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.”
Considering how easily I’d just smacked her, the last thing I expected her to do was run up beside me and grab my arm in response, digging her fingers into my biceps and causing me to pull up short. I stopped, but instead of being angry, I turned on her curiously, wondering what could cause such a reaction from her when we’d had this conversation a dozen of times already.
“What?” I asked.
She looked up at me sympathetically. “Why go home at all, Jacob? Why? You have often spoken of how desperate and morbid it has become. Why do you desire to return to such a place?”
“Because I have a responsi…”
But she didn’t give me a chance to finish. “Why not stay here? With the knowledge you have recently gained, you know your world will always be there, as intact as the day you left it. It will always persist, and with the power of the orbs, remain a simple trip away. But why not stay here? Together, you and I could affect great change, bring about resounding prosperity to Rome, and lead it toward a brighter future.”
I didn’t even consider walking away again, suddenly interested. I’d never really considered the notion of staying and directly taking control of this place because I’d never before known if doing so would lead my home toward an even more certain and earlier doom. Nor had I ever thought someone with any actual power would ever offer such a thing to me… let alone Agrippina the Younger.
I turned to her. “What are you offering?”
“I am not offering you anything, Jacob,” she said, her voice steady. “Not yet. I simply wish for you to think on it. You and I, together, could do great things. Your home will always be there, but I am quickly losing my own.”
I couldn’t help but think about it.
But then Agrippina let go of my arm and wrapped her arms around herself, her demeanor shifting completely, as though everything that had happened in the last five minutes had never happened at all.
“What is it?” I asked, already accepting her sudden change.
“It is growing quite cold, Jacob,” she said, looking off in the direction of our earlier sniper hide. “What are we to do for accommodations tonight? Finding dry firewood has not been easy in recent days, and ever since we lost the wind shield in that storm, your tent has grown quite cold at night.”
I nodded, remembering the cold nights the two of us had shared all too well, and looked off into the distance. I scanned the low hills and wooded forests that surrounded us in all directions. It was almost unbelievable how monotonous gorgeous scenery could become when there were barely any discernable landmarks to distinguish one endless field of grass or forest of trees from another. Back home, unless one was truly trapped in the wilderness, finding a road or random cottage in the countryside wasn’t difficult. It allowed observant people, like me in particular, to immediately recall an exact location on a map as easily as a GPS device could offer it. But the Romans hadn’t built that many roads out here, and in our current location there was nothing, just an endless sea of green and brown.
Luckily, after years of military training, all I needed to find my way was a compass and a vague idea of where I was on a map, which I didn’t have in any physical form, but the one in my mind would do just fine. I’d never had an old friend’s innate sense of direction when in tight quarters, but out in the world, I was pretty good at finding my way around.
And I had been in this area before.
I glanced at my watch again, hit the compass setting, and turned myself so that I faced south. I raised a hand and pointed ahead and just a little to the right. I opened my mouth to speak but then closed it, swinging my head around to my left, an odd feeling creeping up my spine just then. A sense that I could feel someone watching us overwhelmed me, but with nothing in visual range, I ignored it.
“There should a road in that direction,” I finally said, turning back around. “When we reach it, we should be able to follow it to a small town. Lutetia. There should be lodgings on its outskirts.”
“Yes, I have heard of it,” Agrippina said, “but how do you know of it?”
“Oh, I’ve been there before. Twice actually. A couple of years ago and back when I was a kid.”
Her eyes widened in surprise and excitement, just as they always did when I connected something from her world with something from my own. “The town remains two thousand years from now?”
“Sure does,” I said, almost having forgotten how great it felt when I got to play history teacher. And it was nice that she was such an energetic student, which was also refreshing. “But it’s far more than just a town. Many of your Roman cities still exist actually, although little of the original cities remain, but the location for their modern equivalents didn’t change much. Would you like to know what Lutetia is called back home?”
“Of course!”
I smiled. “Paris.”
She grew even more excited, a
nd shot a hand out to grip my forearm. “Named for the Trojan hero?!”
I looked down at the childish way she’d reached for me and almost chuckled. “Sure. Maybe. I don’t know actually. I thought it might have come from a local tribe with a similar name, but maybe you’re right. They do call it the ‘city of love’ after all.”
Agrippina smiled as well, but with the return of those seductive eyes as well. “As any city named for the lover of Helen would be.”
I looked away from her but then performed a quick double-take, the name Helen bringing back familiar memories of a woman’s face I couldn’t quite identify. I shook my head and tried to forget about it. “Sexual lovers, sure, but actual ones? No. Hardly. They…” I paused and shook my head again. “Never mind. I’m sure we could debate Homeric verse until the cows come home, but that’s not going to get us to Lutetia before nightfall. Come on.”
I walked away and it took a moment before Agrippina caught up, asking in a confused voice, “What cows do you speak of, Jacob? Jacob…?”
***
Wherever the overwhelming might of Rome went, Rome itself followed. Roman legions didn’t just conquer territory, they romanized it. With them came the construction of roads, the establishment of new towns and villages, and once a territory was subdued and occupied, a more modern civilization was created. Mail was carried through conquered areas, much like the postal system back home, aqueducts were constructed, and roadside inns popped up along Roman roadways as well, generally spaced so that travelers who put some thought into their trips could always have a place to stay for the night.
All Roads Lead to Rome (The Praetorian Series Book 4) Page 6