I finished eating, so to aid digestion sat up cross-legged on my couch. Flavius Hilaris did the same. He had the pinched look of a man with stones, who from anxiety or embarrassment never found time to let his doctor examine him.
"Your job will be to investigate the theft, Falco. I want to plant you in the mines, establish you among the work force"
"I had my eye on a management post!"
He let out a disparaging laugh. "All filled up with senators' dim nephews out here for the boar hunting sorry, Helena!"
As a senator's daughter she might well have objected, yet she forced a cranky smile. I meanwhile became a mite preoccupied.
My new job demanded stamina. Mines are worked by the grimmest types of criminal. Slave gangs labour there from sunrise to sunset, it's heavy work, and although the lead seams in the Mendips lie fairly near the surface, what those mines lack in physical danger they make up for in the utter desolation of the spot.
"Falco?" asked Flavius. "Pondering your good luck?"
"Frankly, I'd prefer to sit in full formal dress without a sun umbrella, in some blazing hot amphitheatre where the gatekeepers ban wine jars and the musicians are on strike, watching five hours of an inaudible Greek play! To whom," I enquired fastidiously, "do I owe this bracing winter holiday?"
Hilaris folded his napkin. "I believe Helena Justina first had the idea."
I had to smile.
"May the gods protect your ladyship! I trust you'll explain to my little grey-haired mother when my back's broken and they bury me in a bog? Do you answer to the Furies, madam, for wreaking this hard vengeance on me?"
She stared into her beaker and did not reply.
I caught her uncle's quizzical eye.
"Helena Justina answers to herself," he said briefly.
It seemed to me that was her problem. To say so achieved nothing, and I had no wish to criticize her father Decimus. No man can ever be entirely to blame for the women in his house. That was something I knew long before I possessed women in my own.
XXV
Flavius Hilaris made arrangements to have me taken west, which I thought decent of him until I grasped what his arrangements were. He sent me round by sea. He owned a town house in the middle of the south coast and an estate with a private summer villa even further west; for passing to and fro between his properties he had acquired a clinker-built Celtic ketch which he jovially called his yacht. This old and robust barnacled hulk was not exactly fit for dreaming in the August sun on Lake Volsinii. It probably seemed a good idea to him, but I made my own arrangements after that.
I was dropped off at Isca. Eighty Roman miles from the mines, but that was good: no point arriving straight off the procurator's boat, virtually with a standard-bearer proclaiming "procurator's spy'. I knew Isca. It's my superstition that it helps to dive into a whirlpool from a rock where your feet feel at home.
There had been military regrouping since my time ten years before. Of the four original British legions, the Fourteenth Gemina were currently held in Europe pending Vespasian's decision on their future: they had been active in the civil war on the wrong side. The Ninth Hispana were in mid-transfer north to Eboracum, the Twentieth Valeria had plunged out towards the western mountains, while my old unit the Second Augusta advanced to Glevum, astride the upper reaches of the great Sabrina Estuary. Their present task was pegging down the dark Siluran tribesmen, preparing for the next push west as soon as they felt confident.
Isca without the Second was a ghost town to me. It seemed odd to see our fort again, but odder still to find all the gates open and the granaries stripped, with higgledy-piggledy workshops cluttering the crossroads, and a native magistrate lording over the commander's house. Behind the fort, as I expected, once the lean-to cabins and shops thinned out there were the small holdings of those veterans who retired while the Second was still there. Hard luck to take your land grant in order to live near your mates, then watch them march out to a new fort a hundred miles away. Still, intermarriage with the natives would be holding some of them. In this disgusting province, I ruled out any idea that they stayed because they liked the climate or the scenery.
I was relying on the veterans. Relying on the fact they would be here beside the Second's fort and the fact that the Second had gone. It seemed likely that if I came offering adventure now, I might find myself a crony with itchy feet.
Rufrius Vitalis was an ex-centurion who lived in a small stone-corridored house on a red-soiled farm huddled below the sullen threat of the moors. All his neighbours were grizzled specimens farming in similar style. I spotted him in the town, bumped into him on purpose, than claimed to know him better than I actually did. He was so desperate for news from Rome we were instant old pals.
He was a fit, sturdy, impatiently capable man with alert eyes and a grey-bristled chin in a leather face. He came from farming stock on the Campagna. Even in Britain he worked outdoors bare-armed; he was so full of energy he could ignore the cold. Before retirement he had put in thirty years five more than he needed, but after the Revolt experienced men in Britain were offered extra time at privilege rates. It never ceases to amaze me what folk will do for double pay.
We spent some time in a wine shop, gossiping. When he took me home I was not surprised to find he lived with a native woman considerably younger than himself. Veterans usually do. Her name was Truforna. She was shapeless and colourless, just a floury dumpling with pale grey eyes, but I could see how in a hovel beyond the ocean a man might convince himself Truforna was both shapely and colourful. He ignored her; she moved about the little place watching him.
