Rome

by Matthew Thayer

  The dogs had been trying to pull my arms off earlier. Now they stood rock still, quivering in anticipation. This wasn’t a frolic. It was a hunt! All I had to do was unclip their leashes and say, “Get ‘em!”

  The dogs tore after the wild pigs. Working as a team as they were trained, the dogs didn’t engage the dangerous pigs immediately, but sprinted straight for the back wall to seal off their escape. Outweighed three-to-one by the boars, the Molossians badgered the hindquarters of the wiry-haired animals and refused to be cornered where they could hooked by the yellow tusks.

  Distracted by the dogs, the milling boars began to resemble porcupines as one arrow after another found its mark. I circled around the chaos and was nearing the dogs when a giant boar that had managed to remain unscathed burst for the hill. Romulus and Remus were too stupid to know the hunt was over, that they could afford to let a survivor go free. Their job was to protect the wall.

  Swinging its ponderous head in deadly arcs, the boar tried to gut the two dogs as they closed on its rear flanks. Spinning left and then right, wicked tusks flashing, the boar grunted as the dogs clamped down on its haunches and folded their bodies away from the ivory knives.

  Could the archers not see? Were their arrows spent? Taking a deep breath, I ran up between the two dogs, leaned over Remus and plunged the point of my blade into the smelly beast’s ribcage. I’d seen Indian hunters kill boars with a knife, but never expected to employ the risky technique myself.

  Tullia and the cavalryman were very impressed. They had indeed run out of arrows and thought the dogs were lost.

  At the final tally, six adult boars and four juveniles were harvested. The cavalryman stayed long enough to help butcher the meat and cart it up to the barn. Over the next few days, the entire household, Tullia included, worked round the clock to turn those boars into salted hams, sausages, fat jerky, pickled pigs feet, brined brains and several Roman delicacies I would have to be extremely hungry to eat.

  The unexpected bounty could not have come at a more opportune time. Rather than borrowing money to buy seed, Tullia was able to trade four large hams and a string of peppery sausage for all the farina and oat seed the farm required.

  Having three staff members gone to the gods meant a greater workload for everyone. Tullia was considering hiring more labor and came to me for counsel. Slowly she has come to trust my judgment. I suggested, as long as she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty and not taking afternoon naps, she could get by with what she had until harvest season. Perhaps Quintus would be able to loan us a few men when it came time to bring in the grain and forage.

  We settled into a grueling routine of chores from sunup to far past sundown. The maids became outdoor laborers as they helped us plow and plant the fields, trim berry bushes, mend fences and endlessly battle to keep ahead of the weeds. Whenever a mare was ready to foal, Tullia and I would retire to the barn to see the valuable mother and baby through.

  For jollies, in my little spare time, I began felling trees that cast shade over the fields or had grown too close to the house. It’s amazing how fast a 10-foot sapling becomes a towering oak when nobody is paying attention.

  Tullia says the farm is in the best shape it has been in years. Now that the crops are planted, we’ve been squaring away the grounds, pathways and buildings to make everything ready for the return of Quintus and his birthday celebration.

  That’s what made it so disappointing when the decurion arrived this afternoon and didn’t share one comment on our improvements or the fact that there were 19 healthy colts and fillies grazing in the pasture.

  He just wordlessly handed me his horse’s reins and motioned Tullia to follow him into the house. It’s past midnight and they have yet to step back outside.

  From the log of Hunter

  Ethics Specialist

  64 A.D.

  “Why in the name of Caesar did you chop down all my trees?” Quintus roared as he entered the barn. “Come summer we’re going to melt without their shade. Our home will be hotter than Vulcan’s forge!”

  The assault caught me completely off guard. I had been saddling his horse as instructed by the maid who delivered my breakfast of bread and scrambled eggs. Rounding the corner of the stall, I saw Quintus had hoisted my plate and was wolfing my food.

  “There you are. Come here and explain yourself!”

