ROME

THE MOB WAS OF TWO MINDS. IT SCREAMED FOR BLOOD.

At the same time it raged against the soldiers who prodded the broken man down the road. His supporters called out, “Rabbi!” and wept wildly as he strained under the weight of the huge timber that the guards forced him to carry on his back. Others ridiculed his bloodied face, his back shredded by the scourge, his hair matted with drying blood. Children either spat in his direction or buried their faces in their mothers’ garments, depending on how their parents behaved. A stone’s throw away from the center of attention, Juve muscled his way through the throng, toward the pitiful man under the timber. As he worked his way closer, he noticed a soldierly man who also seemed determined to reach the object of everyone’s attention. Then another and another --- five, maybe six tall men forcing their way through the crowd, shoving people aside. Their imposing statures, clean garments, and washed faces made them easy to spot. They moved quickly and forcefully, leaving a backwash of grimy faces bobbing in a motley wake of worn and tattered fabric.

In the next few seconds, the six converged, one by one, on the man under the timber. Two grabbed either end of the heavy shaft and used it to push back the crowd. Relieved of his burden, the bloodied man stood up and seemed to protest. Guards around the rabbi responded too slowly as the remaining four big men drew long knives from under their togas and sent several to their deaths. Then the rescuers quickly formed a semicircle around the angry and bewildered rabbi, menacing anyone who dared come near.

As Juve arrived at the scene, a soldier broke through the crowd and went for one of the rescuers. Instinctively Juve threw himself into the fray. With his right fist, he grabbed the soldier. More armed soldiers arrived. A whip cracked just above Juve’s head. Before he even considered his response, Juve snatched the whip from the soldier’s hand. Then, holding the business end with his left hand, he struck the stunned attacker’s face several times with the hard handle. The soldier stumbled into the crowd and slumped to the ground.

Almost as one, the mob greeted the new spectacle with cheers of approval. They roared as Juve slammed another soldier down onto the hardened surface of the road and broke his neck with the heel of his shoe. An odd sense of embarrassment distracted Juve for a second, when he noticed that his shoes and pants singled him out among men and women dressed in sandals and robes. He shook off the feeling and turned just in time to impale yet another soldier on the spearlike fingers of his outstretched arm.

Two more soldiers broke through the ring of the six protectors. Juve dispatched them both— one with a side kick to the bottom of the jaw, the other with a swift, knifelike chop of his hand. Three more soldiers arrived. The crowd roared as Juve’s arms and legs made contact with aweinspiring precision—a heel to a nose, a fist to a throat. Juve clutched the third soldier by his groin and face, raised him high above his head, and speared him head-first into the dust. The six rescuers gaped at each other, their open mouths expressing their bewilderment.

Suddenly another soldier rushed Juve from behind. Sensing the attack, Juve spun around and found himself looking into the surprised man’s eyes. For the first time, Juve hesitated. The crowd sensed his indecision. Silence as the men stood eye to eye. There was a flaw in the soldier’s left iris. Juve couldn’t move, but he managed to speak. “If you move anywhere but away, I’ll kill you.” The crowd urged the soldier to attack, but he remained frozen. Then, slowly, he took a step back. The remaining soldiers followed his lead. The crowd protested loudly and demanded that the soldiers continue to fight. But, one by one, they shrank back into the crowd. Thirsting for more blood, the people groaned in angry disappointment. Some picked up rocks and began to pelt the retreating soldiers. Only a few noticed the rescued rabbi speaking to Juve. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

Put off, Juve declared, “I’m just trying to save your life!”

“You don’t understand,” the rabbi said, as if scolding a child. “I have a job to do.”

Over the rabbi’s shoulder, Juve saw another soldier advancing. He moved the rabbi to one side and punched the soldier directly in the nose, knocking him flat. Then he turned to the rabbi and replied, “So do I.”

The rescuers converged on Juve and the rabbi. One of them, his blade still dripping with blood, hoisted the rabbi, too weak to resist, up onto the timber. The others took positions on either side of the long shaft of wood and used it to plow through the crowd. Juve hefted a section of the timber and ran with the six and their pitiful passenger. “Where are we going?” Juve shouted to the large-muscled man in front of him.

