by John Barnes
It was always possible that he knew already, and this was a trap, in which case I would be executed in about five minutes, tops. I was betting he didn’t.
I won my bet. He shrugged. “Well, that’s the way of it then. I shall retain the other devices I confiscated, though I don’t expect that you or your companions will explain them unless I torture one of you, which would be the end of voluntary cooperation. Since your voluntary cooperation is valuable, and I can probably conquer the whole world without the use of the superweapons, clearly it is best for me to refrain from such methods … though if either of those circumstances should change, well, then that decision would have to be reevaluated, wouldn’t it?
“Still, it seems that I ought to provide you with a better weapon, and I note that you do have along one very simple-seeming gadget, something that bears a great similarity to our muskets.” He gestured to a slave, who handed me my .45 Colt automatic, plus all the clips of ammunition I had been carrying. “We assumed it was a gun and treated it like one, so it has been kept from moisture, extreme heat, and extreme cold. I hope we have not damaged it.”
“They’re hard to damage,” I said, “and it should be fine. I’ll strip and clean it before I go.”
“Excellent. Am I right in my surmise that the percussion cap is somehow included in the cartridge, and that the device is set up to cock itself and chamber another round after each shot?”
“That’s the basics,” I said.
“I shall have my armorers think about these things at some length,” Caesar said. “And why are the casings brass, instead of paper, which burns away?”
Sometimes the best way to slow somebody down is to make him conscious of the difficulty of what he’s trying to do, so I explained, as casually and accurately as I could manage, “Oh, because if you load at the breech, you need to seal the breech against gas leaks, and that’s what the brass does that the paper couldn’t do. You have to use a special kind of brass, I don’t know exactly how that’s made, so that it will expand to seal but still eject easily. Also, to get the very high muzzle velocities these things have—this weapon isn’t very accurate but its slugs are deadly at four times the distance your muskets can achieve—you have to seal everything tightly, and right now you aren’t making iron good enough for the job.” I figured that I didn’t really want to tell him about steel, either.
Caesar nodded, turned to a slave who had been standing quietly by, and said, “Repeat that, please.” The slave recited exactly what I had said, pauses and all.
I congratulated him on his accuracy, and Caesar said, “It’s his accuracy that makes Memorex valuable.”
I gaped for a second, and then asked, “How did he get his name?”
“Oddly enough, he was named by your agent, Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell. He said it was an honored name in your timeline.”
“It certainly is,” I hastened to say. No reason to hurt poor Memorex’s feelings. I was beginning to really look forward to meeting Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell, however; the guy’s sense of humor appealed to me, every time I ran into an example of it. “I was just surprised to hear the word here. If I may, then, I’ll draw a pack of supplies from one of your quartermasters, take the bicycle I’ve been using, and be on my way within the hour.”
“Excellent,” Caesar said. “Oh—an afterthought. It occurs to me that the safest place possible for your two remaining female friends to be is here with my army. That is, it’s the safest place for them if you and I truly are the friends I hope we are. If on the other hand, you have any other notions about it, from my standpoint, it is also the safest possible place for your two friends to be. So naturally they will be staying here.”
That was not an afterthought, as he had said it was. That was the thought he wanted me to leave with. “I expected as much,” I said, and smiled in the friendliest way I could manage.
He smiled back at me, and said, “Gods and fates aid your genius, Marcus Fortius.”
“Be strong, Caesar,” I said. And with that, a slave showed me to the door.
By the time I got back, the others were just getting up. I sent the little British slave to fetch me a packed field kit from the quartermaster, at Caesar’s instruction if they asked. That got at least one set of ears out of the tent, and then I sat down and fieldstripped and cleaned the .45 (though in fact they’d done a perfectly fine job of maintaining it), working the slide hard or thumping something on key words so that anyone listening outside the tent would have a hard time hearing.
