The Last Roman (Praetorian Series - Book One)

by Edward Crichton

  The modern military could take a page out of the Roman army’s training playbook. As a result of the constant pace of physical and weapons drills, along with long distance runs, those of us who needed to shed a few pounds did so easily. Another thing we learned quickly was how to dig a mean ditch. Along with the digging came knowledge about Roman camp fortifications, how they were erected, and what we needed to do to contribute. If we had to move and build a new camp, the Roman’s made sure everybody could pitch in and lend a hand.

  As for the rest of our wayward companions who had accompanied us the night we fled Rome, Caligula took to running a legion camp very efficiently, and Galba happily relinquished full control to his emperor. Fully recovered within a week, Caligula was seen walking amongst the troops, and training daily with the camp’s officers.

  The surviving Praetorians from the bloody battle in his home were commended, and as a group, were elevated to a newly created position within the Praetorian rank. The one hundred and five survivors, including Quintilius, who was promoted to the rank primus pilus, formed a new sect known as the Praetorian Sacred Band. The name was a homage to the Sacred Band of Thebes, a personal bodyguard unit to Thespian kings that contained one hundred and fifty pairs of lovers. During one battle against the hoplites of Sparta, they defeated a foe which greatly outnumbered them, but were eventually slaughtered by Philip II of Macedon, whose victory removed the Greek city-states authority over the land.

  Unlike their Greek counterpart, the Praetorians were not required to partake in homosexual activity and create sexual pairs, but the number of men was set permanently at three hundred.

  Many of the survivors were promoted a rank or two, and they recruited the remaining men needed from the two Praetorian cohorts that had joined us in Caere, choosing only those they deemed feverously loyal. Once merged, the Sacred Band became Caligula’s flagship unit, and newly promoted Quintilius became the highest ranking centurion in the camp, even higher than Maximus Nisus, the legion’s own primus pilus. Despite Quintilius’ new position, Nisus took his promotion in stride, aware that Praetorians were rewarded with special privileges and honors. Quintilius took the promotion graciously and professionally, and even though I knew he was booming with pride and happiness, he never let on that he wasn’t doing anything but his duty.

  Gaius and Marcus were also promoted. Originally holding the rank of optio, a centurion’s second in command, they were not only promoted to the centurion ranks, but also accelerated to the rank of pilus prior, or “superior file,” the second highest ranking centurion in a legion.

  A Roman legion was simplistic in design, but could become frustratingly confusing when it came to the specifics of the chain of command, and the finer details of its construction. A legion, comprised of around six thousand men, was broken into ten cohorts, containing slightly less than six hundred men each, which were broken into centuries. Six thousand was a rounded up number, most legions containing only slightly more than fifty two hundred front line soldiers, but when combined with officers, administrators, and other staff, the number was closer to six.

  The breakdown of centuries got pretty confusing, but each cohort had six centuries, of about eighty fighting men each. Things got even more confusing, as the first centuries of each cohort was doubled in size, and depending on what cohort you were in granted you superiority, and certain centurions of equal rank still had more power than others...

  It didn’t really matter. The system confused even me.

  The end result was Quintilius in complete command of the Sacred Band, his orders coming directly from Caligula, and Gaius and Marcus commanding one half of the three hundred man unit. It was a large honor for the two young men I had come to call friends, but they took their new posts like any seasoned soldier would. Caligula had no patience for tribunes in his Sacred Band, knowing that centurions were the real leaders on the battlefield.

  And so things went.

  Training and teaching and training and learning and training, we were quickly becoming well versed in military history, legion tactics and strategy, sword handling, horse riding, spear casting, and ditch digging. While not officially folded into the legion’s command structure, we were treated as mercenaries may have been, albeit ones who weren’t paid, and Vincent was invited to attend all command staff meetings. He ordered me to attend as well, unofficially promoting me as his second in command, which likewise garnered me no additional pay. Flattered, I accepted, and spent another large chunk of my time engaged in strategizing for the upcoming campaign against Claudius.

  To keep me even busier, it was about the time when the first snow started to fall, in mid-December, that the Romans assigned us watch shifts to participate in during the course of the day. Each of us was assigned a different shift, which were rotated biweekly. My first shift landed me patrolling the ramparts between midnight and six in the morning. By the grace of God, our gear had managed to find its way to our camp a few weeks after our arrival, carried by a few loyal slaves of Caligula’s, and was greatly appreciated by us all.

  We found cold weather gear in the supplies, which made those long windy nights much more bearable. I didn’t know how the Romans didn’t freeze to death, but they endured, and somehow remained healthy. It honestly seemed like a miracle.

  My watch shift rarely synced up with Helena’s so we rarely had time to speak with one another. I missed her during that time. The sparks we’d felt months earlier had yet to rekindle, but we cherished the time we spent together nonetheless. It wasn’t until late January that we were lucky enough to land watch shifts that kept both of our nights free, and while many of them were spent talking about our pasts, most revolved around current affairs and our lives in the Roman world.

