Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

Liam looked back down the rat run into their courtyard. There was food there. Several sacks of grain bought in at an extortionate price yesterday afternoon, a dozen or so loose chickens and, of course, their two ponies. Liam guessed Macro had about a hundred tenants in his apartment block, a hundred mouths to feed for however many days this crisis was due to last.

‘And they all know we’ve got food in here.’ Macro nodded at faces peering at them from the three storeys of small shuttered windows and balconies opposite. ‘Word’ll spread quickly enough. We’ll be fighting to hold on to it before long.’

Sal worked with the young man, a blond-haired slave from Gaul. She held the wooden stake steady as he sharpened the end into a spike. She guessed he was only fifteen, but it was hard to tell. His arms were all sinew and muscle, his face taut and lean. Not a square inch of flesh on him without a purpose. So unlike the puffy-faced friends she knew back in 2026.

‘Steady, please,’ he said, smiling at her fleetingly.

The bud translated that for her. ‘Sorry.’

He worked the blade of the knife honing the end of the stake to a sharp tip then took it from Sal’s grip and blackened and hardened it in the flames of a brazier.

‘People say you and friends comes from far away,’ said the boy.

Sal nodded. ‘Very far.’

He glanced at her again. ‘Someone whisper me… same place as the Visitors?’

She shrugged. ‘Not really.’

To say ‘yes’ would have invited a barrage of questions she wasn’t sure how she’d answer.

He looked at the stud in her nose. ‘Is this mark of slave?’

She lifted her hand and felt it self-consciously. ‘This? No… it’s just… decoration, I suppose. To make me look good.’

The lad picked up another stake and offered her one end to hold. ‘You look… different.’

‘Different?’ She looked down at herself. Her dark hoody, black drainpipe jeans and platform ‘docker’ boots were stored away in their room. She was wearing a sleeveless, burgundy-coloured tunic, hanging down to her shins, belted at the waist with a strip of leather, and sandals. No different from any of the other girls and women in the courtyard.

The young lad touched his own mop of curly hair. ‘Hair like… short like boy.’

She made a face. It wasn’t. If anything, it was too long. Her fringe seemed to hang in her eyes all the time. It had been far too long since she’d had it cut. But compared to every other girl or woman in this time, long hair pulled back and tied in braids that hung down to the small of their backs, yes… hers probably did look boyishly short.

‘I like it like this,’ she replied. ‘It’s the fashion where we come from.’

He cocked his head. ‘They says you home is call…’ He frowned with concentration as he tried to get the pronunciation right. ‘… A-me-ri-ca?’

America. Home? She smiled a little sadly. Not really.

‘I’m from a place called India,’ she replied. ‘Mumbai.’

‘ Marm… bye? ’

‘Nearly. Mumbai. ’

‘Is this… same place as… you friends?’

How was she going to explain that? No. It wasn’t. But then, she reminded herself, keep it simple.

‘Yes, sort of. Quite close.’

He stopped whittling the stake for a moment. ‘What is Mumbai like?’

She looked up at him, then at the courtyard, now filled with the apartment block’s tenants working together on make-do weapons and barricades. She looked up at lines of laundry strung across the skylight above them, stretched from balcony to opposite balcony. There were parts of Mumbai that looked like this still, shanty towns of corrugated iron and breeze blocks stacked precariously high and ludicrously close. Tens of thousands of impoverished migrants from the now submerged lowlands of Bangladesh living on top of each other. Each towering shanty-block sharing several dozen overloaded electrical feeds, a handful of water taps and communal toilets that channelled untreated human waste down on to the mucky streets below.

Sal sighed. She realized she came from a time almost exactly two thousand years after this particular here-and-now, and yet things back then, back home, had been getting so bad, so overcrowded, resources so scarce, food and sanitation so utterly shadd-yah poor… that this downmarket district of Ancient Rome looked almost like a step forward in time.

Almost.

‘It’s not so good,’ she replied. ‘I think we might have ruined the place we came from.’

‘What you mean?’

How to explain it all? ‘Too many people,’ she replied eventually. ‘Too many people wanting too many things… I think.’

He nodded as if he understood that. ‘Is like Rome, huh?’

Like Rome? She nodded. Rome fell eventually, didn’t it? Crashed and burned, overrun by Vandals and left as nothing more than smouldering ruins. Maybe he was right. Maybe the far future and Rome had a lot in common.

‘Yes, quite a bit like Rome.’

Just then she heard Liam’s raised voice across the hubbub in the courtyard. She couldn’t make out what he’d said, but by the shrill tone of his voice it didn’t sound like good news.

Maddy, who’d been talking with Bob, called out. ‘Liam? What’s up?’

‘We got company!’

Macro’s voice boomed even louder, a parade-ground bark that bounced off all four towering sides of the courtyard and turned every head in the middle. The babel-bud in Sal’s ear calmly translated his raucous cry into the relaxed, detached and emotionless voice of an elevator announcing a floor.

‹ Here they come!›

AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome

The palace was a quiet place normally. Caligula’s notorious orgies, his peculiar excesses tittle-tattled about by Roman tongues all over the empire, were a feature of his younger years. Some of the older veterans in the Guard had shared with Cato tales of the emperor’s extravagant behaviour after he’d first come to power. But they’d all agree that the Day of the Visitors was the day Caligula left that all behind him.

Since then the emperor’s halls had become a place where conversations were spoken gently, and the guards that patrolled anywhere near where they thought the emperor might be, stepped lightly and muffled as best they could the clank and clatter of their equipment.

The palace was a quiet place normally, Cato noted, but today it was as silent as a tomb. The palace personnel, slaves and freedmen were confined to quarters for their own safety. The only people within the imperial compound were Cato, Centurion Fronto and his century… and the three Stone Men Caligula had chosen to leave behind.

And where exactly have they got to? He didn’t like the idea of not knowing where those things were quietly lurking.

Cato did his best to look like an officer with duty on his mind, scouring the hushed, marble-floored hallways and private courtyards for any signs of intruders or looters. Out in the palace’s herb garden he squatted down over a sewer grating and checked the grating itself was secure. Not that he particularly cared. But appearances were everything.

His mind was elsewhere.

A messenger from Prefect Quintus had arrived only several hours after the Guard had set off in a long column of purple cloaks. His message was that cavalry squadrons scouting ahead of the column had already clashed in several light skirmishes with scouts from the Tenth and Eleventh Legions. And that they’d caught a brief glimpse of Lepidus’s column on the horizon. It seemed Atellus had successfully goaded the general into making his move.

Both forces would probably draw within a couple of miles of each other by noon, and then spend the remains of the day building temporary marching camps. Their men suitably rested overnight, the fighting would happen tomorrow.