XVIII
A heavy hammer struck the bolt, releasing the metal doors overhead. They rang loudly but Rufinius had not the wits to cover his ears. The cell containing him had heated beneath the onslaught of the sun and his body felt shriveled with lack of water and his mind drifted from lucidity.
Uncaring hands lifted him from the pit and threw him on the back of a wagon. There he saw the stiff corpse of Nonus’s accomplice. The man had not been able to come to terms with the extremes of heat and cold, and must have perished sometime in the middle of the afternoon. The deceased was taken to the fires and thrown to the flames without ceremony and no mention of the gods. The wagon then moved on and delivered Rufinius at sunset to the pen from which he had been brought, returned to the embrace of his men. Libo, Carbo, Dentianus, Appias, Fabianus and many others crowded around him and gave him water, but it was several days and nights till his strength fully returned.
“What of Nonus?” Rufinius inquired finally, when his wits had recovered sufficiently that he realized the criminal was not among the men.
“We heard they took him early from the pit and made the camel’s landica an overseer,” said Dentianus.
“And he’s very free and easy with the lash,” Libo added. “Thinks nothing of working over his former comrades drafted into the work crews. There’ll be murder at first opportunity.”
“There will be tickets sold for it,” Carbo observed, the man’s face still heavily bruised and a gap in his mouth where front teeth once lived.
Rufinius closed his eyes and rested his head against the rough wall behind him, the shade growing smaller by the minute and the day heating to its usual furnace.
“How are you in your heart, Rufinius?” Appias asked eventually, when they were as alone as two prisoners among hundreds can be.
“In my heart? What is that?”
“What are you thinking? What is your plan? How do we change our situation? Turn the tide?” the historian wanted to know. “History bursts with tales of men who overcome their captors.”
Rufinius opened an eye and looked at the man. “I’m a slave, you’re a slave. We’re all slaves. We have no rights, only value, and even that depends on what our eventual owner deems it to be.”
“There are many of us and few of them,” Appias observed.
“If you haven’t noticed, the few of them have weapons, historian. And it’s not the first time the slave master who holds us captive has had thousands of men and women to sell, if my reading is true. The mercenaries who run this camp are careful. They know what we are capable of and they take no chances.”
“So we wait to be sold? Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s the sum of it. And because you have learning, if you’re lucky, you’ll be sold to teach the snot-nosed brats of some wealthy patrician, or whatever they call the class that rules this sand kingdom.”
“And if luck is not with me?”
“As in Rome, I’m sure in Parthia there are mines and quarries and any number of occupations of misery reserved for men and women who wear the collar of iron around their neck.”
“You disappoint me, Alexandrian,” said Appias.
Rufinius sighed wearily. “How do I disappoint you, historian?”
“Have you no desire to return to Roman lands?”
“I have had this conversation before, with a one-eared decanus who ended up in the desert with a bird dancing on his face. Do you remember? He held a similar opinion to you, if I am not mistaken.”
Appias looked at the centurion. Yes, he remembered.
“Whatever you or I desire would not change the reception we would get if we returned to the Republic.” Rufinius shook his head at the thought, the curl on his lips wry. “Let us imagine that we could somehow escape from this place and miraculously survive the long march west. Arriving home we would be the objects of shame, historian. Don’t you understand that? Rome embraces victories. She does not love defeat. Especially where defeat should have been unavoidable. The legions of Crassus – forty thousand of us and only ten thousand of them …? We would be pelted with nightsoil and rotten things – that would be our triumph.”
Appias knew that Rufinius spoke the truth. Their homecoming, if it could be managed, would be neither welcome nor pretty. “There are other lands besides Roman lands.”
“You live in a dream, historian.”
“It was a proconsul who was defeated. Anyone would think it was you who had been made to drink molten gold.”
“Go and teach your disappointment to someone else, historian,” Rufinius insisted. “The nation beyond these walls won and we lost. Total victory or total defeat. That is how the game is played.”
“Then perhaps the answer lies in thinking on how to change the rules.”
“Optimum est pati quod emendare non possis. You know well the saying, historian: it is best to endure what you cannot change.”
“Then let me remind you, Centurion – deos fortioribus adesse: the gods are on the side of the stronger.” Appias got to his feet, walked away from Rufinius, and found another place to take some shade.
Rufinius ground his teeth as he watched the man go, a sharp pain in his chest. Slavery was not the end he saw for himself, a legionary who was the son of a legionary and the grandson of a legionary. But what could he do? The slavers were well versed in security. These Parthians made no mistakes.
Fabianus and Dentianus took the empty space beside their centurion. “You’re troubled, primor,” the optio said.
“It’s nothing,” Rufinius replied.
The door to the pen swung open and from behind it walked in a large number of mercenary soldiers, accompanying overseers and others from the slave master’s ranks. They fanned out in lines two deep and confronted the Romans.
“What now …?” muttered Dentianus.
A man among them carrying a whip and wearing a hood to shield his face from his countrymen came forward and spoke. “Two hundred from among you are required for manual labor. We want none who are sick. Those who offer their services will receive extra food and water rations. Those we have to convince will receive the lash.”
