Chapter XIX

 

 

Freedom and slavery. One is the name of virtue, the other of vice. Both are acts of the will – Epictetus

 

Mountain of the Horn, Parthia

 

What is this stench? It permeates his being as though some rotting thing has crawled inside him and died. Piss. Sound … buzzing, buzzing. Flies. Rain. It’s raining. No, pissing. His fingers creep up the side of his face to probe at a painful swelling around his eyes and cheeks. Too difficult. The manacles.

Malorix feels as though he is floating, disturbed only by occasional faces that come and go, unexplained. Time. The world comes into sharper view, he is lying on his back trying to focus on the craggy roof of a cavern. Voices drift in and out, low, indistinct. He sleeps.

In time he finds the will to shift onto one hip, conscious of a new sensation. Weight on his ankles. Chains? Able to tuck up his knees he slides his hands down his legs and his fingers trace the rough iron of heavy rings that bind his ankles. The contours of shadow-men play along the walls opposite a grillwork door that guards the entrance to the cave, its sole source of illumination. Human shapes pass before it, and dust dances on narrow beams of light.

Movement is pain. Beginning at his feet, it rolls up his legs to his brain like a relentless brushfire. Beaten. They beat the bottom of his feet. Parthians. Surprising, the way they left the rest of his body alone and worked mostly on his feet. He wonders vaguely why they did that. Duris. They had asked about Duris and Gelanor. What had he told them? But, no. They weren’t interested in anything he had to say, just the pain. A sport.

He pulls himself awkwardly onto one elbow and sees other men nearby, like corpses. The slightest rise and fall of their chests shows them to be among the living. A figure approaches from the direction of the light. The face grows large, vaguely familiar.

"Welcome to the Horn," says Aulus Quirinus, in a lackluster voice. "I think you should find a new profession. You’re meant to buy and sell slaves for profit, not join in the work. You are maybe the worst slaver ever."

Malorix hears laughter from other parts of the cavern, faint and short-lived. Someone coughs. "You did a terrible thing, slaver." Quirinus continues. "You gave us hope. Now hope is gone. But slaver or not, as you are now one of us I will tell you what I tell all of the new ones. This is our rest time. They give us rest because otherwise we die too quickly. There are two rests per day. Other than this, you work. You are worse than a galley slave now. You stop, you get the lash. You work too slowly, you get the lash. You ask for water, you get the lash. Get it?"

"Gelanor?" He wills his mouth to form the sounds.

"Your friend? At the smelters. There is no rest time at the smelters, but the work is lighter there. We work the mine. You have joined the living dead. Welcome to Hades."

Quirinus retreats into darkness and Malorix drops his head back to the ground, mercifully cool against his throbbing temple. Flies play up and down his body, alternately lighting or zigzagging around him. For reasons unclear to him, his dulled mind tries to follow their flight, unaccountably curious to know if there is a pattern, some mysterious logic in their movements. But the flies will not reveal their secrets, so he turns his attention back to the door and the particles that skip playfully in the light and settle atop huddled figures that once were men.

 

* * * * *

 

Secreted neatly below its eponymous, jagged peak in a range of ancient mountains, the mine known as the Horn swarms in daylight hours, echoing with the sound of hammer on chisel and stone. Every tool, every tool-bearing man, and every moment of every day is devoted to the extraction and processing of gold. It is like factories Malorix has seen in Ostia, an enormous living machine.

Romans and Greeks alike work together and suffer together, but when they reach the end of the day’s labour, Malorix is not one of them. He is the slaver, a person who profits from the sale of others. He was in league with Vasiges, an outcast.

Being reviled by other men is not a new experience for Malorix. Impassively, he weathers the petty abuse of his fellow captives, and after a meagre few days they tire of going out of their way to kick him or trip him up. Punches, the spitting and the curses stop, or at least decline in frequency. Animosity to Malorix or the seeking of some belated vengeance requires an energy of spirit these men no longer possess. Their world grows smaller by the day. For the most far gone it begins and ends with physical torment and a desperate hope of release.

