The only light inside was what shone through the many gaps in the uneven walls, and it took a little while for his eyes to adjust. The building had a dirt floor, and in winter would have been cold and drafty, but it was comfortable enough for the Syracusan summer. About thirty men were within it, some of them lying very still on straw mattresses on the ground, but some, in leg irons, gathered together in little knots, talking or playing dice. Marcus made his way silently along the space between the cliff and the back of the shed, shielding his eyes from the light to preserve their adjustment to the dimness and checking each prisoner in turn, but it was soon clear that none of them was Gaius.
He waited until both the guards at the shed door were facing into the building, watching the prisoners, then glided out from behind the wall of the first shed and crept on to the next. He found another gap in the planks and peered through it.
He spotted Gaius at once, about halfway along the shed and on his own side of it, lying on his back on a mattress with his injured arm across his chest. Marcus made his way noiselessly along the side of the shed toward his brother. He could hear the guards at the door beyond talking, and his skin prickled with tension. He told himself that even if they did notice him, he could explain himself by saying he was simply curious to see the prisoners. But his skin prickled anyway. It was not really the guards he was afraid of.
When he had reached Gaius he knelt in silence for several minutes, inches away behind the thin planking, watching through a crack. Gaius was awake, his eyes open and staring darkly at the ceiling. His tunic was loose about his waist, and his chest was wrapped in bandages.
Marcus tapped lightly on the wall. Gaius' head turned slowly, and their eyes met.
Gaius sat up, bracing himself against the wall, trying to see more of his brother than showed through the crack. 'Marcus?' he whispered. 'Is it really you?'
'Yes,' whispered Marcus. He was trembling again. The Latin word, sic, tasted strange in his mouth. For a long time he had spoken Latin only in his dreams, and to use it now made him feel that he was dreaming still.
'Marcus!' repeated Gaius. 'I thought you were dead. I thought you died at Asculum!' On his right, his neighbor looked around at the raised voice, though the man on his left was asleep.
'Softly!' hissed Marcus. 'Don't look at me; the guards may notice. Just sit with your back to me and keep your voice down. Right. Now, I've got some things for you-'
'What are you doing here?' whispered Gaius, sitting stiffly against the wall with his back to his brother. 'What are you doing alive?'
'Being a slave,' replied Marcus flatly. The man to Gaius' right was still listening, he noticed. He was not looking any more than Gaius was, but the expression on his face showed that he was listening intently. He was a lean, thin, dark man with something dangerous-looking about him; his head was bandaged, but he didn't seem to be otherwise injured, and his feet were imprisoned in irons.
'How?' demanded Gaius in a furious whisper. 'Nobody was enslaved at Asculum! King Pyrrhus returned all his prisoners without ransom.'
'He returned all his Roman prisoners,' Marcus corrected him. 'The other Italians were offered for ransom, and if nobody ransomed them, they were sold. There were a couple thousand people enslaved, Gaius. Not 'nobody' by any…' He found he could not remember the Latin for 'reckoning' and fumbled to a halt.
'No Romans!' Gaius pointed out angrily.
'One at least,' said Marcus bitterly. 'Gaius, don't be stupid. If nobody told you what happened, you must have guessed. I deserted my post in battle. I was frightened, and I ran.'
Gaius gave a jerk of pain. Roman did not desert their posts. A Roman who did would be beaten to death by his comrades. Even at Asculum, where the legions had tasted defeat at the hands of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, most of the Roman troops had been so afraid of the punishment for flight that they resisted to the death, and made Pyrrhus' victory so expensive that it cost him his campaign.
'Our square broke,' said Marcus bluntly, 'and most of the men died. I knew that the survivors would list me as one of the ones who ran. So after the battle I said I was just an allied Latin, or a Sabine or a Marsian, or anything except a Roman. I wasn't returned, and of course nobody ransomed me. I was sold to a Campanian, a vulture who was following the war about picking up scraps, and he sold me to a private citizen here in Syracuse.'
