Stinging sand whipped at his eyes as the wind howled about him, trying to blow his robes free to sail over the desert with the sandstorm. His horse whinnied and shied away from the wind, trying to turn around and put its rear to the cutting bits of grit.
Casca finally agreed and took shelter on the leeward side of a dune. Tying his horse to a bush, he pulled his robe over his head and sat with his back to the wind. Feeling the sand slowly begin to pile up against him, he kept his head down and pulled his precious goatskin of water closer between his legs. There was nothing to do now but wait. His horse whinnied again. The beast didn't tike this region of whirling, biting sand devils and screaming winds. As far as that went, the horse didn't particularly like his new master. The man didn't have the smell of those who had owned him before. But Casca really didn't give a damn whether the horse liked him or not. As far as he was concerned, he would rather eat one of the damn things than ride it, and if he didn't come across some food soon, that would probably not be far in the future. The horse's previous master was beyond any complaint.
The Arab's body lay two days behind, the sun and wind drying it into another of the thousands of shriveled, desiccated husks of humanity that littered the floor of the Persian desert. The former member of the victorious legions of Avidius Cassius felt no remorse. If the bastard hadn't thought Casca was easy picking, he wouldn't be lying back there with the large blue flies trying to suck out the last remaining bits of moisture from his body.
A sand lizard, blown from its shelter under the dune, crawled between his legs and sat looking up at him. Casca smiled through cracked lips. "Welcome, little friend, to what protection I can give. We'll just have to wait this thing out, and if you don't bite, neither will I."
Back on the battlefield of Ctesiphon were forty thousand that would never bite or do anything else again. He had no sense of guilt for deserting the Eagle standards of Rome. Avidius Cassius had promised the warriors of Parthia that he would spare the city and its people if they came out to do battle, but even now Casca knew that thousands were on their way to the slave pens of Syria and that the city was still burning. It took a long time for a city to die-much longer than it did for a man.
He had had enough of slaughter and wanted no more than to get away to some place where the stench of death didn't fill the nostrils. But even that was to be denied him. If that stupid Arab hadn't tried to take him on, the man would still be living, feeling the blood course through his veins and the beat of his heart.
The sand had reached up to his waist and began to flow around him; he knew that if it didn't stop soon he would be buried. He wondered how his horse was faring-for some time now he had heard nothing save the keening of the wind over the dunes.
He pulled the stopper from the goatskin and took a pull of the strong-tasting, brackish water. The lizard watched him, its eyes moving independently from one another; it missed nothing. Casca ran his tongue over his lips, put his hand down in front of the small creature, and poured a couple of drops into his palm, holding it still. The lizard twitched its tail, looking as if it were thinking about running, then, making up its mind, moved onto the man's palm and drank, its mouth opening and closing like a fish trying to breathe air. Then, finishing quick as a blink, it flashed back to its place between Casca's legs.
Casca wiped the remaining damp spot across his lips. The heat of the sand on his back was drugging him, making his eyes feel heavy and gritty. He sighed and pulled his robe closer about him. Looking at his guest, he spoke, eyes red rimmed and dull from heat and fatigue.
"Well, little friend, I'm going to crap out for a while. You keep watch for me and I'll see you later." His eyes closed and the darkness set in-the kind that eats up the hours and rests the soul. He slept, not knowing when the storm passed by and the night sky shone clear and stark in its brilliance, the stars each set perfect in the firmament of the heavens.
Some time during the storm the horse broke free and followed the course of the wind.
The silence woke him. Slowly, stiff-jointed, he moved. The sand, which had built up to his shoulders, slid off in slow waves. The lizard blinked once, twice at the disturbance, and was gone, burrowing back into the shelter of the dunes to wait for the warmth of the next dawn to start the blood flowing through its veins. Casca wished him well. Rising, he looked for his horse, which he knew was long gone. Well, he thought, that's about normal. If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any. He pulled his burnoose closer about him. The insulating sand had kept him warm, but now the night chill of the desert made itself known. It always amazed him, the contrast between the burning sun and heat of the day, which could kill a man without water in six hours, and the chill of the night. He climbed the nearest dune and looked out over the open expanse, ghostly lit by the clear night sky. There was nothing, not even the howl of a desert jackal; it was empty. He had hoped perhaps to see his horse, but knew there was little or no chance. Sighing, he went back down the slope. Sliding and kneeling, he dug himself a small pit in the sand and lay down, pulling the sand back around him to serve as a blanket to keep the worst of the cold out. He closed his eyes again and slept in the small, shallow grave.
