Saviour of Rome [Gaius Valerius Verrens 7] (20 page)

He remembered Serpentius speaking about the hidden glories of his bleak Spanish homeland, the soaring mountains and the fertile valleys. He wondered how he would have reacted had he looked upon what Valerius had just seen. It gave him some satisfaction to imagine the
Spaniard ripping out Nepos’s guts and strangling him with the coils.

That thought sustained him as they travelled east through a tortured landscape riven with great chasms and cut by streams of vile liquid that looked like the run-off from an abattoir. Eventually they came to a hillside and a shelf of land scattered with odd-shaped mounds that, on closer inspection, turned out to be spoil heaps. A line of men staggered towards one of the mounds bowed beneath the weight of the large baskets they carried, before returning more lightly burdened to what looked like the mouth of a cave. Meanwhile other workers wielded picks to extend some kind of rock-cut channel towards the entrance.

‘The mine,’ Nepos confirmed. He craned his neck to study the mountainside. Valerius followed his gaze to a sluice gate several hundred paces above them. ‘Yes, they are making the final preparations for the release,’ the tunnel manager said. ‘Wait here and I will ensure we are given time enough for you to be shown round the workings.’ He turned his horse and urged it towards a track that wound up the steep slope.

‘How did you explain to Nepos why I want to inspect the mine?’ Valerius asked Aurelio.

‘I didn’t. All I did was show him the warrant from the prefect of mines and that was it. Believe me, you don’t cross Licinius Ferox, not if you’re fond of life.’

‘There seem to be a lot of people in Asturica Augusta a man shouldn’t cross,’ Valerius said wryly.

‘It’s that kind of place— Stand still, you bastard.’ The other man curbed his fidgeting horse. ‘A frontier town like those settlements that grow up outside our forts on the Danuvius. A man can get rich if he’s not too scrupulous and prepared to get his hands dirty, but tread on the wrong toes and there’s always someone who’s willing to stick a knife in your ribs for a bent
denarius
.’

‘That sounds reassuring.’

Aurelio grinned, but his face quickly turned sombre and he nodded towards the mine entrance. ‘Do you know what you’re in for down there?’

‘I’ve been in a few black holes.’ Valerius remembered with a shiver
the damp, slippery foulness of Hezekiah’s Conduit beneath Jerusalem.

‘Not like this one.’ Aurelio’s pale features twisted with distaste, but Nepos’s return silenced anything else he was going to say.

‘We have two hours.’ The mine manager pushed his horse past Valerius and set it on the path to the entrance. ‘So we must hurry. There is much to see.’

They dismounted by the entrance where four workers laboured at a massive bellows attached to a leather pipe a foot in diameter. Nepos picked up a short pole resembling a centurion’s vine stick. He called to one of the men carrying an empty basket to hold the horses, and another to fetch an oil lamp. When it was lit the man led the way inside, with Nepos following. Valerius waited for Aurelio, but the guide shook his head and glanced at the black portal. It was perhaps two and a half paces wide and just high enough to allow a tall man to pass without bending his neck. ‘You’re not getting me down there. I’ll wait for you here.’

He walked off and Valerius hurried after Nepos into the ill-lit tunnel. He noticed the engineer took care to keep close to the right-hand wall, allowing room for the filthy, grunting creatures who passed them going the other way. The leather pipe twitched like a living thing every time the bellows were pumped and Valerius guessed it carried fresh air to the lower reaches of the mine. It was certainly needed. The smell of damp and sweat mixed with the smoke of the oil lamps that occupied niches in the wall every ten paces was thick enough to choke a man in the confined space. Even this was overwhelmed by the sewer stink of freshly evacuated human shit. Clearly the workers were expected to defecate where they stood when the need came upon them. Valerius had to stifle the urge to add his vomit to the vile mix.

‘This is a diagonal shaft.’ The echo from the streaming rock walls gave Nepos’s voice a metallic ring. ‘But other mines have vertical shafts which you have to negotiate by ladder. The conditions there are much worse.’

Worse? Twenty paces in and Valerius could feel the sweat running down his back beneath his tunic. The ragged miners who passed him
with their enormous baskets of stone were so sunk in their own eternal misery that none would meet his eyes. They had a habit of coughing, hawking and spitting and he grimaced at the dampness he could feel seeping its way through the iron-shod soles of his sandals.

