Fireball Read online

  They were bidding for him. Someone came up close and stared at him, and he looked blindly at the sky. A last bid, a final entreaty from the auctioneer, and it was over. The guard pushed him to the steps and down to where his new owner waited.

  He was aware of two figures, a man and a boy, both in embroidered tunics of expensive cloth. He still would not look at them, but bowed low as he had seen other slaves do. It was the boy who responded. He said, in English:

  “Pretty good, Simon. That saves you from a whipping. For today anyway.”

  5

  THE VILLA WAS BUILT ON a small plateau just under the brow of a hill and faced southeast. All that Simon had so far managed to take in was an impression of spaciousness and luxury. He sat with Brad in the impluvium, the central courtyard, or rather, they reclined on facing couches, made of intricately carved oak and heaped with cushions. When he moved, he was aware of the clinging softness of the tunic he had been given, to replace the blanket he had worn during the drive out from the city.

  A servant brought a painted tray with a tall jug of rosy glass and two elegant glass beakers, and set it down on the small table between them. Brad reached and poured for them both. He raised his glass.

  “Prosit! Which means, I believe: May it do you good.” He sipped. “Not bad?”

  It was basically lemon, but with other spicy flavours as well. Taste buds, battered almost to extinction by the barracks diet, came gratefully back to life. Simon said: “Better than not bad. Now tell me how it happened—all this.”

  During the journey here, on Brad’s prompting, he had told his own story. He had not needed much encouragement; the relief of talking to someone who could understand what he said had made him garrulous. But curiosity was uppermost now.

  Laconically, Brad set about telling him. The horsemen who had picked him up at the edge of the wood had been returning from a hunting party. They had given chase more out of curiosity than anything else. But having captured him, they thought they might make a coin or two out of selling him. They decided to stay overnight at an inn and take him into the city the following morning.

  Simon said: “Wait a minute.” Brad looked at him. “How did you know all this—what they were planning to do?”

  “Because they were discussing it. I was facedown over a saddlebow, but I could hear well enough.”

  “Are you telling me they were talking English?”

  Brad smiled. “I guess maybe they had a bit of an English accent, being natives of this island, but no, they spoke regular Latin.”

  “But . . . I thought they didn’t do Latin in American schools?”

  “They don’t often. We didn’t study it in my school. I got interested a couple of years back and studied it in my leisure time. I wouldn’t say I got really proficient, but I could make out what these characters were saying.”

  Simon recalled thinking of poor Brad’s having to cope with an incomprehensible world, and felt a wave of irritation. He said briefly: “Go on.”

  The men had kept Brad with them at the inn and bought him supper when they had their own. They hadn’t seemed a bad bunch, Brad thought, but a runaway slave was fair game, and a useful bonus after an unsuccessful hunting trip. After eating, they sat on in the dining room, drinking wine and playing dice. There was another guest in the room, a man on his own. He was at the next table, but not far from Brad, and Brad saw him looking with some curiosity, not so much at him as at his jeans. The others hadn’t spotted them as unusual or, if they had, had not thought it worth comment.

  The stranger asked them where they had found Brad, and they told him, and that they were taking him into the city to sell. The man looked as though he might be on the point of saying something, but in the end did not. He got to his feet, preparing to retire.

  In a low voice, in Latin, Brad said: “I can tell you wonders.” He hesitated, looking from Brad to the men and back, but in the end he smiled regretfully and shook his head. As he started to turn away, there was a little chink of metal, and Brad saw something hanging from a chain round his neck: a gilt cross.

  In an even lower voice, but loud enough to carry, Brad said: “Christus ascensus est.” Christ is risen.

  That worked. The man with the cross turned back. He started negotiations with the horsemen which did not take long. Both sides knew roughly what price a boy of Brad’s age and physical condition would fetch in the open market. Brad had become the property of Quintus Cornelius Ericius, the man who that morning had bought Simon, too.

