by Q V Hunter
I’d been detained before—as a runaway slave in Vegesela, North Africa—but at least that jail had had a single window that allowed prisoners to look at the ankles and shoes of passersby in the marketplace outside. This was not so much being jailed as buried alive. Of course, we had no need of light if we were, for all intents and purposes, already dead.
As Catena’s torch inched nearer, I covered my face with my hands, but that was enough to give me away. My limbs were far too clean and unbruised to belong to a long-term resident of Hades.
Catena crouched low and wrapped his fist around my collar, half-strangling me with the twists of my tunic.
‘Hello, Numidianus. You’re the man we hope to present to Constantius. You’re the assassin who robbed him of a brother and a co-emperor.’
‘That’s a rumor. Gaiso led that expedition. Ask Gaiso how Constans died.’
‘I don’t have to. Did you forget I was up in Treverorum when Gaiso rode south from Augustodunum for the Pryenes? You were riding right along behind. And next thing we knew, the Emperor was no more, thanks to you, I heard.’
My agens papers had been torn away, along with my satchel, spatha and pugio, belts, armor, and cloak. My treasured Pannonian hat, the formal gift of Gregorius on the day of my manumission from slavery, was stolen or lost back in the massive tent camp with my bedroll and cooking kit. I felt a wave of naked despair. Was there any point in arguing?
‘Try talking while you still can,’ Catena said.
‘Where’s Titianus?’
‘Your delegation marched westward the same day as Vetranio’s abdication.’
‘Where is my agens insignia? My Cursus papers? They prove I’m neutral.’
‘Neutral nothing. You’re the ex-slave of Commander Gregorius, his freedman, nothing more than discarded family property. You still do their dirty work for them, Emperor-Killer.’
‘You want Gaiso and you’ll never find him here. I’m protected by imperial law.’
‘So you are, like all the other citizens here.’ He laughed as he waved his torch behind him to display the dying sprawled around the cell. If they didn’t have rights, they’d already be dead.’
‘A soldier follows commands. An agens goes where he’s posted.’
‘So he’d better choose the winning side. We’ll get a confession out of you soon enough.’ Catena got up from his crouch and looked down at me. ‘If you say you don’t know my reputation, you’ll hurt my feelings.’
Catena’s guard yanked me up and together they dragged me out of the dank pit into a corridor carved whole out of solid stone. Then we entered a tunnel lined with granite blocks lit only by wall torches. I heard screams echoing off the wet damp stone. Dizzying flames blinded me and I stumbled as my boots dragged through cold puddles too dark to identify as blood or rainwater.
The guard unlocked a door and we entered a small chamber, lit by two torches set in the walls. I stared at a set of three huge wooden tubs. Each lid had a hole large enough for a man’s head. I saw a large hive of insects sitting on the lid of one. The buzzing and shifting waves of shiny black backs and tiny wings was like a lump of molten lava.
Then the whole hive moved. Its mouth opened to emit a low moan. The hive was the head of a man, still barely alive, being consumed alive by flies. Judging by the stench leaking out of his wooden coffin, I guessed that Catena’s victim was swimming in his own rising shit. Thick white maggots coursed out through a crack at the top of the tub and moved down the side in a determined path for the floor.
‘I see the unmistakable look of admiration crossing your face, Numidianus. I learned my trade on the Persian border,’ Catena. He favored me with a smile from that oddly small mouth of his. ‘The Sassanids are more artful than any other people in obtaining information.’
‘The law forbids torturing anyone but slaves or foreigners. I’m a freedman. You’re the criminal, Catena.’
‘You’ll confess.’
‘It appears your other customer hasn’t talked yet.’ I fought back my rising terror, which blocked out any intelligent search for some kind of escape.
‘Oh, I never asked this man anything. He didn’t do anything wrong. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t even know my name. He’s just a slave. I bought him to keep in practice for bigger prizes like you.’
He suddenly slapped me hard across the mouth. ‘Take off your boots. You wouldn’t want to get them dirty.’
