Fireball Read online

  He asked: “Will you miss me?”

  A small nod. “Yes.”

  “Truly?”

  She looked at him. “Yes, Simonus, truly.”

  A sharp look round showed they were free from observation. He quickly bent down and kissed her. It landed high up on her cheek, and she immediately pulled away. But she did not look upset.

  • • •

  On the journey out to the villa Simon had been too preoccupied with talking to Brad to take in much of his surroundings. In the cisium, sitting beside a taciturn driver, he could observe things better. The approach to Londinium was something of a sprawl, with rows of hovels crowded alongside the road for half a mile before they reached the gate.

  It was a very old gate. The brickwork was crumbling in several places, and the heavy wooden doors looked as though they had not been closed for centuries. On one side, in fact, a small hut to house the sentry had been built against the door, and would have to be demolished before it could be closed. The sentry was on duty but made no challenge as the cisium rattled through. And beyond a couple of feet on either side, the wall was invisible beneath the clutter of buildings clinging to it. Plainly it was meant as no more than a token defence, as one might expect in a land that had been at peace for more than a thousand years.

  Inside, there was a further stretch of mean-looking buildings before they came to shops and larger edifices. The shopfronts were on the pattern he had seen before, but some had translucent glass windows, and some were double-tiered with staircases leading up from the street. There was the usual bustle of activity—vendors crying their wares, beggars calling, sometimes yelling, for alms—and a constantly changing mixture of smells: fruit and flowers, fish and cooked meats, leather and liquor, and the nauseating whiff of drains.

  The buildings became still more impressive as they approached what Simon realized must be the quarter of the forum. The road broadened, and they clopped past large houses with only their roofs showing behind high walls, temples with porticoed entrances above flights of marble steps, the massive outline of the baths, and the great curving arc that was the circus. It would be deserted now. He remembered the gale of voices roaring for blood.

  It puzzled him that the streets started getting meaner again. The driver halted the cisium in a street of shabby buildings and indicated that he should descend. He led the way through a narrow tunnel into a courtyard and left him there. The place was no more impressive inside than out. He realized he had been expecting the Bishop to live in something like Lambeth Palace, with a Roman version of  Westminster Abbey close by. The driver came back with Brad and left them together.

  Simon gestured towards the buildings.

  “Not quite what I imagined.”

  “The Christians are poor relations on this side, remember.”

  “I wouldn’t describe Quintus Cornelius as a poor relation.”

  “It’s okay for individual Christians to be rich, but the Church has to keep a humble profile.” Brad paused. “How’s everything at the villa?”

  “Fine.”

  “And Lavinia?”

  “She’s okay.”

  He had spoken shortly. Brad grinned.

  “Parting is such sweet sorrow—that right?”

  He made no reply, and Brad led the way into one of the buildings and up a stone staircase. They went along a landing painted with Christian murals to a small room overlooking the courtyard. It was sparsely furnished, but the walls were thick with religious paintings, and there was a bronze crucifix in one corner. Brad said: “Our sitting room. Privilege of special guests.”

  Simon said: “I’ve seen worse. I don’t suppose I shall be here long.”

  “No? How do you figure that?”

  Simon shrugged. “You’re the one with the brain and the information. I shouldn’t think the Bishop would need more than half an hour to pick mine clean.”

  “Such modesty.” It was mock respectful, and Brad was grinning. “Come on. Time for prandium. But I hope you’ve not worked up too big an appetite. It’s not like life at the villa. They go in for modest eating here as well. You’ll need to tighten your belt a notch for that half hour you’re going to be around.”

  The Bishop’s study was small and bare, too, but it had a much bigger crucifix with a broad halo that looked like real gold. The Bishop was writing on a wax tablet and continued for some moments before looking up.

  “Be seated, Brother Simonus.”

  Brother carried a suggestion of belonging Simon did not much care for. The aim, he reminded himself, was to be stupid, but not too stupid. Confused, more—sounding as though he wanted to be helpful, but totally useless.

