Land of the Sacred Fire

Chapter 15

The gymnasium echoed with the scraping of feet on sand. Gallus and Carbo circled, back-to-back, their eyes tracking the three pushtigban who stalked around them. The three wore their full bronze armour and the hammer-wielder directed the other two with clipped commands. Gallus and Carbo faced them wearing just loincloths, helms, spathas and small, circular wooden shields. Nothing more.

Gallus glanced over to the shaded area at one side of the training court. There, Ramak and Tamur watched on. As always, Tamur seemed encouraged by some rhetoric Ramak was whispering in his ear, fists clenched as if strangling some invisible enemy. After six weeks of imprisonment, the Festival of Iron was just over a week away. The arena at the foot of the acropolis was nearly complete. Now it seemed that the archimagus and the spahbad wanted to rehearse the glorious slaughter of their Roman prisoners. The pushtigban grinned eagerly — as if in hope that this could be more than a rehearsal.

Suddenly, the warrior with the spike hammer lunged forward and smashed his weapon down. Gallus threw up his shield arm and felt the blow like a falling rock. He crumpled to his knees and the shield shattered, half crumbling away. Numb, he pushed up, barging the splintered shield boss into the pushtigban’s face. The warrior stumbled back, growling, hefting his hammer as if for a death blow.

‘No blood, not today,’ Ramak stood and called out.

The hammer-wielder seemed to wilt under Ramak’s glare. He lowered his weapon and sneered; ‘You make it all the worse for yourself, Roman. At the festival, you will suffer, and the last thing you will see will be my face. I will be smiling as I dash out your brains.’ He smoothed a finger over the point of the spike on his hammer as he said this.

Just then, another pushtigban swiped his spear around for Carbo’s shins. The centurion leapt over the swipe, but as he landed, the other warrior jabbed his spear forward, scoring Carbo’s thigh. Carbo could not contain a yell of pain, and he staggered, struggling to stay on his feet.

At this, Ramak sat forward. ‘I said enough! I want them to walk unaided into the arena on the day of their deaths.’

The three pushtigban turned, prostrated themselves in the direction of the archimagus, then kissed the ground.

‘But show me how you will despatch them,’ Ramak finished, a predatory grin stretching across his face.

The three pushtigban stood up. The hammer-wielding warrior flicked his head to one side then the other. One of his comrades swept his spear round to bash the spatha from Gallus’ grip, then the other prodded his spear at Gallus’ throat, driving him back until his ankle thwacked against the execution stone. ‘Kneel,’ the spearman spat.

With no option but to comply, Gallus knelt and lay his head on the stone. The stench of dried blood and innards encrusting the filthy stone turned his gut. The spearman stood back, then he felt the boot of the hammer-wielder press upon the back of his neck. Beside him, Carbo had been pinned to the ground likewise, the two spearmen holding the tips of their weapons to the centurion’s breast.

Gallus grimaced as the hammer wielder hefted the bronzed weapon. He refused to avoid the man’s glare. The man looked over to Ramak and Tamur for approval, then grinned and let out a roar. The hammer came sweeping down then halted, the spike barely an inch from Gallus’ temple.

At this, the hammer-wielder laughed aloud and looked up to his watching masters. ‘Archimagus, Spahbad; this is how the Roman’s brains will be cast across the sand. It will be a fine festival. In years to come I will regale my men,’ he pushed down, pressing on Gallus’ windpipe, ‘with tales of this wretch’s pleas for mercy.’

Still, Gallus refused to look away.

Pavo chipped at the salt face at the edge of the cavern. The salt stung at his eyes, worked into his lungs and burned like fire in the seeping wounds inflicted by Gorzam’s whip. Khaled’s cries still echoed in his every thought, and his every waking moment had been consumed with honouring the vow he had made with the man at the last. The seventh chamber, he affirmed, glancing over at the main shaft, or death.

He heard Gorzam’s rasping laughter echo through the cavern, turning to see the giant in conversation with his colleagues. Then his gaze drifted beyond the gathering and up the sides of the chamber wall. Behind the bars of the cell up there, he saw a shadowy shape move. Bashu! The man’s reward for his foul betrayal had merely been this cell slightly higher on the wall than his old dwelling. So far, the treacherous dog had kept well away from Pavo. A shrewd strategy, cur, he grimaced, then twisted away to look back at the salt face.

A sharp pain stabbed into his hip and he stifled a cry just in time, then adjusted the slat of sharpened stone tucked in there. It was Khaled’s shaving stone. He had found a whetstone of sorts to grind it to perfection. Indeed, he had slept little in between shifts in this last week, honing at the blade over and over instead. All for this moment.

He smashed his pickaxe into a shard of salt crystal, then scooped up the pieces that fell away and pressed them into his near-full basket. He heaved the basket to the pulley and hooked it onto the ropes, stooping to pick up an empty basket. Gorzam and his men had grown complacent in these last days, thinking the brutal murder of Khaled had cowed the spirit of the slaves. Indeed it had — many of them visibly trembled and cowered when Gorzam strode past. Pavo had elected to feign fear too, cowering and pleading to be excused of his daily beatings. And it had worked, for now their eyes were not upon him. They thought him broken. They were wrong.

In a heartbeat, he stepped into an empty basket on the downwards pulley and crouched to conceal himself. The basket swung and squeaked as it settled and began to descend. The fourth chamber disappeared and the jagged rock of the main shaft rolled past. He held his breath as the rock opened out again into the fifth chamber, then glanced up to the rim of the basket. This chamber was darker and had a lower ceiling than the one Pavo had worked in all this time. It also had pillars of rock and salt blocking the view across the space — fortunately one such column part-obscured the area around the pulley from the rest of the cavern. He looked to the stack of baskets near the pulley. A single, dark figure stood there, hunched and still. He had not heard from Sura since their foiled escape attempt. He peered at the figure, and was sure he could see a blonde lock.

‘Sura,’ Pavo whispered.

