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[mdidiusfalco]

I ended up naming the parrot Cicero. At the time it had seemed a good idea and now the both of us were stuck. The parrot with an inappropriate name, and me with the parrot. It wasn't really that bad though. If nothing else the bird seemed to be one of the few people in the area with a fine appreciation of the great Roman poets. And if I just

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[phoinikothrix]

For the most part, Francis had become used to the sounds of the island--the chittering of the insects at night, the strange rustlings in the jungle foliage--but this was different.

This was Latin.

He made his way towards the source of the sound, stopping abruptly when he came upon the short, dark-haired man throwing fruit at a bird. "Is that bird reciting Ovid?" he asked, staring at both parrot and man in disbelief. "Badly?"

[mdidiusfalco]

I nodded, eating some of the fruit myself this time instead of wasting it on the bird. "Ars amatoria to be precise. Reciting it very badly too," I said, purposefully blase. As though hanging around parrots reciting poetry was something that happened to yours truly every day, even before the arriving on the island. Not true, though I would be the first to admit that Cicero was a large step up from following Juno's sacred geese all day.

"You should hear it do Catullus."

[phoinikothrix]

"Nobody needs to hear it do Catullus. Nobody needs to hear anybody do Catullus," Francis said flatly, recalling several evenings with Bunny drunk out of his mind and braying filthy poems out the window to passers-by. "Who on earth taught it Ovid and Catullus, anyway?"

[mdidiusfalco]

"Don't look at me. Cicero came that way. Its last owner clearly had taste." I had to wonder for a moment what the man had against Catullus. True, Cicero's favorite poem wouldn't precisely go down well with the Island's citizenry, but others weren't bad. I was rather partial to one with Lesbia and the thousand kisses, myself.

[phoinikothrix]

"I suppose. Although, if teaching an animal to recite Latin is the new arbiter of good taste, well..." Francis trailed off with a smirk. "This island is more of a disappointment than I'd thought previously."

[mdidiusfalco]

"It isn't the teaching the parrot to speak Latin, it's what you teach it to say in Latin that counts," I pointed out. Cicero shuffled a little closer, beady parrot eyes playing innocent in a bid for more grapes. The grizzled old informer wasn't falling for it. "Trust me, Ovid and Catullus are huge improvements over some of the horrible poetry I had to put up with back in Rome." My own attempts obviously not included.

[phoinikothrix]

"Fair enough," Francis conceded. "I suppose if you have to teach it anything at all, Latin verse is one of the better decisions one can make."

He laughed briefly at the other man's comment about horrible poetry, on the verge of making a biting comment about modern Italian poetry versus the ancients, but something--the man's familiarity with Latin verse, the way he pronounced Cicero and Ovid and the rest so perfectly--held him back long enough to reconsider. "When exactly were you in Rome?" he said finally, not entirely sure he wanted to know the answer. "If, that is, I can ask?"

[mdidiusfalco]

"The sixth year of Vespasian's reign." Oh, I'd gotten very used to answering this question by now. So used to it in fact, that I wasn't even going to bother asking the other man where or when he came from. He was taller than me and his hair was a rather telltale shade of ginger. Clearly a Celt or Gaul from the future. Some days it felt like half the Island fit that description. "I think that's the year 75 going by the way you people reckon those things here. But I had the misfortune to be in Britain before I came here, not Rome."

[phoinikothrix]

"You wouldn't happen to know how far apart soldiers in a Roman legion used to stand, would you?" Francis blurted unthinkingly. He colored as the inanity of the question hit him. "Not that you'd know that instinctively even if you are Roman, if you are actually Roman--not that I don't believe you, it's just, well, awfully difficult to believe--"

He took a deep breath and tried to think of a way to explain the question. "I had...a friend." He hesitated for a moment, wondering if friend was still the best way to describe Henry, after all that had happened. "We were both studying Ancient Greek and Latin together at school, and that was one thing we were never able to agree on--he said they stood three or four feet apart, I always said they stood shoulder-to-shoulder." He gave the other man a small, embarrassed smile. "I thought you might know, probably better than either of us."

[mdidiusfalco]

I had to think about that for a moment. "It depends on how long it's been since the soldier next to you has washed." I shrugged. "It's been a long time since I was in the legion and back when I was I'm afraid I wasn't exactly the best soldier." In fact, I was down right terrible, but I wasn't about to openly admit it.

"Three to four feet is a bit much, though, don't you think? And if you're in the middle of a battle that is three or four feet for the enemy to slip through in between you." The idea that everything in my life was now something far enough in the past to be studied in school was something I was going to let pass. For now.

[phoinikothrix]

"That's a very astute observation." Francis nodded at the man's words, trying to suppress a grin of triumph at the fact that Henry had been proven wrong, regardless of whether he was actually there to witness it. "I did always think Henry was allowing for far too much space between the soldiers," he continued, somewhat smugly.

[mdidiusfalco]

I don't think I could have possibly foreseen that the remains of my military knowledge would one day make someone quite that happy. Though maybe happy wasn't quite the right word. Smug might have been better. The young man had the same self-satisfied look that tended to show up on my face when I knew a piece of information that would give me the upperhand in a nasty case. Unfortunately, that same look wasn't seeing much action on the Island yet.

"Glad I could help. Falco's the name, by the way."

[phoinikothrix]

"Francis Abernathy." He stood for a moment, trying to decide between shaking Falco's hand (which seemed overly modern) and attempting a Roman salute (which seemed both ludicrous and uncomfortably facist). "It's nice to get a definitive answer," he said instead, with a slight shrug. "Not that Henry is around to hear it, but still."

[mdidiusfalco]

I mirrored his shrug. "I've found that when it comes to one-upping someone it's the thought that counts, not whether or not they're actually there." Some of my best 'told you so' moments had happened in the middle of cases with no one else around at the time, but the lack of an audience hadn't spoiled the victory.

"So, where are you from, Francis Abernathy," I said, repeating his name to help me remember it, though I wasn't so sure of my pronunciation. If only some of the people on the Island would have had more normal names. "Or should I be adding when to that too?"

[phoinikothrix]

Francis' initial thrill at talking to an actual Roman from actual Ancient Rome had just worn off, only to come rushing back at hearing Falco's careful pronunciation of his name. "I was in Hampden, Vermont just before I came here, but I'm originally from Boston, Massachusetts," he said, trying to think of a way to explain what Hampden or even Massachusetts or Vermont were to the man without completely confusing him.

"Both of those places are in the United States of America? In North America?" he tried, even while thinking of ancient maps with the legend HERE THERE BE MONSTERS written in the general vicinity of the Americas. "It was also 1984 before I came here. 1984 AD. Of course." Realizing he was starting to babble, Francis shut up.

[mdidiusfalco]

He was probably trying to be helpful and specific, but it wasn't really working much. I had no idea where any America was, north or united, and even less of an idea about Vermont or Massa... Massa... whatever that other one was. I wasn't about to question it though for fear of a sudden geography lesson. Far away and probably not as nice as Rome was all the description I needed.

"What's an AD?" Focusing on something like that was minimally easier than focusing on the fact that he was just a century shy of being from two thousand years in my future.