Malorix settles down to life as pariah. As he recovers from his injuries he considers himself fortunate. In his weakened state, they could just as easily have killed him. No sign of Silo. Aulus Quirinus has disappeared as well. Without him or Silo, it will be difficult for Malorix to make any progress with these men or begin to plan an escape. None will talk to him, the sole exception a Cretan auxiliary by the name of Thetis. He is old for a soldier, a twisted hermit of a man, head covered with a mat of stringy grey hair with face with a beard to match.

Other prisoners leave Thetis to himself, as he is believed mad, and madness is sacred among legionaries. The lunatic is, by contrast, enormously amused by the irony of his circumstances. Having fallen into debt, he signed up with the IX^th Legion to dodge being sold into slavery.

Whereas others avoid Malorix, Thetis seeks him out. "Lots of room to stretch out wherever you are, slaver," he says often, his twisted grin accompanied invariably by a bizarre cackle that passes for laughter. One of the few who can still muster a smile, helped along by his unabashed insanity.

"I’m not a slaver," Malorix insists.

"I believe you," Thetis leers. "But then no one cares what I believe, or what you say."

"Look at them, slaver," Thetis says one day. "They look like men, but they are changing. They are on their way down. Every day they are less than what they were the day before. I see it in their eyes, the movement of their hands, and the way they carry their heads. From men, to animals, to wraiths, to dead. And they blame the slaver."

"I am not responsible."

"They don’t care. You are here. You’ll do. Besides, it’s not up to us, is it?"

"What isn’t?"

Thetis looks at him with a sly grin. "You know. It will take us in its own time."

"What will?"

"The Reaper," he says in a crazy sing-song voice. "It came for us when we were a legion, and it comes for us still." His expression grows conspiratorial. "Every man of the IX^th will see the Reaper. He takes us one at a time. All who served in the IX^th must die."

"I never served in the IX^th."

As the days of his incarceration grow into weeks his wounds heal. Malorix makes it his business to examine every part of their prison with an eye to escape. There is no reason for optimism. The walls are too high to climb and are guarded by sentries. Bowmen are posted at intervals, so even if a prisoner does manage to jump the wall and make a run for it, he will be cut down. Divided into three distinct sections, the site encompasses an open pit mine and crushing operation, sieves and smelters, and a deep shaft mine. The sleeping and rest areas for the prisoners are scattered around these sites, although well over half the men work in the open pit. According to his rough estimate, there are between five and six hundred prisoners guarded by a detachment of perhaps fifty armed men.

The guards are not regular Parthian soldiers, but a mixture of Bactrians, Kurds, Greeks, and a few Persians. A desperate lot. As desperate as those they watch over, driven the gods know by what ill winds to end up in this bleak abode. The Horn is craggy, hot, and treeless. It begets their boredom but offers no remedy.

The guards find relief in thinking of new ways to employ their whips. Pick on the weak and the slow moving, that’s their way. Not that working hard is protection against the lash. Their wrath is frequently indiscriminate. Under a burning sun, faced with the monotony of hammer and chisel on stone, their aggressions can emerge with sudden violence. On other days they are too tired or too bored to bother. The worst excesses come following weekly visits from the Greek named Polydius who brings a supply wagon from Stravin. Among his supplies there are always a few amphorae of arkhi. After a night of drinking, the guards awake irritable and hung-over, and they relieve their pain by sharing it.

For several weeks, Malorix works the open pit. Prisoners are fettered at the ankles and wrists, but only the wrist manacles are removed during work hours. He learns to walk anew, and like the others adopts a kind of scuttling gait that gives the men the appearance of a colony of sea crabs. Set to work with iron mallet and chisel, his task is to break away chunks of ore from the pit face.

The pit itself is about twenty feet deep and about half as wide as a Roman city block. According to Thetis the operation has been in place just over two years. In that time, it is reckoned maybe a thousand men have died here. There is a slope near the southern edge of the pit where collections of bones can be seen whitening in the sunshine. This is where the bodies are dumped, rolled over the side like rancid meat to make meals for the vultures and wild dogs that now make the Horn their habitat thanks to a steady supply of carrion.

