The Silver Pigs (11 page)

XXVIII

My hearing seemed unusually sharp. Understandable. Only noises from outside were keeping me sane; only my dregs of sanity kept me alive.

I could not move. No one came to speak to me. I could see nothing except the different shades of greyness that distinguished day from night on the pitted stones of my cell's damp walls. There were no windows. Some days the door cracked open for them to push in a thick-lipped bowl of greasy food. I marginally preferred the days when they forgot.

I did not know how long I had been here. Probably not even a week. A week to a man who has been left for dead feels a long time.

From the shuffling of their footsteps as the chained slaves were marched about, I had learned to distinguish whether it was raining or merely drifting with the eternal winter mist. Rumbling waggons were the common traffic, though sometimes I caught the jaunty clip of a pony's hooves and knew an officer from the fort had ridden past in his scarlet cloak. With the wind right, I could make out the distant chipping of axes and the thonk of wooden hods at the seams. The smelting furnace was a perpetual roar, varied only by the fervent wheeze of bellows on the cupellation hearths.

Sometimes now I remember what happened next, and smile.

One day a pony, drawing some sort of dainty cart amid a tangle of businesslike riders, passed the works then pulled up smartly nearby. A military voice named the procurator Flavius. Someone grumbled. Then another voice sharp as the scream of an adze on wood:... the one you call Chirpy."

Now I was in a bad way. Delirium, if not death itself, was snuggling up to me: it sounded like the senator's daughter. At first I could not even remember her name. Then I dragged it back to mind from another world: Helena.

"Now which was that... Dead, I believe"

"Then I'll have to inspect the body! If he's buried, dig him up."

Oh lady, let my servants fetch the silver wine set out for you!

The door creaked ajar on its one hinge in the unexpected dazzle of a flare.

"Oh yes! That's him our precious runaway!"

I was almost too hoarse to swear at her, but I managed it.

Cornix the foreman stood just behind her shoulder, pitifully subdued.

After one distasteful glance around my cell she quipped tartly, "What's this he has? Bedrest and special nursing?"

I felt sorry for Cornix. Her attitude was intolerable. Besides, she had a military escort; there was nothing he could do.

He hauled me from my thin pallet of stinking ferns to stretch me at her feet in the mud outside. I closed my eyes against the glazed light of huge wan clouds. I carried with me a young woman's sturdy shape in swathes of dark blue material, the crinkled woollen fringe on her dress, a frowning white face beneath twists of soft straight hair.

For a moment I nearly collapsed.

"Marcus!" rapped Helena Justina, in the patronizing tone she would naturally use to a disgraced slave.

My face lay in a puddle only inches from her feet.

Smart shoes. Slate-grey leather, punched with spirals of tiny holes. Much better ankles than she deserved.

This is a fine scene! Uncle Gaius had such faith in you. Look at you now!" What did she expect? A runaway rarely packs clean tunics and his personal toilet sponge... I clung to reality in the chalky smudge of that familiar hostile face. "Oh really Marcus! What have you achieved? A broken leg, fractured ribs, chilblains, ringworm, and filth!" She considered the dirt uneasily. She had me put through the baths they provided for officials before I disgraced her aunt's good pony trap. A soldier who must have known who I really was tied my leg to a new splint, too shamefaced to do it properly.

By the time Helena allowed me to ease into the cart, I had been thoroughly sluiced down and my rags exchanged for somebody's third-best tunic, which had a smell I found uncomfortable, though it was several times better than how I had stunk before. Cornix had slunk away for one of his afternoon bouts of torture and fornication in the sheds. I was shuddering; her ladyship flung a travel rug over me with an angry hiss. I still felt damp. I had managed a rough and ready scrub, but bathing under the eyes of a soldier and Cornix was not a time for drying carefully between your toes.

My scalp itched madly with the shock of being clean. All my skin felt alive. The lightest breath of breeze bruised my face.

Helena Justina produced a cloak, which I vaguely recalled had been mine in another existence. Decent dark green garment with a stout metal toggle: I must have been a lad of taste and style. Somehow I clambered into the pony cart.

"Nice rig!" I told Helena, struggling to sound more like myself. Then since she was a woman, I offered like a good boy, "Want me to drive?"

"No," she said. Some people might have said "No, thanks'. Still, I could barely stick upright on the seat as it was.

She organized herself before she deigned to speak again. "If you had charge of a vehicle would you let me drive yours?"

"No," I agreed.

"You wouldn't trust a woman; well, I won't trust a man."

"Fair enough," I said. Quite right; most men are wicked on wheels.

