Broken Chariots

by J. G. Willem

Finally, Auribus shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He headed for the door.

  “Wait!” said Ursa.

  The centurion ignored her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Auribus,” the bookie said, hearing his own desperation. “To do evil in ignorance is one thing. To listen to your conscience and go the other way is not to preserve the life you have, but to opt for a lesser one. Even if you were condemned for saving us, the life you would live between now and then would be more full than another thirty years of nightmares.”

  The centurion had stopped with his hand on the latch. He was frozen there. His back was to his captives. His head hung low. Gone was whatever distinction the man had once earned on the battlefield. Gone was valour. Gone glory. In its place was a well run dry, so that those who might once have been quenched knew to leave it off their route.

  Auribus let out a deep, soul-rattling sigh.

  Somewhere above and far away, a horn blew and the race began. Another great cheer arose, and with it, the pounding gait of horses like the rumble of proximate thunderclouds.

  The centurion opened the door.

  “Go on,” he said to his men.

  A dozen burly soldiers filed in, faces set for violence. Some of them were almost rubbing their hands together with delight, nostrils flaring and eyes bright. Eager to dominate. To humiliate. To mutilate. To kill. To be freed of reprobation for indulging those most base desires of the human animal.

  “No!” Ursa scrambled back.

  “Him first,” Auribus said.

  A few audible groans from the soldiery. The bookie’s punishment was less enjoyable, but as before, they did as they were told. A few of them grabbed firewood from a large steel drum that had been dragged in and set in the corner. The others descended on their prisoner.

  Belbus did not move. Could not. He was numb. His limbs simply didn’t work. His body was already dead. It had given up. Even as the men circled around him, he did not move.

  “No!” Ursa said, scrabbling for him. She grabbed at his cloak but one of the soldiers seized her by the hair. She screamed. He yanked her backwards and she went sprawling on the floor.

  Belbus saw it happen and could not respond. The soldiers grabbed him roughly where he lay propped up on his elbow. He said nothing as they hauled him to his feet. Did nothing as they walked him to the bull.

  The men had already stacked the wood beneath the bull and now were pouring oil upon the wood and lighting it. The wood began to burn.

  Belbus stared in wide-eyed horror at the brazen monster that was about to devour him. The tongues of flame licking at the creature’s belly. The metal warming up. He saw the firewood stacked in the corner. There was a lot more yet. Enough to get that bronze belly glowing, with him inside.

  Him inside...

  The knowledge of himself inside that thing. The hollow of the bull. He closed his eyes to block it out but there it stayed. It would not leave him.

  The racing chariots thundered overhead, and a peal of cheering followed them, growing as they drew near, peaking as they passed, diminishing as they took off down the track.

  Auribus just stood to the side and would not meet the bookie’s eye, like a boy watching his horse put down but with his father in attendance so he does nothing. Says nothing.

  Belbus felt himself moving and realised the soldiers were escorting him around to the side of the bull where the hinged panel lay open, exposing the claustrophobic space within.

  There was a latch on the door so it could be locked from outside.

  Made sense, he thought.

  As hands put downward pressure on his shoulders, he looked over to Ursa and saw what he presumed was his own terrified expression reflected back at him.

  Then his head was forced down and inside and his shoulders and his legs were lifted up and folded in and he curled around on the flat metal surface so that he could fit.

  It was only now, when he was completely inside the bull, that he found his voice:

  “No!”

  While his face was pressed into the far flank of the bull, he heard the door clap shut behind him and the grating of metal on metal as the lock was slid into place.

  A darkness blacker than night enveloped him. There were no stars here. There was no moon. No fire that he could see. There was not even that dim, ambient light as in a dark forest by which his eyes might adjust.

  No.

  There was nothing. Nothing but warm bronze getting warmer.

