Gates of Rome by Alex Scarrow
Crassus was alive and favoured because the advice he uttered to Caligula, on the few occasions that the emperor deigned to ask for it, was what he wanted to hear.
‘Since that failed attempt, my hope was always that Caligula would kill himself. By accident, or in one of his dark moods, take his own life. But the day of that visitation at the amphitheatre, real or not, gave him a sense of destiny. At least in his own mind. And now, far too late, I finally see that Caligula will destroy Rome long before he destroys himself.’ Crassus had smiled sadly. ‘I hope in my final years I have found in me a little of what my friend Cato has in abundance.’
Quintus Licinius Cato, they learned, was a tribune in the Guard. Once upon a time the son of a court slave, he’d been given his freedom on condition he joined the legions. He’d served in the Second Legion, stationed on the Rhine frontier. There he’d fought alongside Macro for many years guarding the western banks of the River Rhine. It was the stretched-thin red Roman line that was struggling to hold back the eastern hordes that collectively sensed, like a pack of hungry dogs, that under Caligula, Rome was on the cusp of eating itself.
Despite an unpromising start, Cato had distinguished himself many times over in combat. Capable and quick-witted. Maddy sensed Macro looked upon his old comrade with something like fatherly pride. They’d bored Crassus into going to bed with their bawdy tales from the Second; stories of heroic rearguard actions and daring counter-insurgency missions that seemed to enthral Liam.
She was looking at Liam when Macro had said his young friend, Cato, had been only sixteen when he’d entered the Second. A pampered, educated court slave, pale-skinned and whippet-thin and unlikely to cope long with the rigours and hardship of army life.
‘I’ll tell you, when I first caught sight of young Cato, I didn’t think too much of him. Looked like a strong fart would blow him over.’
Liam had chuckled at that.
‘But I watched this young lad turn into a fine soldier … and a fine officer.’
They learned that ten years ago, Macro had retired from the Second with his pension and bought the crumbling apartment block in the Subura as an investment. Meanwhile Cato had been headhunted by the Praetorian Guard’s praefectus – always on the lookout for officers with talent.
Finally with Macro’s snoring echoing round the atrium – sleeping off Crassus’s wine – Cato bid them goodnight and to get some rest. There were ‘others’ he and Crassus wanted them to meet tomorrow. A slave had shown them to their rooms.
‘The Stone Men are support units,’ said Maddy presently. ‘Clearly.’
‘And this Caligula has a dozen of them as his personal guard,’ added Liam.
‘But … why would they protect Caligula?’ asked Maddy. ‘I mean they wouldn’t unless they’ve been programmed to.’
‘Affirmative.’
Sal made a face, incredulity and amusement wrestling with each other. ‘You saying Caligula’s, like, hacked the code? Reprogrammed them?’
‘No, of course not! But –’
‘Maybe … I dunno, maybe this Caligula fella isn’t Caligula,’ said Liam. All three of them turned to look at him as if he’d belched unpleasantly. He glanced from one face to the next and shrugged.
‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’
CHAPTER 43
AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome
He could never sleep during the hot months of summer, even as a child. Caligula recalled the uncomfortable summer nights in his father’s quarters, hearing the noises of an army camp coming through the tent flaps – the legions on their various summer campaigns. He smiled wistfully – half of his childhood spent in innumerable marching camps. Such a different creature he’d been back then. Just a small boy, fascinated by the same things any small boy would be: the soldiers who towered over him, their armour, their swords. In his father Germanicus’s tent he played out the battles Germanicus had fought with an army of small wooden soldiers … carved by those same men. They loved him. The legion’s mascot. Little boot.
He looked out over Rome now, still and dark.
I am something other now. No longer that boy.
The city had once seemed so vast to him, long ago: the centre of the civilized world. Now he saw nothing but an endless tangle of scruffy rooftops, and there, across the city, his magnificent unfinished stairway to the heavens. The only beautiful thing out there.