A few short sentences were enough to explain the basic situation and what I intended to do about it. None of us was happy about leaving Porter here with only one trained person for protection, but none of us had any other ideas; we knew that if Chrys were alive, free, and in the neighborhood, she’d have contacted us by now, and that meant that she was either still captive or a long way away. Probably she was still Pompey’s captive, or if she had escaped (which you could never rule out with Chrysamen—she was smart and fast and improvised well), then she was either making her way back here or heading on to Rome, depending on what looked like it would get the mission accomplished fastest.
That other possibility was one I had decided not to think about.
“Basic thing,” I said, “Ifway ouyay etgay away ancechay, eakbray ailjay andway eadhay orfay omeray. Damn, my translator is malfunctioning! Brillig and the slithy toves—mimsey were the borogroves and the mome raths outgrabe.”
“I think something is wrong with gamboling on the gumbo with me gambits all a-gear,” Paula said.
“Mairzy doats and doazy doats and little lamsy divy,” Porter agreed.
“Ixnay, Daddio,” I said, and then slid the clip in. My old Model 1911A1 was as good as ever; it felt good in the shoulder holster. “Whoops, that’s the problem, when you pull out the hemulator on the gun it jams the fratistat on the translator and we can’t understand each other.”
Five minutes later, after I’d checked through the pack that the kid had brought me, I was throwing my leg over my bicycle and setting off down the Via Flaminia. It was mostly downhill from here, but not terribly steep; I had only about thirty miles of that downhill to cover, and I did not have to go more slowly so that horses could keep up.
The biggest problem with these bikes, which required a little concentration, was that they didn’t have any kind of coaster arrangement; the pedals always turned with the wheels. Thus, for control, it was really better to pedal constantly, or on steep downgrades to resist the pedals a little with your feet. That was very tricky compared with the bicycles of my timeline, and it raised my admiration for those adaptable Romans another couple of notches—if they could learn to balance and ride on a bicycle with never-quite-straight wheels, as well as control the bicycle without real brakes, they were pretty amazing guys.
The Via Flaminia was one of those famous cases of all roads leading to Rome, and as I neared the city, the traffic of local merchants and farmers, from the villages and small towns around, got thicker and thicker. I had not overtaken Pompey, but then it was possible that I had passed him—he might have pitched camp somewhere off the road behind me, though in the gently rolling hills it seemed improbable that I wouldn’t have seen an army.
Then again, how much army could he have left after yesterday? They could probably all hide in a phone booth, if there were any phone booths.
That was actually a pretty good thought, because while even somebody with Chrys’s talent for sneaking around and barehanded mayhem might have trouble sneaking out of a large Roman army encampment, getting away from twenty guys would only demand somebody’s attention wandering for a second or two—the way it might tend to do if the guy had just been on the losing end of a huge battle and run for miles to get away from it.
Then again …
I did my best to force the speculations out of my mind. It was a nice, bright, winter day, and since I was bicycling, I was pretty warm and comfortable. After a while I realized that by just blending into the traffi
c flow and taking my time, I was overhearing a lot of conversation; there were no windows or windshields in the way, and no running engines to fill the air with noise. The loudest thing I passed on the road was one wagonload of ducks and geese. It was enough to give you some doubts about that word “progress.”
The road got more and more crowded as I neared Rome, and now I was hearing a lot, but of course people don’t talk much about current events, or when they do they assume the other person understands the reference. The one thing I gathered clearly was that there were a lot of live animals and produce going to Rome right now “while the selling is good” and that everyone wanted to get there, sell what they had for gold only—a couple of them said, “Nothing in trade today,” very emphatically, as if repeating a slogan—and get back to the farm in a hurry.
Nobody was interested in selling jewelry, but some of them were talking about how much of it they expected to acquire.
Finally I overheard one farmer talking to another, and he said, “So do you believe Pompey is really going to make that last stand he’s talking about, on the Palatine Hill, with the special blessing of the gods?”
