Scopius looked up at the approaching man with the huge hammer and screamed.
‘Oh be quiet. It’s not to stove your head in.’
With a deep breath, he stepped past Scopius and inserted the long, ash handle in the iron ring protruding from the wall. Gritting his teeth, he pushed with every ounce of strength. In a count of thirty the wall of the cistern groaned and the loop made a pinging noise. Redoubling his efforts, Rufinus looked up nervously. Another groan echoed through the cavernous structure and the pressure in his ears increased.
With a shattering metallic din, the ring burst from the wall and Scopius fell forward onto his face, blubbering and shaking. The pressure was continuing to build and a distant roar was now faintly audible.
Throwing the hammer aside, Rufinus grasped the naked guardsman by the shoulder and hauled him off the floor, throwing him over his shoulder with relative ease. Desperately now, he left the circle of low, orange light, and made for the steep staircase down which he had entered the basin. With the blubbing man slung on his back, he felt the first stone step with his toe, almost tripping over it.
The roar was becoming ever louder, the pressure building to headache-inducing levels. Rufinus cursed himself. He’d left it too late. Had he been harder in his resolve, he’d already be outside by now and Scopius would be busy watching in panic as the water flowed into the tank.
But no. Here he was, staggering up the slimy steps with the man he hated most in the world on his back, trying to get out as fast as possible.
A thunderous crash of water burst out of the unseen darkness above, leaving the channel of the aqueduct and flowing in to fill the basin. The sheer force and quantity took Rufinus by surprise. His estimate had clearly been wrong. A couple of hundred heartbeats at most and this whole place would be full. The spray battered at his face and the surfaces around him, further endangering his ascent.
Sudden agony ripped through Rufinus and he staggered against the wall in shock, Scopius falling from his shoulders. He stared down at the naked guardsman, who quickly came up into a crouch and then straightened, the sharp-edged knife bloody in his hands. Again, Rufinus cursed himself. Why hadn’t he retrieved the knife before freeing Scopius? He reached up gingerly to the wound: a deep cut that crossed his right shoulder. Lucky. The blow had been poor in the dark. A couple of fingers to the right and he’d have cut Rufinus’ vein, causing him to bleed out in moments. Damn lucky, all things considered.
Rufinus hissed in pain as the man lunged for him again, and he rolled out of the way along the slimy, green wall of the structure, almost losing his balance and tumbling back down the stairs in the darkness. The cloak was a hindrance now, though not as much as the stygian blackness.
Grateful that, despite the murk, he had chosen to wear soft leather shoes for their stealth rather than the easily audible hobnailed boots, Rufinus danced lightly up three steps, trying to decide whether to deal with Scopius or make a run for it.
The thunderous waterfall rumbled overhead, closer with each step. The exit to the aqueduct top was only a few feet from where the channel emptied into the basin, giving him a clear direction to aim by sound alone.
‘Where are you, Argentulum?’ called a sing-song voice a few steps below, followed by the slash of a blade through empty air, barely audible over the din of water. Rufinus could feel the blood running down his neck and back. There was plenty of it; the cut had been deep and intended as a killing blow.
Silently, he took another step up.
A skittering noise down half a dozen steps announced that Scopius had almost lost his footing. It also gave Rufinus a rough location and helped him make up his mind. To run back down the stairs was just to plunge deeper into danger, all for the sake of trying to finish the maniac off. Better to run away and leave him to his fate.
Rufinus nodded to himself in the darkness and turned back to face the ascent.
The turn saved his life.
Of the four oil lamps below, the three that lay on the floor had now been extinguished by the rising water. The fourth, standing on a stone ledge some three feet high, had so far escaped. The light twinkled in the oppressive gloom but, as Rufinus turned, was suddenly blotted out by a black mass.
As the knife came for him, Rufinus lunged out with both arms at whatever it was that had obscured the lamp. Scopius, ever the plotter, had thrown a few pebbles down the stairs to attract his quarry’s attention.
The bully yelped at the sudden and unexpected double-handed blow, his bare foot slipping on the slimy step, right hand still gripping the knife tightly as his left grasped desperately, seeking something to hold on to that might prevent his fall. One naked leg flailed out over the dark abyss, the churning water far below perhaps a foot deep now. His groping hand fastened on the wool of Rufinus’ cloak and he clung tight. Rufinus felt the sudden yank of the man’s desperate weight almost pull him off his feet, threatening to cast the pair of them into the hole together.
‘Always be prepared to lose a little ground’, his boxing mentor had drilled into him time and again. You can afford to give a little in order to gain the upper hand. Officers said it too: sometimes you had to lose a battle to win the war. Give and take.
Reaching out quietly in the darkness, he grasped the flailing, knife-wielding hand and guided it towards his own face and down a few finger-widths. Scopius was so distracted, single-mindedly concentrating on holding on and not falling away, that he barely fought the enforced movement of his knife-hand. In fact, having it grasped helped, allowing him to start pulling his feet back in.
Rufinus flicked with the knife, just enough to sever the tie that held the cloak closed round his neck, and then let go of the knife hand.
He couldn’t see Scopius’ face, but he could imagine the look as the bully suddenly lurched back, a ragged handful of useless cloak ripping away in his hand. His foot skittered a moment and he fell.
There was a brief clonk as part of the falling man struck the staircase on the way out into the open abyss. If he was lucky, it was his head.
Rufinus stood for a moment, heaving in ragged breaths, his shoulder twitching and spasming with the pain. From twenty feet below there was a splash and a crunch. The water was perhaps three feet deep now; not deep enough to cushion Scopius’ fall.
Rufinus shook his head to divest himself of some of the water that coated his face and hair, wincing at the pain in his shoulder as he did so. The only noise was the thunderous roar of the water. Scopius had gone, whether during the fall, on impact, or beneath the rising water it didn’t matter.
What mattered was that, despite all his plans and his resolve, when it came down to it, he had proved to be a better person that he’d expected, choosing a higher path. And still the bastard had gone, done away through his own anger and unwillingness to let it go. It was hard to deny the workings of Nemesis. He would have to raise an altar to her with next month’s pay.
Wearily, and with a great sense of relief, Rufinus pushed the slab at the top of the steps, next to the aqueduct channel that poured gallon after gallon of water into the tank. He felt a brief pang of guilt that the poisonous bastard floating in the gloom might foul the water supply to the palace for a time, but there was only so much a man could do.
The air outside was so fresh after the wet, mouldy miasma of the huge basin, that it tasted sweet. The sun was shining bright, following the brutal thunder storm earlier in the week. With a smile, Rufinus clambered out onto the basin’s roof and looked at the covered aqueduct channel that ran past the temple of Claudius towards the Palatine.
It was a good day to be alive.
Dabbing gently at the deep wound on his shoulder, Rufinus winced and made for the set of iron rungs driven into the outer edge of the structure that served as access for workmen. The people in the street rushing about their business barely gave him a second glance. A scruffy, muck-covered man clambering down the works access for the aqueduct would hardly be an unusual sight, despite the once-white tunic, stained with green mould and spattered with blood.