Sometimes the prisoners pause to watch the guards unload a new body and let it roll down that slope, the one time they can be sure their tormenters will not punish them for downing tools. The sound of dogs fighting, tearing at the flesh of friends they once knew. Like three-headed Cerberus devouring overlarge pieces of meat, they emit gagging, gargled, animal sounds. A brief spectacle for men wondering when—it will be their turn. The jailors can be relied on to make time for prisoners to watch this most piteous of all possible human endings, to pass through the entrails of a dog.

Each day Malorix sees the evidence of those who have gone before him in this place, their messages scratched on stones secreted in the pit face and tucked away in isolated crevasses. Discovered by others yet living, respectfully returned to their places with a kiss and a prayer. Deliver me, says one in Greek. Others in languages he cannot decipher, but he reckons that single message is the essence of all the messages that have ever been, or ever will be scratched on the rocks at the Horn. Lucian is wrong, for Hades does exist. Deliver me.

From the open pit they haul the ore in baskets to a crushing area, where other prisoners break it down with hammers into chunks small enough for processing in mortars, and from there into giant mills. Teams of men rotate the mill shafts by pushing the long spokes of a giant wheel. The product of this process is taken in sacks to smelters located in a separate area below the mine. Malorix has overheard prisoners speak of the smelters, describing it as easy work. But like everything in Hades, relief comes at a price. The smelter crews are known as the "Sabine Women" because they are selected for their good looks and raped whenever the guards take it into their heads. No surprise that prisoners do not compete to join the smelter crews. Most believe they are going to die in the Stravin mine. Why suffer such indignity, especially when finding this easier work only prolongs the misery? The quickest route to escape is death, and the quickest route to death is the deep shaft mine.

Every morning the prisoners line up in three queues to have wrist shackles removed and receive the tools needed for their particular work stations, a ritual repeated in reverse again at the end of the day. Every chisel and hammer is noted in a book by a pair of scribes.

Waiting for his tools this morning, Malorix is pulled from his usual place in the open pit line and shoved roughly into the queue occupied by the prisoners who work the deep shaft. His assailant is the senior guard, the most feared and hated. His name is unknown. They call him Garum because he smells like fish guts. Garum habitually carries a hardwood stick, and he uses it now on Malorix as he shouts, "Replacement!"

Malorix stumbles into his new place in line. As Garum turns away, Malorix hears a familiar voice. "They lost two in the shafts yesterday," Aulus Quirinus says quietly, as another pox-faced jailer known as “Keys” removes the iron shackles on his legs. Quirinus is haggard, less than he was.

"Where have you been?"

"Stravin. Nearly sold with some others but Fortuna, it seems, will not hear me." Quirinus speaks quickly, eyes tracking the movements of the guards. "Listen. Where you are going, the air gets thick. Tear off a bit of your tunic to wrap around your nose, it will help you breathe. If the gas comes hold your breath, tie the rope around your waist, and pray they pull you out in time."

"Gas?"

"Comes from the ground—and kills."

"Why are you telling me this? I thought I was the slaver."

"Slaver or slave, no man deserves to go where you are going. Gods Consentes protect you."

“No leg irons?”

“Sparks,” says a man next in line to Malorix. He grins maniacally as he mimes an explosion with one hand. Malorix shuffles forward with the other prisoners until he reaches the head of the line. A hairy guard hands him a small axe about twice the size of his hand, a chisel, and a leather sack with a cord. He looks at the tools with stupefaction, until the guard cuffs him on his way, shaking his head.

"There’s not much space to move," says the grinning man. "You chip it out and put it in the sack. Tie the sack to the rope and tug twice. They haul it up. Simple."

"Don’t talk to him," says another.

