Tarcho tried to explain where he was going, with maps sketched in the dirt with sticks. Audax didn’t understand what a map was in the first place, and north, south, east and west were all the same to him.

And he didn’t want to leave Thalius’s house in Camulodunum, because of the food. He had been fed in the kitchen, with the slaves and servants, and sometimes Tarcho joined him. It was better food than he had had in his life. Sometimes he was given so much that he stopped being hungry, so much food he couldn’t finish it. Tarcho promised that Audax would never go hungry, he could always share Tarcho’s bread.

But whether he understood or not, of course, whether he wanted to go or not, he had no choice about making the journey.

And now they had new people to travel with, and that was another problem for Audax. The lady Aurelia rode with them, and sometimes Ulpius Cornelius too. The three of them, Thalius, Cornelius and Aurelia, would huddle in the back of the cart, whispering.

Audax, utterly dependent on their goodwill, was acutely sensitive to their moods. Thalius, overweight, fussy, clumsy, was a good man. Audax couldn’t imagine him harming anybody on purpose. But he was vague. When he turned his attention on you, you could bask in his kindness, but then he would turn away, his head full of thinking, and he would forget you even existed. Thalius was all right, but he wasn’t to be relied on.

As for Aurelia, she was an old woman with the body of a girl. Caked in creams, she trailed a cloud of stinks that made Audax’s nose itch. She hadn’t been unkind to him, that time when she had touched the tattoo on his back. But to her Audax was just a slave, no more than a bit of furniture, and just as easily disposed of. Audax understood this very well.

It was an attitude Ulpius Cornelius shared too. But sometimes Cornelius looked at Audax with a searching stare. Perhaps Cornelius was a ‘dirty man’, as the boys in the mine had called the men, slaves and overseers alike, who had used them. Perhaps he was working out how he could get Audax alone, or dreaming of what he would do if he could. But he made no approach to Audax. Tarcho was careful not to let Audax out of his sight.

All this discomfort was dwarfed by a deeper dread.

Audax had spent almost all his life in the mines, shut up in the dark. Before Thalius and Tarcho came he had had only broken memories of the wider world, relics of when he was very small. Now he was stuck out in the open, and he hated the vast pulsing of day and night. It seemed unnatural, somehow out of control.