The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

  September 7, 9 AD

  Rebecca Cames paused, leaning against a panel shielding one of the amphitheater’s midlevel entrances. A sausage seller elbowed her to get past.

  Rebecca’s misplaced frustration flared in a fashion that shocked her. She forced her hand to relax on the grip of the microwave pistol. Hit with the full charge at this range, the vendor would’ve had blood in his urine for a week—if he’d been lucky. All he’d done was jostle somebody standing in the way in a crowded aisle.

  Vetera’s wooden amphitheater might hold as many as ten thousand spectators in a pinch, but the current six or seven thousand were enough to fill the lower tiers fuller than comfort. She guessed as many people had come to see Tiberius as for the games themselves. The region’s civilian population included many retired soldiers. Whatever faults Tiberius would have as emperor in his later years, he was a popular and successful commander throughout his military career.

  “I can’t be sure,” said a machine voice througi Rebecca’s headband, “but I don’t believe Svetlanov is on the other side of the amphitheater either. Not if he has any advanced equipment with him, at least.”

  Rebecca had searched for the revisionist outside the amphitheater as crowds climbed the outside steps to the upper entrances. When Tiberius and his entourage arrived to enter through the tunnel to the first tier reserved for dignitaries, Rebecca went in by a public entrance and worked her way down as close to Tiberius as she could.

  Tiberius, a senator as well as the emperor’s stepson, sat on a folding ivory chair looking directly down through a railing to the arena. Fifty fully armed Germans from the imperial horse guards had escorted him to Vetera. Some blocked the runnel entrance while others separated the general from spectators behind and to either side. Only a half-dozen officials sat in Tiberius’ immediate presence; the guards watched them as well with no great affection.

  “I don’t think a submachine gun would be effective from so far away, Gerd,” Rebecca said. Spactators continued to bump her but the fit of temper had passed.

  “Istvan didn’t know Kiknadze carried a grenade,” the analyst replied. “Svetlanov may have a rifle or even a rocket launcher. Though of course a bulkier weapon will be easier to locate.”

  Gerd had gotten a space early to the left of the area reserved for dignitaries and from there scanned for Svetlanov. There’d been a risk the revisionist would attack while Tiberius rode to the amphitheater; the general didn’t use a slave-born litter, one of the reasons his men loved him.

  Svetlanov was alone, however, and the only place he could be sure of finding Tiberius was at the entrance to the amphitheater or seated inside. By watching those two points, she and Gerd maximized their chances. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what they had.

  Squads of regular troops were stationed at intervals on the first tier. An event like this drew spectators from local tribes. There was a serious chance of a riot.

  The crowd cheered. The pair of beast-slayers in the arena were dressed as Parthian horse archers in embroidered trousers, terribly exotic on this opposite end of the empire. Wild bulls charged up the north ramp. The riders shot arrows over their horses’ backs as the bulls chased them across the sand. Maybe they really were Parthians. They were certainly skillful enough.

  Three bulls were down, blowing bloody froth from their nostrils. The riders played with the last animal. His flanks were a pincushion of arrows, their feathers brightly dyed to add to the gaiety of the occasion.

  More cheers as another pair of arrows slapped home. The beast stumbled but managed to pick itself up again. My God, what a civilization!

  Rebecca was ten rows above the bottom tier and about fifty feet to the right of Tiberius, a youthful-looking man of fifty-one. From this angle she would see only sparse hair and the gleam of his high forehead. The big guardsmen glared outward, a living iron barrier to any attack. The murder of Julius Caesar had taught his successors the basics of imperial survival.

  “Pauli,” she said. “Svetlanov knows his fellows failed to prevent the massacre of Varus’ army. Now Kiknadze’s dead as well. Mightn’t he just give up?”

  “If he does,” Pauli Weigand said, “it’s going to be more difficult to find him. We’ve still got to find him, though. He could do just as much harm even if he can’t execute his plan.”

  He paused and added, “Besides, it’s our job.”

  Pauli’s voice was weak and crackly despite sharpening by the AI in Rebecca’s receiver. The headbands were short-range devices and the mass of iron and stone over Pauli attenuated the signal even more.

