Perennius' hand stopped her. "Why don't you, then?" he demanded. Echoes from the rock deepened his voice and multiplied its urgency. "Why don't you just pitch it when there's places like this in the world?"
Most people would have replied, "Why don't you?" and it was perhaps that response for which the target was hoping. Instead, the tall woman backed a half step so that she could straighten to her full height again. "Because," she said, "I know that it isn't true. I'm luckier than many, I suppose, because I will know exactly when I've done everything possible to accomplish my duty." Perennius thought she might be smiling as she added, "Of course, I
won't retire then, in the usual sense. But that doesn't matter."
Perennius muttered something unintelligible even to himself as he led his companion outside again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As they followed their escort of villagers to the church, the agent fingered the garland of daisies and columbines which he had not removed with his pack. Another ragged procession was wending toward the hut, carrying the burdens of the three bathers. Those villagers were singing something more cheerful than any hymn had a right to be. The two soldiers and Sabellia, who must have been hurried through her own chance at a bath, were being led toward the church directly from the alcove. The Gallic woman wore her own garments, but the two men seemed to have accepted tunics of bleached wool in place of their own travel-stained garments.
Perennius had refused a similar offer of clothing because he would have had to give up more than his tunic. The agent had shed his spear and equipment belt in the hut - it would have been insultingly churlish to do otherwise - but he had found a tiny, ivory-hilted dagger in the pirates' loot. That knife now weighted the hem of his inner tunic, a comfort to his paranoia. Perennius's groundless fears irritated him, but he had learned that sometimes it was better to feed them discreetly instead of depending on his control to prevent embarrassment.
The bell had ceased its warning from the tower when Father Ramphion met the strangers. Now it pealed again, but with a joyous exuberance in contrast to the measured beats before. The black-clad priest bustled out the door of the church even as the streams bearing the outsiders converged on it. Ramphion raised both hands and cried, "God's blessing on this day and its works!"
"God's blessing!" chorused the villagers, both without the building and, mutedly, within.
It occurred to Perennius with some embarrassment that he had in the past been treated with equal pomp - but only under a false persona. Odenath had feted the envoy from Postumus, not Aulus Perennius himself; and there had been similar occurrences before. The agent had spent too many years among lies to be fully comfortable with the present situation. When he reached Father Ramphion, beaming by the doorway, Perennius said in his halting Cilician, "Father, we needn't be a burden to you. Our needs are simple, and we're willing to pay."
The village priest bowed to him. "We regard strangers as God's gift to our valley, the opportunity he gives us to repay the agony of his sacrifice by which we all are saved. Enter, and join our feast of love." Father Ramphion's broad gesture within had a compulsion to it as real as if it had created a suction in the air by its passage. Bemused and still uncertain, Perennius obeyed.
The interior of the spire was lighted primarily by rush-candles - pithy reeds dipped in grease. There were good-sized windows in the building's upper levels. Because the sun was low, the windows could only throw rectangles on the curved surface of the wall across from them. The church was designed much the way Perennius had assumed from the exterior. Eight thick columns supported the second level; four separate columns reached up the full forty feet to the base of the third. The belfry which was perched on top of even that must have been constructed of wood, because there was no evidence of the additional bracing which that structure would have required if it were stone. Though the church looked massively large from the outside, the columns filled its interior and gave it a claustrophobic feeling despite its volume.
What Perennius had not expected - though it might have been the norm for Christian churches - was the fact that all the stonework inside had been brightly painted. The porous limestone provided a suitable matrix for the paint, and the rock's natural soft yellow color was used both for
backgrounds and for the flesh of the figures. Those figures were painted in stiff, full-frontal poses which seemed to reflect local taste as much as they did the crudity of the efforts. While the paintings were not the work of trained artists, their execution displayed some of the same raw power that suffused the architecture of the church itself. The bright colors and the depictions of calm-faced men undergoing gruesome tortures affected Perennius as real events were not always able to do. The agent kept remembering Calvus' face and the way it retained its surface placidity during her multiple rape.
It was Calvus herself who shook the agent from his grim imaginings. "How would they have gotten high enough to do that painting?" the bald woman asked in Latin. She gestured with a flick of her chin instead of raising her hand.
"Ah, that?" the agent said. "Scaffolding." He had to swallow the "of course" that his tongue had almost tacked on. Calvus did not ask questions to which the answers would have been obvious if she had thought. There were surprising gaps in the traveller's experience, but her mental precision was as great as her physical strength. "Would have needed it just to build the walls," the agent went on. He wondered how on earth the tall woman had thought the stones had been lifted into place. Perhaps there were people - where - she came from who could make stones fly. She had denied that she herself could move anything of real size without touching it, but . . . "You're right, they seem to have built this without so much as a staircase integral to it."
Perennius was thinking as a military man. Any tendencies the architect - if that were not too formal a term - had toward military design were exhausted when the bottom level was pierced with arrow slits. A rope ladder served as access to the belfry, adequate for religious ends and as a watchtower. If there was no easy way to use the height of the upper levels against putative assault, then there seemed to be no reason to do so either. The thick walls, with the modicum of offensive capacity which the slits gave, would suffice against raiders. A real military force would make short work of an isolated tower, however strong it was individually. The waste of capacity still prompted an inward sneer. The agent thought that perhaps it was that from which arose his growing sense of unease.
"Herakles, Legate," Sestius called cheerfully from behind him, "This isn't the sort of place I expected to find out in the sticks. Or the kind of spread I thought we'd be offered, neither. Hey, what do you suppose they've got for wine?"
"Quintus," the agent said. His voice was as flat as a bowstring. "Bag it. Pretend you're at a formal dinner given by the Emperor. We need the help of these people."
The centurion winked and clapped Perennius on the shoulder.
The thick columns had trefoil cross-sections which increased their resemblance to walls. Perennius had the impression that he was in a spacious maze. Ramphion himself guided the strangers to a table beneath the belfry. There was no aisle from the door to the other side of the circular building. Those entering the church had immediately to dodge one of the outer ring of pillars. There was another such pillar in alignment across the room. It might be barely possible to see from the outer wall at one point to the equivalent point across the building, but the focus of any mass services would have to be the center of the room rather than the side.