At last, in the absence of orders or movement, some of the men began to whisper. The sound was like hissing heard through a trumpet. Occasionally, from the vaguely lit stretches before me or behind, I heard grim laughter. What sort of gruesome banter were the men passing back and forth? Meto’s sense of humor had changed much in the years since he became a soldier; it had grown more vulgar and cruel, more mocking of god and man alike. Laughing in the face of Mars, he called it; whistling past Hades. Sometimes, Meto said, with certain death looming ahead—his own death or his enemy’s—a man had no choice but to scream or laugh. What would happen if a single man in the tunnel began to scream and panic? I thought about that and was thankful for the release of an occasional burst of harsh laughter.
A chain of whispers came from the head of the line. The young soldier in front of me turned and said, “This is where we wait while the sappers dig out the last bit of earth. Pass it on.” I relayed the message to Davus. When I turned back, the young soldier ahead was still looking at me. His voice had been familiar; I suddenly realized that he was the one who had been talking about me behind my back out in the hollow. By the flickering light of his taper, he looked hardly older than a child.
His scrutiny was intense, but not unfriendly. His eyes were unnaturally wide. He looked nervous.
I smiled. “Since you were wondering, I happen to be sixty-one years old.”
“What?”
“I overheard you ask your friend before we entered the tunnel. ‘How old is that one?’ you said.”
“Did I?” He looked chagrined. “Well, you could be my grandfather. Or even my great—”
“Enough of that, young man!”
He grinned lopsidedly. “Maybe Fortune put me next to you. Marcus said the gods must like you, if you’ve managed to grow—as old as you have—making your living with a sword. What do you think? Maybe a bit of your good luck will rub off on me today.”
I smiled. “I’m not sure I have much luck left to spare right now.”
Suddenly a deep, muffled boom! ran through the tunnel, as if lightning had struck the earth nearby. I felt it in my ears and toes and teeth. Another boom! sounded, and another.
“What—what’s that?” The young soldier’s voice broke. He rolled his eyes up. “Where’s it coming from?”
“It’s the battering-ram,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “We must be directly under the wall.”
The soldier jerked his head. “They warned us about that. But I didn’t think…it would be so…”
Boom! A trickle of sand fell from the rafter overhead. The soldier clutched my forearm.
“It’s far off,” I said. “Hundreds of feet away. The vibration travels through the stones. It seems closer than it is.”
“Of course. It’s far away.” He loosened his grip and released me. He had clutched my forearm hard enough to leave nail marks.
The booming stopped, then resumed; stopped, then resumed again, over and over. The tunnel roof just above my head seemed particularly affected. Trickles, then clods, then lumps of earth fell down on me. Occasionally the young soldier gripped my arm impulsively.
The air became more dank and foul and smoky. Our tapers burned to nothing; fresh ones were passed down to us from the tunnel entrance. Pails of earth and stones were passed back from the sappers at the head of the line. “They said we wouldn’t have to get our hands dirty,” joked the man behind Davus in mock-complaint. The young soldier giggled nervously. Hours seemed to pass.
Finally the sappers began to pass back shovels and other digging tools. Then the sappers themselves began to depart, heading back up the line toward the entrance. They squeezed past me easily enough, but getting past Davus proved to be a challenge. “What in Hades is that giant doing in here?” muttered one of them.
Davus whispered in my ear. “It’ll be soon now, won’t it, fatherin-law?”
“I imagine so.”
I tried to gird myself for what lay ahead. I had never been a soldier, but years ago I had fought beside Meto in his first battle, at Pistoria, where Catilina met his end; and only months ago I had witnessed the final hours of the siege of Brundisium and had very nearly died there. I had some idea of the dangers and the terrors that might lie ahead. But like every soldier, I imagined another scenario. Perhaps all would go smoothly. We would catch the Massilians unaware, their attention diverted by the battering-ram, exactly according to Trebonius’s plan. We would encounter virtually no resistance and open the gates with hardly a struggle. Trebonius would make his triumphant entry without bloodshed. The Massilians would see the hopelessness of resistance; they would lay down their arms. Davus and I would shrug off our armor, slip away, and search the city until we found Meto, alive and well and very surprised to see us. With the city taken, Meto’s secret mission would be at an end, and he would surrender himself to Trebonius, present proof of his loyalty to Caesar, and all would be well.
