I manoeuvred my way through all the sections of the mine.
From the open seams and pits where ore was clawed physically from the ground, back indoors to the clay stacks for the first smelt the hottest work in the world then promotion to the cupellation hearths, where bellows men strained to blast the silver, separating it at white heat from the refined lumps. There I worked the bellows first, afterwards as picker, gathering the silver from the cooled hearth at the day's end. For a slave, picking was the prize job. With luck and scalded fingers you could scratch up a drip or two for yourself. That put a light back in your brain: escape!
Every day there was a body search, but we found our own foul ways round that.
Occasionally now I wake, bolt upright in my bed, in a drowning sweat. My wife says I never make a sound. A slave learns: lock in every thought.
It would be easy to say it was only Sosia's death that held me on my track. Easy but foolish. I never considered her. To recall such brightness in this murderous hole would bring increased agony. What forced me on as I inched through my search was sheer self-discipline.
Anyway, you forget.
There is no time for leisured recollection in a slave's day. We enjoyed no hope for the future, no memory of the past. We woke at dawn; that is, while it was still dark. We snarled Wearily over bowls of gruel ladled out by a filthy woman who never seemed to sleep. We marched in silence through the shuttered settlement while our white breath wreathed around us like our own ghosts. They chained us in links with neck rings. One or two lucky ones pulled caps down over their filthy heads. I never had a cap; I never have any luck. In that hour when the cold light seems half-excited and half-ominous, when the dew soaks your feet and every sound carries through the still air for miles, we stumbled to the current workings. They unchained us; we began. We dug all day, with one break during which we sat empty-eyed, each withdrawn into his own dead soul. When it was too dark to see, we stood head down like exhausted animals to be rechained. We marched back. We were fed. We dropped into sleep. We awoke in the dark the next day. We did it all again.
I say "we'. These were criminals, prisoners of war (mostly Britons and Gauls), runaway slaves (again mainly Celts of different kinds, but with others Sardinians, Africans, Spaniards, Lycians). From the first, there was no need for me to act. The life we led made me one of them. I believed I was a slave.
I was bruised, muscles torn, hair matted, fingers cracked, cut, blistered, blackened, en grimed with my own and others' filth. I itched. I itched in parts of my body where it was a challenge making fingers reach to scratch. I rarely spoke. If I spoke I swore. My headful of dreams had been drained off like an abcess by the punishment of my present life. A poem would have filled me with staring scorn, like the senseless lilt of a foreign tongue.
I could swear in seven languages: I was proud of that.
It was while I was a picker that I stumbled into glimmerings of organized theft. In fact once I started to identify the signs, I soon found corruption ran so rife throughout the system that it was difficult to distinguish the petty fiddles every individual put his hand to, from the major fraud that could only have been set up by the management itself. Everyone knew about that. No one talked. No one talked, because at every stage each man involved took his small cut. Once he had, he stood guilty of a capital offence. (There were two punishments: execution or slavery in the mines. Anyone who had lived at Vebiodunum and seen our conditions knew execution was the preferable fate.)
At the end of December, as a Saturnalian treat, Rufrius Vitalis turned up looking prosperous with a hide whip pushed through a huge brown belt, to see if I had discovered enough to let me be pulled out. When he saw my dull-eyed state his honest face grew grim.
He extracted me from the furnace, then drove me some distance down the track, cracking at me with his whip for show. We crouched out of doors in a bank of wet bracken where we were unlikely to be overheard.
"Falco! It looks as if you need to get out quick!"
"Can't go. Not yet."
By this time I had slid into a sullen mood. I no longer believed in release. I felt my life for ever would be scrambling round the cupellation hearth in nothing but a loincloth with my shaved hair frizzling on my mucky head and my hands red raw. My only challenge was how many silver scratchings I could steal for myself. My mental and physical strength were both so depleted I had almost lost interest in the reason I was there. Almost, but not quite.
"Falco, are you cracked? Going on with this is suicide"
That doesn't matter. If I pull out too early I won't want to live with myself in any case. Vitalis, I have to finish it He was starting to grumble, but I interrupted urgently. "I'm glad to see you. I need to smuggle out information in case I never get a chance to make a full report myself."
"Who's this for?"
"The financial procurator."
"Flavins Hilaris?"
"You know him?"
"I know of him. They say he's all right. Look, laddie, there's not much time. It will look suspicious if I hang about. I'll find him. Just tell me what I have to say."
"He should be at his villa near Durnovaria." Gaius had promised to locate himself there, within reach if I managed to send messages. Tell him this, Vitalis. There's flagrant corruption all through the mine. First, when the rough ingots leave the smelt for cupellation, they are counted out by a weasel who can't actually count. He scratches marks on a tally stick; sometimes he "forgets" to make his nick. So what the contractor Triferus declares to the Treasury as his overall production is fraudulent from the start."
"Hah!" Vitalis let out this exclamation like a man who assumes he has heard almost everything, but who is not surprised to learn of some new dodge.
"Next, every day a few of the rough ingots are held back from the cupellation hearth. It's surprising how many, though I guess the number has crept up gradually over many years. This has the effect that the silver yield per ingot appears less than it really ought to be. I gather the declining yield was explained to Rome during Nero's time as geological variations in the ore being mined. Things were notoriously slack then, so in case Vespasian has anybody looking at the figures it's customary nowadays to slip in extra ingots some weeks, and claim the mineralogist has discovered a better seam."
"Delicate touch!"
"Oh yes, we're dealing with experts here. Will you be able to remember all this hogwash?"
"Have to try. Falco, trust me. Go on."
"Right. Now, regarding the ingots of pure silver which are produced at the cupellation hearth. Some get lost. This is natural wastage." Rufrius Vitalis scoffed admiringly again. Then, when the lead bars that have had their silver extracted go back for a second smelt"
"What's that for?"
To remove any other impurities before carting them out for sale Mars Ultor, Vitalis, don't let's knot ourselves up in technicalities, this is complex enough as it is! Hilaris will know what the procedures are He shushed me to calm me down; I was sweating with the effort of ensuring I told him everything. Frowning, I pressed on. "After the second smelt more ingots disappear though since their value is by then so much reduced, this last wrinkle in the system is considered to lack finesse! Apparently it's permitted to the overseers, as a privilege that keeps them sweet."
I fell silent. I was so unused to talking that presenting these details in an ordered form had tired me out. I could see Vitalis watching me closely, though after his first attempt he made no more suggestions for restoring me to civilization prematurely. My choice of comrade had been an intelligent one; I could see he understood the implications of what I had said.
"How do they get away with it, Falco?"
"It's a completely enclosed community; no outsiders are allowed."