Rogue Emperor

by Crawford Kilian

  The tunnels at last fell silent except for the scrabble of rats. Sabina pulled him to his feet and led him back out to the tunnel. No lights burned. The underworld of the Amphitheater seemed deserted, though in the distance Pierce could make out some kind of intermittent noise: gunfire. Sabina turned right, away from the arena. Slowly they groped their way to the outside.

  Night had fallen, and no lamps burned in the entrances. The plaza was dark, though Pierce could see people running across the pavement. Occasionally someone shouted, but the words were blurred.

  “Where shall we go?” Sabina asked.

  “Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Not back to Scaurus.”

  “No … to the Campus Martius.”

  The streets were silent and empty, with even the all-night popinae shuttered.

  “Do you know Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, the poet?”

  Sabina looked up at him. “Who?”

  “A silly man, but a friend of mine.”

  “No, I don’t know any poets.”

  “They have their uses.” Pierce hoped Juvenal was safe and drunk somewhere.

  They went by a roundabout route, avoiding the gunfire around the Palatine. Why would the Militants be shooting? Or were the Praetorians and Crucifers debating who should be the successor to Martellus?

  At the door of the baths of Tertius, Pierce pounded slowly. He seemed to have gone through so many gates, so many doorways, looking for shelter, for safety for himself and his people. And on the other side were only danger and blood …

  The gate swung open. Tertius himself stood there, with three frightened slaves carrying cudgels. The balneator held up a lamp and recognized Pierce.

  “Come in.”

  Pierce staggered and almost fell as he crossed the threshold, but Sabina and Tertius caught him.

  By lamplight they bathed him, oiled him, rubbed him down with strigils. They put ointments on his cuts and sores, and bandaged them in gauze. Then Tertius guided him to a small room upstairs, near the library, and left him and Sabina to rest. He lay in her arms, waking often from grim dreams into the safety of her embrace.

  Early the next morning he woke for good, with sun streaming through a window and Sabina snoring beside him. He lay for a long time without moving, luxuriating in the heat of her body, the softness of her breasts, the tickle of her pubic hair. Outside, in the courtyard of the baths, the slaves were singing as they swept.

  Another sound intruded, faint but growing louder. Pierce heard it before the slaves did, but soon they had fallen silent to listen for it also: a low, wavering drone. He eased himself out of Sabina’s arms, got up, and walked naked to the room’s single little window.

  It faced south over the roof of the baths and across the city. The sun was just up, gilding every eastern wall and roof. Off to the west, low in the sky but appearing to climb as they grew nearer, a cluster of glittering dots approached Rome. They were in V formation: eight huge Sikorsky B-450 troop carriers, flanked by four Bell A-90 gunships. All were painted Agency blue and white.

  “What is it?” Sabina asked sleepily from the bed.

  “Our friends have Finally arrived. Come and look.”

  She stood naked beside him, on tiptoe so she could see. “Iuppiter optimus! What are those?”

  “Flying machines — like ships that sail through the air, full of soldiers.”

  They were circling the center of Rome now, the troop carriers staying well out while the gunships swooped in on the Palatine Hill and Domitian’s palace. Smoke shot up, and seconds later they heard the thump of explosives.

  “They’ll wreck the palace,” Pierce sighed. “But I don’t really mind, as long as they wreck the Praetorians’ camp as well.”

  “And Scaurus’s school.”

  “Yes; they’ll get around to Scaurus eventually.”

  The detonations were coming faster now, a stuttering rumble; black smoke rose in a straight column into the still June morning. The slaves in the courtyard were chattering anxiously to one another. Pierce saw the Sikorskys curve in, losing altitude as they converged on the palace. He supposed they knew their targets from interrogation of the Militants’ knotholers; what he himself had learned was irrelevant.

  “Come back to bed,” said Pierce.

  *

  The battle lasted all morning, but by noon the center of Rome was silent under a pall of smoke. Pierce and Sabina breakfasted late with Tertius, who had given them new clothes: a flne linen tunic and wool toga for Pierce, an ankle-length dress for Sabina that she was delighted to try on.

  “Surely, though, it’s too early to venture out,” Tertius said. “These terrible portents — “

  “All will be well,” Pierce told him. “Tell Ioannes Marcus that his children and grandchildren will be avenged.”

  “That will not console him. He is not a vengeful man.”

  Pierce nodded and looked away, embarrassed. These early Christians reminded him of the Navajo back home in New Mexico: people for whom vengeance, the premise of his soul, was a meaningless idea.

  “We will see you soon, Tertius. Again, our thanks for your shelter.”

  “We never know when we might shelter an angel unaware. Until we meet again, Alaricus.”

