‘What do you think you’re doing? Have you all gone mad?’
‘Don’t worry, old man. No one will notice a thing. The wind is getting stronger and it’s blowing from the north. It will carry away the smoke and the smell.’
‘But why? What’s the point in risking your lives?’
‘The emperor of the Romans must have the funeral honours he deserves, or he cannot be taken in by the gods. His ashes must be delivered to the urn.’
‘Ashes are ashes!’ screamed Uxal. ‘You are crazy . . . crazy! You cannot believe this idiocy!’
‘You’ll see,’ replied Metellus.
The woodpile was ready and other branches had been inserted among the trunks to feed the flames. They had prepared a kind of makeshift crematorium and a little clay jar.
‘Give me the lantern,’ ordered Metellus.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it!’
‘Give it to me or I’ll throw you into that pit.’
‘Would you really be capable of doing that?’ asked Uxal, stunned.
‘Without a moment’s thought. The lantern . . .’ he repeated peremptorily, holding out his hand.
Uxal handed it over, shaking his head incredulously.
Metellus opened the lantern and poured the mineral oil it contained on to the branches, then held the wick flame close. The stack of wood caught fire immediately, stoked by the impetuous highland wind.
‘Men!’ shouted Metellus. ‘In formation!’
The two centurions divided the men into two columns, right and left of the pyre.
Metellus declaimed, emphasizing each word, ‘Honour to Licinius Valerianus Augustus, emperor of the Romans!’
The men raised their hands as if gripping the legion’s javelins and shouted out, ‘Honour!’
Uxal shook his head, disconcerted. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Just when things were promising to get better, when his able diplomacy was about to earn some small privileges for the group, this useless and absurd ceremony was going to ruin everything. ‘I’m getting out of here,’ he said loudly. ‘I’ll take no part in this craziness. You have no idea of what will happen to you if they find out.’
‘Go,’ replied Metellus. ‘We’ll be here for a while.’
Uxal turned on his heel and, when he arrived at camp, tried to slip back into the shack, but one of the guards spotted him.
‘Where are the others?’ he demanded.
‘The others? They’re coming. They’re still busy with all their prayers and conjurations. You know, there are all those religions in Rome and each one of them has to say something different. They’ll be here soon.’
The sun was peeping over the mountain crests and the wind changed direction, bringing a burning smell towards the camp.
‘But that’s . . .’ said the guard in alarm.
‘The sentries’ campfire. It’s so cold this morning,’ said Uxal, trying to distract the guard. But the man shoved him aside, sending him rolling to the ground, then ran off towards the gully. Uxal popped up and took off after him at a run, shouting, ‘Where are you going? There’s nothing going on down there. Stop!’
When the guard arrived the fire had abated and the embers were arranged in a rough circle. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.
‘He asked what you’re doing,’ translated Uxal, who had just drawn up, panting.
‘We’re just trying to get warm,’ replied Metellus. ‘We’ll be starting back now.’
The guard took a look at the men’s faces and knew they had something to hide. He poked the embers with the tip of his sword and saw a piece of half-burnt fabric, with something unmistakable attached to it. ‘You’ve burnt that corpse!’ he cried out. ‘You’ve profaned the fire, damn you all!’ He turned towards the camp and yelled out, ‘Hurry! Out here! Sacrilege!’
Metellus jumped on him to make him stop yelling and wrestled him to the edge of the crevasse.
‘No! What are you doing?’ cried Uxal, but the other guards, who had heard their comrade’s shouts, were already upon them and had the little group surrounded. There was nothing they could do. Metellus let go and got to his feet, panting.
‘He has nothing to do with this,’ said Metellus, pointing at Uxal. ‘It was us.’
‘He said I had nothing to do with this,’ translated the old man.
The guards closed in on them and chained them hand and foot, dragging them back to the centre of the camp.
‘What have you done?’ Uxal continued to moan. ‘I warned you. I told you not to do this . . . Now nothing and no one can save you.’
