Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion (29 page)

The runner, in full legionary armor sans his marching kit, came to a stop a respectable distance from me and saluted.  He didn’t seem even remotely winded.

“Legate, we have located a suitable location for camp two miles away.  You’re
praetorium
is already under construction.  If you will follow me, please.”

I nodded and signaled to the cohorts behind me that we were about to
deviate from our current path.  I received no response from any of them, but I hadn’t expected one.  I turned back to the runner who had already veered off to the right, and followed, Santino beside me.  We entered into a lightly wooded area, a path that disrupted the precise marching formation of the cohorts behind me, but the runner and the centurions who had picked our camping location knew what they were doing.

As I
suspected, we were only within the wooded area for a few minutes before we emerged into a large clearing many acres in size.  Off in the distance and down a low hill, I could see a narrow strait of water that barely qualified as a river.  It ran east to west, and beyond it was another clearing followed by a dense forest that continued for miles.

Perfect.

***

Hours later,
I sat hunched over my desk, writing down my thoughts about our campaign.

Since
Julius Caesar had recorded his memoirs while in the field, warring against all manner of barbarian tribes, I figured I should too.  The sounds of Romans completing the camp’s construction were all around me, threatening to lead me toward distraction, but I’d grown used to them in recent weeks and found them almost soothing now.  Besides, I was dedicated to turning this whole story into a book series one day, and I needed the practice since I’d nearly failed out of my creative writing class back in college.  In fact, I’d dropped the class at the last possible second, which ended up working out quite well since it had given me the time I’d needed to focus on my history classes.

Then again
, the only reason I was even in fucking Ancient Rome is because I was a Navy SEAL with a college degree in ancient history.  If not for my inability to write coherent sentences with any kind of snap or pizazz, I might not even be here!  It would be some other poor asshole instead.  Although, since the chances of him sharing the same connection I had with Varus seemed extremely low, maybe nobody would be here at all.  If not for that stupid creative writing class, no one would probably be here.  We’d all be back home, living our stupid, meaningless…

“Calm down, Jacob,” Helena said from our bed.  “You’re going to snap your pen in half.”

I shot a look at her, but took notice of my journal page out of the corner of my eye.  My latest sentence had started out well enough, but then had transitioned into a series of zigzagging lines of gibberish that ended with the page being torn because I’d been pressing too hard.

Angrily,
I flung my pen at the desk and watched as it skipped off it to land on the ground.  I swore and shoved myself away from the desk, and stalked my way around it, bent over, and retrieved the pen.  I gave it another long, angry look before hurling it through the tent’s entry flap and out into the legion camp. 

I stared after it for a long while before Helena
let out a long breath from behind me.  “That make you feel better?”

I ignored her and stomped my way to retrieve the pen again, since it was my last,
knowing I wasn’t about to start using ink and a stylus if I could avoid it.  I walked out into the blistering cold night air, searched for my pen in the thin layer of snow that had accumulated in the last hour, found it, and picked it up.  I glared at it again after straightening, but movement to my left drew my attention away.  Standing there were Wang, Santino, and Stryker, holding steaming cups of something in their hands, on their way back from doing… something – I didn’t care what.  They looked at the way I held my pen and then shook their heads in unison at me and walked away.

I watched them go, a part of me wishing I could catch up with them and have some fun.  But there was something about being in command that kept me from doing it, as did my
writing responsibilities.  I couldn’t just hang out with the guys anymore, and it didn’t help that Stryker had replaced Titus as the third member of the Three Stooges over there.

I guess he was the group’s Shemp now, and I only felt more and more left out because of it.

I sighed and returned to my tent, taking a second to glance at Helena on the bed as I shook the light coating of snow from my shoulders.  She was leaning back on a series of pillows, reading through Brewster’s social studies text book that was propped up on her growing belly.  I smiled at her, unable to help it even though my mind told me I shouldn’t even bother.

She noticed
my attention and peeked over the book at me.  “What?”

“
Now
you grow interested in history?”

She tilted the book down so that it r
ested against her knees.  “It’s pretty… interesting, isn’t it?”  She said, finally closing the book.  “It’s almost like reading a historical horror story, only everything is wrong.”

