Blood Debts

by Ashley Gardner

  The fact that Quintus hadn’t gone after the money owed himself meant that Selenius frightened him. Selenius might be surrounded by bodyguards or have a vicious disposition, more inclined to have a small man beaten than pay his debt to him. What luck that I’d come along this morning.

  But there was nothing for it. Unless I turned the baker upside down and shook him, I would not return with money today. The thought of facing Cassia empty-handed was not a happy one.

  “Where is this Gaius Selenius?” I asked, resigned.

  Quintus brightened. “On the Clivus Suburanus, in a macellum near the Porticus Liviae. His shop is in the middle of the market, by the atrium. He’s a money-changer.”

  Better and better. Money-changers were a despised class of men, lumped with usurers and tax collectors. Even gladiators, though we were infamis, at the very bottom of society, had higher reputations.

  I abruptly turned from Quintus without a farewell or another word, joining the crowds in the increasing heat of the day. Once the sun hit its zenith, in the sixth hour, shops would close, business would halt, and men and women alike would wander to the baths, to meals, to lounge in the shade and wait for evening. I’d go back to sleep.

  Once in the street, I turned down a winding lane toward the Clivus Suburanus. The twisting sway was so narrow I could lift my arms and touch walls on either side, and still my elbows would be bent. Despite the stink of refuse that curled in my nose, the tall, crammed-together buildings in this passageway shaded me from the blazing sun.

  At the end of this lane, I turned into a wider, airy street of shops that were doing a brisk business. A tavern served food and drink to plenty of people who’d found time to stop and ingest barley and beans, soup and pork.

  All manner of things were sold on this street—silk cloth from the east, spices and peppers, clay lamps and pots, fruits and vegetables, fresh flowers, sandals, and the baskets to carry it all in. A person could clothe himself, get his dinner, light his house and decorate it, buy his bedding, and purchase a pot for his slops, without ever having to turn a corner.

  I’d lived most of my life in this city, first snatching survival in the streets, then in prison, then in the ludus. The lanista didn’t lock us in; we were free to move about and take odd jobs in the city, as long as we were back in our cells at dusk.

  But I hadn’t really seen the place until I’d emerged from the ludus a free man. The city had gained a new tint, the stones a golden glow, the hills a grandeur. Even the fires that constantly burned gave it a scent that I’d come to associate with my home.

  I turned at last to the Clivus Suburanus and found the passage leading to the macellum—an indoor marketplace housed within a large building. I ducked in, following the baker’s directions.

  This macellum was owned by a patrician who probably lived in a villa in the hills. He’d turned his property into rental spaces for sellers of food and other goods. The main building had shops around all of the outer walls and a few in the middle near the atrium. I had been here before—thick walls and the arched roof kept out the heat, which made it a popular place.

  A niche in a wall inside the main door held a terra cotta carving of an erect phallus, a symbol of fertility—five times the size of any man’s prick and correct in every detail. It was customary to give such statues around the city a rub for good fortune. I gave this one a pat in passing, both for luck and in hopes of sympathetic magic. My phallic instrument had been sleeping as much as I had lately.

  The macellum was quieter than usual, only a few slaves in tunics buying wares for whatever household they worked for. Two were Gauls, with very pale hair and blue eyes, wooden baskets on their arms to hold what they purchased for their master or mistress. They were big men, muscular and tall. I was taller than most Roman men, which made people question my ancestry, but these two both topped me by an inch.

  They stopped and stared at me as I went by. They might have recognized me from the games or they thought me as unusual as I thought them.

  The two slaves finished their transaction across the counter of the stall nearest the main entrance, a vendor of garum, the smelly fermented fish sauce that made Cassia blench.

  As I reached the inner shops near the atrium, all was quiet. It was nearly midday, and most of the vendors in here had already shut down, slipping away home for a nap or to the baths to relax.

  Selenius had one of the innermost shops, a square room with a door on one side, and a counter on another, which could be closed off by a series of vertical wooden boards stuck into slots in the counter and locked in place with iron bars. Other shops had already put in their boards, guarding whatever was inside from casual thieves until they opened the next day.

