With gut-wrenching realisation as he strained weakened muscles pulling at a door-ring there was, suddenly, nowhere to go; suddenly he was trapped. The corridor ended in a locked door and he had no key; he began to panic, he had allowed himself to think of escape and now he was trapped. He knew that he must calm himself; it was only one locked door. He must think, yes, think; and it was obvious: he must turn around. And so he began to retrace his steps to find another corridor that did not have a locked door at its end. Now he seemed to be going against the tide of people but he did not care for he knew that he was going away from the locked door and they were going towards it. He took another left turn and shuffled along a passage in which a guttering torch burned; he passed through its glow, shielding his eyes as he did, and then on to the end to meet only with another door: it too was locked. Panic welled ever higher within him and he turned and began to jog back through the torch’s glow, back the way he had come. He tried to think but he could not; every thought he had seemed to end in a locked door. He tried another and then another; all seemed to be locked. He became increasingly frantic as he dashed from door to door up and down corridors that all seemed familiar and then, as the shout of ‘There he is!’ pierced his panic, followed moments later by a fist flying towards him, he realised that they were, indeed, all familiar because they were all one of the same two corridors.
Vespasian opened his eyes unsure of whether he had just been addressed as ‘proconsul’ or whether it had been a dream.
He was lying face down on a marble floor.
‘Proconsul?’
There it was again and it seemed to be real enough. He looked up, squinting against the light.
‘Ah, proconsul, you are back with us.’
Vespasian focused slowly and the architect of his torment, King Izates, materialised, smiling cheerfully despite the fallen columns around him.
‘This is a most fortuitous occurrence,’ the King carried on, beaming happily around the heavily damaged room. ‘I expect that you thought the earthquake was a part of your supposed gods’ plan to free you?’
Vespasian had but he was not about to admit as such to this man; he did not want his first conversation for however long to be a religious discussion. So he did not respond.
‘But you didn’t escape, did you? According to the gaoler he found you running backwards and forwards up and down two corridors. But the one true God does have the power to help those who worship him and follow his laws. Tell him, Ananias, tell him of Paulus, the man you baptised in Damascus.’
A man appeared in the corner of Vespasian’s vision; he groaned as Ananias started to tell the same story that Sabinus had told about the earthquake breaking open Paulus’ gaol, but with much embellishment and exaggeration. Vespasian was in no mood for it.
‘So you see, proconsul,’ Izates said with annoying cheerfulness once the tale was over, ‘just how fortuitous this earthquake has been for you and for me. All you have to do is accept baptism into the Way of Yeshua and I can say to my nobles that God sent this earthquake to spring you from the deepest dungeon in order that you could follow him. Just think of it: my nobles would flock to the baptismal river if they knew that they could have a power like that on their side. And you would be free, free to live here as a permanent witness to the power of the one true God and his son, Yeshua. Free, proconsul, free and saved.’
Vespasian closed his eyes; he wanted none of the bewildered old King’s freedom at the price of rejecting Mars. If Mars indeed had a destiny for him then it would be Mars who eventually would lead him to it, not some jealous god who would brook no other and insisted on men mutilating their penises. He heard the King shouting at him but took no notice as he slipped back into his tranquillity that had been so disturbed by the anger of the gods below. Soon he felt himself being dragged away and he knew with certainty what he would see when he next opened his eyes: it would be the same thing that he always saw in the moment.
And it was so as the hammering on the door to his cell, fixing it back into place, disturbed his peace and forced him to open his eyes. He was back in the moment; his brief surge of hope dashed. He pushed away the offer of consolation from despair, the would-be companion who had been locked out of his cell with the repairing of the door, left in the corridor to whisper through the grille. Back he went to his blanket and his gruel, forbidding all images of his brief foray into the outer world; more and more he played scenes from the past with his inner eye, chewing slowly on his bread and sucking on bones, occasionally nodding in the dark when certain images pleased him.
