Steven Saylor - Catilina's riddle

Beneath us the ground fell steeply away towards the winding stream below. Down the rugged hillside was strewn a great mass of bones, mixed in with the tailings from the mine to form a talus of crushed rock and bone. Even here whole skeletons had been preserved, and skulls stared up from jagged crevices in the stone.

'Have you ever seen a mine in operation?' asked Catilina, so close behind me that I gave a start. 'No.'

'I have.' His face was sombre in the soft light, with no hint of a smile. 'You can't really understand the value of a precious metal until you've seen its true worth at the source — the agony and death required to extract it from the earth. Tell me, Gordianus, when does the weight of a hundred men equal less than a pound?'

'Oh, Catilina, not a riddle…'

'When they are stripped of their flesh and weighed against a single cup made of pure silver. Imagine all those bones down there gathered up and stacked high upon a great scale. How much silver would it take to strike the balance? A handful, no more than that. Think of it me next time you press a silver cup to your lips.'

He turned towards Forfex. 'At least it should be cooler inside the mine. Tonguius, you brought the torches? Good. Are you corning with us, Gordianus?'

I had no particular interest in seeing a hole in the ground and would have preferred to sit for a while and catch my breath, but it struck me that an abandoned mine could be a dangerous place, especially for a fifteen-year-old boy. 'Yes,' I said wearily, 'I'm coming.'

Just within the entrance we came to a shoulder-high wall made of stone. 'Good for keeping out goats,' Forfex explained. And grown men, I thought, though when it came my turn to step into the stirrup of his hands and scurry over the wall, I did so without complaining, following the examples of Catilina and Tongilius. Meto gave Forfex a boost, and then followed last, pulling himself up unassisted.

Only a little light seeped over the wall, just enough to illuminate our immediate surroundings with a vague twilight. Tonguius knelt and kindled one of his torches, then lit the other and handed it to me. The flames lit a low, narrow chamber that sloped steeply downward into darkness. In such a confined space the burning pitch smelled strongly.

Catilina took a torch from Tonguius and led the way. Meto followed, and then Forfex, with myself in the rear. This is absurd,' I whispered, thinking how easily one of us might trip and fall into the void. I imagined Meto breaking his neck, and I cursed myself for allowing him to take part in such folly.

'We needn't go far,' said Catilina. 'I only want to have a look at the general condition of the mine. How far down does it go?'

'Quite a distance,' Forfex said. 'Consider that there used to be as many as two hundred slaves inside here at one time.' 'Two hundred!' Meto said..

'So I was always told. Oh, this was quite an operation in the old days. That's how young Master Gnaeus's ancestors made their fortune, from this silver mine. That's how they came to buy all the land for miles around. Now of course it's split up among the Claudian cousins, but at one time the mountain and all the land you could see from it made up a single great estate, or so they say. Watch your head, young man!'

Meto, straying from Catilina's lead, had nearly collided with a jagged fist of rock suspended from the ceiling. Forfex laughed. ‘I should have warned you. We call that one the miner's brains, partly because it looks a bit like a brain, all knobby and slick, but more because many a careless miner lost his brains against that stone! Made of something so hard they could never chisel it out, so there it stays, waiting to bash in the skull of any man who walks too close. If you look at it closely you can still see a coating of dried blood on it.'

'It's no laughing matter,' I said. 'Come,' I called ahead to Catilina, 'you'll agree this is no place to bring a boy. The place is dangerous.'

Catilina's laughter echoed from ahead, distorted and hollow as if he were calling from a well. 'I'm beginning to wish I'd left you behind, Gordianus! Are you always so fussy and difficult? Have you no sense of adventure?'

I looked over my shoulder and saw that the opening had dwindled to a dismayingly small spot of grey light. The spot suddenly blinked shut I opened my mouth and almost cried out, thinking that someone had covered it up. But by moving my head I was able to catch glimpses of light, and realized that because of a slight curve in the path the rock called the miner's brains had come between us and the entrance, blocking out the light. After a few more steps I lost sight of the entrance completely.

'How much farther are we going?'

'Oh, I think this may be far enough,' said Catilina.

The path abruptly grew level and we found ourselves in what appeared to be a small, oval chamber hewn out of the solid rock. The air was musty but dry, cool but not chilly. The ground was flat underfoot Low doorways had been carved out of the rock, leading in different directions.

'It's like a little room, underground,' said Tongilius.

'Like the entrance to a maze,' said Meto, 'or the Labyrinth of the Minotaur!'

'This is only one of several such rooms in the mine,' explained Forfex. 'Without a guide, you'd need a map to find your way, or else be willing to spend a day wandering about. For that you'd need more than a couple of torches.'

'Where does this passageway lead?' said Catilina, ducking beneath one of the rocky lintels.

'Careful, there,' called Forfex. And under his breath, 'Wouldn't you know, of all the passages he'd choose the most dangerous? Careful, please! They warned me from boyhood about going into that one. There's a sheer drop down into a deep pit. It's one of the oldest parts of the mine. You could easily fall!'

From beyond the narrow doorway, lit up with shivering shadows from Catilina's torch, there issued a sharp gasp of alarm. Tongilius hurried after him 'Quick, Gordianus, bring your torch!'

Together we wedged ourselves into the narrow passage. Meto pressed up against my back, peering over my shoulder, and behind me I heard the goatherd clucking his tongue.

'Lucius, what is it?' said Tongilius.

'See for yourself,' said Catilina.

Ringing the pit was a ledge barely wide enough to stand on. The five of us pressed close together, shoulder to shoulder, gazing down. Forfex, who all that day had seemed so inured to the sight of human bones, gave a gasp of shock.

Catilina looked at him sidelong. 'I thought you knew these mines?'

'Not this chamber. I told you, as a boy I was always warned away from this part of the mine. I always thought it was just a sheer drop into darkness.'

'And so it would be, if it weren't for these, filling up the abyss.' Catilina held his torch aloft. By its wavering light the skulls of the dead peered up at us, their empty eyes strangely animated by the flickering play of light and shadow.

'So many!' whispered Tongilius.

'I've never seen anything like it,' I said.

'Nor have I,' said Catilina.

We had seen many bones that day — at the foot of the waterfall, along the hillside, in the talus that spilled from the mine. But those sights were scant preparation for the vast pit heaped up with skeletons that we now saw below us. There were hundreds of them, perhaps many hundreds, for there was no way to tell how deep the pit was.

Whatever dwelled in the cave had picked them perfectly clean, for they were as white as if they had been weathered in a streambed. The sheer number of them was staggering and somehow unreal, for without flesh the bones of the dead lose all identity, and one skull becomes like another, so that to see so many in one place numbs the senses. The meaning of such a thing cannot be comprehended at the moment, only in retrospect, for the mind cannot make sense of what overwhelms the eye.