His eyes were drawn to the night sky, a star-filled night. The ghosts of silver-blue clouds chased each other in front of the moon. These days he spent more and more of his time gazing up at the sky, particularly on overcast days, wondering whether he might catch the slightest glimpse of the heavenly world far above between tumbling anvils of cloud.
My waiting world.
My kingdom.
He stepped away from his window, bored with gazing at the city. Frustrated by the very sight of it. To be God … not just a god, but to be the God, the one and only, and yet have to wait so interminably to visit the kingdom above.
I am God. So why can I not simply wish myself there … and be there?
Caligula shook his head. He had no answers to that. But then his divine baptism was yet to happen. His ‘ascension to Heaven’. Then, when it was done, of course, all those godly powers would come to him. He could simply wish … and things would happen.
And he would wish good things. He would wish wonderful things. He would shower Rome with wealth and treats. He would reward his faithful followers with eunuchs and virgins and fountains of the finest wines. There would be bountiful harvests of wheat and maize. No one would be hungry again. If only those grumbling disbelievers out there could see that.
Yes. He would also punish his enemies. Their fate would be endless torment, endless agony. He would wish on them all the pox, leprosy then hordes of gargoyle-faced demons to poke at their weeping skin with sharpened sticks, flame-hardened and still smouldering.
He shook his head at the stupidity of men.
Why doubt me? They came to me. Down from Heaven … to speak to me.
The doubters were blind. Blind to the obvious truth. That’s why he decided those fools who’d made that attempt on his life so many years ago would not need their eyes any more. How many had there been? Five hundred? Six hundred of them? To be fair, he was certain now that a good few of them had not known anything at all about the plot to kill him. But to be the wife or even the child of a conspirator was, in some way, a form of complicity.
He’d ended up with over a thousand bloody eyeballs staring up at him from where they were piled on his marble floor. And their butchered bodies had covered the palace gardens outside.
Caligula’s bare feet had carried him absently out of his bedroom into the main atrium. There, standing guard outside his bedroom, was one of the few he could fully trust.
‘It is a hot night, is it not … Stern?’
Stern. Such an odd-sounding name. Caligula had tried to rename these guardians of his, but they only responded to the names they came with.
‘Affirmative. One degree centigrade hotter than last night.’
Caligula smiled, nodded. Some of the things Stern and the others said confused him. They used words he didn’t quite understand. He was sure he would understand these words, the strange language he’d heard Stern and the others of his guards use occasionally, when he properly became God.
Not so long now.
‘Will you walk with me?’
Stern nodded. Caligula admired the sculpted contours of the man, the fascinating olive-coloured armour he and his men wore; so light and yet so effective. And their helmets, so odd-looking.
‘Affirmative,’ Stern replied. His Latin perfect. His accent still so very foreign.
Caligula’s restless feet took him across the atrium, down the main passage. Three steps dutifully behind him, the soft clunk of Stern’s boots, the gentle clatter of his armour echoed in the stillness.
‘Do you ever dream, Stern?’
‘Negative.’
‘Have you no wishes? No fantasies? No desires?’
‘Negative. I have mission parameters that need to be fulfilled. That is all.’
Caligula turned and smiled at him curiously. ‘You and your men are such a puzzle to me, Stern. You are not like anyone else. You do not seem to have the weaknesses of other men, other soldiers. I never see you sleep,’ he said, laughing, ‘or get drunk.’
‘It is not a requirement.’
He’d never seen them sleep as such, but every now and then Stern and his men periodically went into a sort of trance, a meditation. He’d looked in a number of times on the palace quarters he’d given them over the years and seen the twelve of them sitting bolt upright on their cots staring into space in perfect, motionless silence. Nothing like the soldiers’ quarters he remembered from his youth: the smell of stale sweat and cheap wine, the raucous noise of men off duty, the clack of dice on a table, raised voices cursing poor fortune. The exchange of crude profanities and vulgar stories.
