23
I opened my eyes to pitch darkness. The air was cold and clammy, stale and foul-smelling.
Where was I? The pit, of course. Now I remembered. Where every day was like the last, where nothing ever changed—except that something was different. We were not alone.
I felt it, sensed it. How? Not with my eyes, certainly. Was it a noise? The sound of another breath, besides Eco’s? Or a faint movement? Or a smell . . . ?
Yes: the smell of garlic, sweated from pores, exhaled on the breath. Another stench added to the miasma that settled in the pit at night, pressed down by the dank evening air. My head reeled from it.
Who eats garlic? Gladiators. They claim it gives them stamina. Lets them knock down an opponent with a single breath, runs the tired joke. I broke into a sweat, despite the chill. Perspiration poured off my forehead in such a torrent that I had to wipe it away with my sleeve, the filthy sleeve of a tunic worn for forty-odd days in a row. I could hear them breathing now, even above the sudden booming of my heart. Who, or what, was in the pit with us?
Surely no one could have entered through the grill above without waking us. The hatch was too small for a man to pass through; for that there was a trapdoor, which was locked with a heavy chain. The chain would have clanged and clattered. The hinge of the trapdoor (never used once since Eco and I passed through it) would have squealed and groaned. I suddenly had a horrible intuition of how the intruders had entered, and where they had come from . . .
Deep in the earth a flame leaped up, and a red glow illuminated the jagged fissure that had opened in the side of the pit. The earth itself had gaped up. The glow showed the two of them in silhouette—huge, hulking, monstrous, looming larger as they lumbered closer. They must have come straight from Hades.
Eco stirred and woke. “Papa . . . what—?”
I touched his lips for silence, but the two intruders had already seen us. I saw them clearly as well, for the fiery glow had seeped into every corner of the pit. It glinted off the blood-encrusted swords they carried. It lit up their hideous faces. What do men look like who have killed hundreds of men without regret, who take pleasure in cruelty, who feed from the savage pleasure of extinguishing the lives of others? Such men look like Eudamus and Birria, of course. The two of them stood over us, looking almost comic the way they leered and smirked and flared their nostrils. What a despicable fate, I thought, that these should be the last two faces I should ever see this side of Hades.
Or . . .
No, don’t even think it! But why not? Hope until the last possible moment! Seize hope, wrap your arms tight around it, strangle it! The gods have been amused by your small life for fifty-odd years. Why should they give up on you now? Think: among your fellow mortals, who knows anymore which ones are friends and which ones are foes? Maybe . . . just maybe . . . Eudamus and Birria are here not to slaughter you, but to save you, yes, to rescue you from this wretched place!
Gordianus! You have no weapons, but you still have your dignity. Stand up! Don’t cower like a victim. Stiffen your spine. You are a Roman citizen. They are another man’s slaves. Give them the barest nod of acknowledgment. Try not to look at their swords. Show no fear. Look them in the eye. Stare them down. Never mind that they tower over you, and the stench of garlic withers you like a leaf in autumn. Never mind that glint of metal you glimpse from the corner of your eye as they swing their swords aloft—don’t flinch!
What is it like to be beheaded?
You shake like a leaf! You try to stop, and yet you shake and shake and shake until . . .
I opened my eyes to the soft light that passed for morning in the pit. Eco leaned over me, looking concerned, gently shaking me.
“Papa! Are you all right?
“First you seemed to be having a horrible nightmare. Then you seemed to relax. Then you let out such a horrible noise that I had to wake you.”
“A dream. Just another bad dream . . .”
“The one about Eudamus and Birria?”
“Yes.” I tried to swallow. My mouth was as dry as parchment. “Do we have any water left from yesterday?”
“A little. Here.” He dipped his cupped hand into the bucket and put it to my lips.
I sucked it up greedily. “Sometimes I wish the dream would come true, for better or worse. If only someone would come, to put an end to this misery one way or another.”
“Hush, Papa. You’ll feel better after you’ve gotten up and stretched a bit.”
So began, by Eco’s calculation, our forty-second day of captivity, the fifth day of the month of Martius, nine days before the Ides, in the year without consuls.
“What do you think is happening in Rome right now, Papa?” said Eco, with a wistful note in his voice.
I cleared my throat. “Who knows? We heard all sorts of wild rumors on Mount Alba, before we were captured. Some made more sense than others. I can’t believe that Milo would kill himself, for instance. He’s too stubborn. He may have caught himself in a trap that he can’t get out of, like his namesake from Croton, but he’ll see it through to the end, kicking and screaming. Of course, anything may have happened—by Hercules, forty-two days is an eternity!”
