by John Barnes
Caesar’s forces advanced until the last of Pompey’s old, false center fled into the reserves ahead. By now Pompey must have known something was wrong, but not quite what it was, by the fact that so few of his front line had returned. They were supposed to fake losing, not get clobbered.
Then the legions of Caesar stopped as one man, formed up for Street Firing, and waited for the surge out of Pompey’s reserves. They didn’t have to wait long.
As Pompey’s legions attacked, this time all carrying muskets and pila, Caesar’s troops opened up at long range. Pompey’s men formed the shield wall, turned the shields to fire from behind it, and continued.
“Not as dumb as we thought he was,” Chrysamen commented.
“Well, historically he had a good rep,” I said. “But look how tricky Caesar is here—his troops are backing up in Street Firing, and between lugging a firearm and javelins, Pompey’s troops are weighed down. Caesar’s men can fire and retreat faster than Pompey can advance, and Caesar’s giving them several rounds for every one of theirs. They may not know it yet, but they’re going to lose.”
A moment later we saw exactly how they would lose. Caesar’s mule-drawn field artillery had finally gotten into place on the flanks of his legions, now that Pompey’s flanks were eliminated. It became quite evident that Hasmonea had given him grape and canister shot—the trick of loading a cannon with musket balls, to make it work like a giant shotgun, or of putting the musket balls in a paper canister that would then burn away in flight, leaving them in a tighter pattern.
And the reason it became evident was that Pompey’s troops went over like bowling pins. They were packed in close, and the field artillery simply tore huge holes in their lines, slaughtering dozens and hundreds at a shot. Within two minutes, as the guns continued to boom on both flanks, Pompey’s center collapsed really, and for good.
It was an utter, smashing victory for Caesar, and though I couldn’t say yet what difference it would make, I knew that all of history had just been altered; Caesar would not have to pursue Pompey to Spain to beat him, at least—
There was a white-hot flash on my distance glasses. I had set them for infrared; now what had they picked up? I was all but dazzled—
“Shit!” Chrys said. “Down!”
I trusted her reflexes too much to ask; I was on my belly before I had really figured out what she had said. I drew a long deep breath, and heard a high-pitched scream—
There were a dozen powerful explosions nearby. I turned, and looked to see flames leaping up from several places in the city. I heard a distant rumble and realized—“Those Stalin organs!” I set my glasses back to normal vision so as not to be blinded, and peered over the wall.
A dozen bright flashes in less than a minute meant that perhaps two hundred rockets were on their way, and behind me I heard the first few land in the city. A preindustrial city has no pumped running water, and its alleys are full of hovels that burn like matchwood. The city was going to die in flames; nothing and no one could stop it now. Curtains of flame were leaping into the air, and sobbing and screaming resounded in all directions.
I looked back the way we had come to the wall, to the villa six blocks away with Paula and Porter in it. It was already on fire.
Grimly, Chrys and I vaulted down the ladders and raced up the street, hoping to reach the burning villa before the hysterical mob, just beginning to form, could block our way.
12
Within two blocks I started to doubt that we would make it. I found out later that Pompey’s rockets were his own invention—he wasn’t a stupid man, in fact he was one of the best generals the world has ever seen, but his reputation has always suffered a bit because he was up against Julius Caesar.
In this timeline his luck was even worse than it was in mine. When the Senate realized how fast Caesar could move, they still didn’t act like people with an emergency on—they acted like rich people who needed to save their financial assets in a hurry. This was perhaps not so surprising, since the Roman Senate was not elected—it was made up of retired high-level civil servants, almost all from the hereditary nobility, plus a few who had bought their way in. Thus they decided they needed a few days to get their more important possessions onto ships and out of Caesar’s reach, and this mattered much more than the lives of Pompey’s men, so to get those few days, they told Pompey that either he could give up his army (and let them send it to its death under some political hack) or he could go fight Caesar right now.