None of the Romans moved.
The hooded man swung his cattails through the air and shouted, “Then if that is the way of it …!”
The two lines of oppressors moved forward several steps, their demeanor threatening.
Rufinius stood.
“Primor,” said Dentianus, perplexed. “You would make yourself a volunteer?”
“Aren’t you interested in seeing more of what lies beyond the walls that surrounds us?” Rufinius said. Thinking on what Appias had told him, he added, “Perhaps there is opportunity.”
The centurion stepped toward the two lines of authority arrayed before them and the entire population of the pen went with him.
“I’m sure it’s the first time they’ve had to beat enthusiasm for work out of the captured,” Fabianus observed to Dentianus.
“We will take only two hundred,” the hooded man called out and signaled his men forward. Those among the Romans that they approached backed away easily so that there was no need for violence, and the lashes whipped only air.
Two hundred legionaries were duly separated, all volunteers. The cohort of armed mercenaries and slavers accompanied the Romans through the camp, down to the waterfront where the blacksmiths’ forges worked incessantly. Rufinius was surprised at the progress made in the short time they had been at the camp. Piers had been built, along with storehouses and forges. Everywhere were gangs of men digging ditches, chopping, splitting or sawing logs, building barges, carting ingots of steel, bags of coal or grain, or toiling on a hundred other projects that would ultimately entrench their enslavement. The processing of 10,000 legionaries for slavery required a small city and, as there wasn’t one on this section of the Euphrates, it had to be built. And quickly. Fortunately, there was a ready force to get the work done – the captured legionaries themselves.
The slavers and the armed escort
guided the men to the forges on the edge of the river and ten men at a time were parceled off from the others. They were then chained together at the ankles and a rough iron collar fitted around each man’s neck, hot rivets hammered into place to ensure the collar remained impervious to tampering.
Libo squeezed a finger inside the collar, between the metal and his skin, the fit tight and scorching hot. “Excrementum … A slave torc. Just in case there’s any doubt about what we are,” he snarled.
Rufinius, Dentianus, Libo, Carbo, Fabianus, Appias and four other men unknown to them had their companionship confirmed by iron chains cuffed to their ankles.
“Don’t get me wrong, primor,” Dentianus observed, shaking the chain on the end of his leg, “but I don’t see much opportunity coming our way with these on.”
Rufinius had been thinking along similar lines, but at least now they had some sense of the encampment itself. An overseer led them away from the congestion along the riverbank. The air was alive with clanking, chopping, shouting, hammering. They marched along muddy tracts, heading toward the river where gangs of men were digging out the riverbanks behind two giant barges being constructed high above the waterline.
“Why build them all the way up there?” Carbo wondered.
“When the rains come, the river will rise,” said Appias over his shoulder.
“Then why dig out the riverbank behind them?”
“In case the rains don’t come,” the historian replied.
The overseer interrupted them. “Too much talk. Too little digging.” He motioned at a pile of mattocks. “Get to work. Try not to chop each other’s feet off.”
Rufinius picked up a mattock and slung it over his shoulder and caught sight of an older shrunken woman burning leaves and some animal parts on a brazier while she chanted some ritual. Before her were several Parthians dressed in the manner of mounted archers. They were on foot however, engrossed in the performance of the woman as she shrieked occasionally, bending down to grab handfuls of sand and throw them skyward. The Parthians would rear back in fear before coming a little closer toward her. The old woman was distracted by the passage of Rufinius and the other nine men chained with him and turned briefly in their direction. It was Mena, Rufinius’s own slave, behaving as some kind of augury and the Parthians were eating it up. Her hideous countenance was a sight that gladdened the centurion’s heart. Mena was alive, and using theatrics to ensure she remained so.
The overseer lashed the back of Rufinius’s legs to get him moving. “Walk, slave, lest I take some skin off your muscles.”
Rufinius threw him a darkened look and moved on. There were many women in this area. He guessed that they’d been captured with the baggage train. A group of older women forked straw from drays into natural basins where those who were much younger stomped on it, working in pairs, each with a hand on the other’s shoulder for balance, while they pressed the straw into the thick river mud, which was carried to the basins by still more teams of women. Others shoveled the mud into molds where it would eventually dry into bricks. But it wasn’t the activity that caught Rufinius’s attention, it was the slave who had belonged to Primipilus Hadrianus. She wore a tunic cut short and the muscles corded on her legs and bare arms as she worked. Her skin was golden where it was free of the mud.
Overseers moved among these younger women, feeling up breasts and buttocks. Rufinius recognized Nonus among them, the overseer’s mask pushed back on his head to get relief from the sweltering heat. It was true then, that the brigand had joined the ranks of traitor. Nonus was moving toward Andica, picking his way through the stew of mud and straw underfoot. He came to her, said not a word, and then slipped his hand between her legs, a challenge, a threat and also an enticement. And Rufinius felt the anger flare in his chest as he witnessed the attack on her person. Andica, though, just looked at Nonus as if bored and uninterested. The overseer felt her breast next and again received no interest, good or otherwise from the woman. Seeing her disinterest and realizing that others saw it too, Nonus switched his attention to another woman of less fortitude. Rufinius let the smile spread across his face, chasing away the heat of anger he had felt. And as Andica turned, she caught Rufinius smiling at her from a distance and stopped to hold his gaze.
