The Fourth Rome (38 page)

The crowd seated itself again. A cleanup crew of a dozen slaves with teams of horses came from the south ramp and began dragging
away the bulls. The animal that had died in a seizure baffled them for a moment. Two groups sel their chain hooks on the bull’s
spine and pulled the corpse over on its side before they could haul it away.

To cover the interval, the officials providing the entertainment brought out a comedy turn: eight slaves connected to a central
hub by ten-foot chains as though they were the spokes of a wheel. Each slave carried a spiked club. They were naked except
for heavy black bags covering their heads to completely blindfold them. Attendants guided the grotesque assembly into the
middle of the arena.

A municipal official beside Tiberius rose and waved a napkin hemmed with narrow red stripes. He was not only a Roman citizen
but a knight—and very proud of his rank. An attendant on the sand below blew a command with his curved horn.

The blindfolded men began flailing wildly. Spectators cheered and cat-called. The last fighter standing would gain his freedom.
The attendant waiting with a long-handled mallet would finish off the rest.

“Gerd,” Rebecca ordered. “Get close to the railing on your side. I’ll do the same. Pauli, when you enter the arena move toward
the target. We’ll use straight microwave sound to keep problems away from you.”

She reached the bottom tier, a broad walkway circling the amphitheater, but spectators still blocked her from the three-foot-high
railing. Wealthy citizens sat on chairs they’d brought with them. Attendants, both slaves and Itee persons who hung on the
wealthy for their living, stood behind the chairs and kept their patrons from being jostled.

Rebecca raised her cape and reset the control dial on her pistol’s receiver from impulse to continuous beam. Nobody paid any
attention to her.

She couldn’t see the sand past three burly slaves standing behind a woman wearing orange and blue silk garments with jeweled
combs in her hair. Her serpentine armlets reminded Rebecca of the past night’s whore, but these were made of gold and didn’t
leave smudges of verdigris.

Rebecca pointed the twin side-by-side muzzles of the microwave pistol from the opening of her cape and played the beam at
kidney level across the slaves. Their bowels began to quiver as though they’d eaten something that was causing intestinal
spasms.

One of the men shouted in wonder. He dropped his cudgel. Sudden diarrhea fouled his legs. His patroness turned in furious
anger at the stench just as her other two attendants rushed up the stairs, trampling spectators as they went.

The crowd was too thick for Rebecca to get completely clear even though she’d expected the result. One of the slaves stepped
hard enough on her left foot that she’d be lucky if he hadn’t broken a metatarsal.

The wealthy woman was so nonplussed by what had happened to her attendants that she simply sat on her ornately carved chair.
Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly. She didn’t appear to notice when Rebecca slipped by.

The blindfold melee had ended with all the participants down. The attendant postured for the crowd, flexing his muscles before
swinging the mallet the last time. The victim’s head burst like a dropped melon within the bag. The cleanup crew was already
attaching hooks to the bodies.

Trumpeters blew a long call for silence. Criers with megaphones faced the crowd from both sides of the arena. With their unison
blurred by echoes from the oval walls, they announced, “And now, citizens of Rome, a captive will pay the penalty of German
treachery. His fate will provide an omen of what will happen to all Germans when our armies under the ever-victorious command
of Tiberius Claudius Nero exact retribution!”

The trumpets blew again. Up the north ramp from the cages came a tall figure carrying a stabbing spear and naked except for
a breechclout. The barred gate clanged shut behind him. Fully armed soldiers had been ready to prod him forward, but there
was no need.

Pauli Weigand wasn’t a man who needed to be pushed into danger.

Pauli paused and let his eyes adjust to the afternoon sunlight. It wasn’t a bright day, but the illumination of the cells
had been only what filtered through slits in the sione twenty feet above.

“Beckie,” he said. “If anything happens to me, you’re in charge. Carry on with the mission.”

“Pauli, get over here close to the wall,”
Beckie said in tight anger instead of answering. Her voice was clear as glass. He was so used to the interference of iron
and wet stone that he’d come to expect the crackling.

The surface of the sand was warm, but as Pauli walked his bare toes found the underlayer was clammy with trapped moisture.
It stank as well. Attendants shoveled up patches of blood and spread fresh sand, but dung and body fluids spattered in all
directions with every violent death. Those scraps of organic matter were trampled down, covered by fresh layers of sand but
removed only by decay. Simply walking across the arena released a miasma and a prophecy.

Beckie’d heard him; he could trust her to obey. It was probably the last order he’d ever give.

Pauli Weigand had never doubted that he was going to die. The Anti-Revision Command dealt in crises; death was the most basic
crisis of existence, so he’d seen a lot of it. Feeling, knowing, that he was about to die
now
was something new. He wasn’t afraid, but his light-headedness had as much to do with foreboding as with fatigue and lack
of sleep.

The arena’s masonry walls were eight feet high with a simple grill of finger-thick wrought-iron rods above that. In the south
and east of the empire the grill would have been higher and more substantial; in Rome herself the grill was topped with a
rotating basket to hurl back any creature who managed to leap so high. No big cats were available for slaughter here on the
Rhine, however, and the local fauna couldn’t jump high enough to be a problem.

“The German traitor’s” death was intended as an exercise in sympathetic magic as well as entertainment. Just as the criers
had announced, Pauli represented Free Germany and by dying would foretell Germany’s conquest. They’d given him a spear, a
real weapon though crude. Most of Varus’ army had been killed by spears just like this one.

The head was iron hammered out on a stump in a forest glade. The metal was soft, but Pauli’d honed it sharp on the stone ramp
during the minutes he waited for the previous act to be cleared from the arena.

He hefted the weapon and found it was for stabbing only. The short shaft wasn’t heavy enough to balance the head. Well, throwing
the weapon would have left him unarmed anyway. He’d rather die with it in his hands.

“Pauli, get closer to us!”
Beckie ordered.

He was fifty feet from Tiberius and his entourage. The hawk-featured general was bent in conversation with two of his aides.
His attendance at games held in his honor was a necessary part of imperial politics, but the man himself was no great fan
of the amphitheater. He’d seen his share of slaughter on the battlefield. The version packaged for civilians was contemptible
by contrast.

“If I get too close …” Pauli said, scanning the front rows of the crowd. He couldn’t see either of his teammates in the press
of faces avid for his death. “Then one of Tiberius’ guards is likely to put a javelin through me on the principle of better
safe than sorry.”

Pauli knew from the ARC Central briefing that when news of the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest reached Rome, Augustus in
panic had dismissed his German bodyguards for fear that they’d kill him in support of their free brethren. Tiberius, who’d
spent years campaigning in Germany, knew better.

The German warrior class was raised to give its loyalty to a particular chief, not to its own race or even tribe. The guards
around Tiberius had pledged to defend their chieftain’s life with their own. So long as he kept his part of the bargain with
honor and high pay, they would do just that.

The Praetorian Guard of Roman citizens rebelled frequently, slaying some emperors and selling the throne to others. The foreigners
of the horse guard never in the history of the empire failed to keep their pledged honor.

The gates closing the opposite ramp squealed open. The crowd bellowed in delight. They’d loosed the beasts on Pauli Weigand.

“Pauli, it’s a pack of wolves,” Beckie said.

A moment later Gerd’s synthesized voice replied, “No, they’re dogs.”

Pauli’d wondered what they were going to send; after him. Amphitheater officials in the west of the empire had problems finding
mankilling animals unless they could afford the expense of imports from Africa. Bulls and boars killed a lot of hunters, but
they were still herbivores who didn’t look on human beings as dinner. They’d pretty much ignore people who stood still, and
you couldn’t count on a condemned prisoner waving his arms to draw the animal sent to kill him.

The only major carnivores in Europe were wolves and bears; wolves had a well-founded fear of humans and tended to get spooked
in an arena. Dogs, though, had the contempt of familiarity for people. A pack of feral dogs, released hungry into the blood-reeking
amphitheater, would be perfectly willing to pull down a lone human and devour as much as they could before attendants whipped
them off the body. They didn’t need pedigrees or training: the work came naturally to them.