He rested an affectionate hand on Stern’s firm neck. ‘If only all men were like you. Dutiful, loyal.’
Stern’s grey eyes rested on him. He said nothing.
‘But then you aren’t really normal men, are you?’
‘Correct.’ Stern had explained on several occasions precisely what he and his colleagues were, again using a host of words that Caligula couldn’t begin to understand, but was certain he would one day soon. The language of angels – so cryptic.
‘You’re just like me,’ said Caligula. ‘Not of this world … this ordinary, tedious world. But somewhere far greater, somewhere magnificent. Somewhere beyond.’
‘Affirmative. We are not from this time.’
He squeezed Stern’s neck gently, feeling the cords of muscle there. Stern and the others were incredibly powerful for their size. And remarkably agile. They made superb gladiators.
In fact, perfect gladiators. None of the gladiators in the various commercial ludi based around Rome had ever managed to beat any of Stern’s men. Once, just once, one of the finest fighters from the ludus at Capua – a myrmillo – had managed to slice through the lower arm of one of Stern’s men. But, with just his remaining hand, he had been able to finish the gladiator off. Crushing the man’s neck, despite the man stabbing and stabbing him over and over with his gladius. One of the public displays he put on for the people from time to time: a free fight. Free entertainment. And a reminder to those with ideas in their heads that his guards – his Viri Lapidei, his Stone Men – were utterly invincible.
That particular myrmillo had died, of course.
Stern’s one-armed man had recovered within a couple of days.
They were paused midway down a long passage, lit by the guttering flames of several oil torches. To their left a heavy velvet drape shifted subtly. Caligula pulled the drape aside to reveal a short passage and, at the far end, a pair of thick oak doors, a locking bar across them. Two more of his Stone Men stood to attention either side of them.
‘I think I shall go and take a look at the oracle.’
Stern nodded.
Caligula’s bare feet tapped lightly along the smooth floor. Ahead of him the two guards watched his approach with impassive grey eyes. They slid the locking bolt to one side and pushed the heavy doors slowly open. Beyond, a dark room, completely dark. Caligula reached for a tallow candle and lit it from one of the torches.
He didn’t need to instruct either of the guards not to follow him inside. They knew the dark space beyond was for Caligula alone. They were forbidden to enter, Stern and his men. They also knew to close the heavy doors behind Caligula as he stepped inside and not to open them again until he rapped his knuckles on them to be let out once more.
Thick hinges creaked under the weight of old oak and Caligula found himself standing alone in the darkness. The candlelight formed a small pool of brightness on the tiled mosaic of the floor.
‘Are you awake?’ His voice echoed across the large chamber.
He took a step into the darkness. It was there, just ahead of him. The candle would pick it out soon.
‘I cannot sleep again.’ Caligula’s voice reverberated in the empty chamber. ‘What about you? Hmmm?’
His candle picked out the front of the wooden box in the middle of the chamber. A box, like the doors, made of thick oak and reinforced with metal brackets. He could smell it from here. An awful smell. Not dissimilar to the reek of those overcrowded streets in the Subura.
‘Are you awake in there?’
He heard a shuffling sound inside the box. A restless stirring like that of a caged tiger.
CHAPTER 44
AD 54, Rome
It took several days, in fact, for Crassus and Cato to coordinate a meeting of their fellow conspirators. Crassus carefully arranged for two other ex-senators to discreetly join them; Cicero and Paulus, two more elders like Crassus, were alive because they too were wily politicians, and at the right moment had stepped away from the aborted attempt on Caligula’s life.
Cato brought with him a centurion he trusted from his cohort – the Palace Guard. Fronto. A muscular man in his early thirties with a scar running down the left-hand side of his face, and all his teeth missing on that side. One other conspirator, Atellus, was a tribune like Cato, but from another legion, the Tenth. Like Cato in his late thirties, muscular but lean, a career officer with a face that gave nothing away.