Just minutes before dawn, Casca pulled himself out of his cocoon and rose, stretching his arms to the sky. He straightened, cracking the sore bones in his back and neck. He took a deep breath and exhaled. Moving to the bush where he had tied his horse, he dug in the sand and pulled out his pack, searching the meager content. Finding out a small, hard, rancid horse curd and a chunk of ten-day-old bread, he climbed back up the crest of the dune to await the coming of the sun.
Taking another small swig of tepid water to wet his throat before attempting to eat the rock-hard and rancid curds, he hunched down in the sand, waiting, his eyes toward the East. The thin, predawn glow lay on the horizon. The sun would be rising soon, and with it would come the brain-cooking heat of the desert.
He put the taste of the food out of his mind and concentrated on chewing the hard bread. Eating slowly, he would let each bite soften and turn sweet in his mouth before swallowing. Careful of how much he ate, he saved most of the curds for later, knowing he would need the strength they could give him then. A light breeze was beginning to pick up with the coming of the sun, as it usually did in the desert. There was no trace of moisture in the air. He was still a long way from the ocean, and the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates lay far behind him.
Before the storm had hit, he had been staying fairly close to the same route he and the legions of Gaius Avidius Cassius had taken in their invasion of Parthia when they had left their staging area at Damascus. It was one thing to cross the desert as part of a great army with supplies laid in along the way, and quite another to try it in reverse, alone and without any stores of food or water to make it across the five hundred miles back. It would be stupid to have tried to make his way along the Euphrates or Tigris. He would have been sure to have run into patrols from the Gelions that had taken Amida and Europa, and he had no desire to have his carcass strung up and crucified for desertion.
The sun was up now, a massive red-gold orb slowly rising. He could see how the Greeks in the legends called it "the fiery chariot of Apollo." In these lands, the sun was everything-the giver of life, and the taker. The ground he would have to cover was bad enough, but to the south was the monstrous ocean of sands that the wandering Semite tribes of Arabia fought so fiercely to keep under control. As far as he was concerned, they could keep it all.
Casca rose from the sands and wiped the scanty remnants of his morning meal from his fingertips and face. The curds had left a sour taste in his mouth, but he resisted the temptation to wash it away with another drink of his scant supply of water. The advance of the sun was beginning to drive the chill of the night from his bones. He knew the day would be a bitch, so he had to try to find some shade before the worst of the heat came. He could see from his position on top of the dune a distant line of mountains to the northwest. They were delicate shades of rose and pink now, but with the rising of the day they would change into shimmering, distant, gray crags of barren rock, cracked and split into schisms from the endless heating and cooling of the centuries.
That was where he must go if water and food were to be found. What there was would be found in those inhospitable stones. He gathered his possessions and made them into a pack, using a couple of strips torn from his robe to sling them over his shoulder.
The soldier of Rome walked out onto the shifting floor of the desert. With every step the sand worked its way into his sandals and then spilled out again into thin streams. He settled down into the mile-eating, steady tread of the professional foot soldier, the sun on his back pushing him on.
He walked slowly but steadily, avoiding the desire to rush, knowing that that would use him up faster than his measured pace. He would have to make the mountains by the next day or run out of water. Even now the base of the crags could not be seen. The top half was floating over the floor, the desert shifting and riding on shimmering heat waves. The day found him crossing a field of stones with lizards and serpents watching his progress. His step was already slowing down, the heat a constant drain, drawing off his life's essence and strength. The water bag at his side sloshed continuously, tempting him to raise it to his mouth and drink, or wash his face to get rid of the caked-up dust and sweat and streaked grit around the corners of his eyes.