“Long enough for the Hebrew god to flood the whole world,” said Eco wryly.
“And long enough for the Roman state to be drowned in blood, I suppose. But if I had to place a wager, I’d bet on order rather than chaos, in the short run, anyway. We know that Pompey intended to get the Senate’s authority to raise troops to quell the lawlessness in the city. I’d bet he got his way on that. Pompey at the head of an army is a pretty unstoppable force.”
Eco was skeptical. “Good for conquering foreign troops in the field, maybe, but what about people throwing rocks in Roman alleys?”
“I can’t see the Clodian rabble standing up to Pompey’s troops.”
“Soldiers can’t be everywhere at once. Little riots and fires can pop up anywhere at any time.”
“Yes, there could still be disorder, even with Pompey’s troops in charge, but only on a minor scale. The Forum will be safe.”
“Safe enough for elections?”
I shook my head. “This business with Milo and Clodius will have to be dealt with first. Can you imagine, if they held the elections and Milo were to win? It’s still possible, I suppose, but the inevitable result would be another round of riots, and that would mean open warfare with Pompey’s troops in the streets—I can’t see the Senate allowing that to happen.”
“Then who’s running the state? Do you think they’ve appointed Pompey dictator?”
“Surely not, with Caesar up in Gaul at the head of his own army. Caesar might feel he had no choice but to march on Rome himself.” I quailed at the thought of Meto being swept into civil war.
“Surely not.”
“It sounds unthinkable, I know, but who would ever have imagined that the Senate House would be burned down in broad daylight?” I shook my head. We had already had this conversation a score of times. Sometimes Eco assumed the voice of reason, sometimes I was the insidious doubter. It was impossible not to speculate on what was happening in our absence, just as it was impossible to know.
After a long pause, Eco said quietly, “That wasn’t what I meant, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I said, ‘What do you think is happening in Rome, right now?’ I didn’t mean politics or elections or any of that. I meant—”
“I knew what you meant. I could tell from the tone of your voice.”
“Why did you change the subject, then? Don’t you want to talk about it? About home . . .”
“Thinking about them makes me feel warm at first, comforted. But then something cold creeps in, and makes a knot in my gut, as cold and hard as ice.”
“I know, Papa. I’m frightened for them too.”
“We’ve been gone so very long now. They must think we’re dead. Can you imagine Bethesda grieving? I can hardly bear it.”
“I know what you mean. I imagine Menenia weeping, and it tears my heart. Women grieving—remember Fulvia and Clodia, that night we saw Clodius’s body? He was really quite an awful fellow, wasn’t he, Papa?”
I shrugged. “It all depends whom you ask. He was ruthless to his enemies, that’s for sure. He caused more than his share of suffering in this world. But he also gave a great deal of hope and some real power to a great many people who had neither, not to mention the guarantee of enough bread in their bellies. To those people he’s a hero.”
“But still a vain, power-mad, greedy man. You can see that just by looking at the houses he built.”
“I suppose.”
“And yet, when he died, his sister wept. And Fulvia—do you remember the way she tried to show nothing when we were in the room? But afterward, in front of that crowd, the way she shrieked and wailed. I thought it was an act at the time, but now I think she was truly suffering, lost, hopeless. I think of Menenia and Bethesda, grieving for us, frightened of the future, and I think of Clodia and Fulvia, and I feel a great sadness for them all.” He wrinkled his brow and turned his eyes upward to the patches of sunlight that showed through the bars and the roof. “But we’re still not talking about the real worry, are we? We’re talking about them grieving for us. What I really meant is—”
“What if something has happened to them?”
“Yes.”
I sighed. “It all comes back to Pompey. He promised he would see that they were kept safe while we were gone. Pompey is a man of his word.”
“But we’ve been gone far longer than he could have expected. He probably thinks we’re dead, too.”
“Yes, probably. If he thinks about us at all.”
“And what if Pompey isn’t in control of the city? What if he’s been assassinated? Or what if something totally mad has happened, a civil war with Caesar, and Pompey’s gone off to Spain to rally his army there?”
“We have no way of knowing, Eco. No way of knowing . . .” I put my face in my hands.
The stable door rattled and opened. Eco took a deep breath.
The basket for bread was raised and lowered, along with a bucket of fresh water.
