to attack Bob. They fanned out either side of him.
Liam pulled Sal back into a corner of the courtyard, beside the old landlord who was already quickly packing away his joints of meat and muttering to himself. ‘Those scum think they own the place!’
‘Maddy!’ Liam called out to her. She was still standing pretty much in the middle of the courtyard. ‘Back up! Give Bob some room!’
Three of them closed in on Bob at the same time, one of them swinging his sword at his neck, the other two thrusting at his torso. He ducked the swing at his neck deftly enough, but one of the other blades lodged deep into the side of his ribcage.
A groan erupted from the balconies above. They recognized the wound as a fatal one. That the fight wasn’t going to last much longer.
The landlord grimaced and shook his head. ‘Pity.’
But Bob casually twisted his body, yanking the handle of the sword protruding from his ribs out of the hands of the man who’d thrust it into him. He grasped the handle and wrenched the blade out of his side. One sword in each hand now, all the collegia thugs had successfully managed to do was arm him with two swords… and, of course, annoy him.
Bob swept the sword in his left hand down low, a round, scythe-like sweep that hamstrung one of them and lopped the foot off another.
In his other hand he flipped the short sword blade-over-hilt, catching it by its tip then throwing it end over end at the third man who’d swung his heavy sword carelessly for Bob’s neck. It thudded into his stomach, the man doubling over with a grunt and dropping to his knees in the dirt, beside the other two men clutching their legs, spurting arcs of dark crimson on to the ground.
Above the courtyard voices cheered out from the balconies. Liam glanced up at them.
They’re cheering for Bob.
Bob picked up another discarded weapon and again had a sword in each hand. His beefy hands were spinning the blades like marching batons; shimmering blurs of glinting metal, like rotary saw blades; a whusk-whusk-whusk of sharp edges slicing through the air.
‘Who’s next?’ Bob announced calmly in heavily accented Latin.
He’s a one-man army. Liam shook his head in amazement. Isn’t he always?
The collegia thugs were certainly now looking less sure of themselves. Liam guessed reputation was at stake here. He could see the gang leader weighing things up, wondering whether to withdraw from the courtyard with all these people still openly braying their support for Bob, or try and finish the ox-of-a-man off. A lesson to everyone watching that no one — no one, not even this extraordinary brute — was going to walk away after thumbing his nose at their collegia.
He barked at the rest of his men. ‘Enough of the play! Now finish him!’
All six began to close in, their eyes warily on the spinning blades and the mischievous grin spreading across Bob’s face.
Liam glanced at Sal. ‘Big mistake.’
She wasn’t listening, or didn’t hear him over the caterwauling from above. Instead, she closed her eyes and turned away, just as the first wet thunk of a blade slicing through muscle and cracking bone filled the air.
Liam watched the blur of Bob leaping forward — the grace of a woodland deer married to the rippling, muscular bulk of a giant bear. He was no longer spinning his blades like a manic circus performer; instead, with flashes of metal and bright droplets of blood, he deployed a sequence of fast and precise thrusts and slices that dropped all six men in rapid succession; each wet thud accompanied by an increasingly raucous cheer of delight from above.
A hand severed at the wrist hit the dirt a yard away from Liam, clenching and unclenching the hilt of a short sword reflexively.
In less than half a minute all six men lay dying, clutching bloody stumps or cradling puckering stomach wounds, desperately holding their insides in.
The courtyard echoed with a hundred or more spectators cheering gleefully as those collegia men still alive withdrew back down the rat run. The voices of the apartment block’s tenants echoed off the clay brick walls. Someone even tossed a basketful of sunflower petals from the third balcony into the air; they spun like confetti all the way down, finally settling on Bob’s sweating head.
The landlord stared wide-eyed at Bob, muttering some oath under his breath.
CHAPTER 40
AD 54, Subura District, Rome
‘Bob’s become some sort of celebrity,’ said Maddy.
Liam made a face and spat out an olive stone. ‘And what’s one of those?’
‘Famous people, you know?’
‘People who get rich for doing nothing,’ added Sal. ‘Mostly.’
‘He’s a hero to the people in this building,’ said Maddy, ‘aren’t you, Bob?’
He nodded. ‘I appear to have earned their approval.’
Maddy looked around the simple furnishings of the room: straw mat on the floor, a small low table between them, almost completely filled with food. They’d had a steady stream of offerings all evening. Gentle, polite knocks on their door, shy smiles through the grilled covered greeting hatch, whispers of gratitude and wooden platters of fruit, bread and amphoras of watered-down wine left behind. Food many of these people could ill afford to surrender so willingly.
The landlord, still wearing his blood-spattered leather apron, had even offered this room to them for nothing, although he’d not made clear how long that gesture of goodwill was intended for.
‘Bob humiliated those thugs,’ said Liam.
‘They run this district of Rome. The people do not like them,’ said Bob.
Liam frowned and spat out another stone. ‘They’re vicious crooks. Extortionists, so they are.’
Maddy sipped at her cup of diluted, sour-tasting wine. ‘These people are looking at Bob as some sort of champion now, aren’t they? Their champion.’
‘That could be of some tactical use to us,’ said Bob.
‘On the other hand…’ She swilled the wine round her mouth and made a face. ‘Ugh! On the other hand it could attract unwanted attention. We do need to be discreet.’
Sal was fiddling around with one of the babel-buds. ‘Tactical use? Jahulla! We don’t even really have a plan!’ She looked up. ‘Do we?’
‘Visitors came by not so long ago,’ said Maddy. ‘Within living memory of some of the people in Rome. Perhaps some of the people in this very building saw them? We need to ask around, carefully of course. We need to figure out when they came back. Precisely when. And why? What was their game plan?’
‘More to the point,’ added Liam, ‘where the devil are they now?’
‘Who knows? They might be here still. They might have gone native. Blended in.’
They sat in silence. Outside, in the courtyard below, they could hear a dog snapping and yowling. Through the thin walls of clay brick they could faintly hear the muted exchanges of other families: somewhere a woman cried; somewhere angry voices snapped at each other; somewhere pots clattered on a brazier.
Liam made a face again. ‘Gah! So bitter.’ He spat out another stone on to the side of the plate of stale fruit, curling his lips in disgust. ‘These grapes are rubbish, so they are.’
Maddy looked at him, then at the olive stone. ‘God, you can be such a moron, Liam.’
It was a tap as gentle and as light as a feather’s touch. Quiet enough that neither Sal nor Liam stirred. Or Bob. He’d gone into one of his occasional ‘standby’ modes, sorting his memories into more efficient storage compartments. ‘De-cluttering’ was the term Sal used for it. Not quite what he was doing inside his head, but close enough.
Maddy sat up and listened carefully. The city, or at least this district of it, had finally quietened down for the night. Even the feral dogs had stopped their yapping.
