Fireball

by John Christopher

  He knew now what place he was in: a charnel house, with coffins ranged all around and this latest one not yet sealed. The food and wine had been left as grave gifts, along with the ornaments and toilet articles. He had an urge to be sick, an absolute need to get out. The aperture by which he had entered was the only exit. Simon scrambled through it, kicking the stone table away behind him, not caring what noise he made. He fell out into the open, picked himself up, and stood for a moment deeply breathing in fresh air. The next thing he knew, there was a heavy step beside him, and before he could turn around to see who it was, an arm was against his throat like an iron bar, bruising and choking.

  The events that followed were confusing and unpleasant. There were three other men apart from the one who had half choked him, and they drove him up a hill, belabouring his legs with sticks. There was a house at the top, but he was too dazed to have any impression beyond the fact that it was large and rectangular in shape. A wooden trapdoor was opened at the base of a wall, and he found himself being thrown down into a cellar. He hit the ground with a thump that slammed the breath from his body. The trapdoor slammed shut, leaving him in near blackness.

  Someone already down there spoke to him in gibberish. He saw no point in trying to answer, and the other did not persist. He started trying to work things out. He had been discovered emerging from a family tomb. And tombs, everywhere and at all times, carried a heavy taboo, which he had, unwittingly, broken. He had, in fact, committed sacrilege, and whatever sort of society this was, punishment was liable to be severe.

  His companion started talking again. It was still gibberish, but by repetition some bits took on significance. One phrase, for instance, spoken with the inflection of inquiry. “Foggy tea wash?” Something like that. Simon thought about the possible punishment. In a primitive society it could well be death, which put a very high premium on any possibility of escape.

  He felt his way round the cellar, inch by inch. The walls were of brick, the bricks smaller than the ones he was accustomed to, but very firmly cemented in. He broke a fingernail on one. Brick, and then wood. A door: That was something. He went over it, inch by inch. It was of heavy timber, barred with iron. He found an iron lock, a keyhole, a heavy metal ring. After a long time of trying, he had to accept the fact that it was either locked or bolted on the other side, and that no one short of a superman was going to get it open from here.

  The only other interruption in the brick was the hatch to the outside, through which they had been thrown. That was of heavy timber, too, and as firmly bolted. The glimmer of light round the edges was wafer-thin. The increasing stuffiness showed how little even of air it admitted.

  During his exploration, the man with him had stayed where he was but with occasional bursts of unintelligible speech. “Foggy tea wash” occurred several times, still with the note of inquiry. He was asking if Simon was a foggy tea wash. Foggy, or fuggy? It came to him suddenly, a recollection of a hot afternoon and old Gargoyle (George Argyle, junior Latin master) droning on. Fugitivus—a runaway. More specifically, a runaway slave!

  Things fell together. He was in the past, all right, and within a few hundred years he could place just when. Roman Britain.

  In a fit of enthusiasm he answered, or tried to. “Non fugitivus sum.” That produced blankness, followed by a meaningless flood. He tried “Homo liber,” to which the silence was longer still. Respectful, or simply uncomprehending? A renewed surge of what must be Latin was no help. Simon gave up, wishing he had paid more attention to the Gargoyle’s soporific nasal tones. The one thing clear was that the man with him was almost certainly a Roman slave and naturally assumed that he was a slave, too, and a runaway. A runaway who had broken into a tomb and eaten the food meant to sustain the deceased lady while she got ready for her crossing of the Styx. His companion had another go, but Simon felt altogether too depressed to attempt an answer.

  Much later the hatch was briefly opened and bread was thrown in—a couple of small loaves—and a leather flask containing water. He was able to see that the day was almost gone and, in the shadowy evening light, that his companion was a small, thin, undernourished man with a straggly grey beard. Simon picked up his loaf from the floor and wolfed it, and the pair of them shared the water in the flask. More time dragged by; he slept and woke and slept again. Then the hatch was pulled open again, and this time it was morning.

  They were shouted at from above. The old man heaved himself out, and Simon took the tip and followed suit. The same brawny individual was in charge of the party and supervised their tying up. A rope went round the neck and secured both wrists and ankles; you could hobble, but no more. He felt some relief about that. Surely no one would bother to tie someone up in order to chop his head off?

  The house, he could now see, was a typical Roman villa out of history books. An open cart stood close by, with a couple of oxen between the shafts. They were made to scramble in at the back, and a guard jumped in with them. Then the high back was slammed up, there were cries and the crack of a whip, and the cart rolled off.

  It was an interminable journey, in discomfort which gradually turned to agony. There was a slight relief when they turned onto a paved road, but it was rapidly lost in the new pain of cramp. Simon tried to struggle up to a squatting position, but a shout from the guard, leaning against the side of the cart, put a stop to that. He could see nothing outside the cart. The sun beat down harshly, and he was soon sweating, and soon after that the flies found him. They had been given neither food nor water, and thirst became a torment. You might, he reflected wretchedly, tie someone up in order to take him to another place to chop his head off—in which case you might not think it worthwhile feeding and watering him.

