“I need a hand,” the agent said. As he crawled vertically down the rock face, he added, “Do you expect to be able to get people to die for nothing, Lucius Calvus? Is that what you expect?”
“Not for nothing,” the woman said. She extended herself so that her right hand alone supported her weight and the agent’s. “Aulus, this is the most important thing on Earth since life appeared.”
Perennius twisted his face upward. He shouted, “Not to me! Not to Gaius and Sestius and the people we’ve killed!” He looked down at the trail over which he dangled. In a neutral voice he directed, “All right, let me go.”
The agent hit with a clang of ironmongery. He staggered. The armored shirt and apron were even more awkward than usual. The lace work of rings had been welded into streaky patterns. They gave the garments the effect of a stiff girdle in addition to their weight.
“Aulus,” Calvus said. She touched Perennius’ shoulder as he would have stamped down the short interval seperating him from Gaius’ remains. The agent turned, not quite willingly, to face her. Calvus’ touch was no more than that; but when Perennius had shifted his weight to stride forward, his shoulder did not move nor the fingers from it. Calvus said, “Even if I were to intervene, nothing goes on forever. Not your Empire, not humanity as you know it … or even as I know it.”
“We shouldn’t intervene, then? We should let things go?” Perennius demanded harshly. “Where’s the bigger joke in that, Calvus? You saying it or me listening?”
Her calm voice, her ivory face, could not express troubled emotions. Perennius felt them as surely as the hand on his shoulder as Calvus said, “Aulus, if your Empire should survive another two centuries, as it might, the cost – ” She broke off to wipe sweat or a tear from the corner of one brown eye. “In my day, nothing, no difference. Events open and close, according to their magnitude. Even what I was sent to do will mean nothing when the sun swells to swallow this world.”
“Praise the Sun for the life he offers,” whispered the agent, an undertone and not an interpolation.
“In my day,” the traveller repeated with emphasis. “In between, the Christian religion would become a theocracy that would last a thousand years beyond this rump of an Empire. I can’t offer more than a few centuries, Aulus. It’s time is over. Please understand that.”
“Well then, give me the rump!” Perennius shouted. “And don’t be too sure that there won’t be a way out then, my friend. Or – ” and his angry voice dropped into a tone of cold ruthlessness – “do you think you can force me to help finish the job? Finish your job. Is that what you think?”
“I think,” said the woman, “that we have grown too good of friends since we met for me ever to try to force you to act. And I think we know each other too well for me ever to think I had to force you to do your duty.”
“Shit,” the agent said dismally. He reached out to clasp the hand still tighter against his armored shoulder.
Perennius was looking away, toward the crags across the gorge.
Still clasping his taller companion, the agent began to walk to where Gaius lay. “I don’t want a thousand years of Father Ramphions, no. But I’d take that if I could give my world a time, a stability like that of the past. And if . . .” Perennius’ voice trailed off. He took his hand from his shoulder to place his arm around the woman’s waist. The play of muscles as she walked was as finely tuned as that of a dog – or a tigress. “I’d give the whole game to those fucking gray monsters if I thought it’d bring Gaius back. I almost would.”
“Aulus, that won’t be necessary,” the traveller said.
The catch in the tall woman’s voice turned the attempt at lightness into something very close to open emotion. “Gaius will live.” Calvus knelt beside the fallen youth. The laces closing his helmet had not burned through the way Perennius’ had. They popped audibly at a tug. Gaius’ face was sallow, bloodless beneath the weathered tan of shipboard and the road. “And so will your Empire, Legate,” the woman added softly. She stripped away the gorget and began breaking the tack-welded hooks and eyes that closed the mail shirt.