The Forge of Pain

Sam woke to the sound of the other women moving in the dark. An oil lamp burned low in its niche, and the rest of the room was still night. The brand on her thigh throbbed worse than it had the day before. The tunic they had given her after the bath was of coarse linen, belted with cord, and she wore nothing beneath it. One of the women, an Egyptian named Nefert, dropped a strip of worn leather onto the pallet beside her.

“Keep your head down, new one,” she said, and was gone.

Sam bound her hair with the strip and followed the others out into the courtyard. The cold met her at the door, and she wrapped her arms about herself to no purpose. Over the roofs the sky was thick with stars, and she found the ones her father had taught her. The Pleiades still stood high. The Great Bear hung low in the north-east. The night was only half spent.

Slaves crossed the courtyard with water jars and armfuls of kindling, and not one of them hesitated. Sam, in the middle of them, turned one way and then the other.

“New one! Kitchen! Move!” a voice shouted. The man was gone before she could find his face.

In the far corner of the yard, a low archway was red with firelight. Sam went to it as fast as the brand would let her and ducked through.

The kitchen was hot. Smoke hung under the rafters from the brick ovens, and porridge thickened in copper pots over the fire while slaves chopped onions at the benches; somewhere behind them a chicken was being plucked. At the long table in the centre, the head cook, a stout Gaul named Brenna, was working a great lump of dough with both fists, her hair stuck in dark strands to her forehead. She looked up at Sam without stopping.

“Ah, the new girl.” She jerked her chin at the braziers along the back wall. “Tend the little fires. Keep them steady. If one goes out, you’ll answer to Cato, not me.”

Sam edged her way along the wall between the hurrying slaves. At the first brazier she knelt, and found the charcoal sunk to a dull red under its ash. She stirred it with the poker and, judging it too weak, threw in a fistful of twigs.

The flame shot up high above the brazier. Black smoke rolled out across the kitchen, and all down the room the slaves began to cough.

“Idiot!” Brenna roared. “Not all at once! You’ll choke the whole house!”

Sam bent and blew at the coals. The ash rose into her face and drifted over the end of the dough table.

“Stop blowing! You’re making it worse!”

Sam sat back on her heels with her eyes streaming. The second brazier had sunk to a grey crust while she fussed with the first, and the pot above it no longer steamed. Brenna smelt it before she saw it. She looked into the dying fire and swore at length in Gaulish.

“You let this one go out? The Dominus’s honeyed water will be cold because of you!”

Half the twigs Sam reached for fell from her fingers, and those she managed to add gave only a thin flame that went nowhere.

Brenna took the poker out of her hand. “Give me that. You’ll kill us all before the sun rises.”

It went no better after that. Each time Sam thought a fire was right, Brenna found it too low, or too fierce, and the air of the kitchen stayed bitter with burnt wood.

Then a man put his head in at the doorway. “To the yard! All of you, now!”

Sam wiped the soot from her eyes with the back of her wrist. Knives were left on the tables and the dough lay half-kneaded as the others hurried out, but Brenna stayed by the ovens.

“Go! I’ll watch the pots.”

Sam followed them out, and after the heat of the kitchen the cold of the courtyard went straight through her tunic.

Cato stood under the colonnade in the first grey of morning, giving each slave the day’s work. When he came to Sam, he stared at the soot on her face.

“Clean the hearth. Then water from the cistern for the kitchen.” He was already turning to the next. “Even a German can carry water.”

Sam nodded quickly. “Yes.”

The slaves scattered to their work. When Sam came back into the kitchen, Brenna pushed an ash basket into her hands.

“The ash from under the hearth, then sweep the stones. Don’t scatter the ash about, or Cato will have us both.”

Sam knelt at the low arch beneath the hearth, where the night’s ash lay heaped against the back. The brand pulled as she bent. She scooped the ash out with her bare hands. It was still warm, and a grey cloud rose into her face.

“Use the shovel, fool!” Brenna snapped. “Do you want blisters?”

The shovel was heavier than it looked, and her grip on the handle was wrong. Ash slid off the blade and spread across the flagstones. The other slaves had to step round it as they hurried past, and one or two went through it on their toes.

Towards midday the hearth was still not clear. Her arms ached to the shoulder, and the ash had greyed her tunic to the hem. Cato came into the kitchen for his bread and cheese and found her there. He looked at the ash trodden across the floor and pushed at a heap she had missed with the toe of his sandal.

