"Shut up, Marcus," our champion ordered, "can"t you see that these poor fellows are in no condition to answer any questions? We"ll interrogate them after they have bathed, eaten and slept."
"Here, Trogus," he called to one of the chief-huntsman"s a.s.sistants, "take charge of these two fellows. Treat them well; if they report any incivility or omission on your part I"ll make you regret it. When they are bathed and fed, let them sleep all they want to.
"And, here, Umbro" (this to the head-huntsman), "see that their effects are found and restored to them."
He turned to us.
"Did you have wallets?" he asked.
We nodded, too shaken to speak.
"Umbro," he said, "scour the wood. Have their shoes, their cloaks and especially their wallets found and brought to me. And make sure that nothing is taken from those wallets, that they are handed to their owners as they were found. If they find anything missing, I"ll make you and your men smart. Be prompt! Be lively. Get those wallets and cloaks and shoes."
While he gave these orders, some beaters brought us our torn tunics; which, even so, were better than no clothing at all. We put them on.
Then we were led off to the edge of a forest, bestowed in a light Gallic gig, drawn by one tall roan mule only, and in it, the driver sitting at our feet, sideways, on one shaft, his legs hanging down, we were driven off through a beautiful gently rolling country, clothed with the superabundant crops, vines and orchards of the lower Po Valley, all bathed in brilliant spring sunshine, to a magnificent villa, most opulently provided with white-walled, neat outbuildings, all roofed with red tiles.
In one of these, apparently the house of the farm-overseer, we were bathed, clothed with fresh tunics, far better than our own, lavishly fed and led to rest in tiny white-washed rooms, very plain, but clean and airy, where we went to sleep on corded cots provided with very thin gra.s.s- stuffed mattresses.
When we woke each found his wallet beside his cot, set on his neatly folded cloak; with our old worn shoes, well cleaned, on the floor by the folded cloaks.
Later we were led before our host and champion, who turned out to be Tarrutenus Spinellus; in no wise, it seemed, affected, by the downfall of his great kinsman. He questioned us and Agathemer told the story we had agreed on: that we had been slaves of Numerius Vedius of Aquileia, who had been kind to both of us and had made him overseer and me accountant of his vegetable farms on the sandy islets offsh.o.r.e along the coast of the Adriatic by Aquileia. There we had lived contentedly till we had been captured by raiding Liburnian pirates from the Dalmatian islands. They had sold us at Ancona, where we had been horribly mistreated by a cruel and savage master, who had branded and scourged us for imaginary delinquencies.
From him we had run away, intent on making our way back to Aquileia and to our rightful owner.
"This all sounds plausible," said Tarrutenus, "and I believe you, and it falls out well. For my cousin, Cornelius Vindex, will leave tomorrow or next day for Aquileia and you can travel in his company all the way."
We were well fed and lodged while at Villa Spinella. While there we learned that Lupercus and Rufinus, the two escaped malefactors for whom we had been mistaken by the huntsmen and beaters, had been runaway slaves, long uncatchable and lurking in swamps and forests, who had lately, tried to rob at night the store-house of a farmstead: and who, when the farmer rushed out to defend his property, had murdered him and even thereafter, in mere wantonness, had also murdered two of his slaves, his wife and a young daughter. This horrible crime had roused the whole countryside to hunt them down and the great battue in which we had been involved had been organized at a time of the year most unusual and ruinous to the increase of deer-herds, precisely in order to snare the outlaws along with the game. They had not been caught and we had.
After two nights" good sleep, and a day"s rest, with excellent and abundant meals, we set off at dawn in Cornelius" convoy, our precious amulet-bags untouched; our wallets just as we had flung them down in the forest, not a coin missing; and we were clothed in new good tunics, our bruises pretty well healed up or healing nicely, ourselves well content with our escape, but meditating a second escape, this time from, Cornelius.
For we had no stomach for the road to Aquileia, if in such company that we must present ourselves before Vedius as claiming to be slaves of his.
We escaped easily enough, just after crossing the Po, by sneaking off in the darkness from a villa where Cornelius, stopped overnight with a friend. Without any difficulty we recrossed the Po, not far below Hostilia, and from there made for Parma.
For we agreed that, after our story to Tarrutenus, with Cornelius Vindex in Aquileia, Aquileia would be no fit bourne for us. So we decided, after all, to risk the highway from Parma to Dertona and from there make our way across the Ligurian Mountains to Vada Sabatia and from there along the highway to Ma.r.s.eilles, where we should be able to hide in the slums among the mixture of all races in that lively city; and where Agathemer was sure he could turn gems into cash without danger or suspicion.
All, went well with us till we reached Placentia. There we put up at an inn. As we were leaving the town next morning, when we were about half way from the inn to the Clastidian Gate, Agathemer gripped my arm and motioned me up a side street. We walked with every indication of leisurely indifference until we had taken several turns and were alone in a narrow street. Then he told me that we had barely missed coming face to face with Gratillus himself.
This barely missed encounter with one of the most dreaded of the Emperor"s spies, a man who knew me perfectly and who had always disliked me, so terrified both of us that we left Placentia by the Nuran Gate and made our way southwestward into the Apennines.
Once in the mountains we avoided every good road we saw and kept to bad byways, until we were completely lost.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CAVE
The late spring or early summer weather was hot and clear. We had been pressing on feverishly and were heated, tired and sleepy, when, while following a faint track through dense woods, we took a wrong turn and soon found that we had utterly lost our way. The sunlight was intensely brilliant and the windless air sweltering. Stumbling over rocks and through bushes was exhausting. We came upon a little spring and quenched our thirst. Standing by it and staring about we noticed what looked like an opening in an inconspicuous vine-clad cliff. It was, in fact, the entrance to a s.p.a.cious and, apparently, extensive cave.