  Turning desperately, he pushed against the door. It didn’t budge. It was of a piece with the rest of the wall. He could not find the groove. It was as if no door had ever existed. As if he had been born here, inside the bull, or was yet to be born. Gestating in the bull. One with the bull. A bull himself. Waiting to be birthed in a furnace of torment and misery but no blood.

  Ursa would bleed. He would not.

  He would cook. His flesh would roast. His blood would boil to vapour inside his veins.

  He would die slowly and in darkness as the temperature climbed ever higher until he stopped screaming and the bull stopped bellowing and they would open the door and let his charred carcass fall to the ground like a spit-roast no one wanted. Bones protruding through his charcoaled flesh. Cooked shiny. Gleaming like diamonds of bone in the red-brown crust that was his skin and sinew.

  He screamed. A long, primal shriek, punctuated by gasps for air. He screamed for the pain that was imminent. For the darkness. For the fear. The stomach-churning dread. He screamed because there was nothing else he could do.

  He wanted to make it go away. Make it all go away. Wanted to close his eyes and sleep through the next part and wake in Elysium with all the people who had left him behind.

  Already, the air was becoming thick. Cloying. Already, he was sweating. He went to pull off his cloak, thinking that maybe he could use it like a blanket beneath him. Maybe then he would die from the heat and not the burning. Maybe his lungs would give out instead of his skin pulling away from him like melting cheese.

  The space was small. At every extremity, he was touching bronze. He grew frustrated, tugging at his cloak but unable to get it free. His weight was on it. Lifting his weight off one part meant putting it on another.

  He would not be able to stay away from the edges. From the bronze. It would grow hotter and hotter and on all fours he would put his hand out to support himself and it would sear and he would pull it away but his knees would also sear and to take the weight off one would mean putting more on the other. On and on it would go, relieving one area to agonise another, skin becoming scorched and blistered and peeling off his muscle and then his muscle searing like raw steak until it became so painful that he rolled onto his side to spare his hands and knees, only to broil his side. He would turn himself until every inch of him was cooked and his mind gave out and he simply lay there, sizzling.

  His clothes might get so hot they caught fire. Maybe his hair. Maybe his eyebrows.

  He screamed again. Longer and louder this time.

  On the outside, he imagined the bellows they must be hearing and Ursa weeping for him as he wept for her. For himself. For the life unlived. For what was so close he could almost taste. For what he could have had were he not so greedy.

  He cursed himself. He could have had most of it. But, no; he wanted everything. He wanted it all. Now, he had none of it. Less than none. He would pay for his greed. He would die in darkness and in agony for his greed.

  How much better off would he have been if this plan had never come to him? If he had had the foresight to dismiss it? If he had been happy with what he had, instead of being driven by something he suspected was insatiable?

  Even if he got everything he wanted, who was to say he’d be happy with that. There was a hole inside him that could never be filled, no matter how many things he attained or wrongs he righted or foes he conquered. It was a hole that had been there for as long as he could remember, made before he had the sense to see it being ope
ned.

  He was sobbing now - great, heaving sobs - but could not tell the tears from the sweat pouring off him in torrents. It was hot. Jove, it was hot. Like a bathhouse in the height of summer when some happy fool kept ladling water on the coals. Kept ladling. Kept ladling. Until someone cursed him out or shoved him from the venue.

  Only here, there was no one to curse or shove. No one to blame but himself.

  Sure, he could blame the soldiers, but they were just following Auribus’ orders. He could blame Auribus, but the centurion was just following Pistrus’ orders, and reluctantly at that. He could blame Pistrus, but the charioteer was just trying to get his daughter back.

  Belbus finally got his cloak off and did his best to lay it out flat beneath him like a sheet. Already, he could tell it wouldn’t be any use. Heat was pulsing up through the floor, through the cloak. With even greater difficulty, he peeled off his tunic to add another level of insulation, but still, the heat rose. He could feel it. Feel it growing.

  Then he felt something else.

  A pouch.

  The opium...

