I Am a Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Author:Edgar Rice Burroughs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: www.gnivek.com, www.freemegalink.com
ISBN: 9780441358076
Publisher: FML Books
Published: 1967-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

A.U.C.776 [A.D. 23]

WHEN I awoke the next morning, I lay with my eyes closed, slowly gathering together the rambling threads of consciousness. It was good to be alive. I stretched the muscles of my young body in voluptuous repose, wondering if Caligula were yet awake and what we should do with this new day. Then I opened my eyes!

Where was I? For an instant I was bewildered and confused. These bare walls of cut stone! This gloomy chamber! The truth rushed upon me like a ravening demon as full consciousness returned. I turned over and buried my face in my poor pallet, trying to shut out the hideous truth that my eyes had revealed.

O, benign sleep! Why have you deserted me? Would that I might sleep forever! But I soon shall: that is all that I have to look forward to. It is what lies between that terrifies me.

"They shan't! They shan't!" I cried aloud. There must be some way. I bit at the vein in my wrist. I would cheat them of the pleasure of the torture. I would die thus before they could nail me to their cross.

The old guard came hurrying in. "What you yellin' about?" he demanded, and then he saw what I was trying to do. He jerked my wrist roughly from my teeth. "So, ho!" he cried. "That is the way you were trying to cheat us! Now I suppose I shall have to sit here and watch you until they come for you. I should beat you for this but what is the use? My little beating would be but a happiness for you compared with what will soon be coming to you."

My breakfast was brought to me and I ate. I was not hungry, but I did not want them to think that I was afraid. Old Sunshine regaled me with detailed accounts of the agonies he had seen endured upon the crosses of the Via Flaminia. After about so much of a thing like that, one becomes insensitive to more. All of the terrors that he recounted could not equal those that I had already suffered in imagination.

Between the fourth and fifth hours, another guard entered my cell. "I think they are coming for you." he said. "There's a detachment of the city watch coming down the street. They would not be coming for any other purpose at this time in the morning."

I stood up. I stood very straight, as my father had stood before the Emperor that day in the Forum.

"I'd hate to be in your boots," said the guard. "I'd certainly be scared stiff."

"I am not afraid," I said.

He eyed me intently for a moment, and then he shook his head. "May Jupiter blast me! you don't look afraid, but maybe you don't understand just what they are going to do to you."

"Old Sunshine, here, has been giving me all the details for the past two days-not omitting the ravens and the vultures."

" 'Old Sunshine'!" The fellow laughed uproariously.

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