TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome (11 page)

The crowd jeered and laughed at that. Not even a good-natured laugh. It was disgust at how little the old ex-senator had been prepared to fight for his life, to put on a good show for them.

He looked down from the imperial box at the crowd either side of him, at faces contorted with mockery and anger at the still twitching man down on the blood-spattered sand.

Mind you, how well would you fools fight, hmmm? Would you struggle heroically till your last breath?
He imagined the vast majority of them would have done what this weak old man just had: dropped his sword, fallen to his knees and pleaded for mercy until the lion casually swiped at him and knocked the fool on to his back.

He shook his head with disgust at the crowd.

So easy to be brave, isn’t it? When you’re sitting up there, safe, comfortable and entertained.

‘Caesar?’

He watched as the lion lazily crunched on the man’s skull, gnawing at it like a dog on a butcher’s scrap.

‘Emperor Gaius?’

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus turned to his freedman.

So few of the people around him used his name. Instead, to his face, it was usually a deferential term. However, when they thought they were beyond his hearing, it was the name that everyone used for him; the nickname that had followed him all his life from being a small boy.

‘Yes?’ replied Caligula.

‘Might I suggest we ought to proceed with the next entertainment?’

Caligula looked out at the crowd. Some of them were impatiently throwing stones down at the surviving lion and the headless body of the last of today’s
ad bestia
victims.

‘Yes, yes … of course; you can clear this lot away for the
gladitorii meridiani
.’

The man dipped his head and left the imperial box quickly.

Caligula settled back in his seat, alone again today. His mischievous, plotting sister Drusilla and her son, and old Uncle Claudius – family – he preferred them all to be kept well away from Rome. They were trouble he could do without.

He watched the midday sun beating down beyond the shade of his purple awning, the heat of it making the dirt in the arena shimmer.

On sweltering days like today, he missed the cool, crisp winter mornings of his childhood in Germania. Dark forests
of evergreens, trees laden with heavy snow. The sound of an army camp all around him, his father Germanicus’s voice barking orders to the men. And those men … those soldiers; stern-faced veterans who grinned down at him in his miniature replica of a legionary’s armour, at his small wooden sword, his little army boots – they regarded their general’s little boy as the legion’s mascot.

His nickname,
Caligula
– ‘little boot’ – that’s what the men around the camp affectionately called him. He sorely missed those times. The feeling of family. The sense of belonging.

To be an emperor was to be entirely alone.

Part of nothing.

Above everything.

Sometimes he actually longed for one of his dutiful subordinates to dare call him Caligula to his face. He wouldn’t be outraged by such a gesture. He wouldn’t discipline such a person. He’d
welcome
it, welcome that feeling … of being a little boy again, surrounded by giants of men who would squat down and politely ruffle his hair, regard him with genuine fondness.

The MCV ahead of them glided through the archway over the Via Praenestina, the road heading into the centre of Rome. The thoroughfare in front of them was empty of people, but littered with abandoned carts, rickshaws, dropped bales of goods. As Rashim’s MCV glided beneath the archway into the market square beyond, he had to admit that Stilson’s idea to pump out hundreds of decibels of awful rock music was a pretty good scare tactic. Personally he would have chosen something a little more melodic and sophisticated to announce their arrival, but whatever. It was certainly working.

Stilson’s voice came over the comms-channel. ‘Which way is it to the Colosseum?’

Rashim ducked down through the hatchway looking for Dreyfuss. He beckoned him to join him up in the hatchway. Dreyfuss clambered through the press of swaying bodies below, found the ladder and pulled himself up beside Rashim.

He pointed to the MCV ahead of them bobbing softly on its electro-magnetic field in the middle of the now-deserted market square. ‘Stilson wants directions to the Colosseum!’

Dreyfuss shook his head and shouted something back. It was lost amid the din of the pounding music. Rashim picked up a headset hanging on a hook beside him and passed it to the his-torian, gesturing for him to put it on his head.