The pony set off jauntily and we soon left the settlement behind. Helena Justina, as you might expect, surged away in front; her small but stalwart mounted escort jingled meekly in the rear.

Tell me if I go too fast and frighten you," she challenged me, gazing straight ahead.

"You drive too fast but you don't frighten me!" She had turned down a byway. "This isn't right take the road east over the uplands, lady, will you?"

"No. We have soldiers; there's no need to stay on the frontier. We need to go north. You have your friend Vitalis to thank for being rescued today. Last time he saw you he told Uncle Gaius you ought to be withdrawn whether you had completed your work or not. I volunteered to fetch you better camouflage. Besides, I felt guilty about your grey-haired mother..." Since I could not remember discussing my mother, I let her rattle on. "Uncle Gaius has that man Triferus under arrest at Glevum -"

Unused to explanations, my brain balked at so many facts. "I see. North, eh?"

Conversation seemed a pointless effort. Let someone else take charge. This cart was a pretty toy; too fragile to bear four ingots' weight. We might at a pinch have organized something with the soldiers' ponies but I was too exhausted to care. Still, I must have shifted restlessly. She slowed the cart.

"What have you been up to on the moor? Falco! Tell me the truth."

"I hid four stolen ingots under a cairn."

"Evidence?" she demanded.

"If you like."

She must have drawn her own conclusions, for she whipped up the poor pony until it flew along. Her eyes flashed.

"You mean, a nice little pension for you!"

We left them behind. For all I know my four ingots are still there.

Helena Justina continued to drive fast. Her husband probably divorced her to save his skin. However, I was never really frightened. She handled the pony cart well. She had the proper combination of patience and courage. The horse trusted her entirely; after a few miles so did I. It was fifty miles to Glevum, so that was just as well.

We stopped a couple of times. She let me slide out. The first time I was sick, though it had nothing to do with her driving. She left me to rest, while she spoke in a low voice to one of the soldiers, then before we set off again she brought me some sweetened wine from a flask. Her steadying grip stayed on my shoulder. At the strange touch of a woman's hand I began to sweat.

"We can stop down the road at a mansio if you want." She was matter-of-fact, though watching me closely.

I shook my head without speaking. I wanted to go on. I preferred to die in a military fort where they would bury me with a headstone over my urn, rather than in a roadhouse where I would be pitched into a trench with a ton of broken wine jars and their run-over tabby cat. It struck me there might be a reason why Helena Justina whipped along at such a cracking pace: she did not want to be stuck in the wilderness with my corpse. I thanked Jove for her ruthless good sense. I did not want my corpse to be stuck with her in any case.

She read my mind, or more likely my sick face.

"Don't worry, Falco, I'll bury you properly!"

XXIX

I thought I was back at the mines.

No. Another world. I had left the mines, though they will never quite leave me.

I was lying on a high, hard bed in a small square room at a legionary hospital. Unhurried footsteps sometimes paced the long corridor round the courtyard at the back of their administration block. I recognized the evil reek of antiseptic turpentine. I felt the reassuring pressure of neat, firm bandaging. I was warm. I was clean. I was resting in tranquillity in a quiet, caring place.

Yet I was terrified.

What had woken me was a trumpet on the ramparts, sounding the night watch. A fort, I could cope with a fort. I heard the spiteful squawk of sea gulls. Must be Glevum. Glevum stood on the Estuary. She had done it then. For hours now I had been asleep in the Second Augusta's big new headquarters base. The Second. I belonged to them; I was home.

I wanted to cry.

"Thinks he's back on army service," said the dryly amused voice of the procurator Flavius.

I never saw him. I was a felled log surging through warm barley soup, though my legs and arms could hardly thrash against the bumbling grains; they had filled me with poppy juice to kill the pain.

"Marcus, rest now, I've had your report from Vitalis; I've been able to act on it already. Well done!"

Gaius, my friend; my friend, who sent me there...

I struggled abruptly; someone else gripped my arm. "Hush! It's over; you're quite safe."

Helena, his niece, my enemy. My enemy, who came and fetched me back...

"Lie still, Falco; don't make such a fuss..."

The dependable vindictiveness of Helena's voice swung with me through delirium. To a freed slave, tyranny can be oddly comforting.

XXX

Awake again.

Their opium had ebbed away. When I moved pain shot back. A red tunic, brooched on one shoulder with the medical snake and staff, loomed over me, then sheered off again when I stared him in the eye. I recognized the complete absence of bedside manner: must be the chief orderly. Pupils stretched their necks behind him like awestruck ducklings jostling their mother duck.

