Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  Or parts of it were. With a crash and jingle, a group of men armed with pistols strode into the square we were struggling across. The crowd parted around them, and the leader of the group began to read, very loudly and not at all well, a proclamation that the “Citizens for Caesar” were going to assume command of the town for everyone’s safety and that as long as they were permitted to surrender it “in good order” no harm would come to anyone.

  He was just beginning to announce the proscriptions—which citizens he was putting a price on the head of—when a shot boomed out from the crowd and he fell dead. An instant later another shot hit one of his followers in the back, and then the mob closed around them. I didn’t look; I’ve seen before what mobs do to people they don’t like, and even though I felt no sympathy at all for the men (whose groans and screams I could hear), it’s a hideous way to die.

  The shift in the crowd freed up Chrys and me; we turned and ran, though she wasted one step to take a snap kick at an older man with a cane. The man flew over backward, his face spraying blood from his broken teeth and nose.

  “What—?” I asked Chrys as we raced down another street, fighting fleeing civilians the whole way.

  “Old bastard groped me in the crowd. Taking advantage of the situation, I guess you’d call it. I hope he learned some manners.”

  We kept running. It was just a short way now.

  High above us something that sounded like a freight train rumbled; an instant later, there was a low, thudding boom. Caesar’s cannon were within reach of the city.

  We put on an extra burst of speed, but it gained us less than fifty yards before we were hopelessly pinned. The Latins of Fanum Fortunae had never heard cannon fired before—they were far enough from the frontier so that they had not seen battle up close in a couple of generations. Moreover, cannon themselves were only about twenty years old in this timeline.

  But they had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gaulish War and his Commentary on the Conquest of Britain. They had read his vivid—maybe a better term would have been “lip-smacking, gloating, joyful”—descriptions of what artillery fire did to cities. He had spread more than enough terror of the cannon ahead of him; these people fell apart at the thought. When you’ve dreaded something long enough, imagined it hard enough, you don’t stand up and fight when you encounter it.

  I found out later that most of the garrison of the city wasn’t even able to get to the walls through the mob of panicking civilians. The cannonballs booming into the city were solid stone shot, not incendiary shells, but they might as well have been filled with napalm, because there were thousands of cooking fires and fires on hearths everywhere, and where one of the massive stones fell, it overturned braziers, threw stoves into thatch, made people run away in a panic from the fires they had tended. Before Chrys and I could even struggle off the wall that our backs had been pinned to by the howling mob, there was a distinct scent of smoke.

  And as the cry of “Fire!” spread among them, people began to pour away in every direction. There was no hope of getting bucket brigades formed to fight the fire; most people standing next to burning buildings couldn’t even get away thanks to all the pushing, shoving, and snarled traffic.

  From the walls came the sounds of fusillades of musket fire. The gadget Caldwell had introduced had been about as good as you could do with Roman iron—basically a length of drilled-out iron pipe (because any seam would be sure to split) with a rammed-paper cartridge, a separate percussion cap, and a lead bullet that was based on the same principle as the Minié ball—designed to expand against the walls of the barrel on its way out, so that it would form a better seal and pick up some velocity. Necessarily that had to be limited in its effectiveness, because Roman iron wouldn’t take the pressures that a really effective seal would have made.

  Still, you could get just as dead standing in front of one as you could get from a twenty-ninth-century SHAKK.

  The percussion cap, cartridge, and Minié-ball design had leapfrogged firearms far past what would have been their “natural” pace of development if the Romans had merely been given gunpowder and some introduction to the principle. They loaded a lot faster than any gun in my own timeline had until close to the American Civil War, and though not accurate at any great distance, they required little training to learn to operate and were more than deadly enough for their purpose.

  The first volleys were sweeping the guards from the walls; moments later we heard a huge, booming crash, which we only realized later had been a particular innovation of Caesar’s for taking walled cities—a battering ram driven by gunpowder.

  The smell of smoke and the screaming were everywhere. The crowd hesitated and then began to pour away from the gate where the crash had happened, knowing full well that the first hour or so as soldiers invaded the city would be much the worst; if they could avoid coming to the attention of Caesar’s troops for one or two hours, they stood a chance of surviving with their property and without severe injury.

  Unfortunately, the crowd was flowing exactly opposite the direction we wanted to go. There seemed to be no way to get through them.

  “NIF?” Chrys asked. “We could stun a few hundred.”

  “And they’d be burned, trampled, or raped by Caesar’s troops,” I shouted back into her ear. The wailing, shrieking crowd, the rumble of cart wheels, and the crashes of musketry were so loud it was hard to hear each other without shouting directly into the ear. “Plus the ones we didn’t get would be screaming that we were wizards or in league with spirits or something, and they’d stone us.”

  She nodded, clearly not liking it. The smoke was growing thicker, and I realized with a grim, sinking feeling that it was thickest in the direction of the Crassus Inn. Caesar must have circled the city before attacking from the unexpected direction—another favorite tactic of his.

