I could not help remembering what happened to me that other time. Something I hate to talk about. A nightmare to endure, then a cause of other nightmares for decades afterwards.

It had been my first mission for the Emperor. Britain. A province I had served in earlier. I thought I knew everything. I thought I would have everything under control. I was proud, cynical, efficient as an eagle stripping carrion. The first thing that happened was that I met a wild, contemptuous, patrician young divorcee called Helena and long before I noticed it, she had knocked every certainty of the previous thirty years from under me. Then I was sent undercover to the mines. For reasons that had made sense to everybody else, I was sent in disguised as a slave.

In the end it was Helena Justina who rescued me. She would not be doing that again. The last time her crazy driving of a pony cart had almost scared me more than all my sufferings in the silver mine as she raced me to a hospital before I died of exposure and cruelty; now she was herself being carried at a delicate pace along the Via Augusta to Valentia and then north towards a port called Emporiae. From there I would be taking her by sea around the southern coast of Gaul—a route that was famous for storms and shipwrecks, yet the quickest way back home.

Three years. Nearly three years I had known her now. I had changed and so had she. I liked to think I had mellowed her. But she had mellowed herself to begin with, when she let herself feel concern for a man she had at first heartily despised. Then I had found myself falling too. I recognized my fate; I plunged straight in. Now here I was, riding up into the hills of another mineral-rich province, older, mature, responsible, a seasoned state official: still stupid enough to take on any task, still put upon, still losing more than I ever gained.

It would not be like the last time. I was more fit and less fanatical. I distrusted too many people, including those who had sent me here. I had a woman and a baby to care about. I could not take risks.

 

I had visited the proconsul to tell him my intentions. He listened, then shrugged, then told me I seemed to know what ought to be done so he would not interfere. Same old routine. If it worked out well, he would want all the credit; if I got into difficulties, I was on my own.

The proconsul's staff, who did seem to have better orders about helping me in my mission, had supplied me with a set of mules. Even better, I had been given a map, and what must be the briefing on mineral deposits that they had prepared for the proconsul when he took up his post. From it I learned in detail what I had previously tried to avoid knowing.

Whereas the silver mines of Britain had proved to be disappointing, the landmass of Hispania was blessed with enormous riches. There was gold, gold in fabulous quantities. It had been estimated that the great state-owned mines of the northwest produced as much as twenty thousand pounds of gold every month; they were protected by the sole legion in the province, the Seventh Gemina. Besides gold there was silver, lead, copper, iron and tin. In Baetica there were old silver mines at Carthago Nova, silver and copper mines near Hispalis, gold mines at Corduba, cinnabar at Sisapo, silver at Castulo; in the ore-laden Mariana mountains— to which I had been told Quinctius Quadratus was heading— there were hundreds of shafts producing the finest copper in the Empire and an extravagance of silver too.

A few older mines remained in private hands, but the Emperor was easing out individual ownership. Most of these establishments were now under government control. A procurator administered the sites; contractors or local mining societies could take a lease on identified shafts on payment of a hefty sum and a proportion of the minerals they produced. Presumably the keen new quaestor imagined he had tripped off on his scenic tour in order to audit the procurator. Unlike his cowardly action in abandoning Rufius Constans under the weight of a grinding stone, questioning the rule of a high-powered imperial career officer was decidedly brave. I myself was not even looking forward to telling the procurator—if I met him first—that Quadratus had devised such a plan. He might be a senator-elect, and the proconsul's deputy, but compared with the man he was venturing to spy on he was a mere temporary figurehead. Any ferret-faced freedman with equestrian status in a salaried post would wrap the quaestor

round a scroll baton and send him home at the bottom of the next dispatch-rider's pouch.

I had to find Quadratus before this was done. I wanted him in one piece, pristine and unrolled.

 

I had crossed the river at Corduba. My journey would take me into the long line of gentle hills that had been a constant backdrop to our stay. In a gentle arc from west to east they closed off the Baetis valley on its north side, stretching from Hispalis to Castulo, and were pockmarked with mineral works almost all the way. Tumbling rivers with wriggling lakes ran through the hills. Transhumance paths, the ancient drove-roads for moving cattle every season, crisscrossed the terrain. I moved up into cooler air, amongst oak and chestnut trees.

I traveled light, camping out if it was more convenient, or begging a night in a contractor's hut where I could. There were two roads going east from Corduba. I was all too conscious that while I took the upper route through these pleasant hills, Helena Justina was traveling the lower, along the river parallel with me. While I was constantly nipping up byways to ask after Quadratus at isolated workings, she made a steadier progress not too far away. I could almost have signaled the carriage.

Instead here I was, miserable as death, barely in contact with humanity. I hated it when the stubbly speculators only produced morose grunts for me; I hated it more when they were hungry for gossip and wanted to delay me for interminable chats. I ate cheese and hard biscuit; I drank mountain stream water. I washed if I felt like it, or not if I felt perverse. I shaved myself, never a success. It was worse than the army. I was surly, solitary, famished and chaste.

In the end I realized Quadratus was not bothering with the smaller individual mines. Only the big show would do for the famous Tiberius; he must have gone straight to the huge silver mine with its complex of hundreds of shafts let to numerous contractors, which lay at the far eastern end of the mountain range. He probably traveled by way of the river road, and stayed in decent mansios. Still, he would not be as desperate as I was, and he lacked the verve and efficiency to cover as much ground. I might yet head him off.

It was a cheering hope. It kept me going for half a day. Then I knew I had to face the kind of scene I had sworn to avoid forever, and I felt myself break into a sweat.

 

It was the smell that turned my stomach first. Even before the appalling sights, that sour odor of slaves in their filth made me want to retch. Hundreds worked here. Convicted criminals who would slog it out until they died; it was a short life.

I could hardly bear to enter the place, remembering how I too once labored to hew out lead-bearing rocks with inadequate tools on a pitiful diet amidst the most sordid cruelty. Chained; flogged; cursed; tortured. The hopelessness of knowing there was no relief from the work and no chance of escape. The lice. The scabs. The bruising and the beatings. That overseer, the worst man I had ever met, whose mildest thrill was buggery, and his biggest triumph watching a slave die in front of him.

I was a free man now. I had been free then—only enslaved from choice and for an honorable motive, though there are no grades of degradation on a chain gang in a silver mine. Now I stepped down from a sturdy horse, a self-assured man with position in the world. I had rank. I had a formal commission with an imperial pass to prove it. I had a wonderful woman who loved me and I was fathering a little citizen. I was somebody. The mine perimeter was guarded, but when I announced myself I was called "legate" and provided with a polite guide. Yet when that smell hit my gut I was nearly thrown back to three years ago. If I relaxed, I would be a trembling wreck.