  I was relieved to see Selenius’s shop still open. The sooner I made him give over Quintus’s money, the sooner I could drop our earnings in front of Cassia and resume my sleep.

  The mosaic tiles on his counter spelled out words, possibly that this was the place of Selenius. I glanced about for bodyguards but saw none. I didn’t like that. A man who dealt in coins, counting out Roman ones in exchange for whatever people in the far-flung corners of the world used for money, had to be cautious. Coins ran the Roman Empire, and everyone wanted them.

  Selenius didn’t appear to be here either. I wondered if someone had run ahead and warned him I was coming. If so, he’d left his shop open to all who might traipse through at this quiet hour.

  There wasn’t much light inside the shop. The only illumination came through the square hole in the exact center of the building, which lit the atrium, much like it would in a rich man’s private house.

  I could see nothing in the shadows over the counter, so I walked to the open door that would let Selenius in and out, and peered inside.

  The shop was about ten feet wide on a side, perhaps ten feet high, a perfect cube. There was another door, I saw from this point, a shorter one that presumably led to the shop next door.

  I noted a long bench, which Selenius would set outside when he was open for business—the inside of the shop was for storage and safeguarding his stockpiles of coin. I saw no coin, however, but it likely had been taken away and locked up for the day.

  As I ran my gaze over the space, it came to rest on a man lying in an unmoving huddle under the counter. His face, head, hands, legs, and long tunic were soaked with blood, and blood had spread in a puddle that stopped shy of the doorway where I stood. A black line ran across his throat, and his eyes were fixed in frozen terror.

  I stood in silence, looking down at the man, trying to feel horror, dismay, fear … but there was nothing. I remained unmoving, as though the entire world had come to a halt, until a small noise made me jerk my head up.

  The door across the shop had opened. A boy stood on the threshold, a small lad clutching a cup with my name etched on it. He gaped over the blood at me, eyes wide, and then he dropped the cup, which shattered into the crimson pool at his feet.

  Chapter 2

  “Stay there,” I said in a hard voice.

  The boy remained frozen in place, his chest moving with his sharp intake of breath.

  I backed out of the doorway I stood in and strode rapidly to the next shop. I reasoned it must be unlocked if the boy had come through it, but it was not. The boards had been fixed in place above the counter, the iron bars firmly run through rings in the boards and into the stone walls. No opening under the counter or around the side of the wall held any crevice that would admit a small boy. Then how had he gotten in?

  I returned to Selenius’s stall, the boy obediently waiting. Terrified, he still followed the orders of Leonidas, champion of the games.

  I stepped carefully around the pool of blood, the stink of it making my vision blur. I sucked in deep breaths through my mouth, willing my thoughts to remain in the present, and skirted the blood to reach the boy.

  “How did you get here?” I demanded.

  He pointed to the black opening of the door behind him. I couldn’t see where it went
but a noisome smell leeched from the shadows.

  I glanced at the man on the floor—I assumed he was Selenius, though I’d never met him. The blood came not from many injuries but from the large one across his throat. The vessels in his neck had been severed, and blood had poured forth to kill him quickly.

  Whoever had done this had known exactly where to cut. It was the sort of execution a soldier would know how to perform—or a gladiator.

  Very little frightened me anymore, but the thought of being tried for another murder, found guilty, and tossed back into the arena filled me with slow dread. Quintus the baker had sent me here—had he known Selenius lay dead and hoped I’d be taken for the crime?

  I thought of Quintus’s polished face and ingenuous dark eyes, which I swore had no guile in them, apart from avoiding payment of my fee. He might be as ignorant of this death as I’d been.

  No matter what, we couldn’t linger. The boy had stooped to the fragments of his precious cup. I pushed his hands away, not wanting him to cut himself on the shards, but I gathered every single one of them. Put together, they had my name on them, and I wanted no connection in anyone’s mind between dead Selenius and Leonidas the Gladiator.