The hunched figure stood upright and spun round. It was not Sura. The albino guard wore a menacing scowl and grasped for his spear, resting nearby.

Panic gripped Pavo’s heart. He leapt from the basket, the pulley juddering behind him, and swung a desperate right hook into the guard’s jaw. The blow was fierce, and his knuckles cracked. The guard staggered back, stunned, then sucked in a breath to raise the alarm. But the words never left the man’s lips, a hefty salt shard crashing down on his head from behind, splintering into dust and a thousand smaller pieces. The guard crumpled and Sura stood in his place, coughing at the salt dust.

Sura looked at him with an incredulous glare. ‘Pavo — what in Hades? What are you doing down here?’ he hissed, shooting glances either side of the salt column; slaves chipped away there, heads bowed. Guards stalked amongst them, snarling and cracking their whips. But nobody had witnessed the incident, it seemed. He grappled the prone guard by the arms and nodded to the feet. ‘Grab his ankles; we need to get him out of sight.’

They lifted the guard back into the shadows by the column and crouched there. Their dry, rasping breaths quietened for a moment.

‘I didn’t mean to get you involved, or for this to happen,’ Pavo said, gesturing at the guard. ‘I just wanted to tell you, I’m going down. To the very bottom of this place.’

‘The seventh chamber?’ Sura gawped, then drummed a finger against his chest. ‘And they say I’m the demented one?’

‘Sura,’ he grasped his friend’s forearm. ‘Legionaries were sent down there, legionaries who knew the whereabouts of the scroll. Some thirteen years ago. And my father may well have been one of them. Khaled told me, before they. . ’

Sura gulped. ‘Are you sure?’ His brow knitted in a frown. ‘Pavo, thirteen years down there,’ he started, shaking his head.

Pavo gazed at him, unblinking.

Sura fell silent and nodded. ‘I understand.’ His eyes darted across the ground before him, then he looked up; ‘But I’m coming with you. When this one wakes up or is discovered, I’m a dead man anyway, he was assigned to watch me specifically,’ he said, rising from the shadows to pull a coil of rope from the topmost basket in the stack. ‘And we’ll need this. I’ve heard the guards talking: there’s no ladder in or out of the seventh chamber, just darkness and a sixty foot drop.’

‘I don’t want you to get hurt for my — ’ Pavo started.

Sura grasped his arm, stopping him. ‘You’re doing this for your father, Pavo. Let me do this for you, brother,’ he finished with a trademark grin that belied his fraught, weary features.

Pavo clasped his arm to Sura’s. ‘Come on.’

He slipped into a basket on the down pulley and crouched below the rim, Sura doing likewise in the next basket. They remained crouched and undetected as they descended to the sixth chamber. Here, the pulley slowed. The downward rope rolled around a polished timber wheel and the baskets began to rise again. Pavo peeked from the edge of the basket — there were no guards nearby in this, the darkest of the chambers he had been in so far. He leapt out, starting as he came face to face with a gawping slave carrying a full basket of salt. The man was probably only in his early forties, but the mines had rendered him a pitiful sight — more like a man twice that age. He was rake-thin. Tendrils of dried blood stained his wiry moustache and beard. Pavo’s lips flapped to say something as Sura leapt from the other basket to stand by him.

But the slave spoke first; ‘When I was young, I used to dream of escaping,’ he raised a shaking hand and pointed to the disc of light, high above. ‘But I would dream of travelling up. . you’re going the wrong way!’ he said, then erupted in a bout of painfully dry cackling, his teeth stained with blood.

‘Come on,’ Sura said, frowning at the crazed man and backing away around the lip of the main shaft. ‘We don’t have long.’

Pavo followed Sura’s outstretched finger to see the dull outline of a trio of guards striding through the gloom, as yet unaware of their presence.

‘How do we get down?’ Pavo looked into the blackness below and then for some fixture to tie the coil of rope to. His gaze snagged on a jagged outcrop of rock that hung over the shaft. ‘There, what about that?’

‘No, I’ve seen the rocks here crumble under the weight of a man. But we can latch onto that thing,’ Sura pointed to the pulley wheel in the centre of the main shaft. Attached to it by an iron axel was a cog, and revolving against the edge of this cog was another, its edge oblique to the first. Extending from the base of this second cog was a thick, vertical timber pole, studded with iron pins, revolving and driving the whole pulley system. This sturdy timber pole disappeared down into the darkness.

Pavo shivered as he heard pained groans from below, where the pole surely ended. ‘What is that?’ he whispered.

‘Did you think the pulley ran on the will of the Persian God, or the power of Quadratus’ farts?’ Sura cocked an eyebrow, then threw a looped end of the rope out and around the axle between the cog and the wheel. The rope looped round on itself. Sura yanked at it, then beckoned Pavo over. ‘Ready?’

Pavo took up a piece of the rope while Sura held a section six feet along. ‘Ready!’

The pair moved gingerly to the edge of the black abyss, then stepped off. For a moment, they were weightless and falling, just like so many poor wretches cast down here by Gorzam. Suddenly, the world around Pavo jolted. The bones in his arms creaked and groaned and his shoulders almost leapt from their sockets. He slid a few feet but then steadied himself. The rope swung out across the shaft, past the revolving timber pole, then back again, eventually coming to a halt with Pavo dangling in the darkness by the pole, Sura a few feet above. The pair’s breath froze in their lungs when they heard a scuffling of boots above. Pavo peered up: the three guards had come to the ground they had stood on just moments ago. He could see their wrinkled faces looking around, then squinting into the shaft, right at him, but unable to see anything other than blackness.

‘What’s going on over here?’ One of the guards asked.

Pavo realised they had accosted the crazed slave.

‘Nothing, nothing at all bar the same toil I have enjoyed for the last five years.’

‘We heard you talking to someone,’ another guard growled. A shower of dust, salt and rubble toppled past Sura and Pavo. Pavo looked up to see the crazed man being held out over the precipice by the throat, his back turned to the shaft, his feet on the lip of the drop and his arms out wide to balance.

