Blood Debts

by Ashley Gardner

  I took advantage of Cassia putting the endive into her mouth to break in. “You asked about the forgeries outright?”

  Cassia swallowed and sipped her wine. “I hinted. Young Gaius crumpled at once. He was so ashamed, and begged me to say nothing. His uncle, you see, and another friend, had come up with the idea. Selenius would give out these chits to select friends for nothing, they would hie off to whatever city accepted them, and the shipping agents there would pay out. The friends would then return to Selenius, and they’d divide the lot.”

  I’d thought of something similar as I dozed in the baths.

  “Wouldn’t the agents in the other cities catch on after a while?” I asked. “When their money was never replenished?”

  “Ah.” Cassia smiled, her melancholy fleeing. “That is the beauty of it. Selenius would pay back one of them. Then a man would arrive with another false voucher for a smaller amount of money from the same shipping agent. Selenius would then use that money plus more from the take to pay the next agent. Then one of his friends would withdraw funds from him, bring it to Selenius, and he’d pay the next one in line. He had all the agents believing they’d been paid back, when in fact, he was floating the same money from one to the other to the other. Astonishing.”

  Cassia sat back, a little smile on her face. Any clever arrangement involving numbers pleased her. The fact that Selenius and his friends had committed blatant fraud and theft was beside the point.

  “Even so.” I lifted my bowl, poured the last drop of broth into my mouth, and set the bowl down with a thump. “Someone would catch on eventually. Maybe they did.”

  “And were so angry that they killed Selenius?” Cassia finished, nodding. “I think so too. I’ve asked young Gaius to give me a list of names of these shipping agents who’ve been skimmed. I promised I’d say nothing—his uncle is dead and can’t answer for the crime anymore—and Gaius will find a way to pay back all the money without argument. I’ll discover if any of these men were in Rome yesterday, and if so, we’ll find them and see if they indeed killed Selenius in a rage. Rest assured, your name will be cleared, Leonidas.”

  She spoke with great confidence, but I knew better than to relax. If Romans decided they wanted justice, they’d have it, no matter who had to pay. They might think a champion gladiator being torn apart by wild beasts a fitting end to the problem.

  I finished my meal in silence. Cassia chattered on, about Selenia, the sister, and her grief. Cassia had pretended to be a slave working for Marcianus to gain admittance to Selenius’s house and ask questions—in fact, Marcianus had accompanied her, saying he’d been sent to look at Selenius’s body.

  “Marcianus confirmed that Selenius was killed midmorning yesterday, as he suspected, which ought to clear you. You were fast asleep.”

  True. The idea of bed appealed to me, so I rose and set down my wine cup.

  “They’re looking for a man,” I announced. “I heard this in the baths. A shopkeeper said he saw a man come out of the center of the shops but not go in, much earlier than he saw me. I think they’re talking about the man I met in the tunnels. He was afraid, and he had blood on him.” I’d thought I’d caused the blood on his tunic, but Marcianus had said I’d given his wrist a clean break, so perhaps not. “I’ll look for him in the morning.”

  I mumbled this last as I walked into my bedchamber and kicked off my sandals. My tunic followed them to the floor, and I pulled a blanket around my naked body before stretching out on my pallet and entering the land of Morpheus.

  My oblivion lasted a few hours and then I was awake again. This happened sometimes—either I slept for a night and half a day, or I woke in the small hours, slumber eluding me.

  I pulled on my tunic Cassia had hung on its hook and slid on my sandals, which were now lined up in perfect parallel by the wall.

  The rest of the apartment was as neat, the supper things long gone, towels folded, Cassia’s tablets and papers stacked at exact right angles to the table.

  I expected to see Cassia in her bed, curled on her side. In sleep was the only time she allowed herself to be untidy, her limbs askew and her hair tumbling.

  Her pallet was empty, however, the blanket smooth. I felt a moment of alarm, then I heard a rustle from the balcony. Releasing a breath, I stepped through the doorway to the flat space that served as our makeshift terrace.

