Rogue Emperor

by Crawford Kilian

  Pierce looked around: Aquilius was gone. “Where is my friend?”

  “The youth? He set off after them. Down there.” She pointed down a dark lane.

  Pierce swayed, touched his scalp, and looked at his bloodied fingers. His shoulder bag was gone: the Mallory, the survival kit, the Pentasyn, the beeper. He smiled and almost laughed. The Agency hit man, reflexes quickened, senses enhanced, armed with enough weapons to wipe out a legion — mugged by local talent.

  “What did they look like? The men who robbed us?”

  Everyone gabbled at once, each contradicting the others. Pierce nodded, smiled, held up his hands. Then he turned and headed down the lane. Each step made his head hurt. Careful: He might actually catch up with the robbers, and be knocked unconscious again.

  The lane seemed to go on endlessly, two brick walls interrupted by occasional doorways. Balconies overhead helped to block what little sky showed between the buildings. The lane itself was a strip of mud and garbage. It branched, branched again; he chose turns at random.

  Eventually Pierce found himself in a little square, then in a wider street beyond it. He turned back, searching through back streets and alleys. The people there looked at him with indifference, as if tall men in bloodstained tunics often reeled past.

  “Have you seen two men, running, with leather shoulder bags?” Pierce asked a boy. The boy shook his head and sidled off.

  For the rest of the afternoon Pierce roved across the neighborhood. Once a patrol of the urban cohort stopped him, heard his story, and laughed.

  “Big fellow like you, robbed by a couple of gutter rats? Ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Pierce nodded; they let him go. He found a square with a fountain and rinsed some of the blood out of his hair. The shock of cool water cleared his head a little; his fingers probed the lump on the back of his head. The actual cut was a small one, and had finally clotted over. He squatted by the fountain and thought.

  He was half a kilometer or more south of the Viminal Gate, and not far from the Macellum Liviae, a big marketplace. Just beyond it was the Esquiline Gate through the Servian Wall, and beyond that the southern wall of the Hesperian embassy. The Praetorian in the wineshop had said the grounds were open; perhaps he could get into the building and find a beeper, a transceiver, something that the helicopter pilot could receive and recognize. Failing that, a weapon of some kind, or even a few coins. Aquilius had been carrying most of the money they had brought from Vallis Viridis; Pierce had only a handful of sestertii in a little pouch tucked under his belt.

  Despite the growing ache in his head, he considered possibilities: Aquilius might have caught up with the robbers, retrieved the shoulder bags, and could now be hunting for him. Or he had been killed by the robbers. Or he had given up and, empty-handed, was now searching for Pierce.

  The most consoling alternative was that Aquilius had retrieved Pierce’s bag, left the city, and turned on the beeper. If the helicopter from Sardinia picked him up and took him back uptime, Aquilius could make almost as useful a report as Pierce himself. Then the Agency would send troops through to the Praetorian camp, occupy the whole city, and wipe out the Church Militant. In the process they would pick him up and get him to Geneva.

  That seemed highly unlikely. He had better assume that Aquilius was dead, the shoulder bags lost forever, and start from there. If the robbers managed to blow themselves up with his explosives, that would be some consolation.

  Pierce turned south through the Macellum Liviae, ignoring the merchants selling grain, wine, and fly-swarming meat. At the Esquiline Gate the traffic was heavy; again he had to wait to get through. But no one was mugged, and the people around him seemed cheerful and relaxed. A few looked curiously at him, and he heard a couple of giggling women speculate on whether he was tall in all proportions.

  Once through the gate, he walked quickly along the south wall of the embassy. If the Praetorians had assaulted this wall, it showed no signs of it. But when he turned north at the corner, and found himself in the square facing the main gate, the violence of the attack was clear.

  Bullet holes pocked the plaster and bricks, and the heavy wooden doors had been torn out — probably by a battering ram, though the Militants could well have supplied their allies with a couple of plastic bombs. Blackened footprints on the flagstones showed where men had run through fresh blood; Pierce thought of the two men, Fred and Howie, who had escorted him inside.

