And yet she was a Roman woman. The enemy. There was no past between them and there could be no future. There was only the hot, shimmering present that seemed powerful enough to obliterate everything.
Including the memory of his wife.
A loud horn signalled the last of the executions. The gladiators grumbled, loathe to begin the journey that was likely to end in their own deaths.
For Cal, it might have been the perfect day to die. The men would need to fight as a group, leaving him little opportunity to defy Rome. It was kill or be killed and Cal and Felix were clearly among the gladiators who had been marked for death.
Strangely, however, he did not wish for it. He pulled his wife’s bundle of hair from the folds of his loincloth and squeezed it in his fist. He knew she was waiting for him and yet...
He tucked away his wife’s hair and took out Arria’s hairpin, rolling it between his fingers like the stem of a flower.
‘Line up to receive your weapons,’ called one of the lanistas.
Cal walked up the stairs and stood behind the door that led to the arena above. But it was as if he were not standing before one door, but two.
Behind the first door was everything he stood for, everything he was: husband, warrior, vengeance seeker, defier of Rome. To fulfil his destiny, all he had to do was open the door and proudly go to his doom.
Behind the second door was everything he wanted. In other words, behind the second door was Arria. She was waiting for him there in her tattered tunic, beckoning him with her big brown eyes. She wanted him and, by the gods, he wanted her—so badly that it made him ache. But to see her again, he had to live. He tucked her hairpin away.
The men began to take their places behind him. They spoke in hushed tones, speculating about what lay behind the door; wondering how they might survive it.
Cal should have been wondering the same. At the very least, he should have been formulating a strategy. He should have been trying to figure out how he might beat the Romans at their own bloody game.
But all he could think about was Arria and all he could feel was that strange alchemy that had him sweating and pacing and shaking his head and realising that a whisper was not going to be enough.
Not nearly enough.
* * *
Arria was shivering beneath her blanket when Oppius burst into the workshop. ‘Happy New Year,’ he huffed. He lifted the blanket from her limbs and promptly informed her that she would be helping him in the market stall that day.
‘You, too, Epona,’ he told Epona, whom he often summoned for market days. Epona closed her eyes for what seemed to Arria a little too long, then nodded.
‘Now go wash yourselves. If you are not ready in a quarter of an hour, I will beat you myself.’
Oppius glanced at Arria’s first carpet, which she used as a bed mat. ‘And you may as well bring that godforsaken thing,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps someone will buy it out of pity. Now go wash.’
Arria and Epona rushed to the courtyard. They removed their tunics and poured buckets of frigid fountain water over each other’s heads. Arria scrubbed the dust from her limbs with violent energy, relishing the cold, which distracted her from her racing thoughts. Today was the start of the games at the circus of Pergamon—the day Cal would either endure or die.
She squeezed her hair, then dipped her fingers into a small amphora of oil beside the fountain and coated her body with it. She found the dull strigil and scraped it along her shivering skin, then wordlessly handed it to Epona.
The young woman’s expression was as dreary as a shroud. To be chosen to accompany Oppius to market was no boon, for he went to market to sell more than just his wares.
Arria reached over her own shoulder and touched the tip of one of her scars. She had finally healed and was now suitable for sale. She knew that Oppius would be looking for the highest bidder for her innocence.
Epona jumped in place, trying to dry herself. ‘We must pray that the cold will keep the old lechers home today,’ she said.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Arria was stumbling on to the concrete expanse of the marketplace, yanking on the rope tied to the metal collar around her neck.
‘Pick up your feet,’ Oppius called from the driver’s bench of the horse cart she followed. A statue of Artemis was teetering on the edge of the cart, threatening to fall.
Arria moved to right it, but was stopped by a low hiss from Epona, who marched behind the cart just like Arria, wearing her own rope and collar.
Better to let it smash, Epona’s eyes told Arria, and in that moment Arria became a conspirator in what she realised was a quiet war.
