The other two were Clio and Egil, both younger than Jarza and both a good deal older than Alpheo.
Egil was a man somewhere in his late twenties who carried a dirty and unruly look about him no matter the hour. His blonde hair, once bright and full of life, had long since gone dull beneath the layers of dirt and neglect, cropped short more out of necessity than any thought of style, to keep it from tangling and matting through the endless labour of each day.
His frame was lean and wiry, scars ran across his skin in a dozen places, and most of them, Alpheo had noted early, were the narrow clean kind that only blades leave behind.
His eyes were a piercing blue and held the sort of quiet wisdom that nothing but years of pain has ever been able to teach anyone.
Despite all of it, Egil's presence carried a strange warmth. He was like a brief ray of sunlight breaking through a heavy sky, and men's shoulders came down a little when he spoke, whether they liked him or not.
Even with their growing bond, Alpheo knew remarkably little about the man's past. Egil rarely spoke of himself and offered only fragments of his story when pressed hard, and he was seldom pressed hard for long. From what could be pieced together he had come from a small tribe settled on Imperial land.
For a time he had served as a rider for his people. Then, without warning and without any explanation he cared to give, his life had turned upside down and stayed that way. Two years of slavery had hardened him since, and yet his pride refused outright to die. Often he would boast to the others of his unmatched skill on horseback, speaking with the unshakeable confidence of a man who still believed in himself and had every intention of going on believing it.
Clio, by contrast, was the most unassuming of the group. His short brown hair blended easily into the general worn and weary sameness of the camp. What set him apart was the great wild beard spilling down his chest in unruly strands of brown shot through with silver, a beard that seemed to have escaped his captivity even if the rest of him had not.
Before the chains and the servitude, Clio had made his living as a fisherman. Like Jarza, he had been dragged under by debt and sold off when he could not pay it. His small fishing vessel had been taken from him first, leaving him without any means of earning the very coin they wanted, which he still spoke of, when he spoke of it at all, as the part that made no sense. Though captivity had battered his spirit, some trace of the sea's stubborn independence still lingered in the way he held his back.
"So. Did you catch anything?" Egil asked, breaking the silence, his fingers scratching absently at his stomach.
Jarza turned his head to look at Alpheo, his gaze expectant like that of a bird waiting for his mother's arrival.
Clio said nothing at all, his eyes fixed on the night sky beyond the bars. Yet the quiet rumble of his stomach made it clear enough that he too was waiting on the answer.
"No luck today," Alpheo said, with a slow shake of his head and a sigh he pitched carefully. "Every cook in that tent had an eye on me, and that fat bitch never once looks away from the food. You would think the whole army could feed itself off the rolls of meat hanging from her and still have leftovers for the mules."
"Oh," Jarza muttered, lowering his gaze.
Alpheo let the silence stretch out a good while longer than was kind before his lips curled into a sly smile.
"Or at least, that is what I would be saying, if I were not as sneaky as a sewer rat."
With a quick motion he lifted his shirt to reveal a hard heel of bread pressed flat against his skin.
The reaction came close and fast.
Egil's whole face lit up with joy, Clio's quiet stare bloomed in a small chuckle and even Jarza's stern features softened at the edges.
"I would kiss you if you were a girl, Alph," Egil said, throwing an arm around him.
"Good thing I am not, then. I know of donkeys whose arse I would sooner smell than share your breath," Alpheo replied with a smirk, and passed the bread to Jarza, who received it with the solemn pride of a man entrusted with a sacred office. In their little circle Jarza was the strongest by some margin, and breaking that stubborn crust was a job that fell to him and to no one else.
The loaf was not the soft warm sort of bread that the word might otherwise bring to mind. It was dry , hard and grey, baked to feed masses rather than to be enjoyed by any of them.
Anyone foolish enough to bite into it directly stood a fair chance of chipping a tooth for his trouble. The only proper way to eat such bread was to boil it in water until it collapsed into a lumpy porridge, and that particular luxury lay well beyond their reach, for they had neither water nor fire in their miserable confinement, and no prospect of either.
So Alpheo had devised a small ritual to make the thing bearable. Each morning, before the camp stirred, he would shift a large flat stone into place near their cell. In the evenings they would drag it close against the bars and use it to break the loaf down into smaller chunks. Then they would place the pieces in their mouths and simply wait, letting their own saliva do slowly what a cookfire would have done in minutes.
Only a fool would attempt to eat it whole. Alpheo had once read a tale in which camp followers had used cooking pots and bread exactly this hard to fend off armed attackers, and the bread was said to be capable of killing a man outright with a single good swing, much after the fashion of a mace. He had laughed at that, once. He no longer found it far fetched at all.
A loud crack echoed through the cell as the loaf split apart at last, scattering fragments across the gritty ground.
Egil let out a low satisfied hum and reached for a piece, only to have his hand slapped smartly away.
"Well. That was a fine meal while it lasted," he muttered, rubbing his knuckles, his eyes never once leaving the scattered crumbs.
Clio turned toward him with a stern look. "Alpheo was the one who risked himself to steal it. So he get the first." His tone left no room whatever for debate.
Egil raised both hands in surrender and muttered something beneath his breath that nobody asked him to repeat.
Alpheo crouched and picked up one of the stone-bread, holding it between two fingers as though it were some rare treasure pulled out of a king's tomb. His hands trembled slightly as he brought it to his mouth. The coarse bread scraped against his tongue, and his jaw ached from the very first effort of chewing it.
He missed real bread. Grain bread, that bends beneath your teeth and warms your stomach and asks nothing of you in return.
On his first day in chains he had nearly spat the stuff out, the sharp crumbs scraping at his gums like gravel. He had been sorely tempted to throw it into the dirt and be done with it. But hunger is a harsh teacher and a thorough one, and he had learned quickly to endure in silence.
The others followed his lead, breaking off their own pieces and chewing with slow deliberate effort, the way men chew when they intend to make a thing last. Alpheo watched them in silence, noting the way their hands trembled and their eyes went soft with a gratitude none of them would ever say aloud.
When the second piece was gone he swallowed the last dry mouthful and broke the quiet.
"I suppose it is time to reveal the other thing."
Then, with a flick of his wrist, he opened his palm to show them the true prize he had stolen that day.