But the slave spoke first; ‘When I was young, I used to dream of escaping,’ he raised a shaking hand and pointed to the disc of light, high above. ‘But I would dream of travelling up . . . you’re going the wrong way!’ he said, then erupted in a bout of painfully dry cackling, his teeth stained with blood.
‘Come on,’ Sura said, frowning at the crazed man and backing away around the lip of the main shaft. ‘We don’t have long.’
Pavo followed Sura’s outstretched finger to see the dull outline of a trio of guards striding through the gloom, as yet unaware of their presence.
‘How do we get down?’ Pavo looked into the blackness below and then for some fixture to tie the coil of rope to. His gaze snagged on a jagged outcrop of rock that hung over the shaft. ‘There, what about that?’
‘No, I’ve seen the rocks here crumble under the weight of a man. But we can latch onto that thing,’ Sura pointed to the pulley wheel in the centre of the main shaft. Attached to it by an iron axel was a cog, and revolving against the edge of this cog was another, its edge oblique to the first. Extending from the base of this second cog was a thick, vertical timber pole, studded with iron pins, revolving and driving the whole pulley system. This sturdy timber pole disappeared down into the darkness.
Pavo shivered as he heard pained groans from below, where the pole surely ended. ‘What is that?’ he whispered.
‘Did you think the pulley ran on the will of the Persian God, or the power of Quadratus’ farts?’ Sura cocked an eyebrow, then threw a looped end of the rope out and around the axle between the cog and the wheel. The rope looped round on itself. Sura yanked at it, then beckoned Pavo over. ‘Ready?’
Pavo took up a piece of the rope while Sura held a section six feet along. ‘Ready!’
The pair moved gingerly to the edge of the black abyss, then stepped off. For a moment, they were weightless and falling, just like so many poor wretches cast down here by Gorzam. Suddenly, the world around Pavo jolted. The bones in his arms creaked and groaned and his shoulders almost leapt from their sockets. He slid a few feet but then steadied himself. The rope swung out across the shaft, past the revolving timber pole, then back again, eventually coming to a halt with Pavo dangling in the darkness by the pole, Sura a few feet above. The pair’s breath froze in their lungs when they heard a scuffling of boots above. Pavo peered up: the three guards had come to the ground they had stood on just moments ago. He could see their wrinkled faces looking around, then squinting into the shaft, right at him, but unable to see anything other than blackness.
‘What’s going on over here?’ One of the guards asked.
Pavo realised they had accosted the crazed slave.
‘Nothing, nothing at all bar the same toil I have enjoyed for the last five years.’
‘We heard you talking to someone,’ another guard growled. A shower of dust, salt and rubble toppled past Sura and Pavo. Pavo looked up to see the crazed man being held out over the precipice by the throat, his back turned to the shaft, his feet on the lip of the drop and his arms out wide to balance.
A dry cackle belied any fear the man felt. ‘I talk to many people when I work alone. The dead walk in these places, you know. Many of them were once my friends. Let me fall, then I can join them and be free of this place.’
The guard growled, then pulled the man back from the edge and shoved him away. ‘Work hard, old man – I’ll be expecting fifteen baskets from you today. If not, then you will feel the barbs of my whip.’ After a moment’s silence, the guards slipped away from the edge of the shaft and their footsteps faded.
In the blackness, Pavo could just make out Sura, clinging to the rope a few feet above him, his eyes wide. The pair expelled a sigh of relief, then Sura motioned to descend. Pavo shinned down the rope until there was only blackness all round. The air was utterly stale and dead here, and it had taken on an odd chill too. He looked up and realised he could no longer see the disc of light above. How far had they descended, he wondered? For a moment, he imagined that the shaft was bottomless, and the thought of an everlasting fall into darkness played havoc with his imagination. His grip on the rope grew tighter and his descent more careful. Finally, he reached the end of the rope and halted, clinging to the frayed fibres.
‘The rope’s not long enough!’ He hissed up to Sura.
‘What? No, I heard it from the guards themselves. Sixty feet, they said, I’m certain of it.’
Pavo tentatively stretched out a foot into the darkness below, poking out in search of ground. Nothing.
‘Then how come there’s no ground below my - ’ the frayed ends of the rope unwound in his hands. His grip deserted him and he plummeted. The terror of the fall into blackness was real. He flailed and sucked in a breath to cry out. But before the cry could manifest, he crunched onto hard ground, only feet below.