A dry cackle belied any fear the man felt. ‘I talk to many people when I work alone. The dead walk in these places, you know. Many of them were once my friends. Let me fall, then I can join them and be free of this place.’

The guard growled, then pulled the man back from the edge and shoved him away. ‘Work hard, old man — I’ll be expecting fifteen baskets from you today. If not, then you will feel the barbs of my whip.’ After a moment’s silence, the guards slipped away from the edge of the shaft and their footsteps faded.

In the blackness, Pavo could just make out Sura, clinging to the rope a few feet above him, his eyes wide. The pair expelled a sigh of relief, then Sura motioned to descend. Pavo shinned down the rope until there was only blackness all round. The air was utterly stale and dead here, and it had taken on an odd chill too. He looked up and realised he could no longer see the disc of light above. How far had they descended, he wondered? For a moment, he imagined that the shaft was bottomless, and the thought of an everlasting fall into darkness played havoc with his imagination. His grip on the rope grew tighter and his descent more careful. Finally, he reached the end of the rope and halted, clinging to the frayed fibres.

‘The rope’s not long enough!’ He hissed up to Sura.

‘What? No, I heard it from the guards themselves. Sixty feet, they said, I’m certain of it.’

Pavo tentatively stretched out a foot into the darkness below, poking out in search of ground. Nothing.

‘Then how come there’s no ground below my — ’ the frayed ends of the rope unwound in his hands. His grip deserted him and he plummeted. The terror of the fall into blackness was real. He flailed and sucked in a breath to cry out. But before the cry could manifest, he crunched onto hard ground, only feet below.

He looked up, his head spinning. A sense of relief swirled in his heart only to be snatched away again: From the surrounding gloom, three dark shapes moved towards him, arms outstretched. He clasped for the sharpened shaving stone, tearing it from his loincloth. The nearest of the figures reached out for him and he swiped at it. Another grappled him by the shoulders. The sharpened stone fell to the ground. Terror welled in his chest and a cry leapt from his lungs. A filthy hand clasped over his mouth to stifle it.

Zosimus looked up from the ridge of salt crystal, resting an elbow on his pickaxe momentarily.

‘Are you bloody insane?’ Felix hissed beside him. ‘Get your head down, or you’ll lose it!’

‘Aye,’ Quadratus whispered from nearby, ‘don’t draw their attention.’

But Zosimus ignored them, his eyes narrowing on the prone form near the main shaft, and the absence of Sura working the baskets on the pulley. Another guard was calling out from the other side of the chamber, his face wrinkled in suspicion as he eyed this scene too. This guard stalked round the edge of the main shaft to the pulley and froze. He stared at the prone form, then crouched, shaking the still figure.

‘If that’s Sura sleeping on duty. . ’ Felix whispered by Zosimus’ side.

Quadratus now broke cover to look with them. ‘That’s not Sura,’ he jabbed a finger at the prone figure who was now coming around groggily, his stark white skin and hair now visible as he sat up, ‘that’s a guard — and someone’s knocked seven shades out of him.’

‘Someone? Aye, Sura,’ Felix groaned.

Just then, the alarmed guard stood up and clenched his spear, looking this way and that. His groggy comrade muttered something over and over.

‘They went below, get Gorzam,’ he croaked once more. At this, the alarmed guard hurried up the ladders into the chamber above.

‘Did I just hear that?’ Zosimus gawped. ‘They went down the main shaft? They being Sura and. . ’

‘Pavo!’ Felix and Quadratus finished for him.

Their eyes sparkled as they looked to one another, each holding their pickaxes. Each thinking the same thing.

The hand slid away from Pavo’s mouth as his eyes acclimatised to the darkness. Slaves, he realised, seeing the dirt-encrusted features of the man before him. Almond-shaped eyes almost devoid of colour dominated his gaunt features. His hair was thin and tousled, his beard tangled. He was aged, but knotted muscle seemed to strain under his taut skin and his back was broad and hunched like some beast of burden, and he wore only a ragged loincloth. The man held up a finger to his lips.

‘Be silent. The guards hear everything,’ he whispered in Parsi, pointing a finger up the shaft.

Behind this man and the two with him, three other hunched figures groaned like oxen as they turned a vast timber wheel. Each man drove at a handle projecting from this wheel, turning it and the iron-studded pole that drove the pulley system. There were seven handles, four of them unoccupied. The three men strained to keep the wheel turning, but it slowed and then ground to a halt, the squeaking of settling baskets echoing above.

Footsteps crunched through the dust in the chamber above. The almond-eyed man’s face lengthened and his milky eyes darted. A bark from a guard echoed down through the shaft.

‘Get the pulley moving, or I will come down there with my comrades. My whip is thirsty!’

The other two who had grappled Pavo hurried back to the empty poles on the wheel. With pained grunts, they drove the pulley back into life, the rumbling and squeaking of baskets picking up once more. With a low growl and then fading, crunching footsteps, the guard above was gone.

As soon as the guard’s footsteps had died completely, Sura thudded down next to Pavo, startling the almond-eyed man, then raising his fists as if readying for a fight.

‘It’s alright,’ Pavo said hurriedly in Greek, lifting and tucking the sharpened rock back into the waist of his loincloth, ‘he’s one of us.’

‘Who is?’ Sura hissed, blinking. ‘I can hardly see a bloody thing!

At this, the almond-eyed man moved forward, frowning. He held out his hands to Sura’s face, and traced his fingertips across his features.

Sura backed away until he bumped into some rocky column. ‘Take your hands off. . ’ he started.

‘You are no Persian,’ the man cut him off.

The breath caught in Pavo and Sura’s throats. The man had spoken in Greek. Not the broken, accented Greek of the Persians they had met in this land. Greek of the empire.

Pavo’s skin tingled, seeing the aquiline nose and pale skin under the filth coating the man’s face. ‘And neither are you.’

