Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 50

AD 54, Rome

Late afternoon sunlight painted the clay-brick walls of every building a warm peach and cast violet shadows into every narrow alley and rat run. The streets were busy with vendors packing up their shop fronts and pulling shutter doors to for the approaching evening.

Liam and Bob flanked Macro; Maddy and Sal a few steps behind.

‘What was it like in the legions?’ asked Liam. Macro repeated the question.

Liam nodded. ‘I’ve seen some…’ He was going to say ‘films’, but stopped himself. Only Cato knew where and when they’d come from. That might change at some point, but for now, the fact that they’d come from some place beyond the known Roman world was enough to share.

‘Well,’ Macro shrugged. ‘I’ll be honest, I probably moaned all the way through my twenty-five years in the Second. It was either hard work or damned boring. And plenty of years spent shivering in cold, damp places I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘But I’d have those days back if I could.’

They stepped aside for a pair of Caligula’s acolytes wearing long green robes. It was approaching evening prayers and the calling horns would be sounding across the roof tiles soon.

‘Why?’

‘I miss the… I don’t know. I suppose I miss the sense of brotherhood. They really are an ugly, stupid, foul-smelling lot of lowlifes… the lads in any legion. Not the sort you’d want to bring home to meet the family, if you get my meaning. But…’ He shook his head, looking for a way to make his point. ‘But together… you and those men, you’re something more. Part of something greater. Do you understand?’

Liam nodded. He thought he probably did. He and the girls, Bob and Becks, even computer-Bob, they were their very own ‘unit’… sort of. With someone else by your side, someone you know would throw down their life to save yours, somehow it made staring into a hopeless abyss possible.

Macro echoed his thoughts. ‘Back then… I would have died for any one of my lads. And I know they’d have done the same, followed me into Hell itself if I’d ordered it. But now…?’ He shrugged sadly. ‘I see faces I recognize every so often. Lads retired from the legions, or even deserters. Just thugs and crooks some of them now. A lot of them hired men in the various collegia. I’d kill them without a second thought if I needed to.’

‘How long did you and Cato serve together?’

‘Oh now, I suppose it must have been about twelve years.’ He laughed. ‘Good times then. Most of it. Well… some of it. He came as a freshly freed slave from the imperial household of the Julii. As thin as a strip of willow and soft as a peach. And completely clueless about army life. I thought the lad wouldn’t last a week.’ He looked at Liam. ‘I’ve told you that already, haven’t I?’

Liam nodded.

‘I suppose I took pity on him at first. Took him under my wing, taught him how to become a soldier. And in return he taught me how to read.’ He laughed. ‘Made this dumb old centurion appreciate some of the finer things in life.’