Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  The houses on this dark hill might have symbolized it all, that night. Many of them blazed with candlelight and lamplight, for the patrician families who lived there were preparing to run for their lives—but they were planning to run with strongboxes of gold, trunkfuls of fine clothing, everything that might turn into loot. They couldn’t possibly pack their own possessions, let alone carry them, and so, though Caesar and his legions might be there early in the morning, though there was no one left to hold the walls of Rome, though the stagecoaches in which they would travel could be easily overtaken by the legions’ bicycles—they were still packing, screaming at each other and the servants like cages full of parrots.

  Surrounding each shrieking pool of light was a ring of frantically working, terrified slaves, desperately trying to get everything in order for their now-refugee masters, responding to the hysterical orders as best they could. In the outer rooms and dark corners of each villa, there were other slaves, no longer following orders, hiding where they could and stealing what they could; and finally, out in the streets, where I was, there were hundreds of slaves escaping with bits of their masters’ property, running away in the hope that with a bit of luck and the jewelry or money they had grabbed, they might win some kind of freedom somewhere.

  That made the job a little trickier; I had to swing wide around many houses because so much light was spilling out, and when I crept through the shadows I was constantly coming upon huddled slaves trying to hide, and other slaves moving more or less quietly and carefully. For a while I thought there were a few slaves who were almost as good as I was at creeping through the dark—I was moving along behind one of them and sort of admiring his technique, the way he placed his feet and avoided backlighting.

  Then he came up from behind on a small figure, barely perceptible in the dark but revealed by candle-glare reflected off a wall, if you were on the shadow side of him. The one I was following closed in on the other figure, who was carrying a large sack—I guessed it was probably the master’s silver service, from the way the figure hefted it.

  There was just one flash of the blade, and then the man who had had the sack lay still, and the man with the blade had the sack—and was gone.

  I crept forward and confirmed that the slave—an old man, physically weak, with no signs of ever having done any real work—was dead. His face was slack—when you suddenly have your throat opened with one blow, there’s no time to form any lasting expression, and whatever he might have looked like in the brief instant he was killed had now disappeared. He looked like he had gone to sleep there in the street—if you could ignore the immense extra mouth leaking blood from under his jaw.

  Probably he had been a tutor, or perhaps a butler or head chef. In this neighborhood almost all the pricey slaves would be Greek. Probably he had dreamed about getting back to his home city with a little bit of money from the stolen silver.

  Probably he had gotten about three hundred yards.

  I slipped on into the night, my dagger already drawn, keeping that additional thought in mind—probably every footpad and lowlife possible was prowling the Palatine tonight, looking for runaway slaves.

  I rounded another corner and crept forward. Suddenly light spilled out of the main doorway of a house, and I slipped into a dark alley, low and sideways, to wait out whatever was happening.

  I almost laughed out loud. It was somebody fleeing in a litter—four slaves bearing the heavy load down the hill, two others carrying torches in front of it, and a scattering of armed guards around the litter. The litter itself, like most patrician ones, was an object of considerable value, a piece of fine furnituremaking inlaid with gold and silver and decorated with gems.

  All it would take, really, would be enough of an attack to convince the slaves that their interests lay elsewhere—and that wouldn’t be much—and that expensive litter would spill its expensive and helpless owner into the street like a toy poodle thrown into a kennel of Dobermans.

  Undoubtedly the owner thought he or she was “fleeing for my life with just the few things I could carry” and, if by some miracle he or she reached the stagecoach station or the river wharves, would complain bitterly at the crowded and inferior service available.

  I reminded myself that though I wasn’t much concerned about these voluntarily helpless, spoiled patricians, who had brought it all on themselves, that Rome could easily be burned and looted by Caesar’s troops, if something put Caesar into the mood to do it, and it would not be these people, but the ordinary citizens—merchants, artisans, and laborers—who would lose everything they had.

  Something moved beside me, and I slipped a bit farther into the shadow. The next moment, something was swinging in at my face—I felt it more than saw it—and I snapped an arm block up, caught the wrist on the little-finger side, drew the arm, and slid my dagger once into an exposed belly, striking upward at the heart and lungs, and then slashed the throat as she screamed.

  I knelt and felt the bloody corpse in front of me. Female, as I had thought from the scream, and quite young—her still-warm breasts were small and firm, her hips not yet much widened. Next to her there was a bag of loot, probably not what she had stolen from her own household—probably what she had gotten by knifing people here in this dark corner.

  More feeling around revealed three more bodies in the alley—an old woman and two fairly young males. The girl had been pretty talented, but an amateur, and her unwillingness to let go of the bag of loot before attacking me with her knife had made killing her fairly easy.

  The litter had passed now, and no one had come in response to the girl’s scream. I wiped as much blood as I could off myself, using the bag she had been carrying her loot in, and left the corpses and loot for some other lucky escaped slave. I slipped quietly out of the alley and continued upward.

