by Camilla Monk
“That we’re gonna die?” The input came from a short, red-haired boy whom I reckoned would be one of Felus’s first victims in his quest to assert his dominion over the tent. The nasty look he flashed the copperhead spoke volumes.
“You gotta hit the Lorians between the eyes,” Felus corrected, brandishing his sword to demonstrate.
Victrix remained unfazed. “You mean to put yourself right in the way of their blades? Great idea.” He ran a hand across his face. “All right, let’s teach you how to handle a sword first. We’ll weed out the idiots later.”
That last comment sent a shudder up my spine. I briefly closed my eyes and saw Leis’s body, lying in blood-soaked mud. Meanwhile, Victrix started demonstrating a different way to hold a sword, expecting us to mimic his movements. That was the easy part for a bunch like us. Farm boys—or girls—weren’t used to military discipline, but we sure knew how to shut up and obey. Guided by his voice, we fell into a numbing rhythm, holding the swords over our heads, then in front of us to guard our left shoulder, then the right, then the gut, the leg, and over and over.
Head, shoulder, gut, leg, leg, gut, shoulder, head… Like the others around me, I was soon drenched in sweat. The burn in my muscles was tolerable, but the cut on my shoulder throbbed continuously, only to become a fiery sting whenever a specific move tugged at my stitches—holding the sword over my head was definitely the worst. Irius circled us with his shuttered expression, correcting our posture with unforgiving swats of his rudis to our spines, or the backs of our knees—nothing keeps you straight like a whack between the shoulder blades.
There was no part of me that didn’t ache or protest, but I found a sense of peace in pushing my body so hard, much the same way I did when I ran. My horizon stretched no further than the tip of my wooden sword, and nothing mattered but my grip around the hilt. Felus’s wary side glances were a blur at the edge of my vision, and Victrix’s voice little more than a faint beat. Irius seemed to have lost interest in me, being busy harassing the red-haired boy who’d farted in the tent last night.
“One to one!”
Victrix’s bark brought the drill to a bumbling halt. The lot of us exchanged befuddled looks, unsure what to make of his cryptic order. Irius’s big hands fell onto my shoulder and that of Felus, and he spun us around, so we were facing each other. I hissed through gritted teeth at the renewed sting from my wound. Facing him under the noon sun, bathed in dust, I took the full measure of the difference in strength between Felus and me. He was barely a thumb taller and didn’t have a beard yet, only a smear of dark down on his upper lip, but his arms and legs were thicker than mine, his chest broader. I could still easily pass as a lithe boy, but he tethered on the brink of that age when a youth’s body sharpens into that of a man.
Felus’s lips were a thin line, his eyes determined brown beads tucked under his brow. There was little doubt that he meant to break me like he had the rest of “his” tent. He rocked on his heels, swinging the wooden rod between his hands.
“Guard, attack, and parry,” Victrix shouted. “Hold nothing back. If I don’t see enough bruises on you once we’re done, I’ll paint them on your ribs myself!”
Felus didn’t need to be told twice: he lunged at me with a war cry, baring the mess of his teeth. I panicked and jumped aside, forgetting every single move we’d just been taught. He smacked his tongue in annoyance and tried again… in vain. I crouched, letting the sword fly well over my head. By the third miss, my fear was turning into some modicum of amusement. He was slow, and I didn’t see the point in all that crap Victrix was trying to teach us about guarding and parrying since that big clod Felus couldn’t even touch me in the first place.
When a blind swing nearly grazed my ear, I decided to step up my game and leaped onto the water barrel the men used to quench their thirst. “Strike higher,” I taunted him.
“Get the fuck down here if you’re a man!” Felus’s cheeks were scarlet with rage, while around us the other boys clashed swords with more or less zeal, throwing anxious side-eyes at our antics.
I had no intention to jump down my perch, but a brutal blow to my left side made me lose my balance. I caught myself and landed on one knee, holding my ribs. A silvery stream of saliva dribbled from my lips as I tried to catch my breath. I looked up to find Irius’s shadow looming over me. “You have good legs, but they won’t be much use if the rest of you can’t keep up in a fight,” he said.