‘Faster, you dog.’ Nepos lashed out with his stick at a man who was struggling to put one foot in front of the other. ‘See,’ he looked over his shoulder at Valerius. ‘Did I not tell you they were lazy?’

They passed a side chamber where a group of workers were chipping away at the walls with picks.

‘They are extracting what they can from a seam before we release the flood.’ Nepos stopped for a moment to allow Valerius to see what was happening. ‘All the gold that can be dug by hand is removed by traditional methods and the ore carried away for smelting. It is only when we reach this stage we begin the preparations for
ruina montium.
We call it honeycombing. Many tons of soil and rock are excavated in a way that creates thin-walled chambers and weakens the interior of the hill. It is a very precise business. Take away too little and the operation will fail. Take away too much and the tunnels will collapse, crushing everyone inside.’

Valerius glanced at the roof above his head, expecting to see cracks. Did he see cracks? ‘Has there ever been an accidental release from the sluices?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Nepos admitted. ‘But fortunately it doesn’t happen often.’

‘What happened to the people inside the mine?’ He had a feeling he knew the answer, but Nepos surprised him.

‘All we found of a hundred men were a few scraps of flesh and slivers of bone.’ Despite the admission Nepos looked supremely untroubled. The tunnel manager turned off into another side chamber, with further smaller chambers off it, in a fan shape. ‘The chambers here have been completed,’ he said. ‘We are doing the last of the work on the lower levels, close to the face of the hill.’

They continued until they came to a vertical shaft with a pair of ladders, one for descent and the other for ascent. Nepos turned to Valerius. ‘This is where we go down.’ He looked at Valerius’s wooden fist as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Will you …?’

‘I can do it,’ Valerius assured him. Reaching for the ladder with his good hand, he swung himself on to the upper rungs and hooked his right arm around the upright. It took no time to reach the floor. He noticed that the basket bearers had thinned out and guessed the work must be almost completed.

‘Nothing to see on this level.’ The rotund tunnel manager descended the next ladder with surprising agility and beckoned Valerius to follow. ‘We have completed the chambers, as you can see. Unless … Yes. If you’ll follow me.’ Nepos led the way through a long tunnel until the oil lamp showed a flat wall covered in pick marks that stood out stark and white against a blackened surface. ‘This is what delayed us,’ Nepos said in a voice tinged with frustration and regret. ‘A block of solid quartzite, unbreakable despite being subject to fire quenched by vinegar. The method is normally good for the hardest of rocks. We lost three men to the fumes before we decided on
ruina
.’

They descended another ladder and Valerius followed the engineer’s retreating back along a tunnel that sloped gently downwards for about fifty paces. Halfway along he heard the sound of picks. He was bemused to feel a draught on the back of his neck and he looked up to see a circular shaft perhaps the length of his arm in diameter.

Nepos saw his puzzlement. ‘This far from the entrance the air is virtually unbreathable even with the help of the air pipe, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Yet because of the shape of the hill we are not too far from the surface. We bored a narrow conduit down to meet this pipe cut by the workers.’

‘But how …?’

The mine manager’s face took on a look of smug complacency. ‘For a man who can trisect an angle it is nothing to work out how to make two straight lines meet at a single point. Now, we haven’t much time.’ He led the way towards the end of the tunnel. ‘The final decision is mine, but I have been assured the work is almost complete.’

Five chambers, each containing four or five men wielding picks. Nepos entered the nearest.

‘Enough,’ he ordered. The men stopped working and slumped to
the floor. Valerius noticed something different about them. Apart from their heavy beards and haunted, exhausted features, what made them stand out was their truly foul and ragged appearance and the fetters fixed to their ankles and wrists.

‘I thought you told me there were no slaves in the mines.’

‘These men are not slaves,’ Nepos corrected. ‘They are the Lost. Condemned prisoners who work at the lowest level and never leave the mine until it is worked out. If I am correct these men will soon see the light of day for the first time in six months.’ He studied the far wall of the chamber for a few moments before putting his ear to the rock and tapping the wall with his knuckle. Valerius watched in puzzlement as he repeated the exercise in each of the chambers, muttering to himself and nodding his head. Suddenly he turned with a beaming smile. ‘We are ready.’

