To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (22 page)

“It had nothing to do with it,” I snapped.  “I could tell when it was influencing me, and it wasn’t then.  It was just that the things she said, the things she implied… Agrippina wasn’t lying to me, Helena.  There’s something about her and the orb that can control me and I don’t know what to think anymore.  I don’t know what to do to protect myself from it.”

“Jacob, you won’t always have all the right answers,” she said carefully, “no one does.
  We talked about that.  That isn’t some indelible personal deficiency you alone possess, but what separates you from everyone else is that you know how to survive.  Adapt.  What’s more is that you have me.  And Santino.  We can help you so that you’ll know what to do next time.”

I shook my head.  “It’s
not that simple.  Besides, I’m not nearly as perfect as you think.  Look at how I treated you and Santino only a few months ago.  The orb can take advantage of emotions like that – pride, arrogance and anger, and warp your will with them.  What if… what if I turn out like Caligula or Claudius if I keep exposing myself to it?”

“Don’t do this to yourself
, Jacob,” she said, her voice filled with emotion.  “You’re your own man, and as good a one as I’ve ever known.  Don’t lose yourself over something you can’t control or even understand yet.  Stick to your gut and stay focused.  You don’t have to be perfect because everyone makes mistakes!  Everyone!  You just have to learn from them.”

I felt anguish tear my heart
to pieces as feelings of rage and dread continued to overwhelmed.  “I can’t control it, Helena.  If I go near the orb again, I don’t know what I’ll do.  It may affect my judgment beyond my ability to handle.  What if it gets someone killed?  What if it gets you killed.  I can’t watch that happen again.  I … I can’t…  I…”

Helena
shot to her feet and moved in to surround me in an engulfing hug.  She sat off to my side and threw her arms around my chest and back, digging her head into the side of my neck as I sat there in denial.  I tried to fight down my fear but only felt anger rise up again instead.  I started to shake, irrepressible convulsions that threatened to throw Helena off of me, but she held firm, refusing to let me go in my moment of pain and panic.

“Please don’t do this, Jacob,” she whispered.  “You’re not the only one who can’t stand the idea of losing the one you love.”

I heard her words and drank them in, but was unable to repress the fury swirling within me as I found myself being dragged to the floor of our tent by Helena, tremors continuing to course through my body.  She turned my head to rest it against her chest, and an overwhelming need to sleep overcame me.  I shut my eyes, forcing any potential wayward tear back behind the shoddily erected barricades my subconscious struggled to rebuild, and felt the sweet escape of sleep overpower me as Helena rocked me in place.

But my last thought before unconsciousness was that maybe Agrippina
was
right.  Maybe she really did have all the answers.  Maybe the only thing I needed was to accept her offer and work with her.  Maybe with her, my life would be complete, or… or at least find meaning again, and the sense of emptiness deep within me would be filled.  The responsibility I’d heaped upon myself would be gone and I could dictate a new path to the future without the need to reorient the timeline.

Who would care?

I thought of little else as my mind slowly spiraled on a downwards course towards oblivion, but a physical presence reminded me not to trust random thoughts influenced by emotion.  The warm, familiar form of Helena next to me reminded my subconscious to think more clearly and rationalize everything, the same as her comforting voice always did when I was awake.

It was unfortunate then that at that very second, when my mind finally collapsed in on itself,
that the last thing I remembered was the sweet scent of Helena’s presence associated with the horrifying idea that maybe Agrippina was in fact right.  It was a furtive thought that threatened everything I had come to understand and hope for, but was perhaps an idea worth investigating.

The only question lef
t was how I would feel when I woke.

Part Two

V

Byzantium

Mission Entry #5

Jacob Hunter

Byzantium, Thracia - June, 42 A.D.

If you are at all knowledgeable about geography
, you should already know from the heading that we went east.  As for the mission to capture Nero, all I have to say on the matter is that it was a failure.  He wasn’t even there.

No
– that’s not all I’m prepared to say, actually.  There’s more.

Finding Agrippina hadn’t been a problem for us that night, but what really threw a wrinkle in our plan was that we found
the blue, time traveling orb as well. It was the same one I knew we’d have to find some day, but was also the one thing I hadn’t been prepared for.  There had been, and still are, too many unanswered questions about the thing, so many, in fact, that I hadn’t even wanted to go looking for it until we were satisfied the timeline was back on track.

And still don’t.

But I’d found it that night and it had influenced me in ways I hadn’t thought possible.  There’s just something about it, some kind of draw that I can’t resist.  Something that makes me think things and do things I wouldn’t normally do.  I’ve yet to determine whether it affects others as well, but I haven’t really had many opportunities to test the theory.  But regardless of whether it does or doesn’t, I can vouch for how it affects me:

Negatively
.

To the point that it almost made me do things I would later regret.

Then again, I did do things that night that I regretted anyway.  Things I don’t want to discuss nor feel the need to record here  I’ve suffered through enough self-inflicted pain over the episode already, and the only reason I had been able to deal with it all was because we egressed the fuck away from Agrippina that night, and have been on the run ever since.

Like I said, we went east.

We knew Vincent was somewhere in the Middle East, probably around Jerusalem, so we decided to follow Bordeaux’s trail.  We hoped to meet up with them a lot sooner than originally planned, but when we arrived in Athens, he’d already left with Wang.

