Barry Sadler - The Eternal Mercenary

Then all was still except for the cries of the panic-stricken and the injured. While he cleaned off the face of Lucius, Casca mused to himself: How strange it is that people in the worst possible conditions will strive to maintain their pathetic lives rather than take the easy way out! Perhaps it was that no one really knew what happened in death that made them cling so tenaciously to their miserable existences. Damn fools. The world was full of them.

Lucius opened his eyes.

The first thing his clearing vision saw was the frighteningly hairy face of Casca in all its filthy, dirt-encrusted splendor.

"What…? Where…?"

Casca soothed him, saying in gentle tones: "You were struck by a falling timber, master, and, remembering your kindness, I could not leave you to perish as did so many others in the falling rocks and flames. I carried you out here to the light."

Memory returned to Lucius. The last thing he recalled was covering up his head while the earth seemed to fall in around him. But this slave, the one they called "The Old One," had saved him. He would not die. He would live to eat and drink and make love. And this slave was responsible. Lucius Minitre felt a deep swelling in his bosom. A surge of brotherly love came sweeping over him. This great hairy beast had remembered his kindnesses… and everyone, even his wife, said he was too good-hearted. This man had brought him out of the bowels of the inferno. Lucius could hardly keep from hugging Casca-and Would have if the years of accumulated filth had not left their mark. Casca stank.

Rising to his feet with the help of Casca's strong arm, Minitre said to one of the lesser overseers: "See that this man is assigned to surface duty. Let him work with the cooks. And see that he is cleaned up."

Casca gloated inside, chuckling to himself. I made it. I'm outside again. How long has it been?

His question was answered, but not immediately. They showed him to the stream where he was allowed to scrape and rinse most of the filth from his body. A razor was loaned to him while the owner watched with careful eyes and an armed guard stood by. Casca cursed and moaned as the dull brass razor pulled clouts of hair and skin from his face and neck.

But the beard came off. Then the guard handed him a clean tunic, making the comment that the mining superintendent liked to have everything topside clean-including the personnel. Casca, remembering his times in the legion, felt a twinge of nostalgia.

The guard noticed Casca's slave tag and took a closer look. "By Mithra, man. Tiberius has been dead for over thirty years. You must be at least sixty, but you don't look it. By the gods, whatever they fed you in the mines damn sure agreed with you."

Laughing to himself at his small joke, the guard returned Casca to his new quarters, a barracks-type hut with a wooden bed and a straw pallet all his own. By comparison with what he had known for the past decades in the mines it was all sheer luxury.

Decades! The thought staggered Casca's imagination. He had been here for the length of a normal life-time, yet-He remembered the face that had stared back at him from the small bronze mirror of the man whose razor he had borrowed, his face, the beard gone. Now he rubbed his hand lightly along his cheek as if to reassure himself that what he had seen in the small mirror was true. So many years, yet his face was essentially the same. Perhaps leaner. Perhaps more craggy looking. But he did not by any stretch of the imagination look his true age of The slave medallion! I must get rid of it…

Going to the outside, Casca returned to the pit area and began helping the other slaves aid their comrades, both the living and the dead. In this service he exchanged medallions for a more recent one, one that bore the likeness of Claudius. The dead slave he swapped medallions with did not complain…

The next few days were spent in a general cleaning up of the mine area. During this time Casca learned much of what had happened in the outside world since his banishment to the nether regions of Achaia. Some of it brought back old memories. The emperor that had followed Augustus was Tiberius. Casca had served under his command for a time in Gaul. He remembered Tiberius as a good soldier and a steady man, but, according to what he was told, while Tiberius had started out well as an emperor, he had turned into a tyrant in his last years.

The slaves who told Casca this were the old ones, in their late fifties and early sixties. Only they could remember back that far, and they were a special class of slaves. They had survived because they were indispensable to their master's comfort- household slaves, cooks, masseurs, poets, teachers. Here they served the governor and his family at his big villa out of sight of the mines. There they went every morning before dawn, returning to the mines area when the governor had no further need of them. It was not like serving some of the great houses of Greece or Rome, but it beat the pits by far, and, after all, they were criminals, guilty of such enormous crimes as petty theft or showing a little temper to their masters. Sometimes when one lived in the great houses one forgot that one was not a person and as such was not entitled to such things as opinions. Well, that was the way the world was. Casca had no intention of changing it. Not that he could All the slaves agreed that the worst thing that Tiberius had done-even worse than his paranoid proscription-was the naming of the mad dog Caligula to the throne. The best thing about Caligula's reign was that it only lasted four years before the Praetorian Guard finally had enough of the damned sodomist, killed him, and put his uncle, Claudius, on the throne. They liked Claudius. The old man was-surprisingly enough-a quite competent administrator. Yes, they all agreed, old man Claudius was a gentleman-even if the rest of the patrician families and the nobility felt he was somewhat republican in his tastes. The old man had done right well, all things considered, but it was rumored that his second wife, Agrippina, had poisoned him so that she could put her son on the throne-her son Nero that the old man had adopted. Odd thing, this emperor business. It seemed that-even for the good ones-being Imperator of the most powerful empire in the history of man carried with it certain occupational hazards: the rulers lately seemed not to enjoy a great deal of longevity after taking power.

So, today Gaius Nero was Imperator. So far his reign was going quite well. The more knowledgeable slaves thought that was because he was following the guidance of his mentor, Seneca, and listening to the advice of Burrus, head of the Praetorian Guard, on foreign affairs. They had helped the young Nero from making too many critical errors. They, and his mother, kept a tight rein on things. Well, it was nothing to Casca. Let the emperors come and go.

It did not take long for Casca to settle into the routines of his new job. After the mines this was almost unbelievable luxury: bathe once a week… see the sun… feel rain on his face instead of dirt.

Lucius Minitre tried in every way to make Casca's servitude easier, and he even developed a certain fondness for the tough-looking former legionnaire. One morning, taking him aside, the overseer motioned for Casca to sit on a bench with him and share a bowl of wine.

"Casca, you saved my life, and I won't forget it. I cannot set you free, but I can be of help in making your life more bearable." He stopped, took a sip of the wine, and cut it a little with a touch of water from an earthenware pitcher. He tried another sip and nodded, pleased with the mixture. Clearing his throat, he continued: "I have been here for eight years, and I heard stories about you from the man I succeeded. He was here for fifteen years, and he said that you had been here long before he came." He peered at Casca through uneasy eyes and asked: "Why do you live?"