  The distance I had to cover was only eight or nine city blocks, but in pitch-darkness, trying to move undetected, with the streets full of escaping slaves, muggers, and the occasional litter or patrician family with their torchbearers, it took me the better part of the night to get anywhere near where I had judged the giant building to be.

  At least for the last two blocks I was able to go a great deal faster—houses were emptying out all over the Palatine, and everyone was fleeing downhill; thus by the time I reached the uppermost blocks, the bulk of escaping slaves and fleeing patricians was already down the hill, most of the houses were already deserted, and with so little prey around, the two-legged predators too were gone.

  Finally, though, I got near enough to the building I was trying to reach to get occasional glimpses of it through the narrow streets, and I was able to see the flickers of light on its sides, and the big yellow letters SPQR on its red surface. I crept closer, until finally I found that I was peering across a torchlit street at a small group of soldiers—real professionals, not just slave bodyguards, to judge by the way they held their gladii and the muskets slung over their shoulders.

  With a group of professionals on the alert and the light against me, there was no going through by the direct route here; I would have to circle and probe. Depending on how determined you are, and how big the risk you can run is, there’s usually a way in.

  It didn’t take long to establish that these guys were really pros. Half an hour of dedicated sneaking and skulking in the perimeter showed me that every post was visible from every other, there were three guards to a post, and they had managed to get enough torches into enough places so that there was no really good band of darkness to crawl through.

  Well, that meant taking on a bigger risk, I figured. I could fire a couple of shots somewhere to make a diversion—but here in the dark my muzzle flashes would draw more attention than whatever the shots hit. The opposing roofs were too high to throw a rock onto. Besides, these guys did not seem dumb or naive enough to fall for such a trick. I could wait around and hope, but there were probably just a couple of hours of darkness left, and I had no idea what Pompey was up to in there.

&nb
sp; Something startled me, and I looked again, then saw what it was. A ripple had run down the bright red side of the “giant building.” Abruptly my brain adjusted to the data, and I knew what I had been looking at, realized I would have recognized it if I had only allowed myself to think without first deciding what it couldn’t be. I guess you’re never too trained or too experienced to stop making dumb mistakes.

  It was a hot-air balloon, a very large one, and undoubtedly the way in which Pompey was planning to escape. Naturally without propane or any other really hot fuel, it was taking a while to get it hot enough, and that was what the big fires burning under it were about. The SPQR on its side probably meant it had originally been a military project funded by the Senate, but I saw now what Pompey was up to; the wind blows west to east, and flying out of Rome, if he kept it aloft long enough, he was bound to come down either in unclaimed territory or at least somewhere Crassus controlled.

  It was sort of like a punt in football, except that Pompey was both the punter and the football. Almost anywhere and any situation had to be better than the one he was in; and if he fled on foot, horse, or bicycle, Caesar or his agents had the means to catch him.

  It occurred to me that I was one of Caesar’s agents, and I was working on the means to catch Pompey. And I didn’t have a lot of time left.

  I crept forward again and moved around to the place I had picked as the weak spot. There, an alley between two temples opened out toward me, and both guard posts, though able to cover the street, had to move forward to see each other, or the alley between them, because of the way the temples protruded. If Pompey or his legates had had a few extra men, they could have stationed them at the alley mouth and closed the gap completely. The fact that they had not done so meant that their resources were strained, and that reassured me a lot—probably they had few or no patrols inside the perimeter.

  The basic problem in coming up with a good diversion is that what you want to do is to pull them off where you’re going, ideally without giving them any more idea than they had in the first place that there is anything big to worry about. You don’t want them poked up and looking for trouble. That wasn’t going to be easy.

  The perfect trick would be to land something between one of the guard posts and its neighbor, on the side away from the alley I wanted to get into, so that the alley I was interested in would be unwatched for an instant, and I could slip across. At the time that seemed a bit like saying the perfect way to win a marathon would be to run at twenty miles an hour for one hour and eighteen minutes; the theory was easy, but it neglected the facts.

  So I sat down, watched, and hoped for a break. The guard might change, rioting might break out, anything could happen.

  But it didn’t. The part of my brain that counts breaths hit six hundred, which meant I had been there two hours. I stretched silently, in place, and was about to start thinking more seriously about taking action, when finally something happened.

  A musket volley cut down the farthest guard post I could see, bringing all three men to the ground, and something or someone, bent low, barely illuminated by the lights of the city behind it, ran across into the area Pompey’s men had cordoned off. There were blazing flashes as other guard posts fired their muskets, but whoever had just shot his way in was moving too fast for anyone to have time to fire—the figure was gone into the shadows just as the muskets fired—and besides, the things were so inaccurate that with only three muskets in each of the volleys, probably nothing could have found a mark if the intruder had stood still with a fluorescent bull’s-eye on his chest.

