To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (38 page)

Two hours later, a shadow
loomed across my body and interrupted my tanning session.  I peeked through an eyelid, the sun glare disrupting my ability to identify who it was.

“We are ready, Jacob Hunter,” Titus said.

I grunted.  His continuous use of my full name had, as I predicted, become irritating.  I waved a hand at him and stood, hauling a dozing Helena to her feet alongside me.  I looked over at a shirtless Titus, who had removed his top along with the rest of the diggers to keep cool.  I couldn’t help but be impressed.  For a kid of eighteen who had two thousand year old genetics, poor dietary habits like all ancient men and no access to modern fitness equipment and training regimens, he was a model of physical excellence.

No more so than the rest of us, of course, but he’d never had the kind of help we had.  Vincent must have worked him hard over the past few years.  He’d already proven to be a halfway decent shot over the past few days, and he dug as good a hole as any legionnaire.  It didn’t take much more than that to make me happy to have him around.

Even so, he was too damn quiet.  Very contemplative and thoughtful, he never said what was on his mind unless directly asked to, and even then it was with obvious bashfulness.   He was the complete opposite of Santino, and while I knew I should count my blessings for it, his polar opposite attitude was almost as annoying.

But he
was still trying to fit in, I suppose.  The rest of us were much older and far more experienced, so his timidity didn’t surprise me.  Looking over at him, I offered him a smile and patted his dust caked shoulder in appreciation.  He returned the smile distantly, and turned to look at the remaining trio of men returning from the dig site as well, just as dirty and just as shirtless.

“My God, Santino,” I said loudly as I spotted him, “put a shirt on.  No one wants to see that.”

Providing a visual aid for my joke, I held my hand out over Helena’s eyes, blocking her view.  She playfully tried to bat away my hand, acting the part of a curious child.

Santino looked at his stomach
and over his shoulder, spinning himself around a few times.  His six pack glistened like a Men’s Fitness magazine cover, but he was just as gullible as I was when it came to his ego.  I’d been calling him chubby for the past year now, slowly progressing to calling him a fatass, and that child-like mind of his ate it up.  Sometimes I wondered if he really was that stupid, or if he just liked to play along with the jokes because he didn’t care who the punch line was, as long as it was funny.  I had to admit, I was forced to suspect the latter.

“Come on, Hunter!”  He complained.  “Just tell me what I need to work on!  I’ve been good
; no MRE snacks at all, I swear!”

“Don’t ride him so hard, Jacob,” Helena said.  “I’ve always found paunch oh so sexy.”

I laughed and waited for Santino to stop spinning around and join the rest of us.  Wang and Bordeaux had already found their way onto the wagon, sitting patiently as they waited for everyone to get comfortable for the show.

I only had to wait a few more seconds before I turned to Bordeaux.

“Ready?”  I asked.

“
Oui
,” he answered from atop the wagon.

“Do it.”

I heard the subtle click of his small detonation box, before the follow up explosion nearly deafened us all.  A cloud of dirt went flying in the air, along with thousands of tiny pieces of the cargo container.

Bordeaux had decided to use one of our original gear containers as a means of containing the blast in a way that also magnified its power.  The containers were bullet and water proof, air tight, and could withstand mortar strikes.  By placing an explosive within the sealed container, any explosion’s power would
only increase.

Inside, he’d placed the
orb with a thin strip of C4 wrapped around its circumference, more than enough to destroy it alone.  He didn’t want to take any chances, so we crammed all of our gear into our three remaining containers and prepped the fourth one for destruction.  Burying it was further insulation to contain the blast.

As the shockwave passed, I realized I had my eyes squeezed shut.  I felt Helena reach out and touch my arm.

“Are you all right?”  She asked.

Peeking, I noticed we
hadn’t moved.  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh.  “I guess I almost thought we’d be sent home.”

She gave me a reassuring smile and
rubbed my arm.  “You knew it couldn’t have been that easy.  Come on.  Let’s see if it worked.”

I squeezed her hand and we headed towards the blast sight together, the remaining six members of our party following closely.  Reaching the palm tree, which was now tilting at a forty five degree angle from the pressure of the blast, I inspected the neatly blown out hole that spanned at least thirty feet in diameter.  The
orb was nowhere in sight, and all I saw were blue dust fragments glittering in the sunlight.

“It worked,” Santino commented.

“Of course it worked,” Bordeaux said, annoyed that anyone would doubt his ability to destroy anything.  “One down, one to go.”

I half smiled at his comment, continuing to gaze at the crater.  It was a small victory, yes, but a hollow one.  All we did was destroy something that didn’t belong here to begin with.  Six of us standing here right now were no less innocent in that light, but we weren’t as easy to deal with.  We managed to dispose of one of the many snags in the timeline, sure, but it didn’t make our jobs any easier.  We stil
l needed to find the second orb and find a way to make it send us home before destroying it.  That was the only way to ensure its destructive potential came to an end.

Unfortunately, it seemed like the only way we were going to get
it was if we went through Agrippina first, and to get to her we needed to get through her Praetorians, and possibly her legions.

“
So now what?”  Wang asked, not taking his eyes off the crater as well.

“We keep heading east,” I replied.

“Why is it so important we go there?”  Bordeaux asked.

I sighed.  It was time to discuss the plan.  The new
and improved one.  “What does Agrippina have that I don’t?”  I challenged, walking out in front of the group.

“Power?”  Wang offered, but I shook my head.

“Money?”  Bordeaux tried to similar success.

“Boobs?”  Santino asked while I ignored him.

Helena, Madrina, and Vincent were staying silent, unable or unwilling to offer any further guesses.

“An ar
my,” Titus said bluntly.