  With a terrible thunder, the wall opposite us came down. I don’t know if it was the mob pressing up against a weak structure, an internal fire, or perhaps a cannon shot that landed inside, but the whole thing fell outward like a house of cards, and the three-story-high masonry wall slammed into the crowd below, crushing many, wounding others with sharp pieces of rock. The building stood for one instant in cross section, as if it had been cut away—I saw people in the uppermost story, mouths wide with horror, and a mother with her baby on the second floor turn to run for a staircase that was already falling out of reach—and then with a twisting, grinding sound, it all came down in a heap, forming a steep pile that then slid and broke out into the crowd around.

  Immediately, smoke curled up from the pile; the gods alone knew how many braziers and stoves had spilled into the mess.

  There was a great wail from the crowd; hundreds rushed onto the pile, seeking to rescue those inside (or to rob them); hundreds more fled as if the bad luck might well be contagious. The ones in the back pushed forward, the ones in front pushed back, and brawling erupted everywhere. Meanwhile the smoke grew thicker, more musketry and cannon fire crashed in the distance, there was a rumbling of horses’ hooves, and then, with a great, thudding whump, the center of the pile of rubble went up in flames.

  The toga, tunic, and chiton were never designed for situations like this. Dozens of men, women, and children went up in flames and staggered into the crowd, desperately trying to peel their burning garments off themselves. A woman in front of us tore her blazing garments from her body, only to be pulled down by two strong men who pinned her to the ground and forced her legs apart—

  Before they both fell over dead, as empty bags of bloody skin. Chrys, beside me, held her SHAKK level and ready. In the volume of noise, I had not even heard her fire.

  I drew my own SHAKK from between my shoulder blades and looked around. The naked woman had fled; we would never know what became of her. The crowd had not noticed our weapons; they were still milling and groaning.

  Then there was an astonishing sound. All the voices seemed to stop at once.

  There came the tramping
of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, and people pulled away from the middle. As if by magic, room began to appear.

  There were about thirty of them, a troop of Caesar’s auxiliaries, and they rode into the middle of that panicked mob as if they were out to give their horses a little light exercise on a spring day. When they reached the center of the crowd, the legate heading the group looked around and bellowed, “Citizens of Fanum Fortunae. It is hereby ordered that you are to cease resistance at once. Your city is on fire. Go immediately to your stations for fire fighting. No one who is fighting fires will be harmed. As soon as resistance in the city ends, Caesar’s troops will also help you put out the fires. Now, if you wish to save your city, hurry!”

  It was like magic, and magic of the strangest sort. There had been a rioting mob there, in a panic, ready to trample the helpless and filled with people whose only motive, besides stark terror, was to take advantage of the ones around them—and at the word of the legate, with the command of Caesar behind it, they were suddenly tough, disciplined Romans, getting the job done. In moments the square had more than half-cleared as people ran to pump water or to join the bucket brigades. As others milled around, not having definite fire-fighting stations, the legate would point, and bellow, “All of you, there, over to that pile of rubble, and pick it apart carefully to see if anyone is alive inside” or “You people there—start pulling rubbish out of that well, see if we can get some water.”

  Before he looked our way, Chrys and I holstered our SHAKKs and slipped off into the winding alleys between the buildings. Roman cities were laid out in a geometric grid for the major streets, but what happened inside the blocks was pretty much improvised on a catch-as-catch-can basis, so there were a lot of narrow passageways and winding alleys to move through.

  It took us another ten minutes to reach the Crassus Inn, because there were so many patrols and work parties on the street. One hour before, Fanum Fortunae had been slumbering through a cold winter day; half an hour before it had been enveloped in flames, rage, and terror; now it was rebuilding itself in an orderly way. Caesar sure knew how to make an entrance.

  When we finally popped out of an alley facing the Crassus Inn, I had steeled myself, but still, what I saw made me gasp. The building was falling apart in flames; a firebreak had been cleared around it, but they were letting it burn itself out. From the yardarm where the sign with the picture of Crassus had been, the body of the desk clerk hung, his face black, clothes smoldering; someone had fired a shot into him after he was dead, to judge from the mess of his belly.

  There was absolutely no sign of Porter or Paula, and that was the best news there could have been at that point. “God, of all the places to be when Caesar attacked,” I said, softly. “Next to Pompey, Crassus has to be the man he hates most on Earth. The mob probably did this just trying to appease Caesar.”

  “As a matter of fact, that is what happened,” a voice said behind us. We turned to find ourselves facing a young legate, with several tough legionaries behind him. He had a horse pistol leveled on us.

  “You look very much like the people Caesar told me to look for,” he said. “So I shall take you to him to find out if you’re the right ones. If you are worried about friends inside, I would not be. I believe only that wretched slave died in this, and several of the guests were taken as personal prisoners by Caesar. Chances are your friends are alive and well, though they are no longer free. And this is after all a circumstance you are very likely to share with them soon.”

  It took me a moment to remember what that all meant, as we marched along, the legate’s pistol at our backs, toward our meeting with the man I was supposed to kill. In the ancient world, prisoners taken in war—especially including civilians—were sold as slaves. All four of us were going to be auctioned off, and as far as the Romans were concerned (even ones who might prove friendly to us) once that had happened, we were slaves until we bought our freedom or our masters freed us.

