Edward Crichton - To Crown a Caesar

I frowned. It wasn’t like Varus to be so disorganized and messy. For as long as I’d known him, his toga had always been perfectly clean and wrinkle free, his face always shaven, and the few times I had visited his home in Rome, I was always impressed with his neatness and organization. He was a taciturn fellow, contemplative and scholarly, a man who had a place for everything and preferred everything in its place.

He was clearly in over his head with something.

I bent over and picked up a handful of his notes, written on a thick, stiff writing medium known as papyrus. Titling them towards the candle light, I tried to discern what was written.

After living in the future and spending years in the past, I had become fluent in both Latin and English, the latter of which I was sadly finding myself using less and less as time went on, as I almost always conversed in Latin these days, even around Helena and Santino sometimes. It was depressing to think of it as yet another piece of home that was slowly slipping away, knowing I would probably abandon English all together one day. If I ever had children, I hoped to pass it on to them. Maybe they could use it as a secret code or something, but that’s all it will ever be to them.

It must have been even worse for Helena, Bordeaux and Vincent, whose native languages had long been without use in the ancient world.

Unfortunately, the text was in neither language, and while some of the letters appeared familiar, most did not. I’d taken a year of Greek in college, and had brushed up on it a bit these past few years, so I could at least identify it when I saw it.

It wasn’t Greek either.

“What language is this?” I asked Varus.

“Hm?” He mumbled, pulling himself up from the bed. He had been lying on his stomach with his knees bent like a child’s as he searched behind the bed. “Oh, it’s Etruscan.”

“Etruscan?” I asked rhetorically, lost in thought. “You mean like…”

“Found it,” he said happily, holding up a clutch of papyrus in his hands.

“Found what?” I asked, not quite sure if I wanted to know. My plans were complicated enough. I didn’t need him adding anymore variables into the equation, and anything dealing with Remus’ orb would be a big one.

“Do you remember the document I discovered with Remus’ orb?” he asked.

He looked at me and didn’t continue. He seemed to be waiting for an answer to a complicated question. I wondered if he actually thought I could forget.

“Uh, yah. Its kinda hard not to,” I replied, trying to keep the sarcasm from my voice.

“Right. Good. Then you will be happy to learn that I have completed a rough translation of most of it.”

“Really?” I asked in abrupt interest. “What does it say?”

“Sadly,” he said, suddenly squeamish, “I have found nothing that describes the orb’s origin. Nothing I have translated so far has offered any insight into what it’s used for or where it came from, but there is still more to translate. However, it could take my entire life to finish it, and I am disappointed to admit that what I have translated is not fully reliable.”

“So you basically founding nothing then,” I pointed out, perhaps a bit too obnoxiously.

“That is inaccurate,” Varus countered. “While I have yet to understand its true purpose, I was able to discover that the way in which you used the orb to arrive in Rome was not how it was intended to be operated.”

Before I responded, I had to remind myself to keep my thoughts succinct. Varus still thought we were from a distant land, but still from this time period, and that’s how it had to stay. While he was probably the only Roman I could truly trust, even more so than Galba, he was too close to Agrippina. I couldn’t let that information fall into her hands. All it would take is for her to think that maybe Varus had more information than he was letting on, and that he needed a little more coaxing before he gave it up.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “It seemed to have worked pretty good last time I checked.”

Varus waved a hand at me in an irritated fashion. “You listen, but you do not hear, Hunter. I’m surprised. After our first meeting, I had thought you to be more than just a mere barbarian, unlike that savage over there,” he said indicating to Santino.

Hearing attention directed at him, Santino’s head snapped around with a big grin on it.

“Think,” Varus continued, tapping temple. “You are right that it did indeed perform a most fascinating function, in this case, bringing you to Rome from wherever you are from, but did it not seem almost… random? Crude? It seems to me that your arrival was little more than blind luck. What good does it do Remus to have a handful of advanced people find their way to Rome five hundred years after his death?”

“Well, maybe something went wrong with his plans,” I offered. “He thought he could use the orb somehow but something happened, and he never got around to using it.”

“Exactly. But for what then? Do you remember the message and how it referred to only those of his own blood possessing the ability to use the orb? If that were so, then at the time, only he and Romulus could wield its power. So why didn’t they?”

I cupped my chin in my left hand and thought about it. Varus’ logic was sound, but he didn’t have enough information to create an effective hypothesis. From his perspective, the orb didn’t work through time. He had no idea what the thing really does. But, it did make me think about one thing, something I hadn’t thought of before. If Remus knew how to wield the power of the orb, which he clearly must have, how come when Varus first touched it years ago, the first person to do so in possibly five hundred years, did he not get sent back to the days of Remus, instead of me showing up, also not in the days of Remus? Or how come he didn’t go to the future?

“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I believe your experience was merely an accident of circumstance,” he answered. “It is a transportation device, yes, but I do not think the way you used it was the way it was supposed to work.”

“Then how?”

Varus shrugged. “That, I do not know, but I am convinced it is meant to be used in a different way. Unfortunately, I have not seen the orb in years. Once it was brought to me during the battle outside of Rome, I had it taken to Galba’s praetorium . It was gone when I went looking for it after the battle.”

“Someone stole it?” I asked.

“I believe so. It has put me in a very limited position. However, I have transcribed the odd mantra found at the bottom of the manuscript and I want you to have it. I am confident that it will be important one day.”

Varus held out the scroll of papyrus he had found, and I tentatively accepted it. Unrolling it, I noticed a small paragraph written out twice.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“I do not know,” he answered. “It reads as gibberish to me. Many of the words have no Latin equivalent that I have been able to discover, and the rest of it speaks of mathematics and calculations, something I am certainly not well versed in.

“But as you can see, I have provided the original Etruscan and then transcribed it phonetically for you at the bottom. I still need time to work on a proper translation, but I fear I may never succeed. At times I almost wish Claudius was still alive. He was the only other man I knew who could read Etruscan, and his vocabulary far outweighed my own.”

Gears in my mind churned at his words. I’d almost forgotten that in the original timeline, Claudius had been one of a handful of people who could still read and write Etruscan. Something about that seemed important, but I wasn’t sure what. I shook my head and returned my attention to Varus.