At his house Rufrius Vitalis and I talked some more. We used an unexcited tone, so Truforna would not be alarmed. He asked why I had come. I mentioned theft. I touched on the political slant, though without saying what; nor did he ask. Any ranker who gets made up to centurion before he retires has too much experience to be excited by politics. He wanted to know my strategy.
"Get in, investigate what happens, get out." He looked at me in disbelief. That's not facetious. That's all I have."
"Can't the procurator get you in?"
"What worries me is getting out!"
He looked at me again. We shared deep misgivings about the administrative class. He understood why I wanted my own scheme, someone I trusted to haul up my rope when I called.
"Need a partner, Falco?"
"Yes, but who can I ask?"
"Me?"
"What about your farm?"
He shrugged. That was up to him. He asked the real question: "We get you in, we get you out. What happens afterwards?"
"Sunshine, I whip straight back to Rome!"
My hook was through his throat. We had talked about Rome until his heart strove against his ribs. He asked if there would be scope for anyone else to tag along, so I offered to sign him up as Helena Justina's baggage master. Our eyes, with veiled lids, covered Truforna.
"What about her?" I murmured delicately.
"She won't have to know," Vitalis declared, with too much confidence. I thought: O centurion! Still, that too was up to him.
He knew the district. I let him work out the plan.
A week later we arrived at the Vebiodunum silver mines, Vitalis astride a pony in the leather and furs of a bounty hunter, me running behind in the rags of a slave. He told the contractor's foreman he was working through the limestone gorges, rounding up runaways from the caves. He extracted the names of the owners they had eluded, then handed back his wretched contraband for reward. I had refused to say where I belonged, so after three weeks of feeding me Vitalis was losing patience and wanted to restore my memory with a spell of hard labour in the mines.
Rufrius Vitalis outrageously embroidered on the story we agreed, not least once I was safely shackled by hitting me so hard he split open my cheek, then hurling me in some toothless villager's pile of pig manure. My sullen look on delivery was as genuine as my smell. At Vebiodunum, Vitalis claimed there must be a good chance I had murdered my ma
ster if I would not admit who I was. This extra certificate of good character was a luxury I could have managed without.
"I call him Chirpy," he said, "because he isn't. Don't let him escape. I'll be back when I can, to see if he wants a little chat."
The foreman always called me Chirpy. I never was.
XXVI
From the neighbouring countryside the upland is deceptive. The limestone ridge where the lead mines lie looks no more hostile than any of the low hills characteristic of southern Britain. Only when you approach this ridge directly from the south or west do stark crags suddenly rise in your face, quite unlike the gentle swell of the downs elsewhere. On the southern side are the Gorges ancient caves and unpredictable waters which plunge underground or rise in a ferocious spate during sudden rain. On the kinder northern edge, small hamlets cling to the steep slopes, joined by precarious tracks that jerk up and over the contours among patches of pasture land.
From the east, the terrain hardly seems to rise at all. The route to the mines is unmarked; anyone with official business comes provided with a guide. For casual visitors the settlement is deliberately difficult to find.
Riding in from the frontier side, woodland and farmland give way imperceptibly. Almost without warning, you lose sight of the countryside below, and the road crosses a cold, featureless plateau. It leads only to the mines; there is nothing else there. Travelling its bare length is a lonely experience. Thoughout this region there is a tendency to greyness, as if the wide Sabrina Estuary makes its surging presence constantly felt, even inland. This high-flung narrow road strikes purposefully across the limestone outcrop for ten miles, and with every mile the emptiness of the landscape and the tugging of the wind attack the spirit with melancholy. Even in high summer the long upland is stormed by desolate winds, and even then there is no blaze of sunshine, only remote high-piled clouds endlessly shadowing the deserted scene.
I worked in the lead mines for three months. After the Revolt, it was the worst time of my life.
I manoeuvred my way through all the sections of the mine.
From the open seams and pits where ore was clawed physically from the ground, back indoors to the clay stacks for the first smelt the hottest work in the world then promotion to the cupellation hearths, where bellows men strained to blast the silver, separating it at white heat from the refined lumps. There I worked the bellows first, afterwards as picker, gathering the silver from the cooled hearth at the day's end. For a slave, picking was the prize job. With luck and scalded fingers you could scratch up a drip or two for yourself. That put a light back in your brain: escape!
Every day there was a body search, but we found our own foul ways round that.
Occasionally now I wake, bolt upright in my bed, in a drowning sweat. My wife says I never make a sound. A slave learns: lock in every thought.
It would be easy to say it was only Sosia's death that held me on my track. Easy but foolish. I never considered her. To recall such brightness in this murderous hole would bring increased agony. What forced me on as I inched through my search was sheer self-discipline.
Anyway, you forget.