Straw came, then more straw came and then, perhaps, more straw had come. The last grains of his gruel were lapped up by his tongue as it methodically pursued them around the bottom of his food bowl. Satisfied with his accomplishment of so far ingesting every morsel of nourishment from his meal he began to suck on the bone that he had saved for last. His children again – or was it for the first time? – paraded before his closed eyes. He had planned to do something that may well endanger Titus, he was sure; it had been to do with Tryphaena. Yes, it was Nero; somehow he was helping Nero’s cause, that’s why he was here. Yes, that was it. It was because of Titus’ friendship with Britannicus that he would be in danger if … but he was sure that he had thought of the way to protect him before he had embarked on the road that led to this moment.
The light again.
But he had not quite finished.
He opened his eyes and placed the inedible remnants of the bone onto a heap of similar fragments in the corner, now just visible in the dim but growing light of the approaching torch; he noted with half-felt curiosity that it was quite big. Had the pile always been like that? No, it could not have been; it must have grown and he must have fed it with other bones.
He stared at the pile; so many bones.
A wave of panic hit him.
How many?
He did not want to count.
He felt his chest tighten as he stared at the physical evidence of the length of this one moment. He lashed out at the pile with both hands, smashing it apart, spreading the bones all across the floor of the cell; scattering them amongst the muck so that they could not be counted.
He needed to breathe; he tried to inhale but could not.
And then he heard himself: he was screaming.
It was uncontrolled and from his very core; from deep within a consciousness that had been buried deep within the deepest bowels of the first foundations made by man. It was fuelled by the millennia of misery that shrouded this pit and sucked what life was left in the barely living incarcerated within it.
It was raw.
But it was also fed by shouts from outside his cell; shouts of anger. The gaoler was shouting at him and he was screaming back. He had not had communication with anyone in the whole moment that he had been in this darkness; in the time that it had taken that pile of bones to appear. No one had spoken to him since Izates and even then he had not responded because he had shut the world off to preserve his peace. But now he was being shouted at and now he was screaming back. Now he was having a conversation, he was interacting with another human being, he was screaming and the gaoler was shouting at him for doing so: the gaoler was acknowledging his existence.
So Vespasian screamed some more.
And as he screamed he laughed. He lifted his face to the ceiling and screamed and laughed and he did not want to stop because he knew that when he did there would be only one friend to comfort him.
And that friend was false because his name was despair.
And so he carried on screaming; even as the door opened; even as his arms were pinioned; even as the first blows slammed into his shrunken stomach and rough hands pulled back his hair. He screamed as vomit surged in his gorge and then screamed again once it had sprayed all over his interlocutors – for they were still shouting at him and he was still pleased with the attention. He wanted this conversation to go on, even as his head filled with agony as his slop bucket crunched down on it,
the contents drenching him. And then he screamed as he saw the floor rushing towards him as if it were a friend anxious to hold him in its embrace after a long absence. He screamed as he kissed it and felt the friend’s arms about him and then he screamed a scream that he knew could be heard by nobody else; it was a scream that echoed around his head alone. It was a scream that could be part of no conversation because it was a scream that was reserved only for solitary use.
It was the scream of despair.
CHAPTER XIII
DESPITE ALL HIS care to keep the door to the world outside locked, Vespasian now found himself with an unwelcome companion who resisted all attempts at eviction. No longer could Vespasian deny to himself the existence of the outside world and no longer could he not yearn to see it, feel it, exist in it. After all, he had almost escaped back to it after the earthquake; yet then he had said not a word to anyone but now, with the gaolers, he had tried to communicate; now he could no longer keep himself hidden lost in an inner tranquillity.
And so his mind turned to the only two subjects that had any relevance: escape and revenge.
