Defender of Rome (24 page)

Though the sun was high above them, he had never felt so cold; chilled to the very centre of his being. With a last glance towards his companions he climbed into the shaft.

XXXIV

THE CHAMBER STANK
of damp and the steps under his bare feet felt as slippery as if they were coated with ice. He had to grip tight with his single hand until his toes found and secured each foothold, whilst holding the bundled cloak in the crook of his right arm. At least he had the comfort of the circle of light above him and the anxious faces of Marcus and Serpentius that almost filled it. He reached the bottom of the channel, identified by thick, oily weed between his toes. The fear was more palpable now, as if someone was gripping his legs and pulling him downwards. He filled his head with Olivia’s face and fought the feeling with all his strength. Carefully, he manoeuvred so that he was facing in the direction of the villa, before dropping to his knees. There was just enough space left to allow him to wriggle his legs backward into the opposite section of the tunnel. His nose was two inches from the brick face of the shaft and still he couldn’t bring himself to break free from that life-giving circle of light. For a moment he felt a wave of claustrophobic terror and his bladder filled with ice water. Rope. Serpentius had been right, he should have waited. With rope he could have tied a line round himself and they would be able to pull him back if he became jammed. If he went without rope he might be trapped down here for ever. He could go back.

Coward
. He heard the word Ruth had never spoken ringing in his head. He closed his eyes. ‘I call on Messor and the spirits of Colonia to aid me.’ The whispered words sounded hollow in his ears, but the very act of saying them had the effect of the herb-infused ale the Britons drank before a battle. He felt warmth again, and his courage returned. He lowered his head and inched his shoulders forward into the pitch black of the tunnel mouth.

It was tight. Very tight. He had to hunch his shoulders to avoid being wedged against the ragged masonry. But was it tight enough to give him a reason to turn back? He wriggled to make himself more comfortable. How far? Maybe seventy paces to the villa. And what then? But he knew there was no use thinking about what then, because that could drive a man mad. What then meant the channel narrowing to a tiny pipe, or diving deep underground where a man would die screaming with no hope of ever being heard. He felt for the hilt of the knife to make sure it was still attached. If …? Don’t think. Just go.

At first, he tried to use his hands to haul himself along, but the walnut of his right could gain little purchase on the weed-covered stone and he made slow progress. Eventually he discovered that by pushing the bundle of his cloak forward, then digging his elbows into the walls and wriggling as if he were a snake, he was able to create a rhythm that gained him a few precious inches at a time. The tunnel roof was so low he felt it pressing down on his back and he suddenly realized that there truly was
no
going back. From nowhere the raw acid of panic filled his throat and poured like liquid fire into his chest. His head roared. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. His limbs thrashed helplessly in the confined space and he knew that if he didn’t stop now he would truly go mad. Think. His mind screamed the word.
Think
. His brain frantically clawed for some memory that would save him. A face. No, faces meant people and people died. Faces meant Ruth and Maeve and Cornelius and Publius Sulla and the girl whose baby he had promised to save. Faces meant people he had failed. Suddenly he was in a battle line, his shield tight against the next man’s, a sword firm in his hand. Death was all around him, but it meant nothing here, for this was the brotherhood of the warrior. The brotherhood of the shadow. And, in the shadow, he felt calm return. He was still trapped in a dark, airless tomb, but he was Valerius again, a Hero of Rome. He gritted his teeth, rammed his elbows into the walls and edged another six inches.