  “As a Christian you are already bound in service to the Church. But the enterprise ahead of us is no common one. Raise your hand. Swear, in Christ’s name, that you will keep secret all you learn here.”

  He mumbled what was required. The Bishop’s eye fixed him.

  “Keep your oath, or meet God’s judgement.”

  As soon that, he thought, as the Bishop’s. He listened as the Bishop started explaining just what the enterprise was. He found considerable difficulty in grasping it, but the difficulty was not so much in the language as psychological.

  In the past few months he had come to a view of the Roman Empire almost indistinguishable from those whose ancestors had been part of it for more than sixty generations. Its power was unshakeable, its permanence eternal—or as good as. It required quite an effort to appreciate that what the Bishop had in mind was a revolt, aimed at overthrowing the Roman army, the emperor, and Rome itself.

  The fireball was the root of the matter. It was, in the Bishops view, either the Holy Ghost or a very senior angel, and it had brought them to be the means of enabling the followers of the Lord to destroy the slaves of false gods. They—Bradus and Simonus—were chosen instruments of the divine will.

  The Bishop’s eyes, fixed on his, made it unnecessary to pretend confusion.

  “Your Holiness . . . I do want to help, I mean, of course I do . . . but . . . it’s Bradus who can help you . . . with information. . . . I mean, I don’t really know anything . . . . anything useful . . . anything he wouldn’t. . . .”

  The Bishop let him stutter into silence, then said: “That is true, Simonus.”

  He suppressed a sigh of relief. But the Bishop went on: “You have a part to play, all the same. God is with us, but the Roman soldiers have been trained in the use of arms. It will not be easy for men unused to fighting to overcome them. But there are others who have acquired skill as warriors—those condemned to fight and die for the amusement of the godless. The gladiators. By the Lord’s will you shared their servitude, and came to know a man called Bos, who is both Christian and gladiator. He is the one who must persuade his fellows, Christian and non-Christian alike, to rise at the appointed time. And you, Brother Simonus, will be our messenger to him.”

  • • •

  Brad asked: “How did it go, Brother Simonus?”

  Simon stared at him. “I’ve been working something out.”

  “You have? Something good, I’ll bet. Go ahead—I’m listening hard.”

  “When the Bishop was at the villa, I never said anything about being a gladiator.”

  “But someone told him? Quintus Cornelius, maybe?”

  “Maybe. But Quintus Cornelius didn’t tell him about Bos because he didn’t know. Only one person knew that.”

  “Well, now! Those stories about the English being dumb—I never did believe them. Not altogether anyway.”

  “I think it might be an idea if I finished what I started, before the fireball, and beat you to a pulp.”

  Brad laughed. “You could try. Might look peculiar, though, in an instrument of the divine will? Think it’ll get you back with Lavinia?”

  Simon weighed the satisfaction of thumping Brad against the possibility of there being something in what he said. He undoubled his fist. Some things improved with waiting.

  He said: “Oka
y. We’ll leave it till this lunatic business is over. That ought not to be too long.”

  Brad kept a wary eye on him. “You think it’s lunatic?”

  “Planning to overthrow an empire that’s lasted two thousand years? What would you call it?”

  “Everything comes to an end some time. There’s no more magic in two thousand years than two hundred. Julian did a good job stabilizing things, but there’s no way you can build a system that gets rid of all resentments. The Christians stopped martyring themselves when he dropped the religious oath of allegiance, but that didn’t mean they were happy. A fuse being long and slow doesn’t make the explosion any less violent.”

  “So what? One legion could put down the Bishop’s crazy revolt. A single cohort could! And there are three legions in Britain and another four just across the Channel, in Gaul. What else but lunatic?”

  Brad leaned against the window ledge. It was the eleventh hour, and the sky was darkening behind him.

  “The Bishop is a pretty remarkable man,” he said.