He had seen a great deal of slow and careless work in his time, most of it from new slaves. But never a whole morning gone over a single hearth, and the job half done at the end of it. No one was as clumsy as that without meaning to be.

“An hour’s work,” he said, “and you have made a morning of it.”

“I have not finished. The shovel was…” Sam looked up into his face to explain.

“Do not answer me.” He took her by the arm and walked her along the corridor towards the tablinum.

They met Jack outside the tablinum, already in his toga, a wax tablet under his arm. Cato stopped and bowed.

“Domine. The new girl. Idle at her work, and she answers back. Twelve strokes, with your leave.”

Jack’s eyes passed over the soot on Sam’s face and went back to Cato. Twelve strokes was the ordinary measure, and Cato had kept the house for as long as he could remember. In the legions an idle man cost lives; in a house he cost silver. Either way it would sting and be over.

“As you see fit, Cato,” he said. “Train her properly.”

He went on towards the atrium. Sam watched him all the way to the front door. Cato’s hand had not left her arm.

Eight thousand sesterces or no, the master had given his permission. He brought Sam out to the courtyard.

From the wall beside the bench, Cato took up the virga, a rod of hazel worn smooth with use, and held it where everyone could see. The slaves in the yard had stopped in their work to watch.

“Idleness and insolence. Twelve strokes. Bare yourself, and count.”

Sam’s hands went to the neck of her tunic and could not, for a moment, do anything more. Then she drew it down from her shoulders to the cord at her waist and crossed both arms over her breasts. The cold met her bare back. She bent over the bench and reached for its far edge. It was scarred under her fingers.

The rod whistled before it struck. The first stroke cut across her shoulders, and she cried out before she could think to count.

“Count,” said Cato. “From one.”

She counted. By the sixth she had pressed her forehead to the wood. After the ninth she no longer knew what she was saying. The twelfth came, and Cato set down the rod.

Sam did not lift her face from the wood. She had never been struck in her life. Her father had never once raised his hand to her.

“Up. Back to work.”

She drew her tunic up. The linen dragged over the welts, and she went back to the kitchen holding the door frames as she passed them. Brenna took one look at her and sighed.

“Water now. Fill the big jar from the cistern. Do not spill.”

The cistern was in the peristyle, a stone well-head with a heavy bucket on a rope. Sam drew the bucket up hand over hand and poured it into a clay water jar, then carried the jar in both arms to the great storage jar inside the kitchen door, setting it down twice on the way. Every step pulled at the welts on her back. She made the round four times. On the fifth, halfway along the path, the jar tipped against her hip, and the water went down her tunic and across the stones.

Sam went down on her knees and pressed her hem to the stones to soak the water up.

A hand pulled her up. “Leave it.”

The woman beside her was older, with dark hair drawn back tight. She swept the puddle off the path into the garden bed with the side of her foot. “Water on stone dries. A wet tunic in this cold does not.”

“What is this?”

Cato stood at the end of the path. “Again? On the same day?”

“My fault,” the dark-haired woman said at once. “I knocked into her and tipped the jar.” She rounded on Sam. “Go and fill it again, girl. What are you standing there for?”

Sam snatched up the jar and ran. Behind her she heard Cato say, “Since when do you walk in a hurry, Janet?”

At dusk the household gathered at the long table under the colonnade by the kitchen, where barley porridge was ladled out with the watered wine. Sam was not among them. Cato stood her in the middle of the courtyard and hung a board about her neck on a cord, painted in black letters: LAZY.

She stood there while they ate. The cord bit into the back of her neck, and under her tunic the welts stiffened as the cold came on. The smell of the barley reached her across the stones.

Slaves passed close by her on their way to and from the table. Some read the board. One or two of the faces were kind; most showed nothing. She kept her eyes on the ground.

It was full dark when Cato sent her to bed. She had stood so long that her first steps came stiff and slow.

In the women’s room she lowered herself onto the straw pallet and lay on her side, careful not to press into the welts. Sleep would not come, or came and would not stay. Some time in the night the women about her began to stir. Two of them rose softly and splashed their faces from the water jar, and in low voices spoke of going to see a friend in the next room. Nefert, stretched beside Sam, would not go. “The night is too bitter. I stay.” The others slipped out into the dark.