  Eventually there were noises other than the creak and rattle of the wheels, the driver’s occasional cry, the snorts of the oxen. The sound of other vehicles, other voices: the cries, unintelligible but unmistakeable, of street vendors. They were in town. Londinium? It seemed likely. Not a small town, certainly. It was quite a long time before the cart creaked to a halt, the high back was dropped, and they were half urged, half booted out.

  They were in a large open square, surrounded by buildings. At the far end, beyond a crowded clutter of market stalls, the buildings were impressive in size, fronted by pillars and colonnades. The nearer ones were more ordinary, with small shopfronts at ground level. Near where the cart had stopped there was a wooden platform, a few feet high and about fifteen feet long. A well-dressed cleanshaven man stood on it, along with three bearded men, who were roped and naked. There was a crowd facing the platform, bidding for the men on display.

  Simon and the other were urged, with cuffs, round to the rear of the platform. More slaves stood there waiting their turn for auction; not only men but women, and some children. They were in two batches, one of more than fifty people, the other comprising about half a dozen. It was to the latter they were directed. The man who had brought them ripped their clothes off, in one quick movement as far as the other man was concerned, but with more difficulty in Simon’s case. He looked at the shirt and pants curiously for a moment, asked some meaningless question, then shrugged and left them.

  The sense of shame was acute, but less than he would have expected. Public nakedness did not seem to matter so much, compared with the brutal reality that he was about to be sold as a slave. But that was a good deal better than being put to death.

  3

  THE DAY STAYED HOT AND cloudless. Thirst, which he had been able to forget in the distraction of the journey’s end, returned and tantalized more cruelly. This, it was borne in on him, was just one of the aspects of slavery. Simon thought of the world in which he had lived till . . . when? The day before yesterday? All those rights so confidently claimed: to work, to food and shelter, to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A slave had nothing, except on his master’s sufferance or whim. Assuming he had some value, he would be given water before he died of thirst, but the actual torment of thirst was un
important. You topped up the oil in a car engine because if you let it run dry, a valuable possession became a worthless wreck. His value as a possession would bring him water—eventually.

  Those in the main batch were taken, singly or in groups, to the other side of the platform and removed from there by their new owners. None was taken from the smaller group, seven in number, which included him. The first batch dwindled until the last two slaves, a woman with a child two or three years old, went. A few minutes later the auction was over.

  The seven remained, crouched in the hot dust. Two soldiers guarded them. They produced bread and meat from pouches in their metal-skirted tunics, ate it with daggers, and drank wine from leather flasks, with no more regard for their charges than would have been paid to penned sheep in a country market.

  Time passed, immeasurable. The guards straightened up suddenly as a small group approached them across the open space of the forum. They stood to attention and slapped hands on arms in salute. The leader was in his thirties, of medium height, well muscled, with a thin face and keen eyes. He wore a tunic with a light red cloak over it, fastened at the front by a gold pin. Two other men followed him respectfully.

  His inspection of the seven naked figures was rapid. Four he immediately touched on the shoulder with a small black stick he carried; they included the man who had been brought in with Simon. He studied the remaining three more closely. Standing in front of Simon, he put the point of the stick under his chin, lifting his head. He stooped down and kneaded the muscles of Simon’s right arm with hard, probing fingers; the act was impersonal but degrading. He stood back again, making a more general survey. Then he touched just one of the three with his stick, rapped out a few words of command, and with his two followers strode away across the forum.

  A choice had been made, Simon realized, but what choice? It did not, anyway, have any immediate effect; the seven were mobilized as a group and marched away by the two guards, except that marching was scarcely the term to describe the ragged shuffling progress their roped ankles permitted. They left the forum at the nearest corner and went along a narrow street, crowded with people and horse-drawn vehicles. It was lined with shops—small boxlike rooms open at the front—selling a variety of goods: metalwork, pottery, cloths, cooked meats, wines. Smells were strong all the way, but particularly as they passed one with a display of leather goods. No one paid any attention to them, any more than they appeared to pay attention to the beggars, with a wide variety of deformities and mutilations, who squatted on the roadside, chanting for alms.

  They turned a corner into another, slightly wider street. The whole of the left side was taken up by one massive building, with no windows at ground level and only narrow slits higher up. A prison? The blank front was broken at last by a stone archway, wide enough to take a cart, with wooden doors folded back from stone pillars and an armed guard on either side. They went through without challenge; through the dark tunnel beyond and into a vast sunlit square.

  It was full of soldiers, practising weaponry and exercising. They were in a number of squads, under instructors. Simon saw a squad fighting in pairs with wooden swords, and another group heaving lances at dummy targets, roughly man-sized figures made of sackcloth. Not a prison but a barracks. Did that mean they had been press-ganged for military service? If it were so, things looked better again. Only marginally, but margins were becoming important.

  There was a brief outburst from one of their guards, and the two groups split. Simon, totally ignorant of what was said, followed the man on his left. A barked order, accompanied by a casual but stinging cuff to the side of the face, told him he had done the wrong thing. The guards seemed to find it amusing; they laughed, obviously at him, before they parted, directing their separate squads. The five who had been tapped by the officer’s black stick went through a doorway on the left. Simon and the remaining slave were marched on.