  We always had plenty to talk about. Over the past four months, I started a process of lumping more and more responsibility for our predicament on my shoulders. My actual responsibility notwithstanding, I took it upon myself, and only myself, to try to understand our situation and find a way to get home. And even though it was difficult with little reference, I wracked my brain around the topic day and night. Neither Varus nor Caligula had thought to bring the orb or manuscripts with them, so all I was left with was to think on the subject, something I did in excess.

  The problem was that there wasn’t anyone for me to talk to. Vincent knew the classics, but time travel was a mystery to him. Varus knew about the orb, but not how it was related to time travel. Santino had watched a lot of movies in his day, but was hardly the guy to go to for an existential debate about anything. Everyone else fell into one category or another, and it forced a sense of ownership of the problem onto no one but me.

  It was compounded by my new leadership position within the group when Vincent ordered me to attend Galba’s meetings. Even there, he took a backseat during the proceedings to let my more – eclectic – mind cogitate on the issues. Vincent himself had even become a major internal debate because of those actions. I’d yet to understand a single decision he’d made in the half year we’d been stuck here. It all culminated to make my life extremely stressful, and Helena knew it.

  “What’s wrong?” She asked quietly one night, feeling something was amiss from across the tent.

  “Hmm? Oh. It’s nothing,” I replied, likewise keeping my voice to a whisper.

  She shifted onto her side to see me more clearly. “Come on, Jacob. I know you better than that by now. You have that far off look again. The one that says you’re trying to wrap your head around something so complex that no matter how hard you try, you know you’ll never figure it out. You know, like Santino when he’s trying to figure out which boot goes on which foot.”

  I chuckled. “You always know what to say to cheer a guy up.”

  “I know,” she said playfully. “So what’s wrong?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I hate to sound like a broken record here, but I just can’t shake the feeling that somehow we’re here for a reason, and I don’t mean just in this camp, but in Rom
e, in 38 A.D. Based on the decisions Vincent’s made since we arrived here I can’t help but think this whole thing is a setup. Somehow he knew we’d get sent here, and he knew that sphere would do something crazy, and now he’s on some kind of mission he hasn’t filled the rest of us in on. Except, everything we’ve done since we’ve been here is a mistake, and as a result, we’ve totally fucked everything up.”

  “Are you sure you even deserve an answer?”

  My eyebrows furrowed. “Of course I do. It’s my fault we’re here to begin with and I deserve to know everything I can to try and figure out a way home.”

  “Maybe that’s not really you’re responsibility either,” Helena insisted.

  “Not my… How can you say that? If not me, then who?”

  She sighed and looked away. “If you want my advice, then I say you should forget about it, but if it means that much to you, talk to Vincent. Get him to talk to you.”

  “I guess. To be honest, I’ve been hoping to avoid that conversation. Have him come out to us on his own.” I took a breath and thought. She had a point that the longer I let this fester, the worse it was going to get. I had to clear my own conscience and there was only one way to do that.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  ***

  If Helena had been right about one thing, it wasn’t that talking to Vincent would make me feel better, but that by talking to him I would at least find the truth. I wished I’d never even tried.

  A few mornings after we had talked, I’d went looking for Vincent. I found him eating breakfast with a number of centurions, talking and laughing with the fellow career military men. I loitered around the area while I waited for him to finish his breakfast, before approaching and asking politely if we could talk. He excused himself from his buddies, and took a walk around the camp with me.

  We spent the first two laps discussing camp gossip, which believe it or not, was prevalent, the weeks itinerary, and the weather, everything but what I had intended to confront him on. He noticed I was keeping something back, and demanded I just come out with what was bothering me.

  So I did.

  “Sir. Prior to our arrival here in Rome, did you, or any of your superiors, have any preconceived notions or intelligence regarding the methods, means, or motives behind how we got here?” I’d practiced the line over and over in my head for months, but I’d never had the guts to ask. I wasn’t sure if I feared a reprimand or the truth more.

  Vincent continued walking around the camp, thinking deeply before answering my question. “Yes.”

  I snorted out a laugh. Of course he did. There were too many plot holes in this story for him not to have.

  “So, are you going to tell me, or am I going to end up with a horse’s head in my bedroll tomorrow morning?”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Jacob. You have a right to know.” He sighed, and I felt frustration flowing off of him. “It wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did. We had no idea things would turn out like this.”

  “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

  He took a deep breath before continuing. “Six years ago, in 2015, papal historians were conducting routine research in the Vatican archives when they came across a document which spoke of a means to change the past. From what I was told, and from what I’ve learned here, I assume that document was the very same one you and Varus had discussed, or at least a copy. I assume so because the historians indicated it was written in a very old language, Etruscan they guessed, which proved nearly impossible to translate. However, it had numerous notes, scribblings and translation attempts scrawled all over it, as well as on attached notes. I assume the document you saw had no such writing?”

  “No, sir. It didn’t.”

  “You see? I’ve been learning from your little lectures. The notes must have been written sometime between now and when we found the sphere, as more and more people attempted to unlock its secrets, before it somehow wound up in our archives, lost and forgotten. Anyway, the few discernible facts historians pulled from the notes were about a blue sphere. At first, we thought nothing of it, until a news report surfaced in 2016 concerning the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities break in. The one in Cairo.”

