The Hole in the Sky -5- Being the Hole (Patreon)

I drove for perhaps twenty or thirty minutes, never any faster than five or ten miles per hour in consideration of the terrible track between the trees. Twice we had to backtrack from apparent dead-ends, one of them at a small river. The next time we came to what was probably the same stream, it looked shallow and slow-moving enough that I simply drove the big car across it.

"Lincoln is made by Ford, after all," said Doc which caused a general, if nervous, chuckle.

When we topped a small rise, the little village in front of us came as a surprise. At first, we just saw a wide clearing in the forest, a meadow, another small stream and a few goats staring at us, some of them with bits of greenery hanging out of their mouths.

I stopped the truck when I saw the buildings at the other end of the clear area. Maybe buildings was a bit of an exaggeration. The largest one might have been twenty feet square, made of what looked like adobe bricks halfway up then rough timbers and finally a genuine thatched roof. Two smaller buildings of a similar nature faced the big one. A half dozen small wooden shed-like structures and some rail fencing completed the tiny settlement. Thorny plants helped the fence keep the goats out of what might be small plots of vegetables and maybe a field of some kind of grain.

"Do you see any people?" Doc asked. Hatton and Dunn tried to peer around us from the backseat since little of this could be seen from the side windows.

"Nope," I said. "Probably scared off by the noise we're making." While the Lincoln wasn't particularly loud for a vehicle of its type, it didn't seem likely that these villagers had ever heard anything like it before.

"What are we gonna do?" asked Dunn.

"Drive on through," suggested Hatton.

"We might be able to get some information…," I let that trail off, reconsidering.

"Shut the engine off if we're going to stop," said Doc. "Let's not waste gas."

Any action seemed better than no action but I didn't really want to drive on through or stop and I really didn't want to turn off the engine. Who knew what these people would be like? And just because we thought we might be back in Roman days didn't mean we were. We'd already encountered things that made no sense. Goat-herding villagers with hidden bazookas didn't seem completely out of the realm of the possible.

While I dithered, Doc opened the car door and stepped out, taking his crossbow with him. "Salve!" he shouted. "Oye! Qui est dux? Possimus loqui?"

"What did he say? That sounded like Latin?" asked Hatton.

"Uh, my Latin is not so good, I think he said, can we talk to your leader?" said Dunn. I didn't say anything, Dunn was close enough. My Latin was only slightly better. But Doc had taken the lead and I was just as happy to let him.

Hatton snickered, probably from nervousness. “Take me to your leader?” he muttered under his breath. “Is it a Gary Larson cartoon?”

“Let’s hope not,” said Dunn, with a snort. “Nihil sanctum est?”

I chuckled then did as Doc had asked and shut the engine off. The silence seemed louder than the motor had.

Several dogs popped out of tall grass and began barking at us. They looked like perfectly ordinary mutts, a little leaner than you might have seen in any small town in America. Yellow dun in color, some of them with black brindle markings or white socks, they yapped and snarled and one even howled but they kept their distance, a good hundred yards away.

None of us had known that Doc Abrough spoke Latin but he'd probably studied it as a young man in high school and maybe college too. After all, he had a medical degree. I knew more than a little of several languages but hadn't actually spoken Latin since my own college days and then only in a classroom.

Dunn opened the rear door on my side and unfolded his lean red-headed self. He left his rifle on the seat and stood beside the big SUV with his hands over his head. "Shalom! Yom tov!" he said.

Hatton goggled at me. “Is that Hebrew? The preacher speaks Hebrew?”

I nodded. I'd known that; Dunn had mentioned once that he trained in a seminary for the ministry before becoming a politician and had visited the Holy Land several times. Hebrew might actually be understood, or nearly understood. If we were in North Africa in the late Roman Republic era, the locals probably spoke proto-Berber, in the same language family as Hebrew. Of course, Greek, Danish and Russian are all in one family, too.

"Mein Gott!" muttered Hatton. I looked back at him and he grinned weakly. "That's about a third of all the German I still remember from high school. Wie gehts? Mir geht es gut. And that's almost the rest of it."

