2
Quentin
I was the last to wake, as always, but even before I woke up proper, I knew everything was wrong. I’d got chilled in the middle of the night and climbed up into the bus to stay warm. That seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the old Transit was swaying under me like I was all at sea, and I hadn’t felt that way since those troop ships on the Pacific. I didn’t like it then, and didn’t now.
It was daylight and bright outside, but the wrong sort of bright, and I was all hot and sweaty, but it was somehow a different hot, with dusty smells in the air I couldn’t place. I heard the Professor shouting, and he doesn’t do that. He’s a man who gets all quiet when he’s angry and glares into your face instead of giving you what-for straight out.
Worst of all, I couldn’t make out what he was shouting.
So I’m calling out, “All right!” and “What the heck now?” and getting to my feet and stumbling down the bus, which I’m alone on, bumping back and forth off the seat backs. The windows are damp with all our night sweat, and I’m peering and squinting and trying to make out who’s who out there.
Then a blade flashed in the sunlight, and suddenly I was wideawake. I lunged for the nearest bag—Jimmy’s, I think—and grabbed up a bat and jumped down the steps and out the front door of that bus real fast.
I expected good ol’ boys, small-town know-nothings who don’t take kindly to strangers camping by their land and even less kindly to folks of a darker hue such as myself and Walter. I had no doubts I’d be jumping into a fracas.
Was I expecting Romans, like from that Ben-Hur movie I snuck into as a little bitty kid? No. I was not.
Romans.
I stopped dead in my tracks and said a very bad word that I generally only whisper when I’m alone, in case the Lord gets angry.
Last night’s fog had cleared. The river was still there, and the ferry, only now it was on this side of the river. But around us was no farmland, no corn, nothing but grass and olive trees, a whole orchard of them surrounding us. The dirt road under the bus led right to the water where that ferryboat had pulled up. It was short and wooden with low sides and places to tie off horses and a big oar at each end where the ferryman would stand and propel that thing. There’d been no Illinois ferry like that in a long time.
As for the sixteen Roman soldiers squaring off against the Professor and the others, they had helmets with plumes, and metal armor that covered their chests and arms in segments, and those odd kilty-skirty Roman things with the metal chains hanging down like an apron. Bare legs and leather sandals, and they all had short swords. Behind them stood a dozen folks egging on the soldiers, dressed in rough linen tunics, three of them carrying—I swear to God—pitchforks. Simple farm folk if I ever saw any, but not in shirts or denims or boots.
Six of those Roman soldiers had been pushing the bus around, trying to get it to move, I guess, and when they saw me come out the door of it they drew their swords and came at me.
I wondered for a second if we’d stumbled into some movie being made in the middle of Nowhere, Illinois, but then I heard the Professor standing up to them all with his head high and his chin thrust out, shouting in Latin, which I knew was Latin because he used it all the time to cuss at us when we needed it, and he liked to read to us sometimes from some book written by Julius Caesar himself way back a couple of thousand years ago, about battles with Vercingetorix and those wild Gauls and all.
The Roman with the sideways helmet plume who was shouting back in the same language looked strong and muscular, as if he could take any three of us down single-handed and then pitch a no-hitter right after with his other arm. And to be honest, our guys, standing behind the Professor, looked nine different kinds of terrified. The Wandering Warriors had wandered mighty far, and that was the truth.
That Roman who seemed in charge of things shouted at the six who were coming at me, and they stopped dead in their tracks. He barked another command, and in two seconds they were over with the others, so that the two sides, us and them, were now facing off twenty feet from the bus and nobody was even looking at me anymore. So when the Professor stepped forward, hands spread wide for calm and still spouting Latin, and the Roman leader upped and raised his sword high, there was no way my bat and me could get there in time to help. I’d been in hand-to-hand combat on Ie Shima so I mighta been useful too.
Instead, I jumped back up into the bus, put my hand on the ignition key, and turned it, and that engine started up with a loud backfire. The Professor had been working on the timing of that engine for a week now, and I was glad he hadn’t been able to fix it.
That backfire cut through the babble of voices like all get-out. The Warriors all flinched like startled coneys, but they’d been hearing that backfire for days and weren’t shook up by it. But the Romans, dear Lord, the Romans threw themselves back away from me and that old Ford Transit. The soldiers leaped, and the farm folk who had brought them ran, hands high and eyes rolling.