‘I’m not quite sure just what I am anymore, after so long in the darkness,’ the man said, then turned to Pavo, tracing his fingers across his jaw and then his brow. As he ran a finger over Pavo’s beaky nose, his brow creased in a frown. ‘Interesting. . ’

Pavo peered at each of the men working the wheel. There were six there including this man, it seemed. ‘You are a legionary? These are your comrades?’

‘Aye, brothers till the bitter end,’ he gestured dryly towards the wheel.

‘Then you are of Legio II Parthica.’

For but a heartbeat, the man’s face lit up. ‘I am Quintus Clovius Arius of the second cohort, second century.’ Then the light left him and his shoulders slumped. ‘These men you see before you are all that remains of my proud legion. It is a long time since I last set eyes upon them,’ he said sadly, passing a hand across his milky, sightless eyes.

Pavo’s heart hammered on his ribs and he looked at the men by the wheel again and again. As each man strained past, turning the wheel, he saw the same sightless eyes, the callused feet scraping in the dust. Their faces were illuminated in the gloom just enough for Pavo to see. To see that not one of them was Father.

Sura took over, stepping forward to place a hand on Pavo’s shoulder. ‘There are no others down here?’ he asked Arius.

‘None bar the few in this foul space,’ Arius replied flatly, extending his arms to the blackness around the wheel.

Pavo heard the words like an icy blade to the heart.

‘And definitely no guards?’ Sura continued.

Arius smiled a weary smile. ‘The guards refuse to work in this place. They come to visit us, yes, usually to mete out punishment should the pulley run slowly or stop for too long. The only other visitors we get are. . ’ he extended a hand to the gloom encircling the wheel.

Pavo gazed into this blackness. At last, he made out the nest of jagged stony spikes that ringed the wheel and the foot of the mine’s main shaft. Like huge teeth, jutting from the ground, twice the height of a man.

‘Stalagmites,’ Sura said by his side, reaching out to one.

Pavo stumbled numbly towards the spikes. At that moment, he caught scent of the raw, metallic stench coming from them. He leapt back, the breath catching in his throat. ‘What in Hades?’ The jagged rocky spikes were littered with white shards, like broken pottery. But this was no pottery. Skulls grinned, shattered and cracked. Skeletons lay impaled through the ribs where they had landed. Smashed bones lay in piles like kindling. Pavo twisted to see this horror all around them. Some bodies were fresher — glistening red or dark-brown, and rats worked on tearing the last flesh from the bones. So this was the resting place of every soul thrown down the shaft. Pavo twisted away from the scene, at once thinking of poor Khaled. His gaze fell upon a thick pile of animal remains near the wheel — some chicken bones and many rat bones.

‘At least Gorzam feeds us well,’ Arius spoke bitterly, gesturing towards the animal remains. Beside it was a bucket of water, half full, that looked like it had been lowered down from the chamber above. ‘And he keeps us well-watered too — as a farmer would do for his oxen. For if the pulley does not continue to turn and lift salt to the surface then he will feel his master’s wrath.’

Pavo glanced at Arius and the five men nearby in the gloom at the wheel. ‘Yet there are so few of you?’

Arius nodded; ‘When we were first sent down here, there were more of us. Those who perished soon after, we buried as best we could in the jagged rocks. When bodies were thrown down from above, we would try to bury them too, to honour them. But when we lost our sight, we lost the ability to offer the dead such dignity, to tell one shattered body from another.’

‘You buried your comrades in there?’ Pavo turned back to the nest of stalagmites and the piles of skeletal remains. A chill finger traced his spine as he remembered his own vow. Even if only to reclaim your bones, Father, I will find you. ‘Then the man I sought lies in there too.’

‘You came here looking for someone?’ Arius frowned, then his face creased in a sardonic half-grin. ‘I did wonder why any man would choose to come down here.’

Pavo felt his legs move under him, his eyes hanging on the jumble of remains in the stony spikes, one hand reaching out. ‘I came here for Mettius Vitellius Falco.’

‘Falco?’ the almond-eyed man replied, familiarity lacing his words.

‘Aye, he was my father,’ Pavo said, crouching to look into the pile of bones.

‘Then you are looking in the wrong place,’ Arius said flatly.

‘No,’ Pavo shook his head, ‘he was sent down here. I know this.’

‘Pavo,’ Sura gasped.

‘I’m sorry, Sura. I was wrong. All this has been for nothing. You shouldn’t have come down here with me. . ’

‘Pavo!’ Sura hissed again, then clamped a hand on Pavo’s shoulder, twisting him round.

Pavo stood tall, frowning at his friend, then followed Sura’s outstretched arm and pointing finger. There, from the shadows at the far side of the wheel, a seventh figure shuffled forward.

A shiver of realisation raced up Pavo’s spine; seven handles on the wheel. . seven men!

This one wore a torn rag like a Roman robe. He carried with him a flat piece of slate containing a meagre pile of bloodied rat meat scraps. He was grey-haired. The long, thick tumbling locks were caked in salt dust, his shoulders were crooked and his back hunched like the others. When the man looked up, Pavo’s stomach fell away. He gawped at the aged, tired face, the blood-matted sockets where his eyes had once been. The wiry beard under a hawk-beak nose that had been broken many times. The stigma on his knotted, scarred bicep.

Legio II Parthica.

Pavo’s heart crashed like a war drum. A warm wash of tears spilled across his cheeks, splitting the white coating of salt dust. ‘Father?’

‘I told you,’ Arius spoke next to him, resting a hand on his shoulder to pat him warmly, ‘you will not find Falco amongst in the bones. He is a hardy whoreson who refuses to die, like the rest of us!’

Pavo heard Arius’ words like a distant echo. Father approached him, holding out one shaking and knotted hand, a broad and frayed leather bracelet hanging loose around his sinewy wrist. He said nothing, then clasped his hands over Pavo’s.

