Gates of Rome

by Alex Scarrow

  Liam shook his head. ‘I got the job on the Titanic so’s I could escape home. Wanted to see the world, to visit America and all that.’

  ‘You have seen many things now, Liam.’

  Liam laughed. ‘More than I bargained for, I’d say.’

  ‘So you currently have no goals in your mind?’

  ‘To stay in one piece, that’s a pretty important one for me.’

  Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. That is sensible.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing I wouldn’t mind, though, Bob.’

  ‘What is that, Liam?’

  He stopped, stepped aside to let a pair of young women pushing double baby buggies pass by; both of them were yapping on their phones, taking the whole pavement between them, oblivious to the disgruntled pedestrians in their wake.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going back to Nottingham.’ He smiled wistfully. If there was one abiding memory he was always going to treasure, it was waking up with the sun streaming into his bedchamber. Stepping out on to the balcony and surveying the city stirring to life; the smell of woodsmoke, the morning chorus of cockerels, the swooping of swallows around his keep … and knowing he was lord – albeit temporarily – of all that he surveyed.

  ‘That was a good time, wasn’t it? You and me in charge of things?’

  Bob nodded. ‘We worked efficiently together.’

  ‘That we most certainly did.’

  He gazed at the shop window beside him; a mobile-phone store, the window peppered with deals on call tariffs and unlimited texts.

  ‘Ahhh, yer eeejit!’

  ‘What is the matter, Liam?’

  ‘I forgot to turn me bleedin’ thingamajiggy on again.’ He fished deep into his trouser pocket for the mobile phone Maddy had issued him with. He was always forgetting to switch the infernal thing on. He was in for a moan from her if she’d tried his number without any luck. He fumbled with the tiny buttons and finally the small screen flickered to life.

  Seven missed calls.

  And all of them from her.

  Oh, great.

  He quickly dialled her number and she picked up on the first ring. ‘C’mon, Liam! What’s the point in you having a freakin’ phone if you never turn the thing on!’

  ‘Ahh … I’m sorry, Mads, really sorry. I was just –’

  ‘Get home now!’

  ‘Why? What’s up?’

  ‘Just get back here now! We’ve got a problem!’

  CHAPTER 23

  2001, New York

  ‘It was some little kid’s Yankees baseball cap,’ said Maddy. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  Sal nodded. ‘That NY logo on the front you see everywhere, it changed to a trident. Just changed in the blink of an eye.’

  Liam lowered the shutter door. ‘So?’

  ‘And so, as any old dittobrain knows, the trident is the symbol for the Greek god, Poseidon. Right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Liam nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, I knew that.’

  ‘And that’s what I figured until we got back here and started doing some data-trawling,’ said Maddy. ‘Something to do with Greek gods. But then it was pretty clear this is a Roman thing. See, the trident also works for Neptune; that’s the Roman version of the Greek god, Poseidon.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Liam, ‘it could be either, then, couldn’t it? A contamination from Roman or Greek times?’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘No, this is definitely a Roman thing.’ She led him over towards the desk. ‘We’ve got us a doozy of a change right here. Computer-Bob flagged it up straight away.’ She sat down. ‘Bob, put up that list from our internal database.’

  >Yes, Maddy.

  A list of names and dates appeared on the screen in front of them.

  ‘Roman emperors,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole list. All the way through the Roman Empire.’ She turned to address the screen. ‘Bob, can you put up the list from our external source?’

  Another list appeared on the screen next to the first.

  ‘Spot the difference,’ said Sal, taking a seat beside Maddy.

  Liam spotted instantly. ‘It changes after the third fella.’

  Caligula.

  ‘You got it,’ said Maddy. She pointed with a biro, running it down the screen. ‘The correct data says he should have been Caesar from Ad 37 to 41. That’s just four years. Now look at the external data – we’re drawing this from a database location at bibliotheca.universalis/libri.cldvi. See? We’ve got the Emperor Caligula ruling for nearly thirty years.’

  ‘Weird,’ said Sal, looking at the database address. ‘A Latin Internet.’

