The mines are easy to find from the donkey tracks leading into the hills, the heaped dirt, and the sound, long before you reach a final turn, of hammering and shouting. Here, under the merciless sun, beneath the distant and skull-like gaze of the many worked-out pits and caves that pock-mark the hills beyond, near-naked slaves burrow and hammer. After I had inspected the grey-colored lumps that constitute the produce of these mines, Konchab drew me further up an arid slope and showed me a place where the hill had been swept away in the blackening wind to reveal a floor of rock that cannot have seen the sun in all recorded time.
Konchab is muscled, tanned, a mixed product of all the local breeds. He shaves his head in the manner of the natives and goes bare-chested most of the time. I had never imagined that he was burdened with much thought. Yet here he showed me an incredible thing. For on this bare rock there were markings, as if living remains had been worked into the stone. Some were strange to me, yet others were unmistakably in the likeness of seaweed and fanning arms of coral. Here, certainly, were the bones of an odd-looking fish. I noticed also the coiled shell of a giant snail, and a large creature somewhat between a squid and a woodlouse. Stranger still were the large triangular marks that bore all the appearance of footprints. I am no scholar, yet here seems to be evidence that this high arid land once lay, unimaginably long ago, deep beneath the sea. Either that, or I witnessed some folly of the gods that I profess not to believe in.
Now, as I write these words, the vision seems fanciful. I almost doubt my eyes, which feel tired, eroded as if from inside by the heat and the sand. As I rode back from my inspection, the sun seemed to shift and dance about the bottomless sky, haloed within a ring of swarming darkness. Such was my weariness that, looking up as I rode amid pillars of rock too high to be climbed, I was sure that I saw a figure, wind-wrapped in ragged black clothing, looking down at me. I once even thought to see its face beneath the hood as it turned toward me, yet revealed only the harsh flash of the reflected sun.
Back at Cul Holman, the late afternoon sky was yet hotter and darker, and there was word that one of the slave-scribes had already died from the effects of the bastinado. I wandered amid the block-buildings and the heaps of discarded rubble, and watched as the donkeys bore down their loaded panniers from the mines, guarded as always by Taracus’s soldiers and Konchab’s chained and growling dogs. There is much weighing and counting in the making of gold. There are scribes at the mouths of the pits and caves, and again here at Cul Holman, where all is checked and weighed even as the donkeys shed their panniers. At each process of the shifting and breaking, and forever closely supervised by Alathn, records are made and re-made. The penalty for any serious discrepancy is death—and the reward for those who report a culprit is freedom if a slave, or money for a freeman. As you, my reader, may imagine, false reporting is a greater problem than theft.
At the end of it all, in the final counting house sheds and after days of weighing, discarding, sifting, and breaking, the gritty rubble that remains still has none of the appearance of gold. Alathn tells me that this stuff, which is weighed and recorded yet again by two independent scribes, contains about one fiftieth of its weight in pure gold. Sometimes, of course, a small nugget is found, or a few glimmering grains may be glimpsed at this final stage, but for the most part it would be hard for any observer to understand what we were producing. It is certainly not as I expected before I came here. The final sifting of the residue requires much water—an element that is even scarcer here in these mountains than the gold—and takes place many leagues’ journey down beside the Nile in the beds and pans at Tarsil. I am reminded once again of how cleverly our Empire divides its power.
At nights here, I find myself dreaming of gold. Of beaten gold, caskets of gold, jeweled hinges made marvelous to contain yet more golden soft intricate nuggets. And my grandmother sits once again beside me on her drawn-up stool. She tells of Catechuan, who walked to the moon on its path across the ocean, and of Midas, whose touch transformed everything to gold. Hearing her voice, I feel the softness of gold against my teeth, its warm pure smoothness beneath my hands. I breathe a mist of gold and slip though gold-clad shafts into secret treasured lands where the stars shine differently and gold flows in shining rivers and its dust forms the glowing sand.
When my ship from Ostia first arrived at Alexandria on my way here, I spent the days wandering the streets and markets, seeing the sights, visiting the disappointingly decrepit lighthouse and library. Famously, the city is a greater hotbed for new sects, seers, prophets, and charlatans than even Jerusalem. Yet as a man who prides himself on his rationality, my interest lay in the oft-repeated claim that gold can be created from the combining of other elements. There was talk of a creature named Zosimus, almost fabled, so it seemed, and certainly shy of the public attention that most other so-called scientists and seers craved. Yet finally I tracked him down, or at least someone who claimed to be him, on the late afternoon of the last day before I set out on the long final leg of this journey.
Led by a guide, and clutching a knife beneath my toga, I plunged deeper and deeper into the dubious back streets that writhe around the low hills in the east of Alexandria. The rats, or whatever creatures scurried at the corner of my eyes, grew bigger, and the few people I glimpsed in dark doorways and alleys were even less well-favored than those I had grown used to. Although some way from the port, a predominantly fishy smell combined with all the usual reeks of humanity and decay. Finally, when I was thinking of running even though I had no idea of where to run to, I was led through a curtained doorway.
Here, my memory becomes vague. I suspect that the air was drugged by the smoke that writhed upward from the many glowing chalices hanging from the low ceiling. The man who called himself Zosimus was bulgeeyed, his skin beneath his voluminous shifting robes not so much black as blackened. He talked in a strange droning voice, the meaning of which seems to depart even as I think of it now. Suffice to say that I feared an ambush and did not detain myself long in his hovel. For once, I truly did thank the gods when my hurrying feet drew me back toward familiar squares.
Kaliphus has, just as he had undertaken, obliged me with a gift.
For these last few days, I have been possessed of two fresh slaves. She is named Alya. He is Dahib. They are young, fit, and, as far as I am ever able to tell these things, well-favored. They may be brother and sister, or in some other way related.
You, my reader, will not know that I am repulsed by the intimate pleasures of the flesh, and have been so all my life. These two creatures are thus of no use to me in the erotic ways that Kaliphus doubtless intended. The boy Dahib, in fact, has the habits of an animal. After Henrika’s efforts to teach him a few rudiments of house-craft failed, I had Konchab take him to work with the other able-bodied creatures up in the mines. Alya, though, I have kept for myself. She has a grace of manner, and speaks a comprehensible version of the Roman tongue. She has cleaned and re-ordered my private rooms, and bears flowers with thick purple petals each evening from some hidden place. Their scent brings some coolness to the hours of the night.
In taking Dahib to join one of his mining gangs, Konchab muttered that he and Alya were of a tribe of nomads from the desert beyond these hills, recently captured and thus far too close to their home and their freedom to be trusted. In truth, as I gaze at Alya as she stoops and works with her braided hair, her pure blue eyes, the sense that she brings of somewhere else, I truly wonder how she would have reacted if I had been a man of baser appetites.