Stopping, he raised his head and looked out across the field of stones and serpents. He had to stop and wait out the worst of the heat. A single, darker object rose from the rocky floor. It was a large boulder that hadn't yet given into the remorseless efforts to wear it down to the size of its neighbors. It stood like a lonely sentinel, guarding nothing.
Casca sat down on the shaded side of the stone. It was about as tall as he was and five feet around, but it also had the only shade for miles. He scraped away the surface layer of rocks, knowing they would be the hottest. Sitting on them would have drawn some of his moisture. He pulled his robes over him, forming a tent, and leaned back against the shaded side of the boulder. He was a single lonely figure, waiting. The gray, once-white robe, which if seen from any distance would seem just another rock, was his protection and shelter. He would wait now until the sun chariot had almost completed its journey before drinking again. He would travel all the coming night, and if nothing unforeseen occurred, he should make the distant mountains by the next sunrise.
He slept fitfully, a waking sleep that came and went. The silence was complete; only the omnipresent heat was his companion, though not a friend. He dozed, head jerking up now and then as he tried to seek the comfort of unconsciousness. He was still sweating and knew that that was a good sign; if the sweating were to stop, he knew a heat stroke would not be far away. As long as he could sweat, he was all right.
The seconds were minutes and the minutes were hours. Time seemed to stop, his mind in a turmoil. He had no way of telling of the passing of the hours. It was too much of an effort to try and determine how long he had been sitting. He knew when the day began to cool, that would be the time to rise. Until then he would have to endure the dragging hours silently, helpless to speed them up.
Far across the desert and sea, another waited, silent and meditating in somewhat different surroundings. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, worried over how the Persian camping was progressing. Long ago, at the age of twelve, the emperor had embraced the teachings and severities of the Stoics. He had trained himself to place his body second to his mind, to resist passion in all forms, and to deal only in logic. For the Stoic, there were only two paths a man could take: the path to good or the path to evil. He regretted only that the office of state that he held so often forced him into unpleasant acts that he deemed necessary for the greater good. He personally had nothing against Christians, but they were a disturbing influence and preached a religion of weakness, which, if allowed to flourish, could sap the already vital strength of the empire.
Therefore, with a sigh of regret, he was now signing the order condemning another ten thousand of these followers of the crucified god to be put to death. He handed the instrument of death over to his chamberlain and took a drink of spring water. He avoided the use of wine or even eating to excess. In his mind, as the father of the Roman people, he had to set the example in everything. How else could he lead but by example, if he wanted the Roman people to return to the earlier state of nobility and virtue under which they had conquered most of the known world.
But, he sighed, he was sorely afraid that he was too late in coming on the scene. Still, one must try, and there was always the hope that his successor would be able to carry on with his work. Smiling, he thought of his son, Commodus-bright-eyed, brave, quick to learn, and the light of his father's eye. Yes, Commodus would carry on after him and lead the empire into an even greater age of prosperity and peace. Commodus would be the artist who would paint in the fine details of the future. He Marcus would now lay in the background with broad, sweeping strokes.
He rose and made his ablutions. It was time to preside over the college of priests and to perform sacrifices for the welfare of Rome and entreat the gods to grant them victory in all things. His wife, Lady Faustina, daughter of Antonius Pius, was waiting for him. She would not, of course, be permitted entry into the college. In her position, she would go to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins and make her own sacrifice and donatives.
Marcus Aurelius was blind to one thing, and that was the infidelity of his wife, who openly carried on with anyone she pleased and promoted her lovers to position of power. None dared tell the emperor otherwise, for to him, as he had written, she was the epitome of virtue. He would hear of nothing else. But his councillors knew, and indeed wondered if the boy Commodus had any of his father's blood in him. For the child, they knew, instead of being serious and gifted as was his father, was instead shallow of mind and purpose, taking on more the attitudes and directions of his mother than the rigid discipline of self-denial that the emperor espoused. The councillors dreaded the day Marcus would give the reins of the empire to his son.
The change in temperature brought Casca back from his dull, half-drugged sleep. He forced his eyes to open. The lids, dried and caked with grit and sweat, stung as he blinked to clear them. Rising from his shelter, he stood and faced the mountains, trying to lock the direction in his mind. If there was no moonlight tonight, and if there were no stars, there was certainly nothing else in the wasteland that he would be able to get a fix on to help guide him.