“What’s wrong with that one?”
“My father, you mean. Why can’t you say, ‘What’s wrong with your father?’” Eco sounded genuinely angry. I kept my head lowered and clutched myself. Despair was what I felt; it was simple enough to feign distress.
“All right, what’s wrong with your father?”
“He’s not feeling well.”
“Seems to be eating the same.”
“He’s hardly eating at all.”
“Then what happened to all the bread I brought yesterday? Did you eat it all yourself? Taking food from your sick father’s mouth?”
“I ate what I needed. The rats took the rest of it last night, if you have to know.”
The man grunted. “So, do you need the bucket emptied again today?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Just go away now, if you don’t mind. I think you’re only making my father feel worse.”
“Why don’t you let me empty it anyway? Get rid of the smell for you.”
“Just go away!”
Eco bent over me, much as he had bent over me when he woke me from my dream that morning. There was a long pause, then footsteps retreated and the door swung open and shut. I strained to listen and thought I could hear a murmur of discussion outside the stable.
We had not been able to catch another rat that day, after all.
The next day, however, Fortune smiled on us, and not on a certain especially plump, especially curious and (most important for us) especially slow fellow-inhabitant of the pit. This was good, since our keeper insisted on emptying the bucket that afternoon. Eco assured me that his face showed great displeasure at seeing so much blood amid the urine. Once again there was a discussion outside the stable. The voices were raised noticeably louder than before, and both carried a distinct tone of recrimination. The keeper’s seldom-seen companion came in and had a look at me himself. “Where do you hurt?” he asked gruffly.
I grunted.
“His belly, you fool,” said Eco, managing to sound as if he were both angry and anxious and trying hard to show neither.
Our keepers withdrew in silence, but there was another heated discussion outside the door, receding into the unseen, unknown distance.
“Since we’ll be getting out of here soon . . .” I began.
Why not be madly optimistic? It was the forty-fourth day of our captivity, seven days before the Ides of Martius, the fourth day of my feigned malady. Eco had again succeeded in capturing, killing and bleeding a rat. “His craving for a bit of bread outweighed his better judgment,” to quote the solemn eulogy which Eco delivered as we buried the creature in a corner out of sight, and hopefully out of smell.
“Yes?” prompted Eco.
“Since we’ll soon be out of here, I think we should try to figure out as best we can who had a reason to put us here.”
“Perhaps we’ll be able to find out from our keepers.”
“If all goes well, either we will be running from our keepers or they will be running from us. I doubt that there will be much conversation. Anyway, going over the known facts of our dilemma will give us something to puzzle over for an hour or two.”
“Again?”
“Humor me. Unless you have an appointment to be somewhere at a certain time? I thought not. Well then, what did we discover on the Appian Way? Or more to the point, what did we not discover?”
“That’s a question fit to give Aristotle a headache, Papa! You might as well ask me to prove a negative.”
“You’re right. Step by step, then. If we believe the account of the priestess Felicia, Milo and Clodius met on the Appian Way by accident. There was no ambush. The two parties passed without incident until they were nearly clear of each other. Clodius uttered a parting insult to Birria. Birria, on impulse, turned and hurled his spear at Clodius. It was no more premeditated than a brawl in a tavern.”
“But it’s possible, Papa, that Birria intended to throw the spear all along, on his master’s orders. Perhaps Birria hurled an insult at Clodius first and Felicia didn’t hear it; Clodius responded and Birria used that as a pretext to begin the attack. It could have been premeditated, or perhaps Milo issued an order to Birria on the spur of the moment, when the two parties met. Milo had the superior force. Perhaps he saw his chance to kill Clodius and seized it.”
“A good point, Eco. At any rate, we’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that Clodius planned or instigated the skirmish in any way, except by hurling an insult at Birria. The conflict probably occurred spontaneously, or possibly at Milo’s instigation. What ensues? Clodius’s outnumbered men are quickly overwhelmed. Some are killed on the spot, others flee into the woods. The wounded Clodius, without his horse and cut off from his villa by Milo’s entourage, is assisted by some five or six of his men downhill toward Bovillae. He takes refuge at the inn, where the innkeeper knows and likes him.”
I rubbed my hands together to warm them. The pit seemed especially dank that day. “Milo’s men do not follow immediately. Felicia says they ran about like hounds who’d lost a scent, until Milo came up. He was furious at first, especially at Birria.”
“Because Birria had attacked Clodius on his own—or because he had failed to finish the job?” said Eco.
