Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 24

AD 54, Italy

Liam looked around as he finished dressing. Maddy had managed to find a perfectly discreet location for them. A small grove of olive trees nestled at the bottom of a narrow valley. A brook meandered through boulders and across a shallow bed of pebbles. A quite pleasant patch of wilderness.

They worked in silence burying their bags in the parched, ruddy, clay-like soil beneath one of the olive trees as the rhythmic trill of cicadas whistled at them from the dry grass all around.

Done, they worked their way up out of the valley, clambering up a slope of coarse grass and hawthorn bushes. Liam was mopping sweat from his face with the back of his hand by the time they reached the top and stood beside a dusty, hard-baked track winding down a slope.

Liam took in the broad, sedentary horizon. In the far distance a ribbon of peaks, the Apennine mountains; before him a patchwork of pastures and fields rolling over gently sloping hills and dotted here and there with pastel-coloured villas with clay-tile roofs that shimmered in the heat of the midday sun.

‘The city of Rome is seven miles east of our current position,’ said Bob. ‘I suggest we acquire transport and make our way there to gather intelligence.’

‘Transport?’ Liam looked around. ‘I think we’re the transport.’

Bob scanned the horizon.

‘We’re probably going to have to walk, so.’

‘Negative. This is a trade route into Rome. We will encounter transport.’ Bob narrowed his eyes and studied the dusty track carefully. ‘Look.’

Liam followed his gaze and this time saw a distant curl of dust kicked up from the track.

Bob flexed his fists and played out an unnervingly wide rictus of a smile on his lips. ‘Show time,’ he grunted merrily.

Five minutes later, they were in possession of their own horse-drawn cart laden with amphoras of wine and were leaving behind them, at the side of the track, a portly old Greek tradesman shouting a stream of unintelligible obscenities, shaking his fist furiously at them. The babel-bud in Liam’s ear calmly translated for him in soothing feminine tones.

‹ Your father is a dog with a hygiene problem. Your mother has low moral values…›

‘I’m sorry!’ Liam called out guiltily.

The bud whispered in his ear. ‹ Me paenitet.›

‘ Me… paenitet! ’ he called out.

Bob nodded approvingly as he cajoled the horses in front of them to break into a weary trot. ‘You are using the translator. Very good.’

‘Maybe we should leave him something to drink? You know, it’s hot and…’

‘As you wish.’ Bob reached a thick arm over the driver’s seat into the back of the cart and lifted up a large clay amphora stoppered with a plug of wax. Liquid sloshed around inside as he swung it out over the side and tossed it gently on to the twisted, brittle branches and needles of a squat Aleppo pine tree by the side of the track.

The Greek’s cursing receded, eventually lost beneath the sound of the cart’s creaking wheels and the clop-clop of hooves on sun-baked dirt.

Liam settled back in his seat and sighed contentedly in the warmth of the sun. ‘So this is Ancient Rome, then?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Another place I can tick off me Must-Go-And-See List.’

Bob turned to look at him. ‘You have a list of places to — ?’

‘Just a figure of speech, Bob.’

‘I understand.’

‘Well now, you might as well tell me all the important bits of information Maddy shoved into your head there.’

‘Were you not listening during her briefing?’

Liam shrugged. ‘I was… but there was a lot of it, and she said it all a bit too quickly. And I was trying to undress at the same time, so…’

Bob sighed. ‘The year is AD 54. In correct history this would be towards the end of the reign of Emperor Claudius. The emperor who is supposed to have succeeded Caligula after his four-year reign and his assassination. Instead, altered history records that this year the Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus — ’

‘Caligula?’

‘Correct — commonly known as Caligula — celebrates his seventeenth year in power. It is also his last year. At some point during this year he is supposed to have ascended to Heaven to take his place as God.’

‘You’re kidding.’

Bob carried on. ‘It appears that Caligula has adopted certain tenets of a relatively obscure belief system imported from Judaea.’

‘What’s that?’

Bob looked at him. ‘You do not know this?’

Liam shrugged. ‘No, I…’ Then he realized. ‘You’re talking about Christianity?’

‘Correct. Caligula overwrites the Greek and Roman polytheist — many gods — belief system with the idea of one true God. This he has stolen from Christianity. Also the Roman interpretation of the afterlife, Elysium, is replaced with the Christian depiction of Heaven.’

‘Cheeky devil!’

‘Caligula has adopted this faith completely and then rewritten it with himself in the role of son of God.’

Liam half laughed at the man’s gall. ‘So, what really happens to Caligula, then?’

