Saviour of Rome [Gaius Valerius Verrens 7] by Douglas Jackson Read Free Book Online

‘Down there.’
    Down there was the lowest level. As Serpentius worked his way past the overseer the thongs of the whip lashed out to catch him on the shoulder and a lightning bolt of pain made him cry out. Every instinct urged him to retaliate. It would be so easy to twist the wrist chain around the overseer’s neck and snap it. But that would get him killed and Serpentius wasn’t ready to die yet. He looked round and met the man’s gaze.
    ‘That was just a taste of what’s to come,’ the overseer sneered. ‘I’ve been told to pay special attention to you—’ But the arrogance faded from his voice when he recognized the message in Serpentius’s eyes. ‘Get on with it.’
    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 shovelhad 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.

V
    Valerius sailed from the port at Ostia on a glittering sun-drenched