Rogue Emperor (The Chronoplane Wars Book 3)

by Crawford Kilian

  They all nodded and murmured assent, pleased to be given a goal.

  “Brother Willard,” Martel said, “please take charge of this event. We’ll be using some of the same effects, and the same holo and audio equipment. How soon can you set it up?”

  “Most of it by tonight, Dear Michael. The rest overnight or first thing in the morning. We’ve got to get word out about this celebration, and that’ll take a while. Can we figure on late afternoon for this?”

  “It’s in your hands.” Martel waved, dismissing the subject. “Do whatever needs doing.”

  “Yes, Dear Michael.”

  Martel still had the floor, but he said nothing for a time. Then he looked up at the Elders and the others assembled before him.

  “Have you ever known divine guidance to fail us?” he asked with a faint smile. “‘Where two or three are gathered together in My name,’ He said. And He is here among us, hearing every word, guiding our thoughts and words. Let us pray.”

  Pierce folded his hands and prayed with the rest of them; his head hurt, and it was a relief to close his eyes. He would have to find the Militants’ pharmacy pretty soon.

  The meeting adjourned, but Martel beckoned to Maria to stay on as the Elders left. Pierce saw that the Crucifer bodyguards stayed as well.

  “Come and sit,” Martel said, gesturing to the chairs just vacated at the table. “You also, Alaricus. We all owe you our thanks for saving the lady Maria today. Tell me what happened, as you saw it.”

  Pierce swallowed, as if nervous. “As we came back from the Praetorians’ camp, Emperor, I saw the streets seemed very quiet, almost empty. When the children attacked us, I thought it must be a distraction. So I looked the other way and saw the two men. That is all.”

  “Alaricus, the man Shimon who converted your tribe — he preached that skill in combat is a sign of special blessedness.”

  “Yes, Emperor.”

  “We also preach it, because it is true. Sister Maria has said that you have learned to use a tormentum faster than any Roman has. And that, too, suggests that you have been chosen for a special mission.”

  Pierce nervously crossed himself; so did Martel and Maria, more slowly. The Crucifers, however, remained alert and on guard.

  “We have been surprised by one thing since we came to Rome,” Martel went on. “We proclaimed the rule of Christ, and many people have said they are Christians. Some even wear a fish like yours, or a cross. But they have all converted since the death of Domitian. We are glad to welcome them into the fold, if they are sincere, but we are worried by the absence of those who were Christians before we came. Can you help us?”

  “In any way I can, Emperor.”

  “First, why have the Christians not come forward?”

  “Ah, that is easy, Emperor. To be known as a Christian under the old emperor was to be doomed to die. Anyone accused of belief in Christ was forced to make sacrifices to the Roman gods; anyone who refused would be put to death.”

  “So your master, the provincial governor, did not know you were a Christian?”

  “No, Emperor. I attended him and his family when they took part in their rites, but I made no sacrifices.”

  “And did you know other Christians?”

  “I heard of some, but I did not know for certain. I did not want to seek out Christians who might come under suspicion; then I, too, would come under suspicion.” Martel looked pleased; a conspiratorial glint shone in his eye. “You are wise for such a young man, and you know your enemy. Here is what I ask of you, Alaricus: Can you seek out the Christians of Rome for us?”

  Pierce’s jaw dropped. “I — I will gladly try, Emperor, but if they have hidden from Domitian and the urban cohorts, they can surely hide from me. I scarcely know this city.”

  “I understand. But you have been specially favored by Jesus, and I think He will guide your feet as He guides our thoughts.”

  “And if I succeed, Emperor, what shall I do then?”

  “Bring their leaders to me. Tell them that they should not be afraid, that a place of honor has been prepared for them.” Martel’s powerful eyes focused intensely on Pierce’s. “They must understand that, Alaricus. We are saving our fellow Christians from centuries of oppression and persecution. And when our enemies rise against us, as they did today against the lady Maria, we will need true Christians at our side.”