Serpentius had been assigned the place of honour to the right of Valuta, the clan chief, as they shared meat from the great bronze cauldron in the traditional fashion. They were surrounded by the
castro
’s elders, and Tito, who seemed to have some kind of special status in the clan. He sat directly opposite Serpentius and the dark eyes smouldered with hatred as he listened to the words of the man who claimed to be his father.

‘Look beyond my years,’ Serpentius urged the elders. ‘See the man who was, not the man who sits before you. How can he be other than my seed? He is swifter in thought and action than anyone in these mountains, as his father Barbaros was. His skill with weapons is bettered by none. His greatest weakness is that he allows his anger to rule him,’ he lowered his eyes, ‘like his father before him.’

A long pause as he stared into the flames of the fire.

‘That day lives in my memory more than any I suffered in Roman chains. That hour more than any hour I spent waiting to enter the arena knowing my life could be forfeit before it ended.’ He looked up and turned to the man next to him. ‘You were right, Valuta, I brought the Romans down upon Avala. In my pride I believed we were untouchable; that our remoteness was protection enough. I did not understand what
they were capable of. That they believe themselves invincible. No cliff is too difficult to traverse, no river too wide to cross, or mountain too high to climb. Even if they came I believed I could protect us with my strength and my skills. I was a fool and I acknowledge my responsibility.’ He shook his head. ‘But I did not abandon you.’

Tito snorted his contempt for the words and leaned across the fire, but the elder on his left placed a hand on his arm and the young man withdrew.

‘You are angry.’ Serpentius spoke directly to the man who was his son. ‘I too would have been angry. I too would want to kill the father who made an orphan of me, even though I was not an orphan. But I did not abandon you, Tito.’

Tito turned away, but Serpentius was driven by an urge to unburden himself in a way he’d never felt before. He spoke in a detached, emotionless tone that placed a barrier between the man and the events he related.

‘The first we knew was the cry of a nightjar. I knew instantly that something was wrong, for it was not the nightjar of these mountains. Then came another cry. The cry of a man who knows he is dying. It was Pedrito, one of our bravest, and the sentry who stood watch at the valley entrance. I rose naked, armed only with a spear, and my wife Lyda begged me not to leave her alone with our son’ – again Tito let out a snort of rage but Serpentius ignored him – ‘but I did not listen. My responsibility was to the
castro
. I told Lyda to take Tito north to the hidden place where our clan always find sanctuary. So I went to meet them, calling out a warning and taking with me what men emerged from the huts as I went. The Romans had torches. I had never seen so many torches. They were like fireflies in the night, to the right, to the left and in front. It was here they were concentrated and here I counted on taking out their heart even if it cost my life. I screamed the war cry of my people and charged them.’ For a moment the barrier was breached and a groan escaped him at the memory. ‘How we fought them. Our warriors died one by one, their souls sent to the gods by sword and spear. Again and again we charged.’ Serpentius’s hand
twitched on his sword as he fought the battle once more. ‘But they would not give a single pace. Instead, they pushed us back to the
castro.
In the end I was alone and surrounded. I fended off blade after blade, but a man’s arm must tire and his strength must fade. By now the
castro
was burning and the heat of the flames seared my skin.’ He felt a tear roll down his grizzled cheek and knew that his tone was a lie and the barrier an illusion. ‘I believed Lyda had fled to safety with my son. My last wish was to go to the gods with the blood of one more Roman on my spear point. Then I heard her scream. I looked round and the house was on fire. The doorway a curtain of flame. She screamed again and I forgot the fight and the Romans. My only thought was to save my family. Before I could move the world turned red, then black, and I believed I was dead.’

‘Yes, that is how it was,’ Valuta nodded. ‘And you are Barbaros the Proud. I see it now through the years and the suffering. I was guarding sheep with my son on the high pasture when they came,’ he continued in a flat voice. ‘We saw the torches streaming up the valley and the village burning. By the time we reached here it was already too late. All we could do was help those left alive to the Cave of Echoes. There we stayed for many days until the Romans left. When we returned, the Romans had stolen our animals, destroyed the crops and mutilated our dead.’