Let it suffice, that, through no fault of Agathemer's, but wholly through my fault, we were suspected, interrogated, arrested, stripped, our brand- marks and scourge-scars observed and ourselves haled before a magistrate. To him Agathemer told the same tale he had told to Tarrutenus Spinellus. It might have served had we been dealing with a man of like temper, for travellers from Aneona for Aquileia regularly passed through Placentia turning there from northwest along the road from Aneona to northeast along the road to Aquileia. But Stabilius Norbanus was a very different kind of man. "Your story may be true," he said, "but it impresses me as an ingenious lie. If I believed it I'd not send men like you, with their records written in welts on their backs, with any convoy, no matter how strict, on the long journey to Aquileia, on which you'd have countless opportunities of escape. I do not believe your tale. Yet I'll pay this much attention to it: I'll write to Vedius Aquileiensis and ask him if he owned two slaves answering your descriptions and lost them through unexplained disappearance or known crimping by Dalmatian pirates at about the time you indicate. "Meantime I'll commit you to an _ergastulum_ [Footnote: See Note H.] where you'll be herded with your kind, all safely chained, so that no escape is possible, and all doing some good to the state by some sort of productive labor. A winter at the flour-mills will do you two good." Our winter at the mills may have benefited us, but it was certainly, with its successor at similar mills, one of the two most wretched winters of my life. 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_. It was located in the cellars of one of the six or more granaries of Placentia, which has, near each city gate, an extensive public store-house. The granary under which we were immured was that near the Cremona gate. Above ground it was a series of rectangles about courtyards each just big enough to accommodate four carts, all unloading or loading at once. It was everywhere of four stories of bin-rooms, all built of coarse hard-faced rubble concrete. The cellars were very extensive, and not all on one level, being cunningly planned to be everywhere about the same depth underground. Where their floor-levels altered the two were joined by short flights of three, four or five stone steps, under a vaulted doorway, in the thick partition walls.