Long shadows were reaching across the plain of stones from the gentle rises and hillocks. The sole boulder became a sundial as its shadow reached out to twice its own length.
Casca shook his water skin. There was precious little left. He took one full, long swallow and held it in his mouth to let it soak into the gums and the membranes of his throat, cutting some of the buildup of phlegm and foul taste away. The bag would be empty this night. He rewrapped his burnoose about him and tied it at his waist.
The cooling of the evening was a balm to his heat-reddened and flushed skin. It even helped to ease the sore spots under his armpits and groins where the grime and sand wore against his skin. The dark closed around him like a soft, silent blanket. He walked, the cool air giving him a sense of renewed strength. The heat soon passed and there were a few miles of stumbling over smooth, slippery stones. Once, this must have been a lake or an ocean bed. Several times he walked over shining paths of salt that had collected into the low areas where the waters must have evaporated or receded back into the earth.
A few times he almost stepped on snakes, which hissed and stuck out their tongues to taste the air, then pulled back into sinuous twisting tendrils ready to strike.
All that night, under dear but moonless skies, he trekked toward the hoped-for shelter in the mountains. With stumbling steps, he met the new dawn and looked to his objective.
It was still, to his eyes, as far away as it had been on the previous day. As he had earlier noticed, distance was often deceptive in this land of shimmering waves of heat. His water was gone. He still carried the empty bag with him in the hope that he might find a spring among the rocks or in the sand and would be able to refill it. He would not be able to rest much this day. If he stayed in one place too long, the heat would take what remained of his strength and he might not reach the walls of granite ahead. This day, heat or not, he must continue as long as he was able.
By midday, it felt as if Vulcan himself was pounding at his temples, trying to forge some strange weapon in his eternally burning furnace. The glare of the sun was a piercing, fiery dagger that lanced Casca's eyes. Every step was heavier than the last, but to stop was perhaps to never be able to go on. He stumbled blindly toward the mountains. A rock caught his dragging feet. It tore one sandal off and he fell to the earth, mouth open and panting, gulping in breaths of oven-baked air. He lay there for some time, trying to gather his inner resources together for the tremendous effort it would take to rise to his feet again. He lay still, mouth open and panting, eyes focused on a small gray stone, inches from his nose. A shadow moved over the stone. His eyes flicked up to meet another pair of goggle-wide eyes watching him. A large gray-and-brown-mottled lizard, the length of his foot, lay on its belly, mouth opening and closing like a fish. It was attracted by the flies beginning to gather around the form of the fallen man. Once and again, a long tongue flicked out and snared a victim faster than an eye could blink. It moved closer to his face and lay still, watching, one eye moving independently of the other. Casca's right hand, near his face, moved before he even thought of it and he held the lizard in his hand. He could feel the sinuous strength of its body squirming in his hand. Through silent lips he apologized for what he was about to do, then tore the beast's head off and placed the neck of the bleeding carcass between his cracked lips and sucked. He sucked the thin blood until the body of the lizard was drained, then tore it into pieces and chewed the meat slowly, squeezing every drop of moisture from the small cadaver. It wasn't much, but it was enough to give him the strength to rise once more to his feet.
He tossed what was left of the drained body of the lizard away and forced his mind on the hazy mountains.
He had to draw on every bit of his inner strength to take the first stumbling step. Fear aided him, too-the fear of what he would go through if he fell once more and was unable to rise. What would happen to him? He wouldn't be permitted to die; the Jew had seen to that. Would he just lie there and become a dried, desiccated husk that refused to die, condemned to a never-ending thirst and suffering?
That fear gave him a degree of increased fortitude and determination to go on. One dragging step after another, forcing his mind to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, he drifted into a semidrugged state that helped to ease the pain of his cut and blistered feet. He tried to lick his lips but found he couldn't force his tongue out of his mouth. It had swollen to twice its normal size and threatened to cut off his gasping and labored breathing.
