Blood Debts

by Ashley Gardner

  At the moment, the man’s grin could light the sky. “I knew you’d come back to me!” he shouted.

  His voice was thunderous. All of Rome would know I’d come back too.

  Aemilianus, or Aemil as he was called, had in his day been the most dangerous gladiator in the empire. He’d always fought to win, no draws. He’d retired ten years ago, bought a handful of gladiators and opened this school. He trained the best, like me and Xerxes, and aediles paid whatever Aemil asked in order to put on the most lavish games.

  Aemil had the light brown hair of a Gaul, but what set him apart from other Gauls was that one of his eyes was blue, the other a green-brown color. He’d often fought without a helmet so that his mismatched eyes could unnerve his opponents, which was why he was missing part of an ear.

  He had a Gaul’s build, large and bulky as opposed to the shorter trimness of a Roman. Aemil had a theory that I was part Gaul too, as I was fairly tall and broad, and that could be true. I had no knowledge of my family. I’d been on the streets alone since my memories began.

  “Who’s this?” Aemil asked, staring bluntly at Balbus.

  I grabbed the young man by the neck, which seemed to be the best way to haul him about, and drew him forward. “Can you put him to work?” When Aemil hesitated, I added. “I’ll pay.”

  “You bring me a slave, and you’ll pay me?” Aemil eyed Balbus, who had the sense to keep his mouth shut. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Underfoot.” I snapped out the word.

  “Ah.” Aemil nodded sagely. “Your woman doesn’t like him. I can always use more help, so yes, leave him. What’s his name?”

  I shrugged. “Give him one.” Aemil had helped me come up with mine, erasing whatever boy I’d been forever. He could erase Balbus too.

  “Fine.” Aemil turned to Balbus. “We’ll call you Hermes, because you’ll be fetching and carrying and being a messenger to anyone I say. You’re too skinny for heavier work.” He looked Balbus up and down again. “Slave to gladiators is the lowest thing you can become. Even lower than me.” He chortled. “You going to live with that and not try to throw yourself into the river? I’m not feeding you and keeping you if you’re going to wallow in despair. Understand?”

  Balbus swallowed hard and nodded.

  Aemil peered at the bandage on his wrist. “You wrapped that,” he said to me.

  “I broke it,” I answered, offhand. “He irritated me.”

  Aemil shook his head then flashed me a grin. “So now I have to wait for him to heal before I can use him. No wonder you’re offering to pay me.” He turned back to Balbus and jabbed his thumb at the barracks. “Go in there and help clean it up. Then come and ask for work. I have plenty.”

  Balbus flashed me a grateful glance. I remained stoic, as though only ridding myself of an annoying slave, but I silently wished him luck. Emptying the slop buckets of gladiators was far better than being bound to a stake while a lion tore out his entrails, and he knew it.

  Aemil watched the man scamper away before he turned to me. I held out my money pouch, but Aemil waved a hand. “Pay me by coming back, Leonidas. Go a few rounds with my new primus palus in the next games. The man’s an arrogant turd, but good, very good. Not as good as you were though. Teach him some humility and make me money. What do you say?”

  I thought of my old life—the days, weeks, months, years of monotonous training followed by the white-hot desperation of a battle for my life. I hadn’t felt fear in the amphitheatres, only heat, determination, and the need to survive.

  The smell of blood, dead animals, and dead men came to me, along with the odor of packed bodies in the seats above me, the memory of sand burning under my bare feet, the airless weight of the helmet locked around my head, and the grim resolve in the eyes of the man I faced, usually a friend I’d sat next to at the feast the night before.

  Aemil had shoved me into every game, sometimes several rounds on the same day, taking more and more money for my appearances, while he coolly negotiated what compensation he’d receive if I were killed.

  Aemil called himself the paterfamilias of our gladiator family, but he was a father who sold his sons to the highest bidder. He was a businessman first and foremost. If I died spectacularly at one of these exhibitions he wanted me to do now, he’d earn an enormous sum.

  I took his hand and slapped the pouch into it. “I say no.”

  Aemil’s wrong-colored eyes flickered with rage, but I cared nothing for his disappointment. I turned my back on him and walked away.

  I made my way back over the Tiber via the Pons Aemilius, its six piers stretching across the water just south of the Insula. The Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer, came through an opening in the thick embankment wall not far downstream.

