by Bob Mayer
“Sir?” The man who’d tripped Eagle answered.
“Is everything under control?”
“Yes, sir. He just fell, sir. Not feeling well. Not a problem at all, sir. You know his head ain’t ever been right since the fire.”
“I want—” Washington began, but a voice called to him from outside
“General!”
Washington sighed and turned toward the barn door. “Yes?”
“Colonel Caldwell is waiting in headquarters, as requested, sir. And the officers are assembling at the New Building. General Gates is already there.”
Eagle gave a quick glance, not quick enough as Hercules sharply elbowed him. He caught a glimpse of Washington leaving the barn, accompanied by another officer.
“Get back to work,” the overseer ordered. “Hercules, take care of her.”
The other four slaves immediately dispersed. Eagle had no idea what his work was or where it was, so he remained in place.
“What is wrong with you?” Hercules demanded of Eagle. He was already moving toward the young woman. “Easy, girl, easy.”
Eagle followed him. “I’m sorry. Just lost my head for a second.”
“Get some of that axle grease.” Hercules pulled a clean piece of cloth out of his pocket.
Eagle was confused for a second, then saw a small bucket near one of the stalls. He brought it over. Hercules put his fingers in, pulled out a dab and gently began applying it to the open wounds.
“What about infection?” Eagle asked.
“You’re really not right in the head,” Hercules said. “That old beating coming back on you? The fire?” It was a question, but Eagle got the feeling they were suggestions for possible excuses.
The download confirmed that axle grease was a poor man’s, a slave’s, field expedient way of packing an open wound. It actually helped prevent infection.
Hercules was better dressed than Eagle. A black frock coat over a white shirt and black trousers, all relatively clean. His shoes were polished and, unlike Eagle’s, intact. His name, surprisingly, was in the download: the head cook at Mount Vernon, also known as Uncle Harkless. Technically, he would become the first head chef for the President of the United States in 1790, when Washington moved the capitol to Philadelphia and established the ‘President’s House’. Eagle found it interesting that despite his apparent subservient demeanor, Hercules escaped Mount Vernon in 1797 and disappeared from the annals of history and thus from the download.
“Must be,” Eagle said, running his hand over the scars scrolled on the right side of his skull.
“Now Nancy, you need be still,” he said to the woman.
She wasn’t paying attention to the ministrations on her back. A slight flinch was the only indication she felt the pain as Hercules packed the wounds. She was in her late teens, her skin black as coal, her face set in what appeared to be a permanent scowl.
“Get her blouse,” Hercules ordered.
Eagle fetched it. Hercules helped her stand up. Eagle held the blouse and carefully slipped it on as she extended one arm and then the other.
She shook off any further help, buttoning it herself.
Hercules moved to a position in front of her and reached out, none so gently, gripping her chin. “Listen here, girl. The Master is right. White men have been hung for what you did. I’ve seen it. You know Master’s a decent man. He took a chance bringing us up north with him. And you try to repay him by stealing and running?”
“No good man owns slaves, Uncle,” Nancy said, shaking his hand off her chin. “And this new country he’s fought to make? Not going to be any different. The British say any slave who comes to them will be free. And they ain’t gonna be around much longer in the City.”
“They say any slave who fights for them will be freed,” Hercules said. “Big difference. How you going to fight in a man’s war?”
“I was bringing them papers. They’d taken me in for that.”
“Don’t matter anyway.” Hercules shook his head. “This war is over.”
“Not over yet, or else why all the grumbling here?” Nancy gave a bitter laugh. “Why’d that man give me the papers to take to the British then, telling me they’d earn my freedom?”
“What man?” Hercules asked.
“Don’ matter,” Nancy said. “They say they’re fighting for freedom, yet we’re not going to see ours.”
“It’s called hypocrisy,” Eagle said.
Both of them turned to him. Eagle belatedly put a hand to his head. “My head isn’t right.”