‘Is this another of the dreams, taunting me?’ Falco spoke in that gravelly tone Pavo had not heard since childhood.

Pavo shook his head, but was unable to reply, his lips trembling. He clasped the phalera and held it to Father’s hands.

Falco gripped the phalera, an intense frown knitting his brow as he traced a fingertip across the engraving. At last he reached up to touch the hot tears on Pavo’s cheeks. ‘Son?’

‘Father, I. . ’ his words dissolved and he and Falco embraced. It was long and lasting, both men sobbing. Myriad memories exploded through Pavo’s mind. The past, the warmth of the sun on his skin as he and Father had paddled in the waters of the Propontus, the joy of Father returning from campaign, the games he would play in the streets with his friends under Father’s doting gaze. Then he recalled the last time he had embraced Father like this in the year before Bezabde; he had barely been chest-high to the broad warrior in freshly oiled armour with the scent of wood smoke and dust in his tousled chestnut locks. Now, he towered nearly a foot over Father. The years in this dark Hades had reaped their toll.

‘You are the warrior now,’ Falco sobbed, as if reading his thoughts.

‘So many years, Father. So many years I thought you were dead,’ Pavo shook his head as they stood back. A flurry of questions danced into his mind. ‘Your eyes,’ Pavo raised a hand, his fingers hovering just before the bloody sockets. Memories of the nightmare barged into his thoughts. ‘Gorzam did this to you?’

Falco smiled dryly at this. ‘Gorzam? No. He is responsible for many of the scars that lace my back, and for putting my men and I down into this chamber. But if that witless creature were to heat an iron to burn out my eyes, he’d doubtless pick the iron up by the hot end and injure himself. No, this happened to me before I was brought to the mines. After the fall of Bezabde, my men and I were taken to Bishapur. We were paraded in chains, marched before the spahbad in his palace, then taken to the Fire Temple. I was made an example of. The Persian Archimagus, he lifted the glowing iron from the Sacred Fire,’ his head dropped in defeat, ‘his was the last face I ever saw.’

Pavo shook with rage. ‘Ramak?’

Falco grappled him by the shoulders. ‘Pavo, do not be angry. . ’ he said then broke down in a coughing fit. The coughs were dry and rasping, thick dashes of blood spitting forth with each one. The lung disease had its claws deep in his chest, it seemed.

Pavo saw the blood but could not make out its colour in the gloom. Red or black? He bowed his head and pressed his lips to the phalera, trying in vain to stifle his fury. Then another question rose to the fore. ‘This,’ he held up the phalera, ‘you sent it to me?’

Falco reached out, feeling the bronze disc and clamping it in his hands again. ‘I did, Pavo.’

‘The crone, how did she carry it from here to Constantinople?’ Pavo remembered the withered old woman who had hobbled up to him and pressed the piece into his palm on the day he was sold into slavery.

‘The crone? Is that what she was? I was sightless when she came to me. In fact, I wondered if she was real at all and not just a voice in my head.’

Pavo’s eyes darted this way and that, trying to make sense of it all.

Falco pushed the phalera back into Pavo’s hands. ‘It does not matter how the piece came to you. What matters is that you have had it these past years. I prayed it would give you strength, to remember me and all that I taught you. I have never felt guilt such as that which overcame me when I was first sent down here. I realised just how alone you would be, so far away.’

Pavo nodded, tucking the phalera into the waist of his loincloth, tears dripping from his chin. ‘Father, the phalera, the memories of you. They have made me everything I am today. I was never alone.’

‘That warms my heart like sunlight itself,’ Falco sighed, clasping both hands to Pavo’s shoulders. Then his face wrinkled in concern. ‘But I never wished to draw you here, to this gods-forsaken realm. Indeed, my few moments of rest and sleep in this place have been plagued with nightmares of you setting out to find me. Every time, I saw you, reaching out to me. . ’

‘Across the dunes,’ Pavo finished for him.

Father gasped. ‘Before the sandstorm would pick up.’

‘And bury us both, deep below Persian sands,’ Pavo finished again.

A shiver crawled over Pavo as he and Father saw the reality of the nightmare. Pavo glanced up the main shaft. Nothing, not a glimmer of light. The nightmare had won.

‘How did you end up down in this chamber, Father? What did you do to poison the guards against you so?’

Falco let out a weak sigh. ‘We were betrayed.’

Pavo’s brow wrinkled. ‘Betrayed? By whom?’

‘It matters little now. You should not have come here, Pavo,’ Falco whispered.

From above, as if confirming Falco’s warning, a chorus of shouts broke out. Then came a scuffling of feet, rushing towards the shaft.

Pavo shot a glance to Sura. Sura stared back.

‘They’ve found the guard’s body,’ they said in unison.

A grinding of cane on rock sounded, growing closer and closer until the bottom of a ladder thudded down nearby. Pavo shepherded Father back from the ladder, Sura and the other slaves stepping away with him.

‘By the gods,’ Arius’ jaw fell agape. ‘They’re coming for us! They will not be satiated with the flexing of their whips.’

‘Then it is time,’ Falco growled as the group backed up against the ring of stalagmites, ‘we must go to the passageway.’ He jabbed a finger downwards as he said this.

‘The passageway?’ Arius’ face visibly paled. ‘No, death awaits us there, surely?’

‘What is life down here, but a slow, lingering death? You are one of the bravest I have ever fought alongside, Arius, yet you have forgotten your valour in this place. Now come!’ Falco hissed, backing away from the cane ladder, pulling Pavo with him. The ladder before them bent and creaked as a troop of yet unseen figures descended in haste.

Pavo stumbled backwards, following Falco and the others to the edge of the stalagmite ring. Here a narrow pathway wound through the jagged debris.

‘Tread carefully,’ Falco said, stooping to lift a knotted cane resting against the first of the stalagmites, then using it to tap his way through the tight corridor between the forest of stone.