  He joined the steady stream of people going through the shattered gate past a quartet of bored-looking Praetorians. Many of the sightseers wore their best togas, and a few were surrounded by retinues of clients and bodyguards. Scores had crowded around the fruit trees, confirming the rumor that the trees now bore heads. Pierce recognized several, including Robinetti’s and that of a young woman, a data analyst who’d supplied much of the information for Pierce’s Briefing.

  Between the fruit trees and the main building, a crew of carpenters was noisily hammering a ten-meter wooden frame: it would be a cross, once erected, and would doubtless be overlaid with fine wood or even slabs of marble. Until Martel found time to build a proper monument to his victory, Pierce thought, the cross would serve quite well.

  The embassy building itself was gutted. Maecenas’s old belvedere tower was scorched and bullet-scarred. The original part of the palace had evidently been hit by grenades or mortars. The beautiful mosaic floors had been blasted in a dozen places, and wall paintings were blackened by smoke and blood. Many of the windows had had little panes of translucent glass; all were shattered.

  Domitian’s statue in the peristyle garden had been toppled and broken up. The wing beyond the peristyle had been systematically destroyed, demolished by plastic explosives and then burned to black rubble. The Praetorians must have had skilled help in the job. Nothing could be salvaged from it; anyone who tried would be seen at once by the gawkers or the scattered Praetorian sentries. In any case, the Militants had probably scavenged everything of value from it before burning it down.

  Ah. Pierce almost swore out loud in anger at his own stupidity. The Militants would have beepers, transceivers, anything he liked; even the Praetorians had communications equipment. A ringmike or walkie-talkie wouldn’t have the range to reach a helicopter off Sardinia, but the Militants’ own equipment ought to be perfectly adequate for his purposes. And they would also have drugs like Pentasyn.

  He turned away from the ruins and walked slowly out of the gardens, past the dangling heads and the excited sightseers. The beginnings of a plan were shaping in his mind.

  *

  From the once-beautiful gardens of Maecenas, it was a short downhill walk along the Clivus Suburanus into the stinking slums of the Subura. Pierce felt oddly comfortable there: The sheer numbers of people were a protection. He might encounter more muggers and street toughs, but now he showed no outward signs of wealth; he might be some rich man’s German slave, on an errand after a recent beating by his master.

  It was slow going, though. Little of the pavement was clear for foot traffic. Lacking sidewalks in this neighborhood, people spilled into the street not only to walk but to sell their goods and their bodies. Boys with painted faces looked at him with distaste and turned to gossip with one another until a likelier man turned up. Barbers trimmed their customers’ hair and scraped their whiskers. A slave struggled through the crowds with a wicker basket full of live chickens on his head. Squads of bodyguards shoved through, clearing paths for their masters. A few idlers gaped uncomprehendingly at the printed posters the Militants had put up, but Pierce overheard no conversations about Martellus or the new ascendancy of the Christians. This was the Roman proletariat, too busy finding its next meal to worry about politics.

  He passed through street after street after street of diseased beggars, gaunt whores, ragged children with the potbellies of near-starvation. The insulae here were even more decrepit than most, though here and there some great family’s palace stood incongruously amid the neighbors’ tenement
s. Pierce reflected that Julius Caesar, who had owned hundreds of gladiators, had lived in the Subura just as many American gangsters had remained in their familiar slums even as they became millionaires.

  A funeral procession was leaving one of the richer houses, a yellow-tiled fortress. Among the line of mourners were men wearing clay masks: the death masks of the family’s ancestors. The dead person would be entombed in the family vault, probably in one of the catacombs or hypogea outside the city. Pierce smiled faintly to see many members of the procession carrying crude crosses; the family was almost surely not Christian, but was taking no chances.

  At last he was out of the Subura and passing the Flavian Amphitheater where Domitian had died just three days ago. The sooty statues of goddesses and nymphs in the niches of the Amphitheater’s wall gazed blandly out over the squalor of the Subura and the fifty-meter-tall Colossus. Across the wide street was a lower wall topped with iron spikes: The gladiators’ school. A cheer rose from beyond it: The school contained its own arena, where the fighters trained. Pierce wondered if Martel planned to continue gladiatorial fights, or to ban them as the Church on Earth had done in the fourth century.

