3
The Professor
The Appian Way! I knew the guys were terrified by all this, but for me it was all the excitement without—yet, anyway—any of the real danger. The Romans were calm, we weren’t in slave chains, we were headed to Rome herself, and the centurion in charge seemed to have something definite in mind.
I had questions, a lot of them, like why was a centurion in charge of a dozen-plus soldiers and a few carts with civilian types walking along beside them. Centurions had eighty or a hundred legionaries under their command. And was it an accident they’d come across us in the morning? I’d asked the centurion that, and he’d just said he was under orders. His Latin and mine weren’t quite on the same page, so I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. But it was obvious that he wasn’t all that surprised to find us, though the old Ford Transit’s backfire had certainly shocked the hell out of the guy. I had to smile at that.
“What’s so funny?” Quentin asked me. “You grinning about all this, Professor?”
I looked at him. My ace pitcher, a guy who’d fought at Iwo and Ie Shima and Saipan and was ready to land on Honshu when the bomb ended that war. A real hero. Amazing, really, that a guy like Quentin, sharp as a tack and a genuine war hero, couldn’t stay at the team hotel in Paducah each time we went there. You had to wonder what he’d been fighting for.
“You daydreaming, Professor?” he was asking me.
I smiled again. “No,” I said, “I was just thinking about you starting up the Transit, Quentin. These Romans about jumped out of those fancy uniforms.”
“They sure enough did, Professor, but they don’t seem too worried now. We’re all marching along pretty good. And this duffel bag ain’t all that good for carrying, you know?”
“I know.” I shifted mine around some. “Let’s try and keep up for another half hour or so and then I’ll ask the centurion up there for a break, okay?”
Quentin nodded and then drifted back in line to tell the others, and I upped the pace a bit to catch up with the centurion. But it wasn’t easy; he was used to moving along smartly, and I had my duffel slung over my shoulder. Plus, I had to admit, a lot of catching over the years had slowed me down. My knees didn’t take nicely to all this walking. But I did get up there, finally, only to have his bodyguards cross their pila in front of me to make sure of my intentions. The centurion was up at the front, chatting with one of his officers as I got there, the two of them looking at something the centurion was holding.
I spoke up. “A word, please?”
He turned to look at me and frowned, waved the bodyguards off, and as I approached to within about ten feet of him, with not a bit of warning, he upped and threw what he was holding straight at my head.
I should’ve ducked or dodged it, but in that less-than-split-second, something clicked in my brain and I reached up with my left hand and caught it.
I wasn’t wearing my catcher’s mitt, of course. If it had been a rock with some edges on it, I might have wound up with a nasty cut. Instead, it just stung a bit. Like Quentin’s fastball on a good day. Which made sense, since the thing he’d thrown at me was one of our baseballs. And the whole group of Romans marching along there laughed and nodded when I tossed it in the air and then lobbed it back to that centurion.