Andivius Hedulio: Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire Part 27

"Then I'll go first," said Agathemer. "You are, even yet, far more impaired in strength by your beating than I by my flogging. If I came second you might not be able to hold on to the opening of the drain. I know I can hold on, no matter how much filth is plastered over my head as you crawl over me. I should not like the idea of defiling your head with filth in crawling over you. Jump so that your clutching hands just reach my shoulders; so that your weight will come on me gradually as you sink into the ooze. Take your time about crawling over me. Be sure to pa.s.s back to me one cylinder."

Then he drilled me as to the signals he would give me by pinching my feet.

When he was sure we both knew them he grinned a wry grin, and made a whimsical boyish gesture with his uplifted right hand, took a careful stand on the sill, balanced himself and jumped.

"I'm all right," he called back, "and ready for you."

Three times I tried to slam that door and failed to shut it. The fourth time I found myself, my back against the shut door, my toes sticking out over the edge of the stone sill, balanced in the pitch dark on a too narrow ledge.

"Lean back against the door," Agathemer called, thickly. "If it gives it is not shut."

It did not give.

I said so.

"Then no one will ever know how we got out," said Agathemer; adding: "Jump when you are ready, but say 'now.'"

I jumped and my fingers caught his shoulders. He held on. My body sank slowly through the ooze, which gave way with a sickening sliminess, until I was in contact with Agathemer all the way to my toes. Then I began to try to crawl up over him. I found it far harder than either of us had antic.i.p.ated.

All slippery as we were with the foul ooze it was a fearful struggle for me to scramble up over him, I slipped back so often. After what seemed an hour of effort and apprehension I had my head, shoulders and most of my body in the drain and knew I had succeeded. I wriggled forward till I felt my feet beyond the opening, then about as far ahead, pus.h.i.+ng before me the cylinders. When Agathemer touched my foot I pushed a cylinder past my body and felt, with my ankle, that he pulled it back.

After that, escape was a matter of wriggling on down the drain. And wriggling was not impossible, though excessively difficult and exhausting.

The drain was nowhere choked with silt, but all along was furred with ooze and there was more than an inch of ooze along its bottom. In this, hitching myself forward on my elbows by violent contortions, I slipped back almost as much as I heaved forward.

Agathemer seemed to have as much trouble as I had and to find the effort as exhausting. For he had instructed me that I was not to crawl forward until he pinched my foot. One pinch was to mean "advance," two pinches "rest." More than once he had signalled me to rest.

Our worst moment came somewhere near half way down the sewer. There I encountered a cracked drain-pipe, the ragged edge of the broken terra- cotta projecting into the sewer, its point toward me. I wriggled my shoulders by it, though it gouged my shoulder-muscle on that side; but, at my hips, it stuck into me so that I could not get past it.

Agathemer, behind, kept pinching my foot, signalling for me to go forward.

I bellowed explanations, but could not suppose that he could hear them in that horrible tube. But he either heard or guessed, he never could be sure which. Anyhow, he felt that we must get forward or perish. In desperation he sunk his teeth into the soft part of the inner side of the sole of my left foot. The pain made me give a convulsive wriggle and I sc.r.a.ped past the obstacle, tearing my hip badly in getting clear.

From there on we wriggled frantically till I could see ahead a round patch of light at the lower outfall of the drain.

It seemed an age before I reached the opening, but reach it I did. I lay there, my head just inside, panting and guzzling clean air in great gulping gasps. Agathemer pinched my foot. I slipped out into the oozy pool below the outfall, slid out as quietly as I could and kept myself submerged up to my chin, clutching my cylinder with one hand, pulling myself clear of the drain and keeping my head out of the drainage by holding to the stem of an alder bush growing by the brook's edge.

I came to rest, the sunlight dazzling my eyes, though the outfall was shaded by willows above the alders, and looked for Agathemer. He, his face purple, kept his head inside the sewer and I could see him suck in the clean air in long gasps as I had.

At that instant there was a squawking above us and, through the alders, came, quacking and flapping their wings, a hundred or more of my uncle's valued white ducks. Their alarm made me peep through the alder stems. I saw, not ten yards from my face, the legs of horses, heard their hoofs thud on the roadway, descried men's feet against their bellies, recognized the gilded edges of the boot-soles, the make of the boots, the gilt scales on the kilt-straps, the gilded breast plates, the crimson tunics and short-cloaks, the gilded sword-sheaths and helmets. There, just above us, was pa.s.sing the detachment of Praetorian Guards sent to arrest or despatch me.

They clanked by us, never suspecting our proximity, though the ducks resented our presence in their favorite pool and quacked at us protestingly. They continued, in fact, to quack at us most of the time until sunset, so that both of us were in an agony of dread for fear that some pa.s.ser-by might notice their voluble expressions of displeasure and might take a notion to investigate to discover what was exciting their wrath.

But no one was attracted by the ducks' noise and, if anyone pa.s.sed up or down the road we, where we were, did not know it.

