‘All right, then, gentlemen, you all have your orders! Dismissed!’
The officers saluted and then turned to gather their men. Fronto dismissed his own optio to go and organize the first century. Both men stood silently until they were entirely alone and out of earshot.
Cato cursed.
‘Our plan is already broken so it seems,’ said Fronto.
Cato nodded. The plan had rested on an assumption that Caligula would remain, and hopefully send out most of his Stone Men along with the Guard. Now he’d chosen to go, it was a battle that would probably go Caligula’s way and embolden the madman even more.
‘Unless Lepidus manages to be victorious. Do you think that likely?’
Cato shook his head. The Praetorians with those Stone Men in the vanguard were probably more than a match for Lepidus’s men. ‘All we have managed to achieve with this, Fronto, is to organize a few days’ worth of blood sport for Caligula. That’s all.’
He wondered whether there had been a moment during the last few hours when he could have reached for his sword and dealt the death blow. Certainly he would have been dead within seconds of the emperor. The Stone Men were quick and lethal. Quite probably it would have resulted in an unsuccessful lunge for Caligula, and him being wrestled to the floor and executed then and there.
Truth was, on his return Caligula was probably going to find out one way or another that Crassus had met with fellow conspirators. Cicero and Paulus were two men the emperor would probably have at the top of his list of people he’d like to have a little chat with, for sure. And how long before either of those old men let slip his name?
‘If he wins, Fronto… if he’s victorious and returns, then I shall make a try for him.’ He looked at his First Centurion. ‘Our names will come up soon enough once he gets back.’
‘We will be dead men, then,’ said Fronto.
‘Indeed.’
CHAPTER 57
AD 54, Subura District, Rome
‘I’ve never seen the streets so quiet,’ said Macro.
Liam nodded as he scanned the empty avenue over the top of their barricade. Not entirely empty, though. Half a dozen bodies littered the cobblestone road. There had been fights all through the night, rival gangs settling old scores, people looting the small businesses that operated from alcoves beneath the apartment building opposite them. And something that had put the fear of God into the stocky old ex-centurion… a fire. Someone had set alight one of the small alcoves, a place selling bolts of linen and silk.
Macro had leaped over the top of their barricade, charged out across the avenue, roughly pushing his way through the mob of brawling young men to stamp the flames out before they got a firm hold of the place. He’d made his way back five minutes later, stinking of smoke, sweating profusely and muttering Latin obscenities to himself.
‘If I’d known how flammable these shoddily-made buildings are… I’d have invested in a vineyard instead.’
It was mid-morning now, the sun spilling down from a smoke-smudged sky on to the cobbles.
‘I suppose none of them food traders will come in today?’ said Liam.
‘No. Any merchant with an ounce of sense will steer clear of Rome until the Praetorians return and restore some order. People are going to be hungry this morning.’
Liam looked back down the rat run into their courtyard. There was food there. Several sacks of grain bought in at an extortionate price yesterday afternoon, a dozen or so loose chickens and, of course, their two ponies. Liam guessed Macro had about a hundred tenants in his apartment block, a hundred mouths to feed for however many days this crisis was due to last.
‘And they all know we’ve got food in here.’ Macro nodded at faces peering at them from the three storeys of small shuttered windows and balconies opposite. ‘Word’ll spread quickly enough. We’ll be fighting to hold on to it before long.’
Sal worked with the young man, a blond-haired slave from Gaul. She held the wooden stake steady as he sharpened the end into a spike. She guessed he was only fifteen, but it was hard to tell. His arms were all sinew and muscle, his face taut and lean. Not a square inch of flesh on him without a purpose. So unlike the puffy-faced friends she knew back in 2026.
‘Steady, please,’ he said, smiling at her fleetingly.
The bud translated that for her. ‘Sorry.’
He worked the blade of the knife honing the end of the stake to a sharp tip then took it from Sal’s grip and blackened and hardened it in the flames of a brazier.
‘People say you and friends comes from far away,’ said the boy.
Sal nodded. ‘Very far.’
He glanced at her again. ‘Someone whisper me… same place as the Visitors?’
She shrugged. ‘Not really.’
To say ‘yes’ would have invited a barrage of questions she wasn’t sure how she’d answer.
He looked at the stud in her nose. ‘Is this mark of slave?’
She lifted her hand and felt it self-consciously. ‘This? No… it’s just… decoration, I suppose. To make me look good.’
The lad picked up another stake and offered her one end to hold. ‘You look… different.’
‘Different?’ She looked down at herself. Her dark hoody, black drainpipe jeans and platform ‘docker’ boots were stored away in their room. She was wearing a sleeveless, burgundy-coloured tunic, hanging down to her shins, belted at the waist with a strip of leather, and sandals. No different from any of the other girls and women in the courtyard.
The young lad touched his own mop of curly hair. ‘Hair like… short like boy.’
She made a face. It wasn’t. If anything, it was too long. Her fringe seemed to hang in her eyes all the time. It had been far too long since she’d had it cut. But compared to every other girl or woman in this time, long hair pulled back and tied in braids that hung down to the small of their backs, yes… hers probably did look boyishly short.
‘I like it like this,’ she replied. ‘It’s the fashion where we come from.’
He cocked his head. ‘They says you home is call…’ He frowned with concentration as he tried to get the pronunciation right. ‘… A-me-ri-ca?’
America. Home? She smiled a little sadly. Not really.
‘I’m from a place called India,’ she replied. ‘Mumbai.’
‘ Marm… bye? ’
‘Nearly. Mumbai. ’
‘Is this… same place as… you friends?’
How was she going to explain that? No. It wasn’t. But then, she reminded herself, keep it simple.
‘Yes, sort of. Quite close.’
He stopped whittling the stake for a moment. ‘What is Mumbai like?’
She looked up at him, then at the courtyard, now filled with the apartment block’s tenants working together on make-do weapons and barricades. She looked up at lines of laundry strung across the skylight above them, stretched from balcony to opposite balcony. There were parts of Mumbai that looked like this still, shanty towns of corrugated iron and breeze blocks stacked precariously high and ludicrously close. Tens of thousands of impoverished migrants from the now submerged lowlands of Bangladesh living on top of each other. Each towering shanty-block sharing several dozen overloaded electrical feeds, a handful of water taps and communal toilets that channelled untreated human waste down on to the mucky streets below.
Sal sighed. She realized she came from a time almost exactly two thousand years after this particular here-and-now, and yet things back then, back home, had been getting so bad, so overcrowded, resources so scarce, food and sanitation so utterly shadd-yah poor… that this downmarket district of Ancient Rome looked almost like a step forward in time.
Almost.
‘It’s not so good,’ she replied. ‘I think we might have ruined the place we came from.’
‘What you mean?’
How to explain it all? ‘Too many people,’ she replied eventually. ‘Too many people wanting too many things… I think.’
He nodded as if he understood that. ‘Is like Rome, huh?’