‘Stop!’ Pavo cried, standing.
Gorzam froze. Khaled’s eyes widened and he shook his head.
Gorzam twisted round to behold Pavo. ‘Ah, the Roman is awake. I have been looking forward to this.’
Pavo squared his shoulders as best he could, but this giant still dwarfed him. ‘It was me you heard calling out, not Khaled.’
Gorzam’s grin broadened and he laughed long and hard. ‘I care little whether it was you or him. You will both suffer!’ His grin faded into a grimace and he hefted the whip back, ready to bring it down upon Pavo.
‘Perhaps he is fit to work?’ Khaled offered quickly. ‘If you flog him he will be of no use to you for days.’
Gorzam froze once more, then his grin returned. ‘So be it,’ he hissed and lashed the whip down regardless. The iron barbs wrapped around Pavo’s back like claws, sinking into the flesh under his ribs and shoulder blades, gouging into muscle and sinew, ripping chunks of flesh free. He heard his own roar as if it had come from another. He toppled back onto the stony shelf and writhed as the pain wracked him to his core. He looked up to see Gorzam’s wild eyes and rotten-toothed grin as he hefted the whip back again. His mind flitted with those awful memories of his childhood as a slave in Senator Tarquitius’ cellar and the savage beatings he had witnessed there. Then he saw something glint on Gorzam’s chest. The missing phalera, spattered with the spray of his own blood.
This was not Hades. This was worse.
Three weeks passed. Three weeks of brutal labour at the salt face. Every day they were afforded a few hours of sleep, and without daylight, the concept of day and night was lost to them. They would be woken by Gorzam’s rattling spear tip on the bars, fed and watered, then shackled and ushered to the salt crystal near the main shaft. Here, the dust was so thick it stole the breath from their lungs, stung their eyes and burned in Pavo’s whip wounds – which had turned to scar tissue after nearly two weeks of agony. Their lips and mouths were constantly cracked and bleeding, their hands raw and their feet callused. They filled basket after basket, loading each one on the pulley before returning to the salt face with an empty one. Men worked all around them, coughing and panting. Nobody spoke, nobody even made eye contact. Don’t ever look the guards in the eye, Khaled had told Pavo, I have seen them kill men for less!
In his first days of mining, Pavo realised that they were deep underground – in the fourth of seven chambers, each linked by the main shaft. So far under the surface that we could cry out until our lungs bled and nobody would hear us up there, Khaled had confirmed, dryly. On taking a full basket to the pulley, Pavo had glanced down into the dark hole of the main shaft, and wondered how many of his vexillatio toiled in the chambers below. He saw another slave nearby, neglecting his work and looking up wistfully. Pavo also risked a look up. High above, he saw a tiny disc of white. Daylight and the world of the living. He only realised he was gawping at it when he heard Khaled’s whispered warning. He turned his eyes down at once, his skin crawling as he heard footsteps thunder over to him. Gorzam had stormed past him and grappled the other slave by the throat. Khaled and Pavo could only stare at the salt crystal and continue to hack at it as Gorzam whipped at the slave again and again until the poor wretch collapsed. Even then, Gorzam did not relent, whipping at the man’s head until the flesh came away and the skull crumpled. He enjoyed every lash. Then he and a comrade kicked the dead slave’s corpse towards the darkness of the main shaft. Another slave chained to the dead man dropped his pickaxe and clutched at the chains as he was dragged towards the shaft as well, begging Gorzam for mercy. The man’s pleas went unheard and he toppled into the abyss with the dead man. His cries echoed until they halted with an abrupt and distant crunch. The monotonous, rhythmic chink-chink of pickaxe on salt continued as if nothing had happened.
At the start of the fifth week of his incarceration, Pavo woke first to the soothing melody of Zoroastrian prayer. The voices of so many tortured souls in this place came together to recite the gathas, and the lilting verses echoed throughout the mines like the tumbling currents of a gentle brook. But the prayer halted abruptly at the sound of a cracking whip and the wailing of some poor slave on the end of its barbed tips. He sat bolt upright. The pain in his ribs and on his back had almost faded, but the burning in his lungs from the infernal salt dust seemed to grow fierier with every day. He scratched at his now wiry beard and straw-like, salt-encrusted hair. Khaled wakened at the same time and the two peered through the bars at the glowing crystalline cavern. Another long shift at the salt crystals lay ahead.