by Camilla Monk
I drew out a calming breath. “I have to go. It’s time.”
•♦•
It was no secret that the cage that welcomed new recruits had been empty for weeks. The crowd massed around the pit was tense, coursed by an anxious clamor whose vibrations I felt thrumming under my skin. Word that we were about to leave the mine and attack had spread already. Everyone wondered what Clearchos would say, why he’d chosen the pit to make his speech if there was no entertainment to be had tonight.
Squeezed between Thurias and a brooding Felus, I watched Clearchos descend into the pit and stop at the center of the arena, flanked by Hastius and Irius, while Victrix and Vatluna stood leaning against the wall across them. Clearchos raised his palms toward the night sky to demand silence, his armor reflecting the flickering flames of the torches.
“My friends!” he bellowed. “I know you have longed for the roofs of gold I promised you, and I commend your patience and discipline. It’s been a long wait, but we wait no more. Tomorrow, we march on Nyos!”
The legion responded with a stomping ovation that made the ground shake under our feet, as hundreds of wine-soaked throats howled in unison and chanted his name.
“And every man,” he went on, shouting to quiet the throng. “Every man, young or old, will get his share!”
That made them cheer even louder. I closed my eyes and went limp, trying to block out the suffocating mass of limbs, leather, and metal, crushing me from all sides. I didn’t cheer, only took slow breaths, preparing my mind and my body for what would come next, after Clearchos was through priming his delirious audience.
Fingers splayed wide, he waved his palms to demand silence again. “But before we sharpen our blades and pray, I want to tell you a story. Almost three months ago, a boy came to me, and said, ‘I want to fight in the pit again.’” Through the renewed surge of shouts and whistles, he added, “I can’t say it happens often,” prompting a wave of laughter from his men. Next to him, Hastius, too, couldn’t hold back a snicker as Clearchos went on. “So, I asked him, who do you want to fight? And the boy said, ‘I want to test my strength against the best of your warriors, the hero who rode with Parthicus’s first legion. I want to fight Ulpinus!’”
His name is Ulpinus… A cold shiver danced up my spine as I remembered the very first time I’d heard his name echoing in Clearchos’s chamber. The black-haired man, the one whose prick I had seen and whose face I had refused to look at. My goal, my prey. Safe in Gemina’s tent, Nerie knew nothing of my deal with Clearchos, of what would happen tonight. Maybe it was for the best.
Around the pit, the tumult became a hesitant hubbub. The men exchanged confused looks; some stretched their necks to search the crowd for Ulpinus. He stood right across from us, near the stairs, his bushy eyebrows drawn together in confusion.
Clearchos motioned for him. “Come down, my friend.”
He did. Ulpinus walked down the stone stairs, his stride slow, heavy. I scanned his attire, filing away every detail of his broad-shouldered frame. Chainmail shirt, greaves to protect his shins, and the usual apron of bronze-studded metal strips falling over his thighs. A long, heavy sword—typical Spathian blade. Victrix had been right to worry; he was better equipped than me. Clearchos’s warm disposition seemed to relax Ulpinus; he lifted a fist to the crowd and barked, “Where’s my adversary? Or has he changed his mind already?”
Still leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, Victrix looked up at me, calm in the rising storm. Several heads turned to follow the direction of his gaze, presumably wondering whether the suicidal champion was me or Felus. Icy fear licked my bones. Not that of dying or even getting mauled: I was afraid to fail, to crumble with a thousand eyes to witness my humiliation. I was afraid to be weak. Clearchos turned to point at me, and this time Ulpinus’s eyes widened in realization.
He understood now what we were here for. A grin pierced through his stubble, all the spark my rage needed to explode. I squeezed past Thurias and jumped down the pit, landing on one knee on a ground turned muddy by fall rains.
Clearchos nodded for us to start and retreated near the stairs with Hastius and Irius, whose vacant gaze lingered on me. I responded with the faintest nod to reassure him—or perhaps myself—that I wouldn’t disappoint.
