Blood of a Gladiator Read online

  No more death.

  I growled at Floriana. Any number of men, gladiators included, shrank from that growl, but not Floriana. She knew me too well.

  Smothering a grunt of pain, I heaved myself from the bed. I towered over Floriana, filling the cell, but she never flinched.

  “Man outside wants to speak to you,” she said as I reached for my tunic. “Wants to hire you, perhaps. If he does, first person you pay with what he gives you is me.”

  I gave her a nod, finding this only fair. I couldn’t imagine who waited for me, and I didn’t much care. I wanted only to sleep and not wake for several days. I’d done that before, after horrific matches. When Xerxes had died, I’d not emerged for almost a month.

  It was not easy to don my tunic while I still held the sword, but even now I could not make myself release it. My hand was cramped, locked around the wooden hilt.

  I managed to slide on the tunic, the sword tearing the fabric. Floriana watched me with great amusement. I gave her another growl as I ducked out of the cell, nearly banging my head on the low lintel.

  The house was quiet as I strode down its middle passage, making for the square of too-bright sunshine that awaited me at the end.

  I emerged from the doorway into December coolness and the glare of light on pavement. The sun was well up, and even the high buildings that lined the street provided no shade.

  A small man in a fine tunic waited outside. He had a neat, slim face, trimmed hair, and wore shoes rather than sandals, well-made pieces of leather that fit his feet exactly.

  “Leonidas the Spartan.” The greeting held a touch of derision.

  I gave him a curt nod.

  “The gods have smiled upon you,” the man went on in the same tone. “Freedom and a benefactor. How fortunate you are.”

  “Benefactor …” I said in confusion. I had no benefactor that I knew of.

  “The person responsible for your freedom. He has followed your career, noting every victory, and decided you deserved to walk away from the games a champion. I have been sent to tell you that.” The man eyed me with some disparagement.

  “Who is he? Who are you?”

  “I am called Hesiodos. You need to remember that name because I can give you no other.”

  Hesiodos carried the slightly pompous sneer many Greeks did—Rome was still rustic backwater to a man from mighty Athens.

  Hesiodos wore the garb of a freedman, but I guessed he’d begun life as slave. His contemptuous regard told me he didn’t want me making comparisons between us. We were both freedmen now, but I was infamis, the lowest of the low. All gladiators were, current and former.

  When I said nothing, he continued, “What I mean is, I am forbidden to give you your benefactor’s name.”

  I’d find this odd if I could think more clearly. Most Romans who assisted others wanted the fact shouted far and wide, so all would admire their generosity. The recipients of their charity would be obligated to the benefactor for life.

  But perhaps the man—or woman—might not want it known that they’d raised a gladiator from his bondage. We were animals fighting for the pleasure of others. No pride in rescuing one. If it were a woman, she would definitely keep it a secret. Hesiodos had said “he,” but he’d just admitted he was hiding the benefactor’s identity.

  I gave Hesiodos another nod to show I understood then jerked my thumb at the door behind me. “I owe Floriana a sestertius. Pay her, if you will.”

  Hesiodos didn’t move. “You misunderstand. This person has not bestowed a legacy upon you. You will have to work for your pay, as any other freedman in this city. Your benefactor has provided you freedom, a place to live, and a slave to serve your needs.”

  This benefactor sounded less and less reasonable. “What place? And I don’t need a slave.”

  “Your benefactor seems to think you do. Someone to keep an eye on you and report to me.” He flicked his fingers toward a corner of a wall across the street.

  A bundle of clothes that had crouched in a sliver of shade made its way across to us, stepping carefully in the damp street. It was a woman, swathed and cloaked like a patrician matron, but her plain palla and sandals told me she was a slave.

  “This is Cassia,” Hesiodos said. “She will not belong to you—she too is in debt to your benefactor. She will look after you, and provide you anything you need.”

  The woman reached us. Instead of bowing her head and cowering behind Hesiodos, she moved a fold of her palla and looked directly at me.

