‘It’s because something terrible is comin’,’ Andrew said, interrupting the conversation suddenly. ‘Tha’s why people are actin’ all uncanny.’
All of the others turned and stared at their usually taciturn friend, who was now speaking in a tone of subdued yet authoritative clarity. His words brought an ominous silence rushing into the tent like water through a smashed dam wall.
‘What dae you mean, Andy?’ Michael asked warily.
‘Dae you lads no’ feel it?’
‘Feel what?’
‘Death.’
A gust of wind howled across the campground, almost extinguishing their fire and spraying the tents around them with eerie, twisting shadows.
‘Death?’ William asked, and as he said this the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck tingled with an eerie dread.
Andrew nodded with a twisted smile.
‘Aye. He walks among us this night. He’s countin’, y’see. Countin’ an’ makin’ lists, lists ay who he’s gonnae take tomorrow. I felt his sickle graze my neck in a dream last night. I felt it lads, an’ when I awoke in the middle ay the night, I saw him standin’ there in the tent wi’ us. The funny thing was, he doesnae look like how they paint him. He doesnae wear a black cloak, an’ he’s not no skeleton. No, see, he’s a really auld man wi’ a long, wispy white beard tha’ reaches down tae his feet. He was there in our tent last night, lads, writin’ our names in his book, this big, ancient tome. He smiled at me an’ laughed … an’ then he vanished.’
An uneasy chill scuttled across William’s skin, setting his nerve endings aflame with icy fire.
‘I also saw him while Will an’ Watty were fightin’,’ Andrew continued. ‘He was just strollin’ amidst the tents, writin’ an’ writin’ an’ writin’ in his book. He didnae stop tae watch the fight, so I knew tha’ Will would be safe from Watty.’
Another gust of wind whipped through the camp, rustling the tents with a furious beating and flapping, as if a flock of ghostly ravens was descending on the campground.
‘Well what about the rest ay us?’ Michael asked warily.
Andrew did not answer. Instead, he smiled strangely, and then went back to playing his guitar, while the others sat enshrouded in an eerie, dread-laden silence around the dying campfire.
PART ELEVEN
37
VIRIDOVIX
July, 78BC. Batiatus’s Ludus, outside Capua
The darkness was eternal and omnipresent, and more terrifyingly suffocating than anything Viridovix could ever have imagined. It swallowed him from the inside, welling up from the deepest pits of his bowels, filling his stomach and lungs and throat as it billowed upwards through his body. He breathed it out, breathed it in, soaked it up through the membrane of his skin and then sweated it out again as droplets of indelible ink, and he felt it burning his eyeballs like salt water, whether his eyes were open or closed.
It was all-consuming and inescapable, and it was the death of all things; the antithesis of life.
Down here, everything was dead.
Viridovix had no idea how long he had been kept in the tiny subterranean cell; it could have been hours, it could have been days. Time had ceased to crank its gears and pulleys in a linear pattern of motion; instead, it had followed the unpredictable and chaotic anarchy of a mosquito dying in mid-flight.
Viridovix could not sleep, but neither could he stay awake. Instead, his mind was suspended on the meniscus of a sea of semi-consciousness – not under the water, but not above it either – with the soul-destroying monotony punctuated only every once in a long while by a blinding shear of light when the heavy oaken door was opened, and a bowl of cold, gooey porridge was tossed in by unsympathetic hands.
Occasionally a rag soaked in vinegar was also thrown through the door – this was to keep Viridovix hydrated, but it was never enough, however dry he sucked it. Indeed, thirst and hunger were his only companions in this black, dank hell. In desperation he had tried licking the condensation from the damp stone walls, but it had tasted overpoweringly brackish and had given him severe stomach cramps.
He had soon had to become used to the stench and feel of his own urine and faeces; he had had no option but to soil himself in here, for there was neither a chamber pot nor a corner in which to relieve himself, and he did not even have the room to turn around or uncurl his body from a foetal position in this tiny, claustrophobic space.
Despite often drifting into a fitful sleep from sheer boredom and helplessness, the cold from the stone floor that seeped through his skin and burrowed deep into the marrow of his bones did not allow him to fall into any sort of restful slumber. Instead, his mind would be dogged with nightmares, and he would awaken with a jolting start, only to find himself stuck in as awful a hell as any his subconscious mind had conjured up behind the wall of sleep.
It was as he was in the midst of a nightmare, about being chased by the same gargantuan grey wolf yet again, that he was awoken by a drenching of icy water.
‘Your cell time is over, dog,’ a gruff voice announced.
The light pouring into the cell from the flaming torch brand was viciously bright, and it was all Viridovix could do to keep his eyes tightly shut against the acute pain it caused him.
‘Get ‘im out o’ there,’ someone said.
Rough hands hauled him out of the cell and dumped him on the rough stone.
‘Give ‘im a few moments for ‘is eyes to adjust. A blind gladiator is a dead gladiator, and we wouldn’t want the master’s investment to become useless before ‘e’s even set foot on the training ground. Oy, slave, you let me know when yer eyes feel a bit better, like, when you can open ‘em, right? Then we’ll get you upstairs an’ get