  Well, with any luck he would never have the opportunity to rule on gladiatorial policy. Pierce walked round the Amphitheater to the south and climbed up the streets of the Palatine Hill toward the palace of Domitian.

  Vespasian and his older son, Titus, had lived relatively simply while building magnificent forums and temples for the public. Domitian had relapsed into Nero’s fondness for private luxury, and his palace reflected what could be done by a psychopath with delusions of divinity and unlimited resources.

  The plans of the palace, and a few recent photographs, had been included in Pierce’s Briefing. In the yellowing light of late afternoon, however, the palace seemed almost dreamlike: a man-made hill of gilded pillars, enormous tiled roofs, and marble walls. It had engulfed earlier palaces like that of Tiberius and Augustus, though it was far smaller than the Golden House which Nero had built, and which the Flavians had demolished to make room for their Amphitheater. No doubt intentionally, the architect Robirius had designed the palace so that all its north-facing windows and terraces overlooked the Amphitheater.

  Pierce walked steadily across a flagstoned terrace to the north wall of the palace and a narrow, heavily guarded gate. Six Praetorians, all with Uzis, watched him approach.

  “Greetings, brothers. My name is Alaricus. I am a German warrior. Tell me, if you will — among the followers of the emperor Martellus, is one a tall woman with yellow hair and blue eyes? And is her name Maria?”

  The squad leader looked uncertain. “I’ve seen such a woman — a giantess, near as tall as yourself. She dresses like a barbarian, in trousers. Speaks pretty fair Latin, better than most of the emperor’s people. What of it?”

  Pierce clasped his hands prayerfully under his chin. “I am commanded to serve her.”

  The squad leader grinned. “I wouldn’t mind serving her myself, for all that she’s a head taller than I. Well then, friend, and who commands you to this pleasant duty?” Pierce crossed himself. “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” A little awkwardly, the Praetorians repeated his gesture. “Far in the north I was given a vision,” Pierce went on. “I have come south in search of her whom I saw in that vision. Is she not within this palace?”

  “Well, I think so.”

  Pierce shouted “Alleluia!” and fell to his knees on the paving stones. “Here shall I wait until she condescends to favor me. Here begins my service to the emperor through his true servant Maria.”

  The Praetorians looked at him with a mixture of amusement, contempt, and anxiety. The squad leader shook his head.

  “You can’t stay here, barbarian. The emperor and his highest friends pass this way. Can’t have you blocking traffic. Get on with you.” He poked Pierce on the shoulder, not hard.

  Pierce snatched the squad leader’s hand in both of his and refused to let go. “Oh, friend and brother, I implore you! Only send a message to the lady Maria. Let her come to hear of my vision, and if she sends me away I shall go in all obedience. I ask nothing more.”

  Alarmed by the strength in Pierce’s grip, the squad leader tried to free himself, failed, and glanced sidelong at his men. He would risk their veiled contempt if he stood here much longer in this demented barbarian’s grip.

  “Enough! Priscanus, get inside and find the lady Maria. Tell her we beg her presence for a moment only. Now let go, friend.”

  “Christ Himself shower blessings on you!” Pierce shouted, releasing the man. He remained on his knees, ignoring the pain. The Praetorians turned away and talked quietly among themselves.

  The wait was a long one; sunset was red in the west before the soldier Priscanus returned. With him were two people, a man and a woman.

  Bingo, thought Pierce.

  The man was Willard Powell, who’d been one of Martel’s closest associates before the deportation. He was a compact man of medium height, wearing a Roman tunic and a holstered pistol. Pierce noticed Powell hadn’t shaved his sandy beard; he was very sensitive about his weak chin. His deep-set brown eyes studied Pierce with suspicion and little interest.

  Beside him was Maria Donovan, whose name Pierce had mentioned to Dennis Brewster. Martel had made her one of his translators, and Pierce wasn’t surprised to find her in the emperor’s palace. She was a tall blonde in her middle twenties. Her father had been one of Martel’s earliest martyrs, and she had grown up in the Church Militant. First as a mascot, then as a public symbol, she had enjoyed more freedom than most Militants. The Agency’s psychological profile on her indicated a much tougher person than she appeared, but with a childlike faith in Martel’s theology.

