by John Barnes
“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t we get something to eat, and then see if there’s anything to talk about? If you don’t mind, though, I’m going to keep this thing trained on you.”
“Understood, as I said before. I suppose we should retain that last sandbag in case we need it for landing—or do you perhaps have a sentimental attachment to it?” His mouth curled puckishly.
“Oh, there was a time when I couldn’t have parted with it, but I feel different now,” I said.
There was clearly no hope of talking him into landing soon—that would amount to a death sentence for him—and for that matter it would have been pretty tough to bring the balloon down even if we had been trying. And now that I suspected Chrys was probably okay, the major worry was Paula and Porter, for whom I could do little even if I were right there in Caesar’s camp.
There are times when there’s nothing to do but drift and enjoy the scenery. The biggest problem was with staying awake; I had been up all night, but I had a feeling that if I fell asleep and left Pompey on guard, I would be apt to wake up without the .45 and tied up—unless he had decided that I was just a complete liability, in which case I would probably wake up somewhere in the sky, with the ground spread out far below me, coming up faster and faster until a last instant of oblivion.
Pompey undoubtedly had a similar feeling about me. The trouble was that neither of us knew about any good reason the other might have for killing him or tying him up; but we also didn’t know of any good reason the other might have not to, and we also had no way to evaluate how many other deals the other person might have going. Clearly we were on our way to join Crassus, where either of us might expect a warm welcome—or not.
So instead we sat and ate; one advantage of the abundance of slaves (as long as you got to be a master) was that a lot of things were first-rate. He had a bunch of hampers packed with all kinds of goodies, and we ate one of the two hot ones first while it was still hot. Italy rolled by underneath us—we seemed to be being pushed along by a front line from an incoming winter storm, moving steadily to the southwest.
Italy itself runs to the southwest, so we were very slowly drifting down the spine of the Apennines, passing mostly over uninhabited country, edging slowly over to the western side of the peninsula. I got out my thumbnail atlas, which could call up a navigation unit that ATN had implanted on the moon when we first got here, and we determined that we would probably head to the west of the Gulf of Tarentum (or Taranto, in the modern spelling) and pass out over the bootheel someplace. It at least gave us a fighting chance to come down in Macedonia or Greece—Roman territory where the garrisons would still be sympathetic to Pompey.
It occurred to me that the situation now was that each member of the Triumvirate had an advisor from ATN, assuming that Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell was still with Crassus, and that his “disappearance” there had been temporary.
“I would assume so,” Pompey said. “He does tend to take off for long periods of time. He might have been needed at that western colony, Terra Elastica, or possibly down in Africa Australis, the new colony that he had launched far down Africa. Of course in these days anyone can have bad luck with a knife or a cup of poison, you know, but he had very few real enemies, despite having a very odd sense of humor.”
“You’ve noted that, too?” I asked.
“Do you know him?”
“Haven’t met him yet. He’s done a fine job here, by the way,” I said, “though I’m sure it doesn’t seem that way to you. Most timelines that we try to advance don’t move nearly this fast or well. Partly it’s a matter of this historical period and place being such a good one for it, but it’s also Caldwell’s effort.”
“He’s a tall, thin man,” Pompey said. “His skin’s a sort of brownish shade, roughly the same color, I’m told, as the inhabitants of Terra Elastica. Likes to talk and laugh. Sort of a deep spirit of fun about him. I’m afraid Crassus was the most natural one of the Triumvirate for him to end up with—both men seem to have genii that love the mundane and the small details. I have some knack that way myself, as you might have noticed with my use of the rockets—all we Romans do—but Crassus could never look at a thing without thinking of three ways to make it better and six ways to sell it. Not a general at all, poor fool, and of course hopelessly without grace or breeding, but his practical gifts are remarkable, and that seemed to mesh naturally with your man Caldwell.”
I nodded. There was no particular reason to try to persuade Pompey that it was his attitude, and those of the other patricians, that had blinded him to why people like Crassus were bound to take power, eventually must take power.
We passed a pleasant enough afternoon, watching Italy roll slowly and all but silently by beneath us. Pompey was an educated, cultured man, in many ways like Caesar but with much more personal charm, a livelier sense of humor, and a keen feeling for irony that his last few years of disappointments had given him.
We talked about books and poets, Greek literature mainly since it was the same for both of us (though of course much more of it still existed in his timeline). We discussed the battles that had been fought at dozens of places we passed over, for it had taken the city of Rome centuries just to conquer the peninsula, Italy itself had been invaded a number of times, and more than once the parts of Italy that were supposed to be Roman allies had risen to throw off the yoke, causing yet more wars to blaze back and forth. Pompey seemed a little sad at all that, finally commenting only that although muskets demanded courage and presence of mind, they would never require the ability to “look a man in the eye, shove a bar of iron into his guts, and wrench it around as he dies before you—and it’s that spirit that makes our fighting men invincible, at least in even numbers on level ground.”
We even managed to talk a little politics; he was fascinated with the setup of the United States, though I’m afraid he perceived all the checks and balances of the Constitution as a way for rich people to keep their money, and things like the space program, the interstates, and the national parks as ways to buy off the populace to avoid revolt, those being the only purposes of government he could really comprehend.