He glanced at his guard as if to promise him my footwear as a tip for services rendered.
This was my only chance but there were two of them, fully armed. Each bootlace was reinforced with thin gold wire. Garroting one might hold back the other. Catena expected a lace in my hand, not a knife, and there was no time to swivel out my concealed weapon in front of two men. The guard had turned away. He was rolling one of the empty tubs forward. Four bolts held down the lid. He released the first one, but the second was rusted down by damp.
I unthreaded my right lace and laid it on the ground, then held the other and stood up, an end in each hand and then made to faint towards Catena, falling on his breast. He pushed me away and then gurgled with the realization that his thick neck was caught in the loop of my garrote. I pulled it tight around his neck just short of strangling him. While he gurgled for help and his frantic fingers tried to work their way underneath the wire, I kneed him hard right up between his legs. He tumbled and I grabbed the other lace, wrapping it over and over around his wrists so tight, a vein burst and spurt blood all over his uniform.
The guard had turned around and pulled his sword. I finally had got Apodemius’ knife in my hand, blade out, but it was no use against the spatha’s deadly reach. So I held its razor-sharp blade against Catena’s muscle-bulging neck and faced off with the guard.
‘An agens carries other proofs of his training besides insignias,’ I said to them. ‘Drop the sword or Catena dies now.’ The torturer’s blood was flowing fast from under the wiry bootlace. I didn’t want to kill one of the Emperor’s most senior officers—another unlooked-for crime on my record—and I was in luck. The guard didn’t want to end up in a tub himself. He halted, unsure what to do. Catena’s words were too garbled to understand.
‘Drop those down the hole,’ I told him. ‘No, the one with the flies.’
He dropped his pugio and spatha down the neck hole of the slave’s barrel of shit. An angry swarm of flies flew up and clouded the air around us.
The instant I felt I had a second of advantage, I dropped the gagging Catena on the honey-slimed stones at the guard’s feet. I stripped Catena’s weapons for myself, and with one in each hand, made a dash for it.
I slipped and banged down a nightmare maze of low corridors and short steps leading to yet more tunnels and turns. Panting, I slid out of the granite passages into tunnels with rough rocky walls. I stayed out of sight as best I could and listened over my panicked breathing for any sounds of their chase. I heard dripping water, screams, but no boots running after me. I hesitated more than once, fearful any minute of hitting a dead end carved into impassable rock.
Then I heard another, terrifying sound. It was the barking of dogs and the rattle of chains. Catch dogs or bay dogs, whichever, I knew what they could do. Which was safer—to seek out the light and be arrested, or get trapped down here in the pitch-blackness by ravenous dogs?
How many animals could I kill with a pugio in one hand and a spatha in the other? How many men held their leashes?
Catena’s guard had sent up a cry for help but for the moment, I figured, he’d brought in other guards to help save Catena’s life. If they weren’t hurrying after me, they must have assumed that I’d trapped myself. It was a chilling realization. And just then I hit a wall, hard. I ran my hands in front of me. I was facing an impenetrable wall of wet and solid stone.
The only course was to backtrack and risk getting closer to them, but it was my only hope to discover some exit to freedom. There must be other ways out. Dogs would be the end of me and they’d be on me
soon. I felt my way back until a narrow passage opened up on my right. I took it—I had no choice—and followed the dim haze of flickering oil lamps on a slight incline of the gravel-strewn tunnel.
The passage widened slightly, but as far as I could guess, this might lead to the women’s cells, more torture chambers or a funeral pit for the dead torture victims. The stench was growing overpowering, tempered only by the indifferent chill of mossy rock. At this point, all I had to go on was my nose and fingers to lead me forward. My ears kept the sounds of screams behind me. I wouldn’t be able to run faster, even if I knew the way, in flopping boots with no laces.
But the dark made me nearly canine, as I depended on my nostrils for survival. Suddenly the scent made me nearly faint. I had reached a pit filled with the corpses of torture victims, some still recognizable as human and others mere hills of unspeakable rot. And trapped there, I heard eager panting, claws tapping on stones.