  Brown eyes regarded me from the face of a young woman I would guess not far past her twentieth year.

  I saw in those eyes, beneath the fear of being handed to a gladiator, a determination that blazed forth more potently than any I’d beheld in the brutal fighters I’d faced in the arena.

  Chapter 2

  I couldn’t see much of Cassia other than the eyes that skewered me and a tendril of very black hair that leaked from beneath the cloth. She had a round face and light brown skin of the peoples of the eastern shores of the Mare Nostrum, but beyond that I could tell nothing about her.

  Hesiodos observed this meeting without expression. “Cassia will lead the way to your lodgings. Settle in and wait for instructions.”

  “Instructions.” I jerked my head to him. “For what?”

  Hesiodos gave me an indifferent shrug. “Time will tell. Good day. Cassia knows how to send word to me.”

  Without a nod, gesture, or any other farewell, he turned on his well-fitted heel and walked away, quickly swallowed by the crowd of a Roman morning. My hand tightened around the rudis as I watched him go.

  I looked at Cassia. Cassia looked at me.

  Around us, Rome surged. Men and women, slave and free, strode the streets to the markets for vegetables and fish, and to the bakeries to take their grain to be made into bread.

  The stream of humanity was too busy to push us aside and so flowed around us as though we were two boulders on the pavement. Water trickled along edges of the street, Rome’s fountains overflowing to drain to the sewers and the river.

  I’d never had a slave before. The ludus used slaves to clean up after us and fetch and carry, but they belonged to Aemil, not the gladiators. Rumor had it that we practiced killing on unfortunate slaves, but that rumor was false. We were trained to fight other killers, to put on a show to please the multitude. The slaves were there to change our bedding and bring us food.

  Cassia wasn’t at all the sort of slave I was used to. The man at the ludus who’d cleaned my cell ducked his head as he dragged out my slop pail and did his best to remain invisible. The women at Floriana’s were trained to please men bodily and made an art of enticement.

  Cassia simply stared at me with the imperious gaze of a patrician’s wife and made no move to do anything.

  One of us should make a start, or we’d stand there all day. It was the end of the year, Saturnalia finishing yesterday, and the wind was sharp.

  “Where are the lodgings?” I asked her abruptly.

  Cassia parted her lips, revealing even teeth. “It is above a wine shop, at the base of the Quirinal.” Her voice was young and soft, but with a cool patience, as though she was used to explaining the obvious to her inferiors.

  The base of the Quirinal sounded promising, though not palatial. I’d visited villas and massive houses at the tops of Rome’s hills, expected to perform for my supper—which could mean fighting another gladiator, or displaying my scars, or simply telling tales of my past bouts.

  I wondered what sort of rooms my new benefactor could provide. If he’d obtained my freedom, he must have paid a handsome sum to take me from my contract with Aemil. That meant a wealthy man or, as I’d speculated, woman.

  Cassia remained unmoving so I made a brief gesture with the sword in my sore hand. “Lead me.”

  Cassia studied me for another moment before she started off along the narrow street.

  She wasn’t used to walking, I could see. She stepped carefully in her sandals, movi
ng warily from stone to stone, shying from the rivulets of water on the road’s edges.

  What sort of slave was uncomfortable with the pavement of Rome? Slaves hurried all around us to get breakfasts or run errands for their masters who lived in the houses, from the grand stand-alone domii to the meager rooms in the insulae. I strode along without hesitation in my thick-soled sandals.

  I guessed, as we went along, that Cassia was used to riding in a litter. She might have been a highborn woman’s slave—dressmaker or hairdresser or some such. I’d seen litters carried about by strapping men, the personal maids of the ladies crouched in a corner inside with their mistresses.

  Or else Cassia was unused to Rome itself. Possibly both were true.

  “Where do you come from?” I asked.

  She glanced over her shoulder then resumed walking with her uncertain pace. “Campania.”

