Field of Mars (The Complete Novel) by David Rollins

Author:David Rollins [David Rollins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760301118
Publisher: Momentum
Published: 2015-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

XVIII

A heavy hammer struck the bolt, releasing the metal doors overhead. They rang loudly but Rufinius had not the wits to cover his ears. The cell containing him had heated beneath the onslaught of the sun and his body felt shriveled with lack of water and his mind drifted from lucidity.

Uncaring hands lifted him from the pit and threw him on the back of a wagon. There he saw the stiff corpse of Nonus’s accomplice. The man had not been able to come to terms with the extremes of heat and cold, and must have perished sometime in the middle of the afternoon. The deceased was taken to the fires and thrown to the flames without ceremony and no mention of the gods. The wagon then moved on and delivered Rufinius at sunset to the pen from which he had been brought, returned to the embrace of his men. Libo, Carbo, Dentianus, Appias, Fabianus and many others crowded around him and gave him water, but it was several days and nights till his strength fully returned.

“What of Nonus?” Rufinius inquired finally, when his wits had recovered sufficiently that he realized the criminal was not among the men.

“We heard they took him early from the pit and made the camel’s landica an overseer,” said Dentianus.

“And he’s very free and easy with the lash,” Libo added. “Thinks nothing of working over his former comrades drafted into the work crews. There’ll be murder at first opportunity.”

“There will be tickets sold for it,” Carbo observed, the man’s face still heavily bruised and a gap in his mouth where front teeth once lived.

Rufinius closed his eyes and rested his head against the rough wall behind him, the shade growing smaller by the minute and the day heating to its usual furnace.

“How are you in your heart, Rufinius?” Appias asked eventually, when they were as alone as two prisoners among hundreds can be.

“In my heart? What is that?”

“What are you thinking? What is your plan? How do we change our situation? Turn the tide?” the historian wanted to know. “History bursts with tales of men who overcome their captors.”

Rufinius opened an eye and looked at the man. “I’m a slave, you’re a slave. We’re all slaves. We have no rights, only value, and even that depends on what our eventual owner deems it to be.”

“There are many of us and few of them,” Appias observed.

“If you haven’t noticed, the few of them have weapons, historian. And it’s not the first time the slave master who holds us captive has had thousands of men and women to sell, if my reading is true. The mercenaries who run this camp are careful. They know what we are capable of and they take no chances.”

“So we wait to be sold? Is that it?”

“Yes, that’s the sum of it. And because you have learning, if you’re lucky, you’ll be sold to teach the snot-nosed brats of some wealthy patrician, or whatever they call the class that rules this sand kingdom.”

“And

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.