For Casca, the years assumed a sameness that was torture in itself. He was unable to differentiate the passage of time other than through the change of seasons, and each seemed to last forever. Always he dug deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, always deeper and deeper…
In his seventh year he was sent underground.
The surface overseer had become uneasy when Casca was around. The other slaves died or grew emaciated or sickly; Casca did none of these things. The only thing that he had in common with the other prisoners was the covering of filth and encrusted dirt and clay that only came off his body when it rained. He looked less human than animal — more, a mechanical thing of earth as timeless as the soil itself.
The emperors in Rome changed. Politicians and heroes rose and fell. And still Casca toiled.
He grew sullen and quiet, an object of wonder and fear to the other slaves. His beard was almost to his waist and matted with knots and tangles. He would have become a total beast, insane and non-human, but it was his mind that saved him. He used his imagination to keep from going mad. Eleven chain mates he went through-and still he remained unchanged.
When he first went underground, the overseer of his shift wondered at this strange man. Under filth, Casca's age was indeterminate, but his strength was unreal. He could do the work of three, and he could lift more than any two other men in the mines. Casca was a solid knot of sinewy muscle and tendons. He always got his full share at feeding time. No one cared to challenge him for his choice of a sleeping place. Casca could have been the boss of the underground if he had so chosen. But he did not. The overseer wondered why. He could not read Casca's mind.
Casca was trying to figure out his fate, spending hours, days, every waking moment, trying to comprehend his plight. The enormity of it…I cannot die. The Jew won't let me. Then, if I cannot die, all I have to do is wait. Everything changes in time, and I have all time to myself… at least all time until, as the Jew said, 'Until we meet again.' Meet again? Perhaps he is in the next shaft, shoring up the sides with timbers. But I will get out of here. An opportunity will present itself. It would do no good to attack the guards and try to escape. They would just overpower me and put me in chains. No, I must get my way to the surface again. Down here, there is nothing but the prospect of being buried alive Buried alive!..
The thought slammed into his brain.
Buried alive!..
He could not die!
If he were buried alive, it would be for all eternity.
Now the days of real horror began.
There was always a very good chance of being buried alive in the mine. It happened often to others. Periodically tons of earth would claim a slave. Stay here long enough, and it would happen to him. And he had all of time itself, not just the short lifetime of these others who had been buried alive. The thought of being buried alive for eternity drove Casca almost mad… the thought of lying, unable to die, under tons of earth was a horror that consumed his hours.
It would not go away. It preyed on his mind… like some monstrous animal gnawing at his brain. Out. Out. I must get out! Before the mine caved in on him.
In the seventh year of the Emperor Gaius Nero the cave-in came.
There was little warning. Casca was working in his shaft, not far from his overseer, Lucius Minitre. Ironically, it was one of the few times when he had forgotten his obsession momentarily since the vein of unusual rock they were working had caught his interest.
The rumbling started… the shifting of the earth overhead.
There was an almost unbearable feeling that came with the change in air pressure. Millions of tons of earth and rock began to settle.
The slaves froze.
For one seemingly eternal but uncertain moment time stopped. Then the roof covering two hundred feet of tunnel dropped, crushing the lives out of forty slaves.
The fall of the first roof started a chain reaction that spread through the other galleries. Throughout the network of tunnels the screams of panic-stricken men echoed one upon the other as the walls grumbled and heaved around them.
Minitre, the overseer, was not a particularly brave man. This was just a job to him. He hid himself behind one of the slaves cowering in a side passage.
Casca paid little attention to the overseer. His own chain mate lay beside him with only part of his head visible under the boulder that had relieved him of the honor of toiling for the glory of Rome. It had also relieved him of two-thirds of his brain case. Casca was wondering how to get free from the ankle chains that bound him to his dead mate. The overseer was only a few feet away, cowering, his hands over his head and his face to the dirt floor. His eyes were closed tightly, and he knew nothing except the depths of his fear. Now Casca took a look at the overseer and saw the short knife in the belt of Lucius. A broken piece of timber lay close by. Casca reached over, hefted the lump of wood in his hand, turned rapidly, and knocked the overseer into the bliss of unconsciousness.
Taking the small blade, he went to work cutting his chain mate's foot off at the ankle. The job took longer than it should have due to the dullness of the blade and the smallness of the knife, but finally he cut all the way through, having a particularly rough time with the ankle joint. He had to cut through the tendons so that he could get to the other side, and that meant working the blade back and forth in the socket. For a moment he thought the blade would break, but it held, and he was through to the other side.
Casca was free of his chain. Well enough, he thought. Ididn't like him much anyway. Talked too much. But he was chained to me. I wasn't going to cut my own leg off… not yet, anyway. He looked at the unconscious overseer. Imay have my way out of here lying at my feet.
Wiping the sticky blood from the amputation off on his dusty beard, Casca bent down and put the shift overseer on his shoulders and began to make his way out of the depths and up to where the sun waited. He carried, pulled, and crawled with Lucius past sealed-off tunnels where men by the dozen were dying or already dead, knowing that only one thought was running through the minds of the trapped slaves: Would the mine superintendent think them valuable enough to try and save-or would he just requisition some more slaves from the penal colony on Cyprus?