  Pierce nodded. He could well believe that part of the Militants’ purpose in mounting this coup had been the prospect of meeting genuine primitive Christians, and saving them from government persecution. He recalled the mention of Plinius: On Earth, in the year A.D. 112, Plinius had been sent to Asia Minor by the emperor Trajan as an imperial commissioner, and had executed many Christians. It had been government policy, not a whim; Christians were antisocial, subversive, and superstitious, as much a threat to peace and order as bandits.

  But having endochronic Christians at his side would also give Martel a political boost when the coup became known uptime. Plenty of Christians, especially in North America, would support Martel for that reason alone. The Agency had minimized contact with Ahanian Rome precisely to avoid political embarrassment about primitive Christianity. Martel understood that and was determined to exploit it. He could hardly do otherwise: A Christian sect ruling ancient Rome, but unable to produce any endo Christians, would be in trouble.

  From Martel’s point of view, Pierce reflected, an alliance with endo Christians could succeed even if the uptime public remained ignorant of it. The old Chinese general Sunzi had said that the supreme military skill is to defeat the enemy without fighting. AID might keep the lid on the coup, but the Agency itself would know how strong Martel had become and might come to an understanding with the Militants rather than risk an all-out battle.

  Or so the Militants might reason. Pierce knew better.

  “How shall I carry out this task and still guard the lady Maria?” he asked.

  “Within the palace, her fellow Crucifers shall guard her whenever you are away. She shall leave the palace only when you are available to protect her. No, Maria, don’t be angry,” he said in English. “You look tired; a little rest will do you good, and Alaricus will probably need only a day or two. After that, you’ll be free to go anywhere you like.”

  “Thank you, Dear Michael. But now I’m worried that Alaricus could be in danger if he goes out alone looking for Christians.”

  Martel smiled and chuckled softly. “I think we’ve seen that Alaricus can look after himself very well.” He sat back and clapped his hands.

  “Good,” he said in Latin. “I have kept you from your cena. Go and enjoy your meal. Take whatever you think you will need, Alaricus, and then go at once to seek our brothers and sisters.”

  Pierce rose. “I go gladly, Emperor. Keep me in your prayers, and I shall succeed.”

  “In nomine paths et filius et spiritus sanctus,” Martel murmured, crossing himself again.

  *

  Pierce escorted Maria to the dining hall, where the murals were now completely whitewashed, and left her to her meal. Then he went to the servants’ mess hall, where the cooks gave him a kind of vegetable stew.

  “Would you like some more dried apples?” asked the junior cook.

  Pierce slapped his stomach and laughed; the dried apples he had tucked in his tunic this morning were still there. “Two double handfuls,” he said, “but put them in a sack.”

  She found a simple string bag and handed it to him. He tied it to his belt and went to the palace baths.

  “Not more blood?” Naso protested. “And all over that fine new tunic! Your old one is clean, but if you come back in this condition a third time, I shall protest to the emperor himself.”

  “You will have to wait until I have protested first.” Pierce pulled off the tunic and loincloth and took the bar of soap Naso offered him.

  “No wounds this time. You’re learning quickly how to take care of yourself in Rome. What happened?”

  “A scuffle. While I thin
k of it, can someone clean my sword?”

  Fierce sank into the lukewarm bath as Naso drew the sword from its sheath and made a face.

  “Foedus! Disgusting.” He handed the weapon to a slave, who hurried off with it.

  “The emperor has given me a task, Naso, and perhaps you can help me.”

  “If I can, master.”

  “The city is full of new Christians, but he wants to meet those who were Christians before he and his people came to Rome. Do you know of any, or where I might search for them?”

  “Perhaps among slaves and foreigners, master. I’m sure I have no idea; this is the palace, after all.”

  “The old emperors executed Christians who refused to abandon their beliefs, isn’t that so?”

  Naso smiled cynically. “Not many ever died that way, master. Pull them up before a magistrate and ask them to sacrifice a cock to Jupiter, and the bird was dead before the magistrate had finished his speech. That’s enough of the tepid bath, master, move along, please.”