We were a lot lower than most airplanes commonly go, and the wind was moving us along at not more than about thirty miles per hour, so it was almost sundown when we first sighted the sea ahead of us. It would still be at least an hour until we crossed the coastline, and it was beginning to get cold in the boat, so we decided to dine inside for our next meal, the second hot hamper (or as hot as the straw it was packed in could keep it, anyway).
“This is a very civilized way to travel,” Pompey said as he finished the last of his meal, “as long as you don’t have much concern about where you’re going or when you get there.” It was now fully dark outside.
“One of my favorite books when I was a child made that point,” I said, polishing off something that could easily have passed for baklava at any deli in New York. Then a thought struck me. “I think we’re in trouble.”
Pompey was instantly alert. “Explain,” he said; it was as if the mask of command had simply dropped across his face.
“It’s a cold clear January day out there, and we’re at probably ten thousand feet. We should have been freezing our asses off. In fact it was freezing cold when I was first working my way aboard, right?”
“True—Jupiter!”
“Yep,” I said. “The metal bottom of the burner has been acting as a space heater outside, which is why it was so pleasant and warm all day—and that burner is what was keeping us up. It must have burned out much faster than you had planned on.”
We burst out the door; it was dark, and we saw at once that we really were in just that kind of trouble; the underside of the balloon reflected only the faint red glare of a few coals. The fire would surely be out within the hour.
We were just passing over the coast. “That’s Barium below,” Pompey said, pointing to the faint grid made by the white-stone streets in the dim moonlight. “I recognize it by th
e plan. Well, we have at least seventy miles to go, a hundred if we’re swept farther south. How fast are we going down and how fast are we moving?”
I got out the thumbnail atlas and called in a request; the atlas included a clock, so I then waited five minutes and called in again. Then I worked the calculator; saw the result, worked through it again. “Uh-oh,” I said. “We were at 11,604 feet five minutes ago. Now we’re at 11,501. And in that time we’ve covered 1.9 miles. If you project that out, unless the wind picks up, we’re going into the drink 50 miles from here. Not far enough.”
“Well, first measures first,” Pompey said. “Let’s see what we’ve got around that will burn—we need to lose weight, and we need to warm the air.”
There wasn’t much to start with. The picnic hampers were the biggest single item; we decided we’d want to hang on to a couple of blankets, the rope, the oars, and the maps (Pompey insisted on that last—he clearly had a healthy distrust of technology). It took a little climbing, and there is something about being up in the rigging of a balloon, even in fairly calm air, at night that is tough on the nerves, but we managed to get them thrown into the hopper, where after a minute or two they blazed up.
“What next?” I said. “We don’t need the sandbag davits, and that’s a few substantial sticks of wood.”
We broke them off, and I started to climb up to pitch them in, except for the one that still held our sandbag—we wanted some control on landing if we could manage it—and one other davit, after Pompey suddenly said, authoritatively, “Save that one out.”
I set it down in the bottom of the boat, put the tied-together davits into a pack on my back, and worked my way up the lines again until I was over the brazier. The hampers, straw, and spare blankets had mostly burned out already, but when I tossed the davits in among them there was a brief flare-up. I just hoped it was hot enough to get the davits going.
When I got back down, Pompey handed me a large piece of wood, and said, “If you don’t mind climbing, I’ll be happy to keep handing you wood. I’d like to get that fire built up before it has a chance to go out completely—I don’t relish the thought of climbing into the brazier with flint and steel.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said, and climbed back up. There was a hole in the chunk of wood, so I put my arm through that, and it was fairly easy climbing.
The problem was that the lines had to run away from the brazier to avoid getting burned, and the most natural and easy way to climb on a rope that goes up at an angle is with your body underneath it. That meant by the time you were even with the brazier, you were too far away from it to throw anything in; you then had to climb back along the lines that ran to the bottom hole of the balloon. Thus you were at least twenty feet up from the boat, and ten feet above the metal brazier, before you could drop a load in.
At least it was easy this time. I dropped in the chunk of wood, right on top of where a few of the davits had begun to burn, and climbed back down. There were several boards tied together waiting for me; Pompey shouted that he thought he had gotten all the nails, but I should be careful. I slung it up, climbed up again, saw that the first piece of wood had caught, and tossed in the bundle. There was a great crash, and sparks flew up into the balloon; I hoped that whatever fireproofing there was continued to work.
When I climbed back down, there was still more wood, including a piece like the first one. It finally occurred to me to ask, “Where are you getting this?”
“I’m taking the stagecoach cabin apart, of course,” Pompey said. “The balloon is secured to the boat, not to the cabin, and I’d rather be cold and land in Macedonia than settle comfortably onto the sea.”
“Agreed,” I said, and set off back up the lines. This was turning into a lot of exercise, so it was warming me up considerably, and the wood in the brazier was beginning to catch as well, so it was getting warmer still. Moreover, as the fire got bigger there, it wasn’t quite so necessary to climb all the way out over the brazier in order to hit the fire exactly with each addition of fuel, so the job went faster. After perhaps forty minutes of dedicated work, we had put the whole cabin into the brazier, and it was blazing brightly. The balloon over our heads glowed yellow and red with reflected light, and the bottom of the brazier was hot enough to warm the boat pleasantly.