  Cassia sat on the one stool that we kept here, a folding tripod she’d found secondhand at a market stall. She leaned back against the wall of our apartment, moonlight glittering on her tear-streaked cheeks.

  I paused in perplexity. Cassia scolding, lecturing, teasing, or rolling her eyes at me I understood. Cassia crying, I did not.

  She hadn’t even wept when she’d discovered she’d been tossed from the lavish villa in which she’d grown up to be slave to a former gladiator, a brute of a man who was the lowest of the low.

  My foot crunched on grit as I stepped out to the balcony. Cassia jumped and wiped her eyes.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked with an attempt at her usual brightness.

  I dropped to sit on the edge and dangle my legs over the wall. We had no railing here, wooden or otherwise, but the space was wide. We didn’t worry about thieves climbing up from the street to our apartment because we had nothing to steal.

  “No,” I answered. “What makes you cry?”

  I heard her start, as though she’d expected I would not notice. “Nothing important.”

  Though I’d lived solely with men all my life, I’d known enough women to realize this was not a true answer. Women said, It’s nothing, when it was the most serious thing on earth.

  I also knew that cajoling her would do no good. If Cassia did not want to tell me a thing, she would keep it firmly to herself.

  I faced the street, listening to the rumble of delivery wagons and the shouts of carters in the distance.

  We sat in silence for a while. A cooling breeze drifted through the narrow street below, driving away the smells and stuffiness of the June night. I thought of Sergius resting his head trustingly on my shoulder as I carried him the long way to Marcella’s farm.

  “I like children,” I said.

  Cassia drew an abrupt breath. “Pardon?”

  “I like children,” I repeated without turning to her. I mused on this for a moment. “I didn’t know.”

  I heard a rustling and then Cassia was beside me, folding herself to sit and hang her legs next to mine. She stared off into the street as I did. “I think I do too,” she said. “Or perhaps I simply like Sergius.”

  “Maybe.”

  Again we fell silent, both of us marveling at this new thing we’d discovered about ourselves. The coolness and moonlight transformed Rome into a silver and black mosaic, the harsh lines of the buildings softening, the smell of so many people packed together eased.

  “Do you think our benefactor is keeping you from being questioned for the killing?” Cassia asked in a quiet voice.

  Our benefactor hadn’t showed his hand, or the rest of him, for that matter, in our lives since he’d found me this apartment and sent Cassia to me. As far as I knew, he’d forgotten about us.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We watched the moonlight for a while, cut by the smoke from the perpetual fires burning to heat the baths. Entire forests had been razed to keep Romans in warm bathwater.

  “You are a good man, Leonidas,” Cassia said. “I will find out who did this crime and clear you of its taint. I promise you.”

  I rested my hand over hers and gave it a brief squeeze.

  We sat again for a while before she gently withdrew her hand and climbed to her feet. Without a word, I stood and let her lead me back into the house.

  I went straight to bed, exhaustion coming over me once more. I removed my sandals and lay down in my tunic this time, pulling the blanket to my chin.

  As I drifted off, I felt the blanket be adjusted, a light hand resting briefly on my forehead. Then her voice, softly singing, Ca
ssia’s liquid tones easing the noise of my thoughts. Sleep came like a friend this time, and I surrendered into its arms.

  Dawn light tapped at my eyelids. “Leonidas!”

  The frenzied whisper mixed with the gray light woke me. I raised my head to find Cassia at the end of my bed, dressed, her hair coiffed, her eyes round.

  I’d thrown off my blanket in the night, so I sat up, the tunic bunched around my thighs, and rubbed a hand over my face. I gave a wordless grunt for answer.

  “He’s here,” Cassia went on in the same whisper. “The man who attacked you in the tunnels. He’s asking for your help. Prostrating himself for it, I should say. Do get up—please.”

  Chapter 8

  I swung my feet to the floor, the inside of my mouth tasting musty. Barefoot, sleep in my eyes, I trod to the outer room, Cassia behind me.