  I shoved the fragments into the pouch at my belt and leaned down to lift the boy. Before I could, he grabbed one more piece from the floor, and then I hefted him into my arms.

  He weighed next to nothing, bones in a threadbare tunic.

  I decided not to ask where he lived. If I carried him home, people would remember—I could not move a step in this city without it being remarked upon.

  It would be the talk of every supper for days to come if I were seen walking about the city with a small boy under my arm. I couldn’t hide him under a convenient toga, because ex-gladiators, freedmen who were barely human, didn’t wear them.

  “Where does that lead?” I pointed through the doorway behind him.

  “Down,” was the helpful reply.

  He’d come in here, so he must be able to get out. I ducked with him through the doorway to find a brick-lined passage that soon grew very dark. I smelled waste, human and animal, which meant this tunnel probably went to a maintenance hatch to the sewers. Rome was pockmarked with shafts that led to the considerable network of tunnels and sewers that crawled to every corner of Rome.

  The boy was much smaller than I was—I hoped he didn’t expect me to slither through tiny orifices in the bowels of Rome. It would be a stupid death for me to get stuck in an opening with the city’s waste flushing through it to drown me.

  I set the lad on his feet but kept hold of his hand. “Show me,” I said as I closed the door behind us.

  He started off at a rapid pace, dragging me down low-ceilinged tunnels, my skin scraping on the walls as I staggered along.

  We twisted and eventually plunged downward, the stone floor sloping inward from the walls, but not to the sewers as I’d feared. The last passage ended in a rough set of steps that led down to a wooden door.

  I carefully opened this door and peered out.

  It took me a moment to gain my bearings. We were at the base of the Esquiline Hill, near the area called the Figlinae, where potters had their factories. The street before me was lined with shops, this obscure narrow door obviously for maintenance purposes. People thronged here as they did everywhere, barely noticing us as we emerged from a battered door in a wall of shops and warehouses to blend in with them.

  A short walk took us to the fountain of Orpheus at a broad crossroads, where a marble Orpheus tried to tame stone animals with his lyre. We turned here and journeyed back through the Subura to the Forum Augusti, where I lost hold of the boy’s hand in the crush of people.

  In three steps I caught up to him and lifted him into my arms. The boy never struggled or cried out, didn’t protest or question. He simply rode against my chest, sanguine that his hero Leonidas held him.

  I hefted him around the corner toward the wine shop, and then took the wooden stairs two at a time, to burst through the door into our apartment.

  Cassia looked up from the tablets and scrolls that surrounded her, her pen falling from her fingers in surprise. She leapt to her feet, one scroll rolling up on itself and spattering ink, as I lowered the boy to his feet and shut the door.

  “This is Cassia,” I said to the boy. “She’ll take care of you.”

  I had the pleasure of seeing Cassia, who always knew what to say at every occasion, at a loss for words. She opened her mouth, switched her stare to the lad, closed her mouth, and looked back at me.

  “Who—?”

  “I don’t know,” I cut her off. “I found him. Or, he found me. The money-changer is dead—Quintus sent me to collect a debt from him, but he’s dead. Someone killed him.”

  I spit out the explanation as swiftly as possible, my entire body willing me to walk across the room and collapse upon my bed. I’d sleep and let Cassia sort it all out. When she’d finished, she’d wake me and tell me what to do.

  Her mouth hung open again, showing even white teeth against her red tongue. She moved her gaze to the boy, who had put his fingers to his lower lip and watched her apprehensively.

  “Killed?” she repeated in a faint voice.

  “Murdered, butchered, his throat sliced. Professional.” I moved my arm as though I cut across a man’s throat. “I came here. I told no one.”

  As I spoke, I untied my pouch from my belt and shook the fragments of terra cotta onto the table. Cassia touched them, mystified.

  “Give me the piece you picked up,” I said to the boy. “Cassia can stick this together for you again.”

  Cassia turned over the shard that had Leonidas scratched on it, and her lips formed an O.

  The boy opened his fist and dropped what he held onto the table. It wasn’t a fragment, or even pottery, but a small roll of papyrus.