  “Maybe. But he’d need to be more than remarkable to take on the Roman army.”

  Brad shook his head thoughtfully. “It didn’t take long to work out what he wanted from me. He’s well aware what chance a revolt against the Romans would have under normal conditions. The only way of reversing the odds would be to bring in some devastating new weapon. This world has seen nothing new in that line for over twenty centuries. It’s very different in the world we came from.”

  “What does he want you to do,” Simon asked, “—build him an H-bomb?”

  Brad grinned. “That’s something I never did read up on. I guess the basic technology would take awhile to develop; and the Romans might get curious if they saw something like Oak Ridge going up. My idea was gunpowder. Mortars, cannon, primitive rifles. I could have helped him there.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “He didn’t want it. It would still take too long. The Bishop wants faster action.”

  Simon was curious. “What, then?”

  “We went through the history of warfare in our world. We picked two technical developments which switched the odds and guaranteed victory for the side that had them.”

  “Which were?”

  “The stirrup and the longbow. The stirrup was introduced in the eighth century and made the Frankish cavalry the masters of northern Europe. Before that cavalry meant only what it still means here: a way of getting soldiers to the scene of the action quickly. They have to dismount to fight.

  “Five hundred years later, Edward the First came up with the longbow, and at Crécy and Agincourt those conquering horsemen got themselves massacred. The longbow stayed dominant for more than two hundred years—until the invention of firearms, in fact. Either one could do the trick probably, against an army which has spent centuries rehearsing stale tactics, with no real fighting. The Bishop plans to make sure by using both. Both are simple to make and to learn to use. You don’t need factories or complicated machinery. That’s what I mean by remarkable.”

  Simon shook his head. “I still think it’s crazy.” He paused. “If it could happen, would you be in favour?”

  “I haven’t been asked. But I think I might. This place is overdue for a change.”

  “I don’t see much wrong with the way things are.”

  “No? With worldwide ignorance—organized brutality like the Games? And how about slavery? Have you forgotten what it’s like to squat in the dust, wearing nothing but a length of rope? Or is slavery okay now that it doesn’t apply to you?”

  Simon ignored the questions. He really didn’t care what happened with the Bishop’s revolt. The important thing was getting back to the villa, and Lavinia. And probably the best hope of achieving that was to do what the Bishop said, for the time being, at any rate.

  • • •

  Simon had been given instructions for locating the tavern, but he still didn’t find it easily. It lay in the centre of a warren of dilapidated streets east of the barracks and was one of many—in some streets, branches of ivy seemed to hang from every roof. The ivy was the only thing to show wine was sold; there was nothing like an inn sign. But though his first choice was wrong, Bos was known there. He was directed to a place even more squalid in the next street.

  A couple of men were drinking from battered metal pots. Simon found an empty pot and rapped with it on the stone counter. There was a shuffle of feet beyond a narrow doorway, and a woman came through. She had to turn sideways slightly; she wasn’t tall, but she must have weighed close to two hundred pounds.

  She looked at him suspiciously; her face was round, but not soft. He asked for Bos, and after a long stare she called into the back room for him.

  Could this be the girlfriend of whom Bos had spoken with such affection? Bos himself provided confirmation by entering and giving the woman a loving pat that set the mass of flesh quivering. Then he said, shaking his big head in amazement: “Simonus! Is it you?”

  Simon put a hand out, but it was disregarded; he was embraced and felt his ribs creak. Then Bos stood back and looked at him with concern. He touched Simon’s shaven chin and, with a quick glance towards the two men, pushed him through to the back room. It was mainly furnished with kegs, but there were a couple of chairs. In a troubled voice, Bos said: “Running away is bad enough, Simonus. But to pass yourself off as a freedman . . . It means the beasts.”

  “I have been freed.” Bos regarded him suspiciously. “And I’ve come here as a messenger. From His Holiness the Bishop.”

  “The Bishop?”

