"And your pick of the exceptional ones as well," Lycon said pointedly. Vonones had told him of his ill-advised purchase here.
"Your orders, gentlemen?" the owner of the shop interjected from the mouth of the arbor. "Will we have a meal today, or merely something from our selection of fine wines?"
Vonones blinked. Lycon had almost ruined his appetite. The merchant grimaced and returned to his best professional mood. This was going to be expensive-always worth the expense to create the proper impression, of course-and he wasn't going to let the bad business of the lizard-ape sour his digestion.
Lycon was already ordering for himself. "Rhodian," he said. "One to two with water." As much to himself as to his companions, he added: "You can get it anywhere, and with the resin and seawater blended to help it travel, it's always just the same. Right now I don't need any surprises." He rubbed a sore toe against the nearest of the three table legs. They were cast bronze, shaggy, and had feet like those of a goat or satyr.
"The Caecuban, I think-mulled," said Vonones. He was no more a connoisseur of wines than the beastcatcher was. Therefore he accepted as the height of sophistication what the literary snobs told him-despite the fact that the vineyards of Southern Latium had decayed to a shadow of their former quality during the century following Horace's enthusiastic remarks. It didn't really matter since Vonones-as with Lycon-would really have preferred the taste of resined wine with which he had lived for decades in the field.
Now he turned with a smile, he hoped, of quiet sophistication to the Egyptian and said: "Master N'Sumu, may I recommend the Caecuban? Urbicius, the owner here, lays in a stock for me personally."
Lycon had relaxed enough that he had to smother a snort. That was a laugh-still, let Vonones impress upon this Egyptian, the Emperor's chosen sauropithecus stalker, that he and Lycon were themselves men of the world.
N'Sumu looked at the merchant without interest and said, "Water for me. Only water." The filters implanted in his esophagus would keep most of the local foodstuffs from playing hell with his digestive processes, but that did not mean that he intended to press his luck. Nourishment prepared in private from local raw substances would sustain life for as long as he had to remain here. Certainly the notion of actually eating alongside these animals was more unpleasant than the food itself was likely to be.
The shopowner bowed and snapped his finger to a waiter who scampered off. Bowing again, the owner backed away also. Vonones, thought Lycon, probably spent more lavishly on his wine than he did on his animals. And that brought them back to the business at hand.
"All right," Lycon said bluntly before the merchant could waste more time with small talk. "You've hunted sauropitheci in your own homeland, so I can see you might do a better job catching the lizard-ape than we would. When I'm in the field, I always talk to the local hunters before I set up my own plans. Even when the quarry is an animal I'm familiar with, the local terrain may affect hunting conditions. Good enough-you know lizard-apes and I don't. But that isn't going to help either one of us capture something that's at the bottom of the Tiber by now."
N'Sumu shook his head in a gesture unfamiliar to Lycon and Vonones. It was sometimes difficult to fit particular gestures into the correct cultural setting on a world as fragmented as this one. The bronze-skinned man then bobbed his head downward in the proper sign of negation for the locals whom he now faced.
"There is a very good probability that the sauropithecus is not on the bottom of the river," he said confidently. "The beasts are quite at home in the water, being in some aspects related to fish. And I very much doubt that the beast would have died from its wounds. In my homeland we often find it necessary to chop them into their separate parts to make certain we have killed them, so quickly do they recover from seemingly mortal wounds. Besides, we know what it did on the grain barge. I suggest that you have simply been looking in the wrong place."
Lycon, his face blank and his voice emotionless, said, "We've been looking in a lot of wrong places, then, I guess. We've got a network of informants throughout every farm and hamlet between Rome and the coast, fifteen miles to either side of the Tiber. We've caught or killed maybe a dozen packs of feral dogs, so I wouldn't say the effort was wasted-but it didn't bring us any closer to the damned thing we were looking for."
"Because you weren't looking in Rome," N'Sumu said. This time he suited the correct gesture, a lift of his chin and eyebrows, to the words. "Because you were looking for a wild animal, Lycon, when in reality the creature is very cunning-and practically as human as you are."
N'Sumu was smiling when the waiters arrived with the order. There were five of them: one with a mixing bowl and three cups, one with two jugs of wine, and one with a larger jug of water-dark with the moisture that sweated through its unglazed surface to evaporate and cool the remaining contents. The last pair of waiters carried a freestanding stove of bronze by the handles on either side. They walked gingerly with their burden, because live coals had already been shoveled into the firepot.
The stove was of hollow construction. When the men carrying the piece set it down by the arbor, one of them lifted the lid from the container, which was cast integrally with the firepot. A servant with a wine jug tipped it to fill the stove container. The wine gurgled as it rushed through the passages cast into the walls of the firepot. The thin bronze popped and hissed as the fluid cooled metal which the charcoal had already expanded. The other wine bearer poured from his jug into a cup, while the man with the water filled a second cup for N'Sumu with a flourish.
"We can serve ourselves, boys," said Vonones. He did not offer to pay. That he would do discreetly at ten-day intervals, feeling that the show of credit was more impressive than an open display of silver would have been in a business setting. The waiters-one was the cook, Hieron; the owner must be alone in the front-bowed and backed away obsequiously.
The wine in Lycon's cup merged and blended in the swirls it cut through the previously poured water. Slowly the richer color smoothed itself to blanket the buff glaze of the cup's interior. "Where would you look for a lizard-ape, then?" he asked. "And no more jokes about looking for it in Rome."
The Egyptian hunched forward. "A grain of sand would hide on a beach, would it not? A wisp of straw in a hayfield. Where would something human hide, beastcatcher?"
"Well, now, we don't want to overestimate the lizard-ape's cunning," Vonones scoffed, wondering if they were meant to laugh. He held his cup beneath the spout of the mulling stove and opened the cock. Steaming wine gushed from a bronze faucet cast in the form of a lion's jaws. "The lizard-ape, it isn't human, not at all. It couldn't just walk around in the midst of Rome-no more than could an escaped lion, or any other large and dangerous beast."