  Pierce and Sabina walked through almost-deserted streets, back into the center of Rome. The gunships, their work done, circled overhead not far above the rooftops; Pierce saw their pilots, in white helmets and sunglasses, gawking at the sights of Ahanian Rome.

  “Are we going to meet your friends?” Sabina asked.

  “Eventually. First I have to find another friend.”

  They reached the insula of Verrus and climbed the dark stairs to the schoolmaster’s little cubicle. His wife, Antonia, answered their calls. Her eyes were red and wild.

  “They went to the Amphitheater together, and they haven’t returned. Not a word, and the world ending all around us! Curse the day my poor husband ever gave you shelter, you and that foolish boy.”

  Pierce’s face darkened. He took Sabina’s hand and pulled her away, while Antonia shrieked and wept and half-naked children stood on the walkway and gaped at her.

  *

  Up on the Palatine, the palace was burning. Agency troops and urban cohorts seemed to be cooperating in putting the fires out, but Pierce thought not much of the palace was likely to survive. The Amphitheater plaza was sweltering in the midaftemoon heat. Agency troops in camouflage fatigues — mostly Cubans, with a platoon of Dutch — were patrolling the area, waving off sightseers who had ventured too near. Pierce and Sabina walked toward a squad of Cubans who were enjoying the shade at the foot of the Colossus. Their sergeant, a big Black man, approached menacingly.

  “Buenas tardes, sargento. Me llamo Geraldo Pierce; soy agente de la Agenda del Desarollo Intertemporal. Bienvenido a Roma.’”

  “What you doing here, man?” the sergeant asked in good English. Pierce politely switched languages.

  “Looking for a colleague of mine. He disappeared when Martel was assassinated yesterday; I think he might be in the Amphitheater.”

  “In there? Nobody in there but some prisoners and corpses.”

  “We just need a few minutes to check.”

  “Sure, man.”

  Sabina was impressed as they walked through the emperor’s gate and out onto the blasted terrace. Empty, the Amphitheater seemed even larger. The marble railing and floor of the pulvinar were stained black with soot and blood. In the arena below, a few hundred people sat or stood in the blazing sun: members of the Church Militant, and perhaps some Praetorians. A platoon of Gurkhas stood guard in the lowest row of seats.

  Further up in the stands, crows flapped and cawed as they pecked at the corpses still unclaimed. Pierce led Sabina halfway up and then turned right, toward the east. The Militants had sprayed this whole section with gunfire, and almost twenty bodies lay sprawled across the seats. Crows squawked and flew off as Pierce and Sabina came near.

  Neither Aquilius nor Verrus was am
ong the bodies. Relieved, Pierce led Sabina out the nearest gate and back into the plaza. The Cubans were still there, taking pictures of each other with the Colossus in the background.

  “I need to talk with the commanding officer,” Pierce told the sergeant.

  “He’s got his headquarters up at the Forum. You know where that is?”

  A command post had been set up in a colonnade on the edge of the Forum; a Cuban named Robles was in charge. He welcomed Pierce with cautious courtesy, unsure what to make of a gaunt, bandaged man in a toga who spoke flawless Spanish.

  Fierce told him only that he had been in Rome at the time of Domitian’s assassination and had done what he could to learn who was behind it. He was now looking for a number of Romans who had helped him.

  “Their names don’t mean anything to me, Mr. Pierce, except for Plinius. We got him out of the palace and sent him home. The Agency said to make sure he was safe. But we’ll look for your friends. Ah, can I offer you a drink, a meal?”

  “Later, thank you, commandante.”

  Less than an hour later they were knocking at the door of Plinius’s house on the Esquiline, while dogs barked frantically inside. A porter peeked through.

  “The consul’s not receiving clients today. Go away.”

  Pierce recognized the porter’s voice from the night he had come with Juvenal. “I’m Alaricus, a close friend of Plinius Caecilius, and the consul wants to see me very much. I’m the man who brought him back from Laurentum.”

  The door swung open. “Enter, master. We will tell the consul you are here.”

  They waited in the atrium while Sabina stared, awestruck, at the size and magnificence of the house. Before long a slave hurried in and invited them to the peristyle garden.

  It reminded Pierce of the garden in the Praetorians’ observation house, across the square from the Hesperian embassy. But this garden had been lovingly maintained, with trimmed hedges, immaculate flower beds, and fountains filling the air with light and music.

  “Alaricus himself!” Plinius rose from a bench, his arms spread wide in a parody of an orator’s gesture. “Risen from the dead, it would seem.”

  Two other people, who had been concealed by a hedge, stood up: Verrus and Aquilius. Pierce burst into delighted laughter and strode forward to embrace them both.