We helped ourselves to some wine from the supplies, and assisted the balloon further by pitching the empty bottles over the side. Then I got out the thumbnail atlas, and said, “All right, now let’s see what effect we’re having.”
We were back up at twelve thousand feet, and holding steady, now moving at just over two miles in five minutes. “If that fire lasts another hour,” I said, “we should make it easily. And with probably only a couple of hours of being unpleasantly out in the weather.”
Pompey made a grunt of satisfaction. “After it burns out, you’ll see why we saved the entrenching tool. I plan to climb up there and shovel out the dead ashes as well. That should amount to at least half as much as the sandbag.”
Another hour went by; on the course that the wind was taking us, we should be coming down in Macedonia in just about three and a half hours—if the fire kept burning long enough.
It actually went a little longer. We had no objections. “We’ll actually get there before midnight,” I said. “Depending on where we come down, we may not even have to camp out.”
We had another bottle of wine—there would be nothing that required us to be sober for at least two hours, and it seemed like a pleasant way to pass the time. Pompey taught me a couple of the basic dirty songs of the legions, and I gave him a couple from ATN training camp. We were delighted to discover a couple that seemed to overlap between the two sets; apparently people who do violence for a living have very similar tastes down through the centuries.
Even through the mild buzz of alcohol, I was still forming my basic assessment, and it was this: Pompey was a brilliant man, and much the more likable guy as opposed to Caesar. You could trust Pompey in a way that you could never trust Caesar.
But Caesar had more brains and more imagination. I hated noticing that, because of what it foreboded, but there you had it; in any kind of contest between the two of them, I would bet on Pompey to put up a brave, honorable, and intelligent fight, and then to lose.
For the hell of it, I asked Pompey how he felt about Caesar’s proclivity for raping younger slaves.
“Oh, hell, yes,” Pompey said. “Want another glass?”
“Sure,” I said. “No point pouring it over the side without straining it through us first.”
“By Castor, that’s true,” Pompey said. He seemed pretty fond of the bottle, I noted, and he was drinking about two to my one. Well, people said he looked a lot like Alexander the Great, who also had a booze problem; and in Pompey’s case, given his generally successful career, I wasn’t sure it was really a problem. A man can adore getting drunk and still not be an alcoholic.
The thought brought a need to both our consciousnesses, so we both lurched to our feet, grabbed a line, raised our tunics, and lightened the balloon some more. “Hope there are no fishermen down there,” I said, joking.
“Ah, fuck ’em. That’s what plebeians are for,” Pompey said, laughing.
As we sat down, it occurred to me that though we both found that funny, Pompey meant it. But I kept the thought to myself.
As we settled back, Pompey handed me my glass, and said, “Now, where were we? Oh, yeah, Gaius and raping slaves. Well, god knows we’ve all done that, when we were teenagers; something about the way a slave boy or girl will scream and cry, because of course they’re afraid to strike us or really stop us, you know, gets the blood pumping. But most of us find out very quickly that a hurt slave is a bad slave, and that it’s far better to treat them with kindness and gentleness so that they’ll want to be in your bed, they’ll be jealous of whoever else is, and determined to please, and so forth.
“But for Gaius it’s just … well, he loves power. He’s also about as sex-mad as an
y man I’ve ever known—even his best pal and favorite catamite, Marcus Antonius, says that Gaius is ‘a woman to every man and a man to every woman.’ There are those of us who think that that shows, well, a lack of control at the least.
“And then, finally, there’s the matter of … now this is talking out of school, you know, but the truth is, Marce, I’ve gotten to like you. You’re a good man for an emergency like this, and I’d rather trust you than not, so if you’re plotting to kill me, be quick and give me no warning.”
“I’m not,” I said, and shuddered, for it echoed what Hasmonea had said a little too closely for my liking.
“I didn’t think you were, since you so easily could have,” Pompey said. “Anyway, as I said, it’s not utterly unknown, there are rumors, but as you probably know, Caesar was my father-in-law for a long time.”
I remembered that detail; Caesar was a few years younger than Pompey, and his daughter would have been a whole generation younger, but it was not uncommon for political marriages to have big age gaps in those days. Hell, if you looked at some wives of senators and governors, it wasn’t all that uncommon where I came from. “Yes, I remember—her name was—”
“Julia, of course. The family name becomes the praenomen when a woman marries. Well, not to make the story too long, apparently most of the dark rumors are true, and even his daughters knew about it when they were quite young; some of them had slave playmates who were badly hurt by Caesar on his little forays. Now don’t misunderstand me—it’s a master’s right to do whatever he likes with his slaves—but still and all, a man who can’t control himself and puts his household into that kind of uproar—well, I think Julia was very happy to be with me, because I certainly run a quieter and kinder house than that. Indeed it was one of the better political marriages I’ve ever seen, if I do say so myself. And at least this way there’s an heir out there descended from both Caesar and me. That might help, someday, in patching all this back together.”
