Rogue Emperor (The Chronoplane Wars Book 3) Page 10

  “Now what about me? Brewster’s about my size.”

  “Don’t try to imitate a Praetorian, Mr. Pierce. You’re obviously a foreigner, just as Brewster is. Romans will take you for one of the Christians, but the Christians will soon realize you’re not one of them.”

  “You’re right. I’ll stay a German civilian.”

  They went back into the peristyle and sat down to a breakfast of cooked cereal garnished with onions, olives, and garlic. Pierce found ientaculum marginally better than the porridge they had eaten yesterday. Sulpicius served them as he had the night before, seeming as calm as ever while the excited chatter of the gravediggers from the village floated over the back wall and into the flowered tranquility of the peristyle.

  When the meal was done they bathed in a small, sparsely furnished room. The bath itself was a rectangular pool tiled in a mosaic of green, blue, and white: fish, water plants, and octopi, with a bright-pink nereid sporting among them. The cooks had been heating water for over an hour to prepare it; Achilleus looked after the two men.

  “Have you seen sapo before, Achilleus?” Aquilius asked with a smile. He had brought some bars of soap as a present for his mother; now the bath smelled of lilac.

  “No, young master, but I’ve heard of it. The Gauls use it to tint their hair, I’ve heard. It’s supposed to be very costly.”

  “Not in Hesperia.” Wallowing in one end of the wide, shallow pool, Aquilius soaped himself and scrubbed with a cloth. Achilleus looked doubtfully at the clumps of foam drifting about on the water. “When all this trouble is over, I think I’ll start us making it. It’s much pleasanter for bathing than oil.”

  He submerged, then stood up and stepped out. Achilleus rinsed him from a tall red-glazed jug, and then wrapped his young master in a large towel. “No oil, young master? It hardly seems worth the trouble of bathing if you’re not to be rubbed down and oiled.”

  “Hesperia changes even the oldest habits, Achilleus. I don’t even want oil on my hair.” Sitting on a stool while a scandalized Achilleus dried and combed his hair, he switched to English. “What are we going to do about Brewster?”

  “I’ll interrogate him again.”

  “And if he doesn’t talk?”

  “He’ll tell me what I need to know.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Aquilius persisted.

  “We’ll have to go into Rome to see things for ourselves.”

  Aquilius rubbed his lower lip. “I will be very happy if Brewster talks. My father will need me, and Rome will be dangerous.”

  Pierce nodded. The proscription would have the whole city in chaos. Better to walk into a well-ordered enemy fortress than into an anarchic city.

  He stepped from the bath, feeling better with the last day’s dust and grim washed from him. The bath towel was coarse and thin, but adequate. He was glad Aquilius had brought the soap; in his first trip to Ahania, he had ventured into public baths but had not enjoyed them. To his heightened senses, the scrape of a strigil over his oiled skin had been almost painful, and he had felt no cleaner afterward than before.

  In his bedroom Aquilius changed into the Praetorian uniform. He emerged looking persuasively military. Pierce contented himself with his old tunic.

  “Now let’s go talk to Brewster again.”

  They took the Militant out into the peristyle garden and sat him on a stone bench with his hands still tied behind him. Pierce sat on a bench opposite. Brewster’s cheek showed a darkening bruise.

  “Dennis, I want to know just who’s involved in the translation team. Each person’s name.”

  “I’m not talking.”

  “That’s all right.” He thought for a moment. He had not seen the files on all six thousand exiled Militants, but he had those of the hundred or so elite firmly in memory.

  Calmly, his eyes fixed on Brewster’s face, he began to recite their names. Each time he saw the subliminal response, the expansion or contraction of the irises, the faint shift in muscle tone around the mouth, he knew he had identified another translator. All told, he found eleven through Brewster’s responses to the names he spoke. One name in particular, Maria Donovan, had provoked an especially strong reaction: recalling her photograph, Pierce wasn’t surprised. She was almost 180 cm tall, spectacularly blond, and the daughter of one of Martel’s martyred early supporters. Pierce supposed Dennis had a crush on her.

  “All right, thank you.”