‘Quit your jabbering, old man,’ Quadratus shut him up. ‘If we have to die, we’ll die and get this whole farce finished with.’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ replied Uxal. ‘You have no idea of what you’re saying.’ He shivered inside at the thought of the tortures they’d be subjected to.
The head of the guards stepped forward and reviewed the chained prisoners one by one. When he was in front of Metellus, he stared into his eyes for a few moments and seemed to move on, but then spun around and struck him violently in the stomach with a club. Metellus bent in two with the pain and, before he had time to react, the jailer gave a sharp blow to the nape of his neck and he dropped to the ground.
When Metellus opened his eyes he saw an indistinct shape before him: a burning globe. As soon as he could focus he realized it was a red-hot branding iron and that the jailer was about to use it on his eyes. They were going to blind him.
In that instant, the awareness of the horror that awaited him unleashed all his remaining energy. He knew that the next few moments were all he had. Metellus yelled out with all the breath he had in his lungs and grabbed the burning iron with his bare hands, ripping it away from the jailer, who was taken totally unawares. He sent it circling and grabbed the other end, pushing it straight into the man’s screaming mouth.
The scream ended in the sizzling of seared flesh. The iron then pounded on to the man’s head, crushing his skull.
Balbus and Quadratus lunged forward, wielding their chains like weapons. Balbus felled the guard in front of him with a ruinous punch and then, before he could get back up, wrapped his chains around his neck and strangled him. Quadratus sprang at one of the guards, the one who held the keys, and knocked him to the ground. He pressed his chains hard on the man’s mouth, like a horse’s bit, shattering his teeth and dislocating his jaw. The wretch’s shriek of pain was drowned in a suffocating gurgle. The other comrades threw themselves at their jailers with all the vehemence of their desperation. Meanwhile, Balbus, Quadratus and Metellus had seized the weapons of their adversaries and were striking out with awesome blows in every direction. As two survivors fled towards the guardhouse to raise the alarm, Martianus, who had seen the guard with the keys on the ground, jumped him, got his hands on the keys and freed his comrades.
‘This way!’ shouted Uxal. ‘Quick, this way! The armoury!’
The men took off at a run, while fresh guards rushed towards them full of murderous intentions. Quadratus unhinged the bolt on the armoury door with a stroke of his axe and was the first one in, followed by the others. Tens of arrows stuck into the door just instants after they had closed it behind them.
Several moments of interminable silence followed, in which the men from the guardhouse – nearly thirty warriors armed to the teeth – advanced through the thick dust produced by the battle and headed towards the armoury. But when the dust settled, the vision they found before them left them astonished and incredulous. Ten Roman soldiers encased in their armour, swords unsheathed: Metellus, Balbus, Quadratus, Martianus, Publius, Rufus, Severus, Lucianus, Septimius and Antoninus.
Before the guards had recovered from their shock, the Romans were upon them. They fought like furies out of hell, like demons of war, with fierce rage and furious perseverance.
Not a single blow missed its mark, not a single wounded enemy escaped death.
Marcus Metellus Aquila shouted to his men, urging th
em on, knowing that this superhuman burst could not last and that any failure would leave them at the mercy of their jailers. Each of the jailers had to die; they had to wipe out every last one of them. When, finally, his sword swung through empty air, he realized that they had succeeded in this impossible endeavour. Ten slave labourers, reduced to skin and bones, had exterminated more than thirty well-armed and well-nourished warriors.
They looked at each other in disbelief, panting, covered in blood, dust and sweat. Metellus raised his sword and said with the last bit of voice he had, ‘Caesar is avenged.’ Then he crashed to the ground as if dead.
All the others collapsed as well, one after another, exhausted. Even a child, arriving at that moment, could have finished them off with no effort whatsoever. They had expended their last spark of energy to regain their lost freedom.
Uxal approached Metellus and shook him. ‘This is no time to rest. Come on. Get moving. We have to do something!’
