Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 38

AD 54, Rome

The faint outline of the city lay ahead of them, nestling in a valley of gently rolling hills, and the track was now a wide cobblestone road leading down a gentle slope emerging from an orchard of olive trees. Bob steered the cart round a line of slow, shuffling slaves up ahead of them. Each had a noose of rope around their necks, attaching them to a long heavy-looking pole that rested along their shoulders.

‘Oh my…’ was all Maddy could say as their cart rattled slowly past them.

‘Slavery’s popular here,’ said Liam. ‘Oh and sacrifices.’

Maddy bit her lip as she looked at him. ‘Seriously?’

‘You’ll start to see some grisly stuff soon enough.’

The cart rolled along in a solemn silence, slowly drawing past the line of slaves. Maddy looked down at them, at their pale faces — she supposed they came from far-off northern countries — all of them daubed with swipes of green paint.

‘What’s the paint for?’ asked Sal.

‘The green?’ Liam leaned on the side of the cart. ‘It’s Caligula’s colour. It’s the colour of his church.’

‘The Church of Julii,’ said Sal.

‘What?’ Liam shrugged. ‘I don’t think it’s called that.’

‘Not yet,’ she added. ‘It gets called that much later. I guess it sort of becomes this timeline’s version of the Catholic Church.’

Sal watched the slaves trudge barefooted along the cobbles. Her face drained of colour as she watched them. The cart slowly rattled past daubed faces gazing down at their own bloodied and blistered feet and she looked like she was going to vomit.

‘Why’ve they been painted green?’ asked Maddy.

‘They’re marked,’ said Liam. ‘Marked for sacrifice. Every call to prayer is begun with a sacrifice.’

‘There are five calls to prayer every day,’ added Bob. ‘This is by decree. Any citizens who are seen not praying are punished.’

‘So, they get through quite a lot of slaves,’ said Liam sombrely. The three of them watched the line of tethered slaves recede until they were no more than a shifting smudge of pale flesh, shimmering in the heat reflected by the sun-baked cobblestone road.

Liam directed their attention to the road ahead. ‘Welcome to Rome.’

The crucifixes lining Via Aurelia, the road into Rome from the south-west, gave Maddy and Sal their first taste of what horror to expect within the city. For the last mile, on either side of them, crossbars of weather-bleached wood bore the dead and dying, the pitiful frames of emaciated men and women. Those still alive pleaded with them in dry whispers, speaking languages none of them understood. Maddy suspected they were begging for a quick death, pleading for the sharp thrust of a blade between their ribs to end a slow, agonizing torment.

Bob cajoled their ponies across the stone bridge over the River Tiber into the city.

The smell of putrefaction, of disease and burning cadavers, filled the air.

‘This is a nightmare,’ whispered Maddy.

Liam nodded. ‘This isn’t just a starving city, it’s a madman’s personal playground.’

She understood what he meant by that. The roadside was decorated with heads stuck on wooden posts. Some posts sported several older heads pushed down by newer ones, the oldest little more than skulls shrouded in dry tatters of leathered skin. Not all of them were daubed with old flecks of green paint.

‘Some of those were Roman citizens,’ said Liam. ‘There was a crowd of people who were protesting last week while me and Bob were staying.’

‘About what?’ asked Sal.

‘Building materials taken from the Aqua Claudia to be used on Caligula’s stairway,’ replied Bob. ‘The aqueduct was one of the city’s main sources of drinkable water.’

‘Caligula assured the people his first good deed after ascending to Heaven and becoming God would be to cause fresh rainwater to fall on Rome and for the river to be made as clean as mountain water,’ added Liam. ‘When those protesters decided they didn’t actually believe any of that, he had his Praetorians kill the lot of them.’

‘Seriously?’

Liam nodded. ‘Me an’ Bob were right there.’ He hesitated. There were details he didn’t want to describe. ‘Wasn’t very pleasant. We saw that happen on the third night, wasn’t it?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘I was a bit… uh… bit shaken up by that,’ said Liam. He didn’t tell her that he’d spent the following day in the rooms they’d rented. The streets and avenues had been deserted, every last person in the city hiding from Caligula’s petulant rage.

There were people in the avenues now, traders with a meagre stock of items on sale: the carcasses of rats and dogs, for the lucky few who could trade in coin, the scrawny bodies of hares, the hind leg of a wild boar crawling with flies. Citizens and slaves, young and old, looking for scraps of protein. A marketplace that was deathly quiet, a hundred conversations carried out in worried half-whispers, as crows lined clay-tile guttering nearby, cawing noisily without a care for the miserable, shuffling humans they eyed.

‘Caught a glimpse of him,’ continued Liam in a low voice. ‘Saw Caligula himself.’

‘What’s he like?’ asked Sal.

‘Yeah.’ Maddy pulled a tattered sack from the floor of the cart and draped it over her shoulders. She offered one to Sal. Their clothes were going to attract stares unless they covered up.

‘I was never a particularly religious type, you know?’ He shrugged. ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph an’ God, I could take ’em or leave ’em, if you know what I mean. But…’

‘What?’

Liam bit his lip. ‘But I… I’ll swear there’s something of the Devil about him.’

‘Did he look like he could be someone from the future? Anything about him? Clothes? Wristwatch? That kind of thing?’

‘Negative. There was nothing anachronistic,’ replied Bob.

‘Looked like the real thing to me,’ said Liam. ‘Quite mad.’