Well, I turned the engine off and stepped back outside the bus and said out loud, “Yes sirree, that is more like it. A little respect for the Professor. That is all we ask.”
The Professor didn’t even glance at me. He was still steel-eyeing that Roman in charge, trying to stare him down, intimidate him like he was the pitcher for a team we hated.
The Roman looked at me again, all uncertain, and at the bus, and lowered his sword. Then the two of them jabber-jawed away for what seemed like ten minutes, the Professor in his Julius Caesar Latin and the Roman in his rough, gritty version of the same. But they understood each other good enough, I could see that.
Then the Romans put their swords away and the Professor turned to the guys. “Get your stuff from the bus,” he said. “Get your gloves and bats, bring the ball bag, all of that. And lock up behind you. We’ll be taking a little walk with these boys to see what’s what.”
Jimmy shook his head, not understanding, on the verge of crying. “What about the game? The Dukes are expecting us. The game. This can’t be happening!”
The Professor took a good look around, and down at the ground and up at the sky, and then he pinched his own arm so hard I could see the white mark.
Then he shook his head. “Jimmy,” he said, “and you others, you all just keep it together and don’t fret. I think we have a really, really long time ahead of us before that Decatur game begins.”
“We’re leaving the bus here?” asked young Davey.
The Professor wiped sweat from his forehead. “Best save the gas,” is all he said.
We gathered up our things and started walking down to the river to the ferry. As we walked I looked at the guys, and it was sure that they didn’t have a clue. They were all rattled and confused and scared, and probably not one in three with any idea how far we’d come, where we’d been brought to and why, and just how impossible this all was. Me, I believed the Professor had things in hand. Or I hoped so.
Romans beside and behind us, we went across on that ferry and then started walking, following a rough track between fields. I saw scrawny cows and a few pigs, real small. The Professor looked lost in thought, as if he was doing math. I didn’t want to disturb those thoughts, but I just had to step up beside him.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” I said.
“For what?” he said, irritated. “For firing up the bus and likely saving our lives?”
“Nope, for me gettin’ us stranded here in God-knows-where-and-when.”
He shook his head, and his voice softened. “You’ll have to explain that to me, Quentin, because you have lost me and that’s the truth.”
“Because I was the one insisted we leave Route 66 behind and take them back roads,” I said.
The Professor upped and laughed. It was the one moment in the whole adventure that I thought maybe he’d lost his marbles. It was a high, wild laugh and the Roman soldiers marching by our side and behind us clutched their sword hilts like they meant business.
“Hey, don’t do that, Professor, you’re making these guys nervous.”
He said, “And to think that all morning I’ve been sure this all was my fault.”
“And you figure that how?” I asked.
The Professor shrugged. “Maybe because we’re in Ancient Rome and I speak Latin? That feels like we must be here because of me. But for my life I can’t fathom why.”
I nearly said to him, “You’ll work it out, Professor.” But I didn’t, because that would’ve put all this on him and made him frown even harder.
So instead, I asked him, “Where are these Roman bruisers takin’ us? What’s next?”
About then we climbed to the top of that low ridge and there it was, a Roman road, right in front us, heading off both right and left. It was raised about a foot, had rocks along the sides and then smoothed out rocks on the top. It was about perfect to walk on.
We got up on there, and then the Professor looked over at me and said, “See that post over there, Quentin?”
I looked and I did see a post, a stone post maybe three feet tall, with some marks scratched into it.
“I do,” I said. “What’s it say?”
“That’s called a millarium, Quentin, and the Romans used them to tell people how far it was to the next important place. A milestone.”
“How far to what?” I asked.
“Unless I’m mistaken, Quentin, that sign means we’re on the Appian Way, the most famous Roman road of them all. I’d say we’re headed to Rome.”
“Well, hell,” I said, “I ain’t never been to Rome, Professor.” And he laughed. I added, “What are they going to do with us, do you think, when we get there?”
“Well, Quentin,” he said, tugging up a bit on the duffel bag he was carrying that had all his catching gear, “I hope maybe we’re going to play some ball.”
I grinned at him. “Damnation, Professor, why didn’t you tell us that a little sooner?”