The serrated ground felt like blunted blades in the soles of Pavo’s feet. Soon the jagged ground was replaced by the dry crunching of bones and wet slipping of putrid gristle underfoot as they passed over the pit of corpses amidst the stalagmite ring. The stench of death was rife here. The path was erratic, and every few footsteps saw someone slide or stumble, but after a few hundred feet, the stalagmites became shorter, blunter and free of the corpses of dead slaves. After that, the ground levelled out and a small cave lay ahead. Pavo heard the murmur of those pursuing them and made to hurry ahead, but Falco pulled him back from his next footstep.

‘Slowly, Son,’ he hissed. He stretched out to tap his cane on the white, circular bed of salt powder where Pavo’s foot hovered, then stooped to pick up a small rock.

Pavo frowned as Falco lobbed the rock onto the salt bed. The rock sat still for a moment, then the salt there puckered under its weight and a heartbeat later it was sucked under — gone, as if never there. Pavo nodded, then turned to Sura. ‘Slowly. Follow my father’s step.’

As they picked their way around the salt beds dotted over the floor. He peered into the darkness ahead and saw that the cave they were in tapered away and descended slightly as they continued along the path, the walls closing in swiftly and the ceiling growing ever-lower until it was only a little more than head height.

‘Where are we going?’ Sura hissed.

‘I fear you would not follow me if I were to tell you,’ Falco replied.

Just then, angry tones echoed behind them, from within the ring of spikes, by the wheel. ‘Find them!’ Gorzam roared.

Falco and Arius upped the pace, leading their comrades, with Pavo and Sura bringing up the rear. They hurried on until the cave became a mere passageway. The salt crystals studding the walls afforded the faintest hint of light and helped steer them round the deadly salt pits on the floor of the narrowing passageway. And there was something else — pools of black, glistening liquid. Then Pavo saw something sparkling up ahead. A solid wall of salt crystal blocking the corridor. A dead end.

‘Father?’ he gasped. Behind them, the footsteps of Gorzam’s party echoed ever closer.

Falco seemingly ignored him and tapped forward with his cane until he reached the dead end. The other slaves went with him, reaching out to feel the salt face there. They came to one large crystal — about the size of a man — resting against the dead end and took to prodding and poking at it.

Sura gawped at this, then at Pavo, then back down the passageway to the jumble of dark shapes approaching. One to the rear carried a torch, and the light from it was blinding, illuminating the corridor in a heartbeat.

Gorzam led the charge, leaping over and weaving round the salt beds, his pitted features twisted in rage, his spear clasped as though he was trying to strangle it. Twelve guards came with him, each wearing the same look of blood lust. Running along with them like a dog was Bashu. The man was pointing, repeating over and over;

‘The Roman, I saw him come down here. I told you!’ he spat, his cold gaze fixed on Pavo. ‘Now give me my place in the first chamber!’

Gorzam slowed and the twelve guards fanned out across the corridor as they approached, forming a wall of spears. Pavo and Sura took a step back then halted, feeling the edge of a salt pit at their heels. Pavo pulled the sharpened rock from the waist of his loincloth, holding it up in defiance. Sura stooped to pick up a jagged boulder and hefted it, ready to throw.

Gorzam swiped an arm at the corridor-end. ‘Kill them. Kill them all!’

The twelve rushed forward. Sura and Pavo pushed up shoulder-to-shoulder. The spear tips rushed in towards them like the fangs of a predator. Two of the guards loosed their spears and the shafts whipped past Pavo and Sura, piercing the frail bodies of two of Falco’s comrades, spattering the dead end of the corridor in blood. The other guards raced for Pavo and Sura. Pavo and Sura let loose a roar that had graced many a battlefield. Then a punch of iron piercing flesh echoed through the passageway.

Pavo felt the hot blood spatter on his face. He blinked, glancing at Gorzam and the guards, halted only paces away. The two guards at either end swayed and crumpled to the ground, pickaxes embedded in their backs. The rest had stopped in confusion, glancing to Pavo and Sura, their stricken comrades and then over their shoulders.

‘That’s what happens when you take a legionary’s spatha away,’ a familiar voice cried.

Pavo squinted to see the shapes rushing for Gorzam’s rear. Felix, Zosimus, Quadratus, then Habitus, Rufus, Noster and two other slaves, all bearing pickaxes. Each man bore the wild glare of a wounded war hound.

‘At them!’ Felix cried, sweeping his hand forward as if commanding a cohort. They raised their pickaxes and rushed for the guard line.

Gorzam barked at his guards, nine of them turning to meet the oncoming charge. The two parties crashed together, pickaxes and fists swinging, spears jabbing and tearing, blood splattering across the corridor walls and polyglot cries filling the passageway.

Meanwhile, Gorzam and one other guard stalked forward to deal with Pavo and Sura, Bashu sticking close to them. Gorzam thundered forward to plunge his spear at Pavo’s midriff. Pavo jinked clear of the first jab, the blade only scoring the flesh on his abdomen.

‘Ah, this will take some skill,’ Gorzam rasped. ‘I only want to wound you, you see. I want you to suffer, Roman — as I promised you when I killed that dog, Khaled. I’ll strip every inch of your skin then bury you up to your neck in salt to cure the wounds. Then you will truly know the meaning of suffering.’

Pavo dipped his brow and fixed his gaze on the guard leader, then lunged forward. The big guard stumbled back in shock. But Pavo’s wild swipe with the sharpened rock was easily parried by a swing of Gorzam’s spear. The shaft thwacked into Pavo’s wrist with a crack of bone. The makeshift blade flew from his grip into the salt pit behind him, disappearing in moments. Pavo staggered back, clutching his wrist. Then Gorzam ducked and swept his spear shaft round to smash it against Pavo’s ankles. The pain was blinding and he toppled to the ground. Gorzam lined up his spear over Pavo’s heart. ‘Or perhaps I should just finish you now, to have the pleasure of seeing the light dim in your eyes. . just as I did when I threw that dog Khaled down the shaft. He was still alive, you know, just before I dropped him.’