‘My God!’ Dreyfuss’s tinny voice crackled over the comms-channel a few seconds later. Behind round-framed glasses his eyes widened. ‘My God! This is actually it! This is really Ancient Rome. This is incredible! Look at those wall decals! That graffiti over there! The –’

‘Jeez, who’s that squawking on the channel? That you, Anwar?’

‘No, Mr Stilson,’ answered Rashim. ‘I’ve got Dr Dreyfuss up here with me now.’

He could see Stilson’s head and shoulders ahead of them, turning round to look back at them.

‘Ah, good job. Dreyfuss, tell me which way do we go for the Colosseum?’

‘Uh, Mr Stilson, see … if this
is
in fact
AD
37, it won’t have been built yet.’

‘No Colosseum? OK, Dreyfuss, give me somewhere else we can go. Where’s the most public place we can gatecrash?’

‘Well.’ He scratched at his beard like a dog scratching for fleas. He looked at Rashim for inspiration. Rashim shrugged a
you’re-the-expert
at him.

‘Well now, the best place I can suggest … would probably be the Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri.’

‘Yeah? So where’s that?’

‘It’s in the Campus Martius District.’

They both heard Stilson curse impatiently. ‘Just give me a goddam left, a right or a straight on, OK?’

Dreyfuss pointed towards a broad cobbled thoroughfare branching off from the small square. ‘That road ahead of us, I think. It should take us in a generally south-westerly direction. Which is towards the centre of the city.’

‘Right.’

The MCV in front of them began to slide towards the broad
avenue. It was flanked on either side by rows of low shops –
tabernae
– their stone walls painted with a riotous variety of colours and murals, and fronted with awnings and stalls selling all manner of crafted goods.

Rashim watched pale faces looking out at them from the dark
tabernae
interiors. Wide-eyed expressions of terror. He wondered whether that was at the sight of the two large hovering vehicles, or the horrendous, wailing, banshee-like noise they were pumping out.

They proceeded slowly, steadily down the thoroughfare, the buildings on either side becoming brightly painted, two-storey structures of clay brick with uncertain-looking balconies of wood and wicker. He saw heads peeking from behind beaded fabric panels and wooden shutters, abandoned animals braying in the street, a baby left on its back in a doorway, pink fists clenching and unclenching above its squawking face.

They entered a second, larger market square. Rashim watched hundreds of people scatter, clay amphoras of olive oil and wine dropped, shattering and spilling their contents on the ground, chickens skittering nervously between the wooden legs of market stalls and packs of dogs barking a challenge as they back-stepped nervously into open-guttered alleyways.

Dreyfuss was grinning at their surroundings, grinning like a fox in a chicken coop. He instructed Stilson to bear left. ‘That avenue’s the Vicus Patricius, taking us past the Forum Traiani … the Palatinus on the left … the –’

‘We don’t need a history lesson, Dreyfuss,’ Stilson’s voice crackled. ‘Just the directions.’

Dreyfuss nodded. ‘Sorry … just keep on this road until we see the River Tiber, then we take a right and follow the river up into the Campus Martius District.’

The workers had cleared away most of the bloody remains from the
ad bestia
. The last wretched lion had been put out of its misery and fresh dirt sprinkled over the largest coagulating puddles of blood. The crowd were clearly restless for the next round –
gladitorii meridiani –
to begin, a fight between several sparring partners of convicted criminals. Man versus beast was one thing, but it was quite another to see two pairs of men fighting desperately for their lives. Particularly when it was well known that one of the convicts about to emerge into the arena was Vibius, the notorious child-strangler from the Esquilinus District.

Caligula rather fancied that if the man managed to survive his sparring partner, he would put on some armour, come down to the pit and face the murderer himself. The crowd would love that. He smiled.

The plebs are so easily pleased, aren’t they?

A roar of excitement began to roll round the amphitheatre as wooden gates opened revealing a dark tunnel down to the underground bowels of the arena and a pair of Praetorian Guards leading out two rows of terrified-looking men; a wretched collection of specimens.

He was about to turn and ask his slave, Gnaelus, for his armour to be readied in case the mood to participate in finishing off any squirming survivors took him when he heard, faintly, over the hubbub of the impatient onlookers around the stalls of the amphitheatre, a soft, rhythmic thumping, almost like a distant battle drum.

