TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome Read online

  ‘Christians?’

  Paulus frowned. Eventually nodded. ‘Yes … yes, I believe they called themselves something like that.’ He resumed his story. ‘The Visitor said that they were here to guide us all … to … to steer us to a better way of life.’ The old man shook his head, frustrated with his foggy recall. ‘He used words that made little sense to us all. Words … I am trying to remember, but …’ Paulus looked down at the hands in his lap. ‘Strange words … like …’ He looked up at Maddy. ‘That word you spoke a minute ago?’

  ‘Which word?’

  ‘The name of the place you said you came from.’

  ‘America?’

  Paulus played with the word on his lips. Whispered it slowly to himself several times then finally nodded. ‘That is the word, I believe. The voice … he told us they had come to show us the Ameri-can-way.’

  Sal, listening without the benefit of buds, picked that phrase out of the exchange in Latin. ‘Did he just say the “American way”?’

  Maddy looked at Liam and Sal. ‘Some Americans came here? My God!’

  ‘Americans?’ Sal’s mouth hung open. ‘Shadd-yah! Remember that man? Cartwright?’

  Cartwright. Maddy remembered him all too well; the classic X-Files type: dark suit and a bad smoking habit. He’d turned up out of the blue, knocking on their roller-shutter door. He and his top-secret agency, an agency apparently so secret even presidents had no knowledge of it. An agency spawned into existence by the discovery of a mere fragment of flint. She shook her head. A mere ‘breadcrumb’ left in time by Liam … and it had brought men in suits and dark glasses to their door, filled the sky above them with circling helicopters.

  ‘It’s possible, Sal. Thing is, we’ve got no idea who else in the future has got their hands on a time machine. It’s –’

  ‘What are you two saying?’ asked Crassus.

  Maddy listened to the Latin in her ear. ‘I’m sorry. We were discussing what your friend just said. The Visitor’s message.’

  She turned to Paulus. ‘So, what happened next?’

  ‘Caligula descended into the arena. He approached them. We were all in fear of our lives. There was panic. But Caligula, I remember this so well … he was calm, almost as if he’d always expected something like this would happen. He spoke to them. Then he stepped aboard their giant chariot. The chariot ascended into the sky –’

  Crassus huffed. ‘There are so many different accounts. That a host of white horses suddenly appeared from beneath the chariot and carried it up. That the ghosts of all those who’d ever died in the arena emerged from the dirt and –’

  ‘I heard it was a flood of water sprites that carried it up,’ said Fronto. ‘Beautiful sea-maidens with long silver hair and the most perfect –’

  Cato rolled his eyes at the soldier’s vulgar fancy. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Anti-grav thrusters,’ rumbled Bob quietly.

  Maddy nodded. Clouds of dust and debris kicked up by some craft taking off. She smiled encouragingly at the old senator. ‘Please … carry on.’

  ‘The emperor was carried back to his palace on the Palatine,’ continued Paulus. ‘And the next day he announced in the forum that he was to become God. That the Visitors had come to tell him this and that he must now spend every moment of his time in preparation for that role. That one day he was going to ascend to Heaven and rule Rome … and the whole world from there.’

  ‘Caligula’s madness became worse. It had a purpose,’ said Cicero. ‘The purges. The mass crucifixions. His twisted new religion. From that day it all began.’

  ‘What about them Visitors, those chariots?’ asked Liam. ‘What happened to that lot?’

  ‘There are stories from some who say they saw them a few times after that,’ said Crassus. ‘The Visitors, that is. Caligula showing them some of the city.’

  ‘The chariots?’

  Crassus shrugged.

  ‘They were never seen again,’ said Paulus. ‘I have sometimes wondered whether I actually saw some sort of trick arranged by Caligula. A chariot lowered into the arena by some concealed device.’

  There was silence for a moment. The atrium of Crassus’s home echoed with the sound of his household slaves preparing food out in his courtyard.