  A night of rest had done wonders for the man. In place of the dusty, sweat-stained clothes and dented, rusty armor he arrived in, he now wore a white dress tunic overtopped by finely polished mail armor and intricately decorated arm guards and greaves. Filling the spaces between the metalwork designs, the armor’s blood red enamelwork matched the long, single plume of horsehair sprouting from the highly polished helmet under his arm. As I approached, his angry scowl was replaced by a broad smile.

  “Father’s last words to me were, ‘Cut down those damn trees.’ I never got around to it and then we became spoiled by the shade. You’ve done good work here my friend.”

  My friend? Do friends scare the merde out of you while stealing your food? Whatever irritation I felt was short-lived. It’s impossible to remain sniffy with Quintus when he is in a jovial mood. Judging by the jokes and riddles he inserted into our short conversation, the weight he was carrying upon arrival must have been shrugged.

  It was obvious Tullia had provided a thorough briefing as Quintus was very much up to speed on the farm’s current operations. He divulged that during their torture, Perdix and Nauta both laid blame at my feet.

  “Liars to the end,” he scoffed. “Linus and I stopped by the former headman’s house on the way here. He and his wife, the old housekeeper, live not too far outside the city walls. To our surprise they were mourning the death of their daughter Ancilla and son-in-law Perdix. Tullia and I did not know there was a familial connection between them. Did you?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Due to our unannounced visit, I was able to recover several personal items they had pilfered from our family over the years. The bastard had them on display over his fireplace. Oh, how I wanted to run my sword through their guts, but Linus and I have enough on our slates at the moment.”

  Looking down at the dish in his hands as if he had no idea how it got there, he dropped into a quiet moment of reflection. Setting the plate on the table, he moved to stand in the doorway and study the pasture with its growing herd of horses.

  “It appears I’ll be leaving Italia for a few years,” he said. “At least that long. I want you to consider staying on and helping my sister. We could use a new headman.”

  Before I could decline, he motioned me to silence

  “Think about it. Running a farm is something you seem well suited for. You could make a comfortable life here in Rome.”

  Placing his helmet over his head, he strode into the barnyard.

  “Bring my horse around. If I do not leave immediately, I’ll be late for lunch with Linus’ father and mother.”

  He hadn’t been gone 10 minutes before Tullia was in the barn fighting to stave off tears. Her story of woe was slow and halting to start, but ended in a rush. It took her a while to overcome the impropriety of confiding family secrets to a servant. This wasn’t idle gossip she was sharing but thunderbolts.

  Linus, she said, has become a pawn in a political war of wills between his senator father and Emperor Nero. In a nutshell, the Emperor wanted to build a new palace and the father’s faction in the Senate had the votes to deny him. Among the political fallout was a reposting for Linus. He received orders of transfer to the Legions in Iberia. Finding the orders could not be changed, Quintus requested his own transfer. They are both scheduled to leave aboard ship in mid-July.

  “Soldiers who transfer to Spain rarely return,” she sobbed. “They either die there or put down roots and stay.”

  I’d heard the same, but knew better than to say so.

  “The senators should just give Nero what he wants,” she said with conviction. “The Empire has prospered und
er his rule.”

  “My Lady, it is not my place to speak of politics, but one hears stories about Nero’s temper. They say he has killed many of his family members, including his own mother.”

  “They should be careful of what they say. There has never been any proof of those claims, not that I’ve heard of at least. The Emperor dismisses the news as fake and I believe him. He’s the Emperor, it is his duty to the Gods to care for the land and its people!”

  Keeping my expression blank, I offered a non-committal, “Uh-hum.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  TRANSMISSION:

  Hunter: “You stayed.”

  Duarte: “Yes, I did.”

  Hunter: “Why? You could be halfway to your husband by now.”

  Duarte: “I’m not sure.”