Juve woke himself with his own words. He opened his eyes and looked around. No more mob. No more long, heavy shaft of lumber. No meek and bloodied man riding to safety. It had been a dream. The same dream.

Juventus Trajan Carnifex rose and stumbled into the bathroom, still shaken by the most recent replay of the dream. Looking in the mirror, he considered again that the pitiful man in his dream might be himself. Carnifex meant “executioner,” and the name marked him as a descendant of a long line of elite defenders of the Republic. But how often had he awakened from these dreams to see himself in the mirror and realize how much he looked like the rabbi? The same dark, curly, shoulder-length hair, the same stubble shading the chiseled lines on his umber-colored face.

“This is nuts,” he snapped out loud and splashed his face with cold water. Juve had always been a vivid dreamer—awake as well as asleep. He thought and planned in realistic mental enactments. As a student, he would fail occasionally to turn in an assignment, not out of laziness, but because his richly detailed plans to do the work convinced him that he had actually completed it. His visionary imagination had helped him solve many problems, but lately he longed for just one night of undiluted slumber.

Exercise would drive this morning’s dream away. He walked back to his bedroom and lay on the cool hardwood floor, extending each limb in turn to awaken his muscles. After several minutes of stretching, he plunged into a strenuous workout. He began with a hundred push-ups, and then he raised himself up on his fingertips a dozen times before switching to one arm. Next he chinned himself slowly on a bar he had fixed in a doorframe, then faster and faster, the veins in his arms engorging with blood. Sit-ups, too, he began slowly and accelerated for almost ten minutes. Finally Juve let himself collapse on his back. His belly heaved as he caught his breath. A light sheen of perspiration covered his deeply muscled torso. He felt the pulse in his throat. In no time, he was breathing slowly and steadily.

Juve’s thoughts drifted back to his childhood. His father was in some sort of military force, and Juve had become accustomed to his absences. Juve was always happy when his father returned and congratulated him for his courage. When his mother began to accompany his father on trips, Juve adjusted to the absence of both parents to prove himself worthy of their praise and love. Then, one day, when he was nine years old and his parents were away on one of their extended trips together, two highly decorated, uniformed officers stood at his door. Young Juventus held his nanny’s hand as she welcomed them in. The news came crashing down on him in a few unthinkable words: “Your parents are gone, Juventus. Gone forever.”

“Both of them?” Juve cried out, stunned. “Both of them?”

After a moment of hesitation, the officer dropped to one knee to look directly into the young boy’s eyes. “Yes, son,” he replied, his strong hands grasping Juve’s upper arms, “they’re both gone. I’m sorry.” Despite the strong grip of the officer’s big hands, Juve felt as if he had been sucked into a black and bottomless well. “You’re a strong boy, Juventus,” someone said, his voice echoing and fading. “You can stand up to this, son.”

He cried for the next five days. His face swelled and chafed from the tears and the rubbing. Refusing to eat or talk, he noticed little of the new residence to which he was taken. A ward of the Republic, Juve had joined similarly orphaned boys in a school that would nurture his natural abilities. At first, he hated the idea of becoming an Indomitable Lion ---- a member of the elite special forces devoted to the ultimate defense of the Republic and its most powerful leaders. He refused to take part in any activities for weeks, unpersuaded by merciless abuse from the other boys in his dormitory. Finally the proctor took him aside and urged him to get into line.

“You’re joining the ranks of your mother and father, your grandfather and his father. You come from a long line of Trajans, Juventus. It’s time to stand up and follow in their footsteps.” Eventually Juventus learned to trust the Indomitable Lions, their mission, and their code of honor. Gradually he invested in their promise of personal worth and lost himself in the discipline of daily training. It was demanding training physically and mentally, meant to weed out weakness and prepare Lion recruits for unquestioning loyalty.

