Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘Aye.’

‘You know who said the very same thing?’ Maddy didn’t wait for him to pull out an answer. He wasn’t going to know. ‘Nazis, that’s who. Concentration camp guards.’

‘So, what are you saying we do, Maddy?’

She turned to Sal. ‘I’m saying I don’t know. I just don’t feel like trusting anyone right now.’

Liam nodded at that. ‘Let’s just get home, then?’

‘Let’s get home. If we can. And then we’ll figure it out from there.’

AD 54, outside Rome

Rashim had mentioned that the Exodus group had travelled most of the one-hour journey on a broad brick road. Winding the memory backwards, he said that it eventually became a broad dusty track. Two lanes, busy with cart and foot traffic. The old man had said it had taken them an hour… but they had travelled quite slowly because their multi-terrain vehicles were heavily laden: people crammed in below, equipment stacked all over. Slow, then. Not much faster than a person could jog. His words. Hardly precise.

But he did mention a range of hills. Nothing too spectacular, hills that would be on their right coming out of Rome. And one hill beyond a gently rolling valley with a notably flat top.

As it approached midday, Maddy scanned the horizon. There were hills ahead of them, as he’d said. And beyond their smooth outline, on the far horizon, the more distinctly sharp-edged silhouette of a range of mountains.

‘Rashim!’ she called out.

He twitched slightly on Bob’s back.

‘Give him a prod, Sal.’

She obliged.

He lurched, opened his eyes then howled at the bright daylight. His eyes instantly clamped shut. ‘ What is this? Where am — !?’

‘It’s OK! It’s OK!’ Sal reached up to calm him. ‘We escaped, remember?’

The old man winced and covered his face with his hands at the glare of daylight, or perhaps it was some sort of agoraphobia — a mortal terror of the infinite openness all around him. Maddy wondered how much of her sanity would be left if she’d spent seventeen years cooped up inside a large packing crate.

‘Rashim, over there… those hills? Are they the right ones?’

Bob eased him down to the ground and he shaded his almost completely shut eyes against the painful brilliance of the morning sun. ‘I… think… yes. Or maybe… I’m not sure.’

‘Come on! We need to be sure.’

His face looked pained as he studied the rolling line of hills to the right of the dirt road. Then his eyes widened as he spotted the flat-topped hill. ‘That one! There! You see it! Yes!’

Maddy followed the direction of his claw-nailed finger. The hills followed each other in almost symmetrical humps, some topped with villas, spilling hair-thin threads of smoke into the morning sky. But the one with the flat top was distinctive, as if a cheese-slice had scooped its crown off.

‘You sure?’

‘Yes! Y-yes! ’ His eyes narrowed, his mouth widened with a manic grin. ‘Needed a flat place! Big… open… flat! Yes? An open place to mark out! Yes! Me and SpongeBubba!’

‘SpongeBubba?’

Rashim ignored her. ‘That’s it! That’s it! That’s the place!’ His eyes were wet with tears. ‘I never thought… I… I…’

‘And how long have we got?’

‘He said three days last night,’ said Bob. ‘Which would mean we have two days now.’

Maddy wiped sweat from her eyes and squinted through scratched glasses at the distant hill. It wasn’t that much of a hike for them. An hour at most. Then, once they were certain they had the precise location, they desperately needed to find something to drink. Even spoiled water would do. Anything. She’d worry about disease some other time — when they got back home.

‘Are you sure Caligula doesn’t know where to come?’ asked Sal.

Maddy bit her lip. ‘Does he know, Rashim? Does he know where your people arrived?’

Rashim smiled. ‘Stories… and stories. Mr Muzzy and me — ’

‘Rashim! Does he know?’

He cocked his head. ‘We… kept secrets. We told… stories… we — ’

‘I’d take that as a no,’ said Sal.

Maddy reached out and grabbed Rashim’s thin arm. ‘But he knows it’s sometime soon? Doesn’t he?’

Rashim nodded.

‘And by now he’ll know you’re missing.’ Maddy frowned. ‘He’ll be looking for you, won’t he? Does he know the Exodus people travelled in from the north-east?’

Rashim closed his eyes. ‘The day the Visitors came… in chariots of gold…’ His sing-song reverie wandered off into gibberish again.

‘There is only one main road into Rome from that direction,’ said Bob. ‘It is this one.’

‘Then let’s get off of it!’ Maddy scanned the road in both directions. It was deserted, except for a pale speck kicking up dust a mile away. A solitary cart or trader. Hopefully. Or perhaps a Praetorian scout — one of many sent in every direction, along every road out of Rome, looking for them. She didn’t want to waste another moment finding out.

‘Come on,’ she said, pointing towards the flat-topped hill. She could see there were trees around the base of it, even though it was a bald hill on top. They could hide somewhere in there for a day or two; wait it out until Rashim’s advance party were supposed to arrive.

‘Let’s go.’

AD 54, outside Rome

‘Dry wood, that’s the secret,’ said Liam. ‘If it’s totally dried out, like charcoal, you don’t get any smoke at all.’

Maddy gazed at the fire. It was barely visible in the daylight. A few wisps of smoke from the cones and branches they’d thrown on, turning grey as transparent flames consumed them and the air above danced with the heat. There was, of course, the pleasant, always welcoming smell of a fire. It would carry, but no one was going to see where it was coming from. Certainly not from that road they’d left earlier.

She raised a hand to her eyes, and peered through the gently wafting evergreen branches of cypress trees at the road, two or three miles away. The weather was so dry this summer, anybody using it would kick up a plume of dust. She could see nothing.

Sizzling on a wooden spit were several wild hares Bob had caught for them, skinned from neck to lean shanks and naked except for furry heads and furry booties. Normally she’d be queasy at eating an animal she could recognize, but her mouth was salivating at the smell of them cooking, the savoury tang of crisping meat.

Rashim sat hunched over beside the fire, drooling at the glistening meat, chuckling at the sound of fat spitting into the fire.

Maddy glanced out once again through the branches of the hillside wood at the distant road. ‘I think we’re safe now.’ They’d seen a party of cavalry thundering along an hour ago, leaving dust trails behind them. From this distance they could have been anyone, but they’d seemed to have a purposeful, disciplined look about them.

Rashim had laughed gleefully as they’d passed by. Laughing that Caligula was going to miss his precious ‘rendezvous with Heaven’. They’d seen no one else since then, though. She looked at him curled over beside the fire. She studied the pitiful skeleton of a man. Malnutrition and complete darkness for so many years: she wondered how a human body could cope with that.

Downhill, through the trees, she could hear the faint splash of water. Bob and Sal were rinsing their tunics in a small brook. Clean water. Drinkable water, not like the rancid Tiber. They’d bring some back when they were done.

Maddy wandered over to where Liam sat, perched on a boulder that afforded him a view down the side of the hill. ‘I guess we ought to get some air to your wound.’ She nodded at the bandage tied firmly round his waist. There were a few spots of dark, dried blood that had soaked through. The wound must have opened while they were fleeing the palace, wading through sewage. Actually, as soon as they got back home, they were probably going to have to pump Liam so full of antibiotics he was going to rattle like a pill bottle.