The outer opening was about the size of an ordinary door. Though it was well masked by beeches above and cornel bushes below, such was the position of the sun and so intense was the flood of light it poured down from the cloudless sky, that the inside of the cave, for some little distance, was faintly discernible in the glimmer which penetrated there.
After our eyes had become accustomed to the darkness we could make out fairly well the shape and proportions of the first considerable grotto.
From the outer opening a pa.s.sage about a yard wide and two yards high extended straight into the cliff for about four yards. There it bent sharply to the right in an elbow. This offset extended three or four yards and then bent to the left in a similar elbow, opening into a cavern more than fifteen yards wide, twice as long or longer, and with a roof of dim white pendants like alabaster, no part of which was less than five yards from the conveniently level, rather damp floor, while some parts of it were lofty.
The two elbows in the entrance pa.s.sage made it impossible to see into this cavern from anywhere out in the woods, and impossible to see out from anywhere inside it. Yet, as I said, so brilliant was the sunlight and so favorable the position, of the sun at the moment of our entrance that, after the outer dazzle had faded from inside our eyes, we could make out the form and size of this rocky hall.
To the right of the opening where the outer pa.s.sage expanded, around a jutting shoulder of rock, we found a recess about three yards across and nearly as deep, in which we felt and smelt wood-ashes and charred, half- burnt wood. We groped among the damp charcoal, convincing ourselves that many good-sized fires had been made there, but none recently. We stood back and regarded this recess, which was so placed that no gleam from any fire, however large, kindled in it, could ever show outside the cave.
Investigating the recess yet again Agathemer looked up and pointed. Above me, I saw sky. The recess was a natural fire-place with a natural chimney from it, opening at a considerable height above.
To the right of the fire-place recess, round another smaller shoulder of rock, was a perfectly vertical wall of smooth stone terminating just above our reach at an opening three yards wide or more. The top of the wall of rock at the bottom of the opening was almost as straight as a door-sill.
At first we could descry in the walls of the cavern no other openings than the entrance, the chimney and this opening above our reach, unless one boosted the other up. From under it we went all round the cave past the fire-place and the entrance. The floor was all damp or moist, no place fit for us to lie down to sleep and we felt along the wall opposite the fire- place, where the light was too dim to see at all. After feeling for some yards we emerged or came round into a less dusky s.p.a.ce, where we could see to some extent and so on along the back wall of the cave opposite the entrance, later groping along the wall, when the light failed.
Some forty to forty-five yards from the entrance, at the far end of this extensive grotto, we came upon a pa.s.sage, two or three yards wide and about as high, leading further back into the bowels of the mountain. We groped into it a few steps, but it sloped sharply downward and was wet, so we retreated out of it, it being also pitch dark.
Returning along the other side of the cavern towards the fire-place we came upon a narrow opening, less than a yard wide and not much over a yard high. It led into a pa.s.sage which sloped upwards and was free from moisture. Agathemer was for exploring it. I remonstrated. He insisted.
After some expostulation I bade him stand at the opening, which was out of sight of the gleam of daylight at the entrance, being behind a big shoulder of rock further in than the fire-place. While he stood as I told him I went out towards the middle of the cavern floor till I could see the fireplace, though very dimly, and the entrance, quite clearly, by the mellow glow at it from the outer sunshine reflected along the walls of the twice bent entrance-pa.s.sage.
When I had reached a position from which I could certainly see the entrance and from which, as Agathemer told me, I could be seen by him, I told him I would stay there while he explored the little pa.s.sage into the side of the cavern. I adjured him to be cautious and not venture himself recklessly in the pitch dark. He declared he could feel his way safely some distance and be sure of returning. Then he crawled into the narrow opening.
Before I had waited long enough to grow impatient, I heard him call:
"Why, I can see you!"
The voice came not from the direction of the opening into which he had crawled, but from near the fire-place.
"Where are you?" I called back.
"Over here," said he, "come towards me."
Advancing towards the voice and peering into the dimness, where the light dispersed from the entrance made the darkness of the cavern just a little less dark than blackness, I saw him standing on the sill, as it were, of the opening up in the wall, beyond the fire-place as one approached from the entrance, and above the vertical wall of rock.
He had found a pa.s.sage just big enough to crawl through leading from the aperture up to this species of gallery-alcove. The pa.s.sage curved and was not much over twenty yards long. He pulled me up to the gallery and we crawled back together out of the aperture by which he had entered the pa.s.sage. The whole pa.s.sage was dry, unlike the floor of the cave.
"I tell you what we ought to do," said Agathemer, "let us go outside and gather armfuls of small leafy boughs and twigs. These we can throw up into that gallery-opening and make a fine bed there where it is dry. Then we can get a good safe sleep, and we need a long sound sleep."
We did as he suggested till we had leaves enough for a good bed. Then we ate, sparingly, for we had not much food in our wallets. After eating we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and went to sleep; Agathemer with his wallet beside him and his head on his arm, I with my wallet under my head.
I wakened with a hand over my mouth and with Agathemer"s voice in my ear saying:
"Keep still! Lie still! Don"t move or speak! Lie still!"
He spoke in a tense whisper, so low that I could hardly understand him with his mouth against my ear, so full of terror that the tone of it startled me wide awake.
My first impression was of a glaring orange light on the roof of the cavern and a diffused reflection of it or from it on the roof of our gallery-alcove.