I frowned.  “Tell me about it
…”

Indeed that textbook really was something of a horror story.  Everything con
tained within it was a demented bastardization of everything I knew about history.  Everywhere I turned there were references to Islamic nations and empires that spanned continents, only to implode or explode into fragments of itself, but then pull themselves back together again into extremely dominant global factions.  In my history, Islam burst onto the scene after Muhammad learned to read and write and drafted the Koran.  Islamic armies then went on a tear throughout the Middle East, Africa, and into Europe, but they were slowly beaten back by western forces, and while entities like the Ottoman Empire had been the Mediterranean’s true dominant force for nearly a thousand years, once World War I had ended, they too lost their influence, allowing the Middle East to finally slide into the chaotic mess that it had been when I’d last seen it.

It was almost easy to feel sorry fo
r the nations that made up the Middle East, since their empires hadn’t really been that different from any western European one, only they’d followed Allah instead of God… who was really just the same damn guy anyway.  Their contribution to science and technology throughout the Middle Ages and beyond was something few remembered, and even much of what was lost during the Dark Ages had actually been recovered by Islamic scholars as well.

But i
n Archer’s history books, Islamic countries in the Middle East were the equivalent of nations like Great Britain, America, France, Australia, Germany, China, and many other world powers, while Europe and Asia had become little more than recalcitrant nation-states that warred amongst themselves and rarely got their shit together long enough to prosper, again, much like the Middle East I remembered.  Only America and Great Britain to a degree seemed immune to the perils of Europe and other formerly prosperous nations, something I still could not wrap my head around.  It was crystal clear from Brewster’s textbook that the vast majority of modern American history had played out almost exactly to how I remembered it, allowing America 2.0 to turn out very similarly to the America I’d once been a citizen of.

Somehow.

Someway.

“You should really
read it from the beginning, Jacob,” Helena suggested, interrupting my thoughts.  “There’s some very odd stuff in here.  You know I’m not an expert, but even I find some of it… odd.”

“Like what?”  I asked,
curious for the first time in days about something she was going to say.

She returned the book to her lap but looked over it so that she could still see me. 
“Don’t get too excited, Jacob, it’s just that there are things recorded here that don’t seem to make any sense.  Even to me.”

I moved closer and sat on the edge of the bed, my curiosity perfunctorily piqued.  Helena shifted positions carefully around her growing belly and scooted closer, opening the book in her lap.  She flipped to the beginning, a few pages into the section entitled
,
The Dark Ages
.

“In what way?”  I asked

She worked her jaw left and right before answering.  “Well, take the very beginning for instance.  It discusses the Greeks and the Romans briefly, indicating that Greece was a proto-nation that eventually evolved into the Italian based Roman Empire…”

“God, I love the way you say ‘
proto
-nation’,” I said.

“Down boy,” Helena
said, although the humor in her voice was lost before she’d finished her quip. “But then it goes on to say that much of their history was lost early on in the first millennium when, ‘a great upheaval overturned the once powerful Roman Empire that had become so successful because of its ability to maintain control over their client states, which in turn caused its downfall when this control floundered…’”

“Boy,” I said, “I could have written this stuff.”

“Maybe you did,” Helena suggested, turning her head to look up at me.

I wasn’t even remotely amused.  “That’s not funny.”

She smirked.  “It’s a little funny.”

I gently
twisted her head back toward the book with a hand.  “Just keep reading before I start calling you Santino.”

“Well, that’s really all there is,” Helena said.  “The book the
n discusses how much of the information known about Rome and Greece was rediscovered when certain Islamic nations were undergoing their own kind of renaissance, but that most of it has been kept from the west.”

My mind churned.  I hadn’t read any of this yet, so it was all new information to me.  It
seemed interesting that these powerful Islamic empires would have such knowledge of Greece and Rome, but western European nations would not.

I reached out
and took the book from Helena, which she relinquished happily, and flipped through a few pages before landing on a map.  It looked a lot like a map of the Roman Empire in its latter days, when Rome had split its seat of power in half, allowing emperors of equal power to sit in both Rome and Byzantium, which was then renamed Constantinople.  I squinted at the map, noticing again how everything from Western Europe through Italy appeared Red while everything from the Balkans through Iran appeared blue.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until I realized that the blue in the east did not represent what would soon be known as the Byzantine Empire, but indicated Islamic influence instead.  Not only that, but the map’s legend also indicated that the Red wasn’t Rome either, but simply
unconquered
territory.

