I thought he was going to declare us evil sorcerers and have us crucified, but soon his face softened.
His eyes met Vincent’s, his look of superiority gone. “You have, indeed. I will order a team to recover your fallen comrade, and then we shall talk about how you may best serve the glory of Rome.”
Edward Crichton
The Last Roman
***
Three days later, we were still waiting for Caligula to come through on his end of the bargain. We were still locked up in the same building we were thrown in the very first night, but there really wasn’t much room for complaint. We were no longer treated as prisoners, at least not officially, and we were allowed to leave the building, a freedom we took advantage of twice a day to workout. Food was provided, we were given fresh clothes and bedding regularly, and we had our very own private bathroom, thankfully, only a short walk away from our little house.
On the downside, however, we were always under the watchful eyes of Praetorian guardsmen, and our weapons were taken, including our side arms. The Romans weren’t going to let that trick fly twice. Occasionally, one or two particular Praetorians, their names not provided, would spend hours speaking to Vincent. He spoke in detail about our weapons, as well as modern combat tactics. The Romans were extremely interested in our methods of waging war, where the largest battlefields saw small, eight man squads, engaging in endless skirmishes, as opposed to legions of thousands of men, fighting one, massive battle. He left out the parts about tanks, planes, ships, and nukes, at least for the time being.
I continued to voice my dissent about telling them anything at all, reiterating the fact that we could still be in the process of altering future events. I even told him a story I had read about time traveling dinosaur hunters who accidentally killed a butterfly in the past, and ended up changing their utopian government into a tyrannical regime, sixty five million years later. Granted, it was an extreme, unscientific opinion of what could happen, but I hoped it would be enough to change his mind.
It didn’t, and I eventually realized there was nothing I could do to convince Vincent. For some reason, he was being overly stubborn about his decisions.
Still, despite the tight spaces and endless boredom, the time helped the unit bond. As a team, we spent the time playing cards, which Santino had stowed in a pouch and chatted endlessly.
Generally, the games left me pretty frustrated, especially after I realized Wang and Helena were phenomenal poker players. I never knew poker was so popular amongst the English and Germans, but while I gained little from the games, I learned plenty about my teammates.
Bordeaux, for instance, spoke of his checkered youth, a life of crime and insolence that landed him in the foreign legion in the first place. He told us about how his military life had changed him, how he had found God, and even a wife.
During a mission in Africa, his team had rescued a group of French peacekeepers, captured by a local guerrilla militia. Successfully rescuing the group, one of the young women immediately fell in love with the bulky hero, and eventually married him. The story lacked a happy ending, however, when Bordeaux also told us how she had died in the Vatican terrorist attacks. The attack only fueled his focus, and it had driven him to find his own way into the Praetorians, instead of being chosen like I was. I immediately connected his loss with the reason behind his unfocused attention during the briefing back in modern day Rome.
Wang continued to grieve, but his attitude quickly shifted when he realized his poker skills were far superior to the rest of ours. Poker soon boiled down to a deadly game of one on one between him and Helena.
I didn’t mind. I wasn’t very good at poker, anyway.
He seemed happiest, though, when he told stories of McDougal and his heroics. From what I learned, he couldn’t have been a better commander, and I only wished I could have served with him longer.
Santino, meanwhile, had a story for everything. Whether it was about his first stealth kill in North Korea, or the first vanilla smoothie he ever had in high school, he always had something to say. And while it may have seemed annoying, they were actually good stories, even the one about the smoothie, which he seriously told.
Helena and I held back our more personal stories with the group, both of us reluctant to delve into our personal lives. It was, however, a personality quirk that strengthened our own friendship. Since swim buddies were bunked together, we had plenty of alone time, and we often found ourselves talking about things we couldn’t have told the others. She became someone I could really talk to.
Our stories tended to revolve around our repressive fathers, who always had the best intentions at heart, but at the expense of what their children wanted. Her father had taught her to hunt, and mine, to play baseball, but both led us in directions neither one of us really wanted. When she had pressed the issue of why I never finished my schooling, I told her it was because of how my father forced me into the military. It was his opinion that school was unnecessary after achieving an undergraduate degree, and only because that degree was important in securing entry into Officer Candidate School.
It was a bad moment in the Hunter family saga. Dad spoke of cutting me off, severing my ties to the family if I didn’t comply with the family tradition. The shouting matches had been epic. When I’d given up completely, figuring I’d have to settle with Christmas cards from mom only, she and my sister took up the cause and pleaded with him to let me make my own choices, but he was stalwart. My sister stopped talking to him for a long while back there, but my mother was more diplomatic. She loved her husband and wanted to make him happy, so she relented and sat me down. Like any good mom could, she compromised, making me understand that military service would be good for me and my career, and that since the world was as peaceful as it had been in decades, it would be safe. So, wanting to make my mother happy, as she did my father, I signed up, and instead of taking the safe route by joining the intelligence sector, I decided to stick it to my father and do something he never could. I joined the SEALs, something he’d tried for back in the 80s, but couldn’t hack.
We didn’t hate our fathers, we just didn’t understand them, like they didn’t understand us. Although, after my father had snubbed me back at the airport, hate wasn’t that far off.
Our mothers, on the other hand, were startlingly similar, despite completely different backgrounds. Loving, guiding, and our primary care givers, we both spent more time with them than our fathers and loved every moment of it, and after the way Helena spoke of hers, I really hoped to meet her one day.
A duchess or baroness of some kind, Helena described her as eternally loving and beautiful, far more so than even herself, reason enough to get home so I could meet her. She had been very hands on with Helena, always a guiding presence, even with the cadre of maids, nurses, teachers, and other caregivers Helena had been surrounded by. My mother had been horribly pedestrian in comparison, but after I’d shown Helena a picture of her that I kept stashed in my go-bag, she commented how she must have been a wonderful lady, beautiful on both the inside and out.
She had been surprised at how close my mom and I had been, and relented to jokingly call me a “momma’s boy” because of it. I told her to try my cooking and see if she still wanted to joke about it. She backed off immediately, admitting she could barely boil water herself.
I still held back my “nurse” story, figuring there’d be plenty of time to get into that one later.
The only one of us who seemed aloof was Vincent. Plagued by the duties of command, he knew better than to socialize with the rest of us in a casual atmosphere. Even so, we spent plenty of time in “Latin 101” as Santino dubbed it. A few times a day, we would learn the basics as best we could from Vincent’s instruction. It took me six years to learn what I know now, and the rest of the time since then to forget it, so I sat in on the basic grammar and vocabulary lessons as well. By the third day, I began to wonder if Vincent had actually written the text book I used in high school, as he seemed to follow the lessons almost to the letter.
While the rest of the team struggled, and would probably continue to do so for the months to come, I started picking things up rather quickly. Listening in, as well as trying my own hand at conversation when the Romans came to chat, I found myself slowly reaching my old level of proficiency and beyond.
I always knew I was good at Latin, even though my professors would never admit it.
All in all, things were going well, if not boringly well, but by the end of the third day, our patience was rewarded with the news that the Romans had recovered McDougal’s body, and our gear containers, thankfully locked from prying eyes.
The next morning, dressed in our BDUs, we met McDougal’s corpse a few miles outside the walls of Rome,