  “Keep me company.” Pierce went into the next room and stepped gasping into the hot pool. “Are there any places the Christians are supposed to frequent — a neighborhood, a market, one of the public baths?”

  “Master, 1 would gladly tell you if I knew. Many rumors come to me, but nothing of the Christians just lately. Would you like a scrub brush?”

  After a plunge in the cold pool, Pierce dried off and dressed in his old tunic. Naso bustled off to look after a group of Militants, while the slave who had taken Pierce’s sword returned with it.

  “If you seek Christians, master, try the baths of Scribonius Tertius, near the Campus Martius. Tell the balneator that Terentius sent you.”

  The words were a murmur; the slave bowed and slipped away. Other attendants came to shave Pierce’s whiskers and comb his hair. When they were done, he asked Naso for a personal bath kit.

  “Want a proper bath, do you, with oil and a good strigilling? I’m not surprised; this sapo just isn’t the same, is it?” Rummaging in a closet, he produced a small flask of oil, a comb carved from a seashell, and a curved blade of bronze — a strigil, for scraping oil and dirt from a bather’s skin.

  Pierce thanked him and tucked the kit into his shoulder bag. Then he returned to Maria’s room. She looked wan and exhausted when she opened the door, and he smelled vomit on her breath: a delayed reaction to the brawl, Pierce suspected. He felt ill himself, though the bath had eased his now-permanent headache.

  “My lady, I am sorry to disturb your rest. But the emperor has given me this task, and I must hurry. Can you help me obtain what I need?”

  “Gladly.”

  “First I must go to the armorer, the man who gave me this sword. I would like to have a tormentum.”

  She looked taken aback. “You’re good with it, but are you sure?”

  “My lady, I will be alone in this great city. Even if I do not use it, it will give me confidence.”

  “Very well. What else will you need?”

  “Some money — a few denarii, nothing more.”

  “That I can give you myself.” She went to a box on the small table by her bed and took a fistful of coins. “Will this be enough?”

  Pierce estimated the handful at forty denarii or so. “More than enough, my lady. What I do not spend I will return to you.”

  “Of course.” She sat on the edge of her bed, rubbing her temples. Pierce felt a sudden burst of joy.

  “My lady, are you ill? Can I do anything for you?”

  “No — it’s just a headache.”

  “Surely some potion would help.”

  “I’ll be fine, Alaricus. Just as the emperor said, I only need some rest.”

  “But you’re not well, my lady! I can’t leave you in this condition. Let me send for a medicus.”

  “No … perhaps you can do this for me. In the hall of the fish murals, there is a room where we store our medicamenta.” She took a steno pad from the table and scribbled on it, then ripped the page out and handed it to him. “Give this to the person on duty, and bring me what he gives you. Then I’ll go with you to the armorer.”

  “I go at once, my lady.”

  Once outside her room, Pierce struggled to keep himself from breaking into a run. He had planned somehow to find time to prowl the palace until he found the pharmacy; now Maria had sent him straight to it.

  The pharmacy was a small room on a dead-end corridor; a counter sealed off most of the room, whose walls carried shelves right up to ceiling. The pharmacist was a gaunt middle-aged man who lacked three fingers and, like Brother Jeff the rangemaster, carried frostbite scars on his cheeks. He read the note from Maria: Dear Brother Samuel, I’ve got another of my migraines. Please give this man some painkillers for me. Thanks, Maria.

  “Do you speak English?” Samuel asked. Pierce looked blank. The man sighed. “Of course not. Wish she’d said what kind she wants.”

  Pierce burst into rapid Latin, knowing the man wouldn’t understand but would catch the key word: “My lady asked me to bring her some medicamenta for her headache. Medicamenta.”

  “Medicaments, yes, I got that. Uh, quis medicamenta?”

  “She wanted a medicamentum called P-penta — ? Pen-tasum?”

  “Pentasyn?”

  “Ita est!” Pierce nodded. “Pentasyn, Pentasyn.”

