Casca 21: The Trench Soldier (2 page)

The cabbie had climbed down and was drying off the horse so that it would not catch cold as the chill wind turned the sweat to ice on its skin. Casca walked to the corner, glancing back as he turned into the side street. The door to the house was just closing.

Casca ran. If a bobby stopped him he would say he was running to order a cab for a swell. Running was risky, but he wanted to be well away from this
neighborhood before the first police whistle sounded.

As he ran he searched the fronts of the houses for a spot where he could hide the pocketbook
when he did hear the whistle for to continue running then would be to invite disaster. He made it the length of a block and slowed to turn the corner. The only bobby in sight was almost four blocks away with his back to him.

Casca walked quickly toward him, maintaining his pace as the bobby glanced in his direction as Casca reached the corner. The short whistle was answered from somewhere in the new direction. He turned the corner, and Casca had the length of the street to himself. He ran like the wind.

Casca made the turn toward St. John's Wood Station. He went into the tea room, sat down and ordered tea and a bun. Then he went to the men's room and under the gas lamp examined the contents of the pocketbook.

There was a gold sovereign and a pound note, a ten-shilling note, some visiting cards that read: CAPTAIN ROBERT GORDON MENZIES, BARRISTER, with an address in the colonial city of Melbourne, Australia.

Regretfully Casca flushed the expensive pigskin and the cards down into the Thames. He wrapped the sovereign in the pound note and hid it amongst his ragged underwear. Back at his table he ordered corned beef and cabbage and a beer. He wanted to change the ten-shilling note, and didn't wish to attract attention by doing so for a penny or ha'penny. Besides, he couldn't remember the last time he had tasted either beef or beer—or, for that matter, cabbage.

An assistant station master, uniformed like a Hungarian brigadier, or perhaps a Bulgarian lance corporal, came past the tea room calling the imminent departure of the morning express for
Bewofsdel.

The name rang a happy chime in Casca's long memory.
Best damned campaign I ever was in
, he recalled. The Roman legions had chased the wily Britons into the distant mountains, the Romans getting close to exhaustion as they tried to find somebody to fight, the Britons tirelessly retreating and leaving behind their blue-eyed women and strong beer to slow the Roman advance. By far the most effective retreat tactic Casca had ever encountered.

When the worn-out Romans at last called off the chase and returned to their fortified posts, the Britons came out of the hills of Wales, reclaimed their wives and daughters, disdaining to notice that their bellies were swollen with beer and babes. And a little later the Britons cheerfully celebrated the births of a whole new generation of short, crinkly-haired children, almost indistinguishable from the
Calabrians of southern Italy where Hadrian had raised most of his legions.

Now, he had a destination, a train leaving,
money in his pocket, and the danger of the police who might appear at any moment. He ate quickly, then hurried to buy a third class ticket and boarded the train just as it left the station.

The shouted name of the station roused Casca reluctantly from dreams of beef and beer and Briton maids. He tumbled out onto the platform just as the train blew its whistle to depart.

Outside the station he looked around at the depressing, ugly, dirty little town.
A grimy soot had applied a gray film to everything in sight. Narrow-fronted little houses straggled up a winding road to a giant wheel that turned slowly at the pithead of a coal mine. A single cable turned around the wheel, and Casca guessed that this was the mechanism that lowered miners into the pit.

Of the quaint Briton village of his memory there was no trace. Perhaps the distant green hills were the same.

In the cafe where he breakfasted he learned that the mine was hiring workers due to a recent cave-in which had killed and injured scores of men.

It was work for which Casca had little taste, but it was work. More than once he had been a slave in a mine, so perhaps working in one as a free man might not be so bad.

He quickly found himself a room in the house of a widow and presented himself at the pithead at the start of the next shift.

He was shocked to find that he had to rent his tools and even his lamp from the mine company. They expected him to pay this rent in advance but agreed to take it out of his first pay as they were in urgent need of
labor.

The descent was terrifying.

The pit cage dropped unrestrained on the single cable, and Casca felt his balls and his stomach leap upward. Then he almost crashed to the floor as the brake was applied, slowing the cage before setting it down on the bottom of the shaft. A tenth-of-a-second miscalculation by the brakeman, Casca realized, would slam the cage into the bottom at full speed. And the brakeman was at the surface, half a mile above, and operating entirely by guesswork and experience.

The miners immediately set off at a trot and Casca ran to catch up. They were running down a dark, sloping tunnel, all the men shambling, head down, shoulders stooped like apes as they trotted on the crossties of the tramway.

There was no light as the miners had to pay for their oil. Casca struck his head hard on an overhead beam and quickly stooped to bring his height down to the level of the other miners.

They ran for half an hour without slackening their pace, except where subsidence had brought down the tunnel roof to an even lower level. And even at those places that it seemed they knew or sensed like bats, they scarcely slowed, bending their knees to shuffle forward in a squatting position. They also jumped aside from time to time to make way for the skips full of coal being hauled by tiny young girls yoked to the tramway cars by a headband. This child
labor had recently been made illegal, but here the pit owners maintained the practice since replacing the little girls with pit ponies would necessitate raising all the tunnel subsidences that the girls were able to wriggle beneath.

By the time they arrived at the coalface, Casca was on the brink of exhaustion. Naked except for his shorts, he was lathered with sweat, panting the hot air in painful gasps. His calves, the backs of his thighs, and the muscles of his back seemed to be on fire.

All around him men were lighting their lamps and getting down on their knees in front of the coal. The face of the coal seam rose only three feet above the floor, and the miners were quickly at work on it with their picks. They were not paid for the time it took to ride down in the cage or for the long run to the coalface. It was almost half an hour since Casca considered he had started work, and so far he was still behind for the tool rent.