Having already missed them, we’d decided to spend
a few days there, where we learned firsthand how much of an influence Wang had been on local doctors and the Greek medical profession in general.  Greece had always been on the cutting edge of science and medicine, even after the Romans conquered them, but their knowledge palled before Wang’s – a simple combat medic from the 21st century.

W
e’d asked around concerning his whereabouts, and many of his former partners told us his story:

Wang had a
rrived early one morning a few months after he’d left Rome, claiming he had walked all the way from the Orient and that he possessed knowledge far beyond their own.  They were skeptical, of course, but with his help, Greek doctors had been able to synthesize all kinds of new drugs, the most popular being more effective pain killers.  Others, such as diuretics and cough drops, were popular as well.

They’d given us a few test samples, and I remember smiling at the small
objects that mimicked those in gross demand two thousand years from now.  Obviously, Wang didn’t have the material or equipment needed to make the kind of pills you take every day, but he had done his best.  From what I observed, the pills, which were more like wafers, consisted of mashed together herbs and plants that had been dried, crushed and formed into little consumables, held together by God knows what.

It had worked though, and the headache I’d been suffering from that day had been gone in minutes.

Unfortunately, the doctors also informed us Wang had left two weeks before our arrival in the company of a very large Gaul and his, likewise, very large family.  They had seemed comically sad that Wang had left them and had indicated no one knew where he was going, just that they had gone east.

So, after a quick tourist stop at the Acropolis and Parthenon for some pictures, we moved on to Byzantium, the ancient city later known as Constantinople, which would even later be named Istanbul.  What name you know the city by is any man’s gues
s, but I do know its Greek name – Byzantium – should still exist in your timeline if you dig down deep enough through your history books.

It was a good place to lay low for a while.

I needed to get my head together after the incident with Agrippina, and I knew Helena and Santino could use rest as well.  After four years on the run, constantly taking risks and making enemies, we needed a break.  Byzantium would be a good place to blend in and keep ourselves off Agrippina’s radar for a few months.

East was the last place s
he would think to look for us.

There was nothing of value for her here.

Byzantium was also the best place to wait for Bordeaux as he made his way back with Wang and Vincent.  They’d have to cross through Anatolia, you may know it as Turkey, but I doubt it, and the best place to cross from east to west was over the Bosporus, the narrow straight that separated the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara (or simply Propontis as its known these days – the “before sea“).

It’s been
a little more than two months since Santino’s last journal entry, which I feel the need to comment on as elegant in its crude simplicity, and it may be a while again before the next one.  I was too hasty and arrogant when I first decided to act on my plan a few months ago.  Santino, Bordeaux… Helena… they were all right.  They were always right.  I don’t know why I even listen to myself anymore.

I need perspective.

I need time to regroup and think.

I sat back and thought, leaving my journal to rest upon the table where it lay.

Taking time to regroup and think was a hell of an idea, but even after a few days here in Byzantium and months on the run, I’d done little in the way of thinking.  It had taken me
the entire time we were here just to convince myself it was time for another journal entry, and I now realized it had in fact been long overdue.

What had happened aboard Agrippina’s barge and later with Helena in our
tent ate away at me at times, but never so much as it did that night.  I had let my guard down with Helena and allowed myself to succumb to the one emotion I couldn’t afford to feel: fear.  We weren’t going to accomplish anything that way, but there were times when I couldn’t help but dwell on that night.  The orb and its power had been disturbing, yes, but it was an obvious problem.  What was truly unsettling were the things Agrippina had said.

The image of her kneeling on her bed as blood dripped from her neck and was smeared all over her thighs was burrowed into my mind, but
her words were all I could focus on –
You didn’t expect all your questions to be answered so quickly, did you, Jacob?  That, as you would say, would spoil the story
, she had said.  And she was right.  It was exactly something I would say, but how would she know that?  And before even that, she had said something about choosing a particular path.  What path?  Were there more than one?

Her words had a distinctly predictive nature to them, as though she knew more than she let on.  As if she knew the course of events that night before they even began.  The thought shouldn’t have been a surprise considering her possession of a glowing, time traveling ball, but I was convinced she couldn’t use it.  I had seen Claudius hold the
orb in his own hand without any indication he could use it like I could and Caligula had had ownership of it for months after the reclamation of Rome.  In neither instance had there been any sign they had any idea how it worked, let alone been able to operate it.  As far as I knew, Marcus Varus and I were the only two people in the entire universe that could use it.

My only conclusion was that I didn’t know what to think, but that I’d damn well better figure it out soon
.  Not only that, but that we now had two immediate objectives, neither new, and neither overtly specific.  First, we had to destroy the orb; both of them, actually, since technically there are two.  The second had yet to surface, but we had to find and destroy it just as soundly as the one in Agrippina’s possession.  Secondly, we had to continue our goal of usurping Agrippina from the throne.  The more I thought about her the more convinced I was that she had to be removed for the sake of
everything
.  She knew too much about the orb, and that was bad enough. At worst, she was displaying signs of corruption from its presence, although it was taking far longer with her than it had with either Caligula or Claudius.

Helena was probably the last piece of redemption I had to work on.  The last, yes, but that didn’t mean I had to wait to work on it.  We’d been so close to bridging the gap that had formed betw
een us over the past year, but little progress had been made since Agrippina.  I’ve been distracted, introspective, much the same as I had been prior to my time on the barge, only this time I had cause and wasn’t unaware of it.  I thought Helena understood this time, hence her own distance, but I couldn’t be sure.