‘If I don’t help?’

‘You die,’ the other man said, quite matter of fact in his tone.

‘You would not really give us much choice, boy,’ Ferox said.

‘There is a condition,’ Domitius told them, feeling certain at last. The other man moved to say something, but Ferox held up his hand to silence him and listened to what Domitius had to say.

‘Agreed,’ Ferox said. ‘Now we must move.’

XXVII

The citadel at Nicopolis

The last hours of the fourteenth day before the
Kalends of June

The forty-first day of the siege

GETTING TO THE prison was easier than Ferox had feared. He, Bran and Vindex were dressed in the manner of the soldiers of the city, a mixture of equipment and clothes provided by Sosius, and the rest stripped from the two corpses. The dead men were hidden as best they could in the shadows, and from there they marched, to all intents and purposes escorting Domitius back to his cell, even if in an undertone he was giving them directions. Ferox led, speaking only when essential, and then using Greek. Nods and smiles, or a stern look as seemed appropriate, were the only ways he could deal with other calls, and their luck held and no one treated them with suspicion. It was dark, save on the main streets where there were torches and some lamps, and it was a big enough city for there to be plenty of unfamiliar faces.

Sosius had gone off on his own. The man had found them on the night of the assault, and hidden them since, in the back of a warehouse not far from the wall, where he had made a little compartment behind great piles of sacks full of grain someone was hoarding in secret until the prices reached a peak. Hadrian’s freedman had some sort of arrangement either with the owner, or perhaps a foreman who was cheating the owner, and they were not bothered. Given the contents of the place, visitors were not encouraged, so they saw no one apart from Sosius who came and went. The food he brought was meagre, made worse because they were living next to an abundance of wheat and barley, without having any means of grinding it or cooking the flour. Sosius explained that he was doing his best, and that nearly everyone in the city was going short.

‘Some of the poor are dying,’ he told them. ‘Especially the ones who came in from the farms and do not have friends here. There are rumours that they are eating the corpses, and even killing anyone who strays too far into the back alleys.’

Ferox had heard rumours like that before and usually they were not true. Sosius spoke Greek to them, because he knew that the other two did not understand the language. Both made clear their loathing for him, but he showed no sign of caring. He told Ferox about Domitius, and explained his plan. The only thing that could be trusted about Sosius was his ruthless determination to serve his master at any cost, and apart from that, there was not much choice other than to go along with his plans. Sosius had gone off to start some distractions, and inevitably there was the nagging fear that they were walking into a trap to make just such a distraction. It still made sense to try. Sosius claimed to have sent messages to Crispinus tied to arrow shafts. Ferox was not sure how reliable that was, but the eastern wall was breached, so the attackers were coming and there was no reason to think that they would wait for longer than it took to organise the attack.