Pompey wasn’t nearly the shrewd politician that Caesar, or even Crassus, was. He had actually disbanded his army when he was supposed to, once, when he was younger, and been horribly shocked and disappointed when the Senate promptly kicked his veterans in the teeth and undid all the arrangements he had made for them. Still, he knew he was being had—but there was a simple problem. The Senate was the real soul of the Roman state, and everyone knew it. If you didn’t have the Senate, you weren’t really the leader, and whatever you did was never quite legitimate.
On the other hand, if the Senate made you consul, or dictator—even if they did it with your army’s bayonets at their throats—you were in. You were legit. Anyone else was a usurper.
Pompey didn’t have an army the size of either Caesar’s or Crassus’s. He didn’t have Crassus’s vast empire in the East or tremendous wealth, and he didn’t have Caesar’s new possessions in Britain and Gaul, let alone the more advanced tech both of them had. All he had was a good record, the admiration of many citizens, the respect of his soldiers—and a claim to legitimacy, via the Senate, that the other two did not.
When the Triumvirate had been organized among the three men, to divide up power, Pompey had thought he was the senior partner—he was higher ranking and had a more distinguished record than Caesar, and he certainly had more prestige than Crassus. But in a three-way contest between glory, brains, and money, don’t bet on glory.
So it was not a surprise to discover that he had been tinkering with some of the toys that Hasmonea and Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell had brought, and made some improvements of his own. I later learned that what Pompey had come up with amounted to a crude kind of napalm—Hasmonea had introduced distilling, and Pompey had played around with distilling petroleum—in little “bomblets” with percussion-cap tips, all tied together at their tails with a gunpowder-filled knot. When the rocket burned out, it lit the gunpowder knot and set the cardboard nose cone on fire; long before the bomblets hit, they were all tumbling freely, and came down widely scattered.
There were ten bomblets to a rocket, and each bomblet was about five pounds of napalm, to be blown apart with half a pound of black powder. That meant that, when Pompey fired his two hundred rockets into the city of Falerii, he set somewhere just under two thousand fires.
Preindustrial cities burn very easily. That’s why in all the cities in all the timelines that haven’t advanced far enough to have piped water and regular fire companies, there is always an unwritten but important rule—no matter what else is happening, if fire breaks out, everyone fights it, because any fire could lose the whole city for you.
Unless, of course, the city is already lost—and if that’s the case, then the rule is, run and save yourself.
Three big fires, or five, would have been a struggle for Falerii to fight in normal times. It wasn’t a large city. And ten separate fires would probably have been too much to hold against.
Many hundreds meant there was no hope, and everyone knew it.
I never did find out whether Pompey’s rockets were fired as a sort of last “spite hit” to stop Caesar from pursuing his army and let the remnants escape, or if perhaps the rocketeers had their orders and carried them out because that was when the launch was supposed to happen and no one told them not to.
But whatever the reason, when Chrys and I tried to fight our way up that street, there was little hope. Dozens of buildings were on fire, and the air was thick with the stench of burning thatch, rich and heavy like a compost heap on fire
. Underneath it, already, there was the more acrid smell of wood burning and plaster roasting, the wet ammonia smell of blazing stables, the occasional scent of charred meat where some luckless soul was trapped.
You’ve probably never heard a whole city scream at once. My suggestion is that you avoid ever hearing it if you can help it. Horses, men, cows, women, chickens, cats, sheep, dogs, children, everything that had a voice was roaring its terror into the street.
As the crowd packed thick around us, Chrys and I found it harder and harder to push and shove our way through. We were trying to figure out what we could do; you can use martial arts to get through a mob only if none of them are armed and there’s somewhere for all of them to go. We were bare-handed, and no one could hear us or would have much cared that we wanted to go the opposite way. There was no likely way to get through, and the side streets were already turning into seas of fire as the little lean-tos the poor built there went up in blazes. As I was pinned for a moment against a wall by an alley, I saw a woman in rags rooting through a collapsed, blazing lean-to; a moment later she pulled out a bundle, and I realized it was her baby.
