The Last Roman (Praetorian Series - Book One)

by Edward Crichton

  I turned my head, and studied his face. “You’re not a priest, are you?”

  Vincent straightened while Helena shifted her look towards him, a confusion spreading across her face. He stood there for only a few seconds before he crossed his arms, and looked at me. His face suggested he was trying to find the best way to answer and he shifted his feet and looked at the floor.

  “What gave me away?” He replied, looking up with his eyes.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from Helena, just slightly more surprised than I was. I met his eyes before responding.

  “I’ve had my suspicions for a while, to be honest, but it wasn’t until just now that I confirmed it. The way you called me “son” and not “my son” did it. You’ve done it before, but maybe my drugged up state has given me some advanced powers of observation, but the way you said it just clicked. The fact you’ve never insisted on presiding over Mass on Sundays didn’t help much, either.”

  “There’s just no fooling you, is there?”

  I shrugged, immediately regretting it.

  “Well… you’re right. I am no priest. I’ve spent my entire life since leaving the Swiss military in the Pope’s Swiss Guard, and I’ve spent more time in the Vatican than I have anywhere else. The Pope himself suggested the idea that we have a member of the clergy on the team, and he wanted me ordained, but I told him no.” He sighed. “I’ve felt lots of things in my life, but never the calling to become a priest. Pope Gregory understood the sentiment, himself not having felt the call until somewhat later in his life. Instead, knowing I was the most experienced and willing man for the post, he gave me his blessing to assume the role, to act as a symbol and a reminder of who and what we were working for.” He stopped himself, and looked at the floor again. “I guess there’s no need to keep pretending then, is there? Ancient Rome has no need for Catholic priests. Especially phony ones.”

  “That doesn’t exactly sound like something a pope would just allow,” I said, skeptically.

  “Desperate situations call for desperate answers, Jacob. Not many priests are fit for military duty.”

  “So, why didn’t you go through with it?” Helena asked.

  He looked thoughtful as he glanced at her, his look lingering ever so slightly. “I think it’s because I still want to have a family of my own, one day. I’m not that old, you know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked.

  He sighed. “At eighteen our convictions are a hill from which to look out from, at forty five they are a cave in which to hide.”

  I squinted. “Hemingway?”

  “Fitzgerald,” Helena answered for him with a smirk. “F. Scott.”

  I returned the look. “Smart ass.”

  Vincent smiled at us. “Were I a younger man, I may have come out with it, but time slows us down. Helps us think. Makes us patient. Hell,” he paused, suddenly taking a moment to ponder his next thought. After an awkward moment, he continued, “Hell, were I a younger man, I may have taken my vows. Either way, it seemed best to keep my cover locked in a cave until you figured it out for yourself.”

  “Seems this outfit is full of surprises,” I said. “What’s next? Is Santino really a cross dresser?”

  “I heard that,” said a weak and raspy voice, “and could you keep it down? I’m trying to sleep.”

  The three of us turned to look over at Santino, who had his eyes open, but kept his head facing towards the roof of the tent. Helena pulled her chair next to him, and gripped his hand.

  “How are you feeling?” She asked.

  “Like I was just crucified. Oh, wait. Remind me not to let that happen again.”

  Helena smiled down at him. “Well, it’s nice to see you haven’t lost your charming personality.”

  I saw Santino’s jaw working, and I assumed he was trying to keep his mouth from drying up, but then it looked like he was almost going to cry.

  “I lost my knife,” he said, as though it had been his mother.

  “Don’t worry,” Helena told him, “we’ll get you another one. A bigger one. I promise.”

  “Oh, that’s nice…” he muttered, slowly drifting unconscious again.

  “Get better, John,” Helena told him, leaning down to give him a quick peck on the lips.

  “I could get used to that,” he mumbled as his small smile faded along with his consciousness.