  “I didn’t tell you anything. I didn’t!”

  “We minions of Satan have our methods, Dennis. Now for the Crucifers. I’ll bet they’re really nice guys by now.” He saw Aquilius frown, and explained: “Muscle boys. Goons. Martel’s hit teams. Probably the guys who killed Domitian, right, Dennis?”

  The instant’s distraction was all Brewster needed. He launched himself headfirst off the bench and butted Pierce on the right cheekbone with startling force. The shock was aggravated by Pierce’s enhanced senses, and he blacked out for a moment. Reviving, he saw Brewster freeing his hands from the leather strap and dropping Aquilius with a hard left to the jaw. Brewster spun and ran from the peristyle, crashing through the kitchen and out the back door.

  The weapons are out there …

  Pierce was up and running, reaching for the Mallory in his shoulder bag. In the tiny kitchen the cooks were screaming hysterically, clutching one another; they screamed louder at the sight of Pierce and the look on his face.

  In the back yard Brewster already had an Uzi in his hands, and was efficiently slamming a clip into it. His face was oddly tranquil. He looked up and met Pierce’s eyes. Then he began firing, from the hip.

  On full automatic and maximum impact, Pierce’s Mallory fired a spray of flechettes. A row of dust clouds puffed into existence along the wall behind Brewster; then the flechettes struck him and threw him backward. The roar of the Uzi cut off. Brewster struck the wall not far from the back gate, and bounced forward to fall face down in the dust.

  The silence was broken first by squawking chickens, then by the cooks’ renewed wails, and last by the shouts of the villagers out in the meadow. They came hurrying in, evidently more curious than afraid, and gaped at the torn corpse.

  Pierce walked slowly out into the yard. When he glanced back, he saw the line of bullet holes the Uzi had gouged in the brick and plaster near the kitchen door. Another fraction of a second and the bullets would have torn him in two, and probably one or two of the cooks as well.

  Aquilius, standing a couple of meters behind Pierce, spoke to the villagers: “Strip the body and finish the burial. When you’re done, cover the grave so it looks undisturbed. If more soldiers come, and find this grave, they’ll kill everyone in the village.”

  Pierce sat on a wooden bench outside a shed. Aquilius sat beside him, his face solemn and his cheek swollen.

  “I should have seen him coming. I should have stopped him,” Aquilius said; he sounded angry with himself.

  “You couldn’t have. We were slack; we should have checked his wrists.” He drew a breath and let it out slowly. Take nothing for granted, for Satan lies in wait for the self-satisfied. The morning sun was warm on his face. Flies were already finding Brewster as the villagers, muttering to one another about the corpse’s terrible wounds, stripped his body.

  “If he’d only talked, the job would be over.”

  “Mr. Pierce, I want to find my father. Do you still need to go into Rome? Don’t you know enough?”

  “Almost. But we need to know just how well they’re doing, what the population thinks, who’s resisting — a day or two ought to do it. Then we’ll head north and you can catch up with your family. It won’t take you long on a bike.” He rubbed his forehead.

  “Aquilius, would the cooks have any dried apples?”

  *

  Before noon, Sulpicius had led the rest of the slaves and Custos the watchdog out of the estate and up into the hills on the east side of the valley. Achilleus had buried a few special family treasures under one of the sheds: the death masks o
f Aquilius’s forefathers, a small and beautiful portrait of his grandmother, a dozen books.

  Pierce chose two bicycles, sturdy Schwinn mountain bikes especially designed for the Roman market, and let the villagers take the others. A thought struck him, and he turned to Aquilius.

  “Do you know how to ride a bike?”

  “Of course! We all learned during our fourth week of Training. And I’d ridden a little in Rome.”

  They walked the bikes out through the front gate; Aquilius locked the gate and tucked the key into his bag. A few villagers stood nearby, Petronia among them. The old nurse marched up to Aquilius.

  “You look more like a soldier than the Praetorian latrones did. You’ve defended the hearth of your forefathers, and I’m proud of you. You’re as brave and handsome as your honored father.” She kissed him noisily, making him blush, and whispered hoarsely in his ear. “Now, don’t worry about the villa. We’ll see that it comes to no harm, and if they send any more soldiers, we’ll say you’ve gone away to Capua to join your father.” She cackled.