It was dated 721 A.D.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“What?”  Helena asked.

“Holy shit!”  Was all I could say, only much louder this time.

“What??”  Helena demanded
again, just as loud.

I
didn’t answer, but ran instead toward tent’s exit.

“
What??
”  Helena yelled.

At the tent’s threshold
, I turned to her, more excited than I’d been in a long time.

“The fucking Byzantines, Helena!”  I exclaimed.  “No Rome, no Byzantines, no defense against Islam, Islam spreads like a wild fire!
  It’s so simple!”

“What?”  Helena asked again, although now she just seemed confused.  “Wait, where are you going?”

I didn’t have time to respond directly.  Instead, I bolted from the tent, yelling, “
Vincent!
”

***

“The Byzantines,” Vincent said, quite impressed, his arm crossed against his chest.  “Well, that was easier than I thought it would be.”

“I know!”  I exclaimed.  “It’s all so simple.  Thank God Helena reads books like a normal person
or I’d still be trying to figure it out.”

Vincent nodded quietly, his mind probably processing this information as easily as my own had.

“Will one of you explain to me what a Byzantine is,” Archer demanded.

I’d asked
him join Vincent and me outside Vincent’s tent as well, since he needed to know this more than anyone.

“The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Rom
an Empire,” Vincent explained.  “Its seat of power resided in Constantinople, or Byzantium, as it’s currently named.  For many years, Constantinople and Rome shared power equally, but then Rome fell into chaos after hordes from the east invaded Europe, while the Byzantines prospered.  Their history is impressive and extensive, but what is important about them for the sake of this conversation is that they were also a buffer zone between Europe and the Middle East.  They kept the powers of Islam out of Western Europe for almost a thousand years, never letting them grow too powerful until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 when the Ottoman Empire sacked the city.”

I nodded.  That was a fairly succinct summarization for a culture and empire that
had been almost as influential in the Mediterranean area as Rome had been.  Not only had they been an important military barrier, but a preserver of so much Roman and Greek history and knowledge, that without them, it all may have been lost.  For instance, the only reason I had the pleasure of reading
The Odyssey
at all was because just prior to its fall in 1453, the few surviving Greek copies were moved out of Constantinople to the west.

That, at least, explained why I hadn’t named my dog Argos in Artie 2.0’s timeline.  It was completely possible tha
t in her timeline,
The Odyssey
was completely unheard of in many western countries, and young Jacob 2.0 had never even read it.  I wondered if there might have been a little kid named Muhammad running around Egypt playing catch with his dog Argos in that timeline.

Crazy
.

I turned to Archer.  “Ever heard of
something called Civil Law?”

Archer shrugged.  “It’s a legal system.”

“Yeah, sure, but who uses it?”

“Mostly Islamic countries,” Archer answered.  “As well as in their former colonies in South America and Africa.”

I waved a hand in his direction knowingly.  “There you go.  I guess instead of Justinian preserving all that stuff, the Muslims found it… although, I’m surprised they don’t use a type of religious law.”

“It’s a hybrid,” Archer clarified, “but it’s grown more secular over the last century.”

“Really?”  I asked.  “Interesting…”

“Just get to the point, Hunter!”  Archer demanded.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said dismissively, too interested in the implications of all this alternate history to really give a shit about Archer anymore.  “Well… I guess we now know why there’s no mention of the Byzantine Empire in Archer’s timeline.”

“We do?”  He asked.

“We do,” Vincent answered for me.  “You see, in order for the Byzantine Empire not to exist, the Roman Empire must not have existed long enough for the split to occur.  Sometime between today and the early fourth century when Constantine moved the seat of power from Rome to Constantinople, the Roman Empire must have floundered.”

“
Yeah,” I agreed, “but I don’t think we’ll need to wait nearly that long…”

Vincent nodded, his mind coming to the same conclusion: that because of the events that were happening now – that is, the fracturing of the Roman Empire under Agrippina’s rule – Rome was about to fall, and no one would be around to pick up the pieces.

