by Chuck Dixon
“It’s time for him to nurse,” Caroline said and took a seat in an upholstered glider Dwayne ordered and had delivered before he left.
“Is there anything you’d like me to get for you?” Greta said once she’d handed the baby off.
“A cup of tea would be nice.” Caroline smiled. “Decaffeinated, of course.”
“Of course. One moment.” And Greta was gone. Caroline entered a waking dream state as Stephen nursed. This was pure contentment. She thought briefly of her feminist acquaintances when she was at school in London and Chicago. They’d be horrified to see her in such a state of reactionary oppression.
The door opened, and Caroline was surprised that Greta could be back so quickly with her tea.
Only it wasn’t Greta. It was the man she knew only as Samuel in a strangely cut dark suit with a blood-stained tear in the right sleeve. She noted that he looked younger than the last time they met. It had to be her imagination.
“You have to come with me. Both of you. Now.”
Greta returned with a steaming cup of tea and a plate of vanilla biscuits on a tray, only to find the master bedroom empty. No Mrs. Nesbitt, and no baby anywhere to be seen. She searched the rest of the suite and found she was entirely alone.
Though not for long. She was startled when a man stormed into the suite from the hallway with a gun in his hand. The man was lean and handsome, with white hair set off by a nut-brown complexion.
“Where are they?” he said coolly, making the pistol vanish under his jacket as though it had never existed.
“I don’t know,” Greta said. “They were here just a moment ago, and then...”
She trailed away as the man fixed her in his gaze, calmly assessing her as though using what he saw and heard to come to a decision. Without another word or gesture, the man turned and left the suite.
Her grandmother used to explain away a sudden chill by saying that someone had just walked across her grave. Now Greta knew exactly what that felt like.
She also knew that she craved something stronger than tea.
21
Pax Romana
They wound up letting Bat Jaffe do the horsetrading. They picked out ten sturdy mounts. Most of the traders spoke Aramaic only. But Bat found a toothless old bastard with a good string and haggled with him in rapid-fire Hebrew for what seemed like days. Other men stood by to witness the exchange and the tall strangers with their odd dress and aspects. A woman speaking for men in a matter of trade? And what army did these men march in?
“Just pay him what he wants,” Lee growled.
“This isn’t Walmart, honey,” she snapped back. “You back down, and they’ll tell everyone they know. We’re making enough of an impression as it is.”
They eventually settled on three of the gold coins from their hoard. The horse trader seemed pleased and shouted God’s blessings on them as they led the horses away.
“We still got ripped off,” Bat said bitterly.
The horses were Nisaeans, a Persian animal bred for stamina but fast enough to get them out of trouble if it came to that. Jimbo knew horses best and picked out each one. He chose all mares and judged them to be two– and three-year-olds.
The scene was repeated at a saddle maker’s. Bat and the stall keeper going round and round. Five saddles and five pack frames for their gear.
“Where’s the stirrups?” Chaz bitched.
“Come back in a few hundred years,” Jimbo said. “No stirrups here until Attila arrives in the neighborhood.”
“Well, that’s just fucking stupid,” Chaz said. “How am I supposed to get up on this animal? And stay on? Should’ve brought our own saddles.”
“Chronal integrity, bro.” Jimbo smiled.
“Shit,” Chaz said and looked around for something to use as a step.
The pack animals were saddled and the gear secured on their backs. The travelers decided to walk the horses until they were beyond the city walls. Caesarea was a trade center, and so was a polyglot of peoples from all over the region. There were Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Macedonians, Dacians, Parthians, Dalmatians, and every other people and race that lived beneath the rule of Tiberius Rex.
There was enough variety of custom, dress, and appearance that four American men in t-shirts, oddly patterned kilts (Lee in his BDUs), and boots did not rate any special attention. Their weapons and armor were concealed on the animals’ backs. They wore knives on their belts as the only visible means of protection. Bat had her Sig in a cross-draw holster concealed under a loose linen blouse that also hid her figure.
Bat was surprised at how little Roman presence she saw as they made their way along the dusty streets. From the wharves to the market, they saw only a few Roman soldiers and those seemed to be more interested in shopping. She naively expected the past to be like the movies: stolid legionnaires tramping everywhere behind their shields and columns of slaves in chains being urged on by lashes from a bullwhip. Except for some of the architecture, there was no sign that this city was under imperial rule of any kind.
It looked like any bustling seaside town in stark contrast to the tomb-like atmosphere they’d encountered the night before. There was no sense of either tyranny or rebellion in the air. No one seemed to be rankling under the yoke of oppression. She remembered that slaves did not wear any outward sign of their servitude under Roman law. There was no way to know how many of the people they passed were chattel to the Romans, or even Judeans. She felt vaguely disappointed. Except for the lack of honking cars and radios blaring everywhere, she could be in modern Haifa.
She realized there was another difference: in modern Haifa, you saw signs of the military everywhere. The IDF was a constant presence in a nation under perpetual threat from terrorists seeking its demise. It was a testament to how absolute Roman authority was here that there were so few soldiers in evidence and the port was left unguarded. A real challenge to the rule of the Caesars was centuries away.
