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, “Let 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.

XXVIII

My hearing seemed unusually sharp. Understandable. Only noises from outside were keeping me sane; only my dregs of sanity kept me alive.

I could not move. No one came to speak to me. I could see nothing except the different shades of greyness that distinguished day from night on the pitted stones of my cell’s damp walls. There were no windows. Some days the door cracked open for them to push in a thick-lipped bowl of greasy food. I marginally preferred the days when they forgot.

I did not know how long I had been here. Probably not even a week. A week to a man who has been left for dead feels a long time.

From the shuffling of their footsteps as the chained slaves were marched about, I had learned to distinguish whether it was raining or merely drifting with the eternal winter mist. Rumbling waggons were the common traffic, though sometimes I caught the jaunty clip of a pony’s hooves and knew an officer from the fort had ridden past in his scarlet cloak. With the wind right, I could make out the distant chipping of axes and the thonk of wooden hods at the seams. The smelting furnace was a perpetual roar, varied only by the fervent wheeze of bellows on the cupellation hearths.

Sometimes now I remember what happened next, and smile.

One day a pony, drawing some sort of dainty cart amid a tangle of businesslike riders, passed the works then pulled up smartly nearby. A military voice named the procurator Flavius. Someone grumbled. Then another voice—sharp as the scream of an adze on wood: “…the one you call Chirpy.”

Now I was in a bad way. Delirium, if not death itself, was snuggling up to me: it sounded like the senator’s daughter. At first I could not even remember her name. Then I dragged it back to mind from another world: Helena.