Imperiata and Other Stories

A Mote, Amidst a Tide of Darkness

Gaius Iulius Caesar’s death at the hands of a mob is a terrible thing to see. He is kicked and stabbed and beaten to death. He weeps. He pleads for his life. Towards the end he has a seizure, and dies with spittle on his cheeks, shaking and jerking, scattering thick red drops across the cool marble floor.

Gaius had once been a friend. We had fought together in Gaul. A few days ago, asking for help, he called me brother. I knew what was planned, and I had my part in his death, and I will always regret what we did that day.

After Gaius, I have had enough of Rome. I am old. I have lived these years well. I have some influence, and help Octavian seize his throne, but there seems little point. I know how it ends for this family. I have already marched with the legions that the boy Caligula will one day befriend along the Rhine, and I will hear of Nero’s last night from those who see it with their own eyes. Rome is little more than a great effort wasted. A year after Octavian takes power, I find a cliff, and step from it, and leave them to their decline. They were but a moment in the span of the world, I suppose, but it was sad. I was fond of them.

I step from the cliff and fall and die and find myself somewhere new. Naked, cold, and alone. My gut is empty, as it always is, as if I have not eaten for a day. I have a raging thirst, and I am tired, as if desperately lacking sleep. Death for me is never death. I simply go somewhere else, somewhen else, to another life. I do not know why, and I do not know how, this is simply how it is.

I look around. I am in an alley, in a noisy town, with stench all around. There is dirt beneath me, cobbles where the alley opens into the street. There are buildings of brick and stone. This could be anywhere in the world, after cities are thought of. I listen. There is a distant hammering, metal on metal, and the clatter of hooves on stone. I breathe in, and among the stench of open sewers and rotting rubbish, the smoke in the air is acrid wood-smoke, not dusty coal. I do all this without thinking. I am somewhere before industrialization changed the world. I usually am. There are more times and places before than after. I read when I can, when I am in a place with libraries, and know a little of the stages of architecture and fashions and other useful things. I can sometimes work out where I have arrived by those details.

Not this time. Everything is functional and uniform, and there are no people around.

I stand. I always awake clumsily sprawled, as if having fallen in a drunken stupor. I look at my hands, at my chest, see slightly-tanned skin, darker on arms than on torso. It tells me little. A place where people are outside, and sometimes bare-chested when working.

I do not know the mechanisms of how this works. I remember nothing of the change. One moment I am dying, and then I am in the next place. There is no memory of death. I use a cliff when I can, because a cliff is a good way to die, for me. One moment I am floating downward, and the next I awake somewhere new, and there is nothing unpleasant in between.

As well as hungry, I always arrive somewhere out of sight, although not necessarily private. A room with a closed door. An alley. A clump of trees. I always look like the nearby people, and my face changes with my skin and build, every time. An average seeming, undistinguished face by whatever the local standard is. Always a man, which may mean something or may not. Always aged in my mid-twenties, unblemished by scar or callus, but with feet hardened enough to walk. I assume that is planned, by whoever makes this happen. I have teeth, but no hair. It begins to grow as soon as I appear. My belly aches, but not more than simply going hungry for a day would cause, as if I am created, but the contents of my gut are not. I am unmemorable, average in most ways for the place that I am. Besides the hunger, the worst thing is that for a few days I am a little taller or shorter or stockier than I think myself to be, and I occasionally bump into lintels or catch on branches. I soon adjust, for these are all cosmetic changes, outward only. My mind remains as it is, my own, my memories intact. I must learn the languages of new places, but once learned, the words stay. Equally the ways of war and trades. I have mastered many odd skills, and practiced many trades, and what I know grows each time I live, and seems not to fill up my head.