“That’s for sure,” Hercules said. “You get on back and rest,” he said to Nancy. “I’ve got to go to the General.” He looked at Eagle. “You take her place in the General’s quarters today since you seem to want to be looking at everything and saying fancy words. Try some fancy words in there and you’d be getting a beating too.”
Hercules walked out, leaving Eagle with Nancy.
“What’s wrong with you,” Nancy said, as soon as he was gone.
“My head,“ Eagle began, but she cut him off.
“You don’t stand right,” Nancy said. “Uncle Harkless saw it, but don’ know what to think. He keeps what he sees real small and don’ see nothing he don’ want to that might cause him to use his God-given smarts.”
“Your back,” Eagle said, but was cut off once more.
Nancy pointed out the barn. “Get going. You keep acting like this, you’ll get worse than me. As the man say, we got to know our place.”
Ravenna, Capitol of the Remains of the Western Roman Empire, 493 A.D.
ROLAND WASN’T THERE AND THEN HE was there, but he’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around him. He was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward.
Since it was his second time trip, Roland was already used to it and didn’t spare it a moment of wonder, awe, or confusion, which helped, save his life.
As he became aware he was there, he slipped in the mud and blood, which also helped save his life from the spear. Roland’s combat reflexes took the Goth’s head off.
They really had to get better with the timing on this time travel thing, Roland thought, as he spun about, ready for more enemies. A fifth person, a woman, in a long black robe, took a step back and vanished into a Gate.
That was different.
“Centurion!” Several soldiers came running around a bend in the path, swords drawn. Roland went on guard, but recognized they were equipped with the same uniform and armor he wore. While one checked the bodies, the others spread out, providing security.
It is 493 A.D. Clovis I marries the eighteen year-old Burgundian princess, Clotilde, who converts him to Catholicism; in the same year, her father is murdered by her brother, Gundobad; the Mor Hanayo Monastery is established in a former Roman fort on the Turkish/Syrian border; The Ui Neill Dynasty wanted to battle the Airgialla Kingdom for the body of St. Patrick but the legend is God flooded a river to keep them from fighting.
Here on a muddy road in the middle of forest, Roland had once more killed. He didn’t keep a tally and he never looked back to try to count how many had departed the mortal coil at his hand. Roland knew to do so would mean there was something wrong with him as a human being; something more than what was actually wrong with him.
Some things change; some don’t.
Riders came around the bend. Odoacer, First King of Italy, leaned forward in the saddle. “Did you kill all four, Centurion?” His voice was raspy, his face pale and exhausted. He had a thick white beard that matched his bushy eyebrows. But his eyes were sunk deep, shadows underneath.
“Yes, sir,” Roland said. It looked like being king wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“I need a man like you close to me. A killer. Especially this day.”
Roland fit the bill of warrior. Six and a half feet tall, a giant in this day and age
where the average height for a Roman was a foot shorter. He was well muscled, broad chested, and all he could be in Army terms. His most distinguishing feature, currently hidden under the centurion helmet was a scar running along the right side of his head the temple to behind his right ear. He’d had a tattoo done to partially cover it; barbed wire. While no one in this era would know what barbed wire was, he’d been assured when he was outfitted back at the Possibility Palace that tattoos were not uncommon now and any who saw it would assume it was a band of thorns.
Odoacer raised his right hand, while he pointed with his left at Roland. “You are now one of my twelve; a Protector.” He gestured imperiously, which Kings actually get to do, at one of the riders around him. “Give him your horse.”
Roland claimed the horse, swung up into the saddle and realized he didn’t know how to ride a horse, and no matter how much knowledge they download into your brain, it couldn’t—but then, he felt a surge of awareness flood his brain, and he had access to a slew of knowledge and advice about how to do exactly that from the best horse trainers, horse whisperers, jockeys, and anyone who had weighed in on the topic.
It was all a bit too much, especially for Roland.
Roland tried to sort through and focus on the advice concerning: How not to get thrown on your ass.
The horse skittered, backed up.
“Do you know how to ride, Protector?” Odoacer demanded.
