Vespasian’s eyes adjusted to the dim light of a few weak oil lamps and his mouth dropped open in shock as he made out the forms of scores of rowers asleep over the oars that they were chained to. The Thracians, unlike the Romans, used slaves to power their ships.
‘How do you maintain discipline down here?’ he asked Gaidres, astounded.
Gaidres shrugged. ‘They’re all chained hand and foot and can’t go anywhere. Besides, they all know that if they make trouble they just go over the side and we replace them with one of the spares we keep down in the bilge.’
‘Yes, but if a slave has so little to live for then he has nothing to lose. That’s why we use freemen; you can trust them to all pull together and not try and sabotage the ship, because if they stay alive they get citizenship after twenty-six years’ service.’
‘Look, don’t ask me, I’m just a marine; I don’t know the whys and wherefores of it all. And don’t go feeling sorry for the bastards either, a lot of them are captured pirates getting a taste of what they’ve meted out to others.’
‘I don’t,’ Vespasian muttered, looking around incredulously. ‘I just worry about my safety on a ship powered by slaves who don’t care if they live or die.’
‘It’s no wonder you never became a sea power,’ Sabinus observed. ‘You must have been too busy worrying about what’s going on down with the slaves to be able to concentrate properly on winning a battle.’
‘Well, that’s how it’s always been done and I don’t ask questions. Come on, the cell’s this way.’ Gaidres opened a small door, ducked and stepped through.
Vespasian and Sabinus followed him into a small, danksmelling cabin. By the faint light of the moon, streaming down through a grating in the deck above, Vespasian could see an iron cage, five feet high, wide and deep.
‘Bring him in here, Magnus; Artebudz, get one of those oil lamps,’ he said as Gaidres started fumbling with a key.
With the help of the small amount of light provided by the lamp, Gaidres managed to get the key in the lock and the cage door swung open. Inside were a set of manacles and leg-irons attached to the cage by heavy chains.
‘I’m going to take the gag off,’ Vespasian warned Magnus and Artebudz, who both had a firm grip on the priest. ‘Watch out for his teeth, they’re nastily sharp.’
As the gag came off a gobbet of phlegm flew into Vespasian’s face. He punched Rhoteces in the stomach, causing his head to fall forward; Magnus and Artebudz’s firm grip preventing him from doubling up.
‘Now listen, you little shit,’ Vespasian growled, ‘we can do this the easy way and you don’t struggle as we chain you up; or the hard way, which will involve you waking up with another crack in your skull.’
Gasping for breath Rhoteces lifted his head, his vicious eyes glaring with hatred; he contorted his weasel face into a snarl, baring his filed, yellow front teeth. His mouth was uneven, unhealed from where Asinius had slit it nearly four years previously.
‘It doesn’t matter which way we do it, Roman,’ he hissed. ‘This is futile, none of us will get to Rome; you because you will all die on this voyage, and me because my gods will bring me back alive to Thracia without ever setting foot in that accursed city of yours. This I predict by the will of Zbelthurdos whose anger you have incurred by seizing me. I curse this voyage in his name; this ship will never reach Rome. ’
A shrill whinny pierced the air and then was suddenly cut off, followed almost instantaneously by the sound of a heavy body collapsing to the ground.
Rhoteces’ snarl turned into a lopsided leer. ‘Zbelthurdos has heard the curse. But it’ll take a lot more than a horse to expiate the insult to my gods; Roman blood is what will be needed.’
Vespasian slammed his fist into the priest’s face, flattening his nose. He slumped, unconscious, between Magnus and Artebudz.
‘The hard way it is then,’ Vespasian said, walking past Sabinus and out of the cabin.
PART III
CHAPTER VIII
It was hot; very, very hot. There was not even the slightest breeze to bring a modicum of relief from the relentless heat as the quinquereme rowed down the eastern coast of the island of Euboia. The sun burned down on to the ship from its midday high, heating the timber deck so that the barefooted crew were unable to walk upon it and were forced to stay under the large awning that had been rigged at the stern of the ship. Not that there was much for them to do; the sails could not be set as there was no wind; nor had there been since they had left Tomi.
For twelve days now the slaves had driven the ship forward, stroke after stroke to the steady beat of a drum — used by the Thracians in preference to the Roman flute — ten hours a day, in the oven-like conditions of the oar-deck; their only respite being two hours in the blackness of the bilge before being rotated back up again to the misery of their mono-purposed existence. Encased in a wooden prison, chained to the oars that gave the only definition to their lives, shitting and pissing in a bucket brought round to where they sat, they existed in a twilight world were the only different sensation during the mind-numbing day was the lick of the whip across their shoulders should their toil be deemed inadequate.
The stench of their living hell wafted up above them to Vespasian and his comrades who sat under the awning. They sweltered in the heat that had plagued them since the storms and rough seas, which had delayed them for almost twenty days in Tomi, had suddenly ceased overnight, after Rhaskos had sacrificed both Drenis’ and Artebudz’s horses. The following morning the clouds had dissipated, leaving the sun free to burn down on them, intensifying with every mile they travelled further south.
Their routine aboard ship was mind-numbing too, but through boredom rather than repetitive labour; from dawn when they sailed to the tenth hour when they anchored for the night there was absolutely nothing to do other than watch the coastline drift past and make scraps of conversation. Relief from the tedium came in the form of evening hunting expeditions in the game-abundant hills above the coves and inlets that provided their nightly shelter.
Fresh water had become the biggest problem. Although Rhaskos knew the coastline well and always managed to contrive to anchor for the night near a stream, the ship did not carry enough casks to supply the parched slaves with the fuel they needed to maintain their relentless exertions. Despite often stopping during the day to take on new supplies of the precious liquid there was never enough and the slaves had started to weaken. Every day for the last few days two or three, either dead or too frail to be of any further use, had been thrown over the side.
‘There goes another unlucky bastard,’ Magnus commented as the latest filth-encrusted body was thrown overboard; a weak cry showed that he was not quite dead.
‘If we carry on at this rate there’ll be none left to make the crossing to Italia,’ Vespasian observed, calculating that the more slaves that died the more work surviving ones would be forced to do, thus accelerating the death rate. ‘We need a wind.’
‘I have never known it to be so calm for so long,’ Rhaskos moaned from his position next to the steering-oars. ‘I sacrifice every evening to the mother-goddess Bendis but she does not listen to my prayers, even though in the past she has always looked kindly upon me. I’m beginning to worry that this voyage is cursed.’
Magnus raised his eyebrows and looked at Vespasian, who kept his face neutral. None of them had said anything about Rhoteces’ curse to anyone. They had all considered it to be the theatrical gesture of a cornered and desperate man and had dismissed it from their thoughts. However, the strange weather conditions since had started the superstitious parts of their minds thinking, and their worries were not helped by the sound of the priest constantly muttering in his cage in a strange language that neither Sitalces nor Drenis could understand. Only Sabinus had seen the positive side of a potential curse upon the voyage when they had discussed the possibility the previous evening: the flat calm had meant that he had kept the contents of his stomach where they were supposed to be rather than spreading them across the length of the Mare Aegeum.