  “I remember reading about that,” I replied, vaguely recalling the morning I read about it on my news feed. “Apparently nothing of value was stolen, except for two items, neither related in any way to the other. They never released what those artifacts were.”

  “That’s probably because they thought their importance wasn’t significant. However, we quickly learned that one of those artifacts was actually in fact our lost blue sphere.”

  “Really?” I asked. “The plot thickens.”

  Vincent ignored my sarcasm. “We knew the robbery was committed by known terrorists from the security footage. Most were unrecognizable nobodies, but there was one the CIA identified for us. Abdullah.”

  Now things were getting interesting. “So, let me get this straight,” I said, hoping I hadn’t missed anything. “Your researchers recovered evidence of an ancient time machine, which just happened to be residing, inconspicuously, in an Egyptian museum, only to have said museum broken into by Islamic extremists and the sphere stolen? Then, in your infinite wisdom, you sent out a team to recover the sphere, hoping to utilize its abilities for yourself, and somehow magically make the world a better place?”

  “You make it sound almost… wrong, but to answer your question, no, that was not actually the plan. Did you or Varus understand the part about how the sphere affects those who spend too much time around it?”

  I thought about it. “Actually… no, that didn’t come up.”

  Vincent huffed. “Well, our historians learned that there were some who, when in direct and constant contact with the sphere, developed interesting symptoms revolving around intense paranoia, Tourette Syndrome, dementia. These people were borderline insane, and prone to random acts of physical violence. Others who came into contact with it showed no affects at all. Sound familiar?”

  I didn’t flinch at his paternal tone. “No.”

  “I thought so. That information was in the notes. Now, think here for a second. Intelligence agencies reported Abdullah as a rational man prior to the attack on the Vatican, a man low on their priority list because he was never pegged as one who would actually do anything crazy. But what does he do a year later after the museum robbery? He causes one of the most atrocious acts of terrorism the world has ever seen. And remember the condition we found him in? He was crazy. By the way, I want to add something to your ever-expanding theory on time travel.”

  I nodded, feeling excited, rather than annoyed.

  “In our history, when nothing happened, you said the ball was packed up and lost to history, right?”

  “It’s a possibility, yes,” I answered.

  “‘A possibility’?” He repeated with a smirk. “Well, here’s my theory: what if it sat on Caligula’s nightstand for months, or even years, before it was lost?”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, because it made perfect sense. The sphere is a part of our history, and may have indeed become a trinket of Caligula’s when it seemed to serve no purpose. If its negative side effects were true, it would definitely explain how Caligula really slipped towards madness, as well as how it became worse and worse over his short reign.

  “I must say, sir, your theory is compelling. If you’re right, then I think it’s especially important to find out where the sphere is now. Actually,” I corrected, “we need to find out where both of them are.”

  “I know. I’ve been thinking about that as well, but I have no idea where they could be. Hopefully, they’re locked away in a vault somewhere back in Rome.”

  I considered that for a moment. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. When we found them, we needed to destroy them. Even if we could find a way for them to return us to our original place on the timeline, home might not be how we remembered it anymore. We’d need to fix that
first, too.

  “You still haven’t answered my question as to your motives behind us arriving here,” I reminded him, not letting him off that easy.

  Vincent stopped, and sat down on a large stone near the porta decumana, while I continued to stand near him. I looked up at the rampart and saw Helena standing on the platform, performing her guard duties. She noticed us beneath her and raised a questioning hand. I waved her off and turned back to Vincent who, meanwhile, had picked up a stick and started drawing lines in the dirt like an eight year old.

  He took another long breath before continuing. “We weren’t supposed to end up in ancient Rome,” he said shaking his head distractedly as he admired his sand drawings. “We had no idea as to the context of what the document meant. The Pope hoped to bring the sphere back and study it, and maybe utilize it to help, but only if it could have been done safely, in a controlled way. The Pope’s first team was really commissioned to look for the sphere. It had been unsuccessful so far, which is why our second team was created, to help in that search, while simultaneously eliminating terrorist threats.”

  I frowned. “Was McDougal in on it?”

  “Of course. He was the one who came up with the plan to provide additional supplies for teams who had a direct lead on the sphere. He knew that when dealing with something unknown that anything can happen and he wanted us ready for anything. That’s why we were given the supply cache. Just in case.”

  I looked at him suspiciously. “What about me?”

  Vincent must have known I’d ask about that because he didn’t hesitate. “We had no idea you would be the key to getting us here. Honestly, we didn’t, but you were chosen for reasons other than the ones you were told. We knew the document was written in Etruscan, so chances were it had something to do with antiquity. We knew you were studying the classics before enlisting in the military, and thought it would be a good idea to recruit you. You’d be surprised to learn there aren’t very many military men with the eclectic educational background that you have. I guess we got lucky, but I was just as surprised as you were when we ended up beneath that temple.” He paused for a second. “There’s... more.”