Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 45

AD 54, Rome

The two senators left for their townhouses in the Greek district. Atellus returned to his legion stationed outside the city.

Maddy and Liam sat with Cato in the shade of a portico watching Macro and Fronto sparring with Bob in the courtyard with wooden training swords. Crassus chortled and Sal hooted with delight at the centurion and ex-centurion’s failed attempts to score a touch on Bob’s torso.

‘Your Stone Man is so fast,’ said Cato.

‘Very,’ said Maddy.

‘He’s saved my life many times over,’ added Liam. ‘One-man army, he is.’

‘Tell me.’ Cato sat forward. ‘What language is that you use, when you speak quietly?’

‘You mean when we whisper to ourselves?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed. ‘You must think we’re totally mad, talking to ourselves.’

Cato splayed his hands apologetically. ‘It’s a very odd thing you do.’

Liam reached up to his ear. ‘Shall we show him?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Might as well.’

He pulled out his babel-bud and handed it to Cato. ‘You’d better explain how it works,’ he said to her.

‘This little device translates our language, which is called English, into Latin.’

Cato turned the small flesh-coloured bud over in his fingers. ‘It actually speaks words to you?’

‘Yes. In our ear. It hears what we say quietly in English and gives us the correct Latin phrase to say.’

He frowned as he looked at it. ‘Do you mean to say it is… this device can understand the meaning of what is said to it?’

‘Yes. There’s a thing called a computer in there. A bit like a mind, I suppose. An artificial one. It’s an engineered thing.’

Cato’s eyes widened. ‘This province of yours with such advanced devices… how is it possible that no one has ever come across it before? How is it possible no Roman has ever heard of America before?’

Cato passed the bud back to Liam and he carefully placed it back in his ear.

‘Because it’s too far away for anyone — even any Roman — to find.’

Liam’s bud was whispering again in his ear. ‘You telling him about time travel, Mads?’

‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ she replied.

Cato frowned. ‘What did you just say to each other?’

‘It was nothing.’

‘I suspect you’re patronizing me,’ he said with a smile. ‘The simple-minded Roman soldier, eh?’

She made an apologetic face. ‘Where we come from is very difficult to explain, Cato.’

‘Why not try?’

She realized how easy and how stupidly incorrect it was to assume that a person from an earlier time was somehow less intelligent. Just because they might not understand the concept of something as commonplace as a cellular phone, or a computer, or a light switch, it didn’t make their minds any less agile.

‘We are from the future.’

His eyes narrowed and he rubbed the dark hairs on his forearm as he digested that. ‘When you say “future”… are you talking about the passage of days?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Days yet to happen?’

‘Correct.’

‘You mean to say, then, you are from time… that is ahead of us?’

‘Exactly that,’ said Liam. ‘A long way ahead.’

‘See… in the future, Cato, mankind will discover how to travel backwards and forwards along time, just like travelling along a road.’

‘A road? A road through time?’

‘The place where we and them Visitors came from — America — doesn’t exist yet,’ said Liam. ‘Well, it does, but it just doesn’t have that name yet.’

Cato stared at the sparring men as he attempted to absorb what they’d just told him. ‘This is an incredible idea,’ he whispered after a while. ‘You know, as a small boy I used to wonder what it would be like to witness the future. To see how things go. To imagine what I would be like as a man. Whether I would ever become a freedman.’ He looked up at them. ‘And you say it is possible to do this?’

Both of them nodded.

‘So, how far along this “road of time” do you come from?’

‘How many years?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, this is quite a hard thing for me to try and explain…’

‘I suspect you’re patronizing me again.’

Both Maddy and Liam laughed at that. ‘All right,’ said Liam. ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you. This’ll really mess with your head, so it will.’ He grinned at Maddy impishly. ‘You gonna tell the poor fella, or shall I?’

‘About two thousand years,’ she said.

Cato’s jaw hung slack. ‘Did you just say two thousand?’

‘Just under.’ She shrugged. ‘Give or take a few years. Depends on whether you count in Jesus-years or normal ones. AD, anno domini, or CE, common era.’

‘Jesus-years?’ He cocked his head.

Maddy shook her head. ‘That’s a whole other story. The thing is, Cato, history has a way it’s meant to go. A way it’s supposed to go. And these Visitors from the future, they’ve sent events going off in a different direction. A wrong direction.’