His eyes were swollen almost completely shut and he thought for a time he was going blind when the day became darker and what little he could see began to fade from sight. He stumbled into a nearby bush and fell over onto his back. The bush was in a dry riverbed. Feebly, he reached up to its branches and felt them. They were hard to see. A chill rushed over him from the evening breeze. At least, he thought, I'm not blind. It's just the night coming on. He touched the leaves, feeling their soft green suppleness under his torn fingers.
Soft..? Up till now, everything in this pit of fire that he had seen or touched had been dry and rough! He tried to force his mind to work. It was difficult! His mind kept wanting to slide off into distant disjointed thoughts. With a tremendous effort he forced his concentration back to the bush. It's green; the leaves are soft. It must be getting moisture. Rolling over onto his belly, he began to push the sand away from the roots of the bush.
Slowly, with an almost impossible effort, the hole deepened. Casca put his face down into the bottom of it and breathed deeply, ignoring the bits of sand that were sucked up into his nostrils. He could smell moisture. No! Smell wasn't quite right; he could taste it with his mind. He tore a limb from the bush to help him dig. Hours passed as he worked in slow motion, but the hole deepened, and soon he could feel the moisture with his fingers. The rains that came so seldom to this region would turn this dry bed into a raging torrent, and then would disappear as fast as they had come. But some of the water remained for this plant to feed on and a few others.
The darkness was on him now, and still he scooped out the sand until at last he could feel real wetness. Sandy mud slid between his raw ringers. He scooped up a handful of it and placed it in his mouth, letting the wetness ease the pain and soak into his gums and tongue. He fought back an impulse to swallow the mud and sand. It helped, but it wasn't enough: he needed to drink. The hole wasn't filling with water; it was just wet sand muck.
Tearing off a patch of his tunic, he filled it with the sand and mud. Tying it into a bundle, he strained his neck, held the cloth to his mouth, and squeezed, forcing every ounce of strength remaining into his right hand and finally, through the cloth, came… water! A slow, sweet wetness that increased as he gained strength from the moisture. Again and again he refilled his rag and drank, nursing the wetness. As a child feeds at its mother's breasts, he sucked and was eventually filled.
He lay back then and slept, as his stomach dispersed the life-giving wetness throughout his body, feeding the cells and bringing back suppleness to dried tissue that had shrunk under the hammer of the sun. Two days he stayed by his miniature oasis, gathering his strength. At night, he found that if he stayed away from the hole for a while, other creatures would come to it, drawn by the smell of moisture in the night air. Rodents, lizards, snakes, and other vermin appeared. All were food and he wasted nothing. What he didn't eat was sliced into strips and put into the sun to dry. There wasn't much, but it was a great deal more than he had eaten for some time and would be enough, he hoped, to see him through.
He used much of his time squeezing his rag to fill his water skin, controlling the urge to drink it dry, and contenting himself with his damp rag. The water skin would be needed when he left, for he didn't know how long he would have to go before finding more. The mountains rose over him. They were stark, craggy, uneven piles of raw rock that reached to the clear desert heavens. They seemed like Hercules, carrying the weight of the world on their granite shoulders.
Four days he stayed by his hole until he knew it was time to leave. He was as strong as he would ever be with the lack of real food. If he waited too long the hole might run dry and the few animals that came would disappear, and then he would be back right where he started.
He waited for the dusk and once more began his trek across the wastelands of the Persian desert. But now, the mountains were his travel companions, and the wind that came from them in the night talked to him of lost caravans and vanished armies that had once followed this path. Some had made it, but most lay forgotten under the shifting, whispering dunes behind him. Their stories were covered by the ever-changing sands that each year claimed a little more of the arable lands, until one day they would reach clear to the sea.
Several days passed as he made his way along the boundary of the mountains heading west. He knew he would have to come out of the desert at some point; it could not be much further. He found small springs in the shelters of the crags, which kept his water skins filled. And… where he found water, he found food.
At one such lonely watering hole he found two horses grazing on the brush. A man, who Casca presumed had been their owner, lay facedown near the waterhole. Rolling the body over, the cause of death was evident. The man's face was swollen to half again its normal size, and there was a purple color from the poison that had been injected into his face through the two puncture marks on his cheek. Probably a desert snake, lying near the hole, had struck him while he'd been drinking. And, Casca figured, it hadn't been too long ago. The body showed no signs of decay yet and the horses looked to be in fair shape.
