Douglas Jackson - Saviour of Rome

Down there meant a cramped chamber where the tepid, filthy water had pooled a foot deep. Their only consolation was that this was where one arm of the ventilation pipe ended and faint puffs of air made the torrid atmosphere just bearable. Serpentius shared the chamber with a hammer man, another pick wielder and a sickly looking prisoner carrying one of the cane baskets. The man with the pick placed his lamp in a notch in one of the walls and Serpentius followed suit. The hammer man rolled his shoulders and hefted the hammer in two hands, bringing the iron head around to smash into the solid rock. Once, twice, thrice, the clang of each strike echoing round the chamber.

He staggered back, allowing Serpentius and the other pick man to attack the fissures with their picks, chipping tiny pieces of stone that fell into the water at their feet, where the fourth man used a short iron shovel to transfer them to his basket. After only a few minutes sweat was pouring from Serpentius. He realized with a thrill of fear that within weeks, or even days, all the spare flesh would melt from him, and his strength with it. His throat was parched and he reached down to scoop up a handful of water, only for the hammer man to dash it from his hand.

‘Fool.’ He glanced towards the entrance. ‘Whatever you’ve done you don’t deserve to die like that. It’s deadly poison. Wait for the water carrier to come round.’

Serpentius nodded his thanks. After an hour the man with the shovel had filled his basket. He made a huge effort to get it on to his back and the leather straps over his shoulder, but eventually the big hammer man had to help him.

‘He won’t last the day,’ he predicted after the man had struggled from the chamber, his knees threatening to buckle under the weight. They continued working hour after hour and eventually the hammer man was proved right. The man with the basket left, but when the basket returned another prisoner carried it. Serpentius was a former gladiator, a superbly fit man who exercised with the sword every day, but his shoulder muscles shook with the strain of bringing the pick up to strike time after time. His head reeled and his lower back ached where Josephus’s sword blade had penetrated his flesh and scraped across his hip. He winced as he remembered the lightning bolt of agony, the disbelief and the sense of betrayal as the Judaean traitor stabbed him in the back outside the Great Temple of Jerusalem. On and on. Someone must have refilled or replaced the lamps, but Serpentius never noticed. It was only when a hand touched his shoulder and turned him towards the entrance that he realized everyone else had stopped working.

He could barely put one foot in front of the other as they staggered wordlessly up the slope towards the sleeping chamber, the strong supporting the weak.

Survive? Endure? After two weeks of backbreaking labour, lying exhausted in his own filth and living on a diet a pig would have turned its nose up at? Serpentius knew that was fantasy. He had to escape soon, or he would undoubtedly die here.

Still, he had been able to gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of his jailers, and, perhaps more importantly, of his companions.

Valerius sailed from the port at Ostia on a glittering sun-drenched morning that turned the gently undulating Mare Tyrrhenum into a vast mirror. Neptune, most capricious of all the gods, showed his kinder face and the gentle breeze drove them west across the ocean at a rate that would have put a smile on the face of the most gloomy of captains. On the third day they docked at Pallas on the island of Corsica to deliver a cargo of oil and replace it with timber, one of the few things the place had in abundance. The other was fierce and merciless bandits, and, though they were said to keep to the mountains, Valerius and his fellow passenger, a jolly merchant by the name of Tiberius Petro, stayed on board throughout the loading and unloading. Petro, a short, fat Ligurian, with the face of a mischievous cupid and a cap of dark, curly hair, had a wealth of stories from his travels. Valerius discovered the merchant was one of the few civilians who’d visited Cepha on the Armenian-Parthian border and Petro kept his companions entertained during the four days it took to reach Tarraco, capital of Hispania Tarraconensis.

The voyage gave Valerius time to ponder the task Vespasian had set him. At first he’d found it surprising that Pliny had made his request for assistance through the Palatine. Over the years, they’d been allies and opponents fighting cases in the law courts at the basilica, and Pliny, who hoarded obscure pieces of knowledge the way others hoarded silver, was one of the few men Valerius could call friend. He’d been a cavalry prefect under Vespasian in Germania and would have had his province long ago had he not fallen foul of Nero and been forced into retirement and obscurity during his chaotic reign. Pliny had been the only man who spoke for Valerius at his trumped-up trial for treason and loaned him money to escape Rome when Domitian’s death sentence had been commuted to exile. He must know that Valerius wouldn’t have refused him if the approach had been made direct? Yet there was a logic in taking the official route. Vespasian’s endorsement and the appointment as legatus iuridicus gave Valerius a power that would open doors and overcome obstacles. The only problem was that the fact Pliny believed he might need that power made it likely this mission would prove more complicated and dangerous than it appeared.

Still, all that was to come. Tabitha’s face swam into his head. It might have been a difficult parting from his bride of three weeks, but his wife – diminutive and Hellenistically beautiful, but with a core of well-tempered iron – had been philosophical as she’d kissed him goodbye on the steps of their new home. ‘The quicker you are gone the quicker I will have you back,’ she had said. There were no tears, only an assurance that with Lupergos’s help she would see the villa completed by the time of his return.

‘I have a potion guaranteed to cure the worst ship sickness, lord.’ Valerius looked up to find Petro watching him. ‘Squid ink, chopped toad bladder and allec .’ Valerius grimaced. Allec was the sludge residue left from the fish guts used to make garum . ‘It tastes revolting,’ Petro grinned, ‘but I suspect that is part of its virtue.’

Valerius swallowed. ‘It sounds more likely to kill than cure. But it is not ship sickness that ails me.’ He hesitated, but … why not? He told the merchant about his wedding and the recent, reluctant parting from Tabitha, though not the reason for it.

Petro’s plump features took on a solemn air and he sighed. ‘A new wife is like an unbroken filly. Give her all your attention and she will lick honey from your fingers and come at your call. Ignore her too long and she is apt to bite them off and run wild.’ The impish grin returned. ‘Not that I am suggesting …’

Valerius had passed through the port of Tarraco once before. During an earlier mission for Vespasian, then a mere legate, he’d come to offer support for Servius Sulpicius Galba’s bid to take the purple. Only three years ago, but the trials Valerius had experienced since made it seem a lifetime – a lifetime that had seen the deaths of four emperors and hundreds of thousands of their subjects. So it was a familiar sight that greeted him as the creaking merchant ship slid between the twin headlands beneath a sky that glowed with all the splendour of a peacock’s breast feathers. Red-tiled roofs of cavernous warehouses on either hand, a harbour bustling with water craft of all shapes and sizes and a quayside that resembled a disturbed ants’ nest.

He stepped on to the dock on legs unused to a stable platform, to be greeted by the overwhelming, familiar scent of garum . Hundreds of amphorae of the pungent fish sauce were stacked high waiting to be loaded into the ship for the return journey to Ostia, next to bales of the pale yellow wool for which Tarraco was famous. A customs inspector, a centurion accompanied by two legionaries, appeared to check the ship’s cargo while Valerius’s baggage was being unloaded. One of the legionaries demanded to see his travel papers and he was forced, against his better judgement, to show the Imperial warrant Vespasian had provided to ease his passage. The man’s eyes widened and Valerius knew that within a few hours the whole town would be aware an envoy from Vespasian had arrived on the ship.