John Roberts - The River God

The first one bulled in like a street brawler, and my punch, instead of smashing his jaw, just ripped his cheek open to the bone. He screeched and wrapped one arm around me, jamming his knife into my rib cage. I didn’t bother to block, but instead brought my own dagger up under his chin. It was like getting kicked hard in the side, but the mail shirt I wore beneath my tunic held. His chin, on the other hand, didn’t even slow my blade down. It went in to the hilt, piercing his brain, and he was dead before he hit the fioor.

Behind me I heard a blade ring against Hermes’s stick and knew that the boy was dueling with a more skillful opponent this time; but I had no attention to spare, for Marcus Caninus was almost on top of me and I was still trying to drag my dagger free of his friend, who seemed reluctant to let it go.

I let the hilt go and brought up my bronze-plated knuckles to knock aside Caninus’s first short, vicious jab. He had seen what had happened to his accomplice’s stab and didn’t bother to go for my body. He was trying for my neck as if he wanted to behead me. His weapon was a large sica with a blade curved like a boar’s tusk, and it looked eminently suitable for the task. With his other hand, he grabbed my right shoulder in a grip like a blacksmith’s tongs.

I went for his knife wrist with my free hand while I tried to knee him in the crotch, but he was an old brawler and too canny to fall for that one. He turned and caught my knee with his own thigh. I got him in the ribs with the caestus , and he grunted as one or two of them broke; but I lacked the distance and the firm stance for a full-strength punch. I had his wrist in my right hand, but that blade was getting closer all the time. I hit his ribs again, but by now he was pressing me against the railing so hard that the blow had no power. The face above me looked as if it were carved from oak, cruel and unfeeling as a crocodile’s.

I heard the unmistakable sound of smashing bone, and I hoped it was Hermes dispatching another opponent rather than the other way around. I certainly wasn’t doing well where I was. I stomped on one of Caninus’s feet, and this brought a groan of pain; but I was barefoot so the damage wrought was minimal. I knew I could feed him weak body blows all day, and I didn’t have all day. I fell back and let my grip weaken. The knife came up for the kill, his elbow rose, and with what strength I had left, I brought my caestus up into his armpit, trying for that spot which, if struck correctly, paralyzes the arm, sometimes the whole side, and can even render a man unconscious. Of course, placement is everything. If I missed by an inch, I would die in the next second.

His eyes bugged out, and he screamed. The wide blade fell from his numbed fingers, and I wrestled him to the railing. He was too heavy for me to lift, but a moment later another pair of hands were assisting me and Marcus Caninus made the biggest splash yet. Hermes and I were about to congratulate each other when the fioor shuddered and something gave way beneath us.

Horrified, gripping the railing for support, we saw the support work that Manius Florus and his crew had planted there the day before disengage, torn away by the rushing fiood, the big timbers shooting to the surface like sporting porpoises. The people lining the Sublician Bridge shouted with astonishment. They didn’t get to see a thing like this every day. I wondered whether they had been following the fight, or if we were just a trivial part of the spectacle that was Rome in a disaster.

We almost fell as the whole side of the theater began to sag.

“Let’s go!” Hermes shouted. “It’s beginning to break up!”

“No,” I said. “There’s still one to go!” I placed a foot against the face of the man I’d stabbed, grasped my hilt, and yanked the blade free. “Get out of here. I’ll attend to this and be with you shortly.”

I lurched for the crazily leaning steps and half-dragged myself up by the handrail. The theater seemed to be in continuous motion now. I wondered if Scaurus had gotten clean away, but I doubted it. A fight always seems to last much longer than it really does. The whole little battle had taken no more than a couple of minutes. I came up on the second-?oor gallery but saw no one. A fiutter of clothing caught my eye, and I saw a foot disappear from the next staircase as someone made it to the gallery above. I followed.

On the third-?oor gallery, I caught up with him. Scaurus was leaning against a wall, a hand clasped to his brow, which was bleeding freely. During one of the theater’s lurches, he had struck his head on something, slowing him enough for me to catch up to him.

“Marcus Aemilius Scaurus,” I called, “come with me to the praetor!” His eyes widened with disbelief at hearing the old formula for arrest.

“Why didn’t those fools kill you? There were four of them! And what business have you arresting anyone? We have to be away from here! We can sort out the legalities at another time.”

“Sorry, it has to be now,” I said, lurching along toward him, my feet trying to slide out from under me on the slanting fioorboards. “You leave here only as my prisoner, and now I have yet another capital charge to lay against you, plotting the murder of a Roman official in the course of his-”

At that moment the theater gave its biggest lurch of all, and it began to slide. I dropped my dagger and wrapped my arms around a wooden pillar to keep from falling as there began a sickening, indescribable sense of unnatural motion, accompanied by the greatest cacophony of noises that had ever assaulted my ears. It was a blend of screaming, rending wood, pops, smashes and snaps, grindings, and, above all, a tremendous roar of rushing, hurling water.

The sliding seemed to go on forever; then it metamorphosed into a sort of whirling, rocking, leaping motion, and I saw the opposite bank of the river rising and falling as if in an earthquake. Then I realized what had happened: The theater wasn’t collapsing, it was ?oating!

Before my amazed eyes the scene began to turn and the Sublician Bridge moved slowly into view from my left. It was almost as if I were at the still center of things, and the world was moving around me. The people on the bridge were applauding in openmouthed joy, leaping into the air and cheering, as if this whole spectacle had been put on just for them.

Next to me I saw a pair of hands emerging from a hole in the fioor. It was Hermes, dragging himself up the last of the stairs. He clawed his way along the fioor and hauled himself up beside me.

“See what you’ve done!” he cried. “We could have got away!”

“Where is Scaurus?”

“Who cares! In a few seconds, we’re going to smash into the bridge; and if we’re going to live, we’ll need to be better acrobats than those Greek women last night!”

“They were Spanish!” I saw that he was right. Slowly and majestically, the theater of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was bearing down on the bridge like a ship about to ram. The people on the bridge were waking up to the fact and scrambling off it at both ends. But everyone on the embankments and the nearby rooftops was cheering and shouting as if the Greens were about to score the upset of the year in the Circus.

“Let’s get up on the railing,” Hermes advised, “but hug this pillar until the last moment.”

It seemed like a good idea, so the two of us stood barefoot on the rail while the bridge drew closer. I was sure we were going too fast and we would be hurled off the railing to our messy deaths, but I had forgotten about the breakwaters that protected the bridge supports. They were submerged, and when the underwater part of the theater struck them, its forward motion slowed, and through the soles of my feet I could feel the timbers of the building part like bones splintering in a numbed limb.