  She was the first Militant Pierce had seen who paid no attention to Roman dress. Instead of a gown, she wore khaki trousers, calf-high boots, and an olive-drab shirt open at the collar. On each sleeve, about where a sergeant’s chevrons would go, a cross was stitched in yellow thread: So she was a Crucifer, one of Martel’s goons, as well as a translator. Like her companion, she wore a pistol, a Ruger .357. It did not seem outsize for a woman nearly as tall as Pierce.

  He looked at her, smiled, and prostrated himself. “Praise Christ and His most noble servant the emperor Martellus! O lady, in the forests of the north I was granted a vision of your face. Angels commanded me to hasten south to this city, to serve and protect you. I now know they showed me a true vision, and I ask only to serve you.”

  Maria Donovan laughed — a musical, pleasant laugh. “Not so quickly, brother. Come, stand up. Tell me your name.”

  Pierce snapped to his feet. “1 am Alaricus son of Thorns, my lady — a Goth.”

  “You speak good Latin for a Goth newly come from the forests.”

  “My lady honors me. I have been journeying almost four years, three years in the empire. Only three days ago did I reach Rome.”

  She frowned. “You say you had a vision?”

  “Yes, my lady. It was just after my youngest brother was baptized — ”

  “Baptized? In the northern forests?”

  “All my tribe are baptized, my lady.” Pierce sounded surprised. “It is twenty years since the holy man came to bring us the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection.”

  Maria Donovan turned to Powell, and said in English: “A Christian Goth? Willard, can you believe it?” Her voice had an east Texas twang.

  “About time we found any kind of primitive Christian at all,” said Willard. “They sure lie low.”

  She turned back to Pierce. “And how am I involved in this vision, Alaricus?”

  “I was shown your face, my lady, and a voice spoke to me, saying, ‘Seek the Lady Maria in the great city of Rome, and serve Christ through her. For she shall have need of a warrior in her battles for Christ.’”

  “And you are a warrior?” She smiled, a little hesitantly.

  Pierce stiffened a little, jutting out his chin. “We Christians in the nort
h must be warriors, my lady.”

  “What are your weapons, Alaricus?”

  “The short sword, the ax, the spear, and my bare hands, my lady.”

  “A boxer?”

  “And wrestler.”

  “Show us how well you fight.” She glanced at the squad leader. “Give him your sword, and pick one of your men to test him a bit. Nothing too rough.”

  The squad leader bowed his head and then handed Pierce a short sword. It was heavy but well balanced, with a grip a little small for Pierce’s hand. One of the Praetorians, a rawboned man in his thirties with the look of a veteran, came to face him.

  Without warning, the Praetorian lunged, bringing the sword up in a graceful rise that could have put its point into Pierce’s throat. To Pierce the attack was lethargic and clumsy; he parried, then stepped forward and clapped the flat of his blade against the man’s neck. Edge on, the stroke would have severed the man’s jugular and vertebrae; instead, it knocked him sprawling. Pierce stepped back, wishing his head didn’t hurt so much.

  “Praise the Lord!” Willard exclaimed in English. “Maria, did you see that? The guy’s really fast.”

  Maria called the squad leader over and spoke quietly to him. Pierce had no trouble overhearing: She wanted the remaining members of the squad to rush him from all sides, using the flats of their blades. The first man to hit Pierce would win a gold aureus.

  The squad leader nodded, glanced at his men, and spun to face Pierce. The others fell into a pincer formation, closing in on his right and left.

  Pierce stepped to his left, closing with the man on the right tip of the pincer. A kick to the groin doubled the man up; Pierce brought the pommel of his sword down the soldier’s helmet with a clang, then shouldered him into the next man. As both went down, Pierce jumped past them to meet the squad leader. The two remaining soldiers were blocked by their leader for a few seconds. As the squad leader’s sword approached, Pierce batted it aside, gripped the man’s elbow, and flung him into the path of the remaining two. Three sharp slaps to face, neck, and armpit marked what would have been killing blows.