  Belbus’ eyes went wide in the darkness. He teased the pouch open, felt the tablets inside. A lot of them. Would they be enough? He didn’t stop to consider it. Didn’t care. He brought the pouch to his mouth and turned it inside out, emptying the pills into his cheeks, crunching them down in a frenzy, swallowing dryly.

  Immediately, a wave of relief came over him. A surge of calm. He lay there on his side on the cloak and felt his body relax. Felt it melt - figuratively, for now - into the floor.

  His eyes closed. The world began to spin.

  His heart slowed.

  He thanked the gods for this mercy, every one by name. He knew that he did not deserve it and he thanked them from the bottom of his heart. He wept with gratitude to have been spared such pain.

  Soon, he would slip into a different blackness. A deeper silence. Soon, he would simply cease to exist. That wasn’t so bad.

  Or he would walk in Elysium.

  Perhaps he would be born again as a bull. Maybe that was how he had been born human in the first place. He lay curled in the foetal position as did a womb-bound infant. Maybe in his previous life he had been a bull who climbed into a bronze human to be roasted and reborn. Maybe it was a constant cycle that one was only made aware of in the moment of their death.

  His body would remain here to be burned, but his spirit would live on and pass painlessly into the next life. He would not scream, and he smiled for the silence of the bull the soldiers would puzzle over.

  “Surely, he’s not already dead?” they would ask themselves.

  Belbus chuckled at this, at the soldiers’ confusion. The chuckle built into a laugh, and soon he was bent over sideways, howling until his sides ached and he gasped for breath.

  As he calmed, wiping joyous tears from the corner of his eye, Belbus wondered if the bull was built to convert laughter into bellows or only screams. He imagined the sounds the bull was making now. Perhaps the same sounds. Perhaps different ones entirely. The soldiers would either think he was screaming or they wouldn’t know what to make of it. They certainly wouldn’t know he died laughing. In that sense, he supposed, it was a win-win.

  For everybody except Ursa.

  Everybody except Agnina.

  Everybody except Bobarius and Taurinus.

  That stopped him laughing. Ursa had nothing to numb her to her torment. She would be alive and awake and aware and she would experience every moment of it. Agnina, likewise, would bear the brunt of her sufferings with total awareness, as had the boy in the pool.

  It was only he who would be spared. He, who had set it all in motion to begin with.

  Belbus began to weep again. The tears flowed horizontally down his face, over the bridge of his nose, mingling with the sweat to soak his cloak-sheet wet.

  “Ursa...” he whispered to the darkness. “Agnina... I’m sorry. I’m so sorry...”

  Then the door opened.

  Light rushed in, and air.

  A hand grabbed his slippery arm and dragged him out backwards into all that light and all that air.

  He fell with a thud onto the stone but felt no pain.

  He lay there, curled and naked and dripping wet on the floor like a rough-handled newborn.

  Resounding in his ears was the distant cheering of a crowd, like thunder rolling across the horizon. Very loud and far away. Cheering. Clapping. Very loud and far away.

  It took him a few moments to realise where he was, what had happened. He was no longer inside the bull but looking at it from the outside. From the floor, where he’d started, though at a slightly different angle. He could see that the fire had been kicked and scattered, ashes and coals and half-burned chunks of firewood sprayed across the stone.

  He breathed, deep and rasping, gulping at the air like a drowning man who had broken the surface.

  He was free. He was alive. He had been saved.

  The air was cool and fresh and he took it by the lungful.

  Another wave of relief crashed over him. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care.

  Then he remembered the opium...

  His heart began racing again. His vision blurred and the brightness of the world was blinding. He tried to pick himself up but his limbs were numb, only this time the numbness had been induced not by fear, but by his own hand; in desperation and in darkness, when it seemed the better path.

  Shit, he thought. Shit, shit, shit...

  He scraped his arms beneath him through the dust, propping himself up onto an elbow. With all his might, he lifted, arms trembling, knees sliding out behind him. He felt hands steadying him, a voice calling to him, calling his name. The voice was familiar, but he didn’t know who it belonged to. Didn’t know anything except what he had to do. The one thing. The only thing.