  “I believe Svetlanov must have known from the start that he couldn’t return to his own time,” Gerd said. “A fanatic intending to sacrifice himself is unlikely to be put oif by the loss of his fellows.”

  Because he didn’t have a headband himself, Gerd keyed his words into his sensor pack and transmitted them i:i voice-synthesized form to his teammates. The result sounded surprisingly like the analyst’s normal speech.

  The bull was tiring. It stood directly below Rsbecca, legs braced and nose to the ground. The Partians capered close, trying to entice it into another charge. Blood streaked the beast’s black hide and dripped onto the sand. The air reeked of death and the bull’s frustrated anger.

  She knew how the bull felt.

  “I’m going to move closer to Tiberius,” Rebecca said. It’d be a way to release some of her tension. They had to find Svetlanov soon.

  She began to work her way down. Spectators watched from the aisles in ever-thicker numbers nearer the arena. She squeezed between, ignoring curses and the occasional elbow.

  Pauli was right. The team couldn’t leave the revisionist loose on this horizon, but he’d be very, very hard to locate if he’d fled Vetera when he realized he was alone. Maybe Gerd could predict Svetlanov’s movements, but she didn’t see how.

  Her real concern, the fear that Rebecca Carnes kept hidden as deep in her heart as she could, was the knowledge that TC 779 couldn’t rescue the team until they’d eliminated Svetlanov. Unless the capsule arrived, she didn’t see any way that Pauli Weigand was going to survive the next hour in the arena below.

  A Parthian chose an arrow with red fletching from the quiver hanging from the left side of his belt of bronze openwork. He laid the shaft across the ivory ring on his left thumb and aimed with particular care. The bull stared at his tormentor twenty feet away but refused to be drawn. His tail flicked stiffly.

  The Parthian loosed. The arrow hit with a tock! like a hammer on wood. The tuft of feather stuck out only a hands-breadth from the center of the bull’s skull. The animal shuddered but didn’t fall over.

  Rebecca’d seen the effect before. Brain damage had brought not only death but rigor mortis instantaneously. The corpse froze in place like the statue of a bull. Blood still dripped from its wounds.

  The whole crowd rose, shouting and stamping its thousands of feet. The amphitheater’s timber floor boomed and quivered under the battering. The Parthian who’d made the final shot rode around the arena, waving his peaked cap to the adoring spectators.

  God. God damn. And they’d do the same thing to Pauli if they could.

  “Pauli,” she said. “I think we’d better get you out while there’s time and worry about Sve—”

  “No,” Pauli snapped. “I’m in charge of this team. He may be planning to hit when the guards’re concentrating on the finale. Or he hopes they are. I’m in charge!”

  The crowd seated itself again. A cleanup crew of a dozen slaves with teams of horses came from the south ramp and began dragging away the bulls. The animal that had died in a seizure baffled them for a moment. Two groups sel their chain hooks on the bull’s spine and pulled the corpse over on its side before they could haul it away.

  To cover the interval, the officials providing the entertainment brought out a comedy turn: eight slaves connected to a central hub by ten-foot chains as though they were the spokes of a wheel. Each slave carried a spiked club. They were n
aked except for heavy black bags covering their heads to completely blindfold them. Attendants guided the grotesque assembly into the middle of the arena.

  A municipal official beside Tiberius rose and waved a napkin hemmed with narrow red stripes. He was not only a Roman citizen but a knight—and very proud of his rank. An attendant on the sand below blew a command with his curved horn.

  The blindfolded men began flailing wildly. Spectators cheered and cat-called. The last fighter standing would gain his freedom. The attendant waiting with a long-handled mallet would finish off the rest.

  “Gerd,” Rebecca ordered. “Get close to the railing on your side. I’ll do the same. Pauli, when you enter the arena move toward the target. We’ll use straight microwave sound to keep problems away from you.”

  She reached the bottom tier, a broad walkway circling the amphitheater, but spectators still blocked her from the three-foot-high railing. Wealthy citizens sat on chairs they’d brought with them. Attendants, both slaves and Itee persons who hung on the wealthy for their living, stood behind the chairs and kept their patrons from being jostled.