  “Ah, okay, my friend. Just a minute.”

  Samuel went to a shelf near the back of the room and took down a small yellow cardboard box. He counted out some capsules and shuffled back up to the counter. “Ten caps ought to do it.” He started to write instructions on an envelope, but Pierce shook his head fiercely.

  “My lady asked for twenty,” he said in Latin, “Viginti, viginti” He opened his hands twice.

  “Ah, twenty. She wants twenty caps? Boy, that’s some migraine.” He went back for more and then finished his written instructions on the envelope before putting the capsules into it.

  Pierce took the envelope and smiled gratefully, “Gratiam habere! Bene facis.”

  “If that means thank you, you’re welcome.”

  Pierce had two of the caps in his mouth within a minute of leaving the pharmacy. Eight more went into his belt pouch, under the coins Maria had given him.

  “Pentasyn?” she said when he handed her the envelope. In English, she mumbled, “I’d have been happy with a few old aspirin. Well, Brother Samuel knows best.” She took a capsule and washed it down with water. “Now let’s go get you a weapon, Alaricus.”

  Sixteen

  The insula stairs were narrow and rickety and stank of urine. Pierce came out onto the fourth-floor landing and drew a deep breath. Below was the courtyard, a rectangle of pounded dirt and broken pots with only a few weeds growing in it. Ragged laundry, attached to poles extending from every balcony, dried slowly in the muggy afternoon heat.

  To live under the tiles of an insula was not a figure of speech: These cubicles’ ceilings were the tiles themselves. In winter the rooms must be bitterly cold; now they were suffocatingly hot. Pierce heard squalling babies behind many of the cubicle doors, and the balcony itself was the playground for a dozen filthy toddlers. Rats scuttled past Pierce’s feet.

  A shopkeeper on the ground floor of the insula had given Pierce directions, so he turned right and walked along the balcony past four doors before knocking at the fifth.

  “Quis?”

  “Alaricus — your traveling companion of last night. I’ve brought your payment.”

  The door opened; Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, the greatest poet of imperial Rome’s Silver Age, stood crouched defensively with a knife in one hand.

  “It is you. What do you want?”

  Pierce held out the flagon of wine he had bought from a good shop on the Esquiline. “I promised you this. May I come in?”

  “Of course, of course.” He smoothed the rumpled fringe of hair around his bald spot. “You find me unready to receive visitors.”

  The cubicle was sweltering; its tiny window faced west,
making the room that much hotter. Sunlight threw a painful glare over everything: the rough plank floor, the rotting plaster, the stains from countless leaks, the shabby bed and stool, the chamber pot, the little trunk serving as a table and writing desk. Book scrolls were piled under the bed, perhaps because they could be protected from leaks there. Pierce thought of a line from Juvenal’s Satires: “Poverty has no greater misery than that it makes men ridiculous.”

  Juvenal produced a couple of earthenware cups from a shelf and pulled the cork from the flagon. While he seemed nervous and agitated, his hand was steady as he poured two generous drinks and handed Pierce one of them.

  “A pity I have no water to mix with this, but we will have to make do, won’t we? I drink to your health and prosperity, my literate German friend.”

  “And I to yours.” To Pierce’s enhanced sense of taste, the wine was sour and musty. “What news have you heard today?”

  “Only what I overhear from my neighbors’ conversations; I have been unwell today. The consul Comutus is rumored a prisoner of Martellus. The consul Plinius has urged the senate not to confer the imperium on Martellus. Plinius is believed to have left the city, some say to his villa in Tuscania, some say to the dungeons of the emperor’s palace. An Amazon who serves Martellus was attacked in the Subura at noon, and they say she slew ten men with a tormentum. Martellus plans a great assembly of some kind tomorrow afternoon in the Flavian Amphitheater. Other than that, there is little news.”

  Pierce smiled. “Have you made plans for dinner yet? If not, I would be grateful for your company. And before that I would like to visit the baths.”

  “I would be honored to accompany you, but I fear — ”