Time and space meant nothing in the dark. Even the urgency to save his father and Olivia was diminished to a distant white spot at the entrance to a half-forgotten world, where light and air and life actually existed. All that mattered was effort and motion. Push the bundle, dig in the elbows, squirm, push. He was chilled to the bone, but the sweat coursed from his brow into his eyes. He imagined a galley slave hauling interminably at massive oars, the muscles of his arms fiery bars of glowing iron, knowing that his agony could only ever end in death. Push the bundle, dig in the elbows, squirm, push again. Something whirled and danced in the dust storm that was his brain and men came from the darkness to greet him. Legionaries who would tear a man’s throat out with their teeth and then share a bloody wineskin with you. Men you could despise for their depravity and love for their loyalty. Lunaris, who had stood beside him to the very end at Colonia. Laughing Zama, who had taken a returned Roman
pilum
in the eye in Boudicca’s last battle. Even Crespo, who had hated him more than any man before or since, yet had earned his respect for his fearless savagery in a fight.
Not so tough now, pretty boy
. Soldiers. And from each of them he took a soldier’s strength and a soldier’s ability to endure, an ability he had all but forgotten. Push, dig, squirm, push.

The air was thick now, almost solid in his throat, and he found it ever more difficult to breathe. He stopped for a moment to rest. He was glad, if gladness was an emotion permitted to a man buried alive, that he had declined Serpentius’s offer of lamp and rope. The one would have killed him and the other made a coward of him. The flame of the lamp would have eaten the air; he had heard of it from slaves who had served in the deep mines. First the light dimmed, then vanished, then the men started to die. As he realized the significance of that thought a split second of panic returned like a lightning bolt through his brain. The air couldn’t reach his mouth and nose from the shaft because his body was blocking the tunnel. But there should be air from ahead, because if there was not, it meant there was no way out. If he had had a rope around his waist at that moment, he would have tugged on it for dear life and screamed to be hauled back to the shaft. But he didn’t have a rope. So he endured and pushed, dug and squirmed.

He tried to concentrate his waning mind on what he would do when he reached the outlet – kind Jupiter, let there be an outlet – but it was impossible to know what to expect. A simple drop from the level of the inlet channel? Something more elaborate and therefore more dangerous? What if there was a grille? They would be wondering by now what had happened to the water and he prayed that they wouldn’t simply call off their meeting. No, they wouldn’t do that. First they would investigate. Petrus would not gather his people at so great a risk only to abandon this most sacred of rites at the first sign of a problem. For the first time he realized there was a possibility they might kill him. He didn’t think Petrus was that kind of man, but who knew about the others? Christus had led a band of rebels. There would still be men among his followers who had fought. Well, he would give them Rodan to fight; that was where the greater danger lay. That’s what he would do, and while they were fighting the bastard he would escape with Lucius and Olivia. As long as there was an outlet.

Back on the surface Marcus and Serpentius had watched, horrified, as Valerius disappeared into the narrow shaft the way a man might make the first steps on his journey to Hades. Now they tried to work out what to do next.

‘We can’t just walk away and leave him in there. What if he’s stuck?’ Serpentius demanded.

Marcus studied the black hole in the earth. ‘And what if he is? Are you going to go in after him? I’ll face anything, man or beast, in the light of the sun, but I wouldn’t go in there for all the gold in Mars Ultor.’

Serpentius had faced death many times in the arena and lived to spit in its face. He had known fear – although he would never admit it to anyone – but when he stared into the mouth of the shaft it was like looking into his own grave. ‘We should never have let him go down.’

‘How could we have stopped him? Did you see his eyes? Valerius is like a gladiator who has had one fight too many and goes out on to the sand seeking death. He would have gone down that shaft even if it was filled with fire.’

The Spaniard smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘He isn’t looking for death, old man, he’s challenging it. Your friend Valerius will die some day, but he will die fighting for his last breath and screaming defiance in death’s face.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ The veteran gave the inspection hole a final glance. ‘He’s beyond our help now. All we can do is come up with a diversion and pray that he lives long enough to need it.’

Serpentius nodded agreement. Thinking about the diversion would stop him thinking about the poor bastard stuck down in that black tomb. He pulled the dagger from his belt and held it up to check the edge. He didn’t notice when it caught the sun.

A mile away, in the water tower on the Cespian Hill, a man noticed two flashes of light.

