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I spent the entire winter haggard for sleep, underclad, underfed, overworked, shivering, beaten and abused. Conditions in that ergastulum were more than amazing.
The child, dazzled by such splendour, smiled and, growing bold even, was beginning to clap his hands and jump, when Hamilcar took him away. He held him firmly by the arm as though he were afraid of losing him, and the child, who was hurt, wept a little as he ran beside him. When on a level with the ergastulum, under a palm tree, a voice was raised, a mournful and supplicant voice.
Whereupon we burst the Bononia Gate of Faventia, flocked into the town, sacked some of the shops, left a score of corpses in the market-place and some in the streets near it, set fire to a block of buildings, and burst out of the Ariminum Gate, tumultuous and excited, but without so much as trying the outer doors of any ergastulum.
And later, when I spoke of being found with Agathemer after the massacre, separated from him and led off to the ergastulum at Nuceria he remarked: "I can't conceive how my brother missed you. Nor could he. He looked for you among the corpses and went over the survivors twice in search of you." "I did not see him after the massacre," I declared. "Mercury protected you," was his comment.
Clusters of trees projected over the long lines of walls. The whole town was asleep. The fires of the outposts shone like lost stars. Spendius, who had spent three years in the ergastulum, was but imperfectly acquainted with the different quarters. Matho conjectured that to reach Hamilcar's palace they ought to strike to the left and cross the Mappalian district.
And Agathemer, I think, suffered every bit as acutely as I. We were not chained, except for a few days and about twice as many more nights; as soon as the manager of the ergastulum felt that he knew us he let us go unchained like the rest of his charges. This was because of the structure of the ergastulum.
The maxim that an aged slave should be sold could not have been peculiar to the dabbler in agriculture, and the ergastulum with its chained gangs must have been as familiar to the manufacturer as to the landed proprietor.
Then he told me that the procurator of the beast-train had sent to Rome by an Imperial courier, whom he had managed to intercept at a change-station, a letter setting forth my powers over fierce animals and asking that an order be sent for my transfer from the horse-breeding estate to the Beast Barracks attached to the Colosseum, where the animals are housed from their arrival in Rome, until their display in the arena; that this letter had come into the hands of the same officials who already had under consideration the requisition for me made by the procurator in charge of the Beast Barracks; that somehow these same officials appeared to know nothing of my identity with the slave who had foiled the conspirators who were fomenting a mutiny in the ergastulum at Nuceria, and for whose manumission a request had been made by the aldermen of that town, and indeed appeared to know nothing of any such request for manumission; that a requisition for my transfer from the horse-breeding estate to the Beast- Barracks at Rome had been made out, approved by the higher officials, sealed, stamped and sent out by an Imperial courier and received that very afternoon by the procurator of the beast-train, who consequently had authority to take me to Rome with him as one of the attendants on the animals of his train, which was now again in order, I having recaged all the four hundred escaped beasts, except five hyenas, one panther and one lion which had been killed by stock-owners and their slaves while attacking stock.
At Turin, as well as I could gather from my chats with this or that centurion or soldier or liberated slave, they had set free the inmates of the ergastulum by the Segusio Gate and had then turned aside to that by the Vercellae Gate, but had ignored the larger ergastulum by the Milan Gate; though they had marched out of Turin, necessarily, by that gate.
When I finished the story of my giving warning of the plot in the ergastulum at Nuceria I paused. "Go on, lad!" he urged. "You have had adventures and you narrate them tellingly." I hesitated and then, utterly reckless, I blurted out: "If I am to go on with my story you might as well know right now, that I am not only Andivius Hedulio, but also Felix the Horse-Wrangler." He swore a great oath.
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