We talked, at intervals, in whispers. Agathemer said that he had been barely grazed by the broken drain-pipe and hardly noticed his scratches.

I, on the other hand, was in great pain from the gouge along my hip, and hardly less pained by the tear in my shoulder. The water, under which I had to keep up to my chin, dulled the pain of my wounds, but chilled me till my teeth chattered, though the weather was hot; so hot in fact, that the sunrays on my head seemed to scorch my hair, even through the willows and alders. I was devoutly glad when the sunrays became more slanting and the daylight began to wane, and the ducks, still quacking protestingly, departed.

CHAPTER XI

HIDING

It was fully dark before we dared to leave our hiding-place and attempt the risky venture of essaying to reach a safer shelter or refuge in the forests without attracting the attention of any dog at any of the several farmsteads which we must pa.s.s.

Agathemer led and I followed, my teeth chattering and the night insects biting me severely. Hugging our precious copper cylinders we waded more than waistdeep in the water, up the Bran Brook, sometimes all but swimming, as we skirted some of the deeper pools. There was no moon and we could see but little by the faint starlight. We had to go slowly, as we could not swim and keep hold of our cylinders; and must not risk losing one if Agathemer went over his head in a deep pool. It seemed to me that we had been threading the curves of the brook for at least two hours when I began to feel as if something were wrong. Even in the dark I had been aware of a sort of recognition of each pool, shallow, riffle, bend, bank or what not. Now, gradually, it came over me that I was among surroundings as unfamiliar as if I had not been in Sabinum, or even in Italy.

I caught Agathemer by the arm.

"Where are we?" I whispered.

"Don't talk!" he warned.

But I insisted; for, as we were by now no more than knee-deep in the water, I knew we must be well up towards the headwaters and it came over me that we had not turned off anywhere as sharply as we should had we turned up either the Chaff or the Flour.

"Are we going up the Bran?" I queried.

"Precisely!" Agathemer breathed.

I almost spoke out loud.

"This," I said, "is the last place on earth I'd expect you to guide me to."

"Precisely," he repeated, "and it's the last place on earth anybody else would expect me to lead you to or you to be in, by any chance; therefore it's the last place in Italy where any one will look for you; therefore it is, just now, the safest place in Italy for you. Come on, I know every stone of this brook."

I followed him. His logic was good, but, on Ducconius Furfur's land I felt hopelessly lost and overwhelmed by despair.

We had not gone far from where I had forced Agathemer to reveal his ruse, when he turned round and whispered:

"This is the place. Here we leave the water. Follow me."

I was dimly aware of a blacker blackness before us, as of a big, tall rock. This we skirted and then stepped out of the brook towards the left.

There we stepped into deep drifts of dead leaves.

"Here is bedding," said Agathemer, "such as Ulysses was content with after his long sea-swim to the island of the Phaeacians. Perhaps we can get along in such bedding."

Naked as we were we burrowed into the dead leaves, and, after a bit I felt less chilly, though by no means warm.

Agathemer took from me the cylinder I had been carrying; opened one of the two, a matter of some difficulty, as the top was so tight; sniffed at it, and took from it some morsels of food: a bit of cold ham, a bit of cold fowl and a bit of bread. These I ate, chewing them slowly. At the same time he ate, as slowly, an equal share.

After eating we tried to sleep. I was too weary and drowsy to keep awake, and too cold and too much in pain from the scratch on my shoulder and the gouge on my hip to be able to sleep long. I got some sleep before dawn, but not much.

Fortunately for us the night had been clear, warm and windless. Even so we suffered severely with the cold; since the chilled air, of course, rolled down the hillsides into the hollow along the bed of the brook, till the valley was filled with thick mist and every leaf and twig dripped with moisture. Through the mist the dawn broke pearly gray at first and then iridescent; and, when the first sunrays penetrated the white haze and gilded every leaf-edge, turning the tree-tops to gold and making every waterdrop a diamond, no lovelier morning could be imagined.

The trees about and above us were mostly beeches, with many chestnuts and a few plane-trees and poplars. We were in a clump of willows with thick alders under them, so that, even with no other protection, we could not have been seen from any distance. And we were most excellently protected, being on a little island where the brook forked and flowed, three or four yards wide and nearly a yard deep, round a huge gray rock, fully fifteen yards across and nearly seven yards high, a bulge of worn stone, shaped much like half a melon and almost as symmetrical. And, as one might lay half a melon, curve up, and then split it with one blow of a kitchen- knife, so this great rock, as if cleft by a single sweep of a t.i.tan's sword, was rent in half and the halves left about four yards apart. The fracture was clean and smooth, except that a piece about two yards square had cracked loose at the ground level from the southern half and lay bedded in the mud, its top a foot or so above the earth, leaving in the face of one rock a rectangular niche about a man's length each way, in which cavity two men could shelter from the rain.

As soon as it was light enough to see I was for crawling into this little cavern. But Agathemer restrained me.