  Liam squinted as he looked at the names on the screen. ‘And the names are all different after him too.’

  ‘Right.’ Maddy sat back in her chair. ‘So someone somewhere has just made sure Caligula stays in power for much longer than he’s meant to.’

  ‘There’d be a much bigger change now, though,’ said Liam. ‘Wouldn’t there?’

  ‘Well, sheesh, God knows what we’re going to get when the next ripple arrives.’

  Sal tutted. ‘Someone’s just been very naughty in Roman times.’

  Liam looked at them both. ‘So-o-o …?’

  Maddy sighed and tossed the biro on to her cluttered desk. ‘So …’

  They shared an uncomfortably long pause, a who’s-going-to-crack-first silence. The question hung in the air between them, not asked and not answered.

  ‘So,’ said Sal, ‘are we dealing with this, or are we still on strike?’

  ‘This is a significant contamination,’ rumbled Bob.

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that, Dr Brainiac,’ said Maddy. She huffed irritably. ‘It would just be so nice if this Waldstein guy actually – you know – bothered to acknowledge what we’re doing here. I want answers before I do another thing for this agency.’

  ‘Still heard nothing from that advert?’ asked Liam.

  ‘Not a thing. Nada. Zip.’

  ‘We cannot ignore this contamination,’ said Bob.

  >Bob is correct.

  Maddy cursed. ‘Great, now I got both of ’em nagging me.’

  Liam shrugged. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t mind having a quick look at them Romans.’ He offered Maddy a conciliatory smile. ‘And maybe the Bobs are right?’

  ‘If Foster’s telling the truth, Maddy,’ Sal said quietly, ‘if we really are the only team …?’

  ‘But what if we let it go?’ said Maddy. ‘Let this small timeline change work its way up to whatever year Waldstein is watching us from. Maybe that’ll make him take notice of us. Make him answer our questions.’

  ‘We cannot ignore this contamination,’ said Bob again.

  She balled her fist on the table. A soft gasp of frustration deep in her throat.

  Sal looked uncertainly at her. ‘There will be more changes coming soon, Maddy. You know how it goes.’

  ‘Aye … we ought to do something.’

  Maddy turned in her chair to look at them. ‘Right.’ She nodded angrily. ‘Clearly I’m the one being the stupid idiot here. And clearly I’m not actually in charge of this team, then. It seems this is in fact a “decision-making committee” and apparently I’ve been outvoted. That about the size of it?’

  Sal was right, though. That was the annoying thing. Liam was right too; even their dumb support unit and the networked computers were right. They couldn’t just do nothing; couldn’t just sit on their hands and ride this one out.

  ‘Crud. I just wanted to … to wait and see, you know? See if someone else might step in and help out.’ She tried sounding hopeful. ‘Maybe even force Waldstein to come back and pay us a visit. You never know.’

  The silence was deafening.

  ‘All right. OK … I get it. All right.’ She pushed her chair back with a squeak of complaint from castor wheels forced across the pitted concrete. ‘I suppose we better start getting organized, then.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘They’re called babel-buds,’ said Maddy. ‘According to the packet they came in, eve
ryone in the future uses them all the time.’

  Liam looked down at them. They looked like flesh-coloured Smarties with a dimple on one side. Maddy opened a small Ziploc plastic bag and dropped two of them in. ‘I checked them. They support seventy-six languages, Latin among them. Just pop them in your ears when you arrive. There’s a spare in case you lose one.’ She looked at his shaggy hair. ‘And since your ears are lost under that mop, no one’s going to see them anyway.’

  Sal handed him another sealed plastic bag containing the woollen tunic, leggings and shoes from his trip to 1194. ‘I found some leather flip-flops and took the label off them. I think they’ll do.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ve got a location set up about seven miles outside Rome,’ said Maddy. ‘Remote. I’ve pinholed it and run a density probe. It’s quiet, so you shouldn’t be observed arriving or leaving. See if you can thumb a lift in or steal some horses from somewhere … and then I guess the best thing would be to head into Rome and have a quick look around.’ She scanned through some printed-out notes. ‘It seems something or someone’s helped Caligula survive the assassination attempt that cut his reign short. I really don’t know where to suggest you should start looking, somewhere central, the government district, the forum or Senate or whatever the term is. Some place like that.’