It was the lash that once more brought Rufinius from this interlude, striking him across the backs of his legs with considerable force such that his temper flared.
“What, Alexandrian? Got something to say?” the overseer asked.
“You’re Roman,” said Rufinius. “You should be ashamed.”
“I’m Syrian, donkey fucker, and you Roman dogs ruined my family, taking my father and brothers to the galleys. The legions were the only employment I could get. So now I’m just doing the work of the gods, rebalancing the family’s scales. Now get to work, cunnus face.” The man lashed Rufinius again for good measure.
Rufinius slipped down into the trench and joined the others pulling mud and loose rocks from the bank, thoughts of Andica making his groin tingle.
XIX
It was late afternoon when the 200-strong Roman work detail was collected as one, their toil at an end for the day. The chains preventing their escape were struck from ankles bruised, raw, and blackened, and then all were marched back to the pen.
“I feel like I’ve dug ten ramparts,” mumbled Carbo. He was exhausted and picking at the hard callouses on his hands that were split and bloody.
As for Rufinius, the day had faded with him barely conscious of its passing. He had toiled as much as anyone, but Andica had occupied his mind.
Once back in the pen, the legionaries took water and then lay down in the shade and slept. Sleep, though, was short-lived for Rufinius, Libo, and others. Many of the biggest and strongest among the legionaries were woken by overseers sometime in the night and removed once more from the pen.
“Where do you take us?” Rufinius demanded to know.
“Shut your face, blondie, before I have my man here shut it for you with his club.”
“Where do you take us?” he persisted.
The overseer made to swing his club and Rufinius shrugged and turned away to show there was no threat. And then the night was suddenly day for the briefest instant. A flash of lightning. It joined heaven and earth with a solid blue-white fork some distance away. The Parthian guards were excited. A portent of coming rain. The air soon became heavy with it, a perfume as rich and heady as any Rufinius had smelled on the most expensive baggage train whore. Another flash of lightning a closer distance than the last illuminated the horizon as the band of Roman legionaries – numbering less than fifty – were introduced to a much smaller pen.
“Inside!” said the overseer. “Go!” He pushed several of the men through the opening. The Romans turned on the guards and clubs were readied.
“Go on, try it!” shouted the overseer.
Nerves were taught as bowstrings, the unknown awaiting the Romans inside the unfamiliar pen.
A high-pitched voice came down from atop the wall. “Come in, come in … What are you waiting for? There is nothing to be afraid of.”
Rufinius looked up as sheet lightning burst across the night. He saw the slave master, Farnavindah, sitting beneath an awning and clapping his hands like an excited child. The slave master was accompanied by others – Parthian officers for the most part – seated as spectators at a show.
The legionaries walked into the enclosure and the gate shut behind them.
“What darkness awaits us here, primor?” Libo wondered.
“Whatever it is, it comes now,” said Rufinius as the opposite side of the enclosure opened wide.
Lightning again turned the night into a flash of day. This bolt was close, almost on top of them, and the air boomed instantly with the thunderclap.
Libo searched the sky. “Maybe it is Jupiter himself come to pay us back.”
“We have done nothing,” said Rufinius.
Libo appeared to ponder on that, and said, “No, he’s come to
pay me back. I’m the one he wants.”
“Don’t be foolish. The gods have better men to punish than you, Libo. And besides, anything you’ve done under the aquilas has the blessing of Bellona. She will protect you.”
The air swirled and dust was lifted from the ground and hurled skyward, the pen full of a howling wind. It heralded movement – another entrance opening opposite them. Walking through it in tentative steps came a number of women, equal in number to that of the men, pushed and prodded by overseers, one of whom was Nonus.
A cascade of heavy raindrops began to fall that cooled skin and ran down faces. Behind the women, the entrance was closed tight. The slaves were locked in this enclosure together with no Parthian or overseer lash to keep them separate from one another … And in the next instant the heavens properly opened with lightning, thunder and a teeming inundation. The men and women stood apart in separate groups, knowing not what was expected of them. But then one of the legionaries gave a shout and tore off his tunic and raced at the women, cock in hand. The women too began to run at the men and, in an instant, both groups were charging at each other, tearing the clothes from their backs. They met somewhere in the middle with the force of clashing armies, the prurient lust on both sides driven by forced abstinence, and within moments limbs and cocks and breasts and asses were entangled in the mud, a hundred rutting men and women, hungry for sex.
Rufinius, though, was stopped, his feet unable to move. The cause of this was Andica. She was naked. A man ran toward her, also naked, his cock waving around like a gladius. He grabbed at her but she swatted him aside so that he continued past her and was tackled hard by another woman, consumed instead by the fire between her legs. Andica had eyes for one man. Rufinius removed his own tunic.
Field of Mars (The Complete Novel) Page 20