  There were a lot of questions that needed asking, but the one this raised could not wait. Simon asked: “How did that happen anyway? I mean, how did you know I’d be there. Or was it just accidental?”

  “We got people asking around. I figured you’d probably wind up in the slave market, and we kept a check on it for a time. There aren’t that many slaves around who don’t speak the language, and the age thing narrowed it down further. We drew a blank, and I thought maybe you’d got killed. You don’t need telling that human life carries a lower price tag than where we came from. Then about a week ago someone who knows Quintus Cornelius, and knew he’d been looking for a barbarian boy, got talking in the baths to Gaius Turbatus . . .”

  “The lanista!”

  “That’s right, the guy who runs the gladiators’ school. He was talking about a young barbarian he’d got who showed promise as a secutor—said he was worth betting on. It sounded interesting. And when you pulled that sensation in the arena . . .”

  “Were you there?”

  Brad shook his head. “The circus is off limits to Christians, and from what I’ve heard about the shows I’ve no regrets about that. But you were certainly the talk of the town, and even without telephones it’s staggering how fast news travels around here. Quintus Cornelius didn’t really think there was a chance; he said if they hadn’t chopped you on the spot, they would have done so as soon as you got backstage. But he got someone to ask, and they said you were being sold off instead. So we took a trip to the forum, and the rest you know.” He looked at Simon in amusement. “The beard almost threw me. Not exactly a thing of beauty, but confusing.”

  Simon fingered the growth on his chin. “I might keep it.”

  “You’re in trouble if you do. Beards are for slaves. Hadn’t you noticed?”

  “I thought it was gladiators.”

  “Gladiators and slaves. The not-free. Free men shave.”

  Simon wrinkled his brow. “I don’t remember that in Roman history.”

  Brad’s look was quizzical. “You don’t?”

  “We are free, I suppose? Quintus Cornelius . . .”

  “Christians don’t have slaves. Only servants. Mind you, I gather in some cases there’s not a lot of difference. But Quintus Cornelius’s servants seem to do okay. And we aren’t servants anyway.”

  “What are we then?”

  “Guests.”

  “For how long?”

  Brad shrugged. In the rectangular pool that occupied the centre of the impluvium, water rose from two fountains and tinkled lazily back. Large golden fish swam among the water plants. Through the open roof one saw blue sky and a fragment of white cloud. The ceramic tiles had pictures of dolphins sporting in the waves, and there were paintings of saints on the walls. Simon had seen paintings very like them in the National Gallery. It was all calm and peaceful and luxurious, but something bothered him.

  He said: “I don’t know. . . .”

  “What?”

  “This household is a Christian one, right? And Quintus Cornelius is a rich man.” Simon paused. “Back in gladiator school there was the man I told you about who helped me. Bos. He was a Christian, too. But he was also a gladiator, and his profession was killing people.”

  “You could say the same about soldiers. A lot of those in our world were Christian.”

  “It’s not the same. I’ve been trying to work out just where we are—or when we are. The fireball . . . we were pulled through it somehow into Roman Britain. Right?” />
  “Right.”

  “But what year? I can remember Constantine’s date—he became sole emperor in 324. Christianity became the state religion after that, so we must have gone back before it. But it’s a time in which Christians aren’t being persecuted. And Bos seems to find no difficulty being both a Christian and a gladiator, which doesn’t sound like early Christians to me.”

  Brad was grinning. “You’d like to know what year it is?”

  “I don’t suppose it makes much difference. But yes.”

  “No problem. Nineteen eighty-one.”

  “Come on! You mean, it’s just a dream. Whose—yours or mine? I know I’m not dreaming.”

  “Okay, let’s figure it a little more closely. Christianity is not the state religion. So what is?”

  “Well, they have lots of different gods. All those temples round the forum.”

  “Did you hear any of the gladiators swear ‘by Julian’? Not Bos, of course, but the rest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who did you figure he was?”

  “I didn’t think. Julius Caesar? They made him a god.”

