Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 42

AD 54, Rome

‘Who in the name of the gods are these people?’

Liam didn’t get the impression they were entirely welcome. The man was small and slim and wearing nothing more than a towel round his narrow waist. The parchment skin of an old man hung in wattles from his neck, wrinkled into slack bands over his knobbly knees.

‘Crassus, they’re not safe where they are!’ replied Cato, ushering them into the senator’s atrium.

‘So? This isn’t a public refuge for waifs and strays!’

‘They could help us, Crassus.’ Cato pointed at Bob. ‘Particularly this one.’

‘My gods…’ muttered Crassus, eyeing the support unit up and down. ‘He’s a giant!’

‘And fast, very fast,’ added Macro.

Crassus nodded. The old senator turned back to Cato. ‘But at this time of night! Caligula’s eyes are everywhere! You arrive at my home at this hour, you’re asking to attract attention!’ Crassus looked a little out of breath. ‘And can you not see I’m being washed? Whatever this is about, it can wait, can’t it?’

‘We need to talk, Crassus.’ Cato’s tone conveyed everything it needed to. ‘An important matter.’

Crassus nodded slowly. ‘All right.’ He wafted his hands at the slave lathering his legs and feet with oil. ‘Off you go, Tosca.’ He smiled. ‘I can finish here myself, thank you.’ He waited until his slave was gone and the atrium was empty but for himself and his unexpected visitors. He stepped out of the wash bowl on the floor and padded wet-footed across the cool granite floor to a seat.

‘Cato…’ he began cautiously, eyeing Bob and the others. ‘If this is “a matter” that might be best discussed in a dark corner, I suggest we — ’

‘This big one — ’ Cato pointed at Bob ‘- is a Stone Man.’

‘Oh please.’

‘He is.’ Macro nodded. ‘Seen him fight with my own eyes. He took a sword that would kill any man.’ He turned to look up at Bob. ‘Why don’t you show him?’

Bob looked at Liam, who nodded.

‘Go on,’ muttered Liam. ‘Might as well show him too.’

Bob lifted his tunic to expose the six-inch line of puckered flesh across his ribcage.

‘To the hilt and out the back,’ added Macro. ‘I’ve seen that wound too many times. If it doesn’t kill you outright… it’ll finish you within hours.’

Crassus shuffled over towards Bob, one hand holding the towel round his waist for modesty; he reached the other out and lightly ran his fingers along the seam of knitting flesh. ‘This must be an old wound.’

‘Actually it happened earlier this afternoon,’ said Cato.

Macro nodded. ‘Took down a dozen of Varelius’s collegia as if they were children.’

Crassus stared at the wound. Up at Bob. ‘Does this monster speak?’

Bob’s grey eyes panned down to him. ‘Of course I do.’ His deep voice made a nearby vase vibrate and ring like a tuning fork.

‘Are… are you a man of stone?’

Bob looked again at Liam and Maddy. ‘Go on,’ said Maddy, ‘you tell ’em what you are.’

‘I am a support unit. A genetically engineered life form with advanced adaptive artificial intelligence. I am capable of delivering a strength-to-weight ratio of seven hundred per cent.’

Crassus shook his head. ‘I don’t understand the words you are speaking.’

‘Which means,’ added Liam, ‘he’s seven times stronger than any human.’

Crassus, already round-eyed, found a way to open them even wider.

‘I have advanced damage limitation and healing systems. Blood with a thickening agent when exposed to air. High concentration of red blood cells delivering oxygen-rich — ’

‘Which means he’s almost impossible to kill.’

Crassus’s jaw suddenly sagged with horror. ‘You brought me one of Caligula’s…?’

‘No! He’s not one of the Palace Guard!’ said Cato. ‘He’s new. These people are new to Rome. They’ve just arrived.’

Crassus’s rheumy eyes, small like slits, narrowed even further. ‘Arrived? From where?’

Cato lowered his voice. ‘You were there, Crassus. The day the acolytes, the priests, talk about? You told me you were there in the amphitheatre, the Statilius Taurus, seventeen years ago. You were one of the few who saw!’

Crassus nodded. ‘Yes, I… I was one who bore witness.’ He was still studying Bob. ‘I have never been certain of what we all saw. You know, Cato, I do not believe in such things as gods or the emperor’s foolish notions.’

Cato smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘But I have no other explanation for the visitation… I…’

‘I do, Crassus,’ cut in Cato. ‘These people are like the Visitors. They come from the same place as them.’

The old man’s breath hitched. ‘The same place…?’

‘Not the heavens, Crassus, for sure. A strange place, though.’

Crassus reached out again and probed the healing wound. The old man looked up at Bob’s face, at the ridge of bone that shadowed his eyes, the jaw that jutted forward like the prow of a ship. Thick cheekbones that looked as if they’d been sculpted from stone.

Crassus’s lips were dry; his old eyes glinted. Widened. ‘And you?’ he said to Bob. ‘You are your own man? You serve no master?’

‘I take orders from Liam O’Connor, Madelaine Carter and Saleena Vikram,’ he replied. ‘They are my team.’

‘So, you… you are not one of Caligula’s Stone Men — not one of them?’

Bob shrugged. ‘I do not understand the question. Who is “them”?’

Crassus shared a conspiratorial meeting of eyes with Cato. A silent, barely noticeable nod of agreement.

‘The Visitors.’

They were given a couple of cubicula in the guest wing of Senator Crassus’s home, comfortable rooms. Through several small square, iron-grated windows the first pale blue light of approaching dawn seeped in. Rome was still fast asleep, the only sound the first twitter of sparrows, impatient for the day to start, and the rasp of some trader’s cart wheel across cobblestones.

In the blue-grey gloom of the receding night, the four of them sat together on a bed of silk and linen. Earlier Maddy and the others had listened as the old man, Crassus, and the Praetorian tribune, Cato, had talked for several hours. Men talking carelessly, impatiently, about their intention to end Caligula’s disastrous rule before it was too late.

They learned that Crassus was one of the few members of the dissolved Senate still alive. The entire political class of Rome entirely wiped out by years of purges. Alive solely because he was a wily politician. Self-serving. Because he’d been one of the few senators to understand their emperor was in an unassailable position, and willing, very publicly, to vote in favour of Caligula’s order that the Senate should dissolve itself.

They’d listened to the old man’s regrets. That a stronger, more moral man would have stood beside his fellow senators and registered his outrage. Instead, his finely-tuned political senses had anticipated Caligula’s agenda. The imperial order had been Caligula’s rather unsubtle attempt to identify which senators and their families were to face the lions first.

‘I am not a brave man,’ he’d said. ‘I have far too weak a stomach for that kind of thing. Courage is a thing for young men… or dying men.’

Marcus Cornelius Crassus had his life still, and his home and wealth, because along with a handful of other equally wily old men, he’d made the right choice at the right time. He’d managed to quickly distance himself from that foolishly planned attempt on Caligula’s life nearly fifteen years ago. Because, since then, he’d been prepared to praise Caligula’s imperial decrees, to flatter the man, to endure his poetry recitals, to clap enthusiastically at his grotesquely one-sided demonstrations of gladiatorial skills. But, most importantly, to donate generously to the emperor.

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?’