It took Sam some while to understand that they had woken from their first sleep. At home there had been no such thing. She and her father had read by the lamp until the wick guttered, and then slept once, deeply, until the grey of morning.

She tried to sleep again. Hunger had hollowed her by now, and the small sounds from the yard kept her at the edge of waking: a footfall on the stones, a hinge somewhere in the dark. Then the women rose for the second time, and it was time for the day’s work.

---

“The legate writes that the traders coming back across the river speak of councils held all winter, and of envoys passing between tribes that have not spoken to one another in a generation. He asks, Conscript Fathers, that we think now on what they mean to do in the spring.”

On the Ides the Curia Julia was full, and the consular on his feet had been reading from the Rhine dispatches for the better part of an hour.

Jack sat with his eyes on the speaker. Yet his mind went elsewhere, to a girl in his litter with his crimson cloak drawn up to her chin. Sam. He frowned at the name and put it aside. Later.

For a fortnight he had been kept at the Princeps’s council from first light until the lamps were lit, over the Rhine and the campaign that must follow in the spring, and for days together he had not thought of the girl at all.

Cato, on the other hand, saw the matter plainly. Eight thousand sesterces, and in all the days since, the master had not once sent for her. If the master had no use for her, the house would find one. The girl still did not learn, and her eyes still came up when they should have stayed down. So he gave her more work. Her day now began at the hearth before light and ended by lamplight among the women combing wool. Between the two came the water and the firewood, the washing when the tubs were short of hands, and whatever else Cato found for her.

“You cost more than the whole kitchen,” he told her. “Earn it.”

Sam held out for four days. On the fifth day Brenna sent her to the storeroom to fill a jug of garum from the amphora. The jug was slick with the sauce by the time it was full, and halfway back to the kitchen it slid from her fingers. It broke on the flagstones, and the kitchen smelt of fish for days.

Cato’s rod found her that afternoon, across welts that had not yet healed. The household heard her count. “Do it again,” he said when it was done, “and it will be more.”

On the twelfth day she was set to sort the washing, and in the dim corner of the yard where the tubs stood, one bundle looked much like another. Cato found the master’s tunic soaking among the slaves’ rags. It should have gone to the fuller, and now the broad purple stripe of his rank lay dark in the grey water.

He lifted the tunic out of the tub with both hands. A German not a fortnight from the auction block, and the stripe of a Roman senator in the slaves’ tub. That was not the sort of thing that happened by chance.

He laid the tunic over the rim of the tub and turned on the girl, whose hands were already shaking. “Twenty-four.”

The courtyard was quiet as Sam went to the bench. She knew what came next now. She drew the tunic down and bent over the wood, and the welts from the fifth day still lay yellow and purple across her back.

“Count them,” said Cato.

Her voice broke after the first dozen. Past fifteen she lost the numbers, and after that there was only the sound she made.

When it was over she stayed bent across the bench, and her legs would not answer her. Two of the kitchen slaves carried her in. Brenna looked at the blood coming through the back of Sam’s tunic and shook her head.

After each correction, when the light went, she stood again in the middle of the courtyard with the board about her neck. The household ate its porridge under the colonnade.

Each night, Sam collapsed onto her pallet on her stomach. But she was not alone.

Janet, ten years older than Sam, had been born in the house, and the house trusted her. When the other three women in Sam’s room had settled into sleep, she would slip in with a small clay jar of ointment.

“Lie still,” she whispered the first time.

Janet’s fingers spread the balm over the welts. It stung, and then the burning eased.

“You’re too clumsy for your own good,” Janet murmured. “Watch how the others do it, and keep your eyes down. He’ll break you if you don’t learn.”

Sam pressed her face into the straw and said nothing.

Janet came again after each correction. The ointment helped, and so did her low voice in the dark. Before she slipped out again she would press something into Sam’s hand: a corner of bread.

One night, as Janet worked the balm into a fresh set of stripes, she said softly, “The master hasn’t sent for you yet.”

Under her hands, Sam went still.

“When he does, things might change. Upstairs, you will get lighter duties, better food.” Her fingers moved on over the welts. “Less of this.”

Sam’s face was hot against the straw. “I…”

“I know,” Janet said. “But that’s how it is. He paid a fortune for you. He’ll send for you soon.”

Janet put the stopper back in the jar and went out.

On the fourteenth night Sam pressed her face into the straw so that no one would hear her weep. Sleep took her before she had finished.