  “So are you upset with me?” Vincent asked as Helena returned to my side

  “No.” I answered firmly. “I’m a military man. I’m used to my commanders lying to me.”

  “And you?” He asked, looking at Helena.

  She considered for a moment. “No, sir.”

  “Good. I was hoping you’d say that, the both of you. Honestly, I feel quite relieved. Maybe I can curse every once in a while now.”

  “That would be refreshing, sir, and since you’re here, mind telling me how and why you came to rescue us?”

  “It was Helena’s idea,” he answered immediately. “After you left, she came to me and voiced her dissent of the mission. She explained how you admitted to her that you didn’t trust Agrippina, and that you knew something was off about the mission. However, since you couldn’t refuse to help a grieving mother, you hoped to expose her plot by going through with it.”

  “I said all that, huh?” I asked, looking up at Helena. She gave me a look that suggested I shut the hell up and roll with it.

  “So, once the legion arrived outside of Rome a few days later, and after you hadn’t reported in, I asked Caligula if we could go in under cover of an artillery barrage, and get you out. He was reluctant to condone such an action, but in the end, decided it would send a strong message to the city’s inhabitants. So he agreed, and even offered a contingent of his own troops to help.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “After we snuck through one of the gates,” Helena answered for him, “we asked some folks along the way for directions. They were very forthcoming. Besides, we had Santino’s UAV.”

  “Ah, right.” I took a deep breath, feeling the need for sleep wash over me. “Thanks.”

  Vincent smiled, and patted me on the shoulder. “Get some rest. We’re going to need you one of these days.” He nodded to Helena, and left the tent.

  She watched him go. “Didn’t see that coming.”

  “Yah,” I replied. “Me neither, but I’m getting pretty good at reading people these days.”

  I thought about Agrippina, and how I was certain she was implicated in Santino and I getting our asses kicked and how she had so easily played us. I hadn’t seen her clearly in that moment before I fell unconscious, but I knew it had to be her.

  “Then again, maybe I’m not,” I thought out loud.

  Helena reached over and intertwined her fingers through my own. I looked over at her, and saw the same bloodshot and puffy eyes I had seen the day I left for Rome. I felt just as sleepy as she looked, but I finally found the strength to reach a hand up and grab her head. I stared at her for only a moment before I pulled her towards me. “Come here.”

  She didn’t resist and I brought her into another kiss, this one sweeter and more intoxicating than the last. Helena was right. We’d danced around our feelings and emotions for far too long. I’ve cared for her just as long as she has for me, probably longer. She pulled back after a few moments and kissed me lightly on the forehead.

  “Like I said before Vincent arrived, you’re heading in the right direction. The man I grew to care for is there again. For you to admit that you were wrong was a huge step. You’re words and attitude are far more compelling than your face ever was, and I want to be there to help.” She smirked. “Then again… I did see you naked.”

  I looked at her happily, more happy than I’d been in a long, long time. “Like what you saw, Miss Strauss?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose so, but it’s not like I have many references to compare it to.”

  “Ouch, Helena. Ouch. Maybe you’d care to return the favor? I’d love
to offer you some constructive criticism. Trust me, it’d be my pleasure”

  She reached down to cup the side of my cheek while unzipping her shirt, stopping just above her navel. “Don’t get any ideas, Lieutenant. There’ll be plenty of time for that… later.”

  “You’re such a tease.”

  “Shut up, Jacob.” She tore the blanket covering my body away and slipped in next to me, pressing herself up against me gently. She kissed me again and laid her head against my shoulder as she wrapped an arm across my body carefully. “Don’t worry. The hero always gets the girl. You’ll just have to be patient.”

  ***

  The nice thing about sieges was that there really wasn’t much to do.

  After I’d awoken for the second time, this time with Helena deep in sleep beside me, her head resting on my chest lovingly, I was still too weak to move. It left me with plenty of time to think, and one of the things that hit me hard was the fact that Santino and I had failed our mission. Not only had we been tricked by Agrippina into participating in her so called humanitarian mission, an embarrassing defeat in of itself, but we also failed to secure the demolition along the walls, which would have ended this mess a lot quicker.

