell.”
The agent grimaced. Sestius had been told to get information, and the soldier could not help the sort of nonsense he was told. Perennius thought he had heard an undercurrent of belief in the myth Sestius was retailing, however. That sort of crap, like tales of hostile armies a million men strong, buried reality and made a hard job harder.