The Silver Pigs (10 page)

XXVI

From the neighbouring countryside the upland is deceptive. The limestone ridge where the lead mines lie looks no more hostile than any of the low hills characteristic of southern Britain. Only when you approach this ridge directly from the south or west do stark crags suddenly rise in your face, quite unlike the gentle swell of the downs elsewhere. On the southern side are the Gorges ancient caves and unpredictable waters which plunge underground or rise in a ferocious spate during sudden rain. On the kinder northern edge, small hamlets cling to the steep slopes, joined by precarious tracks that jerk up and over the contours among patches of pasture land.

From the east, the terrain hardly seems to rise at all. The route to the mines is unmarked; anyone with official business comes provided with a guide. For casual visitors the settlement is deliberately difficult to find.

Riding in from the frontier side, woodland and farmland give way imperceptibly. Almost without warning, you lose sight of the countryside below, and the road crosses a cold, featureless plateau. It leads only to the mines; there is nothing else there. Travelling its bare length is a lonely experience. Thoughout this region there is a tendency to greyness, as if the wide Sabrina Estuary makes its surging presence constantly felt, even inland. This high-flung narrow road strikes purposefully across the limestone outcrop for ten miles, and with every mile the emptiness of the landscape and the tugging of the wind attack the spirit with melancholy. Even in high summer the long upland is stormed by desolate winds, and even then there is no blaze of sunshine, only remote high-piled clouds endlessly shadowing the deserted scene.

I worked in the lead mines for three months. After the Revolt, it was the worst time of my life.

I manoeuvred my way through all the sections of the mine.

From the open seams and pits where ore was clawed physically from the ground, back indoors to the clay stacks for the first smelt the hottest work in the world then promotion to the cupellation hearths, where bellows men strained to blast the silver, separating it at white heat from the refined lumps. There I worked the bellows first, afterwards as picker, gathering the silver from the cooled hearth at the day's end. For a slave, picking was the prize job. With luck and scalded fingers you could scratch up a drip or two for yourself. That put a light back in your brain: escape!

Every day there was a body search, but we found our own foul ways round that.

Occasionally now I wake, bolt upright in my bed, in a drowning sweat. My wife says I never make a sound. A slave learns: lock in every thought.

It would be easy to say it was only Sosia's death that held me on my track. Easy but foolish. I never considered her. To recall such brightness in this murderous hole would bring increased agony. What forced me on as I inched through my search was sheer self-discipline.

Anyway, you forget.

There is no time for leisured recollection in a slave's day. We enjoyed no hope for the future, no memory of the past. We woke at dawn; that is, while it was still dark. We snarled Wearily over bowls of gruel ladled out by a filthy woman who never seemed to sleep. We marched in silence through the shuttered settlement while our white breath wreathed around us like our own ghosts. They chained us in links with neck rings. One or two lucky ones pulled caps down over their filthy heads. I never had a cap; I never have any luck. In that hour when the cold light seems half-excited and half-ominous, when the dew soaks your feet and every sound carries through the still air for miles, we stumbled to the current workings. They unchained us; we began. We dug all day, with one break during which we sat empty-eyed, each withdrawn into his own dead soul. When it was too dark to see, we stood head down like exhausted animals to be rechained. We marched back. We were fed. We dropped into sleep. We awoke in the dark the next day. We did it all again.

I say "we'. These were criminals, prisoners of war (mostly Britons and Gauls), runaway slaves (again mainly Celts of different kinds, but with others Sardinians, Africans, Spaniards, Lycians). From the first, there was no need for me to act. The life we led made me one of them. I believed I was a slave.

I was bruised, muscles torn, hair matted, fingers cracked, cut, blistered, blackened, en grimed with my own and others' filth. I itched. I itched in parts of my body where it was a challenge making fingers reach to scratch. I rarely spoke. If I spoke I swore. My headful of dreams had been drained off like an abcess by the punishment of my present life. A poem would have filled me with staring scorn, like the senseless lilt of a foreign tongue.

I could swear in seven languages: I was proud of that.