  ‘Their version of Times Square,’ added Sal.

  ‘Right,’ Maddy nodded. ‘I’ve picked AD 54. On the database of corrupted history we’re getting garbled data for that year. It’s in a state of flux. I think these might be a sequence of oscillating time ripples, like an interference pattern. It’s very unsettled. Obviously something major happens in that year. Let’s start from there and see where it takes us.’

  Bob and Liam nodded.

  ‘So, like the Cabot trip, Liam. OK? Just go look and listen and see if there’s anything at all we can zero in on as a possible cause.’

  ‘Aye, will do.’

  ‘Return windows, as usual, are one hour, one day, one week.’

  ‘Well, don’t get all hissy with me if we miss the first two windows,’ said Liam. He looked at her. ‘Seven miles, you say? That’s a day’s walk there and a day’s walk back. Me an’ Bob won’t get to see much of Rome if we have to get back for –’

  ‘A week, then,’ she replied irritably. ‘If that’s what you want?’

  ‘Aye.’ He smiled. ‘It’ll be good to get a proper look around for once, rather than a flying visit.’

  ‘Up to you. Just be care–’ Maddy stopped.

  She’d not noticed it before, but standing here at the base of the displacement tube, with the strip light fizzing away directly above and casting an intense light down on his face, Liam’s eyes seemed lost in shadow. Ever so slightly sunken. The very first faint hint of Foster’s face in his younger features.

  ‘Mads?’

  She shot a quick glance at Sal. She knew about Liam now. Can she see it too? By this light, is she seeing what I’m seeing?

  Liam cocked his head curiously and in the change of expression the vague resemblance to Foster’s face was all of a sudden gone. ‘Maddy? You all right?’

  She nodded quickly. ‘Uh … fine. No, what I was going to say was, just … uh, just be careful.’

  ‘Of course I will. Always am.’ Liam grinned, turned and punched Bob’s bare shoulder. ‘Come on, then, fella. Time for the goldfish bowl.’

  She looked at Bob, naked apart from shorts and clutching his own plastic bag of clothes. ‘Is your data-packet upload complete?’

  He nodded. ‘I have first-century Latin and the correct timeline history from the database installed.’

  ‘Bring Liam back safe and sound, won’t you, Bob?’

  ‘Of course I will. Liam tutus erit in manibus meis.’

  Maddy smiled. ‘Convincing as ever.’

  She watched Liam ease himself into the tube, with a whoop at the cold water that echoed round the archway. Bob joined him a moment later, treading water beside Liam. As energy began to surge into the rack of circuitry beside the perspex tube, Sal joined her.

  ‘Now I know why you always look so sad when you’re sending Liam back,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ Maddy nodded. ‘Now you know.’

  The hum of kinetic energy rose in volume and pitch as Maddy counted down the last two minutes.

  Because every time I do this to Liam … I’m gradually killing him.

  The archway boomed with the release of energy and the flex of perspex suddenly relieved of the weight and pressure of thirty gallons of water.

  CHAPTER 24

  AD 54, Italy

  Liam looked around as he finished dressing. Maddy had managed to find a perfectly discreet location for them. A small grove of olive trees nestled at the bottom of a narrow valley. A brook meandered through boulders and across a shallow bed of pebbles. A quite pleasant patch of wilderness.

  They worked in silence burying their bags in the parched, ruddy, clay-like soil beneath one of the olive trees as the rhythmic trill of cicadas whistled at them from the dry grass all around.

  Done, they worked their way up out of the valley, clambering up a slope of coarse grass and hawthorn bushes. Liam was mopping sweat from his face with the back of his hand by the time they reached the top and stood beside a dusty, hard-baked track winding down a slope.

