delay me for interminable chats. I ate cheese and hard biscuit; I drank mountain stream water. I washed if I felt like it, or not if I felt perverse. I shaved myself, never a success. It was worse than the army. I was surly, solitary, famished and chaste.
In the end I realized Quadratus was not bothering with the smaller individual mines. Only the big show would do for the famous Tiberius; he must have gone straight to the huge silver mine with its complex of hundreds of shafts let to numerous contractors, which lay at the far eastern end of the mountain range. He probably traveled by way of the river road, and stayed in decent mansios. Still, he would not be as desperate as I was, and he lacked the verve and efficiency to cover as much ground. I might yet head him off.
It was a cheering hope. It kept me going for half a day. Then I knew I had to face the kind of scene I had sworn to avoid forever, and I felt myself break into a sweat.
It was the smell that turned my stomach first. Even before the appalling sights, that sour odor of slaves in their filth made me want to retch. Hundreds worked here. Convicted criminals who would slog it out until they died; it was a short life.
I could hardly bear to enter the place, remembering how I too once labored to hew out lead-bearing rocks with inadequate tools on a pitiful diet amidst the most sordid cruelty. Chained; flogged; cursed; tortured. The hopelessness of knowing there was no relief from the work and no chance of escape. The lice. The scabs. The bruising and the beatings. That overseer, the worst man I had ever met, whose mildest thrill was buggery, and his biggest triumph watching a slave die in front of him.
I was a free man now. I had been free then-only enslaved from choice and for an honorable motive, though there are no grades of degradation on a chain gang in a silver mine. Now I stepped down from a sturdy horse, a self-assured man with position in the world. I had rank. I had a formal commission with an imperial pass to prove it. I had a wonderful woman who loved me and I was fathering a little citizen. I was somebody. The mine perimeter was guarded, but when I announced myself I was called 'legate' and provided with a polite guide. Yet when that smell hit my gut I was nearly thrown back to three years ago. If I relaxed, I would be a trembling wreck.
I was led through a busy township in the shadow of mountains of slag. As we passed the cupellation furnaces, the smog and the ceaseless dints of the hammers left me almost demented. I seemed to feel the ground trembling under my boots. I was told how here the shafts reached over six hundred feet deep. The tunnels chased seams of silver underground for between three and four thousand feet. Deep down below my feet the slaves worked, for it was daylight. There are rules. No mine may work at night. You have to be civilized.
Below ground there would be huge polished mirrors to reflect the bright sunlight from above; beyond the reach of the sun the slaves carried clay lamps with vertical handles. Their shift lasted until the lamps ran out; never soon enough. The lamps used up the air and filled the tunnels with smoke. Amongst this smoke the slaves toiled to free the lumps of ore, then carried the backbreaking weight of esparto bucketfuls on their shoulders in a human chain. Up and down from the galleries, using short ladders. Pushing and shoving in lines like ants. Coughing and perspiring in the dark. Relieving themselves when they had to, right there in the galleries. Near-naked men who might never see daylight for weeks on end. Some endlessly trudged treadmills on the huge water-wheels that drained the deepest shafts. Some struggled to prop up the galleries. All of them coming a little closer every day to an inevitable death.
'Stunning, isn't it?' inquired my guide. Oh yes. I was stunned.
We came to the procurator's office. It was manned by a whole battery of supervisory staff. Men with flesh on their bodies and clothes on their backs. Clean-skinned, well-shaven men who sat at tables telling jokes. They picked up their salaries and enjoyed their lives. Visiting overseers cursed and complained as they took their breaks above ground, while they boasted about pacifying new convicts and keeping the old hands at their hard work. The supervising engineers, silent men scribbling inventive diagrams, worked out new and astonishing achievements to be turned into reality underground. The geometrists, who were responsible for finding and evaluating the seams of silver, completed dockets in between putting their feet up and telling the most obscene stories.
It was a room where people constantly came and went; nobody took any notice of a newcomer. Arcane discussions were going on, occasionally heated though more often businesslike. Huge movements of ore and endless shipments of ingots were being organized through this office. A small army of contractors was being regulated here, in order to provide a vital contribution to the Treasury. The atmosphere was one of rough and ready industry. If there was corruption it could be scandalous and on a massive scale, as I had proved in another province. But we had had a new emperor for two years since then, and somehow I doubted that more than harmless fiddling went on here. The profits were enough to cushion greed. The importance of the site ensured that only the best staff appointments were approved. There was an unmistakable aura of watchfulness from Rome.
It did not include supervision by the quaestor, apparently.
'Oh yes, Quadratus was here. We gave him the grand sightseeing tour.'
'What?
'You know the score!' the procurator beamed admiringly. 'Then we bluffed him with a few graphs and figures, and booted him out to Castulo.'
'When was this?'
'Yesterday.'
'I should catch up with him, then.'
'Want to look around our system first?'
'Love to-but I need to get on.' I managed to make my refusal sound polite. Seen one, you've seen them all.
Castulo would be a day's ride away. Quadratus himself had told me his father had interests there, in the tight little mining society which had tied up all the mineral rights for a radius of twenty miles or more. The mining sites were smaller than here, but the area was important. Some of the wealthiest men in Hispania were making their fortunes at Castulo.
I nearly escaped without incident. I had left the office and was looking for my guide. Apparently he worked on the principle that if he got you in, you could find your own way out while he sloped off for a gossip with a friend.
Then a man came towards me. I recognized him immediately, though he did not know me. A big, shapeless bully, just as sly as he was merciless. He seemed heavier than ever, and shambled with even more threat in his ugly gait. His name was Cornix. He was the slave overseer who had once made a habit of singling me out for torture. In the end he had nearly killed me. Of all the pig-ignorant debauched thugs in the Empire he was the last man I would ever wish to see.
I could have walked right by him; he would never have realized that we had met before. I could not help my start of recognition. Then it was too late.
'Well! Well! If it isn't Chirpy!' The nickname froze my blood. And Cornix was not intending me any favors when he leered, 'I've not forgotten I owe you one!'
SIXTY-THREE
He had two beats of time to reduce me to a jelly, but he missed his chance. After that it was my turn.
I had made a bad mistake with Cornix once: I had escaped his clutches and publicly humiliated him. The mere fact I was alive today was because in my time as a slave I had continually outwitted him. Since I had been shackled, starved, despairing, and close to dying at the time, it was all the more commendable.
'I'm going to smash in your head,' he told me, in the same old sickening croak. 'And after that, we'll really have some fun!'
'Still the tender-hearted giant! Well, well, Cornix… Who let you out of your cage?'
'You're going to die,' he glowered. 'Unless you've got a girl to rescue you again?'