"I talk to who I please, Tetricus. Mind your own fucking business." He is burly and stubble-haired, with a boxer's nose and thick, heavily tattooed arms. Though by now much reduced by the effects of the Horn, his body must have once been that of a wrestler. "I’m Balera." His voice is a guttural rasp. "I don’t give a rat’s ass where you come from, or what you done. Down there, do what you are told. Or somebody dies."

They’re marched in two groups toward a dark gash in the mountainside that proves to be a tunnel, carved by human hands. The ceiling is supported by heavy beams in places, in others carefully placed piles of stones none-too-convincingly buttress the walls. The tunnel splits in two. Most of the prisoners disappear down the passage to the right, Quirinus with them. Malorix follows the remainder into the maw of absolute darkness.

"Two shafts, so two crews." Balera's voice looms from the void. "I haven’t worked that crew. They say the gas comes from there." As they follow the fork to the left he perceives a faint light. The source is a cluster of oil lamps arranged at the lip of a fathomless pit in the cave floor. The aperture of the pit is about eight feet across. "It’s narrower at the bottom." Balera says, now visible in the lamplight, pointing downwards. "They started with this tunnel, and then the vein with the gold ore dropped here and kept going down. It’s more than a hundred feet straight down. At the bottom it branches out into a new horizontal seam. There are hand-holds carved into the side here, but the shaft is so deep a fall means death. So we go down with ropes."

Twelve in this crew. Balera selects one of the oil lamps and grabs a rope. "Ten go down, two stay topside. They haul up the spoil. After a while the guards let us shift."

Malorix mimics the others as they put their tools in the leather sacks and sling the cords over their heads, letting the sacks hang down the small of the back. A light waft of air ascends from the pit, cool and pleasing. Balera sits on the edge, places his foot in a loop at the end of the rope and holds the lamp in the other hand. Two men ease him over and four others lower the rope. Malorix watches his lamplight grow fainter by stages. When it is little more than a pinpoint it stops moving. One at a time they follow. Malorix goes last.

After what he guesses to be about twenty feet, the air becomes noticeably cooler. When at last his feet touch bottom the shaft is only a few feet across and the men are packed closely together. The lamplight is dim, half concealed in a low niche carved into the sidewall.

Balera’s voice comes from his left. "Now the fun begins. Who’s going in first?"

"The new guy," answers a voice from the darkness.

"No, let him get used to the tunnel first. Tomorrow he can go first. Whose turn is it?"

"The Rhodean."

"Shit."

Scraping sounds, curses, growing fainter. "Okay, slaver. Watch your head. We work on our backs or our knees. You need to get four full bags. You don’t get ’em, they beat the crap out of all of us. Wrap your strip of cloth tight around your mouth and nose or you’ll choke to death."

Malorix does as bidden. Feeling the rock face with his hands, he stoops low and crawls inside a waist-high tunnel that follows the ore vein into the mountainside. The air is soon filled with the dust of chisels working the rock, the din of the hammering amplified ten-fold by the tomblike confines of the tunnel. There is little lamplight, and that serves mainly to reveal the dust in the air and, very occasionally, the grey and gold-streaked face of the mountain.

Malorix feels strangely not himself. His heart has a drumbeat rhythm and sweat issues from every part of his body. Not the heat, nor the din of hammers this. Something else. He is unstrung, a new terror, more powerful even than that which grips the soul on the cusp of battle.

It is all too close. Roof, stone, walls ... Targitai protect me.

Gripped by a desperation to be free, it wells inside him, to obsession. Nothing left to do. No thought. No greater need. Only the absolute imperative to be free of this tomb. He wants to run. He wants to scream, wedged in between other men working the seam. Nowhere to go.

Death is preferable to this.

But he has no sword, nor space to fall upon it. He screws his eyes closed, feeling his spirit ebb like blood pouring from a wound. His nails dig painfully into the palms of his hands, clenching and unclenching his fists in a struggle for air. He screams, but the sound is muffled and stale.

"Balera!" He hears a voice calling. "This new one has the fear."

He screams again and kicks out.

“Fuck off!” cries the man next to him.