  Not the answer I expected. Campania was south of Rome, containing the seaside towns of Herculaneum and Baiae. Wealthy patricians built vast villas there, growing olives and grapes for expensive wines. Cassia, as I’d observed, had the complexion of a woman from Antioch or Cyprus. Her Roman Latin was perfect and unaccented—better than mine. I reasoned that she must have been born and raised in Campania, but her parents or grandparents had hailed from the eastern end of the sea.

  We left the Subura, skirting the Forum of Augustus and the great wall he’d constructed to shield his grand space from the rest of Rome, and turned up the Vicus Longinus.

  From here Cassia took a smaller street, this one filled with shops whose awnings were propped open. The vendors sold anything from oranges and lemons to fresh-pressed oil to the baskets to carry the comestibles in. We passed a popina doling out bread and pottage, and my stomach growled, accustomed to being filled soon after I woke.

  I halted. “Is there food at our lodgings?”

  Cassia realized after a few steps I wasn’t following and turned back. “No, nothing to eat there.”

  “Then we should buy it.” I waved vaguely at the vegetable seller whose counter was piled with fresh greens from the farms open to winter sunshine. “You can prepare me breakfast. And have some yourself,” I added. It was not my way to starve a servant.

  “Oh.” Cassia paused in confusion. “I don’t cook.”

  I blinked at her. “No?”

  “No.”

  We regarded each other a few moments. I noted that her nose wasn’t perfectly straight.

  “Maybe you didn’t cook for your mistress,” I ventured. “But you belong to me now. I need meals, not my hair dressed.” I touched my head, close-shaved to keep me from bothering with vermin or having my hair grabbed in a bout.

  I had thought to make her laugh, but she studied me in all seriousness. “I mean I don’t know how to cook. Or dress hair.”

  My puzzlement grew. “Never mind. We can eat what the popina sells.”

  Cassia glanced, mystified, at the eating shop, with its customers leaning on the stone counter, the man behind it ladling out grainy soup from copper bowls sunk into that counter, kept hot by pots of burning wood beneath them.

  “Do you have coin?” I prompted. “To buy us something?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Any coin is in our lodgings. And there is not much of it.”

  I was growing impatient with this single-minded personage. I’d taken my meals outside the ludus plenty of times when I’d done guarding jobs. I’d preferred to eat at the ludus, because our food was much better, but I sometimes had no choice.

  “Then we will go to our rooms, and decide what to do. You can sweep up and set the table, or whatever it is a person does in a house.”

  “I don’t know much about cleaning either.”

  I foresaw a future where I took out the slop buckets and fetched water while this swathed creature reclined on a dining couch, munching grapes while she observed my labors.

  “I thought you were my servant,” I said. “What sort of slave are you, if you can’t cook, clean, or fetch and carry?”

  A courtesan, was the answer. One to keep the gladiator tamed while his benefactor decided what to do with my obligation to him.

  Cassia lifted her chin. “I am a scribe.”

  Her answer surprised me to silence. A scribe? The gods must be laughing at me. Leonidas, the champion of the empire, left alone on the streets with no money and no food, and the only one sent to assist him was an unworldly scribe.

  My hand throbbed where it clutched the sword. Cassia had turned away and continued along the quiet street as I stared in disbelief.

  “A scribe?” The words scraped out of me as I strode after her. “Why do I need a scribe?”

  Cassia halted at a plain door next to a shop whose customers lined up to take away amphoras of wine. She opened the door to reveal a stone staircase that rose into shadows.

  She began to ascend, but I put my hand on her shoulder and drew her back, not wanting her to walk alone into who knew what kind of rooms with who knew what kind of person waiting. Rome was not a safe place.

  Cassia skittered from my touch like a bug from a boot, eyes enormous. While she hugged the wall, trying to catch her breath, I went past her and climbed the stairs.

  Above I found a single, L-shaped room that stretched from the front of the building to the back, with a stone pallet built into a wall under a window. The shorter end of the L opened onto the roof of the wine shop below, wooden shutters leaning against the wall to close off the balcony in the evening.

  The room held a table and two rough-hewn stools. A shelf, empty, had been fastened to one wall, but looked as though it would tumble down from any heavy tread on the stairs. That was all.