I laughed and he and I sat there watching the antics of our pair of cunning linguists for most of five minutes. They took turns, Doc would shout in Latin and Dunn would say something in Hebrew. At one point the senator tried to switch to Greek but he couldn't bring enough of his old lessons back to mind. Modern Hebrew is modeled on the ancient tongue and Dunn had had practice in both, but modern Greek is as much like classical Greek as Spanish is like Latin so he'd never really had occasion to speak it outside the classroom twenty years ago.

Doc tried a bit of Greek, too but his was worse than Dunn's. Mine was not even as good, so again, I didn't join in. Greek, I thought, who would expect to need to know Greek in backwoods Montana?

My Latin was fresher than Doc's and my French and Spanish might help, too. But Swedish would be useless—well, maybe not. There were the blonds riding the elephants. But the bits of Russian, Japanese and Hawaiian I knew were less likely to be understood. For the moment, I stayed in the car.

We still had not seen a single villager. The noise of the approaching SUV must have been terrifying. Scared people might do anything; I wanted to stay where I could restart the car before they could do something like create a rhino stampede or whatever. Not that we had seen any rhinos but this was the country for them.

While I mused on such silly possibilities, Doc took another step. Making a few mild oaths under his breath, he put the crossbow back onto the passenger seat and stepped away from the SUV then he began calling out in just about every language he could think of. "Peace. Pax. Paz. Shalom. Salim. Salaam. Eirinikos. Salong, Friede. Frid," he said as he walked toward the largest building.

Dunn called out, "Don't go too far, Doc," just as a small boy ran out from behind a shed and grabbed a spotted pup, one of the dogs that had been barking at us. The kid could barely carry the dog and a woman suddenly darted out, grabbed both of them and sprinted back to her concealment.

We couldn't help it, we all laughed, maybe just from relief of the tension. Doc squatted then sat on the ground, still laughing and Dunn hunkered down, sitting on his heels in a position that only Southern boys seem able to hold comfortably.

"Bring me some food and something to drink," said Doc.

Dunn stood up and reached into the console between the rear seats where we had been keeping a few snacks in a cooler. He pulled out an open bag of potato chips and two cans of Coke which he carried up to Doc and shared with him, both of them sitting on the ground. I noticed he'd also taken his rifle with him, under his arm.

"This isn't getting us any closer to that caravan," Hutton complained.

"Shut up," said Doc, pleasantly. "We're going to need somewhere to take those women when we rescue them aren't we?"

"Huh," said the General, not making any commitment to the idea.

The two villagers we had seen were both brown-skinned, dark-haired, big-nosed Mediterranean types, like most of the caravan guards, slaves, and hangers-on. But could a village of probably less than 100 people do anything to help with about 600 captive women?

Shortly after the incident with the boy and the dog, a dozen or so men with spears emerged from the brushy cover nearest us and charged from maybe twenty yards away.

The General and I grabbed our rifles and got out of the car, him on the right and me on the left. "Fire one shot over their heads," I said.

Hatton grunted and Dunn fired almost as soon as I finished speaking followed quickly by a second booming .30-06 shot from me and the flatter, cracking sound of Hatton's .400. A branch fell out of a tree, one of us had hit something.

The natives disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. We policed our brass and reloaded.

The General grinned at me but I just shrugged. I noticed that his forehead was damp. Dunn laughed nervously, fumbling a bit with his reloading. Doc continued calling out in his fractured Latin, he hadn't fired because he hadn't taken a weapon with him to his spot. He had stood up but he hunkered down again. So did the senator when he finished with his rifle.

"Damn waste of time," said Hatton.

"We've got nothing but," I said, settling back into the driver's seat with the rifle across my knees.

Hatton grunted again and climbed back into the SUV himself. "I don't know…," he began but cut himself off. "We should go and rescue those women if we're going to," he said. "They're not going to come out and talk to us after we scared the shit out of them," he said, meaning the villagers.

My turn to grunt.

After perhaps twenty minutes in which Hatton became quietly but increasingly insistent that we abandon trying to communicate, a single figure emerged from behind one of the sheds and came toward us.

He wore a garment like a knee-length tunic, long-sleeved and the gray color of unbleached and un-dyed wool. He had a belt with a sort of pouch hanging from it and what might have been a knife. Doc Abrough and Senator Dunn sat still and watched him approach.