  My Model 1911A1 was in my hand before I even began to think, and my feet were slamming into the pavement. Sure enough, the guard post to my right pulled over to cover the situation, and I ran behind them into the alley; an instant later the guard post to my left had rounded the temple and was racing past the alley entrance. I was in Pompey’s compound, at last. I knew nothing of its layout, it sounded as if there were troops running everywhere firing at shadows, and there was at least one trigger-happy force of some kind or other (quite possibly hostile to me as well as to Pompey) present in the compound—but I was inside, and that was a lot farther than I had been seconds before.

  I dove into the shadow nearest the exit of the alley. Nothing seemed to be happening in my view, but I heard running feet and gunshots, so I stayed put.

  In a few seconds a group of soldiers came into view. “Anything?” barked the centurion in the group.

  “Nothing, sir!” they all said.

  “Our men are firing at shadows out there, sir,” one added. “We’ve got to get organized, or there’s going to be someone shooting a friend.”

  “Don’t I know it,” the centurion said, and started bellowing orders.

  They assembled in the small square there, beside the big building that I later learned was the Temple of the Great Mother. I had nowhere to go but back—which would get me nothing—or forward, which would get me shot, so I stayed put. The false dawn wasn’t far away, and from the sight of the stars overhead, I judged there was going to be a lot of light pretty soon. It didn’t look particularly great.

  The group of soldiers were doing a fast roll call, and they didn’t like what they were finding; mumbles were running through the crowd. Three men dead at the guard post, eight men missing. Some of those were probably guys who had taken a chance to desert and would be making their way to Caesar to sell whatever they knew—but eight was a lot.

  A moment later there was a shout—one of the eight coming out of another alley. There was horror in his cry.

  The centurion barked, “Rufus! Humilis! Sine-colle! Get over there and help him! All others, load muskets, form a circle, wait for my command!”

  Three men sprinted out of the group and the rest rapidly formed their circle. Moments later, there were two more groans in two more voices, and then one of them shouted, “Sir, it’s Quintus and Decius. They’ve both been knifed in the back. Titiculus here just about fell over them.”

  “Come back real slow,” the centurion said. “Everyone make sure you know what you’re looking at before you pull the trigger!”

  “Leave the bodies, sir?”

  “We’ll have to. They won’t care, and you need to get back here. Now move.”

  A few moments later four figures—one of them moving strangely, probably Titiculus—emerged into the dim light of the square and rejoined the group. They formed up quickly, and the centurion said, “Decurion Alba, take your men and reinforce the guard at the platform. Tell the imperator that we cannot hold for long, that we are already breached, and he must act quickly if he is to act at all. The rest of you, we’re going to sweep the compound and see if we can turn up this mystery enemy. We’ll start to the west.”

  Dead away from me. I all but sighed aloud with relief.

  Sure enough, in just seconds, the century was moving away from me, and one little knot of men—a decurion was supposed to command ten men, but in fact the numbers varied between units the size of one of our squads and one of our platoons—moved to the right, then forward.

  I nerved myself and dashed to the next shadow, following Decurion Alba and his men. I really did not like this; you shouldn’t know too much about your enemy. It occurred to me that this last century, of all of Pompey’s legions, was being literally loyal to the death. I revised my estimate that any of the missing men had deserted; probably they were all dead or mortally wounded, somewhere in the cold dark alleys. Whatever was loose in the compound, it was like walking death.

  And there had been no collapse of discipline or morale. These men were trained to die in their tracks, and they were doing it as necessary, for the sake of their commander. It wasn’t as if their commander were a better man than their enemy; really there wasn’t much to choose between any of these guys, so far as I could see.

  I came slowly and quietly around the corner to find that Alba and his men had reached their goal; there was the platform, with great roaring fires leading into bent c
himneys that then passed into the balloon through the opening at its bottom. The slight smell of roasting rubber told me that the balloon was made of rubberized linen, the same thing the legion ponchos were made of; under it hung—it took me a moment to realize—a stagecoach body, minus the wheels and axles, mounted on a small boat. Clearly landings were something they weren’t terribly sure about just yet.

  The balloon was tied down by a cable that looped from eyebolts driven into the pavement around it up to the large band that ran horizontally around the circumference of the balloon, through a grommet there, and then back down to another eyebolt, until finally both ends of it were tied together between two eyebolts on the platform. It would take just one stroke of a sharp ax to send the balloon on its way.

  Below the boat, hanging from short improvised davits that protruded all over it, were dozens of big sandbags.

  On top of the stagecoach was a pile of wood, not yet lit. I realized at once that there was no easy means of controlling that fire in flight, and since it would be the one thing keeping Pompey aloft, he wouldn’t light it until he was in the air, or just before; once it burned out, he would be on his way down to the ground.

  It was a big payload, which was why the balloon had to be so large and why it was taking so long to get hot enough for takeoff, but it looked very much like Pompey could probably leave now if he had to.

  Over the rumble of the fires burning in the three furnaces heating the balloon, there was a distant boom, and Alba looked around instantly. “Cannon, sir,” he called to someone inside the stagecoach body. “From the north, I think; perhaps they’re already at the Aurelian Wall, though I can’t imagine why anyone would be stupid enough to try to stop them now.”