  Rebecca raised her cape and reset the control dial on her pistol’s receiver from impulse to continuous beam. Nobody paid any attention to her.

  She couldn’t see the sand past three burly slaves standing behind a woman wearing orange and blue silk garments with jeweled combs in her hair. Her serpentine armlets reminded Rebecca of the past night’s whore, but these were made of gold and didn’t leave smudges of verdigris.

  Rebecca pointed the twin side-by-side muzzles of the microwave pistol from the opening of her cape and played the beam at kidney level across the slaves. Their bowels began to quiver as though they’d eaten something that was causing intestinal spasms.

  One of the men shouted in wonder. He dropped his cudgel. Sudden diarrhea fouled his legs. His patroness turned in furious anger at the stench just as her other two attendants rushed up the stairs, trampling spectators as they went.

  The crowd was too thick for Rebecca to get completely clear even though she’d expected the result. One of the slaves stepped hard enough on her left foot that she’d be lucky if he hadn’t broken a metatarsal.

  The wealthy woman was so nonplussed by what had happened to her attendants that she simply sat on her ornately carved chair. Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly. She didn’t appear to notice when Rebecca slipped by.

  The blindfold melee had ended with all the participants down. The attendant postured for the crowd, flexing his muscles before swinging the mallet the last time. The victim’s head burst like a dropped melon within the bag. The cleanup crew was already attaching hooks to the bodies.

  Trumpeters blew a long call for silence. Criers with megaphones faced the crowd from both sides of the arena. With their unison blurred by echoes from the oval walls, they announced, “And now, citizens of Rome, a captive will pay the penalty of German treachery. His fate will provide an omen of what will happen to all Germans when our armies under the ever-victorious command of Tiberius Claudius Nero exact retribution!”

  The trumpets blew again. Up the north ramp from the cages came a tall figure carrying a stabbing spear and naked except for a breechclout. The barred gate clanged shut behind him. Fully armed soldiers had been ready to prod him forward, but there was no need.

  Pauli Weigand wasn’t a man who needed to be pushed into danger.

  Pauli paused and let his eyes adjust to the afternoon sunlight. It wasn’t a bright day, but the illumination of the cells had been only what filtered through slits in the sione twenty feet above.

  “Beckie,” he said. “If anything happens to me, you’re in charge. Carry on with the mission.”

  “Pauli, get over here close to the wall,” Beckie said in tight anger instead of answering. Her voice was clear as glass. He was so used to the interference of iron and wet stone that he’d come to expect the crackling.

  The surface of the sand was warm, but as Pauli walked his bare toes found the underlayer was clammy with trapped moisture. It stank as well. Attendants shoveled up patches of blood and spread fresh sand, but dung and body fluids spattered in all directions with every violent death. Those scraps of organic matter were trampled down, covered by fresh layers of sand but removed only by decay. Simply walking across the arena released a miasma and a prophecy.

  Beckie’d heard him; he could trust her to obey. It was probably the last order he’d ever give.

  Pauli Weigand had never doubted that he was going to die. The Anti-Revision Command dealt in crises; death was the most basic crisis of existence, so he’d seen a lot of it. Feeling, knowing, that he was about to die now was something new. He wasn’t afraid, but his light-headedness had as much to do with foreboding as with fatigue and lack of sleep.

  The arena’s masonry walls were eight feet high with a simple grill of finger-thick wrought-iron rods above that. In the south and east of the empire the grill would have been higher and more substantial; in Rome herself the grill was topped with a rotating basket to hurl back any creature who managed to leap so high. No big cats were available for slaughter here on the Rhine, however, and the local fauna couldn’t jump high enough to be a problem.

  “The German traitor’s” death was intended as an exercise in sympathetic magic as well as entertainment. Just as the criers had announced, Pauli represented Free Germany and by dying would foretell Germany’s conquest. They’d given him a spear, a real weapon though crude. Most of Varus’ army had been killed by spears just like this one.

