To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (12 page)

“Obviously they’re all insane
sadists.”

At least our conversation was back
near our normal banter level.

“You have no idea,
” I said, tearing open the rice pilaf package and handing it to her.

I tore open the turkey
and gravy and started digging in.  Helena and I traded packages after a few scoops from each, and I used the MRE’s small container of Tabasco sauce to spice up the rice, finished off the rest of our crackers, and split the black and white cookie desert with her.  Never liking chocolate much, I gave her that end, and I ate the vanilla side.  Even without warming it through, the meal had tasted good and had been substantial.

W
e policed our mess and got comfortable again.  I looked up at the bottom of Galba’s bed and picked at some splintered wood with a finger, hoping we were in fact doing the right thing.  Helena had a point about one thing.  No matter how I justified it, we were in fact messing with people’s lives every time we took a breath in this world, and the only responsible thing to do would be to just flee into the shadows and never interfere with society again.

But that felt like giving up, and even if we stayed away from every human being for the rest of our lives, it still wouldn’t matter.  Even if we buried our heads in the sand like an ostrich, we were still interfering with the lives around us.  Even that deer Santino shot the other day could alter the timeline.  That deer could have been meant for a starving family two months from now,
but since it won’t be there for the family to hunt and feed off of, the children in that family may die of starvation.  Those kids could be the ancestors of Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Jacque Cousteau, Celine Deon, even Bordeaux, or any other countless soul who could possibly draw their ancestry back to the area around the Rhine River.

I tried to keep track of all the people we’
d helped over the years, and the number sat at eighty five men, women and children.  Each was a life we interfered with, but that number didn’t include the few hundred we’d killed while helping them, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of men had who died on the battlefield outside of Rome four years ago, which included Claudius, and later Caligula, whose deaths alone could be more than enough to alter the future.  After all we’d done, there was no telling what 2021 looked like anymore.

Maybe I’m not being fair to the rest of the world, but I think it’s hard to argue
that the decisions made by the various civilizations to call Europe home weren’t amongst the world’s most influential.  Sure, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan still needed to embark on their rampage through the area, and I’m sure nothing we do here will stop that from happening, but even with their intervention and… seeding, the emigrating hordes of barbarians weren’t the only people to call this area home.  What if through the results of our actions here we somehow produce a stronger, more enduring Rome, one that could hold off the invading hordes of Huns, Mongols, Goths and the rest of them?

The possibilities
were mind boggling.

As for places like China and Japan, they didn’t
really catch up to the rest of the world until the likes of Marco Polo and his successors got involved a thousand years from now.  Eastern civilizations may be older, and at one point or another more advanced, but where the western world progressed over the millennia, the east hit a plateau.

Even Islam’s day might be over.  I knew Augustus had sent a Legion to Yemen to conquer the area for their stash of incense and precious ston
es.  He’d been hurting for cash after establishing his unilateral dominance over Roman politics and needed whatever resources he could find.  The expedition had failed thanks to traitorous guides and a deadly Arabian summer, but now that someone like Agrippina was running the show, they might try again.  Who knows?  The prophet Mohamed may accidentally trip on a rock after receiving his visions from God because a Roman siege engine, hundreds of years earlier, knocked a stone onto his path where there originally hadn’t been one.

Then again, maybe nothing quite so re
volutionary will happen by 2021 and the only discernible difference would be that Betamax players will put VHS tapes out of the market in the 1990s.

Stranger things have happened

And probably will.

“What are you thinking about?”  Helena asked from beside me, closer than we’d slept last night, but still not in my arms.  The distance seemed like miles.  “You have that far off look on your face again.”

I smiled.  “Just thinking... like always.”

“Obsessing.
”

I hesitated.  “Yeah, I guess
.  I just can’t stop thinking about it, Helena.  I simply can’t be responsible for something that could potentially end western civilization.”

“You’re being melodramatic.”

“Maybe,” I admitted, “but even if only one life is changed because of all this, I can’t help but feel like I’ve murdered them all.”

She leaned up on her elbows and tilted her head to look at me.  “J
ust stop it, Jacob.  You’re beyond melodrama now and not helping anyone with talk like that.”

I shook my head before turning to gaze at her.  “I’m really not, Helena.  If just one person back home ceases to exist because of what we did here; it’s no different than if I held a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

“It’s not like that and you know it.”

“Maybe not, but it’s no different than if I just stood by and did nothing
while someone else did the deed.”

Helena didn’t have a quick response
herself this time, but I could feel her mind churning.  I couldn’t guess what exactly was going on in there, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.  She’d never been a deep thinker, relying instead on a clarity of mind that gave her answers to problems more easily than they came to most.  I’d always respected her opinions because of it, at least I had until recently I suppose, but in this case I still wasn’t sure she understood the situation enough to render an appropriate perspective.

A few seconds later, she lowered herself to the ground and pressed
her body up against mine.  She propped herself up on one arm and looked down at me.  “I suppose I’ve never thought about it that way, but I still don’t understand where all this is coming from.  You haven’t voiced a thought on timelines or changing the future in years, so why now?  Why this past year?  What’s changed?”

“Because now is the time to worry about it,” I answered easily.  “I’ve tried to keep it out of my mind
in all that time to avoid going crazy, but I have to think about it now.  The longer we wait, the more divergent things will become and the more difficult it will be to put back together.  Now is the sweet spot.”