I couldn’t reconcile the agony in my side with the fact that he wasn’t angry. His voice was completely flat, as if his mind were barely here.
“Parry. Don’t dodge,” he ordered as I scrambled back to my feet.
My nostrils flared in stubborn anger, but I raised my wooden sword, allowing Felus to strike. I staggered back from the impact; that rotten piri was strong, and I wasn’t good at parrying. He flashed me a triumphant grin, before unleashing a deluge of clumsy blows that I struggled to block. Victrix would be pleased; I just couldn’t get the upper hand this way. Red bruises bloomed one after another on my forearms, my hands, and my throat was tight with hatred. Felus was made of the same dirt as Servilius; he only liked to hit, not to fight.
After the umpteenth blow had me backed against the barrel I’d been standing on moments ago, I couldn’t take it. The frustration, the bile, his ugly smile. Ignoring Irius’s order, I leaped aside to dodge an attack so blunt and artless a blind woman could have seen it coming. Balancing myself on my right foot, I spun around Felus and struck his neck with all my strength. The moment the rudis hit, my chest swelled with dark joy at the thought that if this were a real sword, he’d be dead.
He fell to his knees, dizzy from the nasty blow. I watched him crawl on the sandy ground and took deep breaths to calm my racing heart. I had broken the rule, but this time Irius didn’t come to Felus’s rescue. He watched, like Victrix, with the same hawkish gaze. Felus eventually got up, and I think he’d have wanted to take his revenge, but a loud clanking had all heads turning to the pit’s stone stairs. Thurias stood there, holding a fuming pot he kept hitting with a rusty ladle. It was lunchtime.
And what a lunch it was. I had no idea how long you needed to cook lentils for them to melt into a such a sludge, but probably a day, or even two. Lined against the pit’s wall, we received one bowl each of lukewarm shit, while Victrix and Irius shared a plate of cured meat and honeyed fruit right under our noses.
Thurias’s gaze swept down our sour faces. “Everyone finds it delicious.”
“There’s a rock in mine,” one of the boys mumbled.
“Accidents happen in every kitchen!”
Having stated this, he marched back to the stairs with his empty pot. Victrix watched him depart with a chuckle and tossed a purple candied fica in his palm repeatedly under our starved gazes. He threw it to the ground, a challenge gleaming in his eyes. We all stared at the fica. Eight empty heads, all silently weighing the risks and reward of debasing ourselves for a piece of fruit.
People didn’t really care for pride in my village, except maybe if someone called you a mollis or they said your wife was a witch. Beyond that, the consensus in our community was that dignity was overrated where survival was concerned. Victrix, with his fica, was the first person who ever made me see that there was pride in me, and who made me consider how much I valued it—evidently more than the two boys who scrambled to pick up the fruit and fought like dogs in the dust. And a lot more than Felus, who towered over the winner and took the soiled fica from him without a word. I gazed at Victrix while Felus ate the prize. His lips curved into a faint smirk in response. Now he knew I was too proud to eat his trash, and so did I.
After we were done with our soup, we were allowed to drink water from the barrel, one bowl each. I should have known that no good could come out of this small mercy. As soon as were done, Victrix yelled, “Start running around the pit, whoresons!” As we bustled into four pairs and started jogging around in circles under the blistering sun, he added, “An
yone who stops before I tell him to, I scourge his back off.”
There was the catch. Hearing this, I slowed down to a steady stride to save my strength: I had a hunch that we were going to be here for a while. In front of me Felus tried to rouse the red-haired boy running at his side, slapping his mop of hair a couple of times, encouraging him to run faster. I let the rest of them pass me until I was last, next to the one I’d renamed fart-boy—his name was, in fact, Plescus.
Unlike the rest of us, Plescus had been fed well by whoever had raised him. His cheeks were full and ruddy, and he had a potbelly that jiggled under his tunic as he ran. His breathing was all over the place, and he was sweating buckets already… I feared he’d be the first to taste Victrix’s whip.
“Take deeper breaths,” I whispered, once we were well away from our wardens. “And count the laps every time we pass the stairs.” The many hours spent doing chores at Servilius’s farm had taught me that exhaustion weighed less on a busy mind.
