Praetorian Series [4] All Roads Lead to Rome (7 page)

She pulled back, her lips pouted.  “I know you desire me, Jacob.  Firing that rifle excited me in ways I didn’t think possible, and I know it does the same to you.  It is obvious that the feeling is part of the rush that you have described when going into battle.  It stirs things inside me, and I want us to experience it together.”

“Back off, Agrippina,” I said rudely, twisting up and past her leaning form so that I could sit up.  I struggled at the once simple movement, a reminder of just how frail my body had become in recent days, for reasons I couldn’t immediately understand.  Agrippina sat up as well and wrapped her arms around me.  She pressed her lips against my neck, and I found myself unwilling to push her away.

She kissed me a few times, but didn’t go any further.  “I understand your reticence, Jacob,” she said, her voice a silky purr.  “I understand what you fear, but let us at least take advantage of this moment.  If you are not yet ready, at least let me…” she trailed off, using her hand to slowly rub my chest, her hand soft and so unlike the calloused hands of the woman from my memories. 

Then then her hand brushed down my abdomen, the spell was broken, and I whirled away from her, albeit sluggishly.

I rose slowly to my feet and looked down at her, but I wasn’t angry.  Not at her nor at myself.  I wasn’t sad or frustrated or emotional in any way.  I simply didn’t need her.  I didn’t need her love and I didn’t need her intimacy.

So instead of reacting, I simply lowered my hand to help her to her feet.  For her part, she didn’t look upset either as she reached out to grab it, allowing me to lift her up.  She rose swiftly, pressing herself firmly against me and looked up at me with those wide, unblinking eyes again.

I ignored our proximity and glanced down range.

“Let’s go check out our handiwork.”

***

The trip from our sniper hide to the target area probably took us longer than it should have, but I’d decided to use it as another training opportunity.  Agrippina and I crept down the hill and toward the stream, our eyes constantly scanning left and right in a two hundred degree arc so that the two of us covered one another’s flanks.  She held her small but reliable 9mm pistol in a two handed grip out in front of her, again just as I’d taught her weeks ago, and I held a familiar, but also completely alien, M4 in my hands.

I’d used a weapon almost identical to it once before, but this one felt foreign.  It didn’t possess the custom handgrip and vertical foregrip like my old HK416, nor did it have the ever-reliable night vision scope or collapsible stock that had made it both versatile and comfortable.  About as basic as a rifle came, the M4 wasn’t even equipped with a reflex scope, meaning I had to rely on its standard iron sights alone.

It was a pitiful excuse for a weapon in the hands of a seasoned operator like myself, but I’d long ago learned that relying on technology or fancy equipment was the first step toward certain doom.  When it came down to the bare necessities, when life pushed a man up against a wall and into a corner, bearing down on him with all its overwhelming might, it was all that a man possessed inside him that saw him through.  It was his logical mind, conditioned physique, gained experiences, and, most importantly, a sense of will and purpose that ensured everything thrown at him was shrugged off as easily as one would remove a hat.

An individual determined to do whatever was necessary, no matter the cost, could stare life or fate or destiny or divine providence in the face and tell it to go fuck itself.

Just as I’d been doing for the past month, with Agrippina as my equally resolute companion.

So as the two of us closed on the stream and our downed targets, I focused my mind on nothing more than protecting us from possible attackers, and continued my evaluation of Agrippina’s performance.  But like her shooting acumen, her tactical and defensive know-how had grown immensely in the short time we’d been together.  It certainly helped that she understood just how vulnerable the two of us were out here, and knew that the best way to protect the both of us was for her to have the ability to protect herself.

And she’d grown quite adept at it.  She walked one foot in front of the other, each step landing on the outer edge of her foot, noiseless and stealthy, her eyes constantly focused on the horizon around her.  Occasionally, she’d lift her pistol in reaction to a noise off in the distance, but she wasn’t jittery, just cautious.

I had trained her well.