Spurred by the crowd’s excited roar, Ulpinus drew out his sword and flourished it in wide, threatening arcs. I watched and waited for him to be finished, my face blank. Irius had taught me to flourish because he said it was a good exercise and it’d make me nimble with the blade. But he’d also told me that only pretentious idiots did so in an actual fight. I let my fingers curl around the hilt of my sword without unsheathing it. Ulpinus’s blade stopped spinning and he held it out in front of him, ready at last.
He bent his legs, his heels digging into the ground; the muscles in his forearms bulged as his grip on his sword tightened, and he charged like a bull. There was no time left to be afraid, only the space of a heartbeat to think and breathe. I watched his steps, the angle of his blade, and drew. He was fast for a man his size, but Victrix was faster, and it’d been weeks since he’d last bested me during our training sessions.
But Ulpinus didn’t know. He didn’t know that Irius too had felt my blade against his neck for the first time a few days ago, after an exhausting duel. Ulpinus didn’t know I would fight low to the ground to avoid injuries and that he held his sword too high. I crouched to duck the first blow and whirled to his unguarded left side, striking once. The steel edge tore through flesh and bone, the brief resistance making my scalp prickle in equal horror and thrill.
A scream ripped through his throat and ricocheted around the pit. The cheering went wild as the crowd watched dark blood trickle from Ulpinus’s amputated left hand. The same blood that now stained my blade. A wave of cheers and whistles washed over, drilling into my skull until I could no longer hear the sound of my own heart hammering in my eardrums. Through it all, Ulpinus managed to maintain his grip on the sword in his right hand, and for that, if nothing else, I respected him.
He straightened with a groan, sweat running down his temples, each bead a gleaming pearl reflecting the torches’ flames. His entire body trembled from the pain, and he was losing blood fast, but he wouldn’t go down without a fight. I liked that.
He bared his teeth to me in a snarl. “I’ll fuck you like I fucked Gemina’s boy.”
I should have been nauseated, but the hate oozing from his voice was contagious, intoxicating. I flipped my bloodstained blade and the corners of my lips curled into a quivering smile. “You won’t. Fight me and die like a man,” I taunted him.
His face twisted by furor and despair, Ulpinus raised his sword and lunged at me with the roar of a wounded beast. I parried a powerful blow that made my blade sing all the way up my arm to my shoulder. The moment he drew back to strike again, I swiped horizontally to slice his gut, but my edge ripped on his chain mail uselessly with a trail of sparks. His own attack narrowly missed my shoulder. He stumbled back, short breaths whistling from his throat. He was just at the right distance, and the angle was perfect. I don’t recall thinking that it was wrong to do this—I’m not sure I thought at all. My hands moved with a will of their own to grip the hilt of my sword tightly. I raised it over my head like Victrix had taught me when we trained with logs. It was just the same, except when my blade swiped down, it met less resistance.
The cut was perfect. Blood beaded and flowed in long rivulets along the thread-thin gash running around his neck. His features went still, but his head stayed on his shoulders until his body collapsed. It came off then, and I watched it bounce and roll in the dust. Numb, deaf to the pit’s cheers, I stared into Ulpinus’s unseeing eyes. Reality came back to me in a rush of earsplitting shouts and the smell of blood—on me, in the air, everywhere.
Clearchos was looking at me, his lips twisted in a smile. Next to him, Victrix seemed… troubled. I had thought he might be pleased—proud, even, to witness the result of his ef
forts. Yet his lips were set in a thin line, and there was a gravity in his eyes that bordered on sorrow. I averted my eyes, preferring the sight of the gore smearing my blade. He had no right to look at me like that; we were the same.
Clearchos raised his palms to calm the crowd and walked to me. He gazed down with the eyes of a benevolent deity, one who would have shared the same monstrous body as the wolf snarling on his cuirass. His voice was a poisonous caress. “Well done. I hope to see many more heads roll.”
I let the words seep under my skin and nodded absently, wondering why I didn’t feel better, why I wasn’t happy that Ulpinus was dead and Nerie had been avenged. Even worse was the pressure in my chest, the insidious certainty that Nerie wouldn’t be happy either, that maybe no amount of blood could wash that kind of hurt away.