Arria’s stomach rumbled as the driver brought the horse cart to a halt next to the stall. Oppius unleashed Arria first, then Epona, and the two went to work emptying the cart of its statues, carpets and blankets while Oppius wandered over to the nearby baker’s stall.
Their task complete, the two women jumped in place and Arria gazed longingly at the blankets.
‘He would beat you for it most certainly,’ said Epona, reading Arria’s mind. ‘He enjoys watching us shiver.’
Arria slid a glance at Oppius, who had purchased a rather large flatbread from the baker and lounged on a bench beside his guard. Arria thought her master looked something like a grazing bull as he sat there chewing, though she could see that he was watching them closely from behind his crust.
Arria wished the sun would emerge from behind Mount Pion and warm her bones. She had never been to the commercial marketplace this early and the place was eerily empty. The statue atop the water clock at the centre of the plaza had yet to rise above the pool and the stairs to the Serapis temple were still littered with sleeping dogs.
But Arria could already smell the smoke of the sausage merchants and could see the herbalists and the spicers setting out their colourful baskets. The sound of laughing seagulls resounded from the harbour and a faint scent of urine came up on the breeze. Arria pursed her lips.
‘If you think the Ephesus market smells bad, you have clearly never been to Rome,’ said Epona, putting her arms around her throat in a mock choke. Arria stole a worried glance at Oppius, who was thankfully busy speaking to his guard.
‘Do not fear. I know when he is not watching us,’ said Epona.
‘You have developed eyes in the back of your head?’
‘After all these years, I can tell you the moment that man is going to burp.’
‘Hazah!’ Arria giggled softly, still keeping a wary eye on Oppius. If he caught them chatting, who knew what new torture he would conjure for them to endure? ‘How do you know the markets of Rome?’ Arria asked.
‘I lived in Rome for most of my childhood,’ said Epona. ‘When I was a girl, Emperor Domitian brought most of my tribe to Rome in chains. We are known as the Chatti.’
Arria sobered. ‘I have heard of your people. I am sorry.’
Epona waved her hand in the air as if swatting flies. ‘Why sorry? It was not your doing. I was fortunate, really, for my family was sold together. We laboured on one of the wheat plantations just outside the city.’
‘How did you come to Ephesus?’
‘My mother and father—and many others—attempted to escape the plantation. They were killed in the public executions at the Ludi Capitolini and I was sold to a slave merchant bound for Delos. The rest is history.’
‘Mercy of Jupiter,’ muttered Arria.
Epona laughed. ‘I consider myself fortunate, for I am young and beautiful, or so I am told, and when I am old and ugly it will not matter, for I know how to weave.’
Epona flipped her long auburn hair behind her head and pursed her lips into the shape of a kiss. Arria laughed. Epona was indeed quite beautiful, her eyes hauntingly grey, her pale skin adorned with joyous freckles.
‘Before I was sold, I was betrothed, you know,’ Epona
added thoughtfully.
‘Really?’
‘He was also a Chatti, also brought to Rome in chains, though he was much older than I. Still, I often wonder what my life would be like had we been able to marry.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Oh, he was also executed,’ she said.
‘Great Mother Goddess.’
‘Some might call it a better destiny than ours.’
‘I do not think so,’ said Arria.
‘But you have laboured at the loom for only a few months.’
Arria nodded, though in a sense she had been at the loom much longer than that. ‘My mother once had great hopes of finding me a patrician husband,’ Arria said.
‘Don’t all mothers?’
Arria smiled. ‘It is the reason she taught me to weave and also to read. She said it would make me more desirable to a well-born man. She had a fine dowry for me...’
‘Until your father gambled it away?’
Arria nodded. ‘I would give anything to see my mother now.’
‘Be careful what you pledge before gods,’ warned Epona, stealing a glance at the cold morning sky. ‘I have found that they quite enjoy breaking our hearts.’