Balera cries out. "Slaver! The hammer. Use the hammer! Hit the mountain. Take a piece of it. Take a piece of the mountain, you make the space bigger." Malorix grips his chisel unsteadily and scrapes the point across the rock face. He tries a hammer blow; the handle vibrates painfully in his hand. "Strike harder! You must strike the mountain. Make it feel your anger!"

He squeezes the handle and strikes again, just able to make out the dull flatness of the chisel head. And again. This time he feels a little piece of stone come loose. Small fragments fly off with each blow, striking his cheeks. This is the way of release. Think of nothing but the chisel …

"Work it!" He hears Balera shouting. The chisel and the hammer, scraping the fragments together with his hands and packing them into the leather sack. And again, and again. Do not think. Again!

Time, a few hours he reckons. He and Balera are pulled to the top of the pit to take their place hauling up the bags of ore. As they sit on the edge of the pit, Malorix is still sweating, his head pounding, but not from exertion.

"I do not understand," he says, a kind of gasping confession. "I have never acted in that way. Not in my life."

"Ever been buried alive?" Balera asks rhetorically. "Nothing to be ashamed of. The seam affects some more than others. You will adapt."

"When I am in the confines of that space it is … a kind of death. Worse. The souls of my ancestors cry out for the Sky God. To see the boundless sky!"

"Forget your sky god." Balera's eyes stare vacantly into the dark. "The gods have forgotten Stravin.”

"How many times?"

"Down there? I don’t know ..."

"And you are used to it."

"As far as it goes. Easier for me than for some, but …"

"But?"

"You never get used to it."

 

* * * * *

 

The following day is worse. “You first slaver.” Three simple words and he is jammed between the end of the seam and the feet of the second man, confined, no exit. The knowledge of it boils in his consciousness

All must collect their ore and leave the seam. Logic tells him this. Apply it, apply the logic. Logic can defeat panic. This will end.

But he knows. Nine other men lie between him and a space where he can stand upright and stretch out his arms, breathe, and live. Trapped, buried alive. Alive.

He tries again to concentrate with all his energy on the end of his chisel. The light is dimmest here, he does not so much see it as feel it. Every strike exhausting, each blow feels like death. Morbidity of thought paired with the coursing of his blood overwhelms him. He loses consciousness. When he awakens he is still there, still in the tomb, unable to move his arms. In the dark, surrounded by stone. He begins to scream.

They pull him from the tunnel screaming. Balera grasps him by the throat and slaps him hard. "The way out is to finish your bags, and then you leave. We can all leave." Malorix has no strength. As Balera releases his grip he collapses to his knees.

"Different world, slaver?" says an unsympathetic voice.

"Shut it, asshole!" Balera snarls. "Finish your bags, slaver!"

Malorix looks upward to see the faint light at the top of the pit. He needs to get there.

"Do it," says a voice.

"We got to get our bags filled."

"The slaver is right. Fuck this!"

Malorix turns toward the shaft, but his legs won’t move. "They’ll have to kill me. I won’t go back in there. I can’t."

"Kill you?" says a voice. "They’ll beat the shit out of all of us."

"What if they do?" says another. "We’ll all be dead soon. I say sooner rather than later."

"I am going to die in this place," says Malorix.

"No. I am."

Silence. "What do you mean, Kaeso?" someone whispers. "What have you seen?"

"Last night." Men breathing, the only sound.

"The Reaper," Kaeso continues. "You know what that means."

"God damn the Reaper!" Balera curses. "I’ll be damned if I know what that means! Everyone get back to work. Look, I’ll go in first!" Balera stoops at the entrance to the seam. "We must stand together and get this done." The argument begins anew again until the voice of a guard can be heard overhead shouting presumed obscenities in Parthian.

"Are we not Romans?" Balera appeals to them. "Are we not men of the legions? Who is from the 1^st Italians?"

"I," says a weary voice.

"And who of the Spanish IX^th?"

"We are," say others, still more abject.