And yet, the second could not happen without the first and escape seemed impossible; there would be no more fortuitous earthquakes. He was never let out of his cell, which had no window, only a door and that was solid apart from the grille. Only the grille was ever opened and although it was big enough for him to squeeze through, the time it would take him to do it would be more than ample for the gaolers to incapacitate him; there could be no surprise rush through the grille. Therefore it had to be the door; the gaolers had opened it when he had had his screaming fit, so could he replicate that and overpower them as they came in to restrain him? His new companion provided the answer to that and showed him his weakened limbs and shrunken belly. But Vespasian refused to be driven down by despair, so, rather than retreat into a corner, cowed by his false friend, he fell to exercise, working his muscles that had been unused for who knew how long and planning the hideous ways in which he would inflict injury on Paelignus and Radamistus. Rather than sit or squat on his blanket he began to pace the cell like a wild beast before release into the arena; he would intersperse his walking with bouts of gymnastics, stretching and working his neck, arms and legs, doing his best to ignore the mockery of the companion who watched his every move.
Gradually his body began to harden but his belly remained shrunken as the rigours of his regime far exceeded the nutrition of his diet and he realised that he would not be able to gain sufficient strength to overpower two so obviously well-fed men. And for a while he fell back into the arms of despair.
For a whole period between two straw deliveries he gave up the fight, lying on the blanket with his friend, until he remembered that he possessed one thing that the gaolers did not: intelligence.
And so he began to study them every time they came down the green-slimed steps. The one who held the torch was bald and bearded with a bull neck and hands the size of a loaf of bread. His mate was slighter with unkempt hair and beard and looked as if he was struggling under the weight of the sack of loaves and the pail of gruel; Vespasian concluded that he must be a slave as otherwise it made no sense that the smaller, weaker man should be doing the hardest work. That gave him his first reason to allow himself a morsel of hope: if the smaller man was a slave, he might hate his master and would perhaps do nothing to defend him if he were to be attacked. But then he remembered how the smaller man had pinioned his arms; the grip had been that of a man enthusiastic about committing violence. The hope died but he carried on studying their routine and it was always the same – until one visit, when everything changed.
It took Vespasian a while to realise that the slave was different as the new man had the same build as the last and similarly unkempt hair and beard. But, as the pair progressed down the corridor, emptying slop buckets and distributing food, Vespasian noticed that the slave was doing something that he did not normally do: he was looking closely through the grille at each inmate; it was then that Vespasian saw that he was new. As they came closer, Vespasian studied the new man for signs that he might be weaker than the previous slave and he looked for clues as to the man’s relationship with his master. But the slave gave nothing away. At each door he would put down his sack and pail of gruel, then, once the gaoler had unbolted the grille and opened it, he would take the slop bucket, empty it into the open sewer and hand it back. It was as he passed the bucket back through the grille that the man bent and looked closely at the occupant. Then he took the jug and walked back to the butt of water at the foot of the steps to fill it. Having passed the jug back he received the wooden bowl, ladled gruel into it, gave it back and passed a loaf through before his master swung back the grille and bolted it.
It was Vespasian’s turn next and he passed out the slop bucket; as he received it back he locked eyes with the slave and after a moment the recognition hit him like a Titan’s punch and he just managed to prevent himself from exclaiming out loud. It was with shaking hands that he went through the remainder of the routine and as he grasped the loaf of bread he felt an addition to it. As the grille closed he glanced down in his hand and saw a scrap of paper. He opened it quickly before the torch moved on too far and read: ‘We’re both here, be ready.’ He screwed it up and breathed a long sigh of relief that turned into a series of sobs that he could barely contain and then gave up trying to. Tears streamed down his face and they were not tears of sadness as his false friend, despair, left the cell forever; they were tears of relief and hope. He cried freely as he wondered just where Magnus was and how Hormus had become the gaoler’s slave.
Vespasian now doubled his efforts to toughen up his body, pushing it hard, forcing it through tiredness. When he was too exhausted to carry on, he slept, deep and peacefully, knowing that each sleep could be the last in this subterranean nightmare. Each time he heard the key clunk in the door at the top of the steps his heart leapt with hope and he put his eyes to the grille to make sure that it was indeed Hormus coming down the steps with the gaoler.