This place and time had a feeling of the surreal. Bat had to remind herself that this was real, not a recreation. They were actually in the distant past. They were in so alien a period that they could openly speak English and not fear being overheard. Their language would not exist in anything like the form they used for over a thousand years or more. The Angles and Saxons were still far to the north in their deep forests. The British Isles were occupied by Picts and Celts and, for now, beyond the rule of Rome. And America was a place undreamed of beyond the waters of the Mare Incognita where the world ended. The thought of that made her a bit dizzy.
They drew some stares as they followed the streets eastward. It wasn’t for their dress but for their height and the diverse mix of the group. Boats with his flowing red hair and beard, Chaz’s ebony skin, and Jimbo’s high cheekbones and striking profile. Lee stood out with the array of multicolored tattoos running down his arms. Only Bat fit the place and time with her olive complexion and raven curls held back by a strip of cloth. No one challenged them, only watched and remarked. The odd caravan moved on through a gate and until the streets became dirt paths and they left the city behind.
In a lane between rows of date palms, they decided to saddle up and make time. Before mounting, Jimbo had taken down a gear bag to remove his Winchester. He slid it into a leather boot and strapped it to the saddle where it would be ready at hand. The rest found their side arms and strapped on. Their holsters were concealed carry models. To anyone seeing them, they would look like the kind of purses men wore on their belts to hold coins. They also retrieved CamelBaks, binoculars, boonie hats, and meal packs.
Bat added the snubby in a thigh holster to her arsenal, securing it under the hem of her kilt.
“Sexy,” Lee remarked.
“Me or the Colt? Don’t answer that,” she added quickly with a squint.
Jimbo and Bat mounted easily despite the lack of stirrups or pommel. It took Lee and Boats a few tries. The worst time of all was had by Chaz. He pulled his mount to a section of a low stone wall that he used as a step. Th
e horse won three out of four falls before Chaz got firmly situated.
“I thought you spent summers on your Uncle Red’s farm,” Jimbo said.
“I didn’t spend them playing cowboy,” Chaz said, urging the horse forward with a slap of the reins.
“You always picked the fattest horse when we were in Helmand,” Lee said.
“Fat horses are safer. They don’t take off with you,” Chaz answered. “This bitch has a gleam in her eye I don’t like.”
“I’ll stay by you,” Bat said and leaned from the saddle to run a hand down the neck of Chaz’s mount. “Who’s a good girl?” she cooed. The horse’s ears came forward.
Jimbo rode ahead to scout. The rest followed at a trot leading the pack horses behind them. Before them, they could see the land rising to the blue ridge of mountains.
They knew from their maps that it fell away beyond those peaks to the deep Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee before ascending again to the Golan Heights. The orchards and farms would give way soon to the broken country of hills and defiles where they would need to be wary. While the Romans held the cities and surroundings, the land they rode for was without law of any kind.
22
Drive Curious
They were on the E-60 heading north and west for Auxerre. The highway was mostly sunken for long lengths between hills but would sometimes climb a rise. Then Caroline could see lights in farmhouses and the dark shapes of trees. The moon cast shadows from set stone walls around farm fields making them appear to be outlined in black.
Stephen slept in her arms where she sat in the back seat of the Audi. She wanted to stop and buy a car seat, but Samuel said that this was out of the question. She was in what she suspected was a stolen car driven by a man she knew next to nothing about toward a destination she wasn’t certain of and away from a threat that had not been fully described to her. Child safety laws seemed low on the list of priorities to worry about. Still, it gave her something practical to focus her anxiety on.
Samuel drove without speaking, a French-language pop station playing low on the radio. The traffic was light at this time of night. There seemed to be nothing ahead of them all the way into infinity. It was as if the world only became real as their headlights illuminated it and then receded again into nonexistence behind them.
The only stop they had made was at a roadside truck station. Samuel went into the brightly lit store alone. He returned with a paper sack of sandwiches, plastic bottles of milk, a tub of sanitizing wipes, and a small packet of diapers. Caroline noted a clean white bandage visible beneath the blood-caked tear in his coat. He must have done some first aid in the restroom. She also saw a dull metallic sheen about his wrist. Something like a wristwatch, but with a broader band.
“Can you tell me where we’re heading?” she asked.
“The White City.”
“Chicago?” she said, confused. “We’re going to fly?”
“Paris. I mean we’re going to Paris.”
“I’ve heard it called the City of Lights,” she said. He did not reply, and she left it at that.
They drove in silence for a while. Stephen slept, his breath a gentle current on the skin of Caroline’s sheltering arm.
“You drive with gloves on,” she said. “You do everything with gloves on.”
“I try to avoid physical contact with my environment as much as possible,” he said without turning, without even meeting her eyes in the rearview.
“That’s a practical consideration, right? I notice you avoid touching anything. Is that a health concern? Are you being cautious about catching some illness?”