And, of course, Cato’s trusted old friend, retired Chief Centurion Macro. Just seven men prepared to discuss the assassination of a leader that was rapidly driving Rome – the only beacon of civilization in a dark world of savagery – towards a cliff edge.
‘Do you know how dangerous it is for us to even be in the same room together?’ said Cicero. He was referring to himself, Paulus and Crassus. Caligula’s spies kept an eye out for any huddled meetings of the few politicians left alive. ‘And you have us standing here … with these complete strangers! They could be –’
‘They’re not spies, Cicero. I’m quite certain of that,’ replied Crassus. ‘They stand out far too much for that.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s why they’ve been my guests here, out of sight. Beyond the reach of spying eyes and wagging tongues.’
Rumours had a habit of travelling quickly through the narrow streets and tenement blocks of the poorer districts of Rome, rumours that could quickly reach the ears of an emperor. Macro had worked quickly to crush the stories being told by his tenants of the ‘invincible superhuman who had wiped out an entire collegium’ in mere seconds. They’d all seen Bob take that mortal wound and walk away from it as if it was just a scratch. He’d spread the word among his tenants that the large man had unfortunately died of his wounds during the night. Sadly he was not an invincible champion of the poor and frightened, just a good fighter who, for a few moments, had provided onlookers a rare glimpse of hope and cheer.
Cicero looked at them all and finally nodded in agreement. ‘They do indeed look very strange.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Sal quietly. Maddy waved that away. ‘We’re not from Rome.’ She was getting used to the technique of muttering to herself what she wanted to say and then repeating aloud the Latin whispered to her. ‘We’re from another place, very far away.’
‘Britain, I believe you told us.’
Maddy shrugged. ‘America actually.’
The conspirators looked at each other. Sal recognized the word amid the Latin. ‘Are you telling them about –’
‘America? I’ve not heard of that place,’ said Cato. ‘Is that a region of Britain?’
Liam shot her a cheeky grin.
‘Not exactly.’ She smiled. No one’s going to hear of it for another fourteen hundred years!
Atellus was studying Bob intently. ‘Cato, you say this man is … is like Caligula’s Stone Men?’
Cato nodded. ‘Not one of them … but he is the same kind.’
‘The Stone Men are of particular interest to us,’ said Maddy.
‘Some of the men fro
Cato glanced at Maddy. ‘What is your interest in them?’
She looked at Liam. How much to say? How much to tell them?
‘We believe they come from the same place as us. We believe they are the remnants of a larger group of people who arrived here.’
‘You’re talking about the Visitors?’ said Paulus.
Maddy nodded. ‘We’ve heard so many different stories about what happened, about that day.’
‘I was also there,’ said Paulus. ‘I was a witness to it.’
‘Can you tell us what you saw?’
‘It was a long time ago. I saw things I couldn’t understand.’ Paulus shrugged. His old rheumy eyes closed. ‘Since that day I have wondered what we saw. Sometimes I almost believe it was a shared moment of madness.’ He laughed. ‘Bad wine even.’
‘Tell me,’ pressed Maddy. ‘What did you see?’
‘There were perhaps a hundred of them. To my eye, as I remember them, they looked like ordinary people, men and women. The Stone Men appeared to be their soldiers. Their protectors.’
‘Support units,’ Liam uttered in English. Maddy nodded.
‘One of them spoke to the crowd in the arena. He spoke in a voice inhumanly loud.’
‘Do you remember what he said?’
Paulus shook his head. ‘I recall small portions, but then I wonder how much of what I remember is a fiction my old mind has conjured up.’
‘Please … try and tell us what you remember.’
Paulus’s eyes twinkled with moisture as he reached back to try and relive the memory. ‘He spoke of bringing news … that our Roman gods were a cruel trick, a lie. I remember that. He said that there was only one God. This … for sure is part of what he said, because I remember thinking that peculiar notion reminded me of … of that odd, that very strange cult that was coming out of Judaea.’