Pavo’s heart thundered against his ribs and his breath came and went in short, snatched gasps through gritted teeth.

‘No,’ Gorzam mused, tracing the spear tip to Pavo’s groin. ‘A deep wound to the thigh and you’ll bleed until you’re weak as a lamb.’ His face lit up in anticipation as he thrust the spear down. Then he frowned as the weapon clunked upon something.

Pavo frowned too. He had felt the tearing agony of sword and spear wounds before. But there was nothing. Just a dull pain.

Gorzam lifted his spear, glowering at the tip, then at Pavo. The phalera medallion slid from Pavo’s loincloth, battered and bent where it had taken the force of the blow. Pavo snatched up and gawped at the piece, then gasped as Gorzam roared and hefted the spear to strike down for a killer blow. Pavo rolled to one side, the spear tip punching down, scoring his back. He tried to stand, but felt the ground slide away under him. Panic gripped his heart; he had rolled onto a salt pit. He was sinking. The salt sucked him down. He was waist deep, then it was up to his chest. He looked up and saw Gorzam watching on gleefully, his laughter filling the passageway.

Pavo knew he had but a heartbeat. His eyes latched onto the butt of Gorzam’s spear resting by the edge of the pit. He stretched every sinew and reached out to grasp the shaft, hauling at it with all his might. Gorzam growled, shaking the spear, but Pavo clung on and prised himself clear of the salt pit. As he felt his legs pull clear, he then drew himself up and thrust his knee up and into Gorzam’s guts. The big guard staggered, winded. Pavo wasted no time, shouldering him in the chest, sending him flailing, then toppling into one of the glistening black pools. Gorzam thrashed to get to the edge of the pool, his skin slick with the viscous liquid. Pavo backed away, glancing around for a weapon.

Falco, hearing the splashing, called back from the end of the corridor where he and his comrades chipped and battered at the salt crystal. ‘Put light to it — the black oil!’

Pavo frowned, then saw Gorzam’s dropped torch only feet away. He stooped and lifted it, then tossed it into the black pool.

Gorzam’s eyes bulged in panic. He cried out in terror, then the torch set light to the oil with a ferocious roar and an angry inferno. At once, the corridor shone like a beacon, orange fury leaping from the pool.

Pavo staggered back, staring at the thrashing, screaming figure in the midst of the flames. He spat on the ground. ‘Your last few moments are for my father, for Khaled and for all the others who have suffered under your yoke.’ Gorzam’s roars died away and his form sunk under the blazing surface.

Pavo spun to find Sura wrestling with the other guard to gain control of the spear. He stooped to pick up Gorzam’s spear then lunged forward, punching the tip into the guard’s gut, driving the gurgling foe away from Sura and then on until the man crunched against the corridor wall.

‘A weapon, for pity’s sake!’ Sura yelled.

Pavo threw him the second guard’s spear, then the pair rushed to the fray between Felix, the XI Claudia men and the remaining guards. Six guards remained, fighting like jackals with Felix, Zosimus, Quadratus, Noster and Habitus. Rufus and the two slaves who had come with them lay in bloody heaps on the corridor floor.

Pavo rushed to aid Noster, who was being beaten back by the furious spear jabs of one guard. But before he could reach the pair, the guard plunged his spear through Noster’s throat. The young legionary gurgled and gawped at his killer, then he sunk to his knees and the life was gone from him. Pavo charged for the guard but the man spun to block. Their spear shafts clashed and the pair growled, noses inches apart. The guard kicked out at Pavo’s knee. Pavo stumbled back, then ducked to one side to avoid the follow up jab but the guard managed to kick out again, snapping Pavo’s spear. At a disadvantage, Pavo backed away, then stumbled on a rock and fell. As he righted himself, he scooped up a handful of salt and hurled it at the man’s face. The guard staggered back, waving his spear this way and that, blinded. Pavo grappled the splintered half of his own spear and rushed for the man, lancing him through the ribs, the tip bursting from the man’s other side. The cracking of bone was accompanied by a thick splash of blood and organs spilling from the wound.

Before the man had toppled to the ground, Pavo spun to find his next opponent. But it was over. The other guards lay still and silent. Felix was bleeding from a wound to the abdomen, but Quadratus and Zosimus were standing like a pair of twin oaks as usual — sweating, cut and bruised, but alive. Habitus had made it too, doubled over and retching.

Bashu was the only one of Gorzam’s party remaining. Now he was trapped between the panting legionaries and the end of the corridor, scrabbling to and fro like a trapped rat, his face contorted in fear. Quadratus strode over to him, lifting a spear to his neck.

‘I am one of you, a slave!’ Bashu nodded hurriedly, a sickly grin belying the fear in his eyes, his hands dropping by his sides.

Pavo beheld his cowering form. For just a moment, pity snaked into his heart. Then he saw the glinting dagger blade the man held just behind his back.

‘No, you are a traitor,’ Pavo replied stonily, then booted Bashu in the chest, toppling him into the salt pit. Bashu wailed. In moments, the salt had spilled over his arms and legs. He thrashed, and this only served to pull him down all the faster. In a heartbeat, he was up to his neck. His silver eyes bulged in panic. The man’s roar of terror was abruptly cut short as the salt spilled into his mouth and then swamped his head. His outstretched, trembling hand was the last part of him to disappear. The salt pit had fed and was still again.

Silence filled the passageway as all eyes looked over the scene.

‘You two,’ Felix said weakly at last, forking two fingers at Pavo and Sura, clutching his wound with the other hand, ‘better bloody well have a plan.’

Pavo looked back blankly.

‘He doesn’t have a bloody plan,’ Quadratus snorted in disbelief.

‘I don’t. But my father does,’ he motioned to Falco. He and the other slaves from the wheel were still chipping and battering at the salt face blocking the end of the corridor.

