Saviour of Rome

XX

Melanius’s ‘bodyguard’ Aurelio turned out to be an unassuming fellow of medium build, with mousy hair chopped short across the brow and at the neck. Eyes a little too close together, nose a little too long and a mouthful of crooked teeth. To Valerius’s eye, the face of a rogue, but the type who could blend in with any crowd and never be noticed.

Aurelio bowed and introduced himself before pulling a piece of parchment from the folds of his tunic. ‘This is a warrant from the praefectus metallorum for the district of Asturica. Julius Licinius Ferox instructs his officers to give you every assistance and allow you access to any site or process, providing there is no danger to your person.’ He shrugged. ‘It covers mines, dams, aqueducts, canals, crushing and smelting houses, but not storehouses.’

Valerius didn’t hide his astonishment. ‘I thought I’d be fortunate to get within five feet of a disused shaft,’ he laughed. ‘How did Melanius arrange this kind of access?’

‘My master doesn’t tell me these things, lord.’ Aurelio shrugged. ‘He says go there and do that and that’s what I do.’

‘When can we start?’

‘With your permission I thought we could begin this morning, lord. We can be at the Red Hills by dusk and you’d be able to see the mines in the morning. With respect, though, I wouldn’t be wearing your best finery. It’s a dirty business.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Valerius said, wondering if the man was mocking him.

‘There is one other thing. Because of the hostility against Rome from some of the hill tribes the praefectus metallorum insists on providing you with an escort.’

‘I thought you were my escort?’

‘I don’t count, lord,’ Aurelio said with a tight smile. ‘I’m only here to make sure you get what you’re looking for. It’ll be three or four men, and the prefect is right. We’ve had word of attacks by bandits and ruffians and the like. Six men is better than two, especially if four of them are likely lads carrying spears.’

Valerius packed his travel clothes in a leather bag while Aurelio fetched his horse from the stables. They rode together to the city gate where the escort waited. Valerius felt his gut tighten when he recognized the four heavily bearded men who studied him from the saddle of their ponies.

‘Parthians?’

‘The prefect has the use of a squadron of cavalry and a century of infantry from the auxiliary unit at Legio to supplement the security provided for the mines. My master believes Councillor Severus mentioned your name, and the great honour awarded you by the Emperor, at a meeting of the ordo last night. The prefect decided he couldn’t risk losing someone of your rank and fame.’

Valerius looked the men over. They wore the same pot helmets and fish scale armour as the troopers he’d seen exercising outside the fort. Valerius had faced Parthians in the battle of the Cepha gap and had reason to be wary. They were as sly as the desert fox and as unpredictable as snakes. ‘So we can’t send them back?’

‘That would be seen as an insult to the Prefect of Mines,’ the guide advised, ‘and,’ he dropped his voice, ‘my master’s ability to influence his decisions in future.’

It was full dark by the time they saw the lanterns of the mining camp that served the Red Hills. The four Parthians had proved as taciturn during the ride as they had been on first meeting. Barely a word passed between them, and none with the men they were escorting. Nothing had occurred to justify Valerius’s initial wariness and he’d finally relaxed. He allowed himself to enjoy the magnificence of his surroundings, which were extraordinary even for a man so far travelled: glorious mountain vistas to left and right, the slopes patchworks of emerald meadow and olive forest, and deep gorges with clear fast-flowing rivers. On arrival, Aurelio showed the mining prefect’s warrant to the commander of the gate guard. He led Valerius to a crude guest house while the Parthians laid their blankets in the nearby barracks. The Roman fell asleep almost instantly, with the sweat stink of the bed’s previous occupant in his nostrils, and a curious bittersweet scent that for some reason reminded him of a fresh-dug grave.

The grave smell was still with him when he woke the following day. Valerius washed in a stone basin while Aurelio went to see the officer in charge of the camp. He returned a little later with a basket of bread and ham and a stone jug filled with small beer.

‘Fortuna is with you,’ the guide announced. ‘I spoke to a praefectus cuniculi,’ he saw Valerius’s blank look, ‘a tunnel manager – of one of the mines a little way from here. He believes it will be ready for the final stage of the mining process later today, or tomorrow morning at the latest. I took the liberty of telling him you would be interested in inspecting the interior of the mine and then watching the process happen.’

‘Thank you, Aurelio,’ Valerius smiled. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without your help and that of your master.’

‘Then we will leave as soon as you are prepared,’ Aurelio said. ‘There is no need of the escort in the mining area.’