“I think it sounds good to the Senate, and he wants a few of them to stay there as bait for Caesar,” the other said. “And I don’t think it will work on any of the smart ones. I just hope there are enough left who will need provisions today, because I’d say it’s two days at most till Caesar comes in, and I’d wager he’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
“I reckon you’re right,” the other said. “But while he’s claiming to make preparations, and working his big magic up on the Palatine, at least a lot of the Senate will stay in the Curia, trying to make up their minds, and there we’ll be, right next door in the Forum, with all the things they’ll need to run away with right there—for a price.”
“Reckon so. I’m thinking besides the jewels and the gold, I might just want to pick up some slaves in trade.”
“Bah. Houseworkers from the city. I don’t need none of them. They’re soft, and if you put ’em to honest work, they’ll die.”
“Oh, but Quintus, you’re a married man. I’m a bachelor. Thought I’d get myself some patrician’s bedwarmer and find out what the aristocracy gets—”
“It’s all the same, theirs is just better washed.”
I passed that wagon, finally, when there was an opening in the traffic stream going the other way. Well, that seemed to answer the mystery. The translator in my head gave me a quick map of Rome; I would be coming in from due north, past Pompey’s temple and the main military parade ground (the Campus Martius in those days) and directly into the Forum, so there was no sense taking any of the ring roads around to enter by any other gate; they would all be just as jammed, and I was on a direct route.
It was late afternoon, and I was fairly hot and sweaty, even in the crisp cold of January, by the time I rolled over the Milvian Bridge, a heavy, arched bridge across the Tiber north of the city, and then down through the gate in the Aurelian Wall, the outermost wall of the city.
Rome had grown a lot in the centuries just before, and they had only recently annexed a lot of the “suburbs” by building a city wall that enclosed them; the Aurelian Wall had been a state-of-the-art defensive system when it was built, but now it would be only an hour’s work for Caesar’s field guns to breach it wherever they wanted.
It was a couple of miles to the old inner wall of the city, the Servian Wall, and the Forum was on the other side of that from where I was. To my right the Campus Martius stretched out, but there was no cutting across—the troops milling about there, survivors of Pompey’s legions and raw recruits from the city being formed hastily into centuries, might very well decide I looked like a recruit. On the road I was safe enough, because I looked like a military courier, but let anyone who was able-bodied get too close to the Campus Martius, and he was going to be marching back and forth with a gladius and scutum in no time.
I really hoped that pathetic excuse for a legion—all that seemed to be assembling there was one scrawny legion—would not be forced to go out and fight Caesar; there was no reason for them to be massacred, except that the patricians who ran the Senate were simply not prepared to face reality in any form.
That last two miles took almost as long as riding into town had, and it was almost fully dark by the time I made my way through the gate in the Servian Wall, now pushing the bike because it was easier than trying to keep my balance in the press of people.
As I passed through the great arched gateway in Rome’s inner wall, into the old part of the city, I saw the Forum was lit by torchlight and lanterns at hundreds of stalls, and everywhere, there were long lines of people bargaining for food and for plebeian clothing. As I watched, a couple of stagecoaches rumbled up, lights blazing, and I saw that one of them had Crassus’s image on it, clearly stenciled on. Below that it said “Fontes Ultra Ire.”
Half a minute later I slapped my forehead; it was another one of Caldwell’s pranks. You could translate that as “Wells Far Go.”
People were still getting onto the stages in an orderly way, but the line was getting longer and longer. I’d been in a city or two that was about to be attacked or brought under siege, and I knew how fast the lines formed at the train station. I was just glad I wouldn’t need to be leaving in a hurry.
As I passed the Forum and the Curia (the building where the Senate met), I looked to my right; there wasn’t much light, but I saw something enormous, tall as an eight-story building, up on the Palatine Hill, where the farmers had talked about Pompey making a stand. There had been no building that big there in my timeline—hell, there had been no building that big in Rome—and the shape was odd, too round and too large.
