Steven Saylor - Rubicon

"No!" the man wailed. "Return me to my master in Beneventum! Only he has the right to punish me."

"Nonsense!" I said sternly. "You were let to me along with the wagon. While you're in my service, I have every right to chastise you."

"Actually, for deceiving an officer of the Roman army in time of military crisis, this slave is liable to be executed by military law, and his master fined, at the very least," said Otacilius coldly. I felt a stab of pity for the cringing driver, who was now the one ringed by soldiers with spears. If only he had kept his mouth shut!

"No, wait!" He lunged desperately toward Otacilius. One of the soldiers gave him a vicious poke with his spear. A blossom of blood stained his shoulder. He clutched the wound and wailed. "Up on that knob! The two of them climbed up there before the troops arrived, spying on you!"

"There's no crime in curiosity," said Otacilius.

"But don't you see? That's when they must have hidden the document, or destroyed it. They saw you coming, and they got rid of it. Go look up on that hill! You'll find it there!"

Tiro rolled his eyes in disgust. "The lying slave will have you searching every stretch of road from here back to Beneventum, if you listen to him. Stupid lout! Perhaps if you stop lying and tell the truth, the cohort commander will at least allow you a quick and merciful death."

Otacilius worked his jaw back and forth and stared at me. I played the affronted citizen and stared back at him. I realized that he had not given back our daggers. That meant he had not made up his mind about us.

At last he called another row of troops from the column. "You men, go search that hilltop. Bring back anything you find that a traveler might have left there- any sort of bag or pouch, and any scrap of parchment, no matter how small or burnt."

Surely they would find nothing, I thought. Tiro had been with me atop the knob. He hadn't mentioned the courier's passport, and I hadn't seen him hide it. The only sign of a human that the soldiers were likely to come across, I thought ruefully, was the deposit left by Tiro when he stole away to relieve himself…

I suddenly realized that Tiro had not lingered behind on account of his nervous bowels. He had gone off to dispose of the document.

Parchment burns easily. Parchment could also be torn, ground underfoot, chewed, even swallowed. But had Tiro destroyed it beyond trace, or merely hidden it, thinking to retrieve it after Caesar's troops passed by? I avoided looking at him, fearful that my expression might give me away. Instead I watched the soldiers scramble up the hillside. At last I could stand it no longer. I glanced in Tiro's direction. In the instant our eyes met, I knew as surely as if he had spoken that he had not obliterated the document, but had only hidden it. My heart sank. I drew a deep breath.

Perhaps, I thought, the soldiers would be content to search the bare hilltop. But I knew it was a vain hope; these men were trained to follow tracks, watch for signs of passage, ferret out hiding places. Their commander had ordered them to search and retrieve. That was what they would do.

Tiro, Fortex, and I stood in the wagon and waited. The driver clutched his wounded shoulder and sobbed. Row after row of soldiers marched past. I felt the suspense one feels in the theater, awaiting a reversal of fortune.

At last the soldiers came scrambling down the hillside. They had found not one artifact, but several. What Roman road is without litter? There was part of a cast-off shoe, chewed on by some animal with pointed teeth. There was a bit of ivory which appeared to be a broken strigil, used for scraping oneself clean at the baths. There was a tattered scrap of cloth which might once have been a child's soiled, discarded loincloth. The most valuable find was an old Greek drachma, the silver tarnished black.

"We also found this, cohort commander. It was rolled up tight and stuffed between some rocks on the far side of the hill." The soldier handed a piece of parchment to Otacilius, who unrolled it. His face grew long.

"A courier's passport," he said quietly. "Issued by authority of the Ultimate Decree. Signed by Pompey himself. Stamped with his seal ring." Otacilius peered at me above the parchment. "How do you explain this, Gordianus? If, in fact, you are Gordianus…"

Row after row of soldiers marched past. Face after face peered sidelong at us, some scornful, some merely curious. A few even looked at us with pity. We must have made a sorry sight: four men with arms bound behind their backs, tethered to one another by their ankles, being led down the mountain in single file along the side of the road by a cohort commander on horseback. A foot soldier followed behind, using his spear for a prod.

The wagon driver was hindmost in the group. The wound at his shoulder had rendered him faint and weak. He had a hard time keeping up. The footpath alongside the paved road was rough and uneven. Occasionally he stumbled, sending a jerk through the tether that connected our ankles, making Fortex trip forward into Tiro, who tripped forward into me. The foot soldier would prod at the stumbling slave with his spear; the slave would let out a yelp. The soldiers marching past would laugh, as if we were performing a roadside mime show for their amusement.

Otacilius peered at me over his shoulder occasionally, his face inscrutable. Another tether connected the two of us, one end tied around my throat, the other wound around his forearm and clutched in his fist. Despite my best efforts to keep up and maintain some slack in the tether, my neck was soon wrenched and sore, the flesh chafed and raw. I was lucky to still have a head connected to my shoulders.

We might have died within moments after Otacilius discovered our lies. We were an unexpected anomaly encountered on the road, a hindrance to the army's progress, a problem to be disposed of. He might have had us all executed where we stood. As soon as the passport from Pompey was produced, I braced myself for that possibility. To avoid the horror of it I let a great tide of recriminations flood my thoughts. If only Tiro had had the sense to destroy the passport, rather than hide it. If only we had stayed on the Appian Way instead of taking Tiro's "shortcut." If only we had dragged the driver into the woods and cut out his tongue before the first scout arrived. If only we had left the wagon behind that morning, and the driver with it…

The list of regrets circled endlessly in my mind as we trudged downhill, the monotony interrupted only by the occasional stumble by the driver, followed by more stumbling up the line and a jerk at the tether around my throat, then the squeal of the driver as he was poked, and the laughter of the soldiers passing by.

"Who are those wretches?" said one soldier.

"Spies!" said another.

"What will they do to them?"

"Hang them upside down and flay them alive!"

That elicited a squeal of terror from the wagon driver, who stumbled again. The humiliating sequence repeated itself. The passing soldiers howled with laughter. Not even the most stumblebum troupe of Alexandrian mimes could have put on a funnier show.

What did Otacilius intend to do with us? The fact that he hadn't yet killed us offered some hope. Or did it? He assumed we were spies. Spies knew secrets. Secrets might be valuable. Therefore we might be valuable. But I suspected that the Roman military in regard to spies, like the Roman judiciary in regard to slaves, recognized only one credible means of obtaining secrets: through torture.

We had been spared our lives, but toward what end? We were being led down the mountain, toward the rear of the army, but for what purpose? I found it easier to scroll mentally through endless recriminations and regrets than to contemplate those questions.