Valerius knew he must be close to the end of the channel. He didn’t have any evidence for the assumption, only the knowledge that he was nearing the last of his strength and if he wasn’t near the end he was going to die. No one who hadn’t experienced it could comprehend the strength-sapping toll of being able only to move a few muscles at a time for what seemed like hours on end. In reality it could only have been minutes, but if his strength ran out now he knew he was finished.

He felt it before he heard it. A rumbling in his lower belly and a compression in his ears that made him wonder if the tunnel was about to collapse. Then the noise, like muted thunder, and a pressure from behind like a gathering storm. Desperately he began to wriggle forward, real fear giving him new strength. He didn’t know what was behind him, but he knew whatever it was meant danger and the only way to escape it was to go forward. The pressure built around his legs until it was something almost physical, and the thunder grew ever louder. A powerful wind whistled in the gaps left between his body and the tunnel walls. At last, he understood what was coming and the knowledge turned fear to outright, gut-wrenching terror.
This
was death. He scrabbled desperately at the tunnel walls, anything to advance him by a few more inches, but he knew it was pointless. There was no escape from the flood.

The shock as the freezing water smashed into his lower body paralysed him. In a heartbeat it was all around, surging in powerful jets past his shoulders and head with a force that would have knocked a cow off its feet. He screamed with the despair of defeat and closed his eyes and waited for the end. But although the water continued to pour past him above and below it didn’t immediately cover him and he found he could continue to breathe. Slowly his mind informed him that his body blocked most of the pipe and was acting as a dam. The force was so great it even pushed him along a few inches. He began to haul his way forward, the water gushing past his face in frothing spurts, and he found he could move faster. All he had to do was stay alive and pray.

But disaster lay a few feet ahead.

When the water channel had been pushed into the hill more than two hundred years earlier, slaves had chipped their way through every foot of the unyielding rock from either side, and from the centre, where the inspection shaft had been sunk. The surveyors did their work so well that the diggers from each section met exactly where they had predicted – almost. When the tunnellers from the baths side met the tunnel from the centre, they found that they were slightly off line and compensated by making the final twenty feet slightly wider than had been specified. It was only a few inches, but when Valerius met the joining place he started to drown.

In a second the water was all around him. He became one with the flood and entirely at its command. His mouth and nose filled and he began to first choke, then suffocate. He held his breath until it felt as if his chest was about to explode before finally giving in to the inevitable. The darkness all around crept into his body and his bones, an inner darkness that he knew preceded death. Suddenly it didn’t matter any more. He was free of responsibility, free of pain, free of life. The last time he had felt like this had been in the final moments of the temple. This time there would be no escape, and in a way he was glad.

He felt himself floating as the gods carried him off to whatever Otherworld the Fates had prepared for him. Then he wasn’t floating, but falling, and a second later the euphoria was knocked out of him as he smashed into something solid and his eyes snapped open to see a bright light. He lay on his back spluttering as a cascade of water battered his chest. Gradually, he realized he was lying in some kind of pool.

He knew he should get up, but his head didn’t seem to be connected to his body. And there was something else. Something he had to do. For a moment his mind continued to whirl, then everything came back in a burst of clarity. The cascade meant he was in the baptism chamber. He struggled to his knees and turned.

A ring of astonished faces stared back at him. He recognized a lawyer from the Basilica Julia and his plump little wife among the ten or so men, women and children his unorthodox arrival had scared into a frozen tableau of terrified eyes and gaping mouths. The room had been prepared for the ceremony, but they must still have been waiting for Petrus, the ultimate survivor. He saw with relief that there was no sign of his father or Olivia. An oil lamp flickered in one corner and the scent of some kind of burned spice hung heavy in the air. On a table in one corner a loaf of rough peasant bread lay beside a seven-branched candelabrum and an overturned flagon of wine which had stained the stone floor beneath blood red. The walls were windowless and bare, apart from a single device painted on the white plaster above the oil lamp. It was another of the pieces of symbolism the Christians were so fond of, a large X cut by a vertical stroke with a small half circle attached to the top: