TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome (32 page)

‘Steady, please,’ he said, smiling at her fleetingly.

The bud translated that for her. ‘Sorry.’

He worked the blade of the knife honing the end of the stake to a sharp tip then took it from Sal’s grip and blackened and hardened it in the flames of a brazier.

‘People say you and friends comes from far away,’ said the boy.

Sal nodded. ‘Very far.’

He glanced at her again. ‘Someone whisper me … same place as the
Visitors
?’

She shrugged. ‘Not really.’

To say ‘yes’ would have invited a barrage of questions she wasn’t sure how she’d answer.

He looked at the stud in her nose. ‘Is this mark of slave?’

She lifted her hand and felt it self-consciously. ‘This? No … it’s just … decoration, I suppose. To make me look good.’

The lad picked up another stake and offered her one end to hold. ‘You look … different.’

‘Different?’ She looked down at herself. Her dark hoody, black drainpipe jeans and platform ‘docker’ boots were stored away in their room. She was wearing a sleeveless, burgundy-coloured tunic, hanging down to her shins, belted at the waist with a strip of leather, and sandals. No different from any of the other girls and women in the courtyard.

The young lad touched his own mop of curly hair. ‘Hair like … short like boy.’

She made a face. It wasn’t. If anything, it was too long. Her fringe seemed to hang in her eyes all the time. It had been far too long since she’d had it cut. But compared to every other girl or woman in this time, long hair pulled back and tied in braids that hung down to the small of their backs, yes … hers probably did look boyishly short.

‘I like it like this,’ she replied. ‘It’s the fashion where we come from.’

He cocked his head. ‘They says you home is call …’ He frowned with concentration as he tried to get the pronunciation right. ‘…
A-me-ri-ca
?’

America. Home?
She smiled a little sadly.
Not really.

‘I’m from a place called India,’ she replied. ‘Mumbai.’

‘
Marm … bye?
’

‘Nearly.
Mumbai.
’

‘Is this … same place as … you friends?’

How was she going to explain that? No. It wasn’t. But then, she reminded herself, keep it simple.

‘Yes, sort of. Quite close.’

He stopped whittling the stake for a moment. ‘What is
Mumbai
like?’

She looked up at him, then at the courtyard, now filled with the apartment block’s tenants working together on make-do weapons and barricades. She looked up at lines of laundry strung across the skylight above them, stretched from balcony to opposite balcony. There were parts of Mumbai that looked like this still, shanty towns of corrugated iron and breeze blocks stacked precariously high and ludicrously close. Tens of thousands of impoverished migrants from the now submerged lowlands of Bangladesh living on top of each other. Each towering shanty-block sharing several dozen overloaded electrical feeds, a handful of water taps and communal toilets that channelled untreated human waste down on to the mucky streets below.

Sal sighed. She realized she came from a time almost exactly two thousand years after this particular here-and-now, and yet things back then, back
home
, had been getting so bad, so overcrowded, resources so scarce, food and sanitation so utterly shadd-yah poor … that this downmarket district of Ancient Rome looked almost like a step forward in time.

Almost.

‘It’s not so good,’ she replied. ‘I think we might have ruined the place we came from.’

‘What you mean?’

How to explain it all? ‘Too many people,’ she replied eventually. ‘Too many people wanting too many things … I think.’

He nodded as if he understood that. ‘Is like Rome, huh?’

Like Rome?
She nodded. Rome fell eventually, didn’t it? Crashed and burned, overrun by Vandals and left as nothing more than smouldering ruins. Maybe he was right. Maybe the far future and Rome had a lot in common.

‘Yes, quite a bit like Rome.’

Just then she heard Liam’s raised voice across the hubbub in the courtyard. She couldn’t make out what he’d said, but by the shrill tone of his voice it didn’t sound like good news.

Maddy, who’d been talking with Bob, called out. ‘Liam? What’s up?’

‘We got company!’

Macro’s voice boomed even louder, a parade-ground bark that bounced off all four towering sides of the courtyard and turned every head in the middle. The babel-bud in Sal’s ear calmly translated his raucous cry into the relaxed, detached and emotionless voice of an elevator announcing a floor.

<
Here they come!>

The palace was a quiet place normally. Caligula’s notorious orgies, his peculiar excesses tittle-tattled about by Roman tongues all over the empire, were a feature of his younger years. Some of the older veterans in the Guard had shared with Cato tales of the emperor’s extravagant behaviour after he’d first come to power. But they’d all agree that the Day of the Visitors was the day Caligula left that all behind him.

Since then the emperor’s halls had become a place where conversations were spoken gently, and the guards that patrolled anywhere near where they thought the emperor might be, stepped lightly and muffled as best they could the clank and clatter of their equipment.

The palace was a quiet place normally, Cato noted, but today it was as silent as a tomb. The palace personnel, slaves and freedmen were confined to quarters for their own safety. The only people within the imperial compound were Cato, Centurion Fronto and his century … and the three Stone Men Caligula had chosen to leave behind.

And where exactly have they got to?
He didn’t like the idea of not knowing where those
things
were quietly lurking.

Cato did his best to look like an officer with duty on his mind, scouring the hushed, marble-floored hallways and private courtyards for any signs of intruders or looters. Out in the palace’s
herb garden he squatted down over a sewer grating and checked the grating itself was secure. Not that he particularly cared. But appearances were everything.

His mind was elsewhere.

A messenger from Prefect Quintus had arrived only several hours after the Guard had set off in a long column of purple cloaks. His message was that cavalry squadrons scouting ahead of the column had already clashed in several light skirmishes with scouts from the Tenth and Eleventh Legions. And that they’d caught a brief glimpse of Lepidus’s column on the horizon. It seemed Atellus had successfully goaded the general into making his move.

Both forces would probably draw within a couple of miles of each other by noon, and then spend the remains of the day building temporary marching camps. Their men suitably rested overnight, the fighting would happen tomorrow.

What concerned Cato was the possibility of a parlay between Caligula and Lepidus. Perhaps the general might be able to convince the emperor that he’d been set up by Crassus and his fellow conspirators. How long into that conversation before Cato’s name cropped up? And how long after that before a messenger and an escort of Praetorian cavalry arrived at the palace with orders for his arrest?

He could have lunged for Caligula. He should have tried while the emperor was distracted watching Crassus dying. He’d had a ghost of a chance then, hadn’t he?

His mind turned to those young strangers: the two girls, the young man and their giant. Perhaps the only chance they had now was to get that creature
Bob
– a curious name – into the imperial grounds while it was mostly deserted. Then, on Caligula’s return, he might somehow manage to pick the right moment, emerge and fight his way through to the emperor.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but right now it seemed to be all Cato had left, other than wait for that inevitable messenger and arrest order to eventually arrive.

He returned to the main atrium and headed west, down along the main approach hallway to the front entrance of the palace. Fronto and several sections of his men were stationed there. Cato needed to speak to him. Halfway down the hall as he paced quickly, filling the echoing hallway with the noise of his own heavy footsteps, he stopped and looked at the drape to his left.

The temple was beyond that.

He took several steps towards it.

The temple that only Caligula entered. He wondered if the girl, Maddy, was right, whether hidden inside the room were those mysterious chariots, perhaps even the remains of the Visitors. He reached for the drape and pulled it slowly to one side.

‘You do not have authority to be here.’

Cato jerked at the harsh voice. So this was where all three of them had been lurking.

‘Please leave immediately,’ said another, taking a threatening step towards him and reaching for the pommel of a sword strapped to its side.

‘
Jay-zus! Get off, will ya!
’ yelled Liam as he swung the club down on to the bulging knuckles of a pair of hands grasping the top of the barricade. The club – the leg of a wooden stool with several lumber nails banged through it – crunched down heavily. Even through the din of the baying, jeering crowd that had amassed out in the street, he heard bones crack like eggshells.