“Most people live in time,” he said as if not hearing her questions. “They are born and live and die in a linear timeline. A few, a very few, live through time.”
“Like me,” she said. “And the Rangers. And you.”
“Yes. Except for me. I live without time.”
She waited for him to explain further. “What does that mean precisely?” Caroline asked at last.
“Because of the peculiarities of my birth, I live outside the normal constraints of time. I can more easily adjust to changes in my chronological location in that way. I do not live a life described in a linear fashion.”
“You’re unstuck in time,” she said. “Like Billy Pilgrim.”
“Who is that?”
“Nobody. A fictional character in a book I read a long time ago.”
Samuel said nothing.
“When we met in Menton on the beach at the hotel?” she said.
Samuel still said nothing. She glimpsed a flash of those extraordinary green eyes in the mirror.
“You were older then.”
“Was I?” he asked.
“A good twenty years older than you are now.” He said nothing at first. The fine hairs stood up on her arms.
“If you say so.”
“Then this…this sudden urgent ride has nothing to do with that?” she asked.
“No. This is about your son.”
“Stephen? What does any of this have to do with my baby?”
“One of my parents was like you, a time traveler,” Samuel said. “Your child is the product of two parents who visited a time period not their own. Several, in fact.”
She put aside the surreal nature of their conversation. She locked down her emotional reaction to learning that her child was “different” in an unanticipated and unwelcome way. The scientist emerged. Her intellectual curiosity took over.
“You mean traveling through the chronal field altered our genetics?”
“No. Not your gene structure. Something deeper. Something simpler yet more complex.”
“Samuel, are we talking string theory here?”
“I’m not as familiar with the study of physics in your era as I should be. We may be talking about the same thing, but I do not have your terminology for it. The scientific language is different.”
“String is an area of theoretical science that seeks to explain how the basic particles of existence relate to one another,” she said. “It can be used to theorize about everything from the causation of gravity to the existence of other dimensions.”
“It sounds like Trivenchy’s thesis called Mica Prima,” Samuel said. “In it, he explains that all matter comes from a single source and all relates back to the first piece of matter in creation; the remnant that holds the answer to the existence of everything.”
“The God Particle.”
“That is an evocative way of stating it.”
“More romantic than Higgs boson, certainly,” Caroline agreed. “You’re saying that because one of your parents was displaced in time, you are significantly affected on a sub-atomic level.”
“Yes. That is the simplest way to phrase it.”
“Which of your parents?’
“My father.”
“Do I know him?” She already knew the answer before he said it.
“Yes. Richard Renzi.”
Stephen was startled awake and began crying. Caroline cooed and rocked him as they rode through the night, holding him to her, absorbing his warmth into her to fight the sudden chill she knew had nothing to do with the cold outside the car.
23
A Stolen March
The cold desert sky was clear above them the night of their first camp.
Lee Hammond was able to take a reading from the position of the stars.
“We’re late,” he announced to the others. Except for Jimbo, who was on overwatch somewhere out in the dark.
They were cold camping. No fire. They didn’t see a single human being once they passed out of the last orchard beyond the walls of Caesarea. A few wild goats were spotted but no sign of settlements or nomads. They’d mostly followed a rough eastward trail until the ground broke up. They settled on a ledge of rock scree in the lee of a hillside to rest the horses, eat, and catch some sleep.
“It’s the tenth of September, AD 16,” Lee said.
“That’s a week past our targ
et, right?” Chaz said.
“We’re making good time,” Bat said. “We’re past the point we meant to make the first day.”
“But we lost a day getting mounts and saddles. There’s not a lot of wiggle room here,” Lee said. “We need to be ahead of the convoy to set up an ambush. That means we really hump it from here on.”
“So we hump it.” Chaz shrugged.
Boats, wrapped in a sheepskin and lying in the shelter of a scrub pine, snored on.
They broke camp and were back on the trail before dawn. Jimbo rode far ahead to scout the country. He made piles of rocks to mark where he changed directions. The ground was rising and breaking up. They counted on the fact that the topography had not changed too much in two millennia. There were more trees and brush than in The Now. The marshlands were larger than they would be one day.
They left the wetlands behind as the elevation increased on the way to the high ground before the Dead Sea rift and the Golan Heights beyond. Jimbo would find the path of least resistance around the floor of hills and avoid settlements and caravans.
They were in time now, racing east to intersect a Roman army column they knew was marching north. Any more delays and they would miss the potential ambush points they’d pre-chosen. Jimmy Smalls was riding farther in advance than any of them were comfortable with. They needed the knowledge of what lay ahead to make the best time. Besides, if the Pima ran into trouble, there was none tougher. And the rest of the team would ride in if he let off a signal shot from his Winchester.
“With all the breaks and a day of hard riding we should reach the road by nightfall,” Bat said riding even with Lee.
“Except we never get the breaks,” Lee said.
“Those Romans have no reason to push,” she said.
“They’re on foot, and they stop at every twentieth milepost and spend hours making a fortified camp. Plus they have prisoners slowing them down.”