He dug a shallow grave and covered the body with stones. He said a general prayer for the man's sake to whatever gods there were in this place, and thanked him for the gift of the horses.
He rode out from the spot that night after checking the packs. There was little in them but the things a lonely traveler would need on the trail. There were new clothes for him, though, and packets of food to insure his reaching civilization with at least a minimum of comfort. He followed the trail back the way the man had come, moving easily, letting the swaying of the horse rock him into a light sleep as the miles were covered.
He felt a tingling up his spine on several occasions after the first two days. It was a tingle that says one is not alone, that eyes are watching.
But he never spotted anybody and put it down to nerves. But the feeling still lingered, and from time to time he thought that if he could just turn around fast enough, he would be able to catch sight of the watchers.
At night, he would search out crevices in the rocks in which to build his lonely camp. A small fire and saddle blankets provided him with all the creature comforts he needed. The distant yapping of a desert jackal would punctuate his thoughts, and the isolation became almost a friend. He gathered it around him as he did his saddle blankets, often spending long hours sitting on a rise looking out over the panorama of deserts and mountains. The wind was shifting and the cooler nights spoke of the end of summer. More frequently now, clouds would gather and let loose in the distance some of their jealously hoarded, life-giving rain. The few times it rained where he was, the Roman would raise his face to the drops, letting them clean the grit from his eyes and face, making no attempt to seek shelter.
There, standing on a ridge in the rain, overlooking the edge of the world, he felt as if he were the only man left in all creation. Would he in fact be that one day? Would he be all that was left of mankind? Or would the Jew claim him before that time came?
He shook the thoughts away; they were much too complicated for his mind. It would be better if he used his time to try and find out who had been following him. He was sure now. The feelings were just too strong. He knew they were out there somewhere.
That night Casca made camp in the open. He could not take shelter among the rocks because the trail he had been following had swung out some distance from them. The day had been long. He made a dry camp and contented himself with what was available. That night he sat close to the fire, made of dried horse droppings and dead twigs from the surrounding brush. His mind was drifting, but he tried to keep one ear cocked for any sound that wasn't natural. The fire and a half-full gut, though, soon lulled him into a nodding sleep. It was a sleep that ended in a flash of lights and pain as a thrown club smashed into the back of his head, sending him down into darkness.
As consciousness slowly returned, he wondered why the constellation of the Hunter whirled so rapidly in the heavens. It took a moment to shake his head free of the flashing, whirling lights and let it settle down into a deep throbbing, reminding him of several really bad hangovers he'd had over the years.
He got his first look at the new owners of his horses and property. They were two wild, scabby looking creatures with dark, weathered faces and coal-chip eyes that gave them the look of the Asian.
Small in size, their hair hanging in knotted masses to their waists, they grinned at him through black, gapped teeth that had been worn down almost to the gums from years of eating sand mixed in with their food. One was playing with Casca's sword while the other grinned a slant-eyed, death's-head leer at his trussed-up captive.
The smaller of the two gave him a kick and turned his attention to devouring everything remaining in the saddle bags that was edible. Their speech, if it could be called that, was mostly a series of grunts and gestures. They quickly got into an argument over the spoils, meager as they were, though to them it was a great treasure.
From the gestures they were making and the repeated looks in his direction, Casca figured that they were trying to decide what to do with him. One kept pointing to him and then to the small stack of silver and copper coins they had taken from his pack. The smaller of them obviously was trying to talk the other into selling him into slavery. His companion shook his head in the negative and made slashing movements with the short sword. The one holding his sword went to Casca, gave him a kick in the side, and pulled the Roman up to His feet by the hair, poking and jabbing him with the sword point. The other came over and the two were quickly involved in a game of tug of war over the sword.
Casca figured he'd better do something. The idea of being sold back into slavery didn't particularly appeal to him. He'd already, to his thinking, spent entirely too many years in that miserable condition and didn't look forward to a repeat performance.
Though his hands were bound behind him with leather thongs, his feet were free, and he made good use of them. While the two were determining his fate, he gave one a snap kick to the balls that raised the savage's testicles almost up to his belly button. The other suffered a milder fate with a heel to the jaw that splintered a few already rotted teeth and probably saved him from a future toothache.