  His new companion was a small, swarthy man of about twenty. He had laughed with the guards, and he now rattled words off, grinning at Simon as he did so. A query of some sort. When Simon just looked at him, he shrugged and said something to the guard. The guard responded, in an almost amiable tone. It looked as though the pair of them had passed some selection procedure and qualified for a slightly improved status.

  Their destination was a door in the end block, immediately facing the tunnel through which they had entered the barracks. Inside there was a hall, lit by oil lamps, with an iron-railed stone staircase leading up and doors on either side. They were led through one of them into a room lined with shelves. The guard barked a command, and since his companion came to a halt, Simon did the same. He had a moment’s panic as the guard approached him with his dagger pointing. But in a quick movement the rope was severed at wrists and ankles. It slipped to Simon’s feet as the other man was similarly released, and he stretched his head and shoulders, easing his cramped muscles.

  The room was a clothing store. A storeman found things for them: underpants and a loose tunic of unbleached wool. Simon still had his own socks and sandals on, and the man stared at these with some interest, asking a question. When Simon indicated his inability to answer, he mimed taking them off and handed him a pair in exchange. They were fairly primitive: simply shaped leather soles, with a thong running between the first and second toes to loop around the ankle. The storeman studied his twentieth-century sandals for a moment or two, before tossing them into a barrel.

  None of them seemed too surprised by his inability to speak Latin. But of course, the Romans never conquered the whole of Britain. They probably thought he was a Pict or a Scot, or one of the wild Celts from across the Irish Sea. The speculation was abandoned when they were taken from the clothing store to another room on the far side of the hall. It held trestle tables with wooden benches, capable of seating two or three hundred, and at the far end a kitchen from which emanated the unbearably wonderful smell of meat cooking. Cooks and cooks’ assistants were busy there. Simon felt faint as they approached the area.

  They were given water first, in rough earthenware pots. Meanwhile, food—beans with a little meat but a lot of gravy—was being put on platters; they were given one each, with a small loaf of bread. Simon could not remember any time in his life when food had smelled, or tasted, as good. He wolfed it greedily.

  When they had finished, the guard set them on their way again: out of the dining room and up the staircase. On the third landing he indicated a doorway.

  It was a very long room, at least fifty feet in length and fifteen feet across. It had narrow windows at intervals, un-glassed but set with iron bars. The floor was concrete, the walls of whitewashed stone. Along the walls, at intervals of about four feet, concrete rectangles projected into the centre. They were raised a few inches from the floor, their dimensions about six feet by three, and any doubt as to their purpose was removed by the fact that at the head of each was a rolled mattress. Halfway along the room there was a gap in the concrete beds, making room for a stove with a chimney vented high in the wall.

  The guard said a few more words and went out. They heard the slap of his feet, descending, on the stone stairs. The other man unrolled one of the mattresses and lay down on a bed. Simon, after a brief hesitation, followed suit, taking the bed opposite. The mattress was of something like sailcloth, with straw inside: not exactly luxury, but an improvement on bare concrete.

  Through the barred window he could see blue sky and a fretted edge of white cloud. He took stock of his situation, looking on the bright side first. To start with, he was alive, something he would not have betted heavily on at most moments during the past thirty-six hours. He had been fed and watered, and he was no longer roped. He even had a bed to lie on.

  Against that had to be set the fact that he was not a free man. He had apparently been pressed into service in the Roman army, and he doubted if they would be willing to offer him a discharge even if he knew how to set about asking for one. The guard had left the pair of them here, unguarded, but that did
n’t mean a lot. As far as he knew, the only way in or out was the main gate, and while the two armed soldiers there had not queried their being brought in, he had a feeling they might take a different view of his trying to walk out.

  Someone really enterprising might, he supposed, look for other possibilities of escape. He didn’t feel that enterprising at present; the fact that they had been left alone seemed to indicate that the guard had no great fear of either of them getting away. And that last unintelligible speech might have included a warning of what was likely to happen to them if they tried; his companion certainly seemed to be resigned to his situation.

  No, it was better to wait and see what the future offered. It might be impossible to escape from the barracks, but they could not be kept in a barracks indefinitely. There must, at some stage, be contact with the outside world, and a reasonable chance of making a break for it. And by then he would have been able to get a hang of things; the world about him was at the moment almost totally strange but was bound to get more familiar and so easier to cope with.

  It would be a help to pick up the language a bit; his three years of doing Latin should help there. He wondered, for the first time in hours, what had happened to Brad. Schools in America didn’t do Latin, did they? Poor old Brad—he probably still had no idea where they were, or when. If he had survived, that was. The more Simon thought, the more he felt he had been lucky. Being plunged without warning into a barbarous past carried hazards he would never have guessed.

  He wondered about what was happening at home, too. Presumably there would have been a search party when they failed to get back; would they still be combing the wood, or had they abandoned it by now? He remembered reading somewhere that thousands of people disappeared every year without trace. How many of them might have done so through an experience like theirs? There would never have been any record, of course. Anyone who did find himself in the past would have to try to survive without talking about his origin. In any period a story like that would only land one in a bin.