How many others in the tunnel at that moment were comforting themselves with equally optimistic scenarios of the hours to come?
Boom! Boom! Boom! A hard, heavy clump of earth fell on my head, knocking me forward against the young soldier. Davus gripped my shoulder to steady me.
Then, from ahead of us, there came another sound. It was nothing like the thunder of the battering-ram. It was a continuous, unending crescendo. A roar.
My ears tingled. I thought I heard screams, but they were drowned out by the incessant booming and swallowed by the sudden roar.
A burst of cool wind struck my face. The wind blew out the taper in my hand, and every taper ahead of me. We were plunged into darkness. The wind continued to blow, carrying the smell of water.
There was no mistaking the screams now, weirdly distorted by the tunnel so that they combined into a kind of monstrous groan, like the roar of spectators at the circus. I heard the explosive crack and crash of rafters being broken into splinters.
My skin turned hot. My heart pounded. By reflex I steeled myself. A part of me knew it would do no good.
The wall of water struck.
V
In an instant, faster than thought, the young soldier was thrown against me like a stone from a catapult, knocking the breath out of me.
Then all was a roar of chaos and confusion. It seemed to me that I stood on a trapdoor that had suddenly opened, but instead of falling down I fell up. From behind, something circled my chest and lifted me. Somehow I was lodged against the roof of the tunnel, in a cavity of some sort, above the rushing flood, facing down. The darkness was not quite absolute; a single flame still flickered from somewhere.
Just beneath me, I gazed into the dark, glittering eyes of the terrified young soldier. He clung to me as the water rushed around him and over him. I tried to grip him in return, but the rush of water and bodies and debris was too great. Something struck his head, so hard that his whole body gave a tremendous jolt. His eyes rolled up. He slipped from my grasp and vanished, lost to the foaming cataract.
Impossibly, I seemed to hover just above the surface of the flood, like a dragonfly. In its depths I saw hands, feet, faces, glinting swords, armor and chain mail, and lumps of broken wood rush by, each glimpsed for an instant and then gone.
The flood went on and on and on. Finally the roar quieted. The rush of water slowed and finally became still. I heard gurgling noises, the lapping of little waves, unaccountable creaks and pops and shudders and groans. Strangely changed from before—duller and deeper—I heard the distant boom! of the battering-ram against the walls of Massilia.
And I heard another sound, so close it seemed almost a part of me. It was Davus behind me, above me, breathing into my ear like a runner whose heart might burst.
As these events unfolded, all was chaos, inexplicable—most inexplicable of all, the fact that I was still alive. Gradually I began to realize what had happened.
An instant before the flood reached us, Davus put one arm around me from behind. When the flood struck, our feet were knocked from under us;
but Davus gripped the rafter above us, and so we pivoted upward. So much earth had been dislodged by the vibrations from the battering-ram that a cavity had opened in the roof. Davus jammed his feet and elbows against the edges of the cavity, kept hold of me, and somehow maintained his grip on his wildly flickering taper, all at once.
Davus had exhibited great strength and extraordinary reflexes before. Still, to have acted so quickly and surely in the face of such sudden, overwhelming catastrophe seemed more than human. What god had seen fit to save me this time?
When he managed to catch a breath, Davus whispered, “We’re alive. I can’t believe it.”
But for how long? I thought, staring at the dark, turbid water beneath us. “Davus, I think you can let go of me now.”
He released his grip. I slid gently into the water. My feet found the bottom. Standing on tiptoes, stretching my neck, I was able to keep my chin just above the waterline. The cavity in the roof offered the only escape from the water. In finding its equilibrium, the flood had left us this isolated pocket of air.
