"How quaint!" gushed somebody's influential cousin, officially an observer for the Senatorial Committee on Anachro-Temporal Affairs.
Maximus controlled his features. Several of the scholarly types didn't try to hide their scorn; either safely tenured, na-ve, or both. A coal-black anthropologist cleared her throat with a hrrrump:
"You're certain this is our own past?" she said.
The operator's poker experience came in handy again. "That's a"-bloody stupid question-"moot point, Doctore Illustrissimo," he said. "It's definitely a past with Martinus of Padua in it. There are no other lines within several hundred chronospace-years that show a scientific-industrial revolution this early. Quantum factors make it difficult"-fucking meaningless-"to say if it's precisely the line that led to us."
"But will He be here?" an archbishop said.
That required even more caution. "Well, Your Holiness, that's what we'll have to find out. This is-" he pointed to the July 14th, 585 a.d. readout "-the traditional date of the Ascension."
"I am not worthy to witness a miracle," the cleric breathed. "Yet that is why we have come-"
"We're here to find final proof of the Great Man theory," a historian answered, and they glared at each other. "Not to indulge in superstition. It's only natural that primitives, confronted with one of history's truly decisive individuals, should spin a cocoon of myth as they did with Alexander or Manuel-"
"Nonsense," the anthropologist said. "Martinus was merely there at the right time. Socioeconomic conditions were obviously-"
"I just drive this thing," Maximus muttered as the argument went into arm-waving stalemate, and checked the exterior deflector screens. It wouldn't do to have any of the natives see them floating up here…
Lieutenant Tharasamund Hrothegisson, hirdman in the Guards of Urias III, King of the Goths and Italians and Emperor of the West, looked carefully at each man's presented rifle as he walked down the line.
Then he called his troop to attention, drew the long spatha at his side, turned to face his men and stood at parade rest, with the point of the blade resting lightly on the pavement between his feet. The street was flat stones set in concrete-nothing but the best for the capital of the Romano-Gothic Empire! — but not too broad, perhaps thirty feet from wall to wall counting the brick sidewalks.
"All right, men," he said, raising his voice. "This shouldn't be much of a job. Wait for the word of command, and if you have to shoot to kill, shoot low."
There were nods and grins, quickly stifled. Tharasamund had spoken in Gothic; that was still the official language of the army-though nowadays only about a fifth of the men were born to Gothic mothers, even in a unit of the Royal Guards, and that was counting Visigoths. There were plenty of Italians, other Romans from Hispania and Gaul and North Africa, Burgunds, Lombards, Franks, Bavarians, Frisians-even a few Saxons and Angles and Jutes, a solitary Dane, and a couple of reddish-brown Lyonessians from beyond the western sea.
None of them were unhappy at the thought of taking a slap at a city mob, though, being mostly farmers' sons or lesser gentry themselves. Good lads, but inclined to be a bit rough if they weren't watched.
"Deploy in line," he said, looking back over his shoulder at the guns for a moment.
There were two of them: old-fashioned bronze twelve-pounders, already unhitched from their teams and pointing forward. And may God spare me the need to use them, he thought. They were obsolete for field use, but as giant short-range shotguns with four-inch bores they were still as horribly efficient as they'd been in the Second Greek War, when they were a monstrous innovation and surprise.
The soldiers trotted quickly to make a two-deep line across the street, identical in their forest-green uniforms and cloth-covered steel helmets. The city was quiet-far too quiet for Florence on a Saturday afternoon, even with the League playoffs sucking everyone who could afford it out to the stadium in the suburbs. The wind had died, leaving the drowsy warmth of an Italian summer afternoon lying heavy; also heavy with the city smells of smoke and horse dung and garbage. The buzzing flies were the loudest sound he could hear, save for a distant grumbling, rumbling thunder. Shopkeepers had pulled down their shutters and householders barred window and door hours ago.
"Load!"
The men reached down to the bandoliers at their right hips, pulled out cartridges and dropped them into the open breeches. They closed with a multiple snick-snick-snick.
"Fix bayonets!"
The long sword-knives went home below the barrels with another grating metallic rattle and snap.
"Present!"
The troops advanced their rifles with a deep-throated ho! That left a line of bristling steel points stretching across the street. With any luck…
Tharasamund took off his helmet and inclined his head slightly to one side. Yes, here they come, he thought.
He replaced the headpiece and waited, spatha making small precise movements as his wrist moved, limbering his sword arm. The first thing he saw was a man in the brown uniform of the City police. He was running as fast as he could-limping, in fact-and blood ran down his face from a scalp bare of the leather helmet he should have worn. When he saw the line of bayonets, he stopped and started thanking God, Mary, and the saints.
"Make some sense, Sathanas fly away with you," Tharasamund snapped.
He was a tall rangy blue-eyed man a few years shy of thirty himself, with a close-trimmed yellow beard and mustaches and shoulder-length hair a shade lighter, but his Latin was without an accent-better than the rather rustic Tuscan dialect the policeman spoke, in fact. Still, his uniform and Gothic features calmed the Italian a little. They represented authority, even in these enlightened times of the career open to talents.
"My lord," he gasped. "Patrolman Marcus Mummius reporting."
"What's going on?"
"My lord, the Carthage Lions triumphed!"
Tharasamund winced. "What was the score?" he asked.
"Seventeen-sixteen, with a field goal in sudden death overtime,"
Oh, Sathanas take it, he thought, restraining an impulse to clap his hand to his forehead and curse aloud.
The Florentine mob hated losing, even when times were good-which they weren't. When times were bad, they were as touchy as a lion with a gut ache. For some reason they thought being the capital city entitled their team to eternal victory, and this was just the sort of thing to drive them into a frenzy. Particularly with defeat at the hands of an upstart team like the Carthage Lions, only in the League a few years-North Africa hadn't been part of the Western Empire until the war of 560, twenty-five years ago.
"We tried to keep everything in order, but when the Carthaginian fans stormed the field and tore down the goalposts, the crowd went wild. They would have killed all the Lions and their supporters, if we hadn't put all our men to guarding the entrances to the locker rooms. Then they began fighting with all the men from other cities, shouting that foreigners were taking all the best jobs, and-"