  “Julianus, not Julius. To be precise, Flavius Claudius Julianus. Born 331, emperor from 361 to 363. Julian the Apostate. He reversed Constantine’s ruling about Christianity and restored paganism. But he’d been emperor only two years when he went to war against the Persians. He did well to begin with; then he was wounded in battle and died of his wounds. The Christians took over again and this time stayed in charge.”

  “I still don’t see. . . .”

  “I’ve been quoting from our history books, on the other side of the fireball. On this side, things went differently. Julian wasn’t killed in his early thirties. He won that battle and went on to conquer the Persians. He did a few other things, like bringing the government of the empire back to Rome from Byzantium, where Constantine had moved it. In fact, he totally reorganized the empire. He didn’t die until he was nearly eighty, and he’d gotten things pretty stable by then. They’ve stayed that way.”

  Simon wondered if it could be some farfetched joke of Brad’s. But was being in a world that had never happened very different from being trapped in the past? He said: “An If world?”

  “Except that from here the If world is the one we came from. You try talking to people about things like the Industrial Revolution and tanks and television and silicon chips—not to mention simple things like there being a pope in Rome instead of an emperor. Not easy, I can tell you.”

  “You mean, you’ve tried? With Quintus Cornelius?” Brad nodded. “Do you think that was wise?”

  “I’m not quite sure yet. It happened. He was interested in my jeans. He hadn’t seen cloth like that before. And then there was the zipper; that really got to him. He’s bright for an old guy, and open-minded for a Roman. He questioned me: What land did I come from where they did such ingenious metalworking? I could have tried lying, I suppose, and said it was from the same land where Pliny said men carried their heads underneath their arms, but I didn’t think he’d buy that. And he’d done a lot for me already, so I wanted to be honest with him. Anyway, I decided to go for broke and showed him my watch—I’d managed to hide it in my jeans pocket before the others could spot it.”

  The watch, which had been a considerable source of envy to Simon, was a calendar quartz alarm chronometer. He tried to imagine the impact it would have on someone accustomed to telling time by sundials and water clocks. He asked: “What did he make of it?”

  “He thought it was magic. It took him a long time to understand what it was meant to do—Arabic numerals never got invented in this world, so the readout didn’t mean anything in itself, but the flashing digits fascinated him, especially when I demonstrated all the functions. The alarm in particular. One thing he knew for sure was that it hadn’t come from any place in either the Roman or the Chinese empires, and it seemed even less likely that it had been made by barbarians. At that time I thought, like you, that we’d gone back into the past. Quintus Cornelius was ready to accept that I’d come from some distant future, as the least unreasonable of all the possible absurdities.

  “Then, as we went on talking, the discrepancies started to crop up. Like dating. They date the way the Romans did before Christianity—A.U.C. not A.D. Ab urbe condita—from the founding of the city. And I discovered this Rome had been founded two and a half thousand years ago. And that Britain had been a Roman province for nearly two thousand years, not a couple of hundred. He got to it almost as soon as I did. Once you’ve accepted that someone has come from the future, I guess it’s not too difficult switching that to a parallel world. As I say, he’s open-minded for a Roman. It’s probably to do with being a Christian. They’re tolerated, but not really part of things.”

  Simon had been trying to come to grips with the situation. He said, feeling his way: “The Roman Empire never fell in this world. So . . .”

  His words trailed off. Brad said: “So a whole lot of things. No Mohammed, for instance; or if there was one, he lived and died obscure. No Islam anyway. And it was probably out of Islam that the ideas came that led to the Renaissance and later to science and engineering. This world has scarcely changed in two thousand years. Some minor improvements—in glassmaking, for instance—but nothing fundamental.”

  “I still don’t see how that could happen.”

