Saviour of Rome

IV

Serpentius clawed his way up through a dark pit of insensibility like a swimmer struggling towards the surface of a pitch black sea. Gradually it returned to him. The room with the scrolls. The spreading pool of darkness beneath his friend’s bowed head. The triumphant, malignant faces. And finally the explosion of light he thought had ended it all. He opened his eyes and a soft whimper escaped him at the terrible finality of eternal night. He was blind.

‘Quiet,’ a voice hissed at his side. ‘If they hear a sound they’ll beat us all.’

The Spaniard drew in a ragged breath, the air thick as sludge and warm as blood. A wave of fear washed over him and he had to dig deep into his soul to rediscover the courage that had sustained him through the long years of slavery. Remember who you are and who you have been. You are a man and a warrior. Whatever it requires you will endure. Whatever you must endure you will survive. Gradually the panic faded. He turned in the direction of the voice and felt a familiar weight on his arms and legs. Heard the faint chink of metal on metal that sent a new chill of terror through him.

‘Where am I?’ he whispered to the blackness.

‘In a deep mine under the mountain somewhere south of Baeduniense.’

‘Mine?’ Serpentius’s reeling mind struggled with the reality even as he tested the iron chains that bound his wrists and ankles.

‘Yes,’ the voice choked on a sob. ‘And you’d best get used to it, friend, because you’re never going to see the light of day again. We are the Lost and they don’t call us the Lost for nothing. Condemned to be worked to death in a place that is worse than Hades.’

‘How can I work when I’m blind?’

‘You’re not blind.’ A soft snort of bitter laughter. ‘Though it would make no difference to them if you were. A blind man can carry his weight in ore the same as a sighted one. They douse the oil lamps at the end of the shift and don’t light them again until they serve the slops at the start of the next one.’

Careful not to make any noise with the chains, Serpentius raised his hands and rubbed his eyes. He could see? Yes, there was definition in the blackness. In places less dense, and in others more so, as with the deep shadow that identified his unseen companion. Suddenly he understood exactly where he was. Trapped in a tiny wormhole in the earth with an entire mountain pressing down on him. He felt a moment of sheer, irrational panic, returned for a heartbeat to the slimy depths of the Conduit of Hezekiah beneath Jerusalem and the terror which had unmanned him in front of his friend Valerius. The scarred face of the one-handed Roman swam into his mind and he clung to the image like a drowning man until the new panic faded.

He took a deep breath. What would Valerius do? Valerius would bide his time. He’d watch and he’d wait, and once he’d watched long enough he’d make his plan. Then, when the time was right, he’d fight. And he’d win.

‘Tell me everything,’ he hissed to the man chained to him.

He was ready when the first oil lamp flared, burning its image into his eyes. The jailer passed down the line throwing each man a small chunk of stale bread and hesitating just long enough before each prisoner for him to dip it into the foul broth in the bucket he carried. Serpentius had forgotten how hungry he was, but even so his stomach rebelled at the bitter liquid.

When his eyes adjusted to the glare he was able to see his companions for the first time and the sight quailed his heart. The men crammed the sopping bread into their mouths with an animal ferocity as if it was the last they’d ever see. His closest companion was a skeleton in a ragged tunic, eyes sunk deep in a face filthy with dust and his flesh pocked with untreated sores. His bush of hair and unkempt beard were caked with grey dust, making it impossible to tell his age. Most of the others – there must have been twenty of them – were in a similar condition, but Serpentius recognized a few newcomers by the muscle on their bones. Not a man met his eye. Each was lost in the depths of his own suffering. Six months, his companion had said, was the most anyone lasted.

From his position in their midst Serpentius guessed they were in a side chamber of the main mine, entered by a narrow entrance at the head of the sloping floor. The two guards who accompanied the jailer were armed with spears cut down for ease of use in the confined space and they wore short swords at their belts.

A single chain connected the ankle shackles of the cowed prisoners and when the jailer reached the end of the line he unbolted it from a ring on the wall and hauled it clear. No order was given, but every man struggled painfully to his feet. One of the guards hovered close, ready for any sign of hesitation or rebellion in the new prisoner, but Serpentius was prepared thanks to his companion’s warning. A few of the men were slowed by weakness or injury and the guard showed what Serpentius had avoided, lashing out mercilessly with the butt of his spear until the prisoners were formed in a ragged line. The guard pushed the man at the head of the line hard in the back so he staggered towards the entrance, followed by the man behind. The ankle shackles had just enough give for a man to take a full step, but they chafed with every movement. After three steps on the rough ground Serpentius felt the sting of the edge cutting into the skin on his ankle bone, and the warmth of blood trickling over his feet.

They filed through the entrance past a pile of picks and shovels heaped against the wall. Beyond lay a stack of waist-high cane baskets. Once again Serpentius silently thanked his anonymous informer as he hefted a short pick in his right fist. Those at the head of the line took a pick or shovel and once they were gone the others picked up the baskets. It was entirely arbitrary and depended on your place in the line at the end of the previous shift.