Something solid but yielding bumped against my ankle. I shuddered, knowing it was human flesh.
Davus slowly, carefully extricated himself from the cavity. The trick was to keep his taper lit and above the waterline. His feet dropped with a splash that sent water into my nostrils. I sputtered and blinked. An instant later Davus was standing beside me, holding his taper safely aloft. His helmet grazed the top of the cavity.
As the shock of the catastrophe began to subside, and with it the thrill of having survived, I began to realize what a terrible pass we had come to. We had escaped one death only to face another, even more horrible. The men who were swept away and drowned at least died suddenly and without dread.
I cursed myself. Why had I come? I had known it was madness when I saw the tunnel entrance before me. Why had I allowed Davus to come with me? I had made a widow of my only daughter. Massilia had already claimed Meto. Now it would claim the two of us as well.
“The bottom of this taper is wet,” said Davus. “It won’t stay lit much longer.”
That would be even more dreadful: to be plunged into utter darkness, buried alive like a condemned Vestal with no hope of rescue.
I suddenly realized that the booming of the battering-ram had ceased. Word of the inundation must have reached Trebonius. The invasion by tunnel had failed. The operation had been canceled. The siege tower with the battering-ram had been rolled back from the walls. In the world above us, the battle was over.
“What happened, fatherin-law? The flooding, I mean.”
“I don’t know. The Massilians must have known about the tunnel, or guessed. Perhaps they dug a reservoir inside the wall, an inner moat. They’d have had to pump water from the harbor to fill it, but they have engineers for that, every bit as clever as Vitruvius. When the sappers finally broke through, the water rushed in. It probably killed every man in the tunnel.”
“Except you and me.”
“Yes,” I said grimly.
“What are we going to do, fatherin-law?”
Die, I thought. Then I looked in his eyes and felt a jolt. Davus had not asked the question idly. He was looking to me for an answer. He was fearful, but not despairing. He truly expected to live because, as always, his wise old fatherin-law would think of something. Davus’s strength and reflexes had just saved our lives. Now it was my turn to return the favor.
“How long can you hold your breath?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“Long enough to swim from here to the end of the tunnel?”
“We’re going to swim out?”
“We can hardly walk.”
“Back the way we came?”
I shook my head. “Too far. The opening inside Massilia must be closer.”
“But what if it’s blocked? I heard timbers breaking. If the earth gave way—”
“If there’s an obstruction, we’ll simply have to get past it, won’t we?”
Davus thought about this and nodded. By the light of the wavering flame, I studied his perfectly chiseled nose, his bright eyes, and strong chin. My daughter had found him handsome despite his simple nature, and without my consent he had became the father of my grandchild. Curious, I thought, that of all the faces in the world, his should be the last I would ever see. Stranger still, that I should find myself faced with drowning in a hole beneath the earth. Drowning was the death I had always most feared, and the one I had least expected to encounter on this day, in this place.
I was a poor swimmer. Davus might have the lungs and the strength to swim to safety, but did I?
“When shall we try it?” he asked.
It would be hard to abandon the safety of the cavity as long as there was light from the taper. But if we waited until the taper burned out and we were plunged into utter darkness, I might lose my nerve, along with all sense of direction. “‘It’s like pulling a thorn…’” I quoted.
“‘Quickly done is best done,’” said Davus, finishing the proverb. “I should go first, in case there’s something blocking the way.”
“A good idea,” I granted. If I went first, and my lungs and strength gave out, I would merely block Davus’s way. “We should take off our armor. Too heavy. Here, I’ll hold the taper while you take off yours. Turn around. I’ll help you with the straps.” When he was done, I handed back the taper and set to unbuckling my own armor. Keeping my head above water while reaching down to remove the greaves protecting my shins was hardest. Davus held my shoulder with one strong arm.
“What about our swords?” he said.
I touched the scabbard at my waist. “We might need them. To cut through something,” I added. The thought terrified me.
“And our helmets?” he said.