Whatever Pompey was up to, if he had Chrys, he would have her with him up there, and that tall building—lit occasionally by a roaring fire beneath it—would be the first and most logical place to look. Probably the fire that occasionally flared there was for the sacrifices; if Pompey was organizing a sacred band for a last stand, he would be sacrificing a lot of animals.
That made a certain amount of sense, except that I doubted that Pompey was any more superstitious than Caesar was, and if the situation were reversed, Caesar would be headed for Crassus like a bat out of hell, trying to get some kind of deal. Compared to Pompey and Caesar, Crassus was no general, and even Crassus knew it. A talented guy like Pompey—especially since he had a reputation for being good-looking, smooth, and a natural diplomat—would logically be on a stagecoach headed south, or leaving on a ship this minute.
Which meant he was up to something, and that something was probably a technological trick, maybe even something more impressive than the rocket launchers.
Most likely something connected with Chrys.
I took the turn onto Vicus Tuscus, a large street that ran through a patrician neighborhood at the base of the Palatine Hill, and headed that way. When I saw a gate with enough darkness, I ditched the bicycle and most of the pack there; I took a deep draft of water and forced in the last of my hardtack, made sure I had all the money, my distance glasses, and the dagger. I left the gladius behind, though it was a good one, because the last time I had practiced with one had been at Crux Ops training camp, more than a decade before subjectively, and if I pulled a gladius out here, practically every free adult male would know more about how to use it on me than I would about how to use it on him. Besides, I had the .45 and half a dozen clips of ammo, and I’d take that up against a gladius anytime I could get six feet of clear space.
I ran one last check. I had the works, everything I was likely to need for whatever came up; was there anything I could forget? I found the thumbnail atlas under my fingers and jammed it into my personal pouch of stuff. Partly that was habit—we weren’t supposed to leave bits of high tech lying around for the natives—and mostly that was because you never know.
Then I realized what was missing.
I spent two long, stupid minutes groping around in the pack before my fi
ngers closed on my wedding ring. I had taken it off because it seemed like an invitation to bandits on the road, and whenever armies start moving around, there are bandits. I slipped it back on.
It seemed like an omen of some kind; I decided to believe it was a good one. Of course, the real omen was that after being around the superstitious Romans for so long, I was starting to think about omens.
With a shrug, I bent my concentration to the job at hand; I slipped into the depths of the shadows and made my way up the Palatine. On the way I passed a couple of pickpockets, three sentries, and a lady of the evening. None of them ever knew.
I was in my element—it was dark, and there was a mystery ahead, one that would require some violence before it was over.
14
The Palatine Hill was supposedly the first part of Rome ever to be settled, and nowadays it was mostly public buildings—temples and government things—on top, but the patrician families still clung to its sides in huge, well-guarded old houses.
The patricians were the people who claimed to be descended from the gods; considering the behavior of Roman gods (plus the ones the Romans plagiarized from the Greeks), I don’t know how that was supposed to be to anyone’s credit, but they didn’t consult me. For generations, the Roman Republic had been dominated by these people, much more thoroughly than the United States had ever been dominated by its First Families of Virginia, Nob Hill Aristocracy, or Boston Brahmins, even more thoroughly than Britain had been dominated by the old peerage. These people ran the show, were used to running the show, and had no concept that anyone else might have a stake in it.
A century of that arrogance had left them with no power base on which to stand. One of their own, Caesar, had won the hearts of the people, even though—or perhaps because—he was ruthless and determined to rule as dictator. Pompey, the most talented man on their side, had been hamstrung and pulled down, in part, by his own allies’ paranoia and need to throw their weight around; no general could have tried harder or done better, having to carry the Senate on his back. Crassus and the other “new men”—people who had no patrician ancestry and were merely very capable, people who got rich by talent and hard work—no longer had any faith in a system that had nothing for them. In their desire to preserve their power and privileges, the patricians had made it pay to be their enemies; they had made it cost to be their friends; and now they were reaping the consequences of that decision.