They loaded their horses and set off with the sun on their backs. Valerius had expected the tunnel manager to be a big man, of the type he had often seen overseeing slave gangs on building sites in Rome. Instead, Hostilius Nepos was small and fat, with a twitchy, nervous manner and a tic in his left eye. He clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice and would have given Valerius the entire history of the mining industry and every stage of the process. ‘You will be astonished, I assure you-’

‘Please, sir,’ Valerius stopped him in full flow. ‘I beg you to wait until I can actually see what you are describing in such technical terms.’

Nepos reluctantly agreed and immediately launched into a description of his workers’ failings.

‘We feed, clothe and house them and they repay us by failing to turn up for work and barely doing any when they do appear. If it wasn’t for my supervisors nothing would get done on time. And there are few enough of them, these days, since the war, when Emperor Galba, of blessed memory …’

‘Blessed memory,’ Valerius and Aurelio mumbled together.

‘… took the very best of them to serve in his legion and never to return to their native land where they could do something productive …’

‘Are the workers well paid for their labours?’

‘Why no, sir.’ Nepos shot Valerius a look of outraged innocence. ‘They are not paid at all. The heads of their villages pledge their services to offset the tax burden imposed upon them. A magistrate with responsibility for, say, ten castros, that is settlements, will set the tax at a certain amount and it is up to the headmen of the clans to decide whether to pay in cash or in kind. Since they seldom have any gold, and are loath to part with what they have, they send their menfolk to work in the mines and their surplus food to the granaries.’

Valerius didn’t hide his bewilderment. ‘But surely the reason they do not have gold to pay their taxes is that we don’t pay them?’

‘But that is the joy of the system.’ Nepos smiled complacently. ‘A bonded man will produce more gold in a single month down the mine than he will pay in taxes in his entire lifetime.’

It seemed a very one-sided system to Valerius, but he supposed it was better than slavery.

Nepos shook his head dolefully. ‘From my own point of view slaves would be an advantage. At least you can always get work out of a slave.’

They passed a group of grey stone buildings in a walled enclosure and Valerius asked if this was where the workers lived. Belatedly, he realized the houses had no roofs.

‘No, these are the hovels their ancestors lived in. Since Tiberius’s time we have provided them with houses on good Roman lines sited close to the mines where they are needed.’

They came upon one of the settlements less than a mile later. Built of the same grey stone, the windowless houses were laid out like barrack blocks and surrounded by a high wall. As they passed the entrance Valerius saw women listlessly washing clothes and sewing on the doorsteps of their homes.

‘Look.’ Nepos drew his attention to the hillside above them. ‘There is one of the canals that supply my mine.’ He pointed to what looked like a score across the broken landscape and Valerius followed it upwards to an improbable height where the linked arches of an aqueduct hung as if suspended in mid-air between two peaks. ‘It runs for twenty miles, fed by a mountain stream, and goes through mountains or round them. Every foot of it has to be monitored, maintained and repaired. And that is only one of seven.’

‘It sounds like an enormous task.’

‘The Red Hills mines are an enormous project. Possibly the largest in the Empire.’ The tunnel manager couldn’t hide his pride.

‘Yet I hear there have been problems,’ Valerius ventured. ‘Poor yields. Bandits.’

He sensed Aurelio stiffen in the saddle, and wondered why. Nepos looked at him warily.

‘I take interest only in my own problems,’ Nepos said defensively. ‘Lazy men and lack of manpower, and rock too stubborn to be shifted. My yields have never faltered, let no man say that. As for bandits, I have heard the stories, but there are always stories.’

Valerius would have liked to ask him why, if his yields were unaltered, others’ had fallen. Why else would the flow of gold to Rome have slowed to a trickle? But this wasn’t the time. A proper talk with Nepos could wait for another day.

They approached a rise in the ground where the road forked. Aurelio took the path to the right, reining in at the top of the ridge, and beckoned Valerius forward. Valerius rode up to where he sat. When he saw what lay below, the breath caught in his throat. ‘Mars save us.’

‘I said you would be impressed,’ Nepos cried.

The scene that greeted Valerius was another world from the mountains and valleys they’d traversed on the way from the camp. It was as if a giant hand had reached down and clawed the earth with huge nails, or an enormous beast of legend had savaged the very hills with its terrible fangs. The landscape had been quite literally torn apart, its entrails glowing blood red in the sun and strewn in great heaps for miles around.

‘Ruina montium,’ Valerius whispered.

‘Precisely,’ Nepos said proudly. ‘This area has been worked out using the hydraulic method,’ he explained. ‘We use the immense potential of water to expose and extract the gold from the ground, but it is not just a question of brute force, as you will discover.’