It was while I was a picker that I stumbled into glimmerings of organized theft. In fact once I started to identify the signs, I soon found corruption ran so rife throughout the system that it was difficult to distinguish the petty fiddles every individual put his hand to, from the major fraud that could only have been set up by the management itself. Everyone knew about that. No one talked. No one talked, because at every stage each man involved took his small cut. Once he had, he stood guilty of a capital offence. (There were two punishments: execution or slavery in the mines. Anyone who had lived at Vebiodunum and seen our conditions knew execution was the preferable fate.)

At the end of December, as a Saturnalian treat, Rufrius Vitalis turned up looking prosperous with a hide whip pushed through a huge brown belt, to see if I had discovered enough to let me be pulled out. When he saw my dull-eyed state his honest face grew grim.

He extracted me from the furnace, then drove me some distance down the track, cracking at me with his whip for show. We crouched out of doors in a bank of wet bracken where we were unlikely to be overheard.

"Falco! It looks as if you need to get out quick!"

"Can't go. Not yet."

By this time I had slid into a sullen mood. I no longer believed in release. I felt my life for ever would be scrambling round the cupellation hearth in nothing but a loincloth with my shaved hair frizzling on my mucky head and my hands red raw. My only challenge was how many silver scratchings I could steal for myself. My mental and physical strength were both so depleted I had almost lost interest in the reason I was there. Almost, but not quite.

"Falco, are you cracked? Going on with this is suicide"

That doesn't matter. If I pull out too early I won't want to live with myself in any case. Vitalis, I have to finish it He was starting to grumble, but I interrupted urgently. "I'm glad to see you. I need to smuggle out information in case I never get a chance to make a full report myself."

"Who's this for?"

"The financial procurator."

"Flavins Hilaris?"

"You know him?"

"I know of him. They say he's all right. Look, laddie, there's not much time. It will look suspicious if I hang about. I'll find him. Just tell me what I have to say."

"He should be at his villa near Durnovaria." Gaius had promised to locate himself there, within reach if I managed to send messages. Tell him this, Vitalis. There's flagrant corruption all through the mine. First, when the rough ingots leave the smelt for cupellation, they are counted out by a weasel who can't actually count. He scratches marks on a tally stick; sometimes he "forgets" to make his nick. So what the contractor Triferus declares to the Treasury as his overall production is fraudulent from the start."

"Hah!" Vitalis let out this exclamation like a man who assumes he has heard almost everything, but who is not surprised to learn of some new dodge.

"Next, every day a few of the rough ingots are held back from the cupellation hearth. It's surprising how many, though I guess the number has crept up gradually over many years. This has the effect that the silver yield per ingot appears less than it really ought to be. I gather the declining yield was explained to Rome during Nero's time as geological variations in the ore being mined. Things were notoriously slack then, so in case Vespasian has anybody looking at the figures it's customary nowadays to slip in extra ingots some weeks, and claim the mineralogist has discovered a better seam."

"Delicate touch!"

"Oh yes, we're dealing with experts here. Will you be able to remember all this hogwash?"

"Have to try. Falco, trust me. Go on."

"Right. Now, regarding the ingots of pure silver which are produced at the cupellation hearth. Some get lost. This is natural wastage." Rufrius Vitalis scoffed admiringly again. Then, when the lead bars that have had their silver extracted go back for a second smelt"

"What's that for?"

To remove any other impurities before carting them out for sale Mars Ultor, Vitalis, don't let's knot ourselves up in technicalities, this is complex enough as it is! Hilaris will know what the procedures are He shushed me to calm me down; I was sweating with the effort of ensuring I told him everything. Frowning, I pressed on. "After the second smelt more ingots disappear though since their value is by then so much reduced, this last wrinkle in the system is considered to lack finesse! Apparently it's permitted to the overseers, as a privilege that keeps them sweet."

I fell silent. I was so unused to talking that presenting these details in an ordered form had tired me out. I could see Vitalis watching me closely, though after his first attempt he made no more suggestions for restoring me to civilization prematurely. My choice of comrade had been an intelligent one; I could see he understood the implications of what I had said.

"How do they get away with it, Falco?"

"It's a completely enclosed community; no outsiders are allowed."

"But they have a civilian settlement"

"Where every baker, barber and blacksmith comes under licence, specifically to supply the mines! They're all human; pretty well on arrival they are all suborned."

"So what do those young dreamers at the fort think they're playing at?"

There was a small fortress overlooking the settlement, an outpost of the Second Augusta which was supposed to supervise the mines. I smiled at Vitalis for his assumption that immediately after he himself retired, all military discipline went to the dogs.