“We should keep them on. Protect our heads. Who knows what we might swim into?”
He nodded. The taper was growing dimmer.
I felt a thickness in my throat. “Davus, we’ve been through a lot together. At Brundisium, you saved my life—”
“I thought you saved mine!” he said, and grinned. Not for Davus any last-minute, sentimental farewells.
“We’ll talk about it later,” I said, “after we’re out of this mess. Do you think they’ll still have wine at the taverns in Massilia, or will they have run out because of the blockade? I’m thirsty.”
Davus seemed not to hear. He thrust out his jaw and narrowed his eyes. “Are you ready, fatherin-law?”
I tried to draw a deep breath, but my chest was tight, as if circled by an iron band. I swallowed hard. “Ready.”
Davus handed me the taper. Our eyes met for an instant, then he turned and disappeared beneath the surface. Before I could reconsider, I sucked in a breath and tossed the taper into the water.
There was a brief hiss, then instant and total darkness. I closed my eyes and ducked beneath the surface. I stroked with my arms, kicked with my feet. Briefly I had a terrifying illusion of propelling myself into an endless black void. Then my outstretched fingers brushed against the sides of the tunnel. I swam blindly forward, using the walls of the tunnel to guide me.
Something cold touched my face, then seemed to slither snakelike against my chest and belly. I grabbed at the thing to thrust it away, but instead became locked in a strange embrace of hard metal and yielding flesh. I was puzzled at first, then horrified. It was the body of a soldier. I recoiled, but his limbs were tangled around me. I thrashed madly until the corpse released me, then swam frantically forward.
The way was clear. My heart boomed in my ears and my lungs felt as if they might burst, but the swimming was effortless. I stroked and kicked, and began to think that escape might be possible after all.
Then my helmet struck something hard. I was dazed. I reached up to feel the jagged stump of a broken rafter above me, sharp as a javelin. What if the way ahead was ringed with broken timbers? I imagined Davus, bigger than I, even more vulnerable, impaled on a spike, thrashing, bleeding, helpless, blocking the way, ma
king it impossible for me to get past him. The image was so real that for an instant I thought of turning back. But that was impossible. I could never hope to find the pocket of air again, not in absolute darkness.
I froze, too frightened to go on, too frightened to turn back. I lost my nerve completely. Spots of light danced before my eyes and became faces in the darkness. They were the anonymous faces of the dead all around me, receding to infinity.
Time stopped. The pressure in my lungs overwhelmed everything else, even panic. I kicked with my feet, stroked with my arms, and swam blindly, as hard as I could, heedless of the danger. I swam so fast I caught up with Davus. His foot kicked my helmet. In desperation I imagined grabbing his leg and pulling myself past him, swimming ahead of him, breaking through to the surface.
On the next stroke, where my fingertips should have touched the guiding walls, there was nothing. The sides of the tunnel were suddenly gone.
I opened my eyes. Up ahead I saw a faint, watery light. Between me and the light, Davus loomed in foreshortened silhouette. I saw him stop and turn about, like wing-footed Mercury suspended in midair. He reached back. I held out my hand. Davus gripped it.
My strength had given out. Somehow Davus knew. With one arm stroking, he pulled me up, up, up toward a growing circle of light. For an instant I saw the world of light and air as a fish might see it, peering up from a pond. Seen through the water, the men who stood at the edge peering down at us were wavering and elongated. Their bright garments flickered like multicolored flames.
An instant later I broke the surface. The light hurt my eyes. I sucked in a long, inverted scream. Ahead of me, Davus collapsed, half in the water and half out, heaving and gasping. I crawled past him, desperate to be clear of the water completely. I rolled onto my back and shut my eyes, feeling warm sunshine on my face.
VI
I must have lost consciousness, but only for a moment. I slowly woke to a confusion of voices surrounding me, speaking Greek—men’s voices, old men, speaking on top of each other. The babble narrowed to an argument between two voices.
Last Seen in Massilia: A Novel of Ancient Rome Page 5