  ‘But the Stone Men are very real,’ said Cato. ‘And dangerous. Caligula has made sure to demonstrate that very publicly. The question we have to ask is do you think your Stone Man could best Caligula’s guards?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Even to distract them for a moment,’ said Cato. ‘That’s all. A moment when I am close enough to him. Enough time to strike him down. That’s all I need.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ she replied. ‘But in exchange we need some help.’

  Crassus leaned forward. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Those chariots … we need to find them. Are they somewhere in Rome still?’

  Crassus shook his head. ‘Nothing from that day apart from the Stone Men has ever been seen again.’

  ‘But,’ cut in Cato, ‘there are places in the palace that Caligula will allow absolutely no one to go.’ The others looked at him. Maddy suspected that was information new to them. ‘He’s given very specific instructions to me on the deployment of the Palace Guard. There are places only he can go.’

  ‘Big enough to hide these chariots?’

  ‘The imperial compound is vast. But in the palace itself … yes. I’ve seen a reinforced doorway guarded by Stone Men. Perhaps in there you might find something.’

  Maddy stroked her chin thoughtfully for a moment. ‘All right, then. Perhaps we can help each other out.’

  Cato turned to look at Crassus and the others. Silent nods from them all.

  Sal tapped her arm gently. ‘Any chance you’re going to tell me what we’ve just agreed to?’

  CHAPTER 45

  AD 54, Rome

  The two senators left for their townhouses in the Greek district. Atellus returned to his legion stationed outside the city.

  Maddy and Liam sat with Cato in the shade of a portico watching Macro and Fronto sparring with Bob in the courtyard with wooden training swords. Crassus chortled and Sal hooted with delight at the centurion and ex-centurion’s failed attempts to score a touch on Bob’s torso.

  ‘Your Stone Man is so fast,’ said Cato.

  ‘Very,’ said Maddy.

  ‘He’s saved my life many times over,’ added Liam. ‘One-man army, he is.’

  ‘Tell me.’ Cato sat forward. ‘What language is that you use, when you speak quietly?’

  ‘You mean when we whisper to ourselves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She laughed. ‘You must think we’re totally mad, talking to ourselves.’

  Cato splayed his hands apologetically. ‘It’s a very odd thing you do.’

  Liam reached up to his ear. ‘Shall we show him?’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Might as well.’

  He pulled out his babel-bud and handed it to Cato. ‘You’d better explain how it works,’ he said to her.

  ‘This little device translates our language, which is called English, into Latin.’

  Cato turned the small flesh-coloured bud over in his fingers. ‘It actually speaks words to you?’

  ‘Yes. In our ear. It hears what we say quietly in English and gives us the correct Latin phrase to say.’

  He frowned as he looked at it. ‘Do you mean to say it is … this device can understand the meaning of what is said to it?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a thing called a computer in there. A bit like a mind, I suppose. An artificial one. It’s an engineered thing.’

  Cato’s eyes widened. ‘This province of yours with such advanced devices … how is it possible that no one has ever come across it before? How is it possible no Roman has ever heard of America before?’

  Cato passed the bud back to Liam and he carefully placed it back in his ear.

  ‘Because it’s too far away for anyone – even any Roman – to find.’

  L
iam’s bud was whispering again in his ear. ‘You telling him about time travel, Mads?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ she replied.

  Cato frowned. ‘What did you just say to each other?’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘I suspect you’re patronizing me,’ he said with a smile. ‘The simple-minded Roman soldier, eh?’

  She made an apologetic face. ‘Where we come from is very difficult to explain, Cato.’

  ‘Why not try?’

  She realized how easy and how stupidly incorrect it was to assume that a person from an earlier time was somehow less intelligent. Just because they might not understand the concept of something as commonplace as a cellular phone, or a computer, or a light switch, it didn’t make their minds any less agile.

  ‘We are from the future.’