While the two thieves were wrapped up in their own problems, Casca made use of the time to free himself from his bonds, nicking himself only slightly in the process of handling a sword behind his back.
When the two were able to motivate under their own power, he sped them on their way with a few well-placed slaps on the ass from the flat of his blade. The two men wasted no time in putting as much distance as possible between them and what was to have been their victim. Casca gave his first laugh in weeks at the sight of the bobbing heads heading for the high ground.
The action of the attack and its subsequent outcome served to break him out of the dangerous, mind-drugging lethargy that had been creeping over him. He was wide awake and ready for some living. Gathering his gear, he mounted his horse and with a kick to the flanks headed back into the wastelands, but this time his blood was racing and alive. There was a world to see, and, thanks to the Jew, he had what looked to be more than enough time to do it all. By the great brass balls of Jupiter, he would try.
Three more days and he reached the first signs of civilization. He came upon neat rows of cultivated fields and groves of olive trees. He spent a few scarce denarii for fresh meat and grain. After eating, he questioned the farmers and found that he had gone in a long half circle to the South and was now near the city of Aphrodisias.
He had heard of the city. It was well known throughout the empire as an artists colony, whose sculptures were to be seen in the finer domus of the empire. The city, as was obvious, was named for its patron goddess, Aphrodite, goddess of love and artists.
The farmers told him the city boasted of having the most liberal attitude toward sex of any in the empire, and also claimed to have more homosexuals to the square foot than any city in the world.
He spent four days in the city lying on his butt and taking it easy. He didn't have sufficient silver for the more plush boardinghouses, but after selling one of his horses he did have enough to raise a little hell and get laid a couple of times. He had some minor luck with dice, playing against Arab traders heading for Bithynia and won enough to cover the expense for part of the trip. He paid for the rest of it by renting out his sword as a guard for the caravan of Izmael Ben Torzah, a hawk-nosed old patriarch of the desert who looked like some great graying bird of prey, riding over the desert on his horse with his white robes flying loose about him in the wind.
The old man had taken a liking to the scar-faced Roman. When they were to leave the fleshpots of Aphrodisias, he went to the trouble of locating Casca and liberating him from the attentions of a widow, who was interested in having his knotted, muscled body carved into a likeness of marble. It would have been something new in the art field. It would have been called stark realism, since Casca was not one of the pretty boys of the Greek school but a real man with all his bad points-and, as she said when examining him in the nude, also his one good point.
Izmael paid the protesting woman no heed as he threw the half-naked and drunk carcass of his new guard over the back of one of his pack animals and rode off to join his caravan, already far outside the city and heading north.
When Casca finally sobered up, he wasn't sure whether to be grateful or not. He was sure he could have had a fairly decent existence as a male model. Hell, he had been getting into the thing. Learning to pose and twist his body into awkward positions while the matron supervised the sculpture. Too bad he had had to leave before it was finished. But what the hell, maybe another tune.
After a little time passed, he realized that the life of a male model wasn't really what he was cut out for and forgave Izmael for hauling him off-especially when Izmael, himself feeling somewhat contrite, let Casca grade and sample the eight slave girls he was taking to the markets in Bithynia. On a scale of one to ten, two of them were threes, and the best one he gave an eight. The others fit somewhere in the middle. But all in all, they served their purposes well enough.
Casca didn't make it all the way with the caravan. When they stopped at Halicamassus, on the coast, he got drunk with some sailors and woke up to find he had signed on as a crewman. The creaking of the timbers brought him staggering to the upper deck of the bireme, where he emptied the remains of the previous night's revelry into the Mediterranean. Being a fatalist, he reconciled himself to the change in his mode of travel. As long as they didn't try to chain him to an oar, he was as well pleased as could be expected.
The captain was fair and the food not too bad. They were carrying an amphora of grain and olive oil as well as hauling precut slabs of marble to be used as facings for public buildings in Rome. These they used as ballast to settle down the tendency of the galley to pitch and roll.