"That's the centurion in you talking! No one can blame them. All operations are subject to inspection, of course"

"Both officers and men should be regularly changed"

"They are. And I've seen details coming down from the fort to peer around. I imagine they are hampered by the fact ingots look identical: how can they tell whether what they are shown even contains silver or not?"

"How can anyone tell?"

"Ah! The ingots that are stolen before cupellation are specially stamped: 'TCL TRIP' four times."

"Falco, you've seen it?"

"I've seen them here and tell the procurator Flavius, I've seen one like that in Rome!"

It was still lying in Lenia's bleaching vat.

Rome! I lived there once...

Our snatched conversation was about to be disturbed. My present life had taught me to smell trouble on the wind like a forest deer. I touched Vitalis on the arm to warn him, and our faces closed guardedly.

"'lo, Vitalis! Has that punk admitted anything?"

It was Cornix.

This Cornix was an obscene bully of a foreman, a real specialist in administering tortures to slaves. A slab-shouldered sadist with a face marbled like a side of beef by his depraved life. He had picked on me mercilessly from the moment I arrived, but owned just enough working ooze in his chickpea brain to be wary in case one day I went back to some previous life and talked.

Vitalis shrugged. "Nothing. Tight as a virgin's apron string. Shall I leave him a bit longer? Is he any use to you?"

"Never was," Cornix lied.

Quite untrue. They had worn me to a runt by now, but I had been well fed and sturdy when I first arrived. I scowled at the ground while Vitalis and Cornix pretended to negotiate.

"Take a thorough squint at him," Rufrius Vitalis urged the foreman scornfully. I stood there looking pitiful. "Another few weeks of fog and frost up here and he'll be pleading to go home. But I won't get much back for him in his present state. can't you fatten the bastard up a bit? I'd be willing to go halves on any reward..."

On this welcome hint, Cornix promptly agreed he would have me transferred to lighter work. When Vitalis left, with a curt nod to me as his only possible goodbye, I had ended my stint as a picker, and was about to be made up to a driver instead.

"Your lucky day, Chirpy!" Cornix leered unpleasantly. "Let's go and celebrate!"

Avoiding the privilege of being selected as Cornix's partner in sexual dalliance had so far occupied a lot of my ingenuity.

I told the brute I had a headache, and was violently kicked for my pains.

XXVII

Driving seemed quite straightforward. We used mules rather than oxen, because of the hills. A cartload comprised four ingots. They were a dead weight and transporting them was fiendishly slow.

I was tucked in behind the leader at the front of the train. The excuse was that a new boy didn't know the way. Really, until you proved yourself a trusty it was a precaution against escape.

No one would ever be a trusty who worked as a slave in the mines. Still, I had learned by then to look as much like a trusty as anybody else.

There was one final check to stop anyone thieving the Empire's loot. On leaving the mines we drove past the fort, where the soldiers counted every ingot and drew up a manifest. This manifest remained with the silver all the way to Rome. There was one good road out of Vebiodunum, the road back to the frontier. Every cart capable of carrying bars had to pass along that road, for the crossways were too narrow and too rough to bear the weight. That meant every single ingot that ever left the mines was registered on an official manifest.

Our destination was the military port at Abona. To reach the great Estuary, we first turned our backs on it, drove ten miles east to the frontier highway, followed it northwards to the sacred springs of Sul, then west again along another spur round the third side of a square say thirty Roman miles in all. Heavy barges drew up the Estuary for the ingots, which they hauled round the Two Promontaries and then, under guard from the British Fleet, right along the Channel to cross Europe overland. Most of the silver went south through Germany, where the dense military presence guaranteed its route.

I knew Abona already.

Nothing had changed. The place where Petronius Longus and I once spent two drizzling years in a customs post. It was still there, still manned by teenage soldiers with the dye brilliant in their brand-new cloaks, striding about like lords, ignoring the sad slaves who brought in the Empire's treasure. These lads all had pinched faces and runny noses, but unlike our private weasels in the mines all of them could count. They checked off our manifest, counting the ingots carefully into their pound; when the barges arrived, they counted them back out. Heaven help the contractor Triferus if ever anything failed to match.

It always matched. But it would. After we first drove the waggons out along the road from Veb, we always stopped for the drivers to relieve themselves at an upland village just before the main frontier. We stopped at this village whether anybody needed to or not.

The manifest was altered while we were there.

Now the end lay in sight for me.

After three trips, I worked my way far enough down the regular line of waggons to be able to see what happened once we left that bundle of wattle shacks where a corrupt clerk doctored the paperwork. As the main line turned north on the frontier, the last couple of carts silently peeled away south. For the thieves to use the military road might appear foolish, though it was a good fast highway giving access to every beachhead on the southern coast. Regular transports which passed openly week after week would be waved through cheerily by any troops they met. But moving the Second Augusta away up to Glevum said clearly enough that this section of road was no longer actively patrolled.

I was back on form now. I had a clear goal: winning sufficient trust to be put to driving one of those carts that slipped off south. I was desperate to discover where they went. If we found their embarkation port we could pinpoint the ship that carried the stolen pigs to Rome; the ship and its owner, who must be in the conspiracy.

I was old enough to recognize the risk that my nerve might fail. After three months of hard labour and cruelty on the worst diet in the Empire, I was in poor physical and mental shape. Still, a new challenge works wonders. My concentration revived. I kept my nerve under grim control.

What I overlooked was the Didius Falco luck.

It was at the end of January that I won my chance. Half the workers were confined to the slave sheds, shamming sick, some so effectively they had given up and died. Those of us who kept on our feet felt rough, but it was worth the extra effort since there were more rations available if you did. Eating the stuff was hideous, but it helped fight off the cold.

There had been a light snowfall, with much in certainty whether the week's transports should be sent out. The weather cleared so it seemed as though the really bitter grip of winter had yet to descend. A last-minute consignment was despatched with a scratch crew. Even the waggon master was a substitute. I ended up in the last cart but one. Nothing was said, but I knew what it meant.

We paraded at the fort. A desultory decurion with swollen, marsh fever eyes came out and stamped our manifest. We set off.

It was so cold they had issued us rough felt cloaks with pointed hoods; we even had mittens so our numb hands could keep hold of the reins. On the uplands the wind swooped at us from a low, sodden sky, tearing our clothes, and so bitter we screwed our eyes into slits and bared our teeth, squealing with misery. The dark line of carts crept along that lonely road, at one point plunging into a dip where the mules skidded through slush and we had to dismount to lead them, heaving back up a sheer slope into the wild scream of the wind. Then we wound across more grey landscape where the low round burial mounds of forgotten native kings loomed and were lost again in a fine, teasing mist.

When we halted to have the manifest forged we were all so badly chilled that for once overseers and slaves seemed one in their agony. The corrupt clerk had trouble: too dark indoors, too windy when he tried coming to the door of his shack. We stood about for what seemed ages, hunched up in the lee of the carts, wretchedly crouching in the slightest shelter from that wind. It had taken twice as long as normal to come this far, and the sky was developing a dismal yellow-grey that boded snow.

At last we were ready for the road again. Two miles to the turn-off at the frontier. The waggon master gave me a wink. The line lurched forward. Starting off with such a weight was always a struggle for the mules, and today with the road in such a bad state they resented it more than usual. Mine skidded in their iron shoes on the slush that was turning to ice almost as we looked. They plunged wildly; one of the cart's axles stuck iced up. The jammed rear wheels slithered sideways, the axle cracked, a wheel gave way, a corner of the cart suddenly dipped, the mules screamed and reared, I stood up then next moment I pitched into the road, my load jiggered down a ditch, the wrecked cart sagged to one side, one mule had hurt itself so badly we had to cut its throat, and the other had broken its traces and galloped away.

For some reason, everyone else blamed me.

There was a long debate about my disrupted load.

Taking it to Abona meant amending the manifest again, apart from the problem of having to haul the extra ingots five to a cart. Besides, mine were four special bars: stolen pigs to be sold to strangers, stolen pigs that still contained their silver. Not for Abona! The other cart designated to go south could never carry eight. After much irrelevant argument of the type you get from men who are unused to solving problems at all, let alone standing outside on a dark day in the bitter cold, it was decided to leave my load here and smuggle it back to Vebiodunum on the return trip.

I volunteered to stay with the load.

After the rest left it grew horribly quiet. The few native huts were used by herdsmen in summer, deserted now. I had shelter, but as the weather hardened I realized that if it snowed badly my companions might be held up. I could be trapped here without food for a long while. Over the uplands came a veil of rain, so fine it neither settled nor fell, but clung to my face and clothes when I peered outside. For the first time in three months I found myself completely alone.

"Hello, Marcus!" I said, as if I was greeting a friend.

I stood and thought. This would have been the moment to escape, but the only reason I had been left there alone was that in the depths of winter the uplands were too isolated. Anyone who tried to run off would be found dead with the frozen cattle and drowned sheep in the spring. I might make it to the Gorges, but there was nothing there for me.

I still wanted to know how the ingots were shipped.

The rain stopped. It grew colder. I decided to act. Bent double, I clutched the ingots one at a time and staggered as far as I could across the ditch and away from the road. I then scraped a hiding place in the sodden ground. That was when I noticed only one of the bars carried the four stamps we used to denote that its silver still remained. Triferus was cheating the conspirators: they were trying to bribe the Praetorians with pipe lead! I sat back on my heels. If we told the Praetorians that, the conspirators would find themselves in trouble and Vespasian would be safe.

I buried all four bars. I marked the spot with a cairn of stones. Then I set out to walk back to the mines.

It was eight miles. Plenty of time to convince myself I was a fool. To keep my feet marching I had a long talk with Festus, my brother. Not that it helped; Festus thought I was a fool too.

Talking to a dead hero sounds strange, yet Festus was the type of magic character whose conversation made you feel light-headed even when he was alive. Out here, under a bloated sky, a frozen dot trudging over a dark plateau back into painful slavery of my own free will, talking to Festus smacked of greater reality than my own wild world.

Half a day later, on the final stretch, I plunged off the road taking a short cut across a bend. Roman roads go straight unless there is a reason. There was a reason for the great curve here: avoiding the gullies and pits of a worked out mine. As I stumbled through chest-high spears of dead bracken, the ground disappeared. My feet slipped on the fine frosted turf, I shot forwards on my back, crashing down into one of the pits. One heel caught awkwardly as I slid. Nothing hurt at first. When I started to climb out, lancing pain told me at once; I had broken a bone in my leg. Festus told me that it could only happen to me.

I lay on my back staring at the frozen sky and told my heroic brother a few home truths.

It began to snow. Dense silence settled. If I lay here, I would die. If I died here I might have atoned for what happened to Sosia, but apart from the report I had smuggled out to Hilaris if Rufrius Vitalis ever found him and managed to make it intelligible -I had achieved nothing else. To die without telling my story would make nonsense of all I had endured.

Snow, cruelly tranquil, continued to fall. I had walked myself warm, but I could feel the heat leaving my body even as I lay. I spoke; no one answered me now.

Better to make the effort, even if the effort fails. I contrived a splint, as well as I could. I found an old stake, and tied it on with the goat hair string I had been using as a belt. It was a poor job, but kept me upright, just.

I began to lurch on. Back to Veb. I would be useless at Veb, but I had nowhere else to go.

Someone a woman I knew asked me once, afterwards, why I did not claim sanctuary with the soldiers at the fortress.

There were two reasons three. One: I still hoped to find out where the stolen pigs were sent. Two: a crazy, skeletal slave coming off the moor and whining that he was the finance secretary's personal representative on business affecting the Emperor could only expect a thrashing. Three: not all informers are perfect. I never thought of it.

I was numb. Exhausted. Windblown inside and out. My brain was wrenched about with disappointment and pain. I homed in on the mines. Limping into the current diggings, I stumbled before the foreman Cornix. When I told him I had left four stolen ingots unattended he let out a roar and seized one of the pit props we sometimes used to support an overhang. I opened my mouth to say I had buried the pigs safely. Then, before I could speak, through the snow gluing my eyelashes I dimly saw Cornix swinging the post towards me. It caught me in the midriff, cracking several ribs. My leg gave way, the splint collapsed, and I fainted as I fell.

When they flung me in a cell I came round just enough to hear Cornix exclaim, "Ect him rot!"

"What if the bounty hunter calls?"

"Nobody wants this sniveller back." Cornix let out his rasping laugh. "If anyone asks, say he's dead he will be soon!"

That was when I really knew, I was never going home.