  His eyes narrowed and he rubbed the dark hairs on his forearm as he digested that. ‘When you say “future” … are you talking about the passage of days?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Days yet to happen?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘You mean to say, then, you are from time … that is ahead of us?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ said Liam. ‘A long way ahead.’

  ‘See … in the future, Cato, mankind will discover how to travel backwards and forwards along time, just like travelling along a road.’

  ‘A road? A road through time?’

  ‘The place where we and them Visitors came from – America – doesn’t exist yet,’ said Liam. ‘Well, it does, but it just doesn’t have that name yet.’

  Cato stared at the sparring men as he attempted to absorb what they’d just told him. ‘This is an incredible idea,’ he whispered after a while. ‘You know, as a small boy I used to wonder what it would be like to witness the future. To see how things go. To imagine what I would be like as a man. Whether I would ever become a freedman.’ He looked up at them. ‘And you say it is possible to do this?’

  Both of them nodded.

  ‘So, how far along this “road of time” do you come from?’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, this is quite a hard thing for me to try and explain …’

  ‘I suspect you’re patronizing me again.’

  Both Maddy and Liam laughed at that. ‘All right,’ said Liam. ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you. This’ll really mess with your head, so it will.’ He grinned at Maddy impishly. ‘You gonna tell the poor fella, or shall I?’

  ‘About two thousand years,’ she said.

  Cato’s jaw hung slack. ‘Did you just say two thousand?’

  ‘Just under.’ She shrugged. ‘Give or take a few years. Depends on whether you count in Jesus-years or normal ones. AD, anno domini, or CE, common era.’

  ‘Jesus-years?’ He cocked his head.

  Maddy shook her head. ‘That’s a whole other story. The thing is, Cato, history has a way it’s meant to go. A way it’s supposed to go. And these Visitors from the future, they’ve sent events going off in a different direction. A wrong direction.’

  Maddy and Liam proceeded to explain to him the nature of time travel and alternate timelines; histories that should never be and how they caused things called ‘time waves’, reality shifts that erased everything in their path and left monstrous new realities in their wake. She was surprised at how well he grasped the notions, how intelligent his questions were. An agile mind just as keen to peer into the unknown as any of the great thinkers and philosophers hundreds of years down the line.

  By the time they’d finally finished explaining, both Macro and Fronto had had enough swordplay and were hunkered over, sweating in the midday sun, gasping for breath. Bob continued play-sparring with Sal.

  ‘So then,’ said Cato, ‘you are here to correct events?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you say this time we are in right now … this would be the rule of Claudius, not Caligula?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Claudius? That old fool?’ He looked surprised, but then shrugged as he gave it some thought. ‘Better a fool than a madman, I suppose.’

  ‘He does a pretty good job,’ said Liam. ‘I read it in a book. He conquers Britain.’

  ‘Britain?’ Cato laughed. ‘Who’d want to conquer that miserable wilderness?’

  They sat in silence for a while, watching the fighting, listening to the clack of wooden swords.

  Cato frowned. ‘But your plan to correct history … that would mean the end of all this, would it not?’ He gestured at Crassus’s courtyard. ‘And the end of all our lives?’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘The end of this version of your life. There’s another world very much like this one. Another version with you and Macro and Crassus –’

  ‘It’s a better version,’ added Liam. ‘Under Claudius your Roman Empire gets richer, gets bigger. Not like it is now.’

  Cato pondered that. As things stood, disaster hung like an approaching storm cloud. The empire was all but bankrupt. The city was on the very edge of starvation as the last of its stores dwindled. The regular arrival of food supplies from other provinces and trading partners was beginning to dry up as it became clear that Roman debts were going to remain unpaid. Even if they did manage to get rid of Caligula, an even greater danger loomed: the threat of civil war. There were three or four generals he could think of in charge of unpaid and disgruntled legions who’d advance on Rome to crown themselves emperor once news reached them that the madman was finally gone.