When they finally put into the port of Ostia, he chose to stay on board rather than take the time to visit the city of the Caesars. The last time he'd been here they had first put him in the arena, and then "Mad Nero" had sentenced him to life as an oar slave on the galleys of Rome. No, the Imperial City still had a bad taste for him and he stayed close to the ship, not venturing much further than the nearest tavern for a drink now and then. Finally they had reloaded their cargo holds and made sail. They sailed first to the west, then north, this time to Messilia in Gaul, where he had first enlisted as a boy in the legions.
He felt an increasing desire to be gone from the hot humid lands of the Mediterranean and also away from the Pax Romana. There was only one place he could go where the long arm of Roman law didn't reach-across the Rhine into Germania. He also wanted to see if what the mercenaries he had served from the northlands had said about the women was true. It was a poor reason, but who said you had to have a good one?
Casca felt a sense of relief when they finally left Ostia behind them and headed out again to the open sea and into the clean sea air. Here the stench of a decaying and corrupt empire would fade with the distance. Rome still left a bad taste in his mouth. At nights, when the sea was quiet and the bireme rocked to and fro with the swells, he would often awake with a jerk, his body soaked in cold sweat as memories rushed on him in his sleep. In his nostrils would be the sweet, sick smell of blood.
It was blood from the sands of the arena-the circus where he'd fought for the amusement of the Roman public, where women in a frenzy would sell themselves into slavery, making wagers on who would die. He could hear the voice of Corvu, the Lanista, barking out commands at the tyros, the same as a sergeant in the army would, constantly repeating commands to recruits until the response to orders became automatic.
"Don't go for the throat or the leg-get the gut first. It's the biggest target. Cut the bastard after he's down. Remember, a leg wound might eventually slow a man up, but if you get careless he can still kill you. Play it safe. Only get fancy when you know he's through; then make it look tougher than it is. Keep in mind that you're out there to entertain the people, not get yourselves killed. Let the bastards from the other schools do the dying."
But even Corvu was not above rigging a fight against one of his own students if the man was a troublemaker. It was simple enough to arrange. A little draught of a sleeping drug in the cup of posca, the watered vinegar that each gladiator would rinse his mouth with before entering the arena, would insure that in a few minutes the man's reaction time would slow down. And before the audience caught on that he was drugged, his opponent would surely take advantage of the situation and put a quick end to the unfortunate one.
But of all the faces of the arena, the one that haunted him most was Jubala, the monstrous black prince from Africa. He was a giant of a man, with the strength and courage of a desert leopard, and with a hatred in his heart that made him not just a hunter, but a killer who fed his hate on pain and death…
So that even now, when the hortator of the bireme struck the skin hide of the drum to set the measure for the oarsmen, Casca could feel a twinge seem to ripple over his back, for a slave master's lash, on the galley he had slaved on, had made its mark there. All this, he owed to Rome. But still, he was a Roman.
When they reached Messilia, Casca transferred over to a grain ship heading up the Rhone to Lugdunum, again trading the muscles in his back and arms for passage. Leaving the barge at Lugdunum, he took a large portion of his remaining sesterces and bought a young gray ass to carry what wealth he had on its small back, and struck out, trying to avoid contact with any of the Roman garrison along the way. After all, he was still a deserter and the arm of Rome is as long as her roads, reaching from Asia to Britannia. He didn't really understand why he wanted to cross the Rhine into Germania, but his feet took him to the same spot where he had killed his first man. Was that it?
Had he come back here because this was where he'd become a soldier, where his sword for the first time had cut the life out of another human? The number he had taken since that day, he couldn't recall. Only rarely did a face stand out in his mind for a moment, then fade back into the mists of the past where they belonged…
Perhaps forgetting helped him to keep his sanity. If all the slaughter and pain he had inflicted and suffered himself were to come to him at one time, it would be too much for his mind to stand. Perhaps forgetting was the way the mind cured itself of the sickness that could linger with bad memories.
It was with a sense of something yet to come that he reached the banks of the Rhine just before nightfall. It was too late to make a crossing now; he would have to wait until the morning. He cast a regretful look at his ass and sighed. There was no way he would be able to get the animal across the rushing waters… So, waste not, want not. And it was time for chow.