He memorized a small dictionary of twenties slang. He tried to make his voice sound like a 1920’s Bostonian but gave up on that one pretty quickly.
He picked his date and made a list of places he wanted to see. There was a website on speakeasies and he found a page on one that included the passwords they used to weed out cops at the entrance.
The next step was money. How was he going to get around in the nineteen twenties? They weren’t going to accept bus fair paid in quarters that were stamped 2011. At first he checked online for collector’s websites where maybe he could purchase some period bills, but the prices were ridiculous.
He thought maybe he could counterfeit some. He had a little experience re-producing ancient coinage. But that takes a lot of time and would cost way too much to pull off, besides the risk of being caught passing off counterfeit money.
Then an idea hit him. He ran to his room and grabbed a camera to take some pictures of the desk. Then he pulled out all the papers that he found in the desk, leaving behind the notebook, and spread them out on the desk and took some close ups.
He called up the Smithsonian but they weren’t interested. He called up the Tesla museum in the Czech Republic, they didn’t have much to offer. Within an hour of posting the desk on eBay the bids were up to $50,000. By the time the bidding closed three days later he was collecting $350,000.
When the check came he stared at it for a moment, not believing he could actually be in possession of that kind of money.
“I need to go to that swap meet more often,” he said to himself.
This would pay off his mortgage and leave him enough to live comfortably without working for a few years. But who was he kidding? He went to the bank and deposited the check, taking $35,000 in cash. He bought a $200 bottle of scotch, paid off a couple bills, and then he went to a jewelry store and bought $30,000 in gold bullion. The college offered a couple jewelry-making classes and they had a smelting furnace. He’d melt the gold down, take some of it back with him to 1928 and pose as a successful prospector.
The shouts from the woods kept getting louder. Marcus was standing in line, his shield locked tight against the shield of the man next to him, staring out across a field towards the edge of a forest he knew was filled with angry Germans waiting for their chance to run him through. But he couldn’t see any of them.
It was late summer and the sun was shining. It was hot. The 1st Legion had been on the march for four days, tracking these rebels. They were nearly two thousand tired, hungry, angry men and they were anxious to get this over with.
Marcus glanced to the left, and to the right. He was near the center of the line, and right up front. This was going to be his first battle. He had been in fights before, but mostly small skirmishes. He had never seen this kind of fight before.
His armor felt tight. He must have gained 20 pounds or more since it was fitted to him nearly a year ago. He thought he would have trouble breathing, but he’d manage. The army did that to you. If you slacked off, or complained, you quickly learned to regret it.
His heart was pounding: he could feel it in his ears. The shouting and the noise from the woods ahead had ceased. He knew what would come next.
The Triarii, the older soldiers in the back ranks, started to move. They pushed the ranks in front of them forward. The Centurions were barking orders, but it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew what to do. The army surged forward. Two thousand men in unison, one step at a time, and the only sound for miles was the dull clanking of armor.
It was eerie, even from Marcus’ perspective. When the Germans made their move it would be loud, ear shattering. They would whoop and holler and scream. They would bash swords and spears against shields. They would do everything they could to seem scary. But the calm, cool silence of the Roman march was much more terrifying.
The front Roman ranks had covered nearly half the distance to the edge of the forest when they began to see the Germans, who a few moments before had made so much noise. At first it was just shadows in the woods, but soon faces became clear. They weren’t trying to hide, they just wanted to draw the Romans into the woods to break up their lines, get rid of the advantage of the shield wall. But it wouldn’t work.
The Centurions ordered a halt nearly twenty yards from the edge of the trees and the Romans locked shields. They would wait until the Germans got angry enough to charge out. It didn’t take long. There was a shout and the tribesmen started to break through the branches, against orders.
Every Roman foot-soldier carried two pilums: short throwing spears made of a wooden handle and a long soft iron spike. As the Germans got closer the Centurions yelled ‘throw’ and two thousand javelins flew into the sky. When they made impact the loud thud could be heard across the field.
A pilum was not meant to kill, though it certainly could. Instead the soft iron spike was meant to puncture a shield, and then bend so it couldn’t be removed. As the Germans started to get close their shields started to become useless and they flung them to the side, continuing their charge toward the Roman line unprotected.
The killing started immediately and the first aspect of battle Marcus noticed was the smell. It was nearly overwhelming. Most of the Germans had not bathed in weeks and they had spent the past few hours running and screaming and working up a sweat. Their stinking bodies pressed up against him as the tribesmen began to make contact with the Roman shield wall.
Marcus was scared when the first big, screaming, half-naked German body smacked into his shield. But the fear didn’t last. As soon as the first blonde maniac was in range his training took over. Marcus had fought this battle in training a hundred times or more and his body knew the routine. He shut down his mind and let his muscles go through the motions.
