So Tryphaena finally has her wish, Vespasian thought, as he was dragged away across the smooth marble floor, and she will not press for peace to save him even if she did have the power to do so. He could well imagine that nobody in Rome would care much about his situation: Agrippina would revel in it as a by-product of securing her son on the imperial throne; Pallas would do nothing to jeopardise that succession; and Narcissus would most probably not spot the subtle danger of a Parthian war to his position until it was too late and Nero was emperor and he was executed.
No, Vespasian found himself thinking, calmly, I am going to be here for some time; I can’t expect to be rescued so therefore don’t hope for it and I won’t be disappointed. Hope for nothing because from hopes dashed comes despair.
And, as his gaolers dragged him down into the foundations of the ancient capital of Adiabene, deep into dark places excavated millennia before, deep into a realm where time has a different meaning, Vespasian fell back into his mind so that his thoughts and memories would cocoon him. Deep in the bowels of Arbela, Vespasian was locked into a cell that had seen countless years of suffering; a place where rats and nameless things held sway and time did nothing but gnaw. A realm of despair; and despair was the emotion that Vespasian knew he must protect himself from.
There was little point in keeping his eyes open as there was rarely any light to see by. Every so often Vespasian heard a grating of a key in a lock and then the creak and crash of a heavy door opening and closing that would presage the arrival of the golden glow of a black-smoking torch held aloft by a gaoler to guide him and his mate down slime-slick steps. Vespasian knew this because he had a grille in his door and could see at an oblique angle along the narrow corridor. How often the gaolers visited, he did not know; it might have been twice a day, once a day or once every few days. It made no difference because he had lost the concept of days, nights, hours or months. In the depths of Arbela there was only a moment and that moment was now.
The arrival of the gaolers would bring not only light but also sound. Low moans or cries for forgiveness, groans of pain or just plain mad gibbering always accompanied the gaolers’ progress down the corridor, attesting to what sort of condition the inmate, behind each of the many locked doors punctuating it, was in. Vespasian, however, never made a sound, not even when the grille in his door was unbolted and swung open. He knew the routine after the first couple of visits and thereafter did not need to communicate. He passed his refuse bowl out and its contents were slopped into the open sewer that ran the length of the corridor to drain away who knew where. The bowl was returned, unsluiced and stinking. He then had to pass two of his other three possessions through the grille in turn: the first, a wooden jug, was returned filled with water that, by its taste, Vespasian knew would have been far from clear had he troubled to examine it. Second was his wooden food bowl, which came back containing a gruel of grains with the occasional morsel of gristle or bone floating in it. A stale loaf was then chucked through the grille as it was closed. With his sustenance safely grasped in each hand he would retire to his only other possession: a blanket that contained more life than the matted hair that clung to his groin, chest, face and head. Every so often some damp straw would be shoved through the hole to supplement the rotting heap upon which his fourth possession rested, but that was the only difference in the routine; he had no way of telling but he assumed that the straw arrived once a month as the second delivery was long enough after the first one for him to be surprised, having forgotten about it. He was unclear but he thought that he could remember at least a few more such deliveries; but what did it matter? What was sure was that even in this subterranean pit shielded from the sun by so much ancient stone it had got colder and Vespasian guessed that winter was approaching outside – if outside still existed.
And that was just one of the many things with which he kept his mind busy at the slowest pace possible. It was not thoughts of escape or life after release that preoccupied him, but memories of life enjoyed and abstract questions to which there could be no answer or a multitude of answers. Slowly he dipped small hunks of bread into the gruel, stirring them with infinite care in the chasm-dark as he replayed scenes from his life, chewing his food methodically and at the speed of some drugged bovine; his expression, if it could have been seen, changing in accordance with the mood of each episode. Wincing, he recalled at great length the hideous bullying and beating that Sabinus had subjected him to as a child. A tender smile as he remembered the loving tutelage of his paternal grandmother, Tertulla, the woman who had raised him on her estate in Cosa, while his parents had been in Asia for seven years. Regret while the decline of his friend Caligula from a vibrant youth to crazed despot flickered in degenerating episodes across his inner eye. As his three children flashed through his mind he felt growing pride that culminated with Titus’ face, so much like his own, smiling at him, only to be dashed as Flavia appeared to make another demand. Contentment came in pulses as his passion for Caenis fired within him, although he was aware that he had to ration those thoughts as he sensed that masturbation in these circumstances could become addictive and sap what little strength remained to him.