‘He will be quite safe as long as he stays in the palace,’ Cato assured them. He nodded at Fronto. ‘Won’t he?’
‘Yes, sir. Perfectly safe, sir.’
Just then they heard a raised voice booming out across the flame-lit palace gardens. ‘What the hell is going on here?!’
The officers all turned to see their praefectus, Quintus, striding towards them. He easily identified Cato’s tall outline among the knot of men. ‘Tribune! Who in the name of Jupiter took my authority and ordered the Guard to –’
‘The emperor himself, sir!’
‘What?’ Quintus stopped in his tracks. ‘Caligula? But … only I have the authority … to …’
‘Quintus!’ Caligula’s voice cut across the darkness. He emerged into the night, flanked by two of his Stone Men. The prefect’s face paled. Nobody but a stupid fool bellowed the emperor’s nickname across the palace grounds.
‘Caesar, I …’
Caligula waved at him to be silent. ‘I exercised my prerogative as emperor to mobilize them, since you were nowhere to be found!’
‘But, sire.’ Quintus swallowed nervously. ‘There … there is a protocol that should –’
‘More precisely, my prerogative as God-in-waiting,’ added Caligula. He smiled. ‘Say another word, Quintus, and I’ll have your tongue removed from your mouth.’
His cool glare left Quintus staring down at the ground like a chastened schoolboy.
‘Now then, where’s that Tribune Cato? Ahhh, there you are!’
‘Caesar?’
‘I have decided that I shall in fact be leading the Guard.’
‘What?!’ He almost forgot himself. ‘What’s that, sire?’
‘Yes, I think it’s fitting that I come along. The men should be led by me and, of course, my Stone Men. It will truly inspire them.’
Cato glanced quickly across heads at the only other conspirator present: Fronto. ‘But, sire, it would be much wiser for you to stay in the palace. The people need to see you right here in Rome. They need to see that Lepidus’s … foolishness … is nothing that you’re particularly worried about!’
‘Oh, I’m not worried.’ Caligula chuckled happily. ‘In fact, I’m actually looking forward to having a splendid big battle! It’s been too long.’ He sniffed the evening air as if there was a faint scent that only he could detect. ‘One last battle before I ascend to the heavens. How marvellous!’
He turned to one of his Stone Men standing behind him, holding his armour. ‘And I really wouldn’t want to miss seeing that fat, treacherous fool Lepidus grovelling at my feet.’
Cato struggled to keep his voice even. ‘Sire! Please … it will be dangerous –’
‘Dangerous! Oh, hardly!’ said Caligula, lifting his arms up as one of the Stone Men helped him into his bronze cuirass. ‘This is what the people need to see … what they need to realize; that I’m not just a god, but also a warrior, a great general.’
Cato clenched his teeth with frustration. The whole plan, for what it was, had relied on the certainty that Caligula would choose to remain in the comfort and apparent safety of his palace.
‘Tribune,’ said the emperor, ‘you just make sure everyone behaves themselves while I’m away. I really don’t want to come back to a messy city.’ Caligula let the Stone Man finish tightening the straps at his side then turned to the prefect. ‘Come along, Quintus! Don’t stand around like an old woman! You better go and get your armour on too. We shall be moving out from the Castra Praetoria at first light.’
He turned to Cato and winked at him. ‘I shall leave you three of my bodyguards to help guard the palace. I’m trusting you with my home, Tribune. Do try and keep it nice and tidy.’ He turned back to Quintus and slapped his shoulder impatiently. ‘Off you go, man!’
Cato watched Quintus turn and leave, and Caligula leading his bodyguards towards the imperial stables. He watched until the night swallowed them up then turned to his assembled officers.
‘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 on
ly 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?’
Like Rome? She nodded. Rome fell eventually, didn’t it? Crashed and burned, overrun by Vandals and left as nothing more than smouldering ruins. Maybe he was right. Maybe the far future and Rome had a lot in common.
‘Yes, quite a bit like Rome.’
Just then she heard Liam’s raised voice across the hubbub in the courtyard. She couldn’t make out what he’d said, but by the shrill tone of his voice it didn’t sound like good news.
Maddy, who’d been talking with Bob, called out. ‘Liam? What’s up?’
‘We got company!’
Macro’s voice boomed even louder, a parade-ground bark that bounced off all four towering sides of the courtyard and turned every head in the middle. The babel-bud in Sal’s ear calmly translated his raucous cry into the relaxed, detached and emotionless voice of an elevator announcing a floor.