  My man from the tunnels was facedown on the floor, a mass of dark skin, bones, rags, and hair. A bandage wrapped around his right wrist, the only clean piece of cloth on him. He lifted his head when he heard me come in, his dark eyes filled with terror.

  “Help me,” he pleaded. “They’re after me.”

  “Who?” I asked, but I knew. The magistrates needed someone to answer for this crime, and when they couldn’t pin it on me, they’d find the next person any witness had seen. Exactly why I’d spirited Sergius out of town.

  “I did not kill this money-changer,” he said. “I was in the tunnels to hide, not to murder.”

  “And to rob,” I said. “You attacked me.”

  “I feared you’d come to drag me back.”

  “Back where?” I demanded.

  “The quarries,” Cassia said from behind me. “Look at his hands.”

  Slaves put into the quarries or mines around the empire didn’t last long. They were worked from dawn to dusk and beyond, given little to eat and little time to sleep. When one died, he was replaced with another. As there had been so many prisoners taken in battle and captured in vanquished cities throughout Rome’s history, the next body wasn’t hard to find.

  “I come from Espania,” the young man went on. “My name is Balbus. My master sold me to the quarries when he brought me to Rome. I ran away. I hid in the tunnels. Now they think I killed the money-changer. I never did.”

  For a flicker of time, I wished I was back in the ludus. There, I’d never had to think—every hour of my existence was planned. I knew exactly what I had to do every moment of the day. Even when I was out on my own, I knew how long the job I’d been hired to do would take and what time I was expected to return.

  Now I had to decide for myself what to do. I could not pass off the responsibility to another person, or shrug and ignore the world.

  Too many possibilities presented themselves to me. If I helped Balbus escape, I might be arrested for the murder with him. Even our benefactor might not be able to help me then.

  If I did not assist Balbus, he’d be rounded up by the cohorts or the vigiles and tried for a crime he might not have committed. They’d condemn him to the games to be torn apart by beasts or throw him right back into the quarry to be worked until he dropped dead.

  On the other hand, if I gave up Balbus to the magistrates, the crime would be considered solved, and I’d be left in peace.

  But a terrified, desperate, and innocent man would die. I could not be the one who condemned him.

  Then again, if I helped a wanted criminal and was caught and executed with him—what would happen to Cassia?

  The last question made me pause the longest. If I were taken and condemned, Cassia might suffer a similar fate. When a slave killed a man in a house, all the slaves there could be put to death as an example to others. Cassia’s life was not her own. The best I could hope was that our benefactor would step in and give her to another master, one who wouldn’t be cruel to her.

  I cursed our benefactor under my breath. A wealthy and powerful man—we assumed—had taken charge of our lives for whatever reason—and we didn’t know who he was. When he could be useful and solve this problem, he was a ghost.

  “Did anyone see you come here?” I asked Balbus.

  “It was dark,” he answered, his voice weak. “I don’t think so.”

  I couldn’t send him to Marcella. The thought of Xerxes’s wife and children, along with Sergius, rounded up and sold into slavery for harboring a fugitive and an escaped slave rippled bile through my stomach.

  “I know a place you can hide,” I heard myself say.

  Cassia remained silent. She not expressing an opinion surprised me, and I glanced at her to see that her expression held relief and approval. In her eyes, I’d made the right choice.

  “Stand up,” I told Balbus. My voice took on the tones of my toughest trainer. “You’re going to be scrubbed and shaved. Then I’ll take you to a place. You say nothing from now on. Understand?”

  Balbus opened his mouth to answer, then closed it and gave a nod.

  Cassia snatched up her palla and wrapped it around her, ducking past me and outside. She lifted the pot we used to fetch water as she went, and I knew she was on her way to the fountain at the end of the street. This would not be seen as unusual, as she moved purposely to and from this fountain every morning.

  I had Balbus next to my bed, naked and shivering, by the time she returned, his rags of clothes in a corner ready to be taken out and burned.