Suddenly there in the dark, two dogs rounded the dark turning in the tunnel. They bared their gums at me with hungry grins and satisfied barks.
I had no choice. I backed away from them slowly and reached into the foulness at my heels. I selected the freshest piece of flesh to offer them and reeling with disgust, I tossed it at their paws. I was lucky. It was just the sort of menu they had been raised on. As their heads dipped down to fight over the generous morsel of limb, I dodged and ran past them, frantic for another exit.
I must have scrambled back for a minute or two when my fingers fell into an open space—some turning that offered a new direction. Now my desperate nose picked up a very different smell scent. It was both civilized and nauseating, the smell of sweet bath oil mingled with nervous sweat—belonging to neither man nor woman.
I tracked it like one of Gaiso’s dogs, raising my chin and drinking in the fetid air for any whiff.
The smell faded and I was lost again. I stopped for breath, a fool in a maze of frozen tunnels dripping with winter’s thaw from above. I blinked, but there was still no helpful light. I threw my head back and rested against the nubbly rock. Then I worked forward again, inhaling more deliberately now, regular and deep.
I caught another whiff.
Someone had been down here recently and I was working my way back to the entrance they’d used. I spent more minutes, slipping along, bent over, desperate not to lose their track. Then I hit it—a wooden door, unlatched from my side, but hooked closed on the other, giving on to a room just visible through the crack between door and frame.
I heard nothing on the other side.
I laid down Catena’s weapons for an instant and slipped the thinnest blade I had on my swivel knife into the space and worked the latch up and off the hook fixed on the other side. Taking up the weapons again, I heaved my shoulder at the heavy door. It hit the resistance of a thick wall hanging. I wrenched the tapestry aside and nearly fell onto the flagstones of a large room. I squinted for a moment, blinded and scrabbling forward, swinging Catena’s spatha against all comers in the open air.
‘I’m sorry, Numidianus, but you don’t have an appointment.’
Eusebius stood in the center of the room, holding a handkerchief to his nose, his egg-yolk eyes bulging out at me.
‘Will you help me?’ I held the sword directly at his soft chest. ‘Or send me back to Catena’s carnificina for monsters down there?’
The chamberlain walked around me and re-bolted the door to the underground passage. He replaced the heavy tapestry.
‘Catena is an unpleasant freak of nature, isn’t he? Coming from me, that’s saying something. Nonetheless, he does his job, his way.’
‘He has no right, no right.
‘Follow me.’
Only then did I discover it was night. We padded and shuffled side by side through the shadows of a side passage in the Sardica imperial compound. For his size and heft, the soft-bellied man moved like silk. He pushed me into a small office, more a porter’s cubicle than a room, and slammed the door against intruders.
‘You would go back to the usurpers’ camp?’
‘I have no choice in the matter. It’s my posting. I serve the Empire. That’s where the government of the West is now.’
‘They’re doomed now that we have Vetranio. The Roman world will never bow to a barbarian slave’s grandson.’
‘If that is the dark message I must deliver, so be it, especially as Titianus will try to paint the painful truth purple.’
‘You value the truth?’
‘It will be hard to tell it.’
‘But you have friends on that side, don’t you? Treasonous loyalties, I hear.’
‘I said, I serve the Empire.’
‘You’d do better to say you serve me.’ Eusebius was powerful but vanity gave him away, like the inch of fine rose linen peeking out below the hem of his brown brocade robe.
‘Do you know what Apodemius says about you?’ I choked on the fumes from an incense burner somewhere just outside the door.
‘I’d give a lot to know,’ Eusebius said, turning his wide girth in a half circle and pulling aside his heavy skirts to rest his wide hips on a stool.
I wasn’t fooled by his lazy manner. I kept my weapons readied. ‘He says Constantius II has some influence over you.’
Eusebius gave a high-pitched giggle. ‘He flatters me.’