The cart rattled out of the broad thoroughfare into a much narrower avenue, flanked on either side by once brightly painted three-storeyed buildings, crimson, yellow, green. The paint was old, though, flaking off like dry, leprous skin. Along the front of the buildings, above a portico of loose clay tiles, were precarious-looking wooden balconies and rat runs from which dangled strings of herbs.

‘This is the Subura District,’ said Bob.

‘It’s a pretty rough part of Rome,’ warned Liam. ‘What am I saying? It’s all rough actually. This is where we found some rooms. The Praetorians stay out of it mostly. Even them priests. The collegia run things around here.’

‘ Collegia?’

‘Gangs,’ said Liam. ‘Criminal gangs.’

Maddy looked up at the creaking wooden balconies that loomed over them. ‘Oh, I thought Caligula was like totally in charge of every-’

‘He rules by consent,’ said Bob. ‘While he pays the Praetorian Guard and turns a blind eye to the activities of the collegia, they are effectively his police force.’

‘Mind you,’ cut in Liam, ‘from what bits and pieces we’ve heard, even they think he’s gone too mad.’

As they drew up beyond the last of the traders’ stalls, Bob clicked his tongue and rapped the reins across the ponies’ backs. Their plodding stopped.

‘But, if everyone thinks he’s a crazy fakirchana-head, why is he still in charge? Why hasn’t somebody just got rid of him?’

‘Everyone’s completely afraid of him.’ Liam reached under a lock of his dark hair and adjusted the babel-bud in his ear. ‘Maybe some of them do actually think he’s some sort of god. I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps he’s got his hands on some tech that makes him appear like a god,’ said Maddy. ‘Say a gun… that would do it, right? Make you look like you’ve got super godlike powers? Sheesh, even a plain old flashlight or a cellphone could look godlike, right?’

She looked up at the chaos of wooden slats above them, the colours of robes and togas drying in the noon sun. They were opposite a narrow rat run between buildings, little more than a yard wide, leading to a shadowed courtyard beyond.

The sounds of life echoed out of it: the barking of dogs, the squalling of a baby, the shrill cry of a woman’s voice raised in anger; countless lives lived on top of each other in cramped squalor.

‘Have you seen any tech, Liam? Bob? Anything at all that shouldn’t be here in this time.’

‘Negative.’

‘I’ve seen nothing like that.’ Liam shook his head. ‘If someone did come back here seventeen years ago and they made a big show of themselves, well…’

‘Chariots from the heavens,’ said Maddy, quoting from one of the sources of the time. ‘Some sort of modern vehicles. Trucks or something?’

‘Right… Chariots from the heavens and messengers from God an’ all that. If someone made a big spectacle like that,’ Liam said with a shrug, ‘there’s not a sign of them now.’

Bob hopped down off the cart.

‘It’s like this city just swallowed them up,’ added Liam.

Maddy peered down the rat run into the dark courtyard. ‘That where you were staying?’

‘Aye.’ Liam pointed up the side of a clay-brick wall. ‘Third floor.’ The building looked more modern than she could have imagined a Roman building would look. Five storeys in height, with rickety balconies of wooden slats and wicker screens for privacy.

‘The building’s basic and very smelly. Gets noisy too. And it’s owned by a right miserable old grump. But it is cheap. Just hope he’ll let us have our room back.’ Liam dug into a pouch tied round his waist. Maddy heard coins jangling heavily.

‘Where’d you get the money from?’

Liam looked guiltily at Bob. ‘We, uh… well, we kind of mugged someone.’

‘Kind of… or did?’

‘Did.’

Maddy shrugged. ‘ Needs must and all that.’

‘I better go and speak to the landlord. See about getting our room back.’

‘Those babel-buds work OK?’

Liam shrugged. ‘Aye. You get some gibberish out of them sometimes.’ He turned to Bob. ‘Better bring them ponies in quick.’

‘Affirmative.’

He turned to the others. ‘We used to have four of them… but people are eating horseflesh now. You’re best not to leave ’em unattended.’

Bob began to unhitch the animals from the cart, Sal helping while Liam led Maddy down the narrow rat run into the courtyard.

As she emerged from the narrow passageway, she looked up. All around the courtyard, on all four sides, she could see balconies and walkways hugging the walls, stacked one on top of the other and propped up on wooden support stilts; she could see the curious faces of children and women looking down at them, a dozen different conversations shouted out from one side to the other. Chickens down in the courtyard, chickens wandering freely along the walkways and balconies. And at the very top an overhanging lip of terracotta roof tiles framed a square of daylight.

Liam approached a thickset, bearded man wearing a leather apron, hacking with a cleaver at the skinned carcass of what looked like a greyhound. She heard Liam mutter something to himself, and remembered that’s how the buds worked: they translated what they heard. Liam cocked his head slightly, listening to the almost immediate translation being whispered into his ear, then repeated it to the man.

‘ Salve. Rediimus. Passimus priotem concavem iterum locare? ’

The man stopped hacking at the carcass then eventually shrugged. ‘ Si vis. ’ He held out a bloody hand. ‘ Quiniue sestertii.’

Liam nodded. A barely discernible delay as he listened for the translation. He dug into his pouch and handed over several coins to the man.

Maddy smiled, impressed at how effectively, almost seamlessly, the babel-bud appeared to work. She made a note to give it a try herself.

Liam nodded a thank-you to the man and was about to lead her across the straw and dung-carpeted courtyard towards an external wooden stairway that would take them up to the building’s third floor when they both heard a commotion coming from the rat run.