Each time it was and each time nothing happened; no shared look between them nor hand signal to notice, no note, nothing, not even a surreptitious nod until one time, as Hormus put his hand into the sack of loaves, he pulled out a knife. The first the gaoler saw of the weapon was as it plunged into his right eye, and then it was but the briefest of glimpses; his howl drowned the sound of misery in the corridor as Hormus twisted and turned the blade so that it made a mush of his brain. Vespasian looked on, almost panting with desire to wield the blade himself as the gaoler weakened and fell to his knees. Hormus withdrew the knife from the pulped wound and, as the light was dying in the gaoler’s other eye, he thrust it in so that the man died blind. Working his wrist left and right, he howled with hatred and Vespasian realised that Hormus must have been put through an exceeding amount of misery by the gaoler in a comparatively short time for that hatred to manifest itself so strongly.
Hyperventilating with released tension, Hormus let the body slump back, threw the bolt on the door and pulled it open. ‘We must hurry, master.’
Vespasian croaked; his mind had formed a reply but nothing came from his mouth and he realised that he could not remember the last time he had spoken. He stepped forward and took his slave in his arms and for the first time in the whole long dark moment that he had endured he felt the comfort of another human, one who was not trying to harm him. Hormus gently prised his master’s arms from around his shoulders as all around a cacophony arose from the other inmates who had realised just what had happened and were now clamouring for release; but Hormus ignored them and led his filthy, naked master by the hand, up the steps. ‘If we are to get out of here alive, we must do it quietly,’ he said. ‘We cannot afford to release the others because of the noise they’d make.’
Vespasian did not care one way or the other; all he knew was that he was mounting the steps that, apart from his brief foray beyond them, had been for the course of his incarceration the horizon of his world.
With each step the weight of his misery seemed to lighten until he came to the door to the world beyond. As Hormus opened that door to a long dim corridor Vespasian saw that the world outside really did still exist and, with a ragged half-sob, he stepped back into it.
*
Hormus began to run and Vespasian, still holding onto his hand, kept pace. At the end of the corridor they came to a narrow, spiral staircase; it was not familiar to Vespasian from the dim memories of his failed escape. Up they ran taking the steps two at a time, but as they approached the top, Hormus slowed, then stopped. With caution he stuck his head around the corner and, after a few moments, signalled with his hand, before leading Vespasian, at a walk, out into another corridor. A light shone from an open door on the right, twenty paces away, and beyond it a silhouetted figure was walking towards them. Vespasian still grasped his slave’s hand, his brain struggling to make the transition from a dark, enclosed world to this place of space and light. The figure walking towards them stopped just before the open door; voices emanated from it.
Vespasian felt Hormus’ hand tense and became aware that the slave was still brandishing his knife in the other. The silhouetted figure had a sword, its blade shone dim in the light, and Vespasian realised that they had to kill the men in the room before they could progress for fear of being spotted as they crossed the doorway. Hormus let go of his hand; Vespasian stopped, feeling as if he had been cast adrift. Hormus and the man with the sword were now either side of the door with their backs against the wall; Hormus held up three fingers to indicate the number of guards in the room and then with a mutual nod of heads they whipped through into the light to surprised shouts that turned into agonised screams. Vespasian ran forward, suddenly clear in his mind as to what he needed to do. He hurtled through the door and into the light, a thing of filth and matted hair, and, with an animal growl that came from the bestial core of his being, he launched himself on the third guard, his lips peeled back, his hands like claws. Releasing the rage that had built up within him in all that time in a dark cell, he sank his teeth into the throat of the man as his hands tore at his victim’s eyes. Feeling blood spurt into his mouth, he clamped his jaw tight and shook his head, ripping the flesh, while he forced thumbs into eye sockets. The guard flailed his arms, trying to fight back, but against such animal fury a mere human was powerless and Vespasian drove him down onto the floor. A red mist covered Vespasian’s eyes as he savaged the guard with teeth and nails; he could see nothing, hear nothing, but he felt everything; he felt life so powerful, coursing through him as he ripped and clawed the body beneath him in a frenzy of death.
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