Pavo backed away until he felt his back press against the cell wall.
‘You fear a wretch like me?’ Khaled said with raised eyebrows, gesturing towards his jutting ribs. ‘Come on, drink – you did not reject me when I watered you in these last days,’ he said with a grin.
Pavo frowned, remembering the nightmare, the soothing voice and the drinking vessel at his lips. ‘Thank you for dressing my ribs,’ he said, then took the cup gingerly. He sipped at the foul water, but found his rampant thirst outweighed his disgust. He gripped it with both hands and in moments, he had drained the cup. Suddenly he realised how hungry he was. He touched a hand to his belly, taut and puckered like Khaled’s. He could not remember the last time he had eaten. Had it been the unchewable, dry hard tack on the dunes, weeks ago?
As if reading his thoughts, Khaled turned and dug something from a pile of the white powder on the floor. A stringy mass of something. He tore it in two and handed Pavo a piece. It was a chunk of white meat, no bigger than his thumb. Pavo held it to his lips tentatively.
‘The salt disguises the taste,’ Khaled said.
Pavo chewed on it and found the texture of the meat and the sensation of eating innervating. Then he saw the long, pink tail jutting from the pile of salt, and the red eyes and fangs of the dead rat. He closed his eyes and finished the morsel.
‘In this place you soon forget the decorum of the real world. Indeed, it pays to forget all of the real world. Down here, you have no name, no future, no hope . . . ’ he stopped as the dry air caught in his throat, then erupted into a fit of coughing, cupping his hands over his lips. It sounded serrated, as if every organ in his body rattled from the effort. The man’s legs buckled and he shot out a hand to stop himself from collapsing. Instinctively, Pavo shot up, grasping Khaled’s hand, guiding him back to sitting. He saw blood on Khaled’s lips. ‘What’s wrong with you?
Khaled wiped the blood away with the back of his hand. ‘The same thing that afflicts every man who sets foot in these mines. The lung disease spares no one,’ he nodded through the bars to the workers out there. ‘Once it takes hold . . . it is only a matter of time.’ He held up his hand. ‘When the blood is red, like this, you might have many months or even years of suffering left in you. When it is black . . . then you should make peace with your god. Few last but a handful of years in this realm.’
Pavo’s eyes darted this way and that. Father had been brought here more than fifteen years ago. No, he mouthed, clutching for the phalera, then his breath froze when he found it was not there. He recalled the last moments before the blackness; the spearman tearing the medallion from his neck.
‘You have lost something?’ Khaled said. ‘That is no surprise to me. If they could denude you of your dignity on the way in, they would. Those who bring new slaves in usually strip them of valuables and sell them to the guards.’
The phalera, the strip of silk from Felicia. Gone. Pavo’s head throbbed again. He slumped back down onto the stony shelf, raking his fingers across his scalp. He was surprised to find his hair had grown in and he could grasp it between his fingers. Likewise, he found a short beard had sprouted on his jaw. Confusion danced across his thoughts. He looked up to Khaled. ‘You said the Savaran spent weeks bringing me here?’
‘No, not the Savaran. They said they would have slit your throat from ear to ear where they captured you. But your comrades pleaded to carry you with them, through the desert.’
Pavo’s ears perked up. ‘My comrades – they are in here?’ He glanced out through the bars, his eyes scouring every sorry, hobbling figure out there.
‘There were very few Romans with you, and they were in a dire state. Many struggled just to stay on their feet.’
But Pavo barely heard him. He remembered Tamur’s order to slay every second legionary. How many had then survived the trek across the desert to this place? He filled his lungs, belying the pain in his ribs and head. ‘Sura?’ he bellowed, grappling the bars once more. His cry echoed around the cavern. Many heads turned, the slaves wore fearful looks, the guards wore scowls.
‘No!’ Khaled wrapped a hand over his mouth and pulled him back from the bars. ‘Your comrades, or those that have survived their wounds, are in the lower chambers, they will not hear you. Do not draw attention to yourself – the guards in here, they detest us as much as they despise their jobs. If you give them an excuse to . . . ’ he stopped, gawping up at the bars.
A rattling of iron bars sounded from off to the left of their cell, growing louder and closer.
‘Who . . . what is that?’ Pavo whispered.
‘It is Gorzam – a dark-hearted cur. Lie down,’ Khaled gasped, gesturing to the stone shelf. ‘Pretend you are still unconscious!’