The child must have been dead, for the woman screamed, and as her head cloth fell back I saw she was a lot younger than Porter. Then I saw that her clothing was burning, smoke pouring off the hem of her skirt, about to go up in flame.
It’s senseless but true—in the middle of a burning city, surrounded by a mob, you can be as ruthless as anyone, but when you see one single isolated crisis, you can suddenly find yourself forgetting even an urgent errand or self-preservation, because even though we all have plenty of the beast in us, we also all have plenty of civilized training. Neither one wins all the time.
I darted into the alley, tackled her, tore off the biggest burning piece, stamped out the rest, and yanked her to her feet. Her legs were horribly red, and I expected that the blisters of second-degree burns would start at any moment, but I shoved her hard to get her running before she collapsed, toward the city gate. I never saw her again. I have no idea what became of her.
I looked around. Chrys had not followed me. The alley was filling with smoke and getting unbearably hot as stone walls reflected the burning junk and hovels; I did not try to run back to the street I had been on, but instead ran around the corner to see if the side street there was as yet unburned.
It was. That meant I had a clear passage, and I managed to run a long way toward the villa before, very suddenly, a huge load of roof tiles from one of the buildings plunged into the alley in front of me. I leaped back, choking from the hot dust and smoke that came with it, and looked up to see evil orange flame licking the sky from the three-story building that had burned to a shell; I dove sideways to the left, down another alley, and then was flung flat by the gust of blazing wind as the wall came down behind me with a grinding, ripping crash.
Jumping to my feet, I hurled myself down the alley—the jet of flame that had passed over my back while I lay prone had ignited dozens of flammable surfaces, and I had to get out of there in the seconds before the alley became a furnace.
I made it with not much time to spare; there was a sort of “whump” sound behind me as the fresh fires grabbed a lot of the oxygen and pushed out a harsh wave of heat.
I was back in the main street. The building across the way was blazing, the one beside it had fires inside—and the next one was the villa where we had left Porter and Paula asleep that morning. I ran toward it; its roof was being licked by flames from under the eaves, but perhaps—
I rushed toward the building, and was just approaching the main doorbell when something knocked me flat. A moment later I was being held down on the ground, and, inexplicably, somebody was slapping at me and pounding me with hands—I placed my hands to roll suddenly and get at them—
“Boss-don’t-it’s-me-and-you’re-on-fire!”
It was Paula, and what she had been doing was beating out the blaze on the back of my tunic, which must have gotten set on fire while I was getting out of the alley. She let me up and I rolled over. The air was unbelievably hot and dry, the smoke terribly thick, and I was gasping, not least because even when she’s doing it to help, if Paula slaps you, you have been slapped.
Porter was standing beside her, looking very worried. “Chrysamen—” I gasped out.
“She’s not with you?”
“We got separated.” I sat up, wheezed, and gagged. Here, in the open street, it was blazing hot in January, and dark with smoke despite the sunlight, but we were far enough away from any individual burning building to take stock for a moment. “I last saw her about two hundred yards back—” When I pointed, I looked. “Shit.”
There was one vast sheet of flame across the street; one whole side of the Praetorium had come down into the street, and the rugs, furniture, tapestries, and all were burning there.
“Well, it’s for sure she didn’t come that way, and she won’t,” Paula said. “Do you think she followed you?”
“I’m pretty sure she didn’t,” I said. “And if she did, the way got cut off in front of her. I’m going to try not to panic about this. She can certainly handle herself, but, on the other hand, anything can happen out there. Anybody could have bad luck. We didn’t have time to set up a rendezvous point—we were trying to get back to you guys.”
Paula nodded. “Well, it’s for sure she won’t stay in the city. And neither should we. What happened in the battle? Caesar must have gotten clobbered.”