  The head was iron hammered out on a stump in a forest glade. The metal was soft, but Pauli’d honed it sharp on the stone ramp during the minutes he waited for the previous act to be cleared from the arena.

  He hefted the weapon and found it was for stabbing only. The short shaft wasn’t heavy enough to balance the head. Well, throwing the weapon would have left him unarmed anyway. He’d rather die with it in his hands.

  “Pauli, get closer to us!” Beckie ordered.

  He was fifty feet from Tiberius and his entourage. The hawk-featured general was bent in conversation with two of his aides. His attendance at games held in his honor was a necessary part of imperial politics, but the man himself was no great fan of the amphitheater. He’d seen his share of slaughter on the battlefield. The version packaged for civilians was contemptible by contrast.

  “If I get too close …” Pauli said, scanning the front rows of the crowd. He couldn’t see either of his teammates in the press of faces avid for his death. “Then one of Tiberius’ guards is likely to put a javelin through me on the principle of better safe than sorry.”

  Pauli knew from the ARC Central briefing that when news of the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest reached Rome, Augustus in panic had dismissed his German bodyguards for fear that they’d kill him in support of their free brethren. Tiberius, who’d spent years campaigning in Germany, knew better.

  The German warrior class was raised to give its loyalty to a particular chief, not to its own race or even tribe. The guards around Tiberius had pledged to defend their chieftain’s life with their own. So long as he kept his part of the bargain with honor and high pay, they would do just that.

  The Praetorian Guard of Roman citizens rebelled frequently, slaying some emperors and selling the throne to others. The foreigners of the horse guard never in the history of the empire failed to keep their pledged honor.

  The gates closing the opposite ramp squealed open. The crowd bellowed in delight. They’d loosed the beasts on Pauli Weigand.

  “Pauli, it’s a pack of wolves,” Beckie said.

  A moment later Gerd’s synthesized voice replied, “No, they’re dogs.”

  Pauli’d wondered what they were going to send; after him. Amphitheater officials in the west of the empire had problems finding mankilling animals unless they could afford the expense of imports from Africa. Bulls and boars killed a lot of hunters, but they were still herbivores who didn’t look on human beings as dinner. They’d pretty much
ignore people who stood still, and you couldn’t count on a condemned prisoner waving his arms to draw the animal sent to kill him.

  The only major carnivores in Europe were wolves and bears; wolves had a well-founded fear of humans and tended to get spooked in an arena. Dogs, though, had the contempt of familiarity for people. A pack of feral dogs, released hungry into the blood-reeking amphitheater, would be perfectly willing to pull down a lone human and devour as much as they could before attendants whipped them off the body. They didn’t need pedigrees or training: the work came naturally to them.

  There were a dozen animals in this pack; big ones for the day, averaging thirty kilos apiece. They sniffed the sand; several rolled delightedly in some foulness they’d sniffed beneath the surface. Then a great brindled bitch sijjhted Pauli Weigand. She led the pack down the arena toward him with a series of incongruously high-pitched yelps.

  “Gerd,” Pauli said, “remember the first priority is to locate the revisionist.”

  “Yes, Pauli,” the analyst replied. Gerd really would do that; not because he didn’t care about Pauli Weigand, but because his conception of life and death differed from that of most people. Gerd wasn’t a sociopath, but he was equally outside the norms of human society.

  The leading animals in the pack spread out as they neared their quarry. They’d circle him, tear his hamstrings out from behind whichever way he turned, and then snatch mouthfuls of flesh as he thrashed on the sand. Slower dogs—one was limping on three legs—straggled on in line at their best speed.

  Holding his spear in one hand, Pauli raised the other and shouted in Latin, “Halt or feel my power!”

  The brindled bitch yelped and turned a somersault. An instant later the ruff of a brown cur flattened at a silent impact. He rolled sideways, snapping at the invisible club. Another of the leaders doubled up, then dragged itself away with a whine.

  The crowd gave a startled roar and rose to its feet.

  Though he knew it was risky, Pauli turned to face Tiberius. The dogs swarmed around him. He shooed a sharp-featured bitch with the butt of his spear. Faces stared down from the amphitheater with expressions of anger and fear.