The two men looked back toward the building proper. To their mutual surprise, the door was open and the chief usher was ceremoniously bowing out the tall, marble-bald subject of their conversation.
“Blazing Noon,” muttered Navigatus in the Dalmatian dialect of his childhood. “If he can get around Delius that way …” And then both of them put on false smiles to greet the man whom Gallienus had sent to them.
CHAPTER FIVE
On closer examination, Lucius Cloelius Calvus was a stage more unusual than Perennius’ initial glance had suggested. Calvus’ skin had the yellowish pallor of old ivory, but it was as smooth as a young child’s. The skin’s gloss suggested someone much younger than the black eyes did. Perennius had heard that the Chinese, on the far end of the route by which silk arrived at government warehouses in Alexandria, had honey-gold complexions. He wondered if the stranger could have come from that far away. Like his skin, Calvus’ features were flawlessly regular; but their proportions, their symmetrical angularity, were not those of anyone Perennius had met before. Also, there was something in the slim neck that nagged him. …
“Interesting that your usher reads lips,” said Calvus in accentless Latin as he approached, “but I suppose it’s a valuable ability for someone in his position.” He shifted his eyes to Perennius. “Or yours, sir.”
“Delius reads lips?” sputtered Navigatus.
Only a facet of Perennius’ conscious mind listened for content. Calvus blandly expressed surprise that Navigatus had not known that his attendant could follow conversations out of earshot. The agent did not care about that – Delius, in his position, could be expected to know enough to get his superior hung whether or not he was a lip-reader. What interested Perennius more was the chance to determine Calvus’ homeland from the patterns within the Latin he was now speaking.
With two languages, Latin and Greek, a traveller could wander the length and breadth of the Empire without ever being unable to order a meal or ask directions. From the British Wall, to Elephantine on the Nile where a garrison watched the Nubians south of the Cataract; and from the Pillars of Hercules to Amida across the Tigris, those tongues were in themselves entree to almost the smallest village. The addition of Aramaic would add textures to the East and to areas of Eastern immigration like Rome itself; but even there, the Greek was sufficient.
But Latin and Greek were not always, even not generally, first languages. There were still farms within a hundred miles of the capital in which nurses crooned to infants in Oscan, for instance. Childhood backgrounds gave a distinctness that went beyond mere dialects to versions of the common tongues. Languages were as much Perennius’ present stock in trade as swords had been when he served in uniform. He was very good with both.
But the stranger had no accent whatever. He spoke with the mechanical fluency of water trembling over rocks. Calvus’ voice had no more character than that of a professional declaiming a rich man’s poem for pay. He gave the words only the qualities required by grammar and syntax.
“If we sit here with our backs to the building,” Calvus was saying with a nod toward one of the benches around the fountain, “we can have our privacy. I should explain, Director – ” he nodded in an aside to Navigatus – “that the reason I have not taken you into my confidence before now is that I felt Aulus Perennius should be informed by me directly. This way he will make up his own mind. There are risks involved, and I understand your relationship goes beyond bare professionalism.” The tall man seated himself on the curved berth, gesturing the others to places to either side of him as if he were host.
Perennius grinned as he sat down. He wondered if Calvus had been told that the agent was Marcus’ chicken. Perennius had been a number of things over the years, but not that. Only the Empire had screwed him.
Navigatus frowned. “I’ve read the letter,” he said, tapping the wallet into which he had returned the rescript, “and I understand my duty.”