Casca ignored all pleas for help. One man grasped at his feet, begging to be helped to the surface. Casca kicked him in the face to break his grip. The man cried through sobbing lips for pity, "Don't leave me to die!"
Casca sneered at him. "Fool, is that all you have to worry about?" Taking the small knife from his waistband, he tossed it to the terrified slave. "Here is your way out. Use it and be free. It's more than I can do." He turned away and began his trek back to the surface.
Crawling and dragging his unconscious burden over rocks and rubble, he at last reached the entrance. The full light hurt his eyes, nearly blinded him after all the time in the dimness underground, but to him it was a glorious sight for it lit the way to the pits.
As he forced his way out among the crowd of slaves trying to reach safety, a great rumble began deep in the mine, one that grew and grew, louder and deeper in tone. The growing rumble finally burst its way to the surface in a great spout of dust and flame.
Somewhere deep below a gas pocket had been ignited by one of the flickering torches, and level after level of the mine fell in on itself, carrying hundreds of men to their deaths beneath the falling rock. He had escaped just in time.
Now he broke through the jam beyond the entrance, past the overseers with their whips and the guards trying to get the slaves into a semblance of order. Twice someone tried to help him with Lucius, but Casca strongly rebuffed them with kicks and curses. Lucius was his. Laying the overseer down, Casca arose and tried to keep his balance. The world was moving. He felt a strange sensation, like seasickness, from the swaying the earth was doing in response to the great explosions still going on.
Then all was still except for the cries of the panic-stricken and the injured. While he cleaned off the face of Lucius, Casca mused to himself: How strange it is that people in the worst possible conditions will strive to maintain their pathetic lives rather than take the easy way out! Perhaps it was that no one really knew what happened in death that made them cling so tenaciously to their miserable existences. Damn fools. The world was full of them.
Lucius opened his eyes.
The first thing his clearing vision saw was the frighteningly hairy face of Casca in all its filthy, dirt-encrusted splendor.
"What…? Where…?"
Casca soothed him, saying in gentle tones: "You were struck by a falling timber, master, and, remembering your kindness, I could not leave you to perish as did so many others in the falling rocks and flames. I carried you out here to the light."
Memory returned to Lucius. The last thing he recalled was covering up his head while the earth seemed to fall in around him. But this slave, the one they called "The Old One," had saved him. He would not die. He would live to eat and drink and make love. And this slave was responsible. Lucius Minitre felt a deep swelling in his bosom. A surge of brotherly love came sweeping over him. This great hairy beast had remembered his kindnesses… and everyone, even his wife, said he was too good-hearted. This man had brought him out of the bowels of the inferno. Lucius could hardly keep from hugging Casca-and Would have if the years of accumulated filth had not left their mark. Casca stank.
Rising to his feet with the help of Casca's strong arm, Minitre said to one of the lesser overseers: "See that this man is assigned to surface duty. Let him work with the cooks. And see that he is cleaned up."
Casca gloated inside, chuckling to himself. I made it. I'm outside again. How long has it been?
His question was answered, but not immediately. They showed him to the stream where he was allowed to scrape and rinse most of the filth from his body. A razor was loaned to him while the owner watched with careful eyes and an armed guard stood by. Casca cursed and moaned as the dull brass razor pulled clouts of hair and skin from his face and neck.
But the beard came off. Then the guard handed him a clean tunic, making the comment that the mining superintendent liked to have everything topside clean-including the personnel. Casca, remembering his times in the legion, felt a twinge of nostalgia.
The guard noticed Casca's slave tag and took a closer look. "By Mithra, man. Tiberius has been dead for over thirty years. You must be at least sixty, but you don't look it. By the gods, whatever they fed you in the mines damn sure agreed with you."
Laughing to himself at his small joke, the guard returned Casca to his new quarters, a barracks-type hut with a wooden bed and a straw pallet all his own. By comparison with what he had known for the past decades in the mines it was all sheer luxury.
Decades! The thought staggered Casca's imagination. He had been here for the length of a normal life-time, yet-He remembered the face that had stared back at him from the small bronze mirror of the man whose razor he had borrowed, his face, the beard gone. Now he rubbed his hand lightly along his cheek as if to reassure himself that what he had seen in the small mirror was true. So many years, yet his face was essentially the same. Perhaps leaner. Perhaps more craggy looking. But he did not by any stretch of the imagination look his true age of The slave medallion! I must get rid of it…
Going to the outside, Casca returned to the pit area and began helping the other slaves aid their comrades, both the living and the dead. In this service he exchanged medallions for a more recent one, one that bore the likeness of Claudius. The dead slave he swapped medallions with did not complain…
The next few days were spent in a general cleaning up of the mine area. During this time Casca learned much of what had happened in the outside world since his banishment to the nether regions of Achaia. Some of it brought back old memories. The emperor that had followed Augustus was Tiberius. Casca had served under his command for a time in Gaul. He remembered Tiberius as a good soldier and a steady man, but, according to what he was told, while Tiberius had started out well as an emperor, he had turned into a tyrant in his last years.