Placing a gloved hand on my shoulder, Clearchos addressed his men in the booming voice he subjugated them with. “His name is Constanter.” His fingers squeezed the scarred flesh under my tunic. “Remember it. And when the battle comes tomorrow, kill with the same rage!”
Rage. Lost in the thunder of hundreds of voices chanting Clearchos’s and my name, the word rattled me. I understood then, why Victrix wouldn’t grin and cheer, and say Ulpinus was a cocksucker who’d died stupidly. He no longer recognized me, and I wasn’t certain I did either.
16
Ulpinus’s name was on all lips as the men prepared to march on Nyos. His eulogy was a collective murmur, sometimes punctuated by wine-soaked laughter and sighs. As they polished their armor with oily rags, counted arrows and sharpened their daggers, the men repeated tales of his days with the first legion, embellished with claims that Legate Parthicus himself had praised Ulpinus’s skill. Some did mumble that the first legion had never been stationed in any of the places he mentioned, or that he had died before he could fuck every last boy in the camp, but those weren’t voices anyone would care to remember.
What would remain hastily painted on the mine’s walls with bone black was that he had been an invincible legionary from the first, who’d been beheaded by a boy so fast the eye couldn’t see him and whose legs and blade were a silvery blur.
I heard them whisper my name, felt their eyes on me as I hurried toward Victrix’s tent. I had lost sight of him in my haste to leave the pit and wanted to give him his cuirass and greaves back. Or maybe I was looking for an excuse to stay as far as possible from Gemina’s tent. Nerie had probably heard the news by now anyway. Hopefully Ulpinus’s execution would bring him some sort of vindication, if no genuine relief.
There was a faint glow shining through the skin tarp—Victrix was inside. I undid the leather straps holding the cuirass in place around my waist and removed it, before calling him. “Hey? Are you in there?”
My question was met with some rustling and clanking before the tent’s flaps parted. Victrix emerged, clad in a well-polished scaled lorica under which an apron of bronze-studded leather strips hung to his mid-thigh. He’d already put on greaves that looked less refined than the ones he’d lent me, but also sturdier. And he still looked pissed, but that was second nature.
I waved awkward fingers at the cuirass in my right hand. “I thought you’d need it back, but I guess not.”
He took it from me and tossed it inside the tent. “I like it, but arrows would go right through it.”
“Sure,” I said, before kneeling to undo the straps of the greaves.
“You can keep them. They’re shit.”
My fingers froze. “Are you sure? They look kind of expensive, like silver.”
“It’s not silver,” he replied, a hateful glint in his eyes as he glanced at the greaves. “Do whatever you want; I don’t have any use for them.”
“Then maybe you could sell—”
He cut me off icily. “You won’t be getting any sleep tonight; we leave soon. So, go eat, drink, piss or whatever, and join me there when you’re done.” He motioned to the guarded door leading to Clearchos’s lair as he said this.
He seemed in such a foul mood that there was no point arguing or asking questions. I shrugged and turned on my heels. “All right. Thank you anyway. I’ll go grab a bite. I won’t be long.”
I heard the tent’s flaps closing before I was even done talking. I glanced down in mild unease at my brand-new greaves which Victrix wanted nothing to do with. I figured he’d come to his senses in a few hours or a few days and threaten to punch my teeth down my throat if I didn’t surrender them back. Might as well enjoy them until then, especially if we were going to fight. The thought instantly cooled the sweat on my skin, and goose bumps bloomed on my forearms. In a few hours I’d join Victrix, Irius, and the others in their underground expedition to Nyos, but it still didn’t feel real. I couldn’t see myself as a soldier. Me, the impostor whose very presence among Clearchos’s men stemmed from a misunderstanding… and a lie.
I pondered this as I dragged my feet to Thurias’s tent. I saw again the day Victrix had found me in the woods. What would he have done if he’d realized I was a girl? Raped me for sure, and taken me to the camp all the same, but I’d be one of the whores who went to seek Gemina and Nerie for a little care, a sliver of humanity in this hell. Thurias, too, had that speck of kindness in him, I thought when his big frame came into sight, busy distributing bread to a pair of boys. Curled inside his tent, I glimpsed a blonde-haired girl whose mousy disposition was now familiar. I smiled to myself; I’d come to understand that Soa—because it was her—would have gladly made Thurias her sole patron, were it possible. She probably saw me as little more than another source of trouble to avoid, but I’d never forgotten she had been the one to bring me fresh water when I thought I might spend the rest of my days in the cage.