A scraping sound. Balera making his way back into the seam. They move to follow him, pushing none too gently past Malorix. He paralysed, his sweat a cold glaze on his skin, temples throbbing, struggling for breath. Never before has fear thwarted him, but this thing is beyond terror. If he could but have the choice, he would face twenty Germans in combat with a single dagger. He will choose death before he will step again inside that hole.

The men are crawling back now, cursing the mine, cursing Malorix. They filter through the aperture, resuming their places, like termites. Malorix feels a first hint of a breeze against his cheek, followed by an unusual smell. Worse than rotten eggs. Noxious and heavy. "Gas!" someone hisses. "Gas! Gas!" A man cries out to the top of the pit. Malorix is jostled violently as men scramble out of the seam calling frantically for ropes to hoist them to the safety. He hears coughing, and shouting, and crying. By the frail light of the lamp he sees them covering their eyes and noses. A race now between the tug on the rope that could mean life, and the sudden breath that means death. Unwilling to wait for a rope, one man begins to climb using only the footholds carved in the rock.

The lamp goes out. "Where’s Balera?" someone shouts. They call to him in the tunnel, the only reply the now audible hiss of the deadly vapour. Malorix pulls his kerchief tighter around his nose and mouth, and shouts "Balera!" into the entrance to the seam. No reply, and nothing for it. Governed by instincts long dead Malorix forces himself back into the seam. Rough stones tear at his knees and elbows as he shuffles and rolls in the narrow space. A sharp edge lacerates his leg. Need to sleep.

Something solid blocking his way. He paws at it in the darkness, the bulky form of an unconscious Balera. Tugging at the soldier’s belt has no effect—his body might as well be an ore sack. Malorix laughs at this thought, although why it should strike him as funny he cannot imagine. He pulls again, the body sliding just a little. Through gritted teeth he reefs on the Roman’s tunic, dragging him in jerking thrusts across the rough stone back to the tunnel entrance. The smell comes heavier, tepid and intoxicating against his face, as he struggles, giggling, alternately driving the elbow of his left arm into the floor while pulling Balera’s dead-weight form with his right. Men are shouting, but their voices have mingled into one. Adrift, he floats …

The swirling wind subsides precipitously, and Malorix finds himself awake once more. No light to guide him. This feels a familiar place. The moon appears. Extraordinarily large, its passage marked by wisps of grey coloured clouds. A strange moon this.

Whitened bones of the dead are stacked man upon man. The moon is gone. Malorix is standing now, axe in hand. This time, no stars. The wind rises, carrying with it a terrible scent of rotting death. He thrusts his face into the torrent of air and opens his eyes. There upon the ridgeline, edged again in silver… The sound of distant battle.

Crimson shields emblazoned with gilded wings. Metallic bands of armour, the unmistakable battle line. Fine troops, in good order …

A lone figure faces the formation. It separates itself from the marching cohorts. Slowly, like driftwood meandering in a calm harbour. Closer now. A centurion, in battle dress. The old armour. The kind you see in temples honouring heroes of wars long past, or Mars the Avenger.

The centurion is running hard now. Shield thrust forward, the long waving horse hair of his helmet, the pilum poised, nearly touching the ground behind him. He uncoils an Olympian throw. Malorix watches its flight unable to move from its path. When Malorix sees it again it is protruding from the body of a legionary, and the centurion is gone. He stares at the man with the pilum’s bent iron shaft protruding from his chest.

"I’m dying …" says Kaeso.

Malorix shrinks from the figure that hovers above him, so close that he feels its hot sulphurous breath upon his face. No escaping the image inside the helmet now, the contorted features of remorseless rage.

"Mal…or…ix!" His name spoken, like nothing that ever issued from a human mouth. Sibilant, toneless, airless—not from the living world. The final gasp of something dying, cold and unyielding like the walls of a sepulchre. It draws upon his spirit, willing him to death.

Held in its unrelenting glare. The face in the helmet within a hand’s breadth of his own. "Mal…or…ix!" He can neither meet these eyes nor turn away. "They belong to me!"

The words linger in his consciousness as he gropes for precious air and sulphur sears his screaming lungs.