  Cassia kept her modest self on the balcony while I sluiced water over Balbus and scraped him down with my strigil—we had no oil, so water would have to do. I doused him again when I finished. The water was cold, and he let out a strangled shriek, which he suppressed when I glared at him.

  I barbered him myself as well. I stropped a blade while Balbus watched nervously, and then I shaved him clean, face, scalp, and all. I was not trained with a razor, and usually had my whiskers scraped by the barber down the street, but I had a steady hand and only nicked him a few times.

  I swept up his fallen hair and put it with his clothes to be incinerated—who knew what vermin was in it?

  Any tunic I lent him would fall right off him, but Cassia had already solved the problem. While I debated what to put on him, she came inside, averting her gaze, and thrust a handful of cloth at me.

  This turned out to be one of her under-tunics, hastily cut so it would end just above Balbus’s knobby knees. There wasn’t much difference between a slave woman’s garb and a man’s, so I soon had him tucked into it, a rope tied around his waist.

  Once I was done, Balbus looked a completely different person. Gone was the scraggly hair and beard that had hidden his face, and the dirt that had given him a foul odor. Before us stood a respectable-looking if overly thin slave, his broken wrist rewrapped in a clean bandage. I’d wrapped my own and my fellow gladiators’ broken and sprained limbs often enough to become almost as good at it as Marcianus.

  Only when I was ready to march the man out did Cassia come to me. “Where is this safe place you will take him?”

  I shook my head. “If I don’t tell you, you won’t have to lie if you’re questioned.”

  Cassia pursed her lips as she thought about this, and then stepped back and let us go.

  I put a heavy hand on Balbus’s shoulder and steered him out of the apartment and down the stairs. When we reached the street I ordered him to walk one step behind me, and if he valued his life, not to run off. I’d kill him myself if he did, I promised him.

  It was the first hour, and Rome was coming alive. Plebeian men and women, freedmen, freedwomen, and slaves rushed about to buy food and drink for the day, and to run errands before the sun climbed too high. Bakers shoveled bread into and out of roaring ovens; fish sellers yelled that their catches were fresh from the coast; fowl clucked and fussed; and vegetable sellers set out mountains of lettuces, cabbages, fresh green stalks of asparagus, and baskets of berries gathered from the nearby fields.

  I could not resist pausing to buy a small measure of strawberries, using the coins Cassia had replenished in my pouch. I ate
the bright, cool berries as we walked along, sharing a grudging few with Balbus, as a master might do with a slave.

  Balbus was starving, I could see that. Where he was going they’d at least give him a meal. Probably a good one.

  I took him to the river via the Campus Martius, not wanting to cut through the Forum Romanum at its busiest hour. We crossed the river at the Pons Agrippae and entered the Transtiberim, that growing expanse of Rome on the other side of the Tiber.

  When the bored guard at my hiding place saw me, he gave a look of surprise, but unlatched the gate and let us in without question.

  The sound of the gate closing after us gave me a moment’s qualm, the habitual shiver at being locked in. I forced the qualm to pass, reminding myself that I could walk out again whenever I liked, a free man.

  The yard behind the wall was full of activity. The morning coolness was as good for training as it was for the rest of Rome to conduct business and shop.

  Men in nothing but loincloths industriously hacked at posts with wooden swords. Others built muscles by lifting lead weights or did various exercises under the tongue-lashing of a trainer, and still others sparred in the middle of the dirt yard.

  Balbus looked around and shrank back. “This is …” he whispered, then remembered his vow not to speak.

  “My ludus,” I finished. “This is where you will hide.”

  “Leonidas!” A good-natured bellow filled the yard, causing all training to stop.

  The gladiators wiped brows, lifted off leather helmets, looked around. They stared—some in welcome, others in hostility, the tiros I didn’t know in eager curiosity. A retired primus palus visiting the school was something to talk about.

  The man who’d shouted had a body full of scars, a left ear half gone, and was missing several fingers on one hand. He was one of the hardest, toughest men I’d met in my life. Under his bullying, I’d become a champion.