* * *
By mid-morning, the sun had finally come out from hiding and so had the people of Ephesus. Arria and Epona guarded their master’s merchandise while he answered the questions of passers-by and the sprawling U-shaped plaza slowly filled with souls.
Arria was just beginning to relax when she spied a large group of uniformed men walking up Harbour Street.
‘Is there an invasion I don’t know about?’ Epona quipped.
‘It is an unusual sight,’ averred Arria and she watched in alarm as the legionaries turned into the marketplace and began browsing its shops. There must have been fifty of them, each in a short red tunic covered by a chainmail shirt, a thick leather belt, a hilted gladius.
The soldiers were not shy and the young women passing near them cowered beneath the men’s lusty gazes. Several of the soldiers stopped outside the sausage cart and watched the man turn his sausages on the grill.
‘They are not allowed to enjoy meat while on duty,’ Epona remarked. ‘Or women, for that matter.’ Her grin sparkled. ‘We are off the menu.’
‘Oh, thank the gods,’ said Arria and the knot in her stomach loosened as a group of them approached.
‘Welcome, soldiers!’ greeted Oppius. ‘To which campaign do you journey?’
‘Not allowed to say,’ said one, glancing backwards at a man whom Arria guessed to be his commander, for his cuirass was made of leather, not mail, and had been shaped to follow the general contours of his chest.
The commander stopped outside their stall. ‘I was noticing the fine quality of your carpets,’ he told Oppius, his eyes ranging across Epona’s body, then Arria’s.
‘The carpets are indeed fine, Tribune,’ said Oppius with a deferential bow.
‘Which one requires the most beating?’ the man asked. His face twisted into a malicious grin.
‘This one,’ Oppius said at last, pointing to Epona.
The tribune eyed Epona closely. ‘How much for the night?’
‘Forty denarii,’ Oppius said. It was the same price he had set for the smaller carpets.
‘And that one?’ he asked, pointing to Arria.
‘That one is more expensive. She is, shall I say, fresh off the loom.’
The tribune laughed wickedly. ‘A carpet merchant who is also a poet! I should have known the great port of Ephesus would produce such a soul.’
‘I am here to serve the Empire,’ said Oppius.
‘In that case wait for me a moment and I shall return with your richest client yet.’
Arria felt the seconds stretch out. She braved a glance at Epona, whose sparkling eyes had grown dark and hollow.
In minutes the tribune had returned with a tall, white-haired man whose wrinkled face and yellowed teeth betrayed an advanced age. ‘Here she is, Legate,’ said the tribune. ‘Pretty and unsullied, just as you like them.’
The old man tossed his red cape over his shoulder and squinted at Arria. ‘How much?’
‘Eighty denarii, Legate,’ said Oppius. ‘A fair price. And half of it returned if she does not bleed.’
The old man nodded thoughtfully. ‘I will have her, then. And my good tribune here will take the other. We will return at sundown to fetch them.’ The legate reached into a small leather purse. ‘Here is proof of our good faith.’
He handed Oppius a silver coin and Oppius gave a sweeping bow. ‘Officers, it is a pleasure doing business with you.’
Chapter Twelve
For Cal, the moments before he stepped into the arena were always the same: he would close his eyes and remember the day his wife died. That is what he did now as the trumpets blared and the door of Pergamon’s underground barracks slowly opened.
He gazed at the stands. Instead of spectators, he pictured soldiers. He saw his Caledonii tribesmen gathered on the steepest slope of Graupius Mountain, thirty thousand strong. He saw their painted bodies, imagined their fearsome voices filling the air. How brazenly they had awaited the Roman approach, so confident in their higher ground.
Cal pictured the Roman army, that terrible iron serpent. He remembered how the Roman infantry soldiers had marched up the valley and come to a halt in its cleft, turning beneath their shields to avoid the Caledonii arrows and how he and the other Caledonii warriors had poured down from above, heedless of the danger.