Metellus forced himself to get up and he looked around him. The other camp prisoners had gathered in a circle, speechless and dazed, and could not take their eyes off the incredible spectacle they found before them.
‘Tell them they’re free. Tell them to join us. Together we can force our way through the outer confine and reach safety.’
Uxal shook his head. ‘You must be raving! None of them will move. They know that no one can break out of the external limits of camp, and that anyone who gets caught – that is, everyone – will be impaled.’
‘You translate what I said!’ shouted Metellus. ‘In the meantime, you – Rufus, Martianus and Severus – go with Balbus. Throw Persian cloaks on your shoulders and take the guards’ places at the outermost posts. We don’t want anyone getting suspicious.’
Balbus took the men and assigned them to the most visible guard posts so they would be seen, then returned.
Uxal translated what Metellus had told him to say in all the languages he knew, but the results were as he had predicted. For an instant, his words lit a crazy light in the men’s eyes, but very soon one after another bowed his head in resignation. There was a brief buzzing here and there, then silence.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Uxal. ‘They’re afraid. When a bird has been kept in a cage his whole life, he won’t fly out even if you open the door. The outside world frightens them. Imagine them trying to break out of here, surrounded as we are by a hundred vicious guards.’
‘Then we’ll go on our own.’
‘It’s suicide, but I know you’re right. This is no life. You’re soldiers, so at least you’ll die with your swords in your hands. But you should lock up the prisoners first. Someone might think of ratting on you to get in good favour with the guards.’
‘Lock them up again?’ asked Metellus.
‘You’ve got no choice. It’s for their own safety as well. That way no one can accuse them of sedition.’
Metellus ordered Quadratus, Lucianus, Publius and Septimius to take the prisoners back to one of the shacks. As they were doing so, he turned suddenly to Uxal. ‘What were you saying?’
‘Me? Nothing.’
‘Not just now, before . . .’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Last night, in the shack, when I interrupted you. You were talking about the gully flooding once . . . and then what happened?’
‘Oh yes. I was in a gallery down on the third level, removing the corpses of some of the prisoners, when I saw that water was seeping out of one of the walls, a lot of it.’
‘Are you saying that the wall down there communicates with the bottom of the gorge?’
‘Something like that. The water couldn’t be coming from anywhere else.’
‘Do you think that the point of contact with the gully wall might be outside the confines of the camp?’
‘I’m convinced of it, but that doesn’t mean I’m sure.’
‘Could you find the place again?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Let’s go then, now.’
He called Quadratus, who was just returning after locking the prisoners up. ‘Muster the men, have them bring shovels and axes and follow me.’
Quadratus was quick to follow orders and the others were soon ready, except for Balbus, who stayed behind to work the hoist.
‘It’s down this way,’ said Uxal. After a few steps, he added, ‘I should warn you that we’ll find people down there. It’s not a pretty picture. It’s where the lot of you would have ended up.’
They descended a couple of ramps to the second level, then went down a steep stair cut into the rock, until they found themselves in front of an iron door bolted from the outside. Below was a hinged slot, just big enough to pass food through. Uxal drew the bolt, but it took Quadratus’s muscle to get the door open. The narrow tunnel before them seemed to descend into the bowels of the earth. The air was foul with an unbearable stench of excrement and putrefaction. They looked at each other in disgust and stepped back, but Uxal shook them out of their stupor. ‘Come on, then. Shall we get moving or settle in here and meditate on what the future may bring?’
‘Move it,’ ordered Metellus.
He was the first to start off down the tunnel, holding his lantern high. At the end, they found themselves in a vast gallery where they were shocked by the vision of pitiful human larvae scratching at the walls with wooden picks by the light of a few lamps. At the sight of a group of men armed in such an unusual way, the toilers all paused from their work and turned towards them. They looked like ghosts: black-rimmed eyes, hollow cheeks, long, unkempt beards, missing teeth, skeletal limbs. They coughed continuously and could barely stand. In a corner, some of them were crushing lumps of mineral in mortars and gathering the turquoise stones in a basket.