  And if that wasn’t enough, there were rival empires watching proceedings from the periphery of the Roman world like vultures. The Parthians to the east, for example. A civil war would surely be the final straw. Once Rome’s many legions had broken themselves fighting each other, barbarian hordes from all over would descend on them to pick the Roman carcass clean.

  If these strangers from another time were to be believed, that correcting history would return the fate of Rome to a more stable footing, how it had been when he’d been a young boy, then that was worth surrendering this life for, wasn’t it?

  ‘Another version of Rome would be worth dying for,’ he admitted.

  ‘Oh, but you don’t die,’ said Liam. ‘Not really. There’ll be another you … another Macro, another Crassus.’

  ‘Living the lives you should have lived,’ added Maddy.

  ‘And how do you intend to correct this history?’

  ‘We believe … we’re hoping really, that there may be technology – devices – left behind somewhere in Caligula’s palace by the Visitors that we might be able to use to get back to our time. From there we can correct this more easily.’

  The others looked like they were getting ready to come over and join them in the cool shade. ‘It might be better if we keep this notion of travelling time like a road to ourselves,’ said Cato.

  Maddy nodded as they stepped into the shade beneath the portico.

  ‘Does this brute of yours ever get tired?’ grunted Macro as he slumped on to a bench and reached for a cup of watered wine.

  Crassus took a seat beside Cato. ‘It is time, I think, that we discuss matters in detail.’ He reached for the jug, poured himself a cup of wine and lifted it. ‘Something our new friends should know. This Roman officer to my left … Tribune Quintus Licinius Cato.’ He was addressing Maddy and Liam in particular. ‘This man is the one who has put our gathering of conspirators together. He is the one who has risked everything by whispering in dark corners to find the few of us willing to commit to treason.’ He patted Cato on the shoulder affectionately. ‘I would give my arm to have a small fraction of this man’s courage.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ barked Macro, filling his cup again and raising it. ‘To Cato.’

  Cato picked up his cup. ‘To success.’ He turned to Liam and Maddy. ‘And to the return of better times, eh?’

  ‘Aye, I’ll drink to that,’ said Liam.

  CHAPTER 46

  AD 54, Imperial P
alace, Rome

  An eternity of darkness. In here. This space. This world of his measured in mere feet. If he flexed his legs, his toes, his arms, his hands, he could brush the edge of his minute universe. He could feel the surface of it, worn smooth now, having been touched so many times.

  But he didn’t touch the edges of his universe any more. Not intentionally. He preferred to imagine the walls weren’t there. He preferred to live within the endless corridors of his mind now. Dwelling on memories that were beginning to fade like old photographs pulled out into the daylight too often. He could wander through a few special childhood memories, could almost be there. Feel the sand beneath his bare feet, the warmth of the sun on his face. Smell his mother, hear his father and brother.

  Only when he heard the doors creak open, and the ghosts of real daylight stole through the slits between the oak planks of his universe, was he pulled away from his memory-world. Once every day – the grim return to reality as someone, presumably one of the slaves, brought a bowl of water and that bitter-tasting barley gruel. Pulled open the feeding slot to his small cubed universe and pushed it through for him.

  As the slot closed, the heavy doors outside creaked shut and his universe became a uniform, blank darkness once again; he would feel with his hands for his bowl of water and his bowl of gruel. If he could have talked … that once daily ritual might be his chance to communicate with someone, even if it was just to say a thank-you.

  But he couldn’t talk. He could grunt. He could whimper. He could howl. Oh yes … he could slobber and whine. But he couldn’t talk.

  He called the mask Mr Muzzy.

  His muzzle. The only other permanent occupant inside this wooden box.

  Me and Mr Muzzy.

  The iron brace around his jaw with a protuberance, a tube of iron, that kept his teeth prised apart, mouth open, and pressed his tongue back preventing him from forming anything that sounded remotely like words; that was Mr Muzzy.