He looked up, his head spinning. A sense of relief swirled in his heart only to be snatched away again: From the surrounding gloom, three dark shapes moved towards him, arms outstretched. He clasped for the sharpened shaving stone, tearing it from his loincloth. The nearest of the figures reached out for him and he swiped at it. Another grappled him by the shoulders. The sharpened stone fell to the ground. Terror welled in his chest and a cry leapt from his lungs. A filthy hand clasped over his mouth to stifle it.
Zosimus looked up from the ridge of salt crystal, resting an elbow on his pickaxe momentarily.
‘Are you bloody insane?’ Felix hissed beside him. ‘Get your head down, or you’ll lose it!’
‘Aye,’ Quadratus whispered from nearby, ‘don’t draw their attention.’
But Zosimus ignored them, his eyes narrowing on the prone form near the main shaft, and the absence of Sura working the baskets on the pulley. Another guard was calling out from the other side of the chamber, his face wrinkled in suspicion as he eyed this scene too. This guard stalked round the edge of the main shaft to the pulley and froze. He stared at the prone form, then crouched, shaking the still figure.
‘If that’s Sura sleeping on duty . . . ’ Felix whispered by Zosimus’ side.
Quadratus now broke cover to look with them. ‘That’s not Sura,’ he jabbed a finger at the prone figure who was now coming around groggily, his stark white skin and hair now visible as he sat up, ‘that’s a guard – and someone’s knocked seven shades out of him.’
‘Someone? Aye, Sura,’ Felix groaned.
Just then, the alarmed guard stood up and clenched his spear, looking this way and that. His groggy comrade muttered something over and over.
‘They went below, get Gorzam,’ he croaked once more. At this, the alarmed guard hurried up the ladders into the chamber above.
‘Did I just hear that?’ Zosimus gawped. ‘They went down the main shaft? They being Sura and . . . ’
‘Pavo!’ Felix and Quadratus finished for him.
Their eyes sparkled as they looked to one another, each holding their pickaxes. Each thinking the same thing.
The hand slid away from Pavo’s mouth as his eyes acclimatised to the darkness. Slaves, he realised, seeing the dirt-encrusted features of the man before him. Almond-shaped eyes almost devoid of colour dominated his gaunt features. His hair was thin and tousled, his beard tangled. He was aged, but knotted muscle seemed to strain under his taut skin and his back was broad and hunched like some beast of burden, and he wore only a ragged loincloth. The man held up a finger to his lips.
‘Be silent. The guards hear everything,’ he whispered in Parsi, pointing a finger up the shaft.
Behind this man and the two with him, three other hunched figures groaned like oxen as they turned a vast timber wheel. Each man drove at a handle projecting from this wheel, turning it and the iron-studded pole that drove the pulley system. There were seven handles, four of them unoccupied. The three men strained to keep the wheel turning, but it slowed and then ground to a halt, the squeaking of settling baskets echoing above.
Footsteps crunched through the dust in the chamber above. The almond-eyed man’s face lengthened and his milky eyes darted. A bark from a guard echoed down through the shaft.
‘Get the pulley moving, or I will come down there with my comrades. My whip is thirsty!’
The other two who had grappled Pavo hurried back to the empty poles on the wheel. With pained grunts, they drove the pulley back into life, the rumbling and squeaking of baskets picking up once more. With a low growl and then fading, crunching footsteps, the guard above was gone.
As soon as the guard’s footsteps had died completely, Sura thudded down next to Pavo, startling the almond-eyed man, then raising his fists as if readying for a fight.
‘It’s alright,’ Pavo said hurriedly in Greek, lifting and tucking the sharpened rock back into the waist of his loincloth, ‘he’s one of us.’
‘Who is?’ Sura hissed, blinking. ‘I can hardly see a bloody thing!
At this, the almond-eyed man moved forward, frowning. He held out his hands to Sura’s face, and traced his fingertips across his features.
Sura backed away until he bumped into some rocky column. ‘Take your hands off . . . ’ he started.
‘You are no Persian,’ the man cut him off.
The breath caught in Pavo and Sura’s throats. The man had spoken in Greek. Not the broken, accented Greek of the Persians they had met in this land. Greek of the empire.
Pavo’s skin tingled, seeing the aquiline nose and pale skin under the filth coating the man’s face. ‘And neither are you.’