“Is there any left for me?” I asked. The moment the boys saw me, they scuttled away like rhagamuses, afraid. I watched them go with a sigh. “You’d think I’m some sort of monster.”
Thurias didn’t smile. His features were taut, and in the dim light of his campfire, he seemed older than his years. “They saw what happened in the pit,” he said, before fetching a loaf of milk bread from his ‘special bag’ and tearing a large piece for me.
I took it with a nod of thanks and bit into the soft center with silent delight. I had no idea where he procured those—or the cured meat and candied fruits he sometimes gave me—but I appreciated every bite. His kind eyes were on me as I ate, and I tried to ignore that their depths harbored the same flicker of sadness I’d seen in Victrix’s gaze after the fight. “Do you think it was wrong?” I asked quietly, munching on the bread.
His chest heaved in something halfway between a shrug and a sigh. “I don’t know. That’s just the way things go around here, I suppose.”
“I didn’t feel sorry afterward, you know. I felt a little bad, but I don’t think I regretted it.”
“Then maybe you’re meant for that…” He made a vague gesture with his hand, unwilling to finish. Killing, I completed inwardly. Maybe I was destined to kill for Clearchos, fated like in those legendary tales the men told around the campfire. But why would the gods have made me a girl then? Out of mean-spirited fun, surely.
Brooding over those deep questions, I was about to leave when I registered that Thurias’s attention had shifted from me to a point past my shoulder. I turned to follow the direction of his gaze. Standing at a distance among the clay spirits guarding Gemina’s tent, bathed in the crusamantes’ eerie pink light, Nerie was staring at us.
It was as if he could reach right through me and cradle my heart in his palm, and he’d see it was ugly and battered, that I had killed Ulpinus to feed my own demons, not just to avenge him. I wanted to avert my eyes and flee, pretend he wasn’t here, but I figured that’d make me a coward on top of being a liar and a girl. I forced myself to hold his gaze and walked to him.
He remained silent at first, studying me with unreadable green eyes, until he eventually said, “I heard it was a good fight, worth watching.”
I shrug
ged. “He wasn’t as strong as he thought.”
Nerie acquiesced, his gaze on my sword. One of his hands rubbed the front of his tunic absently, as if to remove a stain that wasn’t there. “I figured once I became as skilled as Gemina I could poison him.”
“I would have wanted to see that,” I admitted.
“But it’ll be years before I know all the plants, so…” He raised his chin to look me in the eye. “Thank you.”
I nodded, forcing myself to meet his gaze even if it meant baring my own to his scrutiny. “It was my pleasure.”
He pointed to my tunic. “You need a fresh one. I could smell you from across the camp.”
“Well, I got a new one from a guy, but it’s…” I waved a hand, in the general direction of my tree, where my precious satchel hung hidden in the branches—in truth, anyone who cared to check knew it was there, but I was long past worrying about getting robbed, especially after what I’d done to Ulpinus tonight.
Nerie’s features scrunched up in doubt. “Is it clean?”
I gave an eloquent shrug.
“Come inside,” he ordered. It struck me that he was starting to sound like Gemina; he didn’t take no for an answer when he considered you his responsibility.
I followed him through the shell curtain, into the peaceful haven that smelled of so many different boiled herbs. Gemina sat on a cushion, busy powdering small bones in a mortar. I glimpsed a flat skull before the pestle crushed it mercilessly—a frog, apparently. She looked up from her mixture to acknowledge my presence, and her eyes widened briefly before she schooled her features into a guarded smile. I could tell something was bothering her, but she let none of her thoughts through as she set the mortar aside and rinsed her hands in a water basin.
Meanwhile, Nerie rummaged through a chest and pulled out a clean black tunic, a pair of dark trousers, and sturdy leather wrist guards, which he tossed me. “Take those and leave your dirty clothes here. I’ll have one of the girls wash them for you.”