His lean face knotted with curiosity. ‘Gnaelus, can you hear that?’

The old slave nodded.

‘Now what do you think
that
is?’

He cocked his head. ‘Sounds like a marching drum, Caesar.’

Some other heads among the roaring crowd began to curiously turn one way then the other at the still faint but steadily increasing volume of that thumping.

The convicts meanwhile were now standing in the middle of the arena, the escort of Praetorian Guards withdrawing to the edges of the pit as a pair of slaves passed out an assortment of weapons to the criminals. Their minds on the prospect of imminent violent death, none of them yet seemed to have registered the growing noise.

Caligula stood up and leaned against the railing of the imperial box. ‘What is that?’ he uttered. ‘It really is getting quite irritating now.’

All of a sudden a flock of starlings fluttered and swooped across the sky above them, quite clearly startled by something. Heads all around the amphitheatre looked up at them, circling once above the arena and then fleeing over the walls and out of sight.

Caligula could hear the roar of impatient excitement for the next round giving way to a chaos of voices filled with curiosity and a growing anxiety at the noise and that sudden peculiar behaviour of the birds.

The thumping sound was now almost on a par with the noise of the crowd, a deep, slow, regular pounding, like a heartbeat. Accompanied by something else now. It sounded like a horn. No. In fact … like nothing he’d ever heard before, a note increasing in pitch, getting higher and higher, more insistent, like a roaring wind whistling with growing intensity.

Up until now he was damned if he was going to display any unease or urgent curiosity like the rabble in the stalls around him. But this cacophony, the thumping so loud his chest was beginning to vibrate, this growing whistling, wailing sound …?

Then shrill screams.

He turned to where they were coming from and saw something loom over the top of the highest row of stalls, something large. The size of those curious, grey, lumbering beasts from Africa, two of them in fact. But it was all angles, corners, plated like armour and the drab colour of a muddy river. It rose over the edge of the stalls and seemed to slide down just feet above the heads of panicking people fleeing their seats. Hovering – the air beneath it shimmering and churning like the air above a campfire.

The thudding was suddenly so much louder, Caligula could hear what sounded like a voice shrieking and wailing like a man tormented by a thousand demons. He dropped to his knees behind the parapet, his eyes bulging with terror.

The giant thing, not alive, not any kind of animal, he sensed that now – some sort of vast flying chariot perhaps? – finally slid over the last stall and down on to the arena floor, whipping up swirling clouds of sand and dust.

A second one of these leviathans appeared over the top wall of the amphitheatre, glided down across the stalls, now empty except for the writhing bodies of the trampled and wounded, finally coming to rest beside the first. Both olive-green leviathans
were hovering a man’s height off the ground, churning up storms of grit and sand into the thousands of terrified faces all around.

Finally the roaring wind sound began to drop in pitch and volume and both monsters settled gently on to the ground, the storm cloud of dust and sand settling around them. The deep booming thudding and the horrifying wailing continued, however, drowning out the hoarse screams of panic from all sides of the amphitheatre.

Caligula realized that beneath his imperial robes he had wet himself. Another childhood memory for him today.

Shame.

Rashim could hear Stilson’s voice over the comms-channel, guffawing like a frat-boy with a hall-pass. ‘Just look at ’em!’

Dreyfuss was grinning too. Drinking in the spectacle of the arena.

The combat unit leading the platoon, Lieutenant Stern, barked some orders to his men and they dropped down from the hulls of both MCVs on to the hard sand, setting up an ordered circular perimeter, kneeling, weapons raised, around both vehicles with quick, well-practised efficiency.

‘Can we cut this wretched noise now?’ said Rashim. ‘I can’t help but think we’ve made our point!’

Forty feet away, standing on top of the weapons turret of his MCV, he saw Stilson nod slowly. ‘I guess these dumb suckers have heard enough AC/DC. Yeah, OK, you can cut it.’

Rashim ducked down inside and gestured for the unit manning the console to turn the music off. He flipped a switch … and all of a sudden they were engulfed with silence. Complete, hear-a-pin-drop silence.