‘This is unclear. The data I have indicates that in this year Caligula does in fact disappear. Historians and writers of this time record he vanished, some believing he really was the son of God and actually did rise to Heaven to become deified. Others thought that he might have become mentally unstable and killed himself in some way, but his death was hushed up and his body secretly disposed of.’

‘Right.’ Liam settled himself in the back of the cart among several bales of reeds cushioning the clay amphoras, wine sloshing in containers all around him. Almost comfortable. He looked up at the cloudless blue sky, the rocking of the cart quite soothing. He recalled some of Maddy’s hasty briefing, her gabbling ten to the dozen as he stumbled around behind the curtains trying to get undressed for the displacement tube:

‘… but it seems that history noticeably changes from AD 37 onwards. There’s some Roman poet, essay-writer dude called Asinius, who describes what sounds to me a lot like a contamination event.’ Through the curtain he heard Maddy flicking quickly across printed pages. ‘Ah, yeah, here it is… During the feast and celebrations of Minerva, the skies above those gathered in the amphitheatre opened and vast chariots descended to the city, from which stepped messengers of the gods, made to look as mortal men.’

‘You think those were time travellers?’

‘Duh.’ He heard her snort. ‘Well, obviously. They certainly weren’t gods. Or messengers of the gods even.’

More rustling of papers. ‘Since we had that third small ripple a few minutes ago, there’ve been more data changes. It’s like this contamination is scaling up gradually.’ They’d all taken a look outside after the last one. From a distance Manhattan still looked the same, the same skyline, skyscrapers, aeroplanes in the sky, traffic rumbling over the bridge above. But Liam suspected Sal would find a million little differences in Times Square.

‘Now we’ve got varying accounts of Caligula’s reign, and not a great deal more about these messengers, though. It’s as if they’ve been purged from history rather clumsily. Or edited out somehow. Which I think makes them pretty damned suspicious, eh?’

Liam had his shoes and socks off and was trying on the flip-flops Sal had got for him.

‘Uhh… but generally it seems the same sort of account of Caligula’s reign. Over the next seventeen years it’s not a good period for Rome. Caligula seems to neglect his job as ruler; there are food shortages, water shortages. He gets really unpopular with the people, although, oddly… it seems Caligula’s version of a one-god religion catches on. This all goes on until he vanishes mysteriously — supposedly going to Heaven. He’s succeeded by an Emperor Lepidus, who encourages Caligula’s take on Christianity. The trident of Neptune becomes the symbol of the faith and the faith later becomes known as Julianity, after his family name Julii. In 345 it becomes known as the Holy Church Juliani.’

Liam emerged from behind the curtains wearing his tunic and flip-flops. Maddy was studying a clipboard of printouts.

‘How do I look?’

‘Like an idiot as usual.’ She smiled, looked back down at her notes. ‘So… I’m going to send you back to AD 54, the year in which he’s supposed to have blasted off to Heaven. There’s no month given, but there’s a suggestion it’s sometime in the late summer months because there’s a reference to poor harvests and stuff. So, Liam… we’ll make that year our first port of call, OK?’

‘Aye.’

‘Liam!’

He jerked awake. ‘Whuh?!’

He realized he’d dozed off and left a damp patch of drool down his own shoulder. The warm sun and the gentle rocking of the cart had seduced him into slumber like some dewy-eyed old codger sitting on a porch in summer.

‘You need to see this, Liam,’ said Bob, rocking his shoulder insistently with one meaty hand.

Liam pulled himself up from the mess of bundles of reeds and leaned over the front of the cart to the driver’s seat. ‘Bob, I just had the weirdest, creepiest dream.’ He yawned as he spoke, eyes still glued up and foggy with sleep. ‘Are we there yet?’

‘Affirmative, Liam. You should look.’

Liam rubbed crusts of sleep from his eyes. The dusty track had become a broad avenue of cobbled stone. That was the first thing he noticed. The second were the broad pylons of wood lining the avenue either side, each topped off with a crossbar making them T-shaped.

‘Oh, Mother Mary,’ whispered Liam. ‘This is the road to Rome?’

‘Affirmative.’

Across the T-bar of each, one arm nailed and lashed to each side of the horizontal bar, bodies hung like overripe fruit; some were recently dead, some leathered and desiccated by the summer sun like withered grapes on a vine and others pecked clean to the bone — carrion for crows. A grisly procession that receded along with the avenue to a vanishing point in the distance and the east gates of Rome.