There is no time for leisured recollection in a slave's day. We enjoyed no hope for the future, no memory of the past. We woke at dawn; that is, while it was still dark. We snarled Wearily over bowls of gruel ladled out by a filthy woman who never seemed to sleep. We marched in silence through the shuttered settlement while our white breath wreathed around us like our own ghosts. They chained us in links with neck rings. One or two lucky ones pulled caps down over their filthy heads. I never had a cap; I never have any luck. In that hour when the cold light seems half-excited and half-ominous, when the dew soaks your feet and every sound carries through the still air for miles, we stumbled to the current workings. They unchained us; we began. We dug all day, with one break during which we sat empty-eyed, each withdrawn into his own dead soul. When it was too dark to see, we stood head down like exhausted animals to be rechained. We marched back. We were fed. We dropped into sleep. We awoke in the dark the next day. We did it all again.
I say "we'. These were criminals, prisoners of war (mostly Britons and Gauls), runaway slaves (again mainly Celts of different kinds, but with others Sardinians, Africans, Spaniards, Lycians). From the first, there was no need for me to act. The life we led made me one of them. I believed I was a slave.
I was bruised, muscles torn, hair matted, fingers cracked, cut, blistered, blackened, en grimed with my own and others' filth. I itched. I itched in parts of my body where it was a challenge making fingers reach to scratch. I rarely spoke. If I spoke I swore. My headful of dreams had been drained off like an abcess by the punishment of my present life. A poem would have filled me with staring scorn, like the senseless lilt of a foreign tongue.
I could swear in seven languages: I was proud of that.
It was while I was a picker that I stumbled into glimmerings of organized theft. In fact once I started to identify the signs, I soon found corruption ran so rife throughout the system that it was difficult to distinguish the petty fiddles every individual put his hand to, from the major fraud that could only have been set up by the management itself. Everyone knew about that. No one talked. No one talked, because at every stage each man involved took his small cut. Once he had, he stood guilty of a capital offence. (There were two punishments: execution or slavery in the mines. Anyone who had lived at Vebiodunum and seen our conditions knew execution was the preferable fate.)
At the end of December, as a Saturnalian treat, Rufrius Vitalis turned up looking prosperous with a hide whip pushed through a huge brown belt, to see if I had discovered enough to let me be pulled out. When he saw my dull-eyed state his honest face grew grim.
He extracted me from the furnace, then drove me some distance down the track, cracking at me with his whip for show. We crouched out of doors in a bank of wet bracken where we were unlikely to be overheard.
"Falco! It looks as if you need to get out quick!"
"Can't go. Not yet."
By this time I had slid into a sullen mood. I no longer believed in release. I felt my life for ever would be scrambling round the cupellation hearth in nothing but a loincloth with my shaved hair frizzling on my mucky head and my hands red raw. My only challenge was how many silver scratchings I could steal for myself. My mental and physical strength were both so depleted I had almost lost interest in the reason I was there. Almost, but not quite.
"Falco, are you cracked? Going on with this is suicide"
That doesn't matter. If I pull out too early I won't want to live with myself in any case. Vitalis, I have to finish it He was starting to grumble, but I interrupted urgently. "I'm glad to see you. I need to smuggle out information in case I never get a chance to make a full report myself."
"Who's this for?"
"The financial procurator."
"Flavins Hilaris?"
"You know him?"
"I know of him. They say he's all right. Look, laddie, there's not much time. It will look suspicious if I hang about. I'll find him. Just tell me what I have to say."
"He should be at his villa near Durnovaria." Gaius had promised to locate himself there, within reach if I managed to send messages. Tell him this, Vitalis. There's flagrant corruption all through the mine. First, when the rough ingots leave the smelt for cupellation, they are counted out by a weasel who can't actually count. He scratches marks on a tally stick; sometimes he "forgets" to make his nick. So what the contractor Triferus declares to the Treasury as his overall production is fraudulent from the start."
"Hah!" Vitalis let out this exclamation like a man who assumes he has heard almost everything, but who is not surprised to learn of some new dodge.
"Next, every day a few of the rough ingots are held back from the cupellation hearth. It's surprising how many, though I guess the number has crept up gradually over many years. This has the effect that the silver yield per ingot appears less than it really ought to be. I gather the declin
ing yield was explained to Rome during Nero's time as geological variations in the ore being mined. Things were notoriously slack then, so in case Vespasian has anybody looking at the figures it's customary nowadays to slip in extra ingots some weeks, and claim the mineralogist has discovered a better seam."
"Delicate touch!"
"Oh yes, we're dealing with experts here. Will you be able to remember all this hogwash?"
"Have to try. Falco, trust me. Go on."
"Right. Now, regarding the ingots of pure silver which are produced at the cupellation hearth. Some get lost. This is natural wastage." Rufrius Vitalis scoffed admiringly again. Then, when the lead bars that have had their silver extracted go back for a second smelt"
"What's that for?"
To remove any other impurities before carting them out for sale Mars Ultor, Vitalis, don't let's knot ourselves up in technicalities, this is complex enough as it is! Hilaris will know what the procedures are He shushed me to calm me down; I was sweating with the effort of ensuring I told him everything. Frowning, I pressed on. "After the second smelt more ingots disappear though since their value is by then so much reduced, this last wrinkle in the system is considered to lack finesse! Apparently it's permitted to the overseers, as a privilege that keeps them sweet."
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