  “Ancient Egypt lasted for thousands of years with almost nothing changing. So did China. We take rapid change for granted, but really it’s pretty unusual. Static civilizations are probably more natural. And Julian—the Julian who survived—did a sound job in stabilizing his world. He completely reorganized both the army and the empire. Except for Jews and Christians, every citizen has to do military service. That turned the army back into a citizen army and got rid of the mercenaries. And he laid down a rule that no emperor could be succeeded by an emperor from the same province, though they always rule from Rome. On top of that he defused the Christian problem. That was probably the most important thing he did do.”

  “How do you mean—defused?”

  “The basic problem was that the Christians and Jews believed in a single god and regarded it as the worst possible sin to worship or even acknowledge any other. But the Roman emperor was supposed to be a god, and everyone had to swear an oath to him. The Christians and Jews refused. It didn’t matter so much about the Jews because after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, they were scattered and survived only in isolated groups. But early Christianity was more widespread and dynamic. It got right to the heart of the empire; the chief bishop was the bishop of Rome. Christians were very noisy about refusing to bend a knee to the god-emperor. The ones who refused got martyred, and the martyrdoms converted more people to Christianity. As far as the Romans were concerned, it was a vicious circle.

  “In this world, Julian fixed things neatly. He decreed that no living man could be deified, including the emperor. Including himself, in fact. So the oath of allegiance became just that, an acknowledgement to a ruler, not to a god. The Christians were tolerated instead of being persecuted—they’re barred from public office, but that’s not something to die for—and the movement ran out of steam. Julian was deified after his death—the last emperor who was, incidentally—but that didn’t matter. It didn’t bother the Christians, as long as they were left in peace to worship their own god.”

  Brad poured more of the lemon drink. There were plants in pots round the pool, some quite tall. A bird flew down through the open roof and settled on one. A sparrow; birds hadn’t changed.

  Simon said: “Thanks.” The drink was very pleasant. The whole setup scored high for comfort, for luxury, in fact. “What was the fireball, do you think? Nothing to do with ball lightning anyway.”

  Brad shook his head. “No. You’d need to be an Einstein even to understand how to set about trying to work it out. These parallel worlds exist side by side, occupying the same space and time, yet separate. That seems to require some basic underlying medium, like the old c
oncept of aether. Maybe it can fray or warp in places, allowing two worlds to come into contact, and the fireball was that sort of fraying.”

  You’d need to be brighter, Simon thought, than he was to understand what Brad was talking about. He said: “So, do we wait for another one to come along and take us home?”

  “Might be a long wait. And could we be sure we’d make it back to where we started? If there’s one parallel world, I’d guess there’s an infinite number of them. We might wind up where Hitler won or the bubonic plague wiped out the human race.”

  “So we’re stuck?” Brad nodded. “But what do we do? We can’t just stay on as permanent guests of Quintus Cornelius surely.”

  “It’s not so bad here.” Brad stretched. “Plenty of activities. And Quintus Cornelius wants us to talk with his bishop—the Bishop of London. He’s at some conference in Rome, or rather on his way back from it. He’s due in London—Londinium, that is—quite soon.”

  “And we’re to tell him we come from a parallel world? Are you sure he won’t decide to have us burned as witches, or warlocks, or whatever?”

  “That’s another way these Christians are different from ours. They’ve never got around to burning people. Quintus Cornelius doesn’t think there’ll be any theological hassle anyway. Multiple worlds isn’t like multiple gods.”

  There was a sound of footsteps approaching, light on the tiled floor. Brad got to his feet, and Simon followed suit.

  As he had guessed from the footsteps, it was a girl who came towards them. She was in her early teens and wore a tunic of what looked like white silk, the top gathered in folds on her shoulders and secured with a gold brooch. She had a thin gold chain round her waist and gold-painted sandals.

  Brad spoke to her in Latin too fast for Simon to follow, and she answered him, smiling. She was black-haired, grey-eyed, and when she smiled, Simon realized how pretty she was. He also understood why Brad had been so quick to respond to the sound of her footsteps and why he seemed so content about being here. Brad turned to him.