He nodded without looking at me, his eyes wide with despair. I recognized in his features that moment when the burn gnaws at your muscles and your body wants to stop running. I looked down and focused on my own stride. We’d done only twenty laps; it was way too soon for him to stumble like that. He wouldn’t last. I just hoped we wouldn’t have to run so long that I lost count of my laps—I wasn’t great with big numbers.
I did lose track of my efforts, and as expected, Plescus was the first to collapse to his knees, just as I started to feel the burn and knew I’d have to fight past that pain. Something inside me protested when Plescus fell in the dust, an instinct that I should have helped him, but I knew I’d only end up whipped along with him if I did. I swallowed the shame in my throat and looked straight ahead.
Irius walked to him, and Plescus was too weak to protest when another soldier tied him to the water barrel with a length of rope. It was Victrix who took the whip, and when our eyes fleetingly met, the eager rage in his twisted my insides. Maybe he and I were more alike than I cared to admit; he wanted Plescus’s blood like I had wanted Arun’s and Fishtail’s. The first lash tore an inhuman scream from the boy, and it was as if his voice pierced through my skull every time Victrix hit him again, tearing his tunic apart, then drawing blood. I clenched my teeth and kept running behind the others, fighting the mix of bile and soup gurgling at the back of my throat.
Plescus’s wails became a rhythmic wave that carried our stride, over and over in the pit that had been so dark last night and now seemed blindingly white under the sun. Eventually the sound faltered and died down, replaced by whimpers. I tried not to look, but I glimpsed him kneeling in the dirt, his torn tunic revealing lacerated meat. I closed my eyes in vain. All the red was still there, inside my head.
Irius went to untie Plescus. He collapsed to the ground sobbing, and when another man came to help him up, at first, he wouldn’t move, as if his legs were crippled. It took some threatening and slapping his face, but he did get to his feet. I thought Victrix would demand he resume running, but the soldier thankfully dragged Plescus away. His blood stained the pit’s cracked ground, and through it all we never stopped running, dark patches forming where our tunics stuck to our backs.
Clouds stretched and passed over our heads, until half of the pit was cast in a cool shade, which brought us some momentary relief every time we jogged under it. Irius grew tired of watching us at some point and left—maybe he had better things to do. I didn’t care: I was long past the burn, lost to a trance where my legs carried me without knowing why and my lungs ached with each intake of air. I kept licking salty drops of sweat from my upper lip until the skin chafed.
When Victrix’s voice tore through the arena, like the call of a bird of prey, I thought it was too good to be true. “All right, we’re done. Get back to your tent, and I don’t want to see any of your pig faces until tomorrow morning. Same place, before sunrise.”
Like fish pouring from the net, our little group scattered as soon as he’d said this, seven mouths gasped for air in a croaking choir. Some fell on their ass in the very place they’d stopped running, others took a few slow steps, clutching their side stitches. I stood in place, my eyes closed, allowing tremors of exhaustion to course down my legs, listening to the pain in my limbs. In spite of it all, I felt strangely serene, content with the simple fact that I’d survived another day.
I dragged my tired carcass toward the stairs with the rest of the boys, intent on taking back my sword and satchel.
“You stay here, birdshit.”
I froze, praying that he meant someone else. The unseen crushing my lungs told me otherwise.
Victrix’s footsteps echoed loud in my ears as he walked to me. I didn’t turn around until he was so close that there was no point trying to ignore him anymore.
He placed a hand on my wounded shoulder, his touch branding my skin through the sweat-soaked wool of my tunic. Jolts of agony shot all the way down my arm when he squeezed the stitched flesh. My mouth opened, but I managed to hold back a scream. It was only the silent vibration of my throat, while ahead of me the pit’s wall and my satchel became a little blurry, as if they were so far I’d never reach them.
“It’s out of my hands,” he said with a chuckle. “You keep running until he says you’re done.”
I didn’t understand. Freeing myself from his grasp, I looked around the pit, thinking maybe Irius was back. But it wasn’t him standing near the top of the dusty stone stairs. The wolf head shone bright under the sun at the center of Clearchos’s silvery cuirass. I stared up at his scarred face and the chin-length jet locks framing it. His features were different in the light of day, maybe less ghostly and more humane. I noticed for the first time he wore a long black tunic with a gold-embroidered hem partially hidden by an apron of dark leather strips—unlike the rest of his men, most of whom contented themselves with chainmail and rags like mine.