All eyes turned towards him.  It was the first time he’d spoken when not directly asked to do so.  He looked calm in his answer, no nervousness in his face, and he had every right to be confident in his remark.

“Exactly,” I said, nodding appreciatively at the young man.

“So what can we find in the east that will help us against an army?”  Helena asked as she hugged herself, trying to stave off the cool dusk air and nervousness alike.

“What else?”  I asked rhetorically with a shrug of my shoulders.  “An army of our own.”

VIII

Judea

Mission
Entry #8

Jacob Hunter

Caesarea, Judea- August, 42 A.D.

So I bet you’re wondering what we’re doing in Caesarea.  That, or perhaps you’re wondering where the hell Caesarea even is?  Maybe both.  To answer the second question first, it’s about as far east as one can get from Rome, and still be in the Empire, just north of Jerusalem.  The first question is a bit trickier.  We’re here because instead of fighting history, I’m going to embrace it.

Finally
get my money’s worth out of that History/Classical Studies double major.

This may take a bit of explaining, so bear with me.

Twenty years from now, Rome is about to experience a major outbreak of hostility amongst the Jewish people in the province of Judea.  Unfair tax laws, offensive religious policies, the restriction of self-government, and simple hostile attitude will soon be enough to piss the Jews off to the point where they decide to move against their Roman protectorates.

Jews…

Anti-Semitism was nothing new, even if it was a term coined in the 19th Century by a German journalist named Wilhelm Marr, if I’m remembering my European Civ II class properly.  It’s also technically a misnomer.  Semitic languages ranged from Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, to Phoenician, yet the hatred was aimed solely at the Jewish people. 

Personally, I had nothing against them, but
it didn’t take a genius to argue that Jews were notorious for finding themselves on the bad side of many personalities throughout history, whether it be Muslims, Christians, Crusaders, Nazis, Muslims again, and more contemporary folk: Romans and Greeks.

Poor guys.

So, what was Rome and Greece’s beef with them?

Well.

Jews are stubborn, at least in the sense that they adhere to ancient practices and rituals as though they had been developed only weeks before.  Romans, however, didn’t much like that, and were constantly annoyed at how uptight Jewish society was.  They took issue with a single deity religions and didn’t accept the idea that Jews were owed something they called the “promised land.”  I’m making light of the issue, I know, but while Romans were normally at ease with other cultures and their religions, any subservient society was still expected to know its place on the pecking order.

As for the Greeks, well… let’s just say Jews, like any other culture, take a certain amount of pride in their society and did little to hide their superiority about it.  Greeks, being the pompous windbags that
they
were, felt the same way.  All that logic and philosophy went right to their heads.  So, since Hellenistic (Greek) culture was dominant from Africa to Babylon and Saudi Arabia to Greece, Jewish culture was just a very small fish in a much bigger pond.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they simply never got along.

So, where does Agrippina fit in then?

Simple.

Despite her obvious shortcomings, she hasn’t been a total failure as empress.  She’d actually done some good for the empire, most of which would have been done under Claudius anyway.  She annexed all the right territories like Thrace, Noricum, Lycia,
and Judea as well, and placed the childhood friend of Claudius, Herod Agrippa I, on the throne, just as Claudius would have done.  However, Claudius had given Herod free reign to rule Judea, finally giving the Jews some semblance of autonomy, whereas Agrippina has not.  But the peace hadn’t lasted long in the original timeline, and during the reign of Herod II, Roman procurators overstepped their jurisdiction and usurped more and more control for themselves, initiating a chain of events which led to the Jewish revolt in 66 A.D.

That’
s where Agrippina messed up.

Herod
is nothing more than a puppet ruler under her rule.  He has no real control.  We’ve only been here a few weeks, and it’s been as easy as sitting in a restaurant to learn just how many disgruntled Jews there were here.  Some simply wanted Herod to have more power while others wanted the procurators gone.  There were even some who spoke of complete succession.  Those later fellas will soon be remembered as Zealots, the same as those who started the conflict in 66 A.D.

They’d be handy soon enough.

As I’ve said, I’m not an expert on the Roman-Jewish War of 66 A.D., but there was more to it than Roman and Greek dislike for the Jewish people alone.  Besides the social upheaval, there was economic mismanagement, religious disenfranchisement, political pandering, and most importantly, the impetuousness of youth. 

As it was in any society, the driving force behind any kind o
f social resistance or protest started with the idealistic young people.  I’ve got nothing against voicing one’s opinions, even if they do go against the norms of an institution, because the ability to protest and voice that opinion is a fundamental right that should be granted to all humanity.

Unfortunately, unlike the
generally
understanding America I left, the Roman Empire wasn’t exactly lenient when it came to its recalcitrant troublemakers.  As a result, it brought down the wrathful fury of its legions upon the small province of Judea.

So, here we were, twenty five years earlier, placing our faith in the theory that if you wanted to get shit done, you see the young people first.  Sociologists would leap at the opportunity to be in
our position right now.  If we could rally the young people of today, who were in fact the same old men who were probably content to live under Roman rule and opposed the war in 66 A.D. in the original timeline, we’d be verifying a very interesting social paradigm.

So, we had some plans, and I must say, for once, not half-assed ones.  We were ready this time, and I had the full support of my team.  Oh, sorry I was so brash in my last journal entry, but I was too excited to put any serious thought into anything.  Vincent, Bordeaux and Wang
were back and had a few friends with them.  Bordeaux had his wife, Madrina, and Vincent his step son, Titus.  Madrina was a hell of a cook, and since Bordeaux would never risk putting her directly in harm’s way, became the team’s central organizer.  She handled the expenses, logistics, inventory, and made sure everything ran smoothly, and she was pretty good at it.  I guess raising kids does that to people.