No one paid us any attention. Everyone was too tired. Of all the inhabitants of Caesarea, we had been the most active, averaging only a few hours of sleep a night, if that. We were all doing our best to cope with the stress in one way or another.
Madrina and Bordeaux sat at our small dinner table, one of the few pieces of furniture we managed to salvage. They were eating the very last of our MREs, ironically, one of the dreaded meat patty variety. At the far end of the room, Vincent and Titus chatted together quietly.
Their relationship constantly surprised me. While I’d known Vincent for going on five years now, I’d really spent only most of the first one with him. We’d grown rather close, I thought, despite his secrecy about the orb and what it could do. He’d become more than a simple friend, comrade and fellow scholar of ancient history, but the closest thing to a father I’d ever had. When I watched him interact with Titus, I tended to forget the fact that they’d known each other far longer than I’d known either of them.
Who was I fooling? I was jealous of the kid.
The relationship I’d had with my father had been nonexistent at best. After high school, even before mom died, the only times I’d ever see him was on holidays and the only reason I afforded him even that luxury was to appease her wishes. If not for her, I never would have seen him. The only positive time the two of us had spent together was when I was seven years old and he taught me how to play baseball. In fact, the only happy memory I had at all was of us playing catch in the front yard. Too bad even that ended badly on the day he decided to coach my little league team when I was nine. It had been the beginning of the end for father and son, and his overbearing and authoritative nature had driven a wedge between us that would never mend.
Finally, I turned to Helena, who rested in the nook of my arm, with her head turned to our right, her eyes locked on something in that part of the room. I tracked her gaze and saw nothing of interest. I squinted at the location, trying to discern something escaping me but found nothing, just a dank corner of the room where we’d piled our remaining cargo containers.
I glanced back down at Helena. If she’d noticed I was paying her any attention at all, she certainly wasn’t letting on that she was; odd behavior for the usually hyper-sensitive Helena. I reached out gently and gripped her chin, turning her head so that she was looking at me. Her eyes still seemed vacant, but a small smile tugged at her lips.
“Everything all right, Helena?” I asked.
She didn’t reply immediately, her eyes now darting back and forth rapidly as she examined my own. The smile at her lips grew broader and she leaned up to kiss me.
When she pulled away she said, “everything’s fine, Jacob. Just fine.”
I narrowed my eyes, her behavior suddenly odd. “Something you want to talk about?”
She smiled at me mischievously and closed her eyes. I waited for her to elaborate, but she simply rested her head against my chest and breathed deeply. Knowing her she’d be asleep in seconds.
Puzzled, I let her rest and waited for everyone to finish what they were doing. We weren’t in a rush at this point. The Romans were quiet and we could use a break. We could always use a break, it seemed. There was no sense going off halfcocked because we didn’t take a moment to catch our collective breaths.
Fifteen minutes later, the four musketeers ended their little chat and gathered up the others. They started maneuvering chairs in my direction so I shook Helena to wake her up. I rolled my eyes when she stayed stubbornly asleep, mumbling indecipherably and biting my t-shirt in response. Switching tact, I tilted her head up, still asleep, and laid a kiss on her. She didn’t react immediately, but while her eyes remained closed, I knew she was awake when she started to kiss me back.
She pulled away, her lips pursed, her eyes still closed.
“That was nice,” she said quietly, biting her lower lip.
“Don’t get a chance to do that too often these days, do we?”
Sadly, it was true. Signs of affection were hard to come by — a few minutes ago notwithstanding. We’d only had the few opportunities Santino had mentioned earlier to find moments of intimacy since the siege had begun, and the only time before that had been way back when we were in Byzantium after I had bought her that necklace, which she was wearing even now. There just hadn’t been many opportunities with all the training, scouting and relocating, not to mention Santino’s constant presence.
She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped to look out towards the open room.
I tracked her look, noticing immediately how everyone else had seated themselves around us and were staring at us intently. I felt my cheeks burn, but Helena shrugged off the embarrassment with a heartwarming smile. She shifted in my arms so that we had some distance between us, but with my arm still around her. She noticed Santino’s look in particular.
“What?” She asked him.
He sniffled mockingly. “You two are just so darn cute.”
She laughed. “Get a life.”
She punctuated her insult by retrieving an apple from our shelf and hurling it at him, which he managed to snag out of the air easily. He let out an exaggerated sigh as he bit into the piece of fruit, perhaps thinking about how little action he’d gotten in the past few weeks. A besieged city was hardly the place to find a Friday night hookup.
“So,” I said. “Gaius. Marcus. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
They looked at each other.
“We are practically in the desert, Hunter,” Marcus pointed out.
“Never mind.” I took a deep breath and thought of home, and all the mindless ne’er-do-wells who at least understood a simple euphemism. I looked back up. “I meant what are you doing here?”
“As we were explaining to Santino and Wang,” Gaius said, “things have changed dramatically in Germany.”
“We finally have our supply trains established,” Marcus continued, “but the Germans are fighting harder than ever, and the empress has been too stubborn to reconsider her strategy.”
“Right,” Gaius annoyingly confirmed. Sometimes I wondered if these two had been separated at birth. “Making matters worse is this uprising in Judea.”
“Any information on how that’s going?” I asked. “We don’t get much news around here.”
Gaius sighed in discontent. “These Jews are running amok all over Judea and into Syria. After the supposed death of their king, cities everywhere rose up against Rome. Most uprisings have already been put down, except for two. Here and in Jerusalem, with a number of Jews moving towards Masada. Do we have you to thank for their success here?”
“More than you know,” I intoned.
“What do you mean?” Gaius asked.
So, I told them how we had instigated the rebellion and set off the chain reaction that pitted Roman against Jew. He didn’t seem impressed.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said, crossing his arms. “You people have always been very good at causing trouble.”
“We did it to draw Agrippina away from Germany, find the last orb, and find a way to get her to abdicate. Speaking of which, did she buy you’re explanation as to why all your comrades ended up dead?”
The two Romans glanced at each other.
“We believe so,” Marcus answered. “We are still alive.”
“That is true,” Gaius picked up, “but when we told her we had been following another lead, therefore avoiding certain death, I immediately felt she didn’t believe us.”
“Did you tell her about the orb?” I asked.
“We did,” Gaius responded. “She was not happy. Especially when we told her we suspected your involvement. No one saw her for two days, but as Marcus said, we are still alive, even though reassigned.”