‘Why would you want me to serve you?’
‘Perhaps I should say help me. You freedmen are so touchy about who and what you serve.’
I took a deep breath as my wits came into focus through the subsiding fear and panic of the chase. ‘Help me and you help yourself, Your Excellency.’
‘Why? How?’ He ran a fat finger across his thick upper lip.
‘Surely the great Chamberlain sees the obvious. Paulus Catena wants my confession to murdering Constans to feed the Emperor’s terror of assassins that you so carefully keep at a constant simmer. With me as the prize, Catena proves he’s on the watch at all times, the more valuable man. He displaces you as the favored confidant.’
‘Then why don’t I just turn you myself and win the game?’
‘Catena won’t let such a trophy slip into your lap unchallenged. The Emperor won’t believe you captured me yourself, not while Catena bears the deep cut of my strangulation and more than one guard as witness.’
‘Oh. That’s tedious.’ He waved the handkerchief as if he’d lost a toss in a Knucklebones game. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Men in my debt are more useful than men in graves but I warn you—I always collect my debts. I can think of uses for you, but first, I will have to hide you for some time. Catena will have every exit post from Sardica on alert . . .’
Chapter 15, Constantia’s Boy
—the Castra Peregrina, March 15, 351 AD—
Catena survived, just, but you must’ve cut him deep. I hear his voice is ruined forever.’
The old man lay on his sagging couch, his long tunic lifted up to his gnarled knees. His deaf attendant was rubbing some resinous liniment into the joints that, from where I sat, looked swollen into balls of painful bone. ‘From now on, his revenge will be as personal as it is political.’
‘Yes, Magister. Catena had already set up checkpoints and spies on every official road, cart track and goat path out of Sardica. Eusebius kept me hidden for two months working as a slops boy in a brothel—the last place Catena would search.’
‘A brothel? Why is that?’ Apodemius never missed a chance to add something to his dossiers.
‘Because the beast uses the girls at that very house every week. He wouldn’t look for me under his very nose, but I saw their bruises. I heard their screams.’
‘Was the price very high?’
‘He can afford what he wants.’
Apodemius rolled his eyes and I flinched.
‘No, Numidianus, I’m asking you for the Chamberlain’s price for letting you go.’
‘For letting me go?’
‘Yes, Marcus Gregorius Numidianus. What deal did you make with Eusebi
us that he would let you escape?’
Apodemius gestured his thanks to the masseur and rose with a grunt from the couch. He wriggled his distended toes back into the cowhide slippers worn so thin they were like a second skin. The servant packed up his ointments, bowed, and closed the door behind him.
I had hoped Apodemius wasn’t going to ask me that question. I stood there, washed, shaved and fed, but still haggard and bruised by weeks of struggling back to the West without money, friends or road permits. I had hoped to be excused from the inevitable debriefing long before it came to this.
Now I realized that ‘this’ was the point of Apodemius’ midnight summons.
‘Then let me tell you.’ Apodemius pulled on his outer robe and walked to the window. He paused, as if listening for something outside. ‘Eusebius threatened you.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Then he kept you prisoner in that Sardica brothel for his own purposes.’
‘He never touched me—!’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous! I meant to serve his ambition, not his appetite for, well, whatever interests that oddity. Why did he let you go?’
‘Well, Magister, I warned Eusebius that Catena wanted my corpse and confession to gain favor with Emperor Constantius over himself. So he sent me back.’ I shoved to the back of my mind my secret vow to that wily mound of perfumed lard back in Sardica.
Apodemius turned away from the window. ‘If only life were as sweet as a eunuch’s perfume, Numidianus. I suggest another explanation. I believe Eusebius sent you back here to spy on me for him.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘To spy on me.’
Nobody got a lie past the old man, so I said nothing.
‘Oh, don’t waste my time! I’m expecting enough bad news tonight as it is. You agreed, I suppose. Didn’t you?’
‘Yes, Magister.’ My shoulders flagged. ‘I vowed to report on your service.’