‘Why?’
Khaled bundled him onto the shelf, then scuttled over to the other shelf to lie down.
The rattling slowed and then stopped, and Pavo sensed a shadow creeping across him.
‘Ah, Khaled,’ an acerbic voice hissed, then muttered something in Parsi. The guard’s eyes then locked onto Pavo and he switched to the Greek tongue. ‘You two choose to make trouble?’
Pavo cracked open an eye where he lay. Khaled lay motionless, eyes closed as if asleep. But the tall, bear-shouldered guard standing outside the bars knew otherwise. He wore a baked leather cuirass over a linen tunic and a hardened leather helm. He carried a whip in one hand and a spear in the other. The guard unlocked the cell gate and stepped inside, then reached up to unbuckle the thick cloth that obscured his face. His pitted features creased in a scowl and his dark eyes raked over Khaled’s prone form like a butcher eyeing a cut of meat.
‘Lost your voice, dog?’ the guard spat, lifting a leg and stamping on Khaled’s gut. With a cry, Khaled rolled from his stone shelf, hacking and coughing, blood dripping from his lips. ‘Gorzam, please,’ he pleaded.
Gorzam’s face split into a gleeful black-toothed smile and he swung the whip back, the barbed tails glinting in the torchlight.
‘Stop!’ Pavo cried, standing.
Gorzam froze. Khaled’s eyes widened and he shook his head.
Gorzam twisted round to behold Pavo. ‘Ah, the Roman is awake. I have been looking forward to this.’
Pavo squared his shoulders as best he could, but this giant still dwarfed him. ‘It was me you heard calling out, not Khaled.’
Gorzam’s grin broadened and he laughed long and hard. ‘I care little whether it was you or him. You will both suffer!’ His grin faded into a grimace and he hefted the whip back, ready to bring it down upon Pavo.
‘Perhaps he is fit to work?’ Khaled offered quickly. ‘If you flog him he will be of no use to you for days.’
Gorzam froze once more, then his grin returned. ‘So be it,’ he hissed and lashed the whip down regardless. The iron barbs wrapped around Pavo’s back like claws, sinking into the flesh under his ribs and shoulder blades, gouging into muscle and sinew, ripping chunks of flesh free. He heard his own roar as if it had come from another. He toppled back onto the stony shelf and writhed as the pain wracked him to his core. He looked up to see Gorzam’s wild eyes and rotten-toothed grin as he hefted the whip back again. His mind flitted with those awful memories of his childhood as a slave in Senator Tarquitius’ cellar and the savage beatings he had witnessed there. Then he saw something glint on Gorzam’s chest. The missing phalera, spattered with the spray of his own blood.
This was not Hades. This was worse.
Three weeks passed. Three weeks of brutal labour at the salt face. Every day they were afforded a few hours of sleep, and without daylight, the concept of day and night was lost to them. They would be woken by Gorzam’s rattling spear tip on the bars, fed and watered, then shackled and ushered to the salt crystal near the main shaft. Here, the dust was so thick it stole the breath from their lungs, stung their eyes and burned in Pavo’s whip wounds – which had turned to scar tissue after nearly two weeks of agony. Their lips and mouths were constantly cracked and bleeding, their hands raw and their feet
callused. They filled basket after basket, loading each one on the pulley before returning to the salt face with an empty one. Men worked all around them, coughing and panting. Nobody spoke, nobody even made eye contact. Don’t ever look the guards in the eye, Khaled had told Pavo, I have seen them kill men for less!
In his first days of mining, Pavo realised that they were deep underground – in the fourth of seven chambers, each linked by the main shaft. So far under the surface that we could cry out until our lungs bled and nobody would hear us up there, Khaled had confirmed, dryly. On taking a full basket to the pulley, Pavo had glanced down into the dark hole of the main shaft, and wondered how many of his vexillatio toiled in the chambers below. He saw another slave nearby, neglecting his work and looking up wistfully. Pavo also risked a look up. High above, he saw a tiny disc of white. Daylight and the world of the living. He only realised he was gawping at it when he heard Khaled’s whispered warning. He turned his eyes down at once, his skin crawling as he heard footsteps thunder over to him. Gorzam had stormed past him and grappled the other slave by the throat. Khaled and Pavo could only stare at the salt crystal and continue to hack at it as Gorzam whipped at the slave again and again until the poor wretch collapsed. Even then, Gorzam did not relent, whipping at the man’s head until the flesh came away and the skull crumpled. He enjoyed every lash. Then he and a comrade kicked the dead slave’s corpse towards the darkness of the main shaft. Another slave chained to the dead man dropped his pickaxe and clutched at the chains as he was dragged towards the shaft as well, begging Gorzam for mercy. The man’s pleas went unheard and he toppled into the abyss with the dead man. His cries echoed until they halted with an abrupt and distant crunch. The monotonous, rhythmic chink-chink of pickaxe on salt continued as if nothing had happened.