The only problem I could find was that she’d abandoned her tight fitting, skin revealing dresses for more suitable attire.  It was unfortunate but probably for the best.

Our targets were in sight now, their forms easily distinguishable from the muddy grass beneath them.  Figuring we were alone in this small clearing at the bottom of a low valley, I shrugged off the large pack I carried on my back and gently dropped it to the ground. Free of the heavy burden, I waved my hand to catch Agrippina’s attention, and when I did, I slowly lowered my palm toward the ground, signaling her to take a knee and cover me.  She complied immediately and I continued forward, approaching the trio of downed targets even more cautiously than before.

Shouldering my rifle, I stepped up to the nearest target and prodded it with my boot.  It didn’t move, not even a twitch, so I continued on to the next two, my attention alert and ready, but they too were clearly dead.  I turned back to Agrippina and signaled for her to fall in.  Moments later she was at my side, the two of us staring down at the target she’d eliminated.

I pointed at the wound just at the edge of its chest, near its armpit.  “Not a bad shot, but you should have waited until he offered his full profile for you to target.”

Agrippina turned a hard expression on me.  “He is dead, is he not?”

“That’s not the point,” I snapped, meeting her gaze.  “I told you to shoot him in the chest, not his flank.”

“He is
dead
,” she said again, leaning in at me angrily.  “Is he not?”

I leaned in as well, ready to yell at her as I raised a finger to thrust against her chest, but then I realized what she was trying to do.  Her face appeared angry, but those large, unblinking eyes remained unchanged from how they had seemed earlier, when she had continued her relentless pursuit to elevate our relationship.

I turned away from her and back to the corpses of the three men who’d decided to pick this particular spot to camp for the night.  Wrong place, wrong time, and I didn’t give a shit.  Maybe once, but not anymore.  They were just three guys who no longer mattered to the continuity of this timeline anymore.  Whether they’d died today, or whenever they were originally supposed to have died in a timeline without me in it, simply didn’t matter.  Time travel didn’t change anything, or so I’d learned.  My timeline was preserved somewhere in time and space, and I no longer cared about this reality at all.

I knelt beside the nearest man and began the process of searching him – standard operating procedure for those in my line of work.  He wore numerous layers of tight fitting animal skins around his chest, one such layer made out of what looked like a wolf skin, another a deer, and there even seemed to be a bear in there somewhere.  I ran a hand through each fold of clothing, finding nothing of interest.

“Who do you think they were?”  Agrippina asked.

I didn’t answer as I continued my search, running my hands up his legs, along trousers made from simple linen but lined with more animal skins.  Again I found nothing, and I grunted in dissatisfaction over not only finding nothing of worth, but also nothing to ascertain whether this man had been a simple innocent or a wandering vagabond looking for trouble.

He was clean, so I moved to the second man.  Like the first, his face was covered in a thick, dirty, brown beard that was so untidy that he made a caveman look like a GQ cover model.  Absently, I ran a hand over the similar beard I had recently grown myself.  Beards had grown out of style among my SEAL compadres around the time I was deployed on my first tour with the Teams, and I’d never attempted to grow one back in high school or college either.  However, when I’d been released from Merlin’s prison only weeks ago, I’d found myself with a fairly thick bit of growth, and I’d decided to let it go and see what happened.  I’d had the benefit of spending an entire month stuck in limbo, not having to deal with a scratchy beard.  Now, it was pretty full, and I was damn proud of it.  Maybe I was like Samson, drawing my strength from the length of my hair, which in my case included the hair on my face as well.

I gave my cheek a quick scratch as I thought, then continued my search.  I rolled him over and patted down the man’s back, finding something hidden beneath a fold of animal skin.  I reached in and gripped something solid. I had to yank on it roughly as it was caught in his clothes, and it finally tore free, revealing a rather nasty looking battle axe.