“I suspect the first. Once Milo calmed down he held a sort of conference, and only then did he dispatch Eudamus and Birria and several others to pursue Clodius. This seems highly significant to me; had Milo planned all along to assassinate Clodius, I think his men would have been prepared to pursue Clodius at once and would have done so, especially since he was wounded and moving slowly on foot. Why did they wait? I think it must be that they needed instructions from their master, who was completely taken aback by what had happened. Why did he upbraid Birria? Because the gladiator had acted rashly and stupidly and without his consent. True, Milo might have been mad at his men for failing to make a clean killing of Clodius, but I favor the idea that the incident was spontaneous and unplanned, and that when Clodius made off on foot, no one was quite sure what to do next.”
“But they did eventually pursue him.”
“Yes, because Milo made a decision to finish what his men had already started, without his consent. Which was more dangerous to him, Clodius wounded, or Clodius dead? Wounded, Clodius could return to Rome, rally his forces, bring legal proceedings against Milo for attempted murder, end Milo’s bid for the consulship. If Clodius was dead, Milo would be liable for murder, but at least Clodius’s followers might be paralyzed with confusion, and Clodius himself wouldn’t be around to accuse him. Either way, Milo was facing the ruin of everything he’d worked for. That’s another reason I can’t believe that the incident was premeditated. To have murdered Clodius by poison or stealth would have been one thing, but to have done so in such a clumsy fashion could only hurt Milo in the end. I wonder if he thought of his namesake Milo of Croton in the forest, trying to split that giant log and getting his hands hopelessly trapped? Did he hear the howling of hungry wolves as he paced there on the Appian Way, fretting over what to do next? It should have been an occasion of triumph for Milo—the end of Clodius, once and for all, within his grasp—but I think it must have been a very miserable moment for him.”
“But he finally decided to send his men after Clodius,” said Eco.
“Once you’ve wounded a dangerous beast, it’s always best to kill it. No doubt it’s what Milo of Croton would have done.”
“So he dispatched his men, then waited for news. Rather cowardly of him, not to join the battle himself.”
“If you asked him, I imagine he’d say he hung back to stand guard over his wife and household.”
Eco snorted derisively, then his face became shadowed. I had said the words sarcastically, but as soon as they were out of my mouth, it was hard not to think of our own loved ones and how vulnerable they were without us.
“Anyway,” I said, “not too much later, along comes Senator Tedius and his daughter in their litter, with their own retinue of household slaves and bodyguards. Tedius and Milo recognize one another. Milo tells an outright lie—that he was set upon by bandits—and advises Tedius to turn back. The stubborn old senator instead presses on, despite some demurral on the part of his pious daughter.
“Meanwhile, down in Bovillae, the battle is joined. The innkeeper’s wife—whose evidence we have secondhand from her sister—actually sees Eudamus and Birria kill one of Clodius’s men on their approach to the inn. There’s a terrific assault which destroys all the shutters and doors on the lower floor. The innkeeper is killed, along with Clodius’s defenders. Clodius somehow ends up out in the road. We presume that Eudamus and Birria take his gold ring as a trophy, and to deliver proof of his death to their master. And then, for some reason, Eudamus and Birria and their men vanish, for when Tedius arrives a little later, the battle is over and the victors are gone. Tedius finds the inn a shambles. He sees blood and bodies scattered all about, including that of Clodius. The innkeeper’s wife emerges from hiding on the upper floor. She looks out the window to see Tedius and his daughter leaning over Clodius. She goes downstairs, discovers her dead husband and loses her senses.
“Tedius, despite his dislike of the man and his politics, does the honorable thing and loads Clodius into his litter, then sends the body on to Rome. He still thinks all the killing is the work of bandits, and decides to return to Aricia on foot. He turns about and trudges up the hill. While he stops to rest close to the House of the Vestals, Eudamus and Birria appear on the road and pass him, returning to Milo. How was it that he didn’t see them before? Eudamus and Birria have prisoners. Felicia, peering out from the shrine of the Good Goddess, also sees these prisoners. Who are they? Not any of Clodius’s men; the ones who fled with Clodius were all killed, and Fulvia told me that none of her husband’s men were unaccounted for. So where did Eudamus and Birria come from and who were their prisoners?
“The gladiators return to Milo and deliver Clodius’s ring, proof that he’s dead. Milo then hands it over to Fausta, who proceeds down the road to make her offering at the House of the Vestals. But somehow Sextus Tedius never sees her. And when Tedius finishes his rest and moves on, by the time he reaches the shrine of the Good Goddess, Milo and all his company are gone.