  The boots I was wearing were new, and I tried to savor their crunch on the pavement; they would go to some poorer supporter of Caesar, along with the good clothes I was wearing. Slaves did not dress this well.

  8

  Caesar had set up his headquarters in Fanum Fortunae’s Praetorium. The Praetorium originally meant where the praetor, a high-ranking government official, stayed, but the term had come to mean first the place where he stayed when he was in town (so that every town had a praetorium) and later simply the center of government. This town was large enough to have an impressive one, about the size of a modern basketball gym, with many benches and tables for the public business inside, and a second floor on which there was a courtroom.

  That was the room Gaius Julius Caesar had appointed his own. When we arrived, there was a long parade of prisoners ahead of us, but it appeared we were something special, because they marched us straight to the head of the line.

  The man sitting next to Caesar was not wearing a toga, like a Roman, or a chiton, like a Greek, or even pants like a barbarian. He wore a simple one-piece coverall that looked like practical work clothing anywhere—in my timeline or in any advanced industrial one.

  It was not any ATN uniform I recognized, and then, as we drew closer, I saw the symbol on his breast—a black-on-white image of two hands, crossed at the wrists, one forming a fist and the other held up like a cop stopping traffic.

  This was a Closer agent.

  His hair was very dark, his skin a coffee color not unlike Chrys’s. His nose was small but hooked, making him look a little like a parakeet, but his expression was sharp and intelligent. He looked very much like a man who knew what he was doing.

  And he was on the other side.

  The SHAKK between my shoulders could not have been farther away if it had been on Mars; the NIF in my boot was equally far. So far I had not been searched, but they would find both with any kind of a pat-down—ATN’s superweapons may be very high-tech, but they are also large, solid lumps on the human body where it normally doesn’t have them.

  There was also my old, reliable Model 1911A1, the military-make Colt .45 that sat in my shoulder holster. My best guess was that I could draw that before anyone realized, and I might get off one shot.

  Now here was an interesting dilemma. I could accomplish the mission—as far as I knew it—with that one shot, assuming fate didn’t decide to intervene. Caesar was right there, and I could just put a round through him and trust to the fact that we were somehow alive back in the future.

  But for my money the most dangerous man in the room had to be that Closer agent. He alone had the potential to turn the whole timeline permanently against us; he was the source, I had no doubt, of much of Caesar’s advanced weaponry. (I was just realizing that one reason Caldwell had done so well was probably that an arms race had gotten started, and that always accelerates technology.)

  I had a few seconds before they searched me; all I had to do was decide whether to get the designated target and hope to have time for the vital second shot, or get the one I thought most dangerous and hope to have time to get Caesar as well.

  I’ve never had any trouble gunning down a Closer bastard; I owe them more deaths than I’m likely to repay, as far as I’m concerned, and knowing what their idea of fun is (they teach their children to kill favorite slaves in order to harden their hearts, and thirteen-year-old Closer boys often kill or mutilate the slave girls they have just lost their virginity to), it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to get both of us killed abruptly and immediately. On the other hand, I was still having a major set of butterflies in the stomach about assassinating Caesar. Maybe I’d seen Shakespeare’s play once too often or something.

  So I walked forward, calmly drew the Colt and leveled it on the Closer in one smooth movement, and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a roar from the muzzle, but the Closer had been alert, and while it must have scared hell out of him, he had sidestepped just as I fired; the round sprayed gravel chips from the wall behind him, but that was al
l. I squeezed the trigger again and nothing happened; I looked down to see the open top of the spent casing sticking up out of the .45.

  Smokestack jam. I had barely brought my left hand to the pistol, still working to clear the jam, when the butt of a spear knocked the gun from my hand, and a solid fist swung in under my jaw and put me on the floor. Then there were hands all over me, and I could feel the rest of the armament being stripped off.

  Over to one side there was another flurry of struggle, by which I knew Chrys was being disarmed in about the same way.

  The world was still spinning from the force of the blow to my jaw, and anyway there were just too many bodies holding just too many parts of me down. I made myself relax and stop struggling—sometimes that will help somebody let their guard down—and waited.

  After a lot of rough poking around, including being turned over for a cavity search, they all agreed that I was harmless, or at least unarmed, and braced me up facing Caesar. I was naked now, which didn’t exactly help my self-confidence.

  Beside me, Chrys was braced up in exactly the same way, hands locked behind the back in a double hammerlock, feet wide apart, three men holding on to her in a very businesslike way. I had the sudden, sad thought that my wife was very beautiful and that if I had been granted a last request just before execution, one more look at her might very well have been it.

  They pressed me forward so that I was now facing Caesar, who sat on the raised dais, where the judge would have sat in a Roman court, with an expression of alert amusement. The Closer agent beside him seemed to be tense and ready to spring, though whether at the prospect of working over two ATN agents or with anger at my attempt to kill him, I couldn’t say.