  Instead, I woke up to find myself in the middle of a siege, a military blockade of an enemy city with the sole purpose of starving the city into fighting or surrendering. Sieges could last for a year, waste precious time, and never left the disgruntled innocent bystanders of the besieged city all that happy should there be a change in leadership. What made me feel worse was the fact I had failed a personal request from Caligula himself. I dreaded the day I had to get my ass out of that tent and face him.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Only a few hours after Helena joined me for her nap, Santino still unconscious on the bed next to me, Caligula had sought me out instead. I hadn’t heard him enter the tent, and he had snuck up on me as quietly as Santino ever could. Caught unaware, my first instinct was to get up, only to find that I still couldn’t move. I felt silly with Helena practically straddling me, but Caligula didn’t question it.

  To my surprise, his expression wasn’t angry, nor did he seem upset. He hadn’t stayed long, but he reassured me that while he was sorry we had failed in both missions, he wasn’t upset. He was just happy we’d be available to fight for him whenever the siege lifted, but also pressured me for information on Claudius and his state of mind. I did my best to relay everything I could. He wasn’t happy to learn of his turn towards insanity, but also didn’t seem overly surprised. If I had to guess, I would assume he and Varus had done some more digging into the origins and meaning behind Remus’ documents, and may have learned what Vincent and I already knew.

  I also tried to apologize to him, as well as tell him about Agrippina’s suspected role in my capture, but he left before I could. I wasn’t sure how to feel as I watched his retreating back, but at least I wouldn’t have to face him later. Suddenly feeling very tired, I fell back asleep.

  Three days later, I finally gained the strength to get up and begin my rehabilitation. Wang had given me a clean bill of health, but also let me in on just how close I had come to death’s door. I had been deprived of food and water for almost two days, had lost multiple pints of blood, and had my head beaten to the point where brain damage had only been a few more knocks on the cranium away. I was lucky to be alive, and as I sat on the table I had spent the past few days on, trying to kneed feeling back into my muscles, he had pointed at Santino and practically proclaimed his survival an act of divine intervention. A man any less willing to survive wouldn’t have, and Wang diagnosed it was probably Santino’s drive to annoy people that had kept him going.

  With him still bed ridden, Helena and I started my rehab exactly the way we had done when she’d recovered from her injuries sustained in 2021. We started with stretches and light calisthenics, then onto walking and jogging, before I was finally able to start running again. Santino took a week to get out of bed, but was soon on his feet and getting stronger as well.

  That was two months ago.

  During that time, Santino and I pushed ourselves hard, and it wasn’t too long until we were back at our peak physical readiness once again. Not that it mattered much. We didn’t see any signs of the siege lifting any time soon.

  Caligula’s initial barrage of artillery had ended quickly after it had started. Its purpose was mainly to let the citizens of Rome know he was out there, but its cover for the rescue operation was still appreciated. As Caligula said before the operation even began, he had no intention of razing Rome to the ground, or destroying more property than he needed to. While the city had burned that night, little real estate was severely damaged, and the fires had quickly died out thanks in large part to the rainy spring months.

  So, the siege would endure, either starving the people of Rome into surrendering, or sallying out in a counter attack.

  Rome was many things, but self-sufficient it was not. It had grain supplies that could feed its citizens, but they wouldn’t last forever. By the time Augustus took power seventy years ago, Rome had just finished fighting its third civil war in the past one hundred years, the last between Augustus himself and Marc Antony. The population of the empire, and the city itself, was at an all-time low. Now, however, more than a half century later, and another forty after Augustus enacted his legislation encouraging Romans to marry and have children, Rome was reaching a population level that it would soon find overwhelming.