  Aquilius took her hands in his. “Farewell, Petronia. May we meet again soon, and happily.”

  They rode down another path, not the road they had taken from the Via Flaminia. It wandered west and south, climbing the side of the valley through groves of oak and pine, and then followed the ridgeline south.

  “We’ll meet the Via Flaminia at the fifteenth milestone,” Aquilius said. “After that, we’ll be in Rome within an hour. Unless we run into more Praetorians or Militants.”

  “I’m afraid we will,” Pierce answered. He was thinking about Michael Martel emerging through the smoke of a fireworks display with his voice booming through a loudspeaker while the Romans bowed in awe, and people like Dennis Brewster waited to launch a massacre. Now the massacre was under way and they were hurrying into it.

  Nine

  Once out of the valley, they found themselves in more densely populated country: farms, villages, brickyards, quarries, and sawmills. The hillsides were bare, dotted with stumps and gouged by erosion. Peasant girls, many carrying baby sisters and brothers on their backs, prowled along the roadside looking for anything that would burn; cooking fuel was scarce. Pierce recalled that the Hesperians had suggested burning coal, but nothing had yet come of it.

  The narrow dirt roads were crowded with wagons drawn by donkeys or oxen; Pierce and Aquilius often had to get off their bicycles and walk around a line of slow-moving wagons hauling bricks or gravel. Peasants and artisans watched them with interest: bicycles were still a great novelty.

  As they neared the Via Flaminia, Pierce pulled up alongside Aquilius. “I meant to tell you: You did well against the Praetorians.”

  Aquilius nodded, pleased and not trying to show it. “It was my first serious fight.”

  “Your father would have been proud of you. You were very calm and collected. How do you feel about it now?”

  He thought for a moment, a handsome young man with sunshine gleaming in his black curls. “It was easier than I’d thought it would be.”

  “That was how I felt, too, after the first time.”

  “Next time I want to be closer. It’s not really brave to hide in ambush and kill people who can’t even see you.”

  “Bravery is like money. Spend it when you must, and save it when you can.”

  Aquilius looked offended. “That might impress a shopkeeper, Mr. Pierce, but I don’t think of courage as money.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  “I do not mean to be disrespectful. You have not had the benefits of a Roman upbringing. Do uptimers feel sick after their first kill?”

  “Often.”

  “I did not, and you did not. You enjoyed it?”

  “I suppose I did. Yes.”

  They began a long glide down a hill, Aquilius ringing his bell to drive off a herd of goats while their herder, a dirty-faced boy, gaped at their speed and magnificence. “Now you’ve killed many people.”

  “Depends on what you means by many.”

  “Do you still feel good?”

  Pierce looked at him and grinned. “I call it zapping bad guys.”

  “Do you still feel good?” Aquilius persisted.

  “Not as good, no. When I go back, they’ll shoot me full of drugs and block this morning out of my memory.” Aquilius’s jaw dropped. “You’ll forget what happened?”

  “Not entirely. But it won’t seem very important.”

  “They have done this to you before.”

  “Many times.”

  “Uptimers are very strange.”

  “No doubt.”

  Pierce was both amused and alarmed. Downtimers often had a far more casual attitude to life and death than even the toughest twenty-first-century thugs. That was why Robinetti had called the Romans psychopathic, and he had not been the only one. Pierce wondered if the Agency would eventually use only downtimers for this kind of job. Probably not; prejudices died hard, and endochronics were endochronics.

  They stopped at a mansio to rest. Aquilius’s uniform and their bicycles had a dramatic effect: the manager hurried to supply a table in the shade of a poplar, and a flagon of wine. Aquilius bought some bread and cheese, and a bowl of olives.

  “What’s the news from Rome today?” he asked.

  The manager, a potbellied man in a greasy blue tunic, smiled nervously. “Much turmoil. You come from the north?”

  “Yes. We’ve heard about Domitian.”