  From the log of Maria Duarte

  Chief Botanist

  Despite strong misgivings about moving a spinal patient, I transferred Hunter to a spot alongside the smoldering embers of the departed clan’s cook fire. Lifting him into a fireman’s carry over my left shoulder, I noticed how desiccated the zebras he had been leaning against were. Compared to other animals starting to swell and stink nearby, Hunter’s field had tapped these dry. I bet they weighed less than half of their original weight.

  Superficially, Hunter already showed signs of healing. Gone were the swelling of his broken nose and the black eyes. Bloody air bubbles no longer emerged from his nostrils and lips.

  Wading through a black sea of vultures, I set him by the fire and hustled off to collect wood. In 14 round trips, I assembled the makings of a substantial bonfire.

  “You must carry on without me,” he said as I took a seat in the sand beside him. Though his voice lacked its usual force, he’d lost the stutter and he no longer needed to pause to compose his thoughts. “You’ve been holding me back. I’ll catch up quickly once I am able.”

  “I don’t know where to go.”

  “You’ll recognize it when you see it.”

  Strange as it sounds, I knew it was the truth. I felt I was being pulled to the southwest. Would I feel it if I shed the damn jumpsuit?

  Having spent a day without armor, I have the answer. No.

  TRANSMISSION:

  Hunter: “Take the pulser. It fits in the pocket at the front of your suit.”

  Duarte: “Are you sure?”

  Hunter: “Don’t lose it.”

  Duarte: “Will you join me soon?”

  Hunter: “It may be a while yet. We’ll see how it goes with this fire. I expect we’ll reunite before too long. Go on, get it started and off you go.”

  From the log of Maria Duarte

  Chief Botanist

  The wadi devolved into a blood-soaked free-for-all, a war amongst the scavengers. If the area hadn’t reached its carrying capacity for vultures it was close. Lions, hyenas, jackals, eagles, crows, flies, beetles, bees and countless other species vied for their bloody shares of gore.

  Even in my jumpsuit there was no escaping the stench. Stranded beside 100,000 tons of flesh and bones being rendered, Hunter knew he couldn’t leave and I couldn’t stay.

  “This is no place to spend your holiday while I’m indisposed,” he said over the com line. Hyenas fighting over the ravaged bones of a gnu briefly blocked our view of each other. Ignoring them as their skirmish carried right to the edge of his force field, he raised his voice to continue. “Go find a nice place to put your feet up for a few days. Enjoy a spot of alone time. How long has it been since you were truly alone, Maria?”

  I didn’t bother to answer, just set off to collect more wood. The bonfire I constructed overtop his force field rivaled the one we built in Galway trying to seal the deal Sal struck with his poisoned knife. That gambit had the opposite effect of what we intended. Swearing the energy created by our Galway fire cut his healing time in half, he insisted on a repeat performance.

  My last glimpse of Hunter was encouraging. While covering his field with dry tree limbs, I’m pretty sure I saw him turn his head. His final words came over the com from the middle an eight-foot pile of burning wood. “Travel safely and take your time, Maria. Write some reports along the way.”

  Leaving the billowing smoke and carnage behind, I climbed out of the gully and jogged south by southwest, confident in which direction to take. In less than a half hour, I spotted the women and children of Green Eyes’ clan gone to ground beneath an acacia tree. Altering course, I stopped to observe them for three minutes.

  Seven sleeping women, passed out atop beaten-down grass, were easily recognized as the revelers who partied all night. Laughing Girl, Dancing Girl, Flirty Girl, One-Eyed Wife, Singer One, Singer Two and The Slut. They were too far gone to react to the biting flies and laughing children crawling all over them. The playful kids giggled in delight as they pulled the women’s ears and opened their eyelids.

  The rest of the women were either too disgusted or too busy tending to chores to protect the sleepers. Several chatted amiably while mashing sweet acacia seedpods with lightweight wooden mortars and pestles. The paste they created was spread on woven fiber mats to dry in the sun. Two worked together repairing fiber sandals, while the rest gutted and skinned small game collected from the gully. Fur and waste from the squirrels and grass rats were tossed in one pile, edibles in another.