CHAPTER 58
AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome
The palace was a quiet place normally. Caligula’s notorious orgies, his peculiar excesses tittle-tattled about by Roman tongues all over the empire, were a feature of his younger years. Some of the older veterans in the Guard had shared with Cato tales of the emperor’s extravagant behaviour after he’d first come to power. But they’d all agree that the Day of the Visitors was the day Caligula left that all behind him.
Since then the emperor’s halls had become a place where conversations were spoken gently, and the guards that patrolled anywhere near where they thought the emperor might be, stepped lightly and muffled as best they could the clank and clatter of their equipment.
The palace was a quiet place normally, Cato noted, but today it was as silent as a tomb. The palace personnel, slaves and freedmen were confined to quarters for their own safety. The only people within the imperial compound were Cato, Centurion Fronto and his century … and the three Stone Men Caligula had chosen to leave behind.
And where exactly have they got to? He didn’t like the idea of not knowing where those things were quietly lurking.
Cato did his best to look like an officer with duty on his mind, scouring the hushed, marble-floored hallways and private courtyards for any signs of intruders or looters. Out in the palace’s herb garden he squatted down over a sewer grating and checked the grating itself was secure. Not that he particularly cared. But appearances were everything.
His mind was elsewhere.
A messenger from Prefect Quintus had arrived only several hours after the Guard had set off in a long column of purple cloaks. His message was that cavalry squadrons scouting ahead of the column had already clashed in several light skirmishes with scouts from the Tenth and Eleventh Legions. And that they’d caught a brief glimpse of Lepidus’s column on the horizon. It seemed Atellus had successfully goaded the general into making his move.
Both forces would probably draw within a couple of miles of each other by noon, and then spend the remains of the day building temporary marching camps. Their men suitably rested overnight, the fighting would happen tomorrow.
What concerned Cato was the possibility of a parlay between Caligula and Lepidus. Perhaps the general might be able to convince the emperor that he’d been set up by Crassus and his fellow conspirators. How long into that conversation before Cato’s name cropped up? And how long after that before a messenger and an escort of Praetorian cavalry arrived at the palace with orders for his arrest?
He could have lunged for Caligula. He should have tried while the emperor was distracted watching Crassus dying. He’d had a ghost of a chance then, hadn’t he?
His mind turned to those young strangers: the two girls, the young man and their giant. Perhaps the only chance they had now was to get that creature Bob – a curious name – into the imperial grounds while it was mostly deserted. Then, on Caligula’s return, he might somehow manage to pick the right moment, emerge and fight his way through to the emperor.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but right now it seemed to be all Cato had left, o
ther than wait for that inevitable messenger and arrest order to eventually arrive.
He returned to the main atrium and headed west, down along the main approach hallway to the front entrance of the palace. Fronto and several sections of his men were stationed there. Cato needed to speak to him. Halfway down the hall as he paced quickly, filling the echoing hallway with the noise of his own heavy footsteps, he stopped and looked at the drape to his left.
The temple was beyond that.
He took several steps towards it.
The temple that only Caligula entered. He wondered if the girl, Maddy, was right, whether hidden inside the room were those mysterious chariots, perhaps even the remains of the Visitors. He reached for the drape and pulled it slowly to one side.
‘You do not have authority to be here.’
Cato jerked at the harsh voice. So this was where all three of them had been lurking.
‘Please leave immediately,’ said another, taking a threatening step towards him and reaching for the pommel of a sword strapped to its side.
CHAPTER 59
AD 54, Subura District, Rome
‘Jay-zus! Get off, will ya!’ yelled Liam as he swung the club down on to the bulging knuckles of a pair of hands grasping the top of the barricade. The club – the leg of a wooden stool with several lumber nails banged through it – crunched down heavily. Even through the din of the baying, jeering crowd that had amassed out in the street, he heard bones crack like eggshells.
There was another pair of hands in the same spot a moment later, the gathered mob working together as one, rocking the heavy cart forward and backward to make it topple over. Bob was doing his best to use his bulk to hold it in place, to steady it. But that wasn’t working how they’d hoped. The wooden spars of the cart were stressing and creaking and loosening. The mob out there might not be able to push it over with Bob holding on to it, but that didn’t matter; the thing was likely to rattle to pieces as soon as fall over.