He remembered watching in horror as his countrymen reached the valley and began to fall beneath Roman javelins. One man. Two men. Five. Twenty. Their slashing broadswords were useless in the close quarters of the chasm. Their wild, violent movements were overmatched by the Romans’ short, precise ones and soon ten thousand Caledonii bodies littered the river, turning its water red. He remembered picking his way through the carnage, searching for survivors and finding none.
He had hurried back to his town to discover it plundered and burning, and remembered how the bodies had been piled like haystacks. He pictured the remains of his hut and the charred black figure at its centre, lying atop the remains of their wedding mat.
He opened his eyes. Moments ago, he had been thinking of Arria, yearning for her, even. But how could he ever even dream of another woman? His wife was all that existed, or ever would exist. No craving or passing fancy or pang of lust could take away his love for his wife, or the pain of that moment when he saw her burnt figure. Time could pass, memories could fade, every woman on earth could lay herself down at Cal’s feet. There would never be any day other than that one, and there would never be any woman other than Rhiannon.
The crowd exploded in cheers. The gladiators marched out on to the hippodrome sands. ‘Filthy barbarians!’ someone shouted. The crowd hissed as the scantily armed warriors fanned out on to the empty field.
At the other end of the field, a phalanx of fifty well-armed men appeared. They were dressed as Roman soldiers.
They were not soldiers, of course—nor were they at all Roman. They were slaves and captives—‘barbarians’ just like Cal. But it did not matter. The Roman spectators would have their spectacle and, judging by the dull, rusted condition of the gladius Cal had been issued, they would also have their blood.
‘We must stay together!’ someone cried, but the other gladiators were already breaking ranks. One of the men bolted towards the stands and a javelin skewered his neck.
The gladiators dressed as Romans were almost upon them. If Cal wanted to die, this would be the day.
Cal stepped backwards and put up his rusty sword like a shield. Felix was standing behind him. ‘By the gods, Cal, fight.’ But Cal did not want to fight the Roman imposters. They were not his real enemies.
Two more men collapsed beside him, pierced by arrows, and it se
emed that the corpses of his own team of gladiators were piling up beneath his feet. Soon it was as if he were not in a circus at all, but a narrow green valley, and the Romans were advancing like an army of the dead.
But instead of his wife, he thought of Arria. ‘Tell your master to purchase me for the night of your victory,’ she had told him. ‘Help me keep a small piece of my soul...’
Peace be damned. He wanted to live. He began to swing his gladius.
‘That is more like it,’ said Felix.
His first kill was easy—a deep stab into a bulging gut. The collapsing body revealed a snarling man whose throat Cal slit for mercy. The next kills came harder, for their opponents had fine shields and well-honed swords. Cal had to scurry around them to gain advantage and soon found himself hacking at limbs.
He fought like the savage barbarian the crowd thought he was. With each spout of blood, they cheered. With each severed limb, they roared. Soon only himself and Felix remained. They stood atop a pile of bodies like actors atop a stage.
‘Why do they not cheer for us anymore?’ asked Felix.
‘Because we are the enemy, remember? We are not Roman.’
‘Well, it is over, so they can all just suck my—’
But it was not over. At the far end of the field, two men emerged from the barracks, donning the regalia of Roman officers. They carried mighty longswords, which they slashed through the air to the delight of the crowd. The larger officer wore a legate’s red cape and an expression full of malevolent joy.
‘You take the tribune,’ said Cal. ‘I will take the legate.’
That was when he heard the bell.
* * *
Arria hovered at the back of the stall, trying to understand what had happened. Had her innocence just been sold for the price of two carpets? She peered at Epona, who appeared to be on the verge of tears. That was when Arria heard the bell.
It was a low, mournful sound—one of tin, not bronze—and hauntingly familiar. Such bells were often rung by female beggars—destitute women who prowled the marketplaces pleading for scraps.
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