  “Indeed. Your comrades in the Praetorian camp are proclaiming a new emperor today, so I’m told.”

  “Trajan?” asked Pierce.

  The manager shook his head and smoothed his thinning hair. “Someone I’ve never heard of, good masters. A person named Martellus. No doubt we’ll hear more before long. Another flagon?”

  “No.” Aquilius tossed a handful of coins on the table and stood up. “We must hurry.”

  “I’ll say this for the new fellow,” said the manager. “He’s a real Titus to the Jews.”

  Pierce, who had also stood, paused for a moment. “How so?”

  “Why, the deified Titus razed Jerusalem, and this one’s driving them out of their houses in Rome. About time, I think.”

  “Tiberius did the same,” Aquilius said. “He sent four thousand to Sardinia.”

  The manager grinned. “This fellow’s just killing them.”

  They pedaled out onto the road. In the early afternoon, most travelers had stopped to eat and sleep; Pierce and Aquilius had the road to themselves for long stretches.

  After a few minutes they overtook a heavy ox-drawn wagon heading south. Three soldiers stood in the back, guarding a huddled crowd of women and children, most of them well dressed and with the bedraggled ruins of careful coiffures. Pierce met the eyes of one of the women, and realized they must be prisoners; he paused, gripped the side of the wagon, and let it pull him along on his bike.

  “Hail, friend,” he said to the driver. He was another soldier, stubble-faced and squinting. “Who are these people?”

  “Enemies of the new emperor, they tell me. Are you with that Praetorian officer?” Aquilius had dismounted and was walking his bicycle on the other side of the wagon.

  “Yes; we’re bound for Rome with dispatches.”

  “And we’re bound for Rome with a lot of rich harlots and their brats,” laughed the driver. His prisoners did not respond to the insult. The three soldiers in the back looked bored and tired. “They’re friends of the Hesperians and the old emperor. Tried to run away when the fun started.”

  “How so, friends of the Hesperians?”

  “They sent their children off to learn sorcery across the sea, or sold Hesperian goods.” He looked again at the bicycles and cleared his throat awkwardly, sensing he might have offended dangerous people. Aquilius studied the prisoners’ faces intently, but recognized none. Then he looked across the wagon at Pierce, who nodded and smiled.

  “Are any of you women able to drive a wagon?” Pierce asked. They looked at hi
m fearfully. Finally, one young woman, probably the slave of the older woman beside her, raised a timid hand. “Good girl!”

  “What do you care?” the driver asked irritably. Pierce pulled his Mallory out and shot him at low impact. Two seconds later the three guards toppled over the back of the wagon. Pierce pointed to the slave woman.

  “Get up here and turn this wagon around,” he ordered quietly. “Head back north, or east. And good luck.” Round-eyed and terrified, the woman stepped up onto the driver’s bench and grasped the leather reins. The two oxen reluctantly turned, aided by Aquilius.

  The driver’s mistress, a handsome woman with gray-streaked black hair, climbed up beside her maid. “You’ve done us a service.” she said. “Give me your names.” “Another time, mistress,” said Pierce with a smile.

  “The men will be unconscious for about an hour. I hope that gives you enough time.”

  “We’ll make sure it does. Come on, Vipsania, lay on that whip! Our thanks, gentlemen!”

  Pierce and Aquilius waved, then dismounted and dragged the four unconscious men off the road and into the weeds growing between the gutter and a brick wall, where they would be less conspicuous.

  “That could have been risky,” Aquilius said as they headed south. “We were lucky not to be seen. Why did you do it? We might have gotten into a serious fight. The women are likely to be caught again anyway.”

  “I said we protect our own.”

  *

  The crowded countryside, however industrialized, was still countryside; where the Via Flaminia entered the Aurelian Wall, Rome began. Aquilius stopped them a kilometer or so north of the Flaminian Gate. The road ahead was jammed with people, some trying to get into the city and others hurrying out of it.

  “Why the crowds?” Aquilius asked a young man being carried in a litter by eight sweating slaves.

  “The Praetorians are checking everyone,” the young man drawled. “Haven’t you heard about the emperor?” He waved languidly as the slaves carried him north.