  Cassia entered behind me, her footsteps light. From somewhere within the folds of her robes, she retrieved a wax tablet, the kind with wooden covers that folded in two, protecting the wax inside.

  She removed a stylus that had been tucked inside the tablet and made a notation. As I could read no words, I had no idea what it said.

  “A scribe does more than write letters.” Cassia’s voice was faint, but she spoke as one bent on explaining. “I can keep records, read and negotiate contracts, balance books and make sure all moneys owed are paid as well as all moneys owed to you.”

  I had no money at all. Unlike some fighters, I had not stashed away my portion of prize winnings or fees earned from guarding to buy my freedom. My price was so high I’d known there was no point. I used the winnings to enjoy myself instead, staving off boredom until I had to fight for my life once more.

  “No moneys are owed to me,” I said.

  Cassia studied her tablet. “Your benefactor requests that you seek employment in order to feed yourself and pay the rent on this apartment. What little coin has been left for meals will only last the day, if that.”

  A very odd sort of benefactor then.

  I was growing weary, first from the excess of drinking and debauchery last night, and then from finding my circumstances so changed. I needed to lie on my back for a time, to think, to sleep. I suppressed a yawn.

  “Who is our benefactor?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” When I took a step toward her, Cassia raised a hand in alarm. “I truly do not. Hesiodos would not tell me.”

  I continued past her and peered through the opening to the roof. Our view showed me the narrow street as it spilled down the hill into the main thoroughfare beyond.

  “So I am to live here, find my own employment, pay the rent, and wait for instruction?”

  “Yes.” Cassia sounded relieved I’d grasped it all.

  It was strange, but by no means the most strange thing people had hired me to do.

  I supposed I could walk out the door, tramp through the streets of Rome, and turn my back on this benefactor. I was a freedman now … I looked at the wooden sword adhered to my hand.

  Or was I?

  “Was my freedom registered?” One had to go to the Forum Romanum when one freed a slave, to have it officially recorded that the slave was fre
e.

  “Hesiodos said so.”

  Cassia began to unwind her palla. Out came more things as she unwrapped herself—a small leather case, a few scrolls, a bottle of ink and a pen. She laid them out in a neat row on the table.

  “Do you have dinner and wine in there too?” I asked her.

  Cassia folded her palla and hung it from a peg near the door without bothering to answer. She opened the case on the table, lifted a small piece of papyrus from it, and held it up to read. “This declares the man known as Leonidas the Spartan, gladiator, is a freedman of Rome.” She glanced at me over the paper. “You are not from Sparta,” she observed. “Or anywhere Greek.”

  “I don’t know where I come from. Aemil thought up that name.”

  “What is your real name?” Cassia asked with the first glimmer of curiosity I’d seen in her.

  “I forgot that long ago. I’m Leonidas now.” I yawned again, this time not suppressing it. “I will sleep.” I moved toward the stone pallet, reflecting I had no blankets or mattress, but I’d slept on worse.

  “With the rudis?”

  I stared down at the sword, my fingers stiff around the hilt. I tried to open my hand, but could not.

  “It seems so.”

  Cassia walked to me, footfalls soft. “Give it to me, and I will put it somewhere safe.”

  I swallowed. “I can’t.”

  For the first time, the fear left her. “Why not?”

  I raised my hand, the sword coming with it. “I try, but I cannot let go. I slept with it last night, and my hand is now too cramped to open.”

  “Hmm.” She peered at my swollen knuckles, dark from the sun and crossed with scars and fresh scabs from yesterday’s fight.

  Cassia reached out a tentative finger and touched my hand. She did it rapidly, a quick brush, as though expecting a jolt to knock her across the room.

  When I did nothing but stand in place, she touched me again, less hesitantly. “I will unbend your fingers.”

  I did not think she could. My strength would overwhelm hers without effort, and if I could not force my hand open, I doubted she’d be able to.

  Cassia rested her hand over mine, but instead of pulling at my fingers, she rubbed.