“I knew this was
your
fault, Hunter!”  Archer yelled, his eyes ablaze.  “My world went completely to shit because you had to stick your nose where you shouldn’t have!  My world is suffering because of
you
.  Because of
you
…”

That’s when I punched him hard in the stomach, knocking the wind from him along with his fucking words.  He doubled over
, and I reached out to grab him by the shoulders to pull him into my knee that was already being thrust into his chest.  He would have fallen on his own then had I let him, but I decided to slam my fist into the back of his neck for good measure as well.

He went down hard, and I leapt on top of him to contin
ue my assault, but Vincent body checked me off of him before I could.  The two of us tumbled in different directions, but I scrambled to my feet far quicker than the older man, yet still he moved to intercept me again.  I was operating in a fury now, and I didn’t care who stood in my way, so when Vincent attempted to block me from attacking Archer again, I hurled a fist into his jaw as hard as I could.

He
slammed into the ground, and my hand exploded in pain.

I took a moment to shrug it off, keeping my eyes on Archer, who remained on his stomach, panting and cringing through the pain.  Vincent
, too, was immobile, but at least on his knees, holding his chin.

O
nce the pain in my hand subsided a second later, I leapt for Archer.

I never
even got close, because I was tackled again, only by someone far more agile than Vincent this time.  Wang was already grappling with me as we hit the ground, and the little Asian-Brit, whom I outweighed considerably, wrapped me up in a submission move from behind so easily that I didn’t have a chance against him.  The little bastard had always been stronger than he looked, but more so, he simply knew how to fight with the best of them, and I couldn’t do anything to free myself from his grip.

“Calm down, Hunter,” he yelled as I thrashed against him.  “Don’t make me put you out, mate!”

My struggles subsided although the anger still coursed through me, but even with all that negative emotion fueling me, I knew Wang could render me unconscious just as easily as he could count to three.  I grew calmer but still Wang held on until he was absolutely certain I wouldn’t fight back.

“Well?”  He demanded once I went completely still.

“I’m done,” I answered, and he let me go. 

I scrambled to my feet
and immediately moved toward Archer again, only to be stopped by Wang’s powerful grip.  “I’ll embarrass you again if I have to, Hunter,” he said.

I tore my ar
m away but didn’t move from where I stood.  Instead, I glared at Archer as he slowly rolled up into a sitting position.  To my right, Vincent had found his way to his feet, and while he looked at me sternly, he didn’t seem outright angry.  I ignored him and turned back to Archer, pointing at him accusingly.

“Don’t think for a second that you know anything about me,” I told him, reiterating the same thoughts I’d given him months ago outside of Damascus.  “Haven’t you realized how much I already hate
myself for doing exactly what you said?  I know this is all my fault!  I’ve known for
five
goddamned years!  You know nothing about me because even if you did, I’m not the same guy you knew at all!  Don’t you understand that??  I hate myself, Archer!  I
hate
myself!”

I stopped yelling as those final words left my lips
and the anger subsided as realization finally rang true.  Those were the words I’d been trying to conjure up to describe how I felt for months now, and they were the truest words I’d heard in years.

I hated myself.

In every sense of the word.

With that realization came panic, a panic induced by the
understanding that a person could actually hate himself, and that such a person was me.  I looked up, horrified at my sudden awareness, and found that more of my friends had gathered around me.  Helena stood there too, looking just as shocked as I was, her hand covering her mouth, a sight that broke my heart even further.

So I
left without further comment.

I
walked back to my
praetorium
slowly and alone, where I could hide from it all, hoping beyond hope that Helena knew better than to join me tonight.  I couldn’t face her.  Not now.  I needed to be alone with nothing but the thoughts that seemed to come so clearly to me in my bed that was always positioned just beside my treasure filled footlocker.

***

The next morning we were back on the road.

Helena hadn’t come home last night, and I hadn’t spoken to another person since my incident with Archer.  I’d been a mess as I’d stumbled into my
praetorium
but felt almost immediately better the moment I’d landed in bed.  I’d snuggled up with my blankets and thought of a million ways Archer was wrong, how he was an asshole, and how the fate of his world was about to join my list of things I couldn’t care less about.