“We know that Milo and the gladiators headed for the villa, where they killed the foreman and Halicor the tutor when they weren’t able to find young Publius Clodius. Why was Milo seeking the boy? Is he really so spiteful and bloodthirsty that he wanted to murder Clodius’s son? Or did he intend to somehow use the boy as a hostage? And how did he know that young Publius was staying at the villa?
“These are the questions, then, for which we have no answers.” I picked up Eco’s marking stick and for each question scraped a numeral in the wall.
“One: Where were Eudamus and Birria when Sextus Tedius arrived at the inn?
“Two: Who were the prisoners Eudamus and Birria herded up the road?
“Three: How did Fausta return down the road to make her offering at the House of the Vestals without passing Sextus Tedius?
“Four: When Milo forced his way into Clodius’s villa, he demanded of Halicor and the foreman, ‘Where is Publius Clodius?’—but how did he know the boy was at the villa, and what did he intend to do with him?”
I stood back and studied the marks—I, II, III, IV. They elucidated nothing. The longer I looked at them, the more they began to appear to be only an assemblage of upright and slanted lines signifying nothing, not even the numbers in my head. They were random lines etched by an idiot. For one brief, shuddering instant I thought I must truly have gone mad. The captivity, the darkness, the stench, the nightmares and the rats all coalesced like a black fog around my head. Nothing made sense; nothing was real. The whole drama of the murder on the Appian Way was only an elaborate fantasy I had contrived to amuse myself, a madman’s epic. Milo and Clodius were figments of my imagination. Nothing existed but the pit.
“Papa? Are you all right?”
“What?”
“Your hand’s shaking. You dropped the stick.” Eco stooped and retrieved it for me.
His voice returned me to the moment. I clutched the stick in my hand, more firmly than I needed to. I reached out and slowly scraped another numeral into the wall, keeping my hand and my voice as steady as I could. “And now the more immediate questions, which surely must be related in some way to the first four.
“Five: Who waylaid us upon our return to Rome? We can be sure, I think, that they were not common kidnappers, looking for a ransom. They’d have wanted me to write something on a scrap of parchment, to prove I was alive. And they’d have figured out by now that there’s no ransom to be had. We’d already be dead.” The numerals on the wall began to lose their meaning again and I looked away, at the dank mound where Eco had buried the newest rat that morning. “Unless we’re dead already.”
“Of course they’re not common kidnappers,” Eco said, pretending not to hear my muttering. “They acted for someone who didn’t like what we were up to on the Appian Way.”
“More precisely, someone who was afraid of the information we might be bringing back to Rome. Therefore, six: To whom did we make ourselves dangerous with our investigation on the Appian Way?”
“But isn’t it obvious, Papa? Milo, of course. We know he lied outrageously at Caelius’s contio, with that tale about an ambush, and we know how to prove it. It’s as you said to Felicia when you advised her to fly south—Milo is in a desperate situation, willing to commit desperate acts.”
“Which leads us to the final question.” I scraped the numeral VII into the wall. “Why were we kidnapped, not killed? If Milo—or whoever—merely wanted to dispose of us, why did his henchmen not murder us and steal our valuables, to make the incident look like another robbery by nameless bandits by the Monument of Basilius? If he wanted to ascertain what we had uncovered first, why were we not questioned, and then killed? Why did Milo not finish us off, as he finished off Clodius? Does he have some future use for us? I can’t imagine what. It makes me wonder whether it was Milo who put us here after all.”
“Who else? The only other person you kept asking questions about was—”
“Marc Antony,” I said.
The stable door rattled open.
“Perhaps this is the day we’ll find out,” whispered Eco. I dropped to the floor of the pit, hugging myself.
The inspection of the bloody urine proceeded like a ritual, with our keepers—both of them had come in together—peering into the bucket like augurs studying some poor chicken’s entrails.
“Your father doesn’t look well,” said the one who usually stayed outside.
“What, have you just figured that out?” Eco sounded outraged, frightened, frustrated. There was a quaver in his voice. Some of this was acting, but I could tell that the quaver came not from desperation, but from its opposite, a sudden exhilaration so acute it made him tremble like the plucked string of an instrument. Had the moment come at last? Yes! I sensed it, too. A frightful, wonderful rage welled up inside us both, a joyous fury that had been suppressed for long days in the dark but finally, finally, at that very instant, was ready to be released.