The horse bucked and Roland flew backwards, landing on his ass in the muddy road.
The guy whose horse he’d been ‘given’ grabbed the reins, keeping it from stomping Roland’s head, which he thought was pretty nice, considering what had just happened.
Odoacer muttered a curse, signaled to the others with him, and rode off. So much for being on the inner circle. Roland got to his feet as the guy remounted his horse and galloped after them.
Roland smiled at the four privates who’d been left behind. “Why ride when you can walk, eh?”
The four exchanged glances, but then looked at the four bodies they’d rolled to the side of the road and their smirks disappeared. They snapped to attention. Roland marched past them, leading the way to follow the King and his destiny with fate.
They’d barely gone a few hundred meters when a rider came back. The de-horsed, re-horsed guy. He leaned and held out his arm, reminding Roland of a high-speed recovery into a Zodiac during water ops where someone leaned over the gunwale with a padded loop of rope and—that was cut short as they gripped hands and the momentum swung Roland up behind him, the rear of the saddle slamming into his testicles, hearing the rider chuckle, knowing what had just happened. They galloped off, leaving the four privates slogging through the mud.
Roland grabbed onto the two ‘horns’ on the rear of the Roman saddle and held on grimly. It seemed to him that the rider was being particularly rough, although Roland had never been on a horse before, okay briefly, so he had no clue.
As they came out of the forest, Roland saw the walls of Ravenna in the distance, which led to a flurry of mostly useless data about cities and this era. What struck him of importance was that every city in this age that wanted to survive needed walls around it.
Roland noted all the hovels on the outside of the walls and understood that at a fundamental level. Some people got to be inside the walls, and others would always be outside. The difference was, of course, levels of wealth. He’d grown up ‘outside the walls’.
Some things never changed
The trail merged with several others as they approached the city and then it became an actual road. A Roman road, a via munita, paved with blocks of stone.
Smoother than many roads Roland had driven on in his present. Especially where he’d grown up.
Of more immediate attention, flanking the road on either side, was a line of crucifixes spaced fifty feet apart. Most of the victims were dead, some long dead, given how picked apart their bodies were, but some were still alive based on their writhing, crying out in pain and begging.
Data flowed from the download: In the east, Constantine had outlawed crucifixion in 337 due to his newly found religious belief, aka Catholicism. Not because he thought it was cruel, but he believed it diminished what his new adopted Lord had been through. But this was the Western Roman Empire, even the dregs of it, and that law meant nothing here.
Roland looked up as they rode past. He’d seen many horrible things in his time under arms. Some worse than this. He was observing, taking it in, wanting to understand this era more than from the data in his head.
“Who did this?” he asked the rider.
“Theodoric,” the rider said. “He’s making a statement to our King, outside the walls of Odoacer’s own capitol. Roman law means nothing to Theodoric. Doesn’t mean much to Odoacer either, but he pretends, which could be his flaw. As you can see, Theodoric doesn’t pretend.”
“Who are these people?”
Roland could feel the rider shrug. “Criminals. The unlucky. I’m sure some were randomly chosen just to make the spacing even. Their crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We know about that don’t we?” The last was said as they passed through the sally port into Ravenna. The rider edged them to the left, into a side street.
Roland slid off the horse, his hand on the hilt of his sword. The rider halted and dismounted. He faced Roland, his own hand on sword. But neither drew.
The rider had short blonde hair, fair skin, blue eyes, and was shorter than Roland by almost a foot. He was barrel-chested, though, with solid, thickly muscled arms. His armor was dull, unadorned, functional. The dents in it were not for ornamentation.
Roland had no doubt the man’s sword was functional as well.
He smiled at Roland, revealing numerous missing teeth. “I am Eric.”
“Roland.”
“A good name. Perhaps you are from the line of my people, far down the ages?”
Roland didn’t reply.
“Odoacer made you one of the Twelve Protectors, but now, since he sent me back to pick you up, I assume we are thirteen. Is that an unlucky number in your time?”