Clearchos nodded once, to me or Victrix, I wasn’t sure. No, definitively to Victrix: that much became clear when that asshole went to take the whip still resting on the ground. He hopped over to sit on the water barrel and tipped his head at the trail of footsteps in the ground running along the pit’s wall. “Go on, run. Maybe if you can keep it up long enough, you’ll get lucky tonight.” His lips curled predatorily as he played with the leather tail coiled on his lap like a snake. “Or maybe I will.”
I flexed my arms, balled my fists, and resumed running. My muscles and joints protested with each movement, and it took less than a lap for the ache in my legs to become relentless pain. This was my limit. I couldn’t do this, couldn’t find any more strength in my body. Panic exploded in my gut at the thought of being whipped raw like Plescus, and no doubt exposed as well. I held on to that fear and pushed through the pain as the sky turned indigo and the moons rose, I pushed even as each step felt like tendons and muscles were being torn from my bones.
At some point, I vaguely realized that I couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to. My body was an agonizing beast with a will of its own, and I was no longer thinking about the whip; this was about beating Victrix. I’d fucking die running in that pit before I let him touch me.
11
I knew the sun had set; I knew the pain in my lungs and my legs. My soles felt like they’d been pummeled into a pulp of bones and flesh. I stumbled once, twice, caught myself and kept dragging my feet, one step after another. I no longer wondered when it would all stop. I was just running because my body knew nothing else and awaited the moment I’d collapse and sink into blessed darkness.
They hadn’t lit the torches tonight; I didn’t even know if I was running in circles anymore. Victrix hadn’t moved from the barrel, and through the bluish haze surrounding me, I was still vaguely aware of his eyes on me, of their hawkish intensity. He was probably just waiting for the moment I’d finally give up and he could whip my bones bare.
I didn’t even notice Thurias walking down the stairs. It was the glimmer of gold behind him that caug
ht my eye, half-concealed by his massive frame. The wolf’s snarling face. He and Clearchos stood near the stairs. I staggered toward them—was I even still running? They grew closer and closer, became dancing shapes—and yet a remote part of me knew they were standing still. I tumbled toward the wolf, made it my goal.
Clearchos’s calm voice echoed in the night. “You can stop.”
I didn’t—not immediately. It was as if, having run for so long, I could no longer find my way back to reality. My legs slowed down, faltered, gave a supreme effort to keep me standing, and at last it was over. My head was spinning, and my stomach heaved. A tremor was the only warning I got before my knees buckled, and I threw up Thurias’s shitty lentil soup on the ground. While I coughed my throat out, I registered silvery shin guards moving toward me, and felt a calloused hand pat the nape of my neck.
“Constanter, that’s your name, right?” Clearchos asked softly.
I spat the last of my vomit between his booted feet. “No… It’s birdshit.”
Victrix jumped down from the barrel with a boyish laugh that was at odds with the bloodstained whip in his hands. Clearchos ruffled my hair with a chuckle of his own.
“Would you have kept running if I hadn’t told you to stop?” he asked.
“Yes… I’d have died here,” I replied between two exhausted breaths.
He considered this answer in silence while I stared at my hands under the moonlight. For some reason I was fascinated by the dust on them, the way it painted every crease in my skin.
“You’re fast and precise but you can’t parry. You duck and run like a roach,” Clearchos noted in a conversational tone. I welcomed his criticism in silence. There was a hard edge to his voice as he went on. “I want to see you get stronger. Don’t disappoint me.”
Having said this, he glided away without another word, cloaked in darkness until he vanished entirely. After he was gone, Thurias approached me with the heavy yet cautious steps of a gentle giant. The hand that reached to help me up, however, wasn’t his. Victrix hauled me to my feet and squeezed my good shoulder in what seemed a comradely gesture. My skin turned to ice where he touched me, but I was simply too weak to fight back. His nails dug into my tunic like talons. “Tomorrow I’ll teach you how to really use a sword.”