She nodded, accepting that.  “But you still don’t know if the timeline even needs to be ‘fixed’ because you can’t see the future, Jacob.  You can’t lay there and definitively tell me that we need to do anything to ensure the future remains as we left it.  You just can’t.”

“And you can’t tell me that we don’t need to do anything at all with any conviction either,” I retorted with a long, slow sigh, waiting for the right thing to say to come to me.  “I need you to trust me on this, Helena, I really do.  Listen.  In light of our last conversation, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.  If you
really
think we shouldn’t do this, just tell me now.  Tell me this is more about your intuition and not your feelings being hurt because I wouldn’t talk to you.  If you can do that I promise we’ll leave, never come back, and find a quiet place to live out the rest of our lives, but I need to know now.”

She was quiet for a very long while as she stared in the general direction of my stomach, her eyes contemplative.  After a while, she laid her left hand on my chest and pounded it with a clenched fist in frustration. 

“Damn it, that’s not fair.  You can’t put everything on my shoulders like that.”

She paused and let out a long breath
, but I interrupted her before she could continue.

“Now you know how I feel, Helena
.”

She looked speechless once again, but she was able to continue after a short while.
  “I do trust you, Jacob, I do.  I told you I’ve always trusted your gut, and I feel no differently now.  I just wanted you to know that you don’t always have all the right answers, and that’s okay.”

I smiled.  “Well, now I know that…”

She smiled back, the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen.  “You’re such a jerk, Jacob.  Sometimes I wonder how I can still love you.”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

She smacked my chest.  “You are that.  More than you know, but if you go out of your way to ignore me again, you won’t be for much longer.”  She continued smiling, and for the first time in months, hunkered down back in my arms, and in that moment I knew better than to ruin it by saying a word.  As she got comfortable resting her head on my chest, I awkwardly moved my arm around her back to hold her.  She noticed my hesitation and looked up at me.

“It’s all right, Jacob.  I’m not going to bite you.”

“That’s not always so clear sometimes,” I replied, finally reaching around and holding her by the shoulder. 

She blinked up at me, an oddly mixed expression on her face.  She didn’t need to say anything more either, and I knew that look only confirm
ed her feelings that while we were reconciled, we weren’t done yet.  She had no problem beginning the healing process with a little cuddling, but it was going to be a while before we shared the same level of trust and intimacy we did a few months ago.

We laid there in contemplative silence for a
few minutes before I got bored.

“Want to play a game?”  I asked.

“What kind of game?”  She replied, curious.

“How about, I Spy?”

“Jacob,” she said with a weary sigh, “there’s not much…”

“I spy something… green.”

“Grass,” she said immediately.

“Damn.  You’re good.”

She slapped my chest again, probably harder than she should have.

“Just go back to sleep.”

***

It was during times like these
that I really missed home.  Hours cooped up indoors would never have been a problem for Child Jacob, Teenager Jacob, or even Young Adult Jacob, each of which would find ways to keep himself entertained for hours on end.  From movies to video games, music and books, and the wonders of the internet; 21st century Jacob was a man-child who knew how to keep himself busy.  Many a girlfriend hadn’t been too thrilled by my ability to avoid boredom, but they’d come and they’d go, but Jacob always remained – entertained.

I’d grown out of such reclusiveness well before I had joined the military, but sometimes I wondered how Helena would have dealt with
such habits back home.  In some ways I was lucky we’d ended up here in Rome.  Something told me she wouldn’t appreciate my MacGyver DVD collection as much as I did.

Instead,
Helena and I boringly spent the next three hours lounging together on the floor of Galba’s tent playing chess on my wrist mounted LCD screen that was attached to a small computer in my MOLLE rig.  It was either that or solitaire, and Helena proved a worthy opponent, even though I managed to edge her considerably in the win column.

We also chatted about inconsequential things, memories of the homes we had five years ago an
d more recent ones.

Our favorite story
surrounded Santino, when the three of us had stalked a band of thieves to their hideout and he had triggered a simple snare trap that caught around his ankle and sent him flying into the trees.  Helena and I had been on his flanks and hadn’t seen what had happened to him, but once we took care of the bandits, we realized Santino hadn’t participated in the take down.  He’d contacted us over the radio and politely asked for us to find him via his GPS tracker to give him a hand.

We
’d found him dangling from a tree, his head bobbing a few meters above the ground.  His predicament wouldn’t normally have been a problem, but his knife had also fallen out of its sheath and imbedded itself in the ground just out of his reach.  I’d picked it up and looked at Helena, and we both burst out laughing as Santino hung there with his arms crossed across his chest, a rare frown on his face.

Back when
Santino had lost his favorite combat knife during our mission to rescue Nero four years ago, Helena had promised him she’d find him a better and bigger one.  She’d come through on her promise months later when she purchased him a ten inch blade shaped like an Arabian scimitar during our time in New Carthage on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia.  Santino had immediately fallen in love with it and claimed it would take either an act of God or, jokingly, an act of sheer stupidity to ever part him from it.  Needless to say, we simply couldn’t contain ourselves when we found him hanging from a trap even a toddler could avoid; his knife having accidently escaped him.

It was
after a few minutes of laughter at his expense that I finally handed him his knife back, and he cut himself down, falling to the Earth with a loud thump.  He had stood and brushed himself off, replacing his knife, and in typical Santino fashion, acted like nothing had happened.  He’d thrown an arm over Helena’s shoulder and my own, and led us towards the bandits’ camp to pick up what we had been tasked to retrieve.