Legionary(84)

‘I’m not quite sure just what I am anymore, after so long in the darkness,’ the man said, then turned to Pavo, tracing his fingers across his jaw and then his brow. As he ran a finger over Pavo’s beaky nose, his brow creased in a frown. ‘Interesting . . . ’

Pavo peered at each of the men working the wheel. There were six there including this man, it seemed. ‘You are a legionary? These are your comrades?’

‘Aye, brothers till the bitter end,’ he gestured dryly towards the wheel.

‘Then you are of Legio II Parthica.’

For but a heartbeat, the man’s face lit up. ‘I am Quintus Clovius Arius of the second cohort, second century.’ Then the light left him and his shoulders slumped. ‘These men you see before you are all that remains of my proud legion. It is a long time since I last set eyes upon them,’ he said sadly, passing a hand across his milky, sightless eyes.

Pavo’s heart hammered on his ribs and he looked at the men by the wheel again and again. As each man strained past, turning the wheel, he saw the same sightless eyes, the callused feet scraping in the dust. Their faces were illuminated in the gloom just enough for Pavo to see. To see that not one of them was Father.

Sura took over, stepping forward to place a hand on Pavo’s shoulder. ‘There are no others down here?’ he asked Arius.

‘None bar the few in this foul space,’ Arius replied flatly, extending his arms to the blackness around the wheel.

Pavo heard the words like an icy blade to the heart.

‘And definitely no guards?’ Sura continued.

Arius smiled a weary smile. ‘The guards refuse to work in this place. They come to visit us, yes, usually to mete out punishment should the pulley run slowly or stop for too long. The only other visitors we get are . . . ’ he extended a hand to the gloom encircling the wheel.

Pavo gazed into this blackness. At last, he made out the nest of jagged stony spikes that ringed the wheel and the foot of the mine’s main shaft. Like huge teeth, jutting from the ground, twice the height of a man.

‘Stalagmites,’ Sura said by his side, reaching out to one.

Pavo stumbled numbly towards the spikes. At that moment, he caught scent of the raw, metallic stench coming from them. He leapt back, the breath catching in his throat. ‘What in Hades?’ The jagged rocky spikes were littered with white shards, like broken pottery. But this was no pottery. Skulls grinned, shattered and cracked. Skeletons lay impaled through the ribs where they had landed. Smashed bones lay in piles like kindling. Pavo twisted to see this horror all around them. Some bodies were fresher – glistening red or dark-brown, and rats worked on tearing the last flesh from the bones. So this was the resting place of every soul thrown down the shaft. Pavo twisted away from the scene, at once thinking of poor Khaled. His gaze fell upon a thick pile of animal remains near the wheel – some chicken bones and many rat bones.

‘At least Gorzam feeds us well,’ Arius spoke bitterly, gesturing towards the animal remains. Beside it was a bucket of water, half full, that looked like it had been lowered down from the chamber above. ‘And he keeps us well-watered too – as a farmer would do for his oxen. For if the pulley does not continue to turn and lift salt to the surface then he will feel his master’s wrath.’

Pavo glanced at Arius and the five men nearby in the gloom at the wheel. ‘Yet there are so few of you?’

Arius nodded; ‘When we were first sent down here, there were more of us. Those who perished soon after, we buried as best we could in the jagged rocks. When bodies were thrown down from above, we would try to bury them too, to honour them. But when we lost our sight, we lost the ability to offer the dead such dignity, to tell one shattered body from another.’

‘You buried your comrades in there?’ Pavo turned back to the nest of stalagmites and the piles of skeletal remains. A chill finger traced his spine as he remembered his own vow. Even if only to reclaim your bones, Father, I will find you. ‘Then the man I sought lies in there too.’

‘You came here looking for someone?’ Arius frowned, then his face creased in a sardonic half-grin. ‘I did wonder why any man would choose to come down here.’

Pavo felt his legs move under him, his eyes hanging on the jumble of remains in the stony spikes, one hand reaching out. ‘I came here for Mettius Vitellius Falco.’

‘Falco?’ the almond-eyed man replied, familiarity lacing his words.

‘Aye, he was my father,’ Pavo said, crouching to look into the pile of bones.

‘Then you are looking in the wrong place,’ Arius said flatly.

‘No,’ Pavo shook his head, ‘he was sent down here. I know this.’