At night, he would search out crevices in the rocks in which to build his lonely camp. A small fire and saddle blankets provided him with all the creature comforts he needed. The distant yapping of a desert jackal would punctuate his thoughts, and the isolation became almost a friend. He gathered it around him as he did his saddle blankets, often spending long hours sitting on a rise looking out over the panorama of deserts and mountains. The wind was shifting and the cooler nights spoke of the end of summer. More frequently now, clouds would gather and let loose in the distance some of their jealously hoarded, life-giving rain. The few times it rained where he was, the Roman would raise his face to the drops, letting them clean the grit from his eyes and face, making no attempt to seek shelter.
There, standing on a ridge in the rain, overlooking the edge of the world, he felt as if he were the only man left in all creation. Would he in fact be that one day? Would he be all that was left of mankind? Or would the Jew claim him before that time came?
He shook the thoughts away; they were much too complicated for his mind. It would be better if he used his time to try and find out who had been following him. He was sure now. The feelings were just too strong. He knew they were out there somewhere.
That night Casca made camp in the open. He could not take shelter among the rocks because the trail he had been following had swung out some distance from them. The day had been long. He made a dry camp and contented himself with what was available. That night he sat close to the fire, made of dried horse droppings and dead twigs from the surrounding brush. His mind was drifting, but he tried to keep one ear cocked for any sound that wasn't natural. The fire and a half-full gut, though, soon lulled him into a nodding sleep. It was a sleep that ended in a flash of lights and pain as a thrown club smashed into the back of his head, sending him down into darkness.
As consciousness slowly returned, he wondered why the constellation of the Hunter whirled so rapidly in the heavens. It took a moment to shake his head free of the flashing, whirling lights and let it settle down into a deep throbbing, reminding him of several really bad hangovers he'd had over the years.
He got his first look at the new owners of his horses and property. They were two wild, scabby looking creatures with dark, weathered faces and coal-chip eyes that gave them the look of the Asian.
Small in size, their hair hanging in knotted masses to their waists, they grinned at him through black, gapped teeth that had been worn down almost to the gums from years of eating sand mixed in with their food. One was playing with Casca's sword while the other grinned a slant-eyed, death's-head leer at his trussed-up captive.
The smaller of the two gave him a kick and turned his attention to devouring everything remaining in the saddle bags that was edible. Their speech, if it could be called that, was mostly a series of grunts and gestures. They quickly got into an argument over the spoils, meager as they were, though to them it was a great treasure.
From the gestures they were making and the repeated looks in his direction, Casca figured that they were trying to decide what to do with him. One kept pointing to him and then to the small stack of silver and copper coins they had taken from his pack. The smaller of them obviously was trying to talk the other into selling him into slavery. His companion shook his head in the negative and made slashing movements with the short sword. The one holding his sword went to Casca, gave him a kick in the side, and pulled the Roman up to His feet by the hair, poking and jabbing him with the sword point. The other came over and the two were quickly involved in a game of tug of war over the sword.
Casca figured he'd better do something. The idea of being sold back into slavery didn't particularly appeal to him. He'd already, to his thinking, spent entirely too many years in that miserable condition and didn't look forward to a repeat performance.
Though his hands were bound behind him with leather thongs, his feet were free, and he made good use of them. While the two were determining his fate, he gave one a snap kick to the balls that raised the savage's testicles almost up to his belly button. The other suffered a milder fate with a heel to the jaw that splintered a few already rotted teeth and probably saved him from a future toothache.
While the two thieves were wrapped up in their own problems, Casca made use of the time to free himself from his bonds, nicking himself only slightly in the process of handling a sword behind his back.
When the two were able to motivate under their own power, he sped them on their way with a few well- placed slaps on the ass from the flat of his blade. The two men wasted no time in putting as much distance as possible between them and what was to have been their victim. Casca gave his first laugh in weeks at the sight of the bobbing heads heading for the high ground.
The action of the attack and its subsequent outcome served to break him out of the dangerous, mind- drugging lethargy that had been creeping over him. He was wide awake and ready for some living. Gathering his gear, he mounted his horse and with a kick to the flanks headed back into the wastelands, but this time his blood was racing and alive. There was a world to see, and, thanks to the Jew, he had what looked to be more than enough time to do it all. By the great brass balls of Jupiter, he would try.
Three more days and he reached the first signs of civilization. He came upon neat rows of cultivated fields and groves of olive trees. He spent a few scarce denarii for fresh meat and grain. After eating, he questioned the farmers and found that he had gone in a long half circle to the South and was now near the city of Aphrodisias.
He had heard of the city. It was well known throughout the empire as an artists colony, whose sculptures were to be seen in the finer domus of the empire. The city, as was obvious, was named for its patron goddess, Aphrodite, goddess of love and artists.
The farmers told him the city boasted of having the most liberal attitude toward sex of any in the empire, and also claimed to have more homosexuals to the square foot than any city in the world.
He spent four days in the city lying on his butt and taking it easy. He didn't have sufficient silver for the more plush boardinghouses, but after selling one of his horses he did have enough to raise a little hell and get laid a couple of times. He had some minor luck with dice, playing against Arab traders heading for Bithynia and won enough to cover the expense for part of the trip. He paid for the rest of it by renting out his sword as a guard for the caravan of Izmael Ben Torzah, a hawk-nosed old patriarch of the desert who looked like some great graying bird of prey, riding over the desert on his horse with his white robes flying loose about him in the wind.
The old man had taken a liking to the scar-faced Roman. When they were to leave the fleshpots of Aphrodisias, he went to the trouble of locating Casca and liberating him from the attentions of a widow, who was interested in having his knotted, muscled body carved into a likeness of marble. It would have been something new in the art field. It would have been called stark realism, since Casca was not one of the pretty boys of the Greek school but a real man with all his bad points-and, as she said when examining him in the nude, also his one good point.
Izmael paid the protesting woman no heed as he threw the half-naked and drunk carcass of his new guard over the back of one of his pack animals and rode off to join his caravan, already far outside the city and heading north.
When Casca finally sobered up, he wasn't sure whether to be grateful or not. He was sure he could have had a fairly decent existence as a male model. Hell, he had been getting into the thing. Learning to pose and twist his body into awkward positions while the matron supervised the sculpture. Too bad he had had to leave before it was finished. But what the hell, maybe another tune.
After a little time passed, he realized that the life of a male model wasn't really what he was cut out for and forgave Izmael for hauling him off-especially when Izmael, himself feeling somewhat contrite, let Casca grade and sample the eight slave girls he was taking to the markets in Bithynia. On a scale of one to ten, two of them were threes, and the best one he gave an eight. The others fit somewhere in the middle. But all in all, they served their purposes well enough.
Casca didn't make it all the way with the caravan. When they stopped at Halicamassus, on the coast, he got drunk with some sailors and woke up to find he had signed on as a crewman. The creaking of the timbers brought him staggering to the upper deck of the bireme, where he emptied the remains of the previous night's revelry into the Mediterranean. Being a fatalist, he reconciled himself to the change in his mode of travel. As long as they didn't try to chain him to an oar, he was as well pleased as could be expected.
The captain was fair and the food not too bad. They were carrying an amphora of grain and olive oil as well as hauling precut slabs of marble to be used as facings for public buildings in Rome. These they used as ballast to settle down the tendency of the galley to pitch and roll.
When they finally put into the port of Ostia, he chose to stay on board rather than take the time to visit the