  The two lookouts posted at the edge of the shadows seemed to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to the west. I set off to investigate and soon found Green Eyes himself, crawling on his belly, leading a squad of four men through the brush so quietly the birds and monkeys in the trees had not yet sounded an alarm.

  Slithering through tunnels in the brush made by warthogs and other mid-size prey, the clan leader’s bright green eyes shone with the intensity of a stalking tiger. Among the weapons strapped to his back was one heavy jabbing spear, two light throwing spears and a long, curved club fashioned from an impala horn. Wrapped around this club to keep it out of the way was his gorilla paw necklace.

  Leaving them to their slow, silent crawl, I jumped ahead to investigate which unlucky prey they were going to slaughter this time. In a grove of Tamarindus indica trees 410 yards to the west, I found a clan of small dark-skinned humans gathered around a nearly smokeless fire cooking a snake. Barefoot and naked, but for the many ivory and shell necklaces around their long necks, the people appeared to be healthy, content and completely unaware they were soon to be invaded by sadistic killers.

  Weighing my options and responsibilities while under the spell of the jumpsuit, I elected not to step in. Not only is it unfeasible for me to right every wrong, I reasoned, I swore an oath to not interfere with ancient man’s tribulations. As Salvatore would say, Primum non nocere, better to do no harm.

  This neutrality was soon reconsidered. On my way south, I passed a squad of Green Eyes’ men sitting in the shade. The crew appeared to be blocking an escape route. While one man kept watch, the rest amused themselves by torturing a wild dog with four broken legs. The leather strap around the brindled dog’s muzzle kept it from defending itself or crying out as they jabbed it with sticks and beat it with rocks.

  Turning the audio in my helmet to maximum output, I walked unseen into the middle of the entourage and shouted, “BE KIND!” I’ve never seen men jump so high so fast.

  After putting the poor dog out of its misery with a twist and snap of its neck, I called out in trade dialect as loudly as possible, “Man is on the hunt. Hunting man. Hunting you. Danger comes from the mountains.”

  Though I didn’t hang around to see if my intervention helped the small, jet-black people, I ran with a clearer conscience. Maintaining a steady pace through the night and into the next afternoon, I covered an estimated 110 miles before stopping.

  The tricky part was finding a place where I would be safe out of the armor. Africa has more varieties of predators and venomous creepy crawlies than any place we’ve been in the Paleolithic. The larger primates are particularly worrisome. Even with the protection of my jumpsuit, I w
ouldn’t stand a chance against a gorilla or baboon if one caught me.

  Searching for campsites on the run, I angled east toward the mountains where a steep escarpment held promise of caves. An overwhelming feeling of deja vu hit as I rounded a corner and found a stream cascading down a vertical limestone cliff in four waterfalls.

  Scaling a sheer wall that no goat or chimpanzee could ever climb, I checked all four pools before selecting the base of the second-highest waterfall as the place to make camp. The oval pool of clear, clean water is about four feet deep and 12 feet across. It takes up about half the terrace, which means I’ve had plenty of room to build a fire and make a bed of ferns to sleep. When I’m not bathing against the heat, I hang out on the pool’s northern shore where a beach of white limestone pebbles holds ground against the ferns and berry bushes.

  Without one thought of how hypocritical my actions were, the moment I shed my pack, I pulled the pulser from my suit and painted the terrace with a wave of energy sure to short-circuit the brains of any snake, insect, rodent or other animal that could cause me harm. It wasn’t until much later, long after I shed my armor, that I thought to compare this wasteful, draconian measure to the stampede Green Eyes and his people started. Though my massacre was inflicted upon smaller species, was it any less wrong than the one I condemned so vehemently?

  A girl could grow old before her time thinking thoughts like that. I scooped up all the dead crawfish, minnows and shrimp floating on the surface of the pool and placed them in the leather cook bag I had carried for 3,000 miles and not yet used.