"Ave," he said when he got within about thirty yards. "Hoc linga loquor. Nescio alter."

Bad Latin but I understood him, "Hello, I speak this language. I don't know the other one." He had a guttural accent and sort of swallowed his endings but Doc had also understood a little.

I spoke to Hatton. "Come sit in the driver's seat, be ready to start her up," I said. "I'm going to go try to help Doc."

"What? What can you do?" Hatton asked but he scrambled across the seat and came out of the back on the driver's side as I stood up beside the big silver SUV.

"My Latin is a lot fresher than Doc's," I said. "I went to university only ten years ago, and I speak both Spanish and French, too." I headed toward where Doc and Dunn had hunkered down and joined them.

Hatton called after me, "Wave a hand over your head if you want me to start the engine." He sounded happier about the situation than he had while just waiting, a true man of action.

I gave an exaggerated nod and a thumbs up. "How are you called?" I asked the native in Latin as I settled down. The man wasn't even as tall as Doc, and I didn't want to appear to tower over him, though he had come no closer than ten or twelve yards.

We learned the man's name was Hadar and the village was called Izim. The city lights we had seen, for it was a city not a town, belonged to Udul which was about ten thousand paces over the hills and on the southern plain. Also, there was a river in the way and the river had… we weren't sure what, he didn't know the Latin name for the beasts. "Dimsa," seemed to be the word he used.

"Prob'ly crocodiles," suggested Dunn.

"Crocodile is Latin," said Doc.

"Yeah, but he don't know that," said the Senator.

The country we were traveling through appeared to be called Yugurta, a name none of us had ever heard. Doc suggested Numidia, and after several repetitions, Hadar agreed that the Romans sometimes called it that but he mangled the pronunciation badly.

Romans. Well, we knew they must be around somewhere since he was speaking their language.

"How did you learn Latin?" I asked. Doc and Dunn had yielded most of the questioning to me but sometimes asked him to repeat things they had not quite caught.

"Servus erat Hippona," said Hadar. "I was a servant in Hippona." He frequently left the proper endings off but that was clear enough.

"A slave he means," muttered Dunn.

I asked where Hippona was and Hadar indicated that it was twenty thousand paces to the northeast, on the other side of the mountains, by the sea. "Fuit quondam," he added. "It used to be."

"What happened to it?"

"The Gaeta came and pulled it down," said Hadar after translation. "Their magi destroyed the city with lightnings and terrible noises."

"When did this happen?" asked Dunn in English and I repeated the question in the modified Latin I was using. He seemed to understand better if I kept things simple and ignored the more complicated bits of grammar.

"Less than two months ago," said Hadar.

"Is that why you left?"

"No, no one escaped. I ran away last summer and came to the village of my uncles. Here." He added something that sounded like a prayer in a guttural language.

"Why did you run away?"

Hadar made a peculiar gesture. "Wise men run when the Gaeta approach. They had already destroyed Cartago.” Carthage.

"Holy shit!" said Dunn, he and Doc had both got that; Abrough was nodding.

I heard Hatton somewhere behind us mutter, "What the hell?" He didn't like being left out of the conversation but it served him right for being a nearly monoglot middle American.

"Who are the Gaeta?" Doc tried to ask but Hadar just looked at him. I tried a different version, "Who are these people called Gaeta?"

"Men from the far north with magic and strange gods," said Hadar with a head gesture that seemed to indicate emphasis. "Gods of lightning and thunder and darkness and fire. If they capture you, they can change you into an animal, or even worse."

He gestured back toward the buildings, "The people here, they think you are Gaeta, too. They are afraid. But I said, there are no old Gaeta, their magic keeps them young." He indicated Doc with a gesture of his head. "You are not Gaeta."

Doc grinned and Dunn snorted.

"What do they look like?" I asked.

"Like him," said Hadar indicating Dunn. "Tall, with bright hair and light-colored eyes. But you are not Gaeta, either, I think," he said to the senator. "You are a Gaul."

Dunn grinned even wider when he worked out what the man had said. "Sure and b'gorra, I'm Irish and don't I look it?"

"Ask him about the caravan we saw," Hatton called from the truck, sitting with the door wide open, half-in and half-out so he could see and hear better.

"Getting to that," agreed Doc.