Maddy and Liam proceeded to explain to him the nature of time travel and alternate timelines; histories that should never be and how they caused things called ‘time waves’, reality shifts that erased everything in their path and left monstrous new realities in their wake. She was surprised at how well he grasped the notions, how intelligent his questions were. An agile mind just as keen to peer into the unknown as any of the great thinkers and philosophers hundreds of years down the line.

By the time they’d finally finished explaining, both Macro and Fronto had had enough swordplay and were hunkered over, sweating in the midday sun, gasping for breath. Bob continued play-sparring with Sal.

‘So then,’ said Cato, ‘you are here to correct events?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you say this time we are in right now… this would be the rule of Claudius, not Caligula?’

‘Yes.’

‘Claudius? That old fool?’ He looked surprised, but then shrugged as he gave it some thought. ‘Better a fool than a madman, I suppose.’

‘He does a pretty good job,’ said Liam. ‘I read it in a book. He conquers Britain.’

‘Britain?’ Cato laughed. ‘Who’d want to conquer that miserable wilderness?’

They sat in silence for a while, watching the fighting, listening to the clack of wooden swords.

Cato frowned. ‘But your plan to correct history… that would mean the end of all this, would it not?’ He gestured at Crassus’s courtyard. ‘And the end of all our lives?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘The end of this version of your life. There’s another world very much like this one. Another version with you and Macro and Crassus — ’

‘It’s a better version,’ added Liam. ‘Under Claudius your Roman Empire gets richer, gets bigger. Not like it is now.’

Cato pondered that. As things stood, disaster hung like an approaching storm cloud. The empire was all but bankrupt. The city was on the very edge of starvation as the last of its stores dwindled. The regular arrival of food supplies from other provinces and trading partners was beginning to dry up as it became clear that Roman debts were going to remain unpaid. Even if they did manage to get rid of Caligula, an even greater danger loomed: the threat of civil war. There were three or four generals he could think of in charge of unpaid and disgruntled legions who’d advance on Rome to crown themselves emperor once news reached them that the madman was finally gone.

And if that wasn’t enough, there were rival empires watching proceedings from the periphery of the Roman world like vultures. The Parthians to the east, for example. A civil war would surely be the final straw. Once Rome’s many legions had broken themselves fighting each other, barbarian hordes from all over would descend on them to pick the Roman carcass clean.

If these strangers from another time were to be believed, that correcting history would return the fate of Rome to a more stable footing, how it had been when he’d been a young boy, then that was worth surrendering this life for, wasn’t it?

‘Another version of Rome would be worth dying for,’ he admitted.

‘Oh, but you don’t die,’ said Liam. ‘Not really. There’ll be another you… another Macro, another Crassus.’

‘Living the lives you should have lived,’ added Maddy.

‘And how do you intend to correct this history?’

‘We believe… we’re hoping really, that there may be technology — devices — left behind somewhere in Caligula’s palace by the Visitors that we might be able to use to get back to our time. From there we can correct this more easily.’

The others looked like they were getting ready to come over and join them in the cool shade. ‘It might be better if we keep this notion of travelling time like a road to ourselves,’ said Cato.

Maddy nodded as they stepped into the shade beneath the portico.

‘Does this brute of yours ever get tired?’ grunted Macro as he slumped on to a bench and reached for a cup of watered wine.

Crassus took a seat beside Cato. ‘It is time, I think, that we discuss matters in detail.’ He reached for the jug, poured himself a cup of wine and lifted it. ‘Something our new friends should know. This Roman officer to my left… Tribune Quintus Licinius Cato.’ He was addressing Maddy and Liam in particular. ‘This man is the one who has put our gathering of conspirators together. He is the one who has risked everything by whispering in dark corners to find the few of us willing to commit to treason.’ He patted Cato on the shoulder affectionately. ‘I would give my arm to have a small fraction of this man’s courage.’

‘Hear, hear!’ barked Macro, filling his cup again and raising it. ‘To Cato.’

Cato picked up his cup. ‘To success.’ He turned to Liam and Maddy. ‘And to the return of better times, eh?’

‘Aye, I’ll drink to that,’ said Liam.