  Twenty five years from now, during Nero’s reign, a fire would engulf the city, last nine days, and reduce entire sections of the city to rubble. Nero would later take advantage of his newly cleared land to build his golden house on top of the destroyed territory. During the fire, however, grain supplies were lost, and the very real revelation that Rome’s citizens might starve occurred to many. While Nero had actually done a good job in rationing out the grain, and not dancing with his fiddle during the fire as Suetonius records, had Rome been ready for such a disaster, they may have been able to feed everyone, despite the loss of supplies during the fire.

  As fate would have it, just as during the fire of 64 A.D., one of the few things hit during the initial artillery barrage was the city’s grain supplies. It wasn’t a major blow, but any loss to their reserve of food brought the city that much closer to starvation.

  Vincent and I determined that Rome’s grain supplies probably wouldn’t last the eight months Caligula’s experts predicted. They just didn’t have all the facts, let alone hindsight. Even so, we’d be here for a while.

  To complete the siege, our legionnaires had spent days digging trenches and ditches three hundred yards or so away from the walls to encircle the entire city. The trench system was meant to contain the inhabitants as well as provide defense if the legion was attacked. Aiding our effort were two natural phenomena.

  The first lucky break was the fact that Rome hadn’t expanded to its largest point yet. The Aurelian walls hadn’t been built, and its defensive line was still the city’s original Servian Wall. The second blessing was the Tiber River, which worked as a natural barrier to the West. The legion merely took up residence in the Campus Martius, which also lay outside the walls, but between them and the Tiber. Additional troops were also stationed on the opposite side of the river, effectively shutting down the city in the west.

  Unfortunately, as the saying goes, “all roads lead to Rome”, there were many points of entry for us to contain. The via appia, aurelia, cassia, claudia valeria, flaminia, salaria, and other smaller ones were all roads that accumulated in Rome, and each needed to be blocked. Therefore, each road received two centuries of legionnaires and a varied number of auxilia. Each century constructed a camp, much like the larger version they had wintered in on either side of the road. On the road, they placed wooden beams, attached together in a cross bracing. These barriers reminded me of the anti-landing craft barricades the Nazis had placed along the shore of Normandy prior to D-day. The remainder of the legion was spread out alon
g the trench network at set intervals in small camps, no bigger than a couple of tennis courts.

  Most of these camps were provided with artillery pieces such as an onager. The word onager literally translated as “ass”, a reference to how it kicked like a donkey when fired. It was basically a catapult, and while it was highly inaccurate, it was still able to throw heavy objects far distances. They scared the hell out of people, but weren’t overly efficient.

  Finally, scattered around the trenches were the legion’s cavalry auxilia, who would be handy if the defenders decided to counter attack. Their quick response time would allow them to react to a breakout along the lines anywhere in a matter of minutes.

  Caligula’s command camp was the largest of all. It held us, his sacred band, his two loyal Praetorian cohorts, and the Primigenia’s first cohort. It was located between the via cassia and aurelia, on the west bank of the Tiber, near where the Vatican would one day stand.

  To help strengthen the defenses, Vincent had assigned us to patrol the trenches in our swim pairs occasionally throughout the day. The trenches, miles long, proved good exercise, as well as a warm up for what was to come.

  On the tenth day of the siege, a supply train was intercepted trying to sneak supplies into the city. A ridiculous undertaking considering the blockade, but nonetheless, a caravan of some fifty wagons tried to breach our lines and move into the city. Only two days after I had started limping my way around the camp, I wasn’t able to participate in the take down, but I did watch it from the ramparts.

  The blockade runners were pressing their horses to full speed as they traveled down the street. Calmly and efficiently, a few dozen legionnaires posted themselves on the paved road, and planted stakes. Unable to dig them into the dirt, they positioned rocks to act as fulcrums, and planted a foot on the blunt side to keep them angled. The Romans managed to erect a barrier of overlapping sharp sticks, three rows deep, while they hunkered down behind their shields.