Santino hesitated. A look of genuine hurt creeping onto his face this time.
Helena smiled. “Just kidding.”
Santino’s own smile returned, although slower than normal, realizing he had just been played. He offered a mock bow. “How quickly the grasshopper becomes the master.”
Everyone laughed.
I laughed alongside everyone else, secretly happy because I knew Helena’s jokes were a good sign. She’d taken my advice to heart and her confidence had reappeared.
Vincent cut off the laughter quickly. 'All right people. Before we move out, there’s one last thing. Hunter, apparently one of Caligula’s closest advisers has some information regarding how we got here. I informed the emperor that I would send someone over to talk to him and try and figure this out. God knows, if anyone can, it’s you. Work on it while we’re gone. We should be back in about two weeks.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll hold down the fort,” I said, before giving our modest accommodations a sour look. I shrugged. “Good luck.”
***
A week and a half later, I was still waiting for Caligula to send for me. Within that week I learned one, very important fact of life: Santino is much more boring to be around when he doesn’t have any material to work with, and a depressed squad member and his equally sarcastic best friend doesn’t offer much material. I spent most of my time exploring the city on my own, as even after three weeks of exploration, I still had about a quarter left to map out.
I couldn’t believe how much I missed Helena.
Now, that would have sounded sappy and pathetic had we been dating, but we weren’t, so it wasn’t, making me feel only partially pathetic. I just hoped my friends in the field were all right, especially her.
I thought I was about to go insane from boredom when I was finally summoned by Caligula on the thirteenth day. I was escorted by two of the original Praetorians who led us to the Curia the day we arrived. Gaius and Marcus were their names, but I had to constantly remind myself which was which because they were practically carbon copies of one another. Even so, with Vincent’s help, I’d gotten to know them fairly well over the past month. We’d taken to each other like any group of professional military men would.
Nice fellas.
The Praetorians took me within the bounds of the pomerium to one of Rome’s numerous libraries. The exterior facade looked magnificent, but once inside I found myself in a dimly lit, dust covered room, overcrowded with information decaying from mold. It was a far cry from the snazzy library I’d worked at on my college campus, but the musty facility made my inner historian feel like a kid on Christmas morning. The place was a gold mine. Besides the hundreds of scrolls lying on what looked like modern day wine cellar shelves and tables with documents sprawled everywhere, I spotted the slinky man from the cavern I had seen almost a month ago.
Finally. Time to get some answers.
Noticing our approach, he nodded to the guards. They replied by performing an about face and marched out of the room, leaving the two of us alone. For the longest time, we just stood there measuring one another up before he started things off.
“My name is Marcus Varus. And you do not belong here.”
I stepped closer to the man, hopping my size would intimidate him to the point where he’d be too scared to screw with to me. Barely a forearm’s length away, the man held his ground and didn’t so much as blink, as he waited patiently for me to speak up.
I ground my teeth in annoyance. “You can call me Hunter, and what do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Your presence here is a mistake, and you must go home.”
I just stared at him, my patience already wearing thin. That sentence was confusing enough without the added stress of what I thought he said. Too many ablatives. Or were those datives? I always got hung up on the grammar.
Taking a deep breath, I slowly straightened my back, raised my chin up, and pulled my shoulders back. I didn’t have to do it too often these days, but pulling myself into perfect military posture gave me a sense of purpose, not to mention a few extra inches which demanded respect, something this little man did not show much of towards me.
I loomed over him with my additional inches, effectively enhancing the image that I was far larger than I really was. “I don’t have time for twenty questions,” I said grimly. “Now, how do I get home?”
The man was finally intimidated. Taking a step back, his throat visibly gulped. “Well, I’m not sure,” he said, his words stammering indecisively. “What I do know is that those who opened the doorway thought they would find vast amounts of treasure. Not human beings. Especially not ones like you.”
“What do you mean, ‘the doorway’? Did it have anything to do with that sphere?” I couldn’t think of the Latin word for sphere or ball, so I just mimicked its shape with my hands. The doorway he was referring to must have meant the portal that sucked us through time. My limited vocabulary was going to make this hard enough without Vincent, and trying to determine archaic terms, and convert them into colloquialisms I could understand would be another, much harder task.
The man just nodded at my question, wandering aimlessly around the room before he settled into a chair behind a table. His eyes moved towards the floor, and he seemed lost in thought. Maybe he was just trying to bullshit his way out of this so I didn’t kill him, but then why bring me here at all?
“Look,” I said holding out my hands. “Just calm down. Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out. We’ll work this out together, and maybe I can help you get me out of your life.”
The man perked up at that. We’d only known each other five minutes, but it was clear he wanted nothing to do with me. Hopefully, the potential for me leaving was enough incentive to get him to work that much harder, and get me home.
So he talked.
And talked.
Unlike Vincent, who spent as few words as necessary to get his points across, Varus had a knack for allegory and long winded descriptions, of which, he provided no context for. Of course, that was probably the language barrier’s fault, but it still took him fifteen minutes to get to the part about documents found with the sphere, finally getting to something useful.
Helena would have killed him.
“So, when I was presented with the sphere and documents, I immediately got to work translating them,” Varus continued. “They are written in an old dialect of Etruscan. I am one of a very small amount of people who can still read it.”
“Can you date them?” I asked.
“I can only extrapolate its origin from the context of the writings itself. From that context, I have surmised that this document may have been written by Remus himself, or someone working closely with him. Are you aware of who Remus was?”
Remus? Co-founder of Rome? Of course I knew him. If what Varus said was true, the sphere would be one Rome’s oldest relics. I had to make sure I played it off cool.
“I have heard of him in passing. What else did they say?”
“Not very much, unfortunately. It spoke of how he knew of his brother’s plot to murder him, and that he had known about the plot for many weeks. Fearful that he would be unable to thwart his brother’s attempt on his life, he sought help from some sort of adviser. Apparently, this friend was a druid from the north, a very powerful one, who, as the document indicates, possessed great power and abilities over nature. The result of which, appears to be the blue sphere.”
“Magic?” I asked. Even though I had suggested it myself a month ago, I never really believed it. “You’re joking, right??
“I too find the subject distasteful and hard to believe, yet, here you are.”
True. At least we agreed on something, and did make a good point.
“So what does it do?” I asked. “Exactly.”
“Besides bring annoying plebeians to my door in search of my aid?”