There were a dozen animals in this pack; big ones for the day, averaging thirty kilos apiece. They sniffed the sand; several
rolled delightedly in some foulness they’d sniffed beneath the surface. Then a great brindled bitch sijjhted Pauli Weigand.
She led the pack down the arena toward him with a series of incongruously high-pitched yelps.

“Gerd,” Pauli said, “remember the first priority is to locate the revisionist.”

“Yes, Pauli,” the analyst replied. Gerd really would do that; not because he didn’t care about Pauli Weigand, but because
his conception of life and death differed from that of most people. Gerd wasn’t a sociopath, but he was equally outside the
norms of human society.

The leading animals in the pack spread out as they neared their quarry. They’d circle him, tear his hamstrings out from behind
whichever way he turned, and then snatch mouthfuls of flesh as he thrashed on the sand. Slower dogs—one was limping on three
legs—straggled on in line at their best speed.

Holding his spear in one hand, Pauli raised the other and shouted in Latin, “Halt or feel my power!”

The brindled bitch yelped and turned a somersault. An instant later the ruff of a brown cur flattened at a silent impact.
He rolled sideways, snapping at the invisible club. Another of the leaders doubled up, then dragged itself away with a whine.

The crowd gave a startled roar and rose to its feet.

Though he knew it was risky, Pauli turned to face Tiberius. The dogs swarmed around him. He shooed a sharp-featured bitch
with the butt of his spear. Faces stared down from the amphitheater with expressions of anger and fear.

From behind Pauli heard the meat-ax
whop
of a full-strength microwave pulse. A pair of dogs ran back across the arena with high-pitched yelps. Fear makes a mammal’s
bowels tremble. Microwaves that induced trembling tricked the dogs’ minds into believing their own fear.

Teeth closed on Pauli’s calf. They released with a startled gasp before Pauli could stab his spear butt down. A tan dog rolled
away. Its eyes were glazed. Repeated pulses hammered the short fur of its skull.

The pack broke up in terror. The dogs still able to move slunk away, speeded by sprays of microwaves. Their tails curled under
to protect their bellies from the teeth of invisible foes. Pauli felt his own guts tremble as a beam brushed him by accident.
Warm blood trickled slowly down his calf.

The official giving the games held the grill in front of him and shouted in fury. Trumpeters blew a signal even louder than
the crowd. Archers entered the arena and began to shoot the dogs. They were locals using all-wood bows and their aim was poor.

Alone in the amphitheater, Tiberius remained sjeated. He leaned forward, resting his pointed chin on one hand. His face was
as unreadable as a pool of water.

The gates of the north ramp clanged. This time the officials would send a bear. Bears were normally placid if left alone,
but this one would have been starved and goaded into a rage that only leopards among the big cats could equal.

A leopard might weigh fifty kilograms. A full-grown European brown bear would be five or six times as large. Microwave pistols
wouldn’t even slow it down. Pauli might be able to kill the beast with his stabbing spear, but by the time it died the creature
would have chewed the top off his skull.

“Pauli, it’s a bear,” Beckie said in a calm voice. She didn’t panic in a crisis. You couldn’t ask for a better teammate when
everything was falling apart.

He’d been so
sure
that Svetlanov would attack during the games. He’d been afraid to consider the idea thai Gerd and Beckie should break him
out of his cell in case that cost them the opportunity to stop the revisionist.

Pauli Weigand was less afraid of death than he was of surviving failure and having everyone in the Anti-Rev sion Command know
what he’d always known about himself: he wasn’t up to the job. Not fit to be an ARC Rider and certainly not able to lead a
team.

Pauli ran his hands along the shaft of his stabbing spear, judging the best spots to grip it for the one stroke the bear would
allow him. The mission might be a failure, but at least he wouldn’t be around to answer for it.

“Pauli, I’ve found—” Gerd said. Before the analyst could get out the next word, an explosion told Pauli that Gerd’s sensors
had located the revisionist.

The runnel acted as a wave guide, channeling the blast and feeding it on echoes. Tiberius turned. Gray smoke puffed from the
archway behind his chair. An officer barked a command; the guards formed an impassable array between their general and the
mouth of the tunnel.