Life and Death in Ephesus by Finlay McQuade

Author:Finlay McQuade [McQUADE, FINLAY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction, short stories, Ephesus, Ancient World
Publisher: Historium Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

***

Then he was crawling between legs and sandaled feet. A wedge had been driven into his head and it hurt unbearably. That lasted for only a moment before everything turned black again.

He became aware of the daylight through closed eyelids, even before he opened them. He was upside-down, his head bumping rhythmically on cobbled paving. He pulled on his hair to raise his head and the bumping stopped. He strained to look forward, towards his feet. Two men—soldiers he guessed, judging by their tunics and baldrics—were dragging him by his ankles. He tried kicking, but they tightened their grip.

Mercifully, his forward motion stopped and other hands lifted him upwards and dumped him into a wagon. He fell on other bodies dumped there already. Another body was dumped on top of him.

Swearing, kicking, and shoving they separated themselves from the heap and took stock of their swollen lips and broken noses and blood-clotted hair. Lykos was there. Glaucus was there. As the wagon squeaked and groaned and its roughly split boards battered them from below, they tried to understand what had happened. Basilius, Decimus, and Milo were there, eight of them altogether, sprawled in the well of the wagon. Along its rails sat four soldiers leaning inwards on polished wooden cudgels that they held upright between their legs. Two more soldiers walked behind the wagon. The one in front was guiding the mules. He wore a helmet and a red cloak. Some of the others wore helmets, but no additional armor over their tunics. They were not crack legionnaires; Pithon called then “trash-collectors.” But where was Pithon? Had he escaped? Had anyone else escaped? They counted and tried to remember who all had been there.

“They knew we were coming,” Glaucos said. “They were waiting for us.” They were eager to tell their stories, all very similar. They had been grabbed, kicked, cudgelled, and dragged through a crowd of gawking dockworkers to the wagon. Glaucus seemed to have kept his wits about him and had most to tell. “Fucking Pithon,” he spat out. “I saw him running away, and you know what else I saw? No one was chasing him. You know what I mean? No one was chasing him!”

Ahirom remembered the last time he’d been beaten, the night he met Joel. He turned to Lycos, who was squatting against the rail between two of the guards, his head on his folded arms. Blood seeped from the back of his head and dripped from his ear. “Lykos, remember? What happened that night?”

Lykos raised his head to answer pitifully, “It wasn’t me, I swear. Okay, I ran away that night, but they were chasing me. Two of them, honest.”

“This happened once before,” Ahirom told the others, “to Lykos and me. A bodyguard was waiting for us.”

Yes, they had heard about it.

“And Pithon escaped then, too, didn’t he?” Glaucos said. “Fucking Pithon! I’ll kill him!”

As the cart clanked up the main road, Ahirom kept his head down. He was aware of his surroundings, however, and could see the high wall of the theater as they took a right turn.

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