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The River God's Vengeance(85)

By:John Maddox Roberts


On the third-?oor gallery, I caught up with him. Scaurus was leaning against a wall, a hand clasped to his brow, which was bleeding freely. During one of the theater’s lurches, he had struck his head on something, slowing him enough for me to catch up to him.

“Marcus Aemilius Scaurus,” I called, “come with me to the praetor!” His eyes widened with disbelief at hearing the old formula for arrest.

“Why didn’t those fools kill you? There were four of them! And what business have you arresting anyone? We have to be away from here! We can sort out the legalities at another time.”

“Sorry, it has to be now,” I said, lurching along toward him, my feet trying to slide out from under me on the slanting fioorboards. “You leave here only as my prisoner, and now I have yet another capital charge to lay against you, plotting the murder of a Roman official in the course of his—”

At that moment the theater gave its biggest lurch of all, and it began to slide. I dropped my dagger and wrapped my arms around a wooden pillar to keep from falling as there began a sickening, indescribable sense of unnatural motion, accompanied by the greatest cacophony of noises that had ever assaulted my ears. It was a blend of screaming, rending wood, pops, smashes and snaps, grindings, and, above all, a tremendous roar of rushing, hurling water.

The sliding seemed to go on forever; then it metamorphosed into a sort of whirling, rocking, leaping motion, and I saw the opposite bank of the river rising and falling as if in an earthquake. Then I realized what had happened: The theater wasn’t collapsing, it was ?oating!

Before my amazed eyes the scene began to turn and the Sublician Bridge moved slowly into view from my left. It was almost as if I were at the still center of things, and the world was moving around me. The people on the bridge were applauding in openmouthed joy, leaping into the air and cheering, as if this whole spectacle had been put on just for them.

Next to me I saw a pair of hands emerging from a hole in the fioor. It was Hermes, dragging himself up the last of the stairs. He clawed his way along the fioor and hauled himself up beside me.

“See what you’ve done!” he cried. “We could have got away!”

“Where is Scaurus?”

“Who cares! In a few seconds, we’re going to smash into the bridge; and if we’re going to live, we’ll need to be better acrobats than those Greek women last night!”

“They were Spanish!” I saw that he was right. Slowly and majestically, the theater of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was bearing down on the bridge like a ship about to ram. The people on the bridge were waking up to the fact and scrambling off it at both ends. But everyone on the embankments and the nearby rooftops was cheering and shouting as if the Greens were about to score the upset of the year in the Circus.

“Let’s get up on the railing,” Hermes advised, “but hug this pillar until the last moment.”

It seemed like a good idea, so the two of us stood barefoot on the rail while the bridge drew closer. I was sure we were going too fast and we would be hurled off the railing to our messy deaths, but I had forgotten about the breakwaters that protected the bridge supports. They were submerged, and when the underwater part of the theater struck them, its forward motion slowed, and through the soles of my feet I could feel the timbers of the building part like bones splintering in a numbed limb.

A moment before the face of the theater hit the bridge proper I shouted, “Now!” We hurled ourselves off the railing and landed on the bridge, ten feet below us, plowing into a few citizens who were still trying to push their way off the bridge through the panicked crowd. Stars fiashed before my face as I was knocked almost unconscious.

But I had no leisure for oblivion, knowing what was coming. I located Hermes and hauled him to his feet. “Come on!” I bawled. “We have to be away from here!” He shook his head for a while, glanced toward the theater building, and wasted no more time. We forced our way through the crowd fieeing the bridge. Hermes drew his stick from beneath his belt and I still had my caestus on my left hand. These helped.

When we were atop the bridge abutment, we paused and looked back. The theater was jammed against the bridge, and it was folding up. Between the power of Father Tiber and the immovable massiveness of the old stone bridge, it was like a bird’s nest being crushed between the hands of a giant. The siding split and peeled away as huge beams shot out, piled against each other, crowding and fiying as the immense building fiattened, pieces of it rising, almost toppling over onto the bridge, all of it accompanied by a noise audible for miles.

Then, just as it seemed that the bridge had to give way or the no longer recognizable theater fall on top of it, the shattered hulk began to sag, falling back into the water as fioating timbers shot out from beneath the arches on the downriver side. The river was shredding the building and washing it out beneath the bridge.