Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 79

AD 54, outside Rome

‘Dry wood, that’s the secret,’ said Liam. ‘If it’s totally dried out, like charcoal, you don’t get any smoke at all.’

Maddy gazed at the fire. It was barely visible in the daylight. A few wisps of smoke from the cones and branches they’d thrown on, turning grey as transparent flames consumed them and the air above danced with the heat. There was, of course, the pleasant, always welcoming smell of a fire. It would carry, but no one was going to see where it was coming from. Certainly not from that road they’d left earlier.

She raised a hand to her eyes, and peered through the gently wafting evergreen branches of cypress trees at the road, two or three miles away. The weather was so dry this summer, anybody using it would kick up a plume of dust. She could see nothing.

Sizzling on a wooden spit were several wild hares Bob had caught for them, skinned from neck to lean shanks and naked except for furry heads and furry booties. Normally she’d be queasy at eating an animal she could recognize, but her mouth was salivating at the smell of them cooking, the savoury tang of crisping meat.

Rashim sat hunched over beside the fire, drooling at the glistening meat, chuckling at the sound of fat spitting into the fire.

Maddy glanced out once again through the branches of the hillside wood at the distant road. ‘I think we’re safe now.’ They’d seen a party of cavalry thundering along an hour ago, leaving dust trails behind them. From this distance they could have been anyone, but they’d seemed to have a purposeful, disciplined look about them.

Rashim had laughed gleefully as they’d passed by. Laughing that Caligula was going to miss his precious ‘rendezvous with Heaven’. They’d seen no one else since then, though. She looked at him curled over beside the fire. She studied the pitiful skeleton of a man. Malnutrition and complete darkness for so many years: she wondered how a human body could cope with that.

Downhill, through the trees, she could hear the faint splash of water. Bob and Sal were rinsing their tunics in a small brook. Clean water. Drinkable water, not like the rancid Tiber. They’d bring some back when they were done.

Maddy wandered over to where Liam sat, perched on a boulder that afforded him a view down the side of the hill. ‘I guess we ought to get some air to your wound.’ She nodded at the bandage tied firmly round his waist. There were a few spots of dark, dried blood that had soaked through. The wound must have opened while they were fleeing the palace, wading through sewage. Actually, as soon as they got back home, they were probably going to have to pump Liam so full of antibiotics he was going to rattle like a pill bottle.

Liam shrugged. ‘All right. Just be gentle with me now, Mads.’

‘Oh, tsk-tsk. Don’t be such a baby.’ She worked the bandage loose. ‘I’ll be careful.’

He winced as she unravelled the material. ‘Sorry. Hurts?’

‘Naw, not exactly. A little tender… just — ’ he looked anxiously at her — ‘just worried this is the only thing holding me together.’ He laughed edgily. Not entirely joking.

‘Oh, I think you’ll mend.’ She smiled. There was something about Liam that felt indestructible. Maybe it was that stupid lopsided grin of his. Maybe God really did exist and spent his full shift every day looking after devil-may-care idiots like him.

‘Ouch! Go easy!’

‘Sorry.’

Even though she could see traces of ageing in his face, the silver flecks in his hair, that plume of grey hair at his temple… somehow she couldn’t quite imagine him as Foster yet. As that poor, frail, dying old man. Or perhaps maybe she just didn’t want to.

He should know.

‘Here we go,’ she said. The last layer was still damp. Blood that was not quite dry. She eased the material away from his skin, stuck to it as if by glue.

‘More slowly, please,’ he whimpered nervously.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ She grimaced as his pale skin tugged at her soft pull.

She eased the last of it away and realized, as she looked at the puckered line of his wound, there was never going to be the perfect time to tell him… just a time. Too many secrets had already got in the way of them as a team, as friends. This was the last of them. She looked across at Rashim, muttering like Gollum as he sat on his haunches and studied the glistening meat.

‘Liam?’

‘Aye… how is it?’

‘Liam… you’re dying.’

‘What? It’s just a cut — ’

‘No, Liam, listen… time travel, it’s actually killing you.’

He frowned. ‘What the devil are you going on about now?’

‘Foster told me. Going back in time, it ages you. It accelerates the ageing process.’

That silenced him.

She pointed at his temple. ‘Liam, come on, you must have noticed — ’

‘Of course I have. I’m not blind.’ He took the bandage out of her hands and began winding it back round himself. ‘I’m not stupid either.’

‘Liam. I — ’

‘It’s killing me.’ He sighed. ‘I know that.’

‘You know?’

He paused then nodded. ‘I suspected as much.’ He busied himself winding the bandage again. ‘When we came back from the Cretaceous time. Edward Chan, that girl, Laura? I think I guessed it then that time travel made them sick.’

Maddy nodded. ‘They both took a lethal hit. It’s a bit like radiation poisoning — there’s no recovery. It does its damage and there’s no way back from it.’

‘That doesn’t sound so good.’

‘No, not good.’ She heard something in her voice she didn’t need right now. ‘Here, let me help you.’ She took the bandage back off him and finished the job with a knot. ‘I’m so sorry, Liam. I’m so very sorry. I should’ve told you as soon as I knew.’

She expected anger. Instead, she got a smile out of him. A heartbreaking one; the wistful, moist-eyed sort that old war veterans give on Patriot’s Day.

‘Liam?’

‘I got some extra time, Maddy. That’s a bleedin’ gift, so it is.’

Oh God, Liam, why can’t you just be angry with me? That would have been easier to cope with.

‘And I’ve already seen so many incredible things with that time.’ He grinned. ‘I’m up on the deal. What’s to be all down about there, eh?’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘Liam… you’re Foster.’

‘Uh?’

‘You are Foster.’

He laughed. ‘I’m not as cantankerous as that old — ’

‘No. Liam… I’m saying you are Foster. You’re the same person.’

For the second time in as many minutes she’d managed to shut him up.

‘I don’t know how that is. I don’t know how it works that you two are the same person; it’s just what Foster told me.’ She was struggling to explain it. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the loop we live in. Maybe we’ve all been here before and we don’t remember it. Maybe history and us, we’re on some big wheel that just goes round and round. I don’t know. All I know is what Foster told me.’

‘Right…’ Liam’s eyes were on Rashim’s sunken, tortured body, folds of skin drooping from bones that seemed to almost poke through in places. ‘Right…’

‘There are no more secrets now, Liam. That’s it. You know everything I know.’

He looked down at the hands in his lap. ‘Old man hands,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what me mam always said I had. All knobbly knuckles.’

‘Liam…?’ She rested a hand lightly on his arm. ‘Liam… I don’t know exactly what it means that you and Foster are the same, but it’s something important. Important to all three of us. We have to think it through. We need to talk it through. When we get back, we’ll do that. The three of us, we’ll — ’

She could hear branches cracking, Bob and Sal’s voices. They were returning from the brook.

He nodded. ‘OK.’

Just then they emerged from beneath the shade of a tree with a cracked clay jug in Bob’s arms. ‘We found this!’ said Sal. ‘So Bob’s humped some water up for you.’

‘About time,’ croaked Liam. He even managed that stupid goofy grin for the pair of them.

‘We should eat,’ said Maddy.

Rashim nodded. ‘Yes, eat! Eat!’

‘Aye! I’m bleedin’ starvin’! We was just about to start on them coneys without you, so we were.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘Right?’

She could have wrapped her arms round him then and there, squeezed him blue just for Liam being Liam.

‘Yeah.’