  He got one knee into place, then the other. He was on all fours now. The same hands steadied him, held him. The same voice called his name.

  He brought one hand to his mouth and shoved his index and middle fingers deep into his throat. He felt himself gag and gag and held the fingers firm and he gagged again and then he retched. The bile came flooding up his throat and out his mouth and he heaved the contents of his stomach onto the floor where it pooled, steaming.

  He stared at the puddle of vomit beneath him, at the tablets and the pieces of tablets. He hoped he got enough of it out. Feared that he hadn’t. Feared that he’d done the damage, condemned himself.

  No...

  He was free.

  He’d been saved.

  He couldn’t die now. He couldn’t.

  It wasn’t fair.

  He lifted his head, bile dripping from his lips, seeing Ursa. She was holding his face now, looking into his eyes. Her lip was cut and her eye bruised and her cloak gone and her tunic torn at the shoulder, but she was alive. She was there and safe and alive.

  Her voice found his ears, warbling in through the narcotic haze.

  “Belbus? Talk to me. Are you okay?”

  “I’m... okay...” he said, with some difficulty. Everything was moving slower, swimming in an opium fog.

  The room took shape around her. Around him. The soldiers were gone. Only Auribus remained. He stared at Belbus, pale-faced. Stunned beyond belief.

  “What...?” Belbus paused to swallow. His throat ached from the pain of retching. “What... happened? Where...?”

  Ursa looked over her shoulder at the centurion, then back to Belbus. Her face, he noticed, was equally drained and pallid. It was as if they had just seen a ghost in the moments before dragging him out. Maybe the ghost had given the order.

  “Belbus...” she began, struggling to find the words. “Pistrus... he’s dead.”

  The confusion that filled him now had nothing to do with the drugs. Of that, he was certain.

  “What?”

  “Pistrus is dead. Leontius killed him in the race.”

  Belbus blinked, shaking his head.

  “He won, Belbus,
” Ursa said, laughing in disbelief. “Leontius won and Pistrus is dead.”

  It took a moment for him to process the implications of these developments.

  “What about Agnina?” the bookie said. “And Bobarius and Taurinus?”

  “It’s alright. Those fuckers who were going to kill us have gone to catch up to the fuckers who were going to kill them.”

  “Will they make it in time?”

  “Yes,” Auribus assured him. “They’ll make it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Ursa said, “They were only a few minutes behind and Auribus put the fear of Jove into them. ‘Run,’ he told them. ‘Run, you bastards, or I’ll put you all in the bull, one after the other.’”

  Belbus looked to the old centurion, who gave a modest shrug.

  The bookie smiled. Then he laughed. Ursa laughed with him.

  His senses were returning to him. He realised he was naked and on all fours. He extended an arm to the bull, but couldn’t reach.

  “Could you...?”

  Ursa knit her brows. “What? Oh...”

  She realised he was reaching for his clothes and grabbed them for him.

  “They’re warm, at least.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Lucky me.”

  As she helped him pull the tunic on, Belbus noticed Auribus still staring.

  “See anything you like, Auribus?”

  The centurion blinked, came back to reality. “What? Oh, no... sorry, I... I...”

  He trailed off.

  Belbus re-tied the belt at his waist, securing the tunic. Whatever part of it hadn’t already been soaked with his sweat now clung to his skin like long hair to a face in the rain. Ursa helped him up, went to put the cloak around his shoulders. He stopped her, took the cloak in his hands.

  “I think I’ll hang onto this for now,” he said. “Until I cool down a bit.”

  “Oh,” she said, realising with a chuckle. “Right.”

  Belbus turned to face Auribus. “So, you got news of his death and just... what? Called it off because the whole reason we were here is because of him?”

  “Pretty much,” Ursa said.

  “Well, I mean... there didn’t seem to be much sense in roasting and raping you to death when he...”