The slaves who told Casca this were the old ones, in their late fifties and early sixties. Only they could remember back that far, and they were a special class of slaves. They had survived because they were indispensable to their master's comfort- household slaves, cooks, masseurs, poets, teachers. Here they served the governor and his family at his big villa out of sight of the mines. There they went every morning before dawn, returning to the mines area when the governor had no further need of them. It was not like serving some of the great houses of Greece or Rome, but it beat the pits by far, and, after all, they were criminals, guilty of such enormous crimes as petty theft or showing a little temper to their masters. Sometimes when one lived in the great houses one forgot that one was not a person and as such was not entitled to such things as opinions. Well, that was the way the world was. Casca had no intention of changing it. Not that he could All the slaves agreed that the worst thing that Tiberius had done-even worse than his paranoid proscription-was the naming of the mad dog Caligula to the throne. The best thing about Caligula's reign was that it only lasted four years before the Praetorian Guard finally had enough of the damned sodomist, killed him, and put his uncle, Claudius, on the throne. They liked Claudius. The old man was-surprisingly enough-a quite competent administrator. Yes, they all agreed, old man Claudius was a gentleman-even if the rest of the patrician families and the nobility felt he was somewhat republican in his tastes. The old man had done right well, all things considered, but it was rumored that his second wife, Agrippina, had poisoned him so that she could put her son on the throne-her son Nero that the old man had adopted. Odd thing, this emperor business. It seemed that-even for the good ones-being Imperator of the most powerful empire in the history of man carried with it certain occupational hazards: the rulers lately seemed not to enjoy a great deal of longevity after taking power.
So, today Gaius Nero was Imperator. So far his reign was going quite well. The more knowledgeable slaves thought that was because he was following the guidance of his mentor, Seneca, and listening to the advice of Burrus, head of the Praetorian Guard, on foreign affairs. They had helped the young Nero from making too many critical errors. They, and his mother, kept a tight rein on things. Well, it was nothing to Casca. Let the emperors come and go.
It did not take long for Casca to settle into the routines of his new job. After the mines this was almost unbelievable luxury: bathe once a week… see the sun… feel rain on his face instead of dirt.
Lucius Minitre tried in every way to make Casca's servitude easier, and he even developed a certain fondness for the tough-looking former legionnaire. One morning, taking him aside, the overseer motioned for Casca to sit on a bench with him and share a bowl of wine.
"Casca, you saved my life, and I won't forget it. I cannot set you free, but I can be of help in making your life more bearable." He stopped, took a sip of the wine, and cut it a little with a touch of water from an earthenware pitcher. He tried another sip and nodded, pleased with the mixture. Clearing his throat, he continued: "I have been here for eight years, and I heard stories about you from the man I succeeded. He was here for fifteen years, and he said that you had been here long before he came." He peered at Casca through uneasy eyes and asked: "Why do you live?"
Casca did not answer.
The overseer continued: "You do not appear to be very old, but you must be. I know that the medallion you originally wore was not that of Claudius. But I will tell no one. Have the gods some special interest in you? Or did you find a way to keep the ravages of time away?"
The man turned his eyes away, a little frightened by his daring and his assumptions. Keeping his eyes averted, he poured another drink for himself and Casca.
Casca felt a great relief run through him. At last he could speak of his torment. So he told Minitre the story of himself and the Jew.
The overseer did not laugh. Everything Casca said he believed. After all, was not the world filled with magic and sorcerers?
Casca finished his tale. Lucius Minitre sat silent, his eyes wide. Casca looked at him and grinned a crooked smile… the first time he had smiled in over twenty years. The unfamiliar usage of facial muscles gave him a cramp.
"It is remarkable," Minitre murmured. "You will live forever. You will never die. Or at least until you meet the Jew again, and who knows when that will happen? Perhaps never."
"But if what the Jew said is true, I have to get free. I cannot endure eternity in chains. Something must happen so that I can get my freedom, but the Mediterranean is a Roman lake, and without money I have no real chance of escape."
Lucius Minitre thought for a moment. He was thrilled to be this close to one who had been touched by the gods-even a Jewish god. He told Casca of the growth of the Jew's cult… how it had spread. Even with persecutions and mass killings in the arenas they seemed to grow in numbers… and prosper. There were even followers of the Jew here in the mines. Not many, mind you, but there were several. You could tell them by their constant praying and singing which only stopped when they were given a touch of the lash. But, why couldn't the Jew be a god? After all, the divine Augustus was made one just after he died. And now, so even old Claudius had some worshippers. And what about Tiberius? He had made his mother a goddess, complete with a temple of her own and priestesses. Casca smiled. Thoughts ran through his mind: Gods and priests… blessings and curses. Well, if I am cursed, I'll make it pay. I have had enough of being pushed around. If live I must, then by all demons and foul spirits of this world, live I will.