That first German was dead the moment he hit the shield. Marcus thrust his sword into the man’s face and a spray of blood and a few chunks of bone flew into the air. It took a few seconds to remove the blade from the ruined face and he watched the limp body fall away to the ground as swords were thrust out all around him, barely missing his own head, cutting down unarmored German after unarmored German. The bodies quickly began to pile up at the Romans’ feet.
As more of the tribesmen caught up with the faster runners and crashed into Roman shields, the fighting got more intense. Soon it took everything Marcus had to dodge axes and swords and spears. With quick movements of his head and shield, he struggled to keep himself alive while the legionaries around him kept adding to the pile at his feet. The stench in the air turned from sweat and unwashed bodies to something much more foul, and the screams of the injured and dying were becoming much more unbearable.
Marcus had no sense of how much time had elapsed when he heard the Centurion’s yell, “Push!”
The entire Roman line took a simultaneous step forward and pushed the Germans back a step. Another call, another step, and again Marcus had to struggle to stay in perfect formation and not trip over the dismembered and disemboweled bodies at his feet. The Triarii in the back ranks calmly stabbed their spears into the belly of every man on the ground as they stepped over the vanquished.
The push continued until they had reached the edge of the woods. The Germans had intended to use the trees to break up the Roman line and allow them to outnumber the enemy in smaller groups. Now the Romans were using their tactic against them. Many of the tribesmen ran back into the forest and tried to take cover behind trees. They wanted a minute to catch their breath.
“Shift ranks!” the Centurions yelled. Every man in the front rank turned ninety degrees to the left and held their shield close to their chest. The second rank stepped through the gaps and became the front line. Marcus and the rest of his rank walked to the back of their section and started to breath. The Romans didn’t like forcing their soldiers to fight more than fifteen minutes at a time and though it felt like only a few seconds to Marcus, it had been nearly twenty minutes. Now a group of slightly fresher troops would do the hard fighting.
At this
point Marcus should have had an hour or so to rest before he would be in the front line again. But just as he was starting to catch his breath, he heard the sound of hooves.
The Romans had held back their auxiliaries, the archers and cavalry, because their intelligence had said that the Germans had only infantry. But they were wrong. Wild men riding bareback on tall dark horses hit the Roman line with a crash and legionaries went flying into the air. The charge was devastating. Within seconds the prefect shield wall had been torn in two.
Before Marcus had time to think a German cavalryman thrust a spear into his chest. The Lorica protected him well and he would barely have a bruise. The horseman was already past him, crashing into the Triarii, when Marcus recovered but almost immediately another was on him.
Marcus ducked and the spear flew over his head, but as he tried to get his shield up the German horse kicked him square in the chest and suddenly he was on his back. He looked up to see the hoof coming down, into his face.
Marcus awoke with a start. Sweat was pouring down his face and back. The thin sheet on his bed felt a thousand degrees. He was panting. He had fought more than twenty major battles after that first, and never gave them a thought. But that was the only time he came so close to dying. The smell of the dying was still in his nostrils.
He rolled out of bed and stood up, but immediately his head felt as though it was hit with a hammer and he fell back onto the bed, pressing fingers into his temples. His tunic was crumpled on the floor next to the bed and when he was ready to try getting up again he reached for it. But that sent another shot of pain through his brain and he decided he was more comfortable naked anyway.
He half walked, half stumbled over to his little kitchen and picked an amphora up off the table, but it was empty. Another was under the table, but it turned out to be broken. He left the apartment and walked down the stairs into the small courtyard where there was a stone fountain.
Marcus was holding his head under the stream from the fountain, letting the water fill his mouth and course over the numerous scars that covered his muscular body when he heard someone call his name.
“You owe me three months Marcus.” It was Marinus, the baker. Marcus rented the apartment over his bread shop. He was a Spaniard and he was a little hard to understand sometimes, but Marcus liked him. He’d given him a place to live after all, when his twenty-five years with the army was up.
“I like you Marcus,” the baker said. “And I respect you did your service. But I can no afford you live here free.”
“I know Marinus,” Marcus replied. “I’m trying.” He dunked his head under the stream again, gulping the water. When he came back up he looked at the old baker and said, “I’ll figure something out. I promise.”
“I’ll leave some bread for you tonight,” the Baker said. He was struggling: it was hard for a foreigner in the city. But he couldn’t bring himself to be hard on the old soldier. He knew what it was like to go through the wars.
“Thank you my friend,” Marcus said, gripping the old man’s shoulders.
The baker hurried back to his business, leaving Marcus naked in the courtyard. He took another long drink from the fountain and went back up to his apartment. Under the bed he kept a purse with what little money he had been able to save, he pulled it out and dumped the coins on the table. It wasn’t much, only a few denarii.
There was a mat on the floor in front of the baker’s door and Marcus placed three coins under it. That was barely a fraction of his debt, but he knew the old man would appreciate the effort. The rest of the money he left in the pouch, which he tied onto his belt. He headed off to find more wine.
