Perennius began to stand up. He was angry that the motion required him to put down his left hand for support.
"From Rome, you mean? No, I didn't see any of them. He must be the Sacrovir that Ursinus talked about. When he died." In the same flat voice, the agent said, "I'm going to see Gaius now. The Sun has received the soul of a brave man."
"It'll be faster," said Calvus as the agent began to stumble down the trail, "if I lower you." She extended an arm and nodded downwards.
Perennius swallowed, then angrily stripped off his gauntlets. He flung them to the ground. The remainder of his padded armor was hellishly hot and confining, but it would take longer than the agent cared to spend to remove it. He looked at his protege fifty feet below. Gaius moved only when the wind blew the trees against which he rested. "Calvus," he said. He extended his hand, stubby and tendon-roped and strong. "Swear to me that what we're doing is going to save the Empire if we succeed. Swear that."
Calvus took the agent's hand in her own, slim and stronger yet than that of the agent. She knelt and found a hold in the roots of an olive tree. Perennius swung out, dangling over the slope in her grasp. "That isn't true, Aulus Perennius," she said. "I can't - "
"Easy, I've got a foothold," Perennius said.
Calvus released the agent's hand with the same care with which she chose her words. "The Empire is doomed, gone," she said. "We have a chance to save humanity from these - others. But not in your day, Aulus Perennius. Not for fifteen thousand years."
Perennius made a sound in his throat. His face was deep in the tilted crevice which now supported him. Calvus could not see his expression. When Perennius looked back up at the woman, it was only to say, "All right, I can hold your foot till you've got a hold. Come down."
Calvus scrambled to obey. The agent said, "That isn't good enough, you know? I can't care about hum - there, sure, put your weight on it. I can't care about humanity. That's the pirates who raped Bella, that's a kid from Gaul who fights for gray things with arms like worms. That's not worth dying for, Calvus. That's not worth me bringing Gaius to be killed."
"Do you need my hand here?" Calvus asked. The lower end of the crevice was ten feet above the next switchback.
"No, I - " Perennius said. His hand gripped a spike-leafed shrub. The stem crackled when he put his weight on it. The agent felt Calvus' fingers link around his ankle, ready to support him if he started to slide. "That's all right," he said. Stiffly but under control, Perennius descended half the distance. When his hobnails missed their bite, he skidded the remainder of the way. Calvus was with him in a series of quick, spider-like clutchings.
"You weren't supposed to follow me," the agent said. He was breathing hard as he eyed the last stage down to the trail. They would be a hundred feet west of Gaius, where he lay in the track the allosaurus had flailed in the vegetation. "You could've gotten killed." The agent looked at Calvus. His face was still but not calm. "Could've gotten Bella killed."
The tall woman nodded. "The allosaurus crossed the ford and picked up your track an hour after you had ridden out. Sabellia said we could either draw it away from you ... or if it ignored us, we were safe anyway. She rode, I walked." Calvus attempted a smile. "The last distance, I ran, Aulus Perennius. And then I couldn't find any way to help you."
"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.
Gaius breathed. There was even a flutter from his eyelids each time the woman's fingers brushed his flesh. Perennius drew off the younger man's gauntlets. He said, "So that I'll go in the cave with you?"
"No, my friend," the traveller said, concentrating on the injured man before her. "Because you'd do that anyway. We thought - they thought - " and she looked at Perennius while her hands continued their gentle work of massaging Gaius' temples - "that they were sending a machine back to root out those others.... And perhaps they were right, perhaps it was a machine they sent back. But I'm not a machine now, Aulus. I'll do the job, because it is my job and my pleasure. But I'll do it my way. Now, I'm going to leave you for a moment."