I presented it to Agrippina, who nodded at it, and I tossed it aside.  The rest of his body was as clean as the first man’s, but when I set to work searching the third man, I immediately found a grouping of five money purses strung along his belt along with a pair of sharp daggers concealed along his waist band at his back.  Pulling one from it sheath, I cut the string of one purse and caught it before it spilled its contents to the earth beside him.  Peeking in, I found an impressive number of Roman coins mixed with bits of gold and silver and other coins that could have come from anywhere.

I held it up for Agrippina, who peeked inside.

She flicked her eyes at me.  “Assassins?”

“Possibly,” I conceded, scooting over so that I could grab my pack.  I opened it and placed the money purse inside, then began cutting the others loose as well.  “But more likely mercenaries or maybe just members of a local war band up to no good.  I don’t think they were looking for us specifically.”

“How is that you are so certain?”  She asked, offering me a hand to help me up, which I gratefully accepted.  She looked up at me as I shouldered my pack again.  “You’re still a wanted man, and your beard is hardly an adequate disguise.  And it would not surprise me to find myself hunted by some as well.”

“I’m not certain,” I said, clasping the pack’s support strap together across my chest.  I leaned down and picked up my M4 and tossed its sling over my neck.  “But even if I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter.  They clearly weren’t upstanding citizens of the Roman Empire, and we probably did some poor sap in the future a big favor by taking care of these guys.”

“Is that how you’ve justified the past six years of your life?”  She asked, a bit of vitriol in her voice.

I couldn’t help but snap at her.  “You’re damned right!” 

I glared at her for a moment but she returned my stare without concern, so I quickly turned away and set off back toward where we’d tied up our horses and stashed our gear.

Agrippina ran up and fell into step beside me.  “Is that so?”  She demanded, stomping her feet as she walked.  “How is it so easy to be flippant about your continued interference in my world?  Interacting with those whose destinies never had anything to do with you at all, and those who were supposed to have lives that did not include you in them?  Going against the will of the gods as you see fit, acting the part of juror and executioner in tandem, for no other reason than to mitigate your ill feelings over your own poor choices!”

Instead of trying to contain the anger welling deep within me, as I had often done in recent months, I whirled on Agrippina and backhanded her.  An action like that would have eaten me up inside only a few months ago, but now I no longer seethed with continued self-hatred nor felt distraught over the act of striking an unarmed woman.  I simply felt the sweet release the action had offered, and waited for what would happen next.

Agrippina took the hit like a champion, reacting to the blow by moving with the direction of the strike, and refusing to fall to the ground.  She simply raised a hand to her struck face and turned angry eyes on me, eyes that didn’t seem hurt or even pained in the slightest, and I was again reminded of how much I appreciated the fierceness in her.  I hadn’t held much back from my blow, and I knew it should have hurt her incredibly, so either she was tougher than she looked or I’d lost more strength than I wanted to admit.

She stared at me, her eyes no longer filled with lust and seduction.  “You know I am right, Jacob.  You no longer care about anything but your own self-pity.  All you want to do is return home, abandoning everything you so heedlessly set into motion.”

“You’re no different,” I said as I restarted my walk back toward our camp.

Agrippina followed.

“Except we now know nothing can affect your home,” Agrippina argued soundly, “but everything you do here affects mine.”

“Then why are we here, Agrippina?” I asked, my eyes forward.  “Why didn’t you just kill all of us back in Britain?  You know you had the opportunity.”

“I have already explained on numerous occasions that I wish to change my persona,” she reminded me for the thousandth time since our reunion a few months ago.  “I wish us to work together so that we can more efficiently find the means to send you home,
as well
as restore my empire to its proper path.”

“I had a good team doing just that a month ago.”

“And it was your idea to leave them behind, Jacob.  Not mine.”

I paused in my tracks, again reminded that she was right, but then picked up my step again.  “That’s beside the point.  I’m doing this for them.  Galba will keep them safe while he conquers Britain, giving us the time we need to do what we need to do.  Once we have the red orb, we can all go home and leave you alone.”