Mary Reed: Four for a Boy

Sisinnius squirmed and squealed. He finally managed to knee John in the stomach. Andrew ran around the end of the table, grabbed John’s arms, and pulled him back. Sisinnius punched and clawed at his attacker’s face. John leapt to his feet. Blood streamed down his cheek.

Andrew and Sisinnius were joined in battle by two of the remaining eunuchs, who danced around, kicking clumsily at John’s legs.

“So at the Great Palace bullies fight four to one,” John sneered, swiping blood from his face with the sleeve of his tunic. “Good odds for weaklings! Or eunuchs!”

With a roar of rage, Andrew started pummeling him with fists resembling slabs of meat. And almost as soft, John thought. Nevertheless, he stepped back out of reach.

He had overlooked Sisinnius, who remained prone on the floor. The dark-haired slave immediately grasped John’s boot and jerked his foot out from under him. John fell sideways. His head cracked painfully against the corner of the table.

Then the familiar black mist descended and again he was a young mercenary, striking out left and right, seeking the best place to land a killing blow.

The pounding of boots in the corridor announced the arrival of an excubitor. A couple of the eunuchs who had fled for help cowered outside the room, peering around the doorpost.

“I order this ended!” the guard shouted.

His command was hardly necessary, for silence had suddenly fallen.

***

His back against a rough stone wall, John sat on a cold flagstone floor and contemplated the rapid change in his fortunes.

In the space of less than an hour he had gone from escorting a senator’s daughter to wearing shackles in a cold, underground room that reeked of mold and fear.

“Fortuna, you do not smile on me today!” he muttered, shifting his lean flanks uncomfortably.

“Shut up!” came his answer, not from that fickle goddess Fortuna but rather from Andrew, chained to the opposite wall. “Do you want to bring even more trouble down on our heads?” The big eunuch’s voice trembled and tears welled in his eyes.

“You mean it’s illegal to invoke pagan deities in a Christian emperor’s dungeon?” John asked with a sarcastic grin.

“What I meant was that we’re all going to be punished extremely severely for damaging imperial property and you don’t need to make it any worse!”

John pointed out that apart from a few broken plates and slight damage to the plaster wall little damage had been done to the slave’s dining room.

“No, you fool! The imperial property we’ve damaged is ourselves! And we’ll pay for it dearly!”

“I see.” John lapsed into silence.

“Why couldn’t you just laugh at our little joke?” Andrew mourned. “Why do you hate us so much when you’re the same?” He began to weep, snuffling and wiping his nose on his blood-spattered tunic.

John examined the ragged bite mark on his thin wrist. “Your weapon needs sharpening,” he grumbled.

Andrew didn’t reply. He was now sitting hunched over, staring at the steady flame of a small lamp burning on the floor by the door. “Do you think it will last long?” he finally asked.

“I suppose it depends on what punishment is meted out to property-destroying slaves.” John spit out the final word.

The other shook his head. “No, I meant the oil in the lamp. Do you think it will last long?”

John stared at him. The big man’s frame seemed suddenly shrunken, his bruised face pitiful. “You’re afraid of the dark!”

Andrew looked at the floor and said nothing.

As the silence stretched out, John contemplated what might soon transpire. That severe punishment that was about to be meted out to all five brawlers was in itself not of much concern. He was familiar with the usual form of justice administered to slaves. Compared to what he had already suffered, a flogging would amount to little. However, he would not like to lose his eyesight and fervently hoped his services were valuable enough to the Keeper of the Plate to forestall anything so drastic. But, then too, he reminded himself, slaves had been summarily put to death for lesser misdemeanors than fighting amongst themselves.

If he lived, he would endure, as he had somehow endured the terrible events that eventually brought him to Constantinople. As to whether he would live, that was in the hands of Fortuna. And she had been filled with black humors for much too long.

The regular tread of military men approached slowly along the corridor. A bolt rattled, and the heavy door of the room swung open and admitted an excubitor who looked down with obvious distaste at the sorry spectacle of two crouching, bloodspattered prisoners.

“You! Eunuch!” He glared at John and bared his teeth in an unpleasant grin. “You’ve been summoned to an audience with Justinian.”

John’s shackles were unlocked and he was thrust out into the corridor where two armed guards waited.

The imperial jailer blew out the lamp inside the room John had just left before yanking its door shut. John was not sure if the faint sound he heard was the creak of the closing door or a horrified groan from Andrew inside the suddenly darkened cell.

He had no time to contemplate the question.

The excubitor prodded John’s back with a sword tip. “What are you waiting for? I’d think you’d be eager to get to a meeting with Justinian.” The man at John’s right shoulder only partly suppressed a laugh as both guards grabbed John’s arms and forced him forward.

John’s feet felt heavy as blocks of stone. He knew little of court life. He did know, however, that prisoners were not usually dragged off to meetings with the second most powerful man in the empire.

At the end of the corridor they were met by a thin, stooped man who carried a lantern suspended on a leather cord. Its need was soon apparent, since instead of emerging into daylight as John had expected, they instead clattered down a flight of narrow stone steps and emerged into another dark hallway.

The lantern’s cap had been painstakingly decorated with a swirling pattern of punched holes. The circles of light it cast flowed over the hallway’s uneven ceiling, occasionally vanishing up into musty darkness when the men passed through cavernous, seemingly empty rooms whose purpose John could not begin to guess.

John sniffed at the cool air flowing in his face. It smelled of loam.

Since his capture he had wished daily for the earth’s final embrace. Although he longed for the destination, something within him feared the journey, however short it might turn out to be. It was easy enough to face death in battle when the mind was fogged by warfare’s powerful, black potion of fury and terror. Such a death was honorable. But extermination in some dark corner like a rat in a cellar was not.

Yet if this was the manner in which Mithra had chosen to answer his oft prayed wish, how could he protest?

The procession passed across an unused cistern, where stagnant puddles lay amidst a forest of pillars and small creatures scrabbled in the shadows. Here and there arches in the hallway’s sweating walls revealed nothing but utter darkness. Soon they moved along the edge of another cistern where the black mirror of water which had never known wind faintly reflected the lantern’s light.

“Almost there,” announced the big excubitor, his voice wakening echoes around them.

John wondered what method would be used to extinguish him. He hoped it would be a mercifully speedy thrust of the blade.

Mithra, let it not be strangulation or drowning, he prayed fervently as he stumbled against the first step of a stairway leading upward.

He should lash out at his captors, he thought rapidly. Attempt to escape. Yes, that would ensure a clean death.