“Your father had better come with us,” said the one who usually stayed outside. He bent to unlock the chain that held the trapdoor shut. The two of them pulled up on the heavy iron door and let it drop back onto the grill with a clang.
The door of the cage was open.
“I don’t think he can stand.” Eco’s voice broke like a boy’s as he fussed over me, acting helpless.
“How in Hades are we going to get him out?” complained our usual keeper.
“Get your father onto his feet somehow,” said the other. “That’s it. Get him to raise his arms. If he can’t raise them himself, raise them for him! By Hercules, is the fellow still alive or not? There, now we’ll each grab a forearm. Be careful leaning over, you fool!”
The greatest mistake a general can make, as Caesar and Pompey would agree, is to underestimate the strength of your enemy. I had convinced them that I was weak, in pain and very ill. They took hold of my forearms to haul me up, expecting a frail body that offered no resistance. The instant before they heaved together, I pulled downward with all my strength. Eco joined in, jumping up to grab their arms above the elbows.
All could have been lost in that instant. They could have kept their balance and pulled themselves free, leaving me to fall onto my backside, looking like an utter fool. The door would have hurriedly clanged shut, our keepers would have cursed us and then laughed at us, and we would have been left alone in the pit once more, to follow the same maddening thoughts in the same dogged circles, to sleep amid rats, to despair for our loved ones, to lie in anguish and wonder how much longer we could bear it.
But that was not what happened.
First, their heads collided with a loud knock. The sound had a lower pitch than two stones struck together, but higher than two hollow gourds. It was one of the sweetest sounds I ever heard.
What followed happened very quickly.
One of them, the one who usually stayed outside, tumbled headfirst into the pit. I fell upon him at once. Eco’s marking stick was still in my hand. In the past few days we had managed to sharpen it to a fine point by whetting it against some of the stones in the pit. I stabbed him at least once before I realized there was no need. The fall had broken his neck.
I turned and saw that I was alone with his lifeless body in the pit. Eco had already scrambled up and out. I heard the sound of a struggle taking place in the stable above.
I put the makeshift dagger between my teeth, tasting blood, and leaped for the opening. I grabbed one of the iron bars and pulled myself up. We had practiced this movement every day, leaping and pulling ourselves up, strengthening our arms. Still, I thought that pulling myself through the opening would be a greater challenge than it was. Instead I seemed almost to fly upward, as if an unseen hand pushed me from below. Cold fury propelled me, and the certain knowledge that Fortune had turned in our direction.
Eco and the keeper were rolling on the floor, thrashing at each other. Eco was by far the smaller of the two, but he was driven by the same fury that drove me, and he was managing to hold his own. I ran toward them, raising the crude wooden dagger. There was already a patch of blood on the man’s forehead. There was more blood, and a loud scream, when I brought the dagger down on his neck. He escaped from Eco’s clutches and ran for the door, blood spurting between the fingers that clutched his neck.
We followed him outside, dazed by the full light of day. I girded myself for more fighting, but there was no one to be seen. We were alone on a patch of weedy ground in front of a disused stable, surrounded by trees and overgrown farmland.
“The other one is still in the pit!” said Eco. He ran back inside, lifted the trapdoor single-handed and dropped it shut with a great clang. “Ha! See how you like that! Now you’ll tell us where we are and who you work for, you son of a sow!”
I followed Eco inside, still exhilarated but suddenly weary. “Come, Eco. We’d better hurry. Who knows where the other one went, or if he has more friends close by? We’re not out of danger yet.”
“But, Papa—”
“Eco, the fellow is dead.”
“No!” Eco peered down into the dim pit. The man had landed in a convoluted heap that no living person could contrive. Still, Eco was unconvinced until a large rat went scurrying over the fellow’s head.
“Papa, you killed him?”
“No. The fall broke his neck. It happened in the blink of an eye.”
“Too bad. He should have suffered!”
I shook my head, unable to agree. The fellow had never shown us any cruelty, as many men would have, given such power over others. He had been our servant, in fact, bringing us food and disposing of our wastes. Our argument was not with him.
The fact that I was able to think so calmly was a dangerous sign. The cold fury had begun to leak out of me. The bloody stick in my hand revolted me. The moment of escape toward which all had been building had come and passed. If more adversaries were to arrive, they would find me with my edge for violence blunted. The truly dangerous part of our escape was just beginning.