At the start of the fifth week of his incarceration, Pavo woke first to the soothing melody of Zoroastrian prayer. The voices of so many tortured souls in this place came together to recite the gathas, and the lilting verses echoed throughout the mines like the tumbling currents of a gentle brook. But the prayer halted abruptly at the sound of a cracking whip and the wailing of some poor slave on the end of its barbed tips. He sat bolt upright. The pain in his ribs and on his back had almost faded, but the burning in his lungs from the infernal salt dust seemed to grow fierier with every day. He scratched at his now wiry beard and straw-like, salt-encrusted hair. Khaled wakened at the same time and the two peered through the bars at the glowing crystalline cavern. Another long shift at the salt crystals lay ahead.
The bars of the cells nearby rattled to the tune of a spearpoint. Pavo and Khaled stiffened.
‘Come drink your water, dogs!’ a grating voice called out gleefully. There was a shuffling of thirsty men rushing to the bars of their cells. Gorzam soon came to their cell, rattling his spearpoint more slowly, as if he had been looking forward to this. He held the whip in his other hand as if in expectation, and the guard with him carried a large water skin. ‘Cups,’ Gorzam rasped.
He and Khaled approached the bars as the second guard readied the skin to pour. They passed their cups through the bars, avoiding the guards’ gaze, Pavo struggling to resist a glance at the phalera on Gorzam’s chest. Gorzam watched as the other guard filled the cups, then took them and handed them back through. Pavo reached out for his cup and Khaled his. His fingers were but an inch from clasping it, when Gorzam let both go. The cups bounced on the floor and the water soaked into the salt and dust in a heartbeat. Khaled and Pavo stepped back, stifling their anger.
‘Ah, it is a shame to see the precious water go to waste, is it not?’ Gorzam grinned. ‘Still, at least you have your food.’ He nodded to the other guard. The man turned to rummage in the hemp sack he carried and produced two lumps of bread.
As Gorzam moved on to the next cell, Pavo prodded at the flint-hard, stale bread, then looked to the spilled water cups. He felt the absence of his spatha more keenly than ever. He pressed his face to the bars, watching as Gorzam halted, he and the other guard pouring water into cups of their own, then squeezing some viscous, grainy substance into it. Pavo frowned, seeing Gorzam lick his lips then gulp at this hungrily. The guard drained the cup then spotted Pavo watching. In a flash, the whip cracked towards the bars of Pavo’s cell. Pavo leapt back, the barbs gouging at the iron where his face had been a heartbeat ago.
Khaled placed an arm on his shoulder. ‘He has but two joys in life: one is the strained seeds from the joy plant – the poppy,’ Khaled whispered. ‘Its juices calm his pickled mind – one day hopefully he will take too much and it will kill him. The other, and by far his favourite pleasure, is to provoke the poor bastards in this place,’ Khaled said, stooping to pick up the two water cups. ‘Don’t give him what he seeks.’ He pushed Pavo’s cup into his hand. ‘Here, drink the drops that are still in there, it will give you moisture enough to chew on this year-old bread. Failing that, we can set about it with our pickaxes,’ he grinned wearily.
Pavo sat with a sigh. ‘That’s two days running he’s denied us water.’
‘It is a complement of sorts. He sees us as a threat. If they spoil our food we will be weak – not so weak we cannot work, but not so strong that we might think about tackling him or his comrades.’ Khaled nodded through the bars to where another guard was crushing the bread of another slave under his heel. ‘There are thousands of wretches in this underground vault, and only a few hundred guards.’