  Liam took in the broad, sedentary horizon. In the far distance a ribbon of peaks, the Apennine mountains; before him a patchwork of pastures and fields rolling over gently sloping hills and dotted here and there with pastel-coloured villas with clay-tile roofs that shimmered in the heat of the midday sun.

  ‘The city of Rome is seven miles east of our current position,’ said Bob. ‘I suggest we acquire transport and make our way there to gather intelligence.’

  ‘Transport?’ Liam looked around. ‘I think we’re the transport.’

  Bob scanned the horizon.

  ‘We’re probably going to have to walk, so.’

  ‘Negative. This is a trade route into Rome. We will encounter transport.’ Bob narrowed his eyes and studied the dusty track carefully. ‘Look.’

  Liam followed his gaze and this time saw a distant curl of dust kicked up from the track.

  Bob flexed his fists and played out an unnervingly wide rictus of a smile on his lips. ‘Show time,’ he grunted merrily.

  Five minutes later, they were in possession of their own horse-drawn cart laden with amphoras of wine and were leaving behind them, at the side of the track, a portly old Greek tradesman shouting a stream of unintelligible obscenities, shaking his fist furiously at them. The babel-bud in Liam’s ear calmly translated for him in soothing feminine tones.

 

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Liam called out guiltily.

  The bud whispered in his ear.

  ‘Me … paenitet!’ he called out.

  Bob nodded approvingly as he cajoled the horses in front of them to break into a weary trot. ‘You are using the translator. Very good.’

  ‘Maybe we should leave him something to drink? You know, it’s hot and …’

  ‘As you wish.’ Bob reached a thick arm over the driver’s seat into the back of the cart and lifted up a large clay amphora stoppered with a plug of wax. Liquid sloshed around inside as he swung it out over the side and tossed it gently on to the twisted, brittle branches and needles of a squat Aleppo pine tree by the side of the track.

  The Greek’s cursing receded, eventually lost beneath the sound of the cart’s creaking wheels and the clop-clop of hooves on sun-baked dirt.

  Liam settled back in his seat and sighed contentedly in the warmth of the sun. ‘So this is Ancient Rome, then?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘Another place I can tick off me Must-Go-And-See List.’

  Bob turned to look at him. ‘You have a list of places to –?’

  ‘Just a figure of speech, Bob.’

  ‘I underst
and.’

  ‘Well now, you might as well tell me all the important bits of information Maddy shoved into your head there.’

  ‘Were you not listening during her briefing?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘I was … but there was a lot of it, and she said it all a bit too quickly. And I was trying to undress at the same time, so …’

  Bob sighed. ‘The year is AD 54. In correct history this would be towards the end of the reign of Emperor Claudius. The emperor who is supposed to have succeeded Caligula after his four-year reign and his assassination. Instead, altered history records that this year the Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus –’

  ‘Caligula?’

  ‘Correct – commonly known as Caligula – celebrates his seventeenth year in power. It is also his last year. At some point during this year he is supposed to have ascended to Heaven to take his place as God.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  Bob carried on. ‘It appears that Caligula has adopted certain tenets of a relatively obscure belief system imported from Judaea.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Bob looked at him. ‘You do not know this?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘No, I …’ Then he realized. ‘You’re talking about Christianity?’

  ‘Correct. Caligula overwrites the Greek and Roman polytheist – many gods – belief system with the idea of one true God. This he has stolen from Christianity. Also the Roman interpretation of the afterlife, Elysium, is replaced with the Christian depiction of Heaven.’

  ‘Cheeky devil!’

  ‘Caligula has adopted this faith completely and then rewritten it with himself in the role of son of God.’

  Liam half laughed at the man’s gall. ‘So, what really happens to Caligula, then?’

  ‘This is unclear. The data I have indicates that in this year Caligula does in fact disappear. Historians and writers of this time record he vanished, some believing he really was the son of God and actually did rise to Heaven to become deified. Others thought that he might have become mentally unstable and killed himself in some way, but his death was hushed up and his body secretly disposed of.’