There was another pair of hands in the same spot a moment later, the gathered mob working together as one, rocking the heavy cart forward and backward to make it topple over. Bob was doing his best to use his bulk to hold it in place, to steady it. But that wasn’t working how they’d hoped. The wooden spars of the cart were stressing and creaking and loosening. The mob out there might not be able to push it over with Bob holding on to it, but that didn’t matter; the thing was likely to rattle to pieces as soon as fall over.

Macro was busy prodding his old army-issue gladius at some of the desperate fools who’d pulled away the stacked clutter either side of the cart and were now trying to push through the gap there.

‘Go on … get away!!!’ he roared angrily at them. ‘This is
my
property!!!’

A man a foot taller than him and armed with a similar army-issue sword swung down at him. Macro, thickset and carrying
a couple of stone more than he must have done as a soldier, was surprisingly agile as he sidestepped it. The blade bit deeply into the wood of a casket and lodged firmly there.

He grinned at the large man as he struggled frantically to wriggle it free. He smashed the pommel of his sword into the man’s face and he fell back into the press of men behind him.

‘Information!’ roared Bob. ‘This barricade will not hold much longer.’

Liam nodded. It was falling apart around them. They’d be better off – he, Bob, Macro and the three other men, Macro’s tenants, holding the barricade – if they took several steps back now and formed a defensive line further down the rat run. ‘It’s going to collapse!’

Macro nodded; he could see that too. He glanced round over his shoulder. At the far end of the rat run was another low barricade of furniture and bric-a-brac. They could run back behind that and then have the advantage of all the other tenants being able to throw down stones and other missiles from the balconies around the courtyard.

‘All right, then … after three, everyone back there!’

The other men nodded. Liam nodded at the whisper of English in his ear, barely audible above the noise. Although he’d already figured out what Macro was bellowing.

‘One …!’

The other men stepped away from the rattling, rocking cart. Bob was still holding it.

‘Two …!’

Liam swung his club down on another pair of hands, crushing them to a bloody mush.

‘
THREE!
’

They all turned together and scrambled down the rat run, sandals slipping in the muck of animal faeces and night-water.

Liam heard the crash and clatter of the cart falling behind him as he vaulted over the flimsy inner barricade. Bob remained where he was, almost completely filling the width of the entrance to the rat run with his bulk and the arc of the short-handled blacksmith’s hammer he was swinging wildly.

Now the cart was torn down and Bob fully exposed, missiles began to rain down on him from the avenue outside: stones, several arrows, dislodged clay bricks. Liam could see thickening blood trickling like syrup from a dozen nicks and gashes on Bob already. The support unit had faced far worse barrages than this, but Becks had been the example – one lucky arrow on target, one arrow puncturing the bone of his cranium and damaging either his walnut-sized organic brain or the computer nestling next to it, and he could be brought down like any other man.

‘BOB! Get back here!’ Liam cried over the cacophony of noise bouncing off the walls either side of them.

‘Affirmative!’ he heard Bob rumble in reply. He retreated slowly under the barrage, still swinging his hammer and holding the crowd back until finally he was able to quickly turn round and leap over the barricade to join the others.

A moment later, the mob crashed into the fragile second barricade. It wobbled and collapsed easily into a tangle of chair legs and shards of fractured crates, and through that pressed a forest of legs and arms, swinging clubs and knives and short swords.

The air above them buzzed and flickered with stones and short sharpened stakes, slingshots and grabbed handfuls of muck from the street. A neighbourhood brawl the likes of which Liam had never seen before.

The first few men through the tangle were quickly dealt with and collapsed amid the confusion of broken furniture; the rest quickly pulled back under the shower of projectiles raining down from the balconies around the courtyard.

Between Bob’s swinging hammer and Macro’s foul-mouthed jabbing swordplay, it looked like the pair of them in this narrow bottleneck were going to be able to hold the jeering, angry mob at bay for a while yet.

‘Go on! Be off, the lot of you!’ Macro bayed at the men hovering several yards beyond the probing tip of his sword. The bud struggled to find modern English alternatives for half of the stream of invective spewing out of his mouth. Liam found himself laughing nervously at the ex-soldier’s coarse bravura.