Tell me the truth, Hippocrates!" I jested. They never tell you the truth.

He tickled me up and down my ribs like a moneychanger on an abacus. I yelped, though not because his hands were cold.

"Still in discomfort that will last several months. He can expect a great deal of pain. No real problems if he avoids getting pneumonia..." He sounded disappointed at the thought that I might. "Emaciated specimen; he's vulnerable to gangrene in this leg." My heart sank. "Best amputate, whilst he has some strength." I glared at him with a heartbreak that brightened him up. "We can give him something!" he consoled his listeners. Did you know, the main part of a surgeon's training is how to ignore the screams?

"Why not wait and see what develops!" I managed to croak.

"Your young woman asked me that' Now he sounded quite respectful; probably impressed to discover someone even more bad mannered than him.

"She's not mine! Don't insult me," I growled viciously, letting myself get annoyed over the girl as a way of fighting off what he had said. But it had to be faced. "Do what you have to then take the leg!"

I went back to sleep.

He woke me up again.

"Flavius Hilaris wants to interview you urgently. Is that all right?"

"You're the doctor."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Leave me alone."

I went back to sleep again.

They never leave you alone.

"Marcus Flavius Hilaris. He wanted me to tell him again everything about the mine that I had already passed on through Rufrius Vitalis. He was too polite to say he was taking formal evidence now in case I died under surgery but I understood.

I told him all I knew. Anything to make him go away.

As far as the plot went, Gaius told me that Triferus the contractor was refusing to talk. It was deep winter now, snow in the hills. No chance of trailing the waggons that turned south no waggons moving, probably for many weeks. Gaius would lock Triferus in a cell and abandon him; try again when I could help. I would be carried to the Sacred Springs to convalesce if I lived.

He sat for a long time at my bedside, grasping my wrist; he seemed upset. He said he had told Rome they should pay me double rates, I smiled. After thirty years of service he should have known better than to try. I remembered thinking a long time ago, it could be him! I smiled again.

I drifted back to sleep.

The surgeon was called Simplex. When they introduce themselves by name, you know the intended treatment is at best a drastic gamble and at worst very painful indeed.

Simplex had spent fourteen years in the army. He could calm a sixteen-year-old soldier with an arrow shot into his head. He could seal blisters, dose dysentery, bathe eyes, even deliver babies from the wives the legionaries were not supposed to have. He was bored with all that. I was his favourite patient now. Among his set of spatulas, scalpels, probes, shears, and forceps, he owned a shiny great mallet big enough to bash in fencing stakes. Its use in surgery was for amputations, driving home his chisel through soldiers' joints. He had the chisel and the saw too: a complete tool bag all laid out on a table by my bed.

They drugged me, but not enough. Flavius Hilaris wished me luck, then slipped out of the room. I don't blame him. If I hadn't been strapped down to the bed with four six-foot set faced cavalrymen grappling my shoulders and feet, I would have shot straight out after him myself.

Through the drugs I saw Simplex approach. I had changed my mind. Now I knew him for a knife-happy maniac. I tried to speak; no sound emerged. I tried to shout.

Someone else cried out: a woman's voice.

"Stop it at once!" Helena Justina. I had no idea when she came in. I had not realized she was there. "There's no gangrene!" stormed the senator's daughter. She seemed to lose her temper wherever she was. "I would expect an army surgeon to know gangrene has its own distinctive smell. Didius Falco's feet may be cheesy, but they're not that bad!" Wonderful woman; an informer in trouble could always count on her. "He has chilblains. In Britain that's nothing to wonder at all he needs for those is a hot turnip mash! Pull his leg as straight as you can, then leave him alone; the poor man has suffered enough!"

I passed out with relief.

They tried twice to pull my leg straight. The first time I ground the pad of cloth between my teeth in shocked silence while hot tears raced down either side of my neck. The second time I was expecting it; the second time I screamed.

Someone sobbed.

I gurgled, but before I suffocated, a hand presumably attached to one of the heavy-squad holding me down removed the pad from my mouth. I was drenched in perspiration. Someone took the trouble to wipe my face.

At the same time a shaft of piquant perfume pierced my senses, marvelous as that Regal Balsam concocted for the kings of Parthia from the essences of twenty-five individual fine oils. (I had never been there, but any spare-time poet knows about the long-haired rulers of Parthia; they are always good for enlivening a limp ode.)

It was not Regal Balsam, but still a wonderful smell. I remember thinking cheerfully, some of these fifteen-stone horse guards are not all that they appear...