  Bos shook his head again. Simon had been told to administer the oath of secrecy, and he decided to get it over with. He felt like a fool doing it, but Bos took it seriously. And it seemed to remove any doubts he had. He listened solemnly as Simon began to explain what was required.

  He was almost immediately interrupted by a girl appearing in another doorway, but Bos barked a dismissal which sent her scurrying off.

  “Macara’s sister,” he explained. “Go on, Simonus.”

  Macara must be the fat one, which meant that this was the girl Bos had had in mind for him. Thinner, certainly, but with lank, greasy hair, a sallow skin, and a mouthful of bad teeth.

  He stated the case as plainly as possible, simply saying that the Bishop was planning a holy war against Rome, that he had new weapons which would overcome the legions, and that Bos’s mission was to win over the gladiators to be the spearhead of the rebellion.

  It sounded thin and unconvincing, an invitation to disaster. Bos, whose profession was fighting, would surely see that. For that matter, why should someone who so far had uncomplainingly accepted everything that fate sent his way turn rebel anyway? He waited for the slow, judicious headshake he had grown familiar with during the long days of training as a secutor.

  But all Bos said was: “His Holiness has greatly honoured me. It will be done.”

  He was a Christian, of course. Loyalty to his Church could outweigh professional reservations. He was, too, a man accustomed to facing death and long odds.

  Simon said warningly: “You’re to win over all the gladiators—not just the handful of Christians.”

  The big face broke into a grin.

  “Leave it to me, Simonus!”

  8

  ALTHOUGH UNIMPRESSIVE AS A BUILDING, the Bishop’s headquarters was extensive; it took up an entire block of small dwellings linked by a maze of alleys and yards. At the heart was the chapel, the one place richly decorated. The walls were painted gold, and rounded corners gave you a feeling of being inside a big golden egg.

  It was a feeling Simon had plenty of opportunity to experience. There was Mass twice daily, and you needed a better excuse than he could think up to be absent. Morning Mass, though it involved unpleasantly early rising, was at least fairly brief, lasting not much more than an hour. (An hour, at this season, was approximately sixty minutes, though since the Roman day was divided into twelve equal parts, it would get shorter with the appro
ach of winter.) In evening Mass, though, the interminable succession of psalms and hymns and Scripture readings dragged on for nearly three hours. He drowsed through it, watching the flickering candles and thinking of more attractive things—usually Lavinia.

  The remainder of the day was not much less boring. Brad spent a lot of time with the Bishop, but Simon was left to kick his heels. There was no prospect, it was made clear, of his returning to the country. On the other hand, there was no prohibition on going out into the streets, and he did that. It was more interesting, but there was one big drawback. The Christians presumably used money, since food was bought in the market, but no one seemed to think it necessary to provide him with any. The smells from the food shops—fresh-baked bread, hot pies, fried fish, meat stews—were tantalizing after the plain and meagre fare of the community, but the cheapest thing appeared to cost a couple of brass sestertii, and he didn’t even have a copper as. He would have liked to visit one of the music-and-dance shows in the booths beside the forum, but they required money, too.

  So he wandered aimlessly, watching people and looking at the buildings. The Temple of Julian was the most impressive, bigger even than the temples of Jupiter and Venus. It stood isolated, with traffic passing all round, approached by marble steps on each side. From the shadowy darkness beyond the columns at the top came the sound of chanting, and sacrificial smoke plumed into the sky. Its magnificence, compared with the poky Christian chapel, put the Bishop’s wild ideas into proper perspective.

  Autumn had come, bringing chill grey days with the wind blowing the dust or the sharp rain laying it. He had a birrus Britannicus, something like a duffle coat with a hood, but it was well worn, threadbare in places: poor protection against a northeaster. The wind was knifelike as he turned away from the temple and trudged back.

  He found Brad packing and asked: “Going somewhere?”

  “Yep.” Brad’s face was expressionless.

  “Where?”