  “And this is the girl who brought you the T-60,” Aquilius said. “Robbing me of my chance to win fame as a tyrannicide. I owe you my thanks; they would have killed us in another instant.”

  Sabina blushed, a gladiatrix turned into a shy girl. Plinius drew her to a bench and called for wine.

  “We have much to tell one another,” he said. “Come and sit, Alaricus, or whatever your name is. ‘Pirrus,’ Aquilius calls you. I am showing you poor hospitality.” They sat in the fragrant garden, shaded by a fig tree, while Aquilius told Pierce what had happened: how he had caught up with one of the raptores, retrieved his own bag, and then fruitlessly continued the chase to get Pierce’s. He had returned to the Viminal Gate, found no trace of Pierce, and like him had wandered the nearby streets. Finally he had returned to Verrus’s flat.

  “But he said he hadn’t seen you.” Pierce was annoyed with himself: He was proud of his ability to detect lies, and the schoolmaster had completely deceived him.

  Verrus looked amused. “Persons in my circumstances, sir, become adept at dissimulation.”

  Plinius chuckled. “Yes, it’s hard to be a client, always agreeing with thick-witted patrons — eh, Verrus?”

  “Not in the case of your clients, I assure you, my lord.”

  “I decided you had probably gone to spy on the Praetorians or the Militants,” Aquilius went on. “Then I saw you outside the Praetorian camp, with the Militant woman, and thought that perhaps you had changed sides. I apologize for my lack of faith, Mr. Pierce. I know your culture chiefly through its historians. Changing sides is very common among people in your profession.”

  Pierce smiled, though his head hurt. He wished he had asked Robles for some Pentasyn.

  “Then I saw you again at the Amphitheater, when you saved Martel’s life. I urged Verrus that if you came looking for me, he was to tell you nothing. After that I kept close to the palace, waiting to see if I could kill Martel.”

  “But you also came to see me,” Plinius said to Aquilius. The consul seemed to relish Pierce’s look of surprise. “He had the same purpose that you did, Alaricus — excuse me, Pirrus. And he seemed very relieved to learn that you had already advised me to reject Martel and leave Rome. That suggested you were still loyal to your own people. I confess, I would not have followed your advice unless Aquilius had appeared soon after. You were an unknown barbarian, but Aquilius — well, I served under his father.”

  “You never thought of going to find your father?” Pierce asked.

  “I thought of it, yes. But then I decided I could protect him better here, by killing Martel.” He looked sober. “If I had known how close Trajan already was, I would have gone north after all, to warn him.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, boy,” Plinius said. “You can’t change the past; what’s done is done. In any case, Trajan is still alive. My servants tell me his legions are up the coast, near Centumcellae. No doubt he’ll be welcome in Rome.”

  “More than welcome,” Pierce agreed. The Agency would be glad to make Trajan emperor — though whether Trajan himself would enjoy being a puppet remained to be seen.”

  “I have to tell you, Mr. Pierce, that I won’t be going back uptime,” Aquilius said in English.

  “Why not?”

  “Rome needs me more than the Agency does. We can’t be protected by lies about Hesperians anymore. We will have to learn how to live with you without being destroyed.”

  Pierce nodded, slumping a little. Aquilius, Sabina, Verrus, Plinius: each of them beautiful, complicated people trying to live difficult lives. And now he had made their lives still more difficult. The Militants and their rogue emperor had been only a nuisance, a minor hitch in the great plan to save the chronoplanes from Doomsday. Emperors and peasants. Neanderthals and physicists, all were servants of the plan whether they liked it or not. As was he himself. He protected his people, even if it meant he must sometimes kill them.

  One of the gunships rumbled past overhead. The Romans looked up — Verrus with awe, Sabina with alarm, Plinius with curiosity, Aquilius with calm resolve. They were his people, Pierce thought, and he loved them but he could not stay with them. Soon he would go back through the I-Screen, to the deBriefing that would restore his senses to tolerable dullness. He would confront Wigner at some point and demand to know why the counterattack had been so delayed. Wigner would give him some nonsense about logistics, priorities, political dilemmas.

  It hardly mattered; after his deBriefing, they would put in some more blocks so that he wouldn’t be angry about it — about the death of the Jewish girl, about the grief of Saint Mark, about the horror that the twenty-first century had visited on Ahanian Rome.

  Sitting in the peristyle of the consul Plinius, Pierce rubbed his face and then touched Sabina’s hand. She looked at him, her dark eyes full of trust. Eros the gladiator had been a lucky man until he’d let his guard down. Pierce would miss her, until they blocked that, too.

  For a while, he would even miss Maria.

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  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

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  Nine

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  Twenty-three:

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