'Oh, gods and goddesses!' whispered Gaius.
'It's what I chose,' said Marcus in a harsh voice. 'I wanted to live.'
There was a long, wretched silence, a silence fully as bad as anything Marcus had imagined beforehand. There was nothing either of them could say. He had preferred life as a slave to death as a Roman, and for that there was neither condolence nor excuse.
'How are things at home?' he asked at last.
'Mother died eight years ago,' said Gaius. 'Valeria married Lucius Hortensius and has three daughters. The old man's still in charge at the farm, though his chest is bad.' He hesitated, then added quietly, 'I won't tell him you're alive.'
There was another silence. Marcus thought of his mother dead, his sister married, his father… his father would not learn of his disgrace. Good, good, good; the thought of the old man's rage still made him cringe inside. He wished that it were his father who was dead, that he could have gone back to his mother- and was ashamed of the thought.
'Thank you,' he said finally. 'I've come to help you. I've brought you some things.'
'Can you help me get out?'
It was exactly what Marcus had expected his brother to say, and he sighed. 'You're better off where you are, Gaius! The king'- he used the Greek title- 'wanted prisoners, and that means he wants an exchange for something. You'll be safest staying here until you're exchanged. And your arm's broken, isn't it?'
'My arm and my collarbone,' said Gaius flatly. 'And three of my ribs. Can you help me escape?'
'Was it a catapult?' asked Marcus unhappily. It seemed ridiculously important to know whether it was his own master's contrivance which had injured his brother.
'Yes, of course it was,' replied Gaius impatiently. 'May the gods destroy it!'
'What size?'
Gaius started to glance around, then remembered that he should not do this and leaned his head back against the wall. 'Marcus, all I noticed was that it hit me! There were catapult stones everywhere, and some of them were enormous. Why does it matter?'
Marcus didn't reply. 'I've brought you some money,' he said instead. 'If you put your left hand up against this crack I'll pass it through. Your guards will probably buy things for you, for a cut. It's twenty-three drachmae.'
'Twenty-three!' exclaimed Gaius in a strangled voice. 'How did you- Marcus, your master will notice it's missing!'
Marcus remembered suddenly how scarce silver coin was in Rome, remembered with a shock how his family had bartered for almost everything, and used the heavy bronze as for almost everything else. When he was sixteen, twenty-three drachmae would have seemed a fortune. It was plain that to Gaius it still did.
'It's my own money,' said Marcus. 'I've never stolen yet, though I will if I must to help you. This isn't as much as you think- a month's wages for a soldier. But it may be useful.'
Gauis set his hand against the crack, and Marcus fed the coins through. 'What are these?' whispered Gaius, watching the silver fall into his palm. 'They're… strange.'
'They're Egyptian,' replied Marcus. 'We spent a few years in Alexandria. Don't worry- they're the same weight as Syracusan, and people here will take them.'
Gaius said nothing, only stared at the silver, and Marcus remembered a time when Alexandria had been remote as the moon. It had ceased to seem that even before he visited it. At Syracuse one met ships from all over the Greek-speaking world, and he had grown used to the idea of traveling even before he'd traveled himself. But in central Italy people hadn't traveled much. Gaius had never traveledexcept, of course, with the army. He had enrolled in the legions for the Pyrrhic War, and had presumably gone home to the family farm afterward, enrolling again for the Sicilian campaign. Marcus was oppressed by confusion and disquiet. It was quite wrong that he, a slave and coward, should feel superior to his elder brother.
'I have a saw and a knife as well,' Marcus said, the confusion adding to the harshness in his voice. 'And a coil of rope, but I think they're better left out here. If you decide you want them, I'll hide them.' He did not really want to help Gaius escape- he sincerely believed that his brother was safest where he was- and yet he could not refuse to help. Besides, he could be wrong. The prisoners might yet be executed, or murdered by a Syracusan mob furious
