“I haven’t made a point of this,” said Calvus against the backdrop of growling beasts, “because I knew you were acting as quickly as possible. But the – ” he swallowed – “Guardians located me once. By now it seems evident that the one you killed was here by himself and that there will not be another attempt until another can arrive from Cilicia. . . . But even if they must rely on – locally-available transportation, every day makes the second attempt more probable.”
Perennius sucked his lower lip between his teeth. He turned. “Longidienus!” he shouted down the quay. “Watch-stander!”
The leader of the Marines braced to attention. He at least was a trained soldier. “Sir?” he replied.
“Get your men aboard. We’ll be sailing as soon as the captain tells me he’s ready,” Perennius ordered. In a low voice, he went on to the traveller, “I suppose you know how the bug found you?”
Calvus lifted his forehead in negation. “We hadn’t ex-
pected anything of the sort,” he said. “They – you see, we’re used to dealing with th-them in a different aspect. It’s easy to underestimate them, because the individuals are treated as so many blood cells, so many flakes of skin. But the gestalt . . .” He turned his palms upward. “My arrival here would have caused an enormous shift of energies. We didn’t think they would be able to detect it. Obviously, they detected something. Perhaps it was that.”
The hyenas stank with a feline musk which made the agent’s stomach turn even in the general reek of the harbor. He stared at the spotted, scabby beasts while his hands rested lightly on the weapons beneath his cloak. There were a dozen of the hyenas, each of them a man’s size or larger; and Perennius thought he understood the frustrated rage with which they glared out of their crates. “How are chances that they can keep right on tracking you?” the agent asked. He spoke toward the beasts.
“If they simply located my – point of arrival,” Calvus said, “then they have no more way of following us when we leave the vicinity that anyone else in this age would have. They will be waiting, of course, but you will still determine how and when to strike.” He paused as if to take a deep breath; though in fact, Calvus’ breathing was, as always, mechanically regular.
“That’s one possibility,” said Perennius to the hyenas.
“Yes,” Calvus agreed. “And yes, they may be able to locate me at all times, wherever I am, whatever I do. In that case, I see very little possibility that our mission will succeed.”
“Yeah, that was how it looked to me, too,” the agent said. He met the tall man’s eyes again. Neither of their faces held any particular expression. “Let’s get aboard,” Perennius said. “We’ll assume that they’ll lose us as soon as we get under way.”
The three and a half hours of unexpected delay which followed would have grated on Perennius even if Calvus had not given him a specific reason to fear delay. He tried to react as he would have done if he were simply waiting for a Bay of Naples ferry to cast off to take him back to base from a brothel. The stocky Illyrian stood in a curve of the poop rail, letting his senses absorb the confusion around him while his mind saw only the dance of sunlight on the murky waters.
The problem was the oars. Perennius was not familiar with the process of fitting out a large warship – nor, for that matter, were many of the crewmen and dockworkers involved. Because the liburnian was decked, there was no practical way that the twenty-two foot long upper-bank ‘ oars could be inserted from inside the seventeen-foot wide rowing chamber. Instead, each oar handle had to be thrust through its port by men on the quay, then grasped and drawn in by the oarsmen inside the vessel. The oarsmen were experienced sailors and generally used to the shattering drudgery of rowing, but the Eagle’s cramped rowing chamber was new to them and thus chaotic. Most merchant ships – all but the monstrously largest ones – carried a few pairs of sweeps to maneuver them in harbor or to make landfall when the inshore breeze failed at evening. Such work, and that of trawling with a dingy, were just as hard as anything the liburnian demanded. The Eagle ranked over a hundred men in blocks of six, with four feet separating oars horizontally and only one vertical foot between the ports of the upper row and the lower.