He dropped to his knees and set to with a will. The coal was surprisingly hard, and a considerable effort was needed to force the pick to penetrate far enough to be able to lever off a chunk of the black stone.

When Casca felt that his aching arms could not wield another stroke, he paused and looked around him. The other miners were hard at it, working at a methodical rhythm, each stroke adding to their piles of coal. Casca realized with a start that theirs were already much larger than his.

He paused a moment longer to study these small Welshmen, any two of whom he could have easily lifted in one arm. In the dim lantern light he could see that their bodies rippled with well-toned muscle, but for all that they were the merest lightweights.

Casca set to again, determined to increase his tally to match that of his workmates. Knowing that overexertion would tire him quickly, he set himself just to match his neighbor stroke for stroke, counting on his extra size to win the extra coal needed for him to catch up.

But when he paused to rest again, he saw that, in fact, his blows were less effectual than those of the small Britons, and that the Welshmen's piles of coal were almost double his. Nor had any of the other miners even paused for
so much as a second.

Casca flailed his pick at the coalface, tearing out great pieces of the black stuff, digging like one demented until his arms were trembling with exertion, and his breath was rasping in his dry throat.

He would pay, he knew, for this overexertion when the work ceased and the overstrained muscles tautened against the damage he had inflicted on them.

But he had caught up. His pile of coal was now a fair match for any of the others. He smiled grimly to himself as he realized that in this one small matter the curse of the Jewish prophet worked for him. Tonight the tortured muscles would give him hell, but by morning the curse that had kept him alive for two thousand years would have worked to repair all the damaged tissue, and his body would perform tomorrow as if it had worked at a coalface for twenty years.

He had just recommenced digging when he stopped; he didn't know why.

All along the face the other miners had stopped too. They all crouched expectantly, pick in hand, as if listening for something.

They all heard it in the same instant. Their picks dropped to the floor, and the miners scurried on all fours out of their workspace, then got to their feet and ran.

Casca was with them. He had felt, rather than heard, the tiny sound just as he had first heard it in the copper mines of Achaea more than a thousand years before. The earth above them had shifted.

Another sound followed, louder, an ominous, crunching noise. And then a thunderous crash as the ceiling of the tunnel fell in behind them.

They retreated farther along the tunnel and waited. A few more pebbles fell here and there, and then there was silence.

Cautiously they returned to where the tunnel was blocked by fallen rubble. They began to pick at it with their bare hands, clearing the way to their buried tools.

A foreman arrived, alerted by the noise and the sudden draft of air that the fall had pushed before it. Behind him came a team of
timberers carrying stout beams which they quickly rigged into position to support the ceiling. Another team arrived with shovels, and the clearing of the fallen material went faster.

The fall had been a small one, and within an hour Casca and his workmates were again kneeling before the coal seam.

And now they worked even faster. The fall had cost them an hour's coal-winning. There was no pay for idle time.

While the timbering team worked, Casca had reflected on his circumstances and concluded that he was scarcely any better off as an employee in this English coal mine than he once had been as a slave in an Aegean copper mine.

To be sure, there were no chains, and the British miners did not go in fear of the whip. But in these cramped mine tunnels there was no room to wield one, especially at the coalface where a slave master would have had to kneel alongside the miners.

Besides, Casca had experienced both ends of the whip, and he knew its limits. Neither men nor animals could be whipped to work beyond their capacity without provoking either collapse or rebellion.

It was sheer economic necessity that drove these British miners harder than any whip-hand could hope to do. The mine owner could increase that pressure whenever he wished by charging more rent for the tools or for the miners' cottages. And by increasing the storekeepers' rents, the mine company could even increase the cost of the miners' food and clothing.

At the end of the day Casca was as weary as he could ever remember being in his life. From force of habit the men ran from their work as they had run to it. The ascent in the cage was not as bad as the descent had been. The cage rose slowly, hauled up by a steam winch at the pithead.

On the surface the miners quickly dispersed to their homes where the only real meal of their day awaited them. Most miners avoided eating before they started work and had a single sandwich at the coalface for lunch.

Casca found
himself alone. And worse, feeling lonely. At times like these the curse of the Nazarene hurt him deeply. For him there was no wife waiting in a cramped cottage to help him out of his pit gear, to wash the coal grime from his body, and set a steaming bowl of soup before him. No kids playing on the floor before the cheery coal fire in the stove.

Not tonight nor any other night. More often than not it suited Casca to be wifeless and childless, but this bleak little village in the lowlands of Wales was not adapted to the needs of single men.

He made his way to the room he had rented. It occupied the back corner of the widow's house and had to be entered from outside like the privy that was next to it. It was cheap because this village was full of widows with rooms to rent. The inevitable accidents in the mine saw to it that there was never a shortage of widows.

To his surprise, his landlady had a tin bath full of steaming hot water waiting for him in his room with soap and a scrub brush.

Casca read in her eyes the mirror of his own loneliness, and through her shyness he saw clearly that she would be happy to scrub his back for him. Or to do anything else for him that he wanted just to be able to feel once more that she was a woman and could play her part in the life of a man.

Casca enjoyed his bath and the boiled mutton that the widow served him in her kitchen. But he evaded the invitation in her eyes, patted the two tiny, fatherless children on the head, and left for the pub.

The Miners' Arms was tiny, too, barely big enough for the half dozen men and dogs
who were in it when he arrived.

Casca's life settled into a routine of the day's hard work, hot bath, supper, a few beers, and a game of darts, then home to bed so he'd be ready for the same the next day. Only Sundays differed.