"With some guards?" asked Marcus.
"Of course!" exclaimed the young guardsman, shocked at the thought of the king's own doctor going unguarded among enemies. "There's a half-file of us here."
Marcus grunted. "Well, bad luck to the Romans anyway!" he said. "Can I go in and check the quarry, even if I can't take samples? I may be able to tell straight off that the stone's no good for my master's catapult."
"Of course," said the guards' leader, smiling. "Your master's welcome to any help we can give his catapult. Good health to him!" And he gestured to his men to unlock the gate.
The youngest guardsman accompanied Marcus into the quarry. The eastern part of the quarry floor was still in shadow, but the morning sun shone warmly on an empty expanse of stone. "Where are the Romans?" asked Marcus.
The guardsman gestured toward the north face of the cliff, where a collection of sheds nestled under an overhang. "In there," he said disgustedly. "Nice and comfortable, out of the sun."
Marcus scrutinized the sheds. There were three of them: long, low, windowless buildings which had probably been set up to house a slave workforce when the quarry was in use. He could make out guards on the doors. "You've only got two people on each shed!" he objected.
"All we need," replied the guardsman. "Most of the Romans are wounded, and we've put leg irons on the rest. All the men on the sheds have to do is let prisoners up to use the latrines. If you want to look round, I'll just tell them who you are, so they don't bother you." He crunched off across the quarry floor to explain Marcus's presence to the other guards.
Marcus made his way slowly about the perimeter of the quarry, ostentatiously examining the spoil heaps and occasionally picking up a chunk of limestone and putting it in his sack. When he was finally approaching the sheds, he was relieved to see the king's doctor come out of the nearest, accompanied by three guards.
The doctor noticed him, recognized him, and came over to ask what he was doing; Marcus explained. The doctor sighed and shook his head sadly. "At times I wish catapults had never been invented!" he exclaimed. "The injuries they produce- but it's for the good of the city. I wish you joy!"
Marcus waited until the man was well on his way back to the gate, then walked slowly up to the shed. The guards were at the far end and were not watching him, but his stomach was so tight that he thought he would be sick. He reached the wooden wall and leaned against it, trembling. There was a gap in the rough planking; he set his eye to it and gazed in.
The only light inside was what shone through the many gaps in the uneven walls, and it took a little while for his eyes to adjust. The building had a dirt floor, and in winter would have been cold and drafty, but it was comfortable enough for the Syracusan summer. About thirty men were within it, some of them lying very still on straw mattresses on the ground, but some, in leg irons, gathered together in little knots, talking or playing dice. Marcus made his way silently along the space between the cliff and the back of the shed, shielding his eyes from the light to preserve their adjustment to the dimness and checking each prisoner in turn, but it was soon clear that none of them was Gaius.
He waited until both the guards at the shed door were facing into the building, watching the prisoners, then glided out from behind the wall of the first shed and crept on to the next. He found another gap in the planks and peered through it.
He spotted Gaius at once, about halfway along the shed and on his own side of it, lying on his back on a mattress with his injured arm across his chest. Marcus made his way noiselessly along the side of the shed toward his brother. He could hear the guards at the door beyond talking, and his skin prickled with tension. He told himself that even if they did notice him, he could explain himself by saying he was simply curious to see the prisoners. But his skin prickled anyway. It was not really the guards he was afraid of.
When he had reached Gaius he knelt in silence for several minutes, inches away behind the thin planking, watching through a crack. Gaius was awake, his eyes open and staring darkly at the ceiling. His tunic was loose about his waist, and his chest was wrapped in bandages.
Marcus tapped lightly on the wall. Gaius' head turned slowly, and their eyes met.
Gaius sat up, bracing himself against the wall, trying to see more of his brother than showed through the crack. "Marcus?" he whispered. "Is it really you?"
"Yes," whispered Marcus. He was trembling again. The Latin word, sic, tasted strange in his mouth. For a long time he had spoken Latin only in his dreams, and to use it now made him feel that he was dreaming still.
"Marcus!" repeated Gaius. "I thought you were dead. I thought you died at Asculum!" On his right, his neighbor looked around at the raised voice, though the man on his left was asleep.
"Softly!" hissed Marcus. "Don't look at me; the guards may notice. Just sit with your back to me and keep your voice down. Right. Now, I've got some things for you-"
"What are you doing here?" whispered Gaius, sitting stiffly against the wall with his back to his brother. "What are you doing alive?"
"Being a slave," replied Marcus flatly. The man to Gaius' right was still listening, he noticed. He was not looking any more than Gaius was, but the expression on his face showed that he was listening intently. He was a lean, thin, dark man with something dangerous-looking about him; his head was bandaged, but he didn't seem to be otherwise injured, and his feet were imprisoned in irons.
"How?" demanded Gaius in a furious whisper. "Nobody was enslaved at Asculum! King Pyrrhus returned all his prisoners without ransom."
"He returned all his Roman prisoners," Marcus corrected him. "The other Italians were offered for ransom, and if nobody ransomed them, they were sold. There were a couple thousand people enslaved, Gaius. Not 'nobody' by any…" He found he could not remember the Latin for "reckoning" and fumbled to a halt.
"No Romans!" Gaius pointed out angrily.
"One at least," said Marcus bitterly. "Gaius, don't be stupid. If nobody told you what happened, you must have guessed. I deserted my post in battle. I was frightened, and I ran."
Gaius gave a jerk of pain. Roman did not desert their posts. A Roman who did would be beaten to death by his comrades. Even at Asculum, where the legions had tasted defeat at the hands of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, most of the Roman troops had been so afraid of the punishment for flight that they resisted to the death, and made Pyrrhus' victory so expensive that it cost him his campaign.
"Our square broke," said Marcus bluntly, "and most of the men died. I knew that the survivors would list me as one of the ones who ran. So after the battle I said I was just an allied Latin, or a Sabine or a Marsian, or anything except a Roman. I wasn't returned, and of course nobody ransomed me. I was sold to a Campanian, a vulture who was following the war about picking up scraps, and he sold me to a private citizen here in Syracuse."
"Oh, gods and goddesses!" whispered Gaius.
"It's what I chose," said Marcus in a harsh voice. "I wanted to live."
There was a long, wretched silence, a silence fully as bad as anything Marcus had imagined beforehand. There was nothing either of them could say. He had preferred life as a slave to death as a Roman, and for that there was neither condolence nor excuse.
"How are things at home?" he asked at last.
"Mother died eight years ago," said Gaius. "Valeria married Lucius Hortensius and has three daughters. The old man's still in charge at the farm, though his chest is bad." He hesitated, then added quietly, "I won't tell him you're alive."
There was another silence. Marcus thought of his mother dead, his sister married, his father… his father would not learn of his disgrace. Good, good, good; the thought of the old man's rage still made him cringe inside. He wished that it were his father who was dead, that he could have gone back to his mother- and was ashamed of the thought.