  Cassia snatched it up and smoothed it out, her eyes widening as she studied the spidery writing within. She sat down, her interest caught, her entire body growing animated as it did when something intrigued her.

  “Where did he find this?” she asked without looking up.

  “At Selenius’s shop,” I said. “I thought he’d picked up another piece of the cup.”

  “No.” Cassia turned the paper around and held it up to me as though I’d be astonished by it. Then she seemed to remember I couldn’t read a word and laid it back down. “It’s a voucher. For a traveling patron to change for Roman coin.”

  I didn’t respond. When Cassia began speaking like a scribe I gave up following her. I crouched down by the boy who was torn between bewilderment and fascination.

  “What’s your name, lad?”

  The boy took his fingers out of his mouth. “Sergius.”

  I waited, but he said nothing more. I didn’t know if that was his praenomen or his family or clan name. He might have had no other if he was a boy from the streets. What if he was from a brothel?

  My chest burned. I’d gone to brothels ever since I’d figured out what my wick was for, and as a gladiator I’d been a welcome guest—my lanista paid for the best. I favored women only, fully grown ones, that is, but there were plenty of Romans who indulged in young men; for some, the younger the better.

  Lads and girls Sergius’s age would have no choice but to fulfill the indulgence. They weren’t old enough to seek a living elsewhere, and likely their parents had sold them to the brothels when they couldn’t afford to feed them.

  The children in these places were hollow-eyed and broken, knowing they could not protest or stop anything the customers wanted to do to them. I’d noticed the relief on their faces whenever I walked past them for the women who actually had breasts and hips.

  I’d not been able to do a damn thing to help them. I had been owned myself at the time, and now I barely had enough to keep me and Cassia fed. I hadn’t been back to the brothels in a long time.

  But I’d sacrifice to any god willing to listen to keep this little lad away from them—a boy whose only delight was a
cheap cup with my name on it.

  “Do you have a family?” I asked him.

  Sergius considered this and then shook his head.

  “Where do you live then?”

  “With Alba.”

  Since any number of women in the empire could be called Alba, this didn’t help much.

  “Is she your mother?”

  A shake of his head, a faint distaste that I’d even think so.

  “Mistress of a brothel?” I asked.

  A nod. That clinched the matter. He’d not be returning to Alba.

  “Did she send you on an errand today?” I continued.

  Another nod.

  “And what was this errand?”

  “Fish sauce. Then I saw you.”

  Cassia had lifted her head to listen, her elbows on the table as she held the small piece of papyrus between her fingers.

  “And you followed me,” I said. “After I left the baker’s.”

  Sergius gave me a single nod. “Took a shortcut.”

  Interesting. “How did you know where I was going?”

  “I heard Quintus tell you to go to Selenius. I ran to get there first.”

  “And what did you see?”

  Horror crept into his eyes. “Saw him dead.”

  “That was Selenius, was it?”

  Sergius nodded vigorously. “Didn’t like him. Mean. Ugly. Stank.”

  He hadn’t smelled that good dead either. “You knew him?”

  “Saw him about when I went to the market for Alba. He had his slave kick me if I came too close to his bench. Once he knocked me down.”

  My anger at Selenius bloomed, no matter the man was dead.

  The small slip of papyrus fluttered between Cassia’s fingers, distracting me. I eyed it in irritation. “What is that? Explain in words I will understand.”

  Cassia laid down the paper and smoothed it out, taking on the patient look she did whenever she had to teach me something.

  “When a man from the outreaches of the empire decides to travel to the city of Rome, he will need money. But it is dangerous to walk the roads with a box full of coins if one does not have armed bodyguards every step of the way. Therefore, a man can go to a merchant or shipping agent who is part of a business in Rome, pay a certain amount of money, and obtain a voucher. When he reaches Rome, he takes the voucher to a shipping agent of the same company, who will then give him the amount he paid in. A small fee is involved, of course, but this way, a man can travel and not risk being robbed of all he has in the world.”