Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

Oh jahulla, not like this. Don’t let me die like this.

‘BOB!’ she screamed. ‘LIAM! HELLLLLPP! ’

Liam looked at Bob. They were watching people pour out of the rat run on to the avenue. Not a fleet-footed escape but a molasses-like spill of the staggering, crawling, coughing and retching. People clambering desperately over a growing bed of collapsed bodies.

‘That was Sal’s voice!’

Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative.’

‘Ah, Jayzus… we got to go in and pull her out!’

‘You must stay here, Liam,’ said Bob. He turned towards the clogged exit.

‘No! I’m comin’ with — ’

An iron grip held Liam’s wrist. He turned to see Macro. ‘Let your friend go, lad.’

Liam struggled to shake him off. But the Roman’s grip was far too insistent and strong. ‘Let him go, lad… if he’s truly made of stone, then he’ll live.’

Liam watched as Bob carelessly bulldozed his way through the emerging people and disappeared into the smoke spewing thickly out of the narrow rat run.

Above screams for help they could both hear the crackle of flames eagerly devouring the apartment block. Smoke, now growing a dark grey, pumped energetically out of seemingly every small window. The yellow-washed, clay plaster facade over the building’s clay bricks was beginning to crack under the heat and crumble to the ground in chunks. Bricks and brittle mortar too… breaking, crumbling and falling, like the decaying flesh of a dead body; a body decomposing in fast forward, rendered from living flesh to skeleton frame in minutes.

Liam’s weary, oxygen-starved legs buckled under him and he sat down heavily in the middle of the cobbled avenue, dropped, like a sack of coke off the back of a coalman’s cart. He wasn’t alone. The avenue was thick with others slumped on their knees, lying on their backs, gasping to fill their lungs with clear air.

Macro squatted down beside him, his eyes glistening with moisture. ‘Stupid,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Stupid, stupid people.’

They heard something collapsing deep inside the column of smoke. Perhaps a wall giving way, filling the courtyard with fractured fragments of heat-shattered clay brick and glowing spars of charcoaled scaffold poles.

Liam felt his cheeks grow wet, tears creating two clean paths down his soot-blackened face.

They’re dead in that. For sure. All of them.

The deafening clatter of collapse somewhere within the smoke ceased, to be replaced by the growing crackle and roar of flames. The stream of people crawling, staggering out of the smoke had become a dwindling trickle, one or two dropping as they emerged. Surely the very last likely to step out of the pall. As certain as he’d ever been about anything, Liam knew the rest of the poor, unfortunate souls caught up in that death-trap space were either suffocated by now, burned to death or buried.

His vision, blurred with tears, became a kaleidoscope of refracting stars and spears of light. He felt a hand lightly on his back, patting him gently, and the deep grunt of Macro’s voice far away offering a soldier’s ill-phrased words of comfort.

But all Liam could do was hear his own choice of words. Hardly any more comforting.

They’re gone… and it’s just me now.

Just me.

Selfish words, he realized. Selfish to grieve at being left alone like this. To cry like this just for himself. Maddy, Sal and Bob… not just friends, but family — more like family in truth than the faint photo-album memories he had of a mother and father, uncles and aunts.

Macro’s hand was still patting him.

If he’d had a greater presence of mind, been stronger, quicker, smarter… he should’ve reacted sooner. Left the stand-off over the barricade and gone to find the girls. There could have been a way out for them. They could have found another way out.

Macro’s hand was thumping his back more heavily. Not a flat pat, more like a fist. Hardly a comforting, soothing gesture. He realized the bud in his ear was calmly, insistently telling him something, telling him what the old Roman was now bellowing loudly, repeatedly.

‹ Look. Look. Look!›

Liam did. Wiped muck and tears from his eyes. His blurred, refracted vision cleared. He saw what he expected to see: the thick column of smoke spiralling up from the skeleton of Macro’s building and an avenue of soot-covered bodies.

But then he picked out the thick, round-shouldered outline of a bull charging towards him. Not a bull… it ran like a human on human legs. A minotaur, then.

No, not a minotaur. Those weren’t horns on top — he could make out that much. He wiped his eyes again and realized Macro, still pummelling his back, was cheering hoarsely.

The minotaur, an enormous black creature, came to a halt in front of Liam. Hefted two blackened humps — what he’d mistaken for horns — from its shoulders and on to the cobblestones, where both began to wheeze, cough and retch.

‘Minor burns and abrasions. There may be some minor scorching of the trachea and nasal passages. This will heal. But they will both be all right,’ rumbled the minotaur.

Behind them the complete front wall of the apartment building collapsed backwards in on itself, sending a mushroom cloud of sparks, ember and ash up into the sky.

‘Unlike your property, Lucius Cornelius Macro,’ added Bob.

Just then they heard the clack of standard army-issue, nail-soled sandals on the cobbles and the approaching rattle and clatter of armour and harnesses.

Macro turned to look up at Fronto. ‘You might have come a little earlier!’

Fronto gazed at Macro’s retirement investment, fully ablaze now. ‘It’s like this right across the whole city. Riots in every district.’ He turned to Maddy and Liam. ‘Cato sent me to get you.’

Maddy, still on her hands and knees coughing up globules of phlegm as black as tar, wiped her mouth and looked up at the officer.

‘You… you can get us in… into the emperor’s palace?’

Fronto nodded. ‘Right now… yes. If we hurry.’

AD 54, outside Rome

Caligula watched the ground, shifting and beetle-black: a thousand crows moving among the dead, more in the sky overhead swooping and buzzing the battlefield.

The dead stretched as far as he could see: the red tunics of dead legionaries; men from the Tenth and Eleventh dotting the olive-green grass of the hillside like wild poppies.

The deed was done before the sun reached midday. Two legions of men broken and routed within the space of an hour. Caligula had watched the battle unfold from the comfort of a wooden platform erected in the early hours of the morning. His small vanguard of Stone Men had formed the very tip of an advancing wedge that had plunged through Lepidus’s predictable chequerboard formation. The Stone Men were soon lost from direct sight in the melee, but their precise location in the press of men was never in doubt; it was the source of the screaming, the source of the greatest amount of movement in the middle of the glistening sea of helmets and armour.

After the brief battle, Caligula could actually trace the path they took by the wake of horrendously dismembered bodies; almost as if someone had gathered up men and bits of men and laid them out like a narrow carpet, a road of ragged flesh, splintered bone and dented metal.

Almost indestructible, those Stone Men, but not quite. Four of them had eventually been brought down by Lepidus’s men. A concerted effort by his archers, leaving them for a moment staggering pincushion figures, like human porcupines, until they’d finally collapsed. But by then, of course, the damage had been done, the legions’ formations were broken and the men were already beginning to turn and run.

Caligula glanced once more at the pitiful sight of so many good Roman legionaries dead on the field, carrion being pecked at by hungry birds. Difficult to savour victory for long when a sight like this was the aftermath. He sighed sadly then turned back round to face General Lepidus, kneeling, stripped of his armour and left with just his tattered and bloodstained tunic.