‘Aye, an army . . . but half-blind and lame,’ Pavo commented wryly, seeing the sorry packs of slaves cowering under the guards’ whips all around the cavern. Suddenly, a cracking of bone sounded behind him. He swung round to see Khaled stretching his painfully thin and knotted limbs, his arms looped behind his back and the bones in his chest popping.
‘I tell you, it means less misery at the end of the shift,’ Khaled said, seeing Pavo wince with every crunch and grind. ‘Did it not aid you yesterday and the day before?’
Pavo sighed, nodded and set about following the man’s routine. First, he stretched his hamstrings by sitting on the flattest area of the cell floor and reaching out to grasp the toes of one foot until the back of his leg burned, before switching to the other leg. He shot furtive glances at Khaled and wondered again how long the man had been in here. Years, was all Khaled had said when he asked.
‘Tell me, when you were brought here, Spahbad Tamur must have been little more than a boy?’ he asked in an attempt to date Khaled’s time in the mines.
‘Ah, yes, a young boy with a supple, malleable mind,’ Khaled shrugged, then twisted until his shoulder blades cracked. An incongruous grin of relief followed this. ‘His father, Cyrus, was the Spahbad of Persis before him. A noble soul, but one who neglected to nurture and educate his son. Thus, Tamur has fallen under the influence of others . . . ’
Pavo frowned as he dipped to rest his weight on one knee then pressed forward upon it, stretching his quadriceps. ‘Aye, who?’
‘The same cur responsible for casting me into this place. Ramak, Archimagus of the Fire Temple.’ Khaled’s gaze grew distant and haunted. ‘Spahbad Tamur controls a vast wing of the Savaran. Shahanshah Shapur trusts Tamur. But it is Ramak who truly rules the Satrapy of Persis. There was an internecine war, thirteen years ago, I was chained at the ankle and forced to fight as a paighan in the armies of Tamur. He was a young warrior then – little more than a boy, as you say - over-eager and yet to understand that his orders could cost the lives of men. He sent us in against a gund of clibanarii that day. A thousand iron riders. Man for man, paighan versus clibanarius.’ Khaled shook his head.
‘The clibanarii are all but invincible, are they not?’ Pavo asked, recalling the fearsome iron-plated, masked riders from the desert.
‘Invincible? I thought so too, once. The finest blades – lances and swords – will blunt on their plate-armour. Then I saw a shepherd’s boy fell one of them with his sling. The shot punctured the iron plate as if it was paper. So I had a sling in my belt that day on the battlefield.’ He mad
e a gesture with his arm, as if spinning an imaginary sling. ‘Took down three of them before we were overrun. Tamur’s army was beaten back that day. He still had some light in his heart then, and consoled us at first. But when Ramak questioned him in front of the ranks, seeking answers for his defeat, his mood grew foul. So he took out his ire upon his paighan, claiming some of us tried to run and caused the defeat. Some of us did,’ he shrugged, ‘but not me. Regardless, Ramak saw fit to blame me and the hundred who fought under my drafsh.’ He held out his arms as if in wonderment. ‘And this is my reward.’ His bitter smile faded. ‘Many of my people follow the noble traditions of old Persia, the traditions I was raised by: speak quietly and eloquently, never criticise bad advice, do not leer at food being brought to you, always speak the truth . . . never mistreat a slave. In the far-flung satrapies, slaves are allowed three days of rest a month, they are not subjected to violence and can aspire to freedom. Such virtues are smiled upon by our God, Ahura Mazda, but not in these lands – not by Ramak. The archimagus does little to uphold Ahura Mazda’s glory, for he is too preoccupied coveting and multiplying his own. He talks of Persia and Rome as the truth and the lie. The only truth is that Ramak is the lie.’ He stopped for a moment, struggling to control his anger. Then a canny smile lined his aged features. ‘When an ambitious man seeks to harness the gods; kings, empires and armies should beware.’
‘Aye, I’ll say,’ Pavo pulled a wry smile, remembering the events surrounding the Bosporus mission. Then he stood to begin stretching his arms. He wondered at the significance of this pair, Tamur and Ramak. They knew of the mission for the scroll, it seemed. So they must have known of its importance. He had said nothing of the scroll to Khaled yet. He had quickly grown to like the man, and was now starting to trust him, but past experience had told him to be wary of strangers in the guise of friends. Thus, he decided to tread cautiously. ‘This Ramak . . . how far could his designs for power stretch?’
Legionary: Land of the Sacred Fire Page 18