I shook my head. “Caesar won. This was sort of Pompey’s last gasp. I don’t know how much baggage train they lost, but his legions still have all their fighting gear and their bicycles, and with Pompey’s army in a shambles, this force can be in Rome tomorrow. It’s down to Crassus versus Caesar. And from what I’ve seen, I’d bet on Caesar.”
“Me too,” Porter said. “Why are you so down on him? Is it because you’re looking for an excuse to … you know?”
“Could be. Could also be that I notice how many other people suffer and die for his great achievements. To paraphrase a great poem, ‘Caesar conquered Gaul / Did he take no one with him? / Not even a cook?’ Meaning he does great things—for Caesar. And what I just saw out there was an ingeniously orchestrated murder of a whole army—of his fellow Romans, mind you. There are probably twenty thousand dead, or more, out there, for Caesar’s ambition. I don’t exactly call that patriotic, no matter what he does for the country afterward.” I peered at her intently. “Are you being pulled in by his charm? Do you want them calling you ‘Face Down’ sometime soon?”
Porter sighed. “No, not really. I mean, no, I’m not falling for him or anything. All I meant was … well, he’s fascinating. And of course he likes my music, and there’s something about flattery from a famous genius …”
“I understand,” I said, thinking of how it felt when I got to meet and become friends with Wernher von Braun, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Daniel Webster, Leonardo da Vinci, and George Washington, among many others. For that matter I certainly hadn’t taken them up on it, but I’d kind of enjoyed the attention from Oscar Wilde and Michelangelo. So I knew some of what Porter was feeling.
The trouble was that Caesar was still a spectacularly dangerous man, in every sense of the word.
“Anyway,” I said, “chances are good that Chrysamen will find us.” Inspiration hit, and I said, “And she probably still has her transponder-tracker. She can find me with that, for sure. So she will.”
“Transponder-tracker?” Paula asked. “Are you wearing a transponder?”
“Yep, inside one of the bones in my pelvic girdle. Approximately the same place Chrys wears hers. Unfortunately I’m not quite the wizard smuggler that Chrys is—she managed to hang on to her tracker. But if I’m within about two miles, she can find me.”
“And if you’re not?”
“Then she’ll keep looking until I turn up at the right distance. She’s as good at this as I am, you know. Let’s get going.” The very last thing I wanted to do was to worry about Chrysam
en any more than I already was—and I was already feeling sick with worry. True, the Romans from the future of this timeline had acted like they expected her back when they showed up to take me to the victory parade … but, on the other hand, they’d gotten some things wrong. And there was something or other they didn’t want to tell me about the whole assassination of Caesar bit, as well.
So the range of things I had to worry about was so large that if I had had the time, I could have sat down and spent the next several hours doing nothing else but worry about them. And that would get nothing accomplished toward alleviating the problem.
So I needed to shake off the fears and worries, remind myself that Chrysamen was not just a big girl but one of the toughest people in a million timelines, and focus on the problem at hand.
“Probably if we move fast, we can escape from Caesar,” I said, “but it’s an interesting question whether we want to. He has most of our gear and all kinds of valuable resources, and I have no doubt he’d help us look for Chrys. And his offer of a temporary alliance seemed perfectly legit to me. We could just link backup with him and take advantage of what he has to offer—not to mention build quite a bit of trust in him.”
“And if we escape?” Porter said.
“Well, then we have no money, no tools worth speaking of, zip for weapons other than bare hands—”
“And this,” Paula said, producing a .38 snubnose from somewhere or other, “and I’ve got a nice little switchblade, but it would take me a second to fish it out, boss.”
“You’ve got a lot of talent,” I said, “and I hope ATN processes your job application a long time before they process Caesar’s.”
“Might take you up on that.” The pistol vanished, and this time I was watching. It didn’t help.
“Well, then, we’d be lightly armed. Otherwise out in the cold. Hard to say how we’d solve the problem,” I said.