‘It’s astonishing.’ Valerius turned to find Aurelio studying him as if gauging his reaction. The guide’s face twisted into a sardonic smile.

‘It comes as a shock when you first see it. Now let us continue and Nepos will show you how it is done, and why.’

A shock indeed, and Valerius’s heart was still fluttering as they rode down into the chaos of disturbed red earth that gave these hills their name. He was familiar enough with destruction perpetrated in the name of Rome. He’d watched as the blackened shell of the Great Temple of Jerusalem was torn down and that once beautiful city taken apart stone by stone. And he’d walked the streets of Cremona as the houses and apartments burned around him, and their occupants with them. Yet somehow this tearing asunder of the very earth he stood upon felt worse. An abomination against the gods.

He remembered Serpentius speaking about the hidden glories of his bleak Spanish homeland, the soaring mountains and the fertile valleys. He wondered how he would have reacted had he looked upon what Valerius had just seen. It gave him some satisfaction to imagine the Spaniard ripping out Nepos’s guts and strangling him with the coils.

That thought sustained him as they travelled east through a tortured landscape riven with great chasms and cut by streams of vile liquid that looked like the run-off from an abattoir. Eventually they came to a hillside and a shelf of land scattered with odd-shaped mounds that, on closer inspection, turned out to be spoil heaps. A line of men staggered towards one of the mounds bowed beneath the weight of the large baskets they carried, before returning more lightly burdened to what looked like the mouth of a cave. Meanwhile other workers wielded picks to extend some kind of rock-cut channel towards the entrance.

‘The mine,’ Nepos confirmed. He craned his neck to study the mountainside. Valerius followed his gaze to a sluice gate several hundred paces above them. ‘Yes, they are making the final preparations for the release,’ the tunnel manager said. ‘Wait here and I will ensure we are given time enough for you to be shown round the workings.’ He turned his horse and urged it towards a track that wound up the steep slope.

‘How did you explain to Nepos why I want to inspect the mine?’ Valerius asked Aurelio.

‘I didn’t. All I did was show him the warrant from the prefect of mines and that was it. Believe me, you don’t cross Licinius Ferox, not if you’re fond of life.’

‘There seem to be a lot of people in Asturica Augusta a man shouldn’t cross,’ Valerius said wryly.

‘It’s that kind of place- Stand still, you bastard.’ The other man curbed his fidgeting horse. ‘A frontier town like those settlements that grow up outside our forts on the Danuvius. A man can get rich if he’s not too scrupulous and prepared to get his hands dirty, but tread on the wrong toes and there’s always someone who’s willing to stick a knife in your ribs for a bent denarius.’

‘That sounds reassuring.’

Aurelio grinned, but his face quickly turned sombre and he nodded towards the mine entrance. ‘Do you know what you’re in for down there?’

‘I’ve been in a few black holes.’ Valerius remembered with a shiver the damp, slippery foulness of Hezekiah’s Conduit beneath Jerusalem.

‘Not like this one.’ Aurelio’s pale features twisted with distaste, but Nepos’s return silenced anything else he was going to say.

‘We have two hours.’ The mine manager pushed his horse past Valerius and set it on the path to the entrance. ‘So we must hurry. There is much to see.’

They dismounted by the entrance where four workers laboured at a massive bellows attached to a leather pipe a foot in diameter. Nepos picked up a short pole resembling a centurion’s vine stick. He called to one of the men carrying an empty basket to hold the horses, and another to fetch an oil lamp. When it was lit the man led the way inside, with Nepos following. Valerius waited for Aurelio, but the guide shook his head and glanced at the black portal. It was perhaps two and a half paces wide and just high enough to allow a tall man to pass without bending his neck. ‘You’re not getting me down there. I’ll wait for you here.’

He walked off and Valerius hurried after Nepos into the ill-lit tunnel. He noticed the engineer took care to keep close to the right-hand wall, allowing room for the filthy, grunting creatures who passed them going the other way. The leather pipe twitched like a living thing every time the bellows were pumped and Valerius guessed it carried fresh air to the lower reaches of the mine. It was certainly needed. The smell of damp and sweat mixed with the smoke of the oil lamps that occupied niches in the wall every ten paces was thick enough to choke a man in the confined space. Even this was overwhelmed by the sewer stink of freshly evacuated human shit. Clearly the workers were expected to defecate where they stood when the need came upon them. Valerius had to stifle the urge to add his vomit to the vile mix.

‘This is a diagonal shaft.’ The echo from the streaming rock walls gave Nepos’s voice a metallic ring. ‘But other mines have vertical shafts which you have to negotiate by ladder. The conditions there are much worse.’