‘They receive food in proportion to the number of stones they manage to produce. It seems incredible that these poor wretches can still have a hold on life. Most of them have no more than a few months to live anyway in this inferno. Follow me now. It’s this way.’
They walked towards another narrow tunnel, which led away from the point where they had entered.
‘What do we do about them?’ asked Quadratus, pointing at the slaves.
‘Forget them,’ said Uxal. ‘They couldn’t walk more than a hundred paces outside of here. The sun would blind them and their skin would be covered with sores. Let them die in peace.’
They advanced about a hundred feet to a fork in the tunnel, where Uxal went to the right. They soon reached another widening of perhaps five feet by three, closed off by a dead end.
‘It’s here,’ said Uxal. ‘At least I think it was here.’
‘You think?’ asked Publius.
‘What do you want from me? It happened at least three years ago, if not four. If you’re so good at this, why don’t you find a way out?’
Metellus made a gesture and moved the lantern close to the wall as the others fell silent. ‘It is here,’ he said. ‘The colour of the wall is a little different. See?’
He placed his lantern on the ground, took an axe and began to dig. The sandstone was crumbly and yielded rather easily to the pick. Septimius and Lucianus took their own axes and started to work the wall alternately, so that the tools were striking uninterruptedly and knocking a great quantity of detritus to the ground. In a short time, all three had to stop, exhausted and panting, but Antoninus took over from the man who was most tired, and the others followed suit so that work could continue.
Uxal would gather up the chunks of stone from the ground as the hole got deeper, and noticed that they were becoming damper and damper. Then at a certain point they became drier again.
‘Stop!’ he yelled.
‘What is it?’ asked Antoninus, trying to catch his breath.
‘I want you to touch those fragments of sandstone and tell me what you think. I mean, what’s wet and what’s dry. I don’t want my imagination playing tricks on me.’
Metellus picked up the stones he was pointing at, as did Quadratus, Antoni
nus and Septimius.
‘This one here is damp,’ said Metellus.
‘And this one is much drier,’ confirmed Quadratus.
‘This one over here is drier as well,’ said Septimius.
Uxal scratched his chin. ‘Here’s what I think: first we found a dry layer, then a damp one, the inside layer I’d say, and now a dry layer again. I think that means we’re getting close to the outside wall, which opens on to the gully where it is exposed to the sun.’
‘I think you’re right,’ said Metellus.
‘Then we have to risk the highest stakes we’ve got. If you continue here, I’ll go back and have Balbus hoist me up. We’ll collect food and water and come back down with Rufus, Martianus and Severus who are still out standing guard. If my calculations are correct, you will have nearly broken through by then. With a little luck, we’ll make it out and have at least a slightly better chance of surviving. If we find ourselves inside one of the guard circles . . . well, we’ll have a good feed at least before we head out. Better to die on a full stomach, I say.’
‘I think that just might work, old man,’ said Metellus. ‘Or at least I hope so. Go ahead with your plan. We’ll press on down here.’
Uxal groped his way back along the tunnel so the others could keep the lantern. They immediately began their work again, but fatigue was overwhelming them and the need to rest was becoming more and more frequent.
‘Let’s hope that Uxal and the others get back here soon, or we’ll die before we’ve managed to put a hole in this damned wall,’ said Septimius.
‘Silence!’ Metellus suddenly called out.
‘What is it?’
Metellus gestured for them to be quiet and started hitting the bottom of the breach with the tip of his pick. ‘Can you hear that?’
‘It sounds hollow!’ said Septimius, his face lighting up. His thinness gave him the look of an undernourished adolescent.
‘Yes, it does, by the gods! Come on, men. Let’s give it all we’ve got!’
They started swinging their axes again, their vigour renewing as the wall began to yield under their blows.