Once again Campbell had chosen a place to travel that was in the woods, not too far away from civilization. When he arrived he marked the closest tree with a little X at the base and below that he put a number, the number of steps to take away from the tree before activating the device for his return trip to make sure he would come back to the exact same spot.
He wore his new suit and fedora. The shoes might stand out a little upon really close inspection, but he doubted anyone would notice. He walked the three miles to town.
His first sight of 1928 Boston looked like a scene out of Newsies. There were kids hanging out on stoops or playing stickball in the street. Most of the people he saw were in black or brown slacks, some had on jeans, and almost all of them wore scally caps. He half expected to see Christian Bale leading a dance routine down the sidewalk.
He walked further into the city and started to see a little more activity. The streets were fairly busy. There were model A’s and model T’s chugging along on every street. Men in double-breasted suits and fedoras on their heads were walking in and out of tall buildings. Ladies wearing loose fitting dresses giggled together as they walked along the shop windows, looking at the mannequins dressed up in the latest fashions.
The whole thing was exhilarating. As he walked along the busy streets he had to stop himself from giggling. He was having a hard time accepting that he had actually traveled through time.
According to the dial on the machine it should be four thirty in the afternoon. He tried to call up an image in his head of the period map of the area he had been studying. One of his main goals in the few hours he would give himself in this time was to visit a real speakeasy and he had memorized the location and password of one of them. But first he needed to exchange the small bag of gold in his pocket for cash.
He had paid the jewelry teacher a few bucks to melt down a bunch of gold coins for him, which he then broke into tiny nuggets and filled several small leather bags which he locked away in his file cabinet. When he was ready to travel he could just grab a bag and go.
He found a young boy selling the daily paper for five cents and asked him where he could exchange gold nearby. The boy pointed out a jewelry store down the street. When he got there he saw a sign that said ‘we buy gold’ and the man behind the counter offered him $500 for his bag of nuggets. It was a little less than the exchange rate he had calculated but still made him a fairly wealthy man for 1928 and was much more than he would need for this trip.
He spent the next few hours walking around the city just soaking up the sights and sounds. The 20’s weren’t very long ago so it wasn’t much of a stretch for movies to get the environment right and that’s mostly what he was experiencing, the feeling of walking through a movie set. He half expected to see a man with a megaphone sitting in a canvas chair surrounded by cameras every time he rounded a corner.
He walked past a few tall buildings under construction. As he scanned the bare metal framework of the building he could see the workers a dozen or more stories up eating lunch on a girder, looking down at the world below. Campbell felt queasy just looking at them, but he stopped to watch the construction for a while anyway. He cringed every time someone tossed a bucket full of tools to the neighboring girder.
An hour or so after nightfall Campbell figured the underground bars would open up. He traveled up a few streets and over a few streets and found the building he was looking for. There was a sign in a blacked out window that said pet store. He walked up to the front door and tried the handle, but it was locked. He waited a few seconds and tried again and a voice inside said, “Closed.”
“To the moral right,” Campbell replied, his heart jumping a little. He had studied the history of the place and was certain he had the right password, but he was afraid he might have messed something up. He hoped this would work.
“How many?” the voice asked.
“Just one.”
The door opened just a crack and Campbell’s heart jumped again. Half of a face was visible through the crack. The eyes darted back and forth for a moment and when satisfied the man opened the door all the way and waved Campbell in.
Inside it looked like what the sign out front had claimed, a pet store. There were cages on the walls and a little aisle of random pet supplies arranged in no particular order. There were no animals.
The doorma
n was large. He was a bit taller than Campbell and about twice as wide. He wore a pinstriped shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of suspenders that held up a pair of brown slacks. The butt of a pistol stuck up from his waistband.
The big man led Campbell behind the counter and through a back door that opened up to another door. After three knocks the back door opened and Campbell had been granted access to a bar in a time when alcohol was illegal.
He felt a thrill, not only was he back in time but he was breaking the law. His heart was pounding a little more as he walked up to the bar.
There were barely over a dozen people inside, but the place was small. It already felt a little crowded and it was still early. Most of them were men, though there were a few women sitting with what were probably husbands or boyfriends at some of the booths that lined the wall opposite the bar.
The room was filled with a white haze and the stench of stale nicotine crept into Campbell’s nostrils. Everyone in the place either had a cigarette or a cigar in their hand. The place was a lot larger than you would have guessed from the outside. There was a bar that ran the length of the back wall. Tables with four or five chairs around them lined the other three and there was a small area cleared out in the center of the room as a dance floor, though no one was dancing at the moment. At one end of the dance floor there was space sectioned off for a band, their instruments laid on chairs or leaned against the wall, but the quiet music that played at the moment came from a record player behind the bar.
The bartender was a short, stocky, balding fellow with a thin white beard. He looked to be in his mid fifties. He had a cloth in his hand that he was using to wipe a glass dry. Campbell hung his fedora on a hat rack next to the bar and sat down at an empty stool. The man immediately walked over.
“What’s your poison?” the bartender asked in a shallow, raspy voice.
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