Worse? Twenty paces in and Valerius could feel the sweat running down his back beneath his tunic. The ragged miners who passed him with their enormous baskets of stone were so sunk in their own eternal misery that none would meet his eyes. They had a habit of coughing, hawking and spitting and he grimaced at the dampness he could feel seeping its way through the iron-shod soles of his sandals.

‘Faster, you dog.’ Nepos lashed out with his stick at a man who was struggling to put one foot in front of the other. ‘See,’ he looked over his shoulder at Valerius. ‘Did I not tell you they were lazy?’

They passed a side chamber where a group of workers were chipping away at the walls with picks.

‘They are extracting what they can from a seam before we release the flood.’ Nepos stopped for a moment to allow Valerius to see what was happening. ‘All the gold that can be dug by hand is removed by traditional methods and the ore carried away for smelting. It is only when we reach this stage we begin the preparations for ruina montium. We call it honeycombing. Many tons of soil and rock are excavated in a way that creates thin-walled chambers and weakens the interior of the hill. It is a very precise business. Take away too little and the operation will fail. Take away too much and the tunnels will collapse, crushing everyone inside.’

Valerius glanced at the roof above his head, expecting to see cracks. Did he see cracks? ‘Has there ever been an accidental release from the sluices?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Nepos admitted. ‘But fortunately it doesn’t happen often.’

‘What happened to the people inside the mine?’ He had a feeling he knew the answer, but Nepos surprised him.

‘All we found of a hundred men were a few scraps of flesh and slivers of bone.’ Despite the admission Nepos looked supremely untroubled. The tunnel manager turned off into another side chamber, with further smaller chambers off it, in a fan shape. ‘The chambers here have been completed,’ he said. ‘We are doing the last of the work on the lower levels, close to the face of the hill.’

They continued until they came to a vertical shaft with a pair of ladders, one for descent and the other for ascent. Nepos turned to Valerius. ‘This is where we go down.’ He looked at Valerius’s wooden fist as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Will you …?’

‘I can do it,’ Valerius assured him. Reaching for the ladder with his good hand, he swung himself on to the upper rungs and hooked his right arm around the upright. It took no time to reach the floor. He noticed that the basket bearers had thinned out and guessed the work must be almost completed.

‘Nothing to see on this level.’ The rotund tunnel manager descended the next ladder with surprising agility and beckoned Valerius to follow. ‘We have completed the chambers, as you can see. Unless … Yes. If you’ll follow me.’ Nepos led the way through a long tunnel until the oil lamp showed a flat wall covered in pick marks that stood out stark and white against a blackened surface. ‘This is what delayed us,’ Nepos said in a voice tinged with frustration and regret. ‘A block of solid quartzite, unbreakable despite being subject to fire quenched by vinegar. The method is normally good for the hardest of rocks. We lost three men to the fumes before we decided on ruina.’

They descended another ladder and Valerius followed the engineer’s retreating back along a tunnel that sloped gently downwards for about fifty paces. Halfway along he heard the sound of picks. He was bemused to feel a draught on the back of his neck and he looked up to see a circular shaft perhaps the length of his arm in diameter.

Nepos saw his puzzlement. ‘This far from the entrance the air is virtually unbreathable even with the help of the air pipe, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Yet because of the shape of the hill we are not too far from the surface. We bored a narrow conduit down to meet this pipe cut by the workers.’

‘But how …?’

The mine manager’s face took on a look of smug complacency. ‘For a man who can trisect an angle it is nothing to work out how to make two straight lines meet at a single point. Now, we haven’t much time.’ He led the way towards the end of the tunnel. ‘The final decision is mine, but I have been assured the work is almost complete.’

Five chambers, each containing four or five men wielding picks. Nepos entered the nearest.

‘Enough,’ he ordered. The men stopped working and slumped to the floor. Valerius noticed something different about them. Apart from their heavy beards and haunted, exhausted features, what made them stand out was their truly foul and ragged appearance and the fetters fixed to their ankles and wrists.

‘I thought you told me there were no slaves in the mines.’

‘These men are not slaves,’ Nepos corrected. ‘They are the Lost. Condemned prisoners who work at the lowest level and never leave the mine until it is worked out. If I am correct these men will soon see the light of day for the first time in six months.’ He studied the far wall of the chamber for a few moments before putting his ear to the rock and tapping the wall with his knuckle. Valerius watched in puzzlement as he repeated the exercise in each of the chambers, muttering to himself and nodding his head. Suddenly he turned with a beaming smile. ‘We are ready.’