Someone thrust a lit oil lamp at Serpentius and he coughed as the noxious smoke swirled in front of his face. A brutal push in the back propelled him forward in the wake of the man ahead and he struggled to retain his balance. The tunnel was perhaps three paces wide and two high and a tall man like Serpentius had to walk at a crouch. They must have been in one of the upper parts of the mine because the floor sloped relentlessly downward. The atmosphere became steadily more breathless and the cloyingly thick air tasted of rotten egg. To one side a sealed leather pipe two handspans in breadth twitched every few seconds and Serpentius realized it must be some kind of ventilation system. No point in suffocating your slaves before you worked them to death.

But not everyone down here was a slave or a jailer. As they struggled along in their chains the prisoners were passed by a group of broad-shouldered men carrying heavy hammers. One of the hammer wielders barged into Serpentius as he passed, slamming him into the rock so the impact removed a patch of skin from his bare shoulder. The man glared at him with his single eye, the other a weeping pit of red. Serpentius ignored the challenge and concentrated on the next treacherous step. The flickering oil lamp revealed the tunnel had been carved from the solid rock; water seeped from the walls to form a slimy stream beneath his feet. Down and down they went until the air quality became so poor that the lamps began to sputter and threatened to go out.

At last they reached what must be the ore-bearing level. An overseer carrying a short whip examined each prisoner in turn and ordered them into side chambers in teams of three.

‘You, new man,’ he pointed to Serpentius. ‘Down there.’

Down there was the lowest level. As Serpentius worked his way past the overseer the thongs of the whip lashed out to catch him on the shoulder and a lightning bolt of pain made him cry out. Every instinct urged him to retaliate. It would be so easy to twist the wrist chain around the overseer’s neck and snap it. But that would get him killed and Serpentius wasn’t ready to die yet. He looked round and met the man’s gaze.

‘That was just a taste of what’s to come,’ the overseer sneered. ‘I’ve been told to pay special attention to you-’ But the arrogance faded from his voice when he recognized the message in Serpentius’s eyes. ‘Get on with it.’

Down there meant a cramped chamber where the tepid, filthy water had pooled a foot deep. Their only consolation was that this was where one arm of the ventilation pipe ended and faint puffs of air made the torrid atmosphere just bearable. Serpentius shared the chamber with a hammer man, another pick wielder and a sickly looking prisoner carrying one of the cane baskets. The man with the pick placed his lamp in a notch in one of the walls and Serpentius followed suit. The hammer man rolled his shoulders and hefted the hammer in two hands, bringing the iron head around to smash into the solid rock. Once, twice, thrice, the clang of each strike echoing round the chamber.

He staggered back, allowing Serpentius and the other pick man to attack the fissures with their picks, chipping tiny pieces of stone that fell into the water at their feet, where the fourth man used a short iron shovel to transfer them to his basket. After only a few minutes sweat was pouring from Serpentius. He realized with a thrill of fear that within weeks, or even days, all the spare flesh would melt from him, and his strength with it. His throat was parched and he reached down to scoop up a handful of water, only for the hammer man to dash it from his hand.

‘Fool.’ He glanced towards the entrance. ‘Whatever you’ve done you don’t deserve to die like that. It’s deadly poison. Wait for the water carrier to come round.’

Serpentius nodded his thanks. After an hour the man with the shovel had filled his basket. He made a huge effort to get it on to his back and the leather straps over his shoulder, but eventually the big hammer man had to help him.

‘He won’t last the day,’ he predicted after the man had struggled from the chamber, his knees threatening to buckle under the weight. They continued working hour after hour and eventually the hammer man was proved right. The man with the basket left, but when the basket returned another prisoner carried it. Serpentius was a former gladiator, a superbly fit man who exercised with the sword every day, but his shoulder muscles shook with the strain of bringing the pick up to strike time after time. His head reeled and his lower back ached where Josephus’s sword blade had penetrated his flesh and scraped across his hip. He winced as he remembered the lightning bolt of agony, the disbelief and the sense of betrayal as the Judaean traitor stabbed him in the back outside the Great Temple of Jerusalem. On and on. Someone must have refilled or replaced the lamps, but Serpentius never noticed. It was only when a hand touched his shoulder and turned him towards the entrance that he realized everyone else had stopped working.

He could barely put one foot in front of the other as they staggered wordlessly up the slope towards the sleeping chamber, the strong supporting the weak.

Survive? Endure? After two weeks of backbreaking labour, lying exhausted in his own filth and living on a diet a pig would have turned its nose up at? Serpentius knew that was fantasy. He had to escape soon, or he would undoubtedly die here.

Still, he had been able to gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of his jailers, and, perhaps more importantly, of his companions.