Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 59

AD 54, Subura District, Rome

‘ Jay-zus! Get off, will ya! ’ yelled Liam as he swung the club down on to the bulging knuckles of a pair of hands grasping the top of the barricade. The club — the leg of a wooden stool with several lumber nails banged through it — crunched down heavily. Even through the din of the baying, jeering crowd that had amassed out in the street, he heard bones crack like eggshells.

There was another pair of hands in the same spot a moment later, the gathered mob working together as one, rocking the heavy cart forward and backward to make it topple over. Bob was doing his best to use his bulk to hold it in place, to steady it. But that wasn’t working how they’d hoped. The wooden spars of the cart were stressing and creaking and loosening. The mob out there might not be able to push it over with Bob holding on to it, but that didn’t matter; the thing was likely to rattle to pieces as soon as fall over.

Macro was busy prodding his old army-issue gladius at some of the desperate fools who’d pulled away the stacked clutter either side of the cart and were now trying to push through the gap there.

‘Go on… get away!!!’ he roared angrily at them. ‘This is my property!!!’

A man a foot taller than him and armed with a similar army-issue sword swung down at him. Macro, thickset and carrying a couple of stone more than he must have done as a soldier, was surprisingly agile as he sidestepped it. The blade bit deeply into the wood of a casket and lodged firmly there.

He grinned at the large man as he struggled frantically to wriggle it free. He smashed the pommel of his sword into the man’s face and he fell back into the press of men behind him.

‘Information!’ roared Bob. ‘This barricade will not hold much longer.’

Liam nodded. It was falling apart around them. They’d be better off — he, Bob, Macro and the three other men, Macro’s tenants, holding the barricade — if they took several steps back now and formed a defensive line further down the rat run. ‘It’s going to collapse!’

Macro nodded; he could see that too. He glanced round over his shoulder. At the far end of the rat run was another low barricade of furniture and bric-a-brac. They could run back behind that and then have the advantage of all the other tenants being able to throw down stones and other missiles from the balconies around the courtyard.

‘All right, then… after three, everyone back there!’

The other men nodded. Liam nodded at the whisper of English in his ear, barely audible above the noise. Although he’d already figured out what Macro was bellowing.

‘One…!’

The other men stepped away from the rattling, rocking cart. Bob was still holding it.

‘Two…!’

Liam swung his club down on another pair of hands, crushing them to a bloody mush.

‘ THREE! ’

They all turned together and scrambled down the rat run, sandals slipping in the muck of animal faeces and night-water.

Liam heard the crash and clatter of the cart falling behind him as he vaulted over the flimsy inner barricade. Bob remained where he was, almost completely filling the width of the entrance to the rat run with his bulk and the arc of the short-handled blacksmith’s hammer he was swinging wildly.

Now the cart was torn down and Bob fully exposed, missiles began to rain down on him from the avenue outside: stones, several arrows, dislodged clay bricks. Liam could see thickening blood trickling like syrup from a dozen nicks and gashes on Bob already. The support unit had faced far worse barrages than this, but Becks had been the example — one lucky arrow on target, one arrow puncturing the bone of his cranium and damaging either his walnut-sized organic brain or the computer nestling next to it, and he could be brought down like any other man.

‘BOB! Get back here!’ Liam cried over the cacophony of noise bouncing off the walls either side of them.

‘Affirmative!’ he heard Bob rumble in reply. He retreated slowly under the barrage, still swinging his hammer and holding the crowd back until finally he was able to quickly turn round and leap over the barricade to join the others.

A moment later, the mob crashed into the fragile second barricade. It wobbled and collapsed easily into a tangle of chair legs and shards of fractured crates, and through that pressed a forest of legs and arms, swinging clubs and knives and short swords.

The air above them buzzed and flickered with stones and short sharpened stakes, slingshots and grabbed handfuls of muck from the street. A neighbourhood brawl the likes of which Liam had never seen before.

The first few men through the tangle were quickly dealt with and collapsed amid the confusion of broken furniture; the rest quickly pulled back under the shower of projectiles raining down from the balconies around the courtyard.

Between Bob’s swinging hammer and Macro’s foul-mouthed jabbing swordplay, it looked like the pair of them in this narrow bottleneck were going to be able to hold the jeering, angry mob at bay for a while yet.

‘Go on! Be off, the lot of you!’ Macro bayed at the men hovering several yards beyond the probing tip of his sword. The bud struggled to find modern English alternatives for half of the stream of invective spewing out of his mouth. Liam found himself laughing nervously at the ex-soldier’s coarse bravura.

‘Aye! Go on, get lost!’ he crowed defiantly as he ducked down and picked up a rock that had just landed at his feet and tossed it back into the crowd.

‘Watch out!’ Macro raised his shield, a battered and old curved rectangular shield that still sported the flecked paint insignia Legio II amid the forked lightning motif. He raised it over his and Liam’s head as a large chunk of flint pulled up from the avenue outside arced over the heads of the mob in front and descended towards them. It clattered and bounced heavily, knocking a jagged gash through the shield before rolling on to the ground at their feet.

Macro lowered the shield and grinned at Liam. ‘Just like the good ol’ days!’

Liam had the distinct impression, even before he got the translation a half-second later, that the old boy was getting a kick out of this. Or he would have been… had he not heard someone scream, ‘ INCENDIA, FLAMMA ’.

‘What?!’

Macro looked back into the courtyard, towards where the scream had come from.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Liam.

Above them they heard the unmistakable whusk of an arrow, accompanied by a fluttering hiss. Liam saw the faint trail of smoke it left in its wake.

Macro spat rage and a stream of abuse. ‘N-O-O-O-O!!!’

Several more flaming arrows zipped overhead, thudding into the wooden balconies, quickly setting fire to the dried wood, the woven-reed modesty screens and the hanging lines of laundry.

‘ NO! ’ Macro bellowed again. ‘That’s my bloodyproperty!!’