Roland shrugged.
Eric laughed. “It is in this time. Of more immediate concern, it means Odoacer is feeling uncertain about the meeting tonight. To bring in another for protection. Tell me, traveler from a distant time. What will happen tonight at the banquet? Odoacer trusts Theodoric. I think him a fool for that, but perhaps he will prove me a fool. Will there be peace? Will the two rule together? That would make for a mighty army. One that could challenge the east. Restore the Western Empire. Perhaps they could rule as the Romans once did in their Republic and pretended to do afterwards, with two consuls, instead of one Emperor?”
Roland remained silent.
“A man of few words?” Eric drummed his fingers on the pommel of his sword. All around was the noise of commerce and trade. The rattle of cavalry riding by. Whores calling out for clients. Dogs barking. It smelled of sewage from the open ditches, but Roland barely noticed. Eric cocked his head slightly to the right. “You know what will happen, but you are not certain of your role in it?”
Roland cut to the chase. “I do not trust you.”
“Nor I you. So what are we to do about that? Should we work together or just settle this now?”
“That would only prove who is the better fighter,” Roland said. “Not who is right.”
Eric laughed. “Isn’t that the way everything is settled? It is never about right or wrong.”
Roland considered that. “Sometimes it is.”
“Ah. An idealist. Yet you appear a warrior.”
Roland shrugged. “I’ve faced evil. Fighting evil is right.”
Eric didn’t respond to that. “Those four who attacked you. They were mercenaries. Their tribe is in the employ of Theodoric, but such men do blood work for whoever pays them, even if their tribe is under payment oath to another. Why were they after you specifically?”
“I have no idea,” Roland answered honestly. �
��But if Odoacer and Theodoric are to join forces, and I’m Odoacer’s man, why would Theodoric’s men attack me?”
“He might not have ordered it,” Eric said. “As I said. They work for money. Anyone’s money.”
“What do you think we should do?” Roland asked.
Eric squinted. “What I think matters nothing in this.”
“This is your time,” Roland said. “You’re going to have to live with the results.”
“And you? Won’t you in your time?”
Roland shrugged. “Above my pay grade.”
“Isn’t everything for men like us?” Eric tugged on the bridle. “Ours is not to wonder the reasons and the whys. We just follow our orders and get things done. Let’s drink some, see if we trust each any further, then go to Odoacer’s fortress where the feast will be held.” He led the horse toward a hitch outside a seedy looking dive. “And, if you trust me and want to succeed, you’ll tell me what the result is to be this evening. Who lives and who dies.” He slapped Roland on the shoulder as he invited him in. “Let us make sure it is neither of us, eh?”
The Missions Phase II
Rome, Roman Empire, 44 B.C.
“DID YOU TELL HIM?” Spurinna asked Calpurnia.
Caesar’s third, and hopefully last, wife was in her atrium, knitting, which was actually called nailbinding in this era, Edith’s nitpicking download informed Moms. A slave girl held the yarn as she worked.
Calpurnia glanced up. She was a slight woman, with hunched shoulders and sunken eyes. “I did not sleep well last night because of you.”
“Is he here?” Moms cut through.
“And who are you?”
“My protégée,” Spurinna said.
“I have not heard you had one,” Calpurnia said. “And to answer your questions: yes and no. Yes, I spoke to him as you told me to. Perhaps not exactly as you would have wished. Would you like the words?”
Moms went back to her question. “So that’s a no as to whether your husband is here?”
Calpurnia ignored her. “Let me try to recall, my dear Seer, although it was not long ago. Ah yes.” She put the knitting down and spoke in a sing-song voice as she looked off into the distance. “Oh, mighty Caesar. As you know well, I have never stood much on formalities or even propriety. When you brought your slut from Egypt and placed her and her barbarians in our villa, I did not stand in protest although many urged me to. I also have never stood much on prophecies. But my mind was troubled during the night. Echoes of Spurinna’s dire words. I am frightened, husband.