‘Your father?’ Zosimus uttered in confusion.

But Pavo ignored this and strode over to Falco. The aged men were struggling to break through the crystal. ‘Father, what is this?’ he asked. Then he heard it. Just as he had heard it with Khaled. The sound of running water. But this was different, not just a faint hiss, this sounded like a rumbling torrent. Furious, endless, desperate to be unleashed.

Falco clasped his forearm. ‘This mine is man-made. But around it weaves a honeycomb of natural caverns and springs. Behind this crystal, an underground river rages. We have speculated for years as to whether it leads even deeper underground, to the darkest dominions? Or, perhaps,’ he pointed upwards, ‘to freedom?’

Pavo’s eyes darted. ‘Has anyone ever seen this river?’

Falco shrugged, gesturing to his empty eye sockets and to his blind companions. ‘Well that would be hard, down here. But no, we have talked about breaking down this wall for years. Every time we have hesitated. It could simply drown us and flood the mines.’ He cocked his head to one side wryly. ‘Though that option has its own merits.’

Just then, another babble of voices and footsteps sounded from the other end of the seventh chamber, at the main shaft and the stalagmite ring. Habitus staggered up to the open end of the corridor, then came rushing back. ‘More guards, thirty at least!’

‘We have no choice — we must break through that crystal,’ Arius said, his face drawn with fear.

Pavo’s eyes widened and he grasped Falco by the shoulders. ‘Stand back, have your men stand back too.’

Falco frowned, then ushered his aged comrades back from the boulder.

Pavo called on Zosimus. ‘Sir!’

Zosimus frowned, then batted Quadratus on the arm. The pair came over and eyed the salt face. Their eyebrows rose in unison as they heard the rushing water.

‘A swim or a fight?’ Zosimus mused, looking from the rock to the far end of the corridor and the approaching footsteps.

‘Ach, I’ve had a fight already,’ Quadratus shrugged, smoothing his salt-encrusted moustache, ‘And I need a good wash.’

The pair of them hefted their pick axes, throwing others to Felix, Habitus, Pavo and Sura. They went at the salt face like men possessed. Shards of crystal flew in all directions, powder blinding them, coating their skin. The rushing of water grew louder and louder, as did the thundering footsteps of the guards. Pavo glanced back to see the thirty approaching shapes at the open end of the tapering corridor, their spears glinting in the light of the torches they carried. Then a splash of something icy cold around his ankles jolted him back to the salt face. He looked down to see foaming water washing from a growing fissure, spilling out across the corridor floor. The fissure in the salt face was narrow — about the width of a blade. He hefted his pickaxe to strike again, when Falco called from the corner of the corridor end where he and his comrades huddled.

‘No, no more! Get back — over here!’

Pavo frowned, then heard a dull, ominous crack run through the salt face. He, Sura and the others shared a tacit agreement, dropping their pickaxes and rushing over to the corner with Falco and his men.

‘Be ready,’ Falco cried. ‘As soon as the water comes, get your backs against the wall and hold on tight!’ The guards were now only a handful of paces away, and they snarled and cursed in Parsi, some hurling their spears forward, the lances clattering against the corridor end, inches from Pavo.

Then, with a ferocious crack like a clap of thunder, the centre of the corridor-end salt face collapsed. The guards stumbled to a halt, their eyes bulging. At that moment, the arid seventh chamber of the Dalaki salt mines was quenched with a tumultuous roar. The underground river spat forth, blowing chunks of salt and rock from the opening, widening it and intensifying the deluge. Pavo and those nestled in the corner of the corridor end were spared the ferocious thrust of the river, but the cries of the guards were drowned out, their bodies punched back through the corridor by the force of the flood. Sharp cracking rang out as the torrents dashed their bodies against the stalagmites at the other end of the chamber, the water washing the stony spikes clean of the layers of gore that had accumulated there over the years.

Pavo blinked through the spray as the river claimed the corridor. The intense flooding had slowed, but now the water level rose swiftly and steadily. It splashed around his chest, so they shuffled to stand higher upon rocks — his head scraping on the passageway ceiling. In moments it was chest high again, then it lapped around their necks. ‘Father. . what now?’ he cried as the water inched up with every heartbeat until it touched his chin.

‘Now take a deep breath, be ready to swim just as I taught you, and pray that the gods wish us to be free,’ Father replied.

Pavo looked to the gaping hole the river had blown in the end of the corridor. Darkness lay beyond. ‘But what if — ’ the water spilled into his mouth and then over his eyes. A heartbeat later, the air was utterly gone and the corridor completely flooded. At once, he could hear only the pounding of blood in his ears and the muffled underwater cries of his fellow legionaries as they thrashed to right themselves. He felt Falco’s arms clasp around his waist. Father needed him. His comrades needed him. He looked through the murky darkness to the hole in the end of the corridor, then waved towards it. In the gloom, Quadratus saw him and beckoned the others.

He swam with all his strength towards the opening, fighting the steady current. All the while one question rang in his thoughts. What in Hades lies on the other side?

He felt the roof of the opening scrape against his heel as he passed through it. On the other side was nothing but near-black water. Bubbles rushed past his ears in thundering torrents. The water stung at his eyes, and he saw only swirling murky shapes and the thrashing limbs of his comrades. He kicked in the direction he prayed was up, but saw no sign of a surface or light of any kind. He clasped his hands to Father’s. Suddenly, the current grappled them like an invisible titan, pulling and twisting their bodies round and round. After that, there was only pure darkness. The next thing he knew, they were falling. They were plummeting downwards, deeper and deeper underground — of that there could be no doubt. They had gambled and lost. The snatched half-breath in his lungs had lost its freshness and now his chest stung, demanding more air. Panic insisted that he open his mouth to yell out, to breathe again, but then another current smashed into him from the side, parting him from Father and propelling him onwards at great haste. He tumbled round and round until he lost all sense of direction. Up, down, all around, blackness. Nausea, burning lungs. Terror.