Juve amazed his teachers with his abilities and creativity. At the age of fourteen, he developed a way to detect when a hand was about to shoot a pistol. In a demonstration Lions would talk about forever, Juve challenged a fellow student named Auspex to point a gun at his face and fire when ready. Auspex refused to use a real bullet, so Juve pretended to substitute a blank. Juve stood in front of a tree. Auspex prepared to shoot. A semicircle of students waited. As Auspex squeezed the trigger, Juve dropped, tackled, and disarmed his friend in one smooth action. No one was more stunned than Auspex when Juve showed them the bullet hole in the tree, right where his head had been a moment before. From that moment on, Auspex’s admiration for Juve grew into a close and trusting friendship.

Juve quickly rose to the top of his class, a model of physical and mental perfection, but not without burying the deepest possible resentment for the very organization that trained him. Yes, the Indomitable Lions had shaped him into the ideal of manhood, but he would give it all back for just one chance to see his mother and father alive again. He dreamed of being a father some day. Never, he promised himself, would the Lions or anyone else ever take his child away from him, or him away from his child. Juve often renewed this youthful vow, especially during his morning exercise. Something about it gave him strength. Now, rising from his reverie, he stood up and broke into a routine of blindingly swift martial arts movements --- powerful kicks and punches, each announced with a loud, explosive grunt.

Finally he settled into a long series of slow, balletlike stretching exercises before stepping into his shower. “Mayhem? It’s Cobra,” Juve said out loud. As consultant for the Republic’s Leadership Protection Service, Juve had been issued a wayfone ---- the latest electronic technology. A thin wafer implanted in his head just behind his ear, Juve’s wayfone allowed him to receive and send calls. To call someone, he did nothing more than think of a name and wish the call to begin. Incoming calls gave him a clear sense that someone wished to speak to him. He could answer or reject the call by simply acknowledging his intention. “Have Crow and Orso commence job number eight,” Juve continued. “Get it over with by the end of the week. We’re done.”

Juve stepped out of the shower and began to dry himself. “Cela, it’s Cobra. I want Lupus and Pavo to monitor sector eleven. Yes. Done.”

It had taken a couple of hours of training to get the hang of it, but now Juve could call and answer as easily as he could speak and listen. He could even juggle, swap, and merge calls. At the moment, he listened to his caller as he began to dress. “Cobra. Right. Gather the rest at point three . . .” Juve pulled on a thin vest of body armor and continued: “Okay, we’ll make dinner.” As he replied, he placed a knife into each of his specially designed boots. “Sure. Fausto, Caldi, and Bruté, too.”

He placed three small, razor-thin knives strategically beneath his sleeves, behind his collar, and in his waistband. Finally, a Rocco-72 automatic pistol that held three twenty-four-shot ammunition clips on a revolving spool that allowed Juve to reload, if necessary, without interrupting firing. Years of practice enabled Juve to grasp and deploy any of these weapons in eight-tenths of a second or less. Still, he continued to practice as he spoke. “Got to run, Mayhem.”

Juve opened the door to his apartment, checked the hall, and stepped out into the street. Already it was alive. Men and women dashed past each other. A video monitor delivered the news as Juve passed. “Authorities report that the dissident group Forza Facia has struck again. Several high-ranking Republic officials were found handcuffed to utility poles and, as usual, distastefully tattooed with the Forza signature . . .”

Juve smiled to himself as he merged into the heavily populated flow. Video monitors were spaced along the walls of buildings so that anyone could walk or ride a velocipede and take in the day’s news and announcements without missing more than a few words. Another monitor picked up where the previous one had left off. “This marks the ninetieth such occurrence in the past two years. Authorities warn that Forza Facia poses a danger to the vitality of the Republic. They offer a reward to anyone providing information leading to the apprehension of any member . . .” Ironic, Juve thought, as the story concluded and he noticed a spray-painted icon of a face on the wall below the monitor. 

Excerpted from The Lion’s Way © Copyright 2012 by Marco Marsan with Peter Lloyd. Reprinted with permission by Greenleaf Book Group Press. All rights reserved.