  As I pushed through the flow of humanity on the bridge, the waste of the city pouring into the river not far away, my thoughts were scattered. Returning to the ludus always did that to me.

  That part of my life was over, and I wanted it to be so, but what unnerved me was that Aemil’s offer had been briefly tempting. I could slip back into the routine so easily, where I didn’t have to think, but only do. They’d made me into a machine as mindless as the great mill wheels that ground the grain for our daily bread.

  Whenever I entered the ludus these days, I had to fight to not take up a wooden sword and join in the training, and then file to the mess for my barley and fresh vegetables, and to my cell for a massage and to sleep. Over and over again.

  I forced my feet to take me around the cattle market and through the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline, letting the stream of people, donkeys, and hand carts sweep me with them to the Forum Romanum. Columns of temples to both gods and government rose around me, towering edifices of stone that we surged, antlike, around.

  I continued walking without ceasing, not halting when people called out to me, ignoring them to turn into the lane that led to the fountain where Cassia drew water, and thence home. My new home, where my decisions could affect the life of not only myself but the woman who’d come to depend on me, through no fault of her own.

  Cassia was there. She’d heaped some bread on a plate and was setting it on the table when I walked in.

  I snatched a hunk from the top and began to chew it as Cassia made a note of the time I’d returned. I trusted her notes did not mention Balbus at all.

  “Shall you sit down?” she asked me from her stool as she tore off a miniscule piece of bread and bit into it.

  “No,” I said around my mouthful. “Going back out.”

  She frowned. “Where? You just got in.”

  I knew she’d persist if I didn’t tell her where I was off to, so I said, “Selenius’s shop. I want to ask the other shopkeepers about him. They must have seen something. Or someone.”

  Cassia nodded, her curls dancing. “An excellent idea. I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” I began.

  “Do not worry, I will stand behind you like a good servant. I imagine the reason you don’t want me to go is because your methods of questioning might be less than polite.”

  I couldn’t argue, because she was right. I’d planned to be as brutal as people expected of me if necessary, which I should have done with the baker in the first place. If I’d shaken the sestertii out of Quintus and gone home, I wouldn’t be in these current difficulties.

  I finished my hunk of bread and washed it down with a cup of the wine merchant’s cheapest vintage, while Cassia more carefully downed her piece. I needed to beat what the baker owed us out of him, or we’d be drinking piss and eating seeds fallen from the back of grain wagons before long.

  “Come with me then,” I growled, clattering my cup to the table. “But don’t talk. You drive a man to distraction when you talk.”

  Cassia sent me a smile of triumph. “Only because that man does not know how to answer.” She fetched her palla and wrapped it around her body like a modest matron, and followed me out.

  Chapter 9

  We walked
through Rome at its busiest hour to reach the macellum. Cassia kept a few steps behind me, as a slave should, but the streets were so crammed, we wouldn’t have been able to travel side by side in any case.

  We had to step out of the way several times for litters borne by Gauls, no doubt chosen for their huge musculature. Inside the litter would be a matron or her eldest daughter, perfumed and bejeweled, out to visit a friend, or making a journey to a temple to petition a god or goddess for whatever matrons and daughters petitioned them for.

  Lictors—men who accompanied patricians and acted as bodyguards, messengers, and announcers—pushed us aside at one point. The man they protected, who was swathed in a toga with a narrow purple stripe, swaggered by, chatting with another purple-striped man, senators on their way to pretend to govern Rome.

  We had an emperor who’d decided he could do what he liked, when he liked, with whom he liked, and the senators could only discuss how to keep themselves and their interests safe from him. They were powerless, and Nero knew it.

  That did not take the arrogance out of the men who walked by in their bubble of protection, or from the lictors who shoved us bodily out of the way. They carried bundles of staves, fasces, that symbolized the time when these highborn men could have their guards beat anyone they liked. The fact that the reeds were symbolic did not stop the lictors from using them for their original purpose if they felt peevish.

  While I noticed the usual stares at me as I moved along, a half head to a head taller than most Roman men, we were not accosted. The streets were so crowded I doubted anyone could get close to me to arrest me for Selenius’s murder if they wanted to, and if they did, they might cause a riot.

  I led Cassia through the Subura, which was full of humanity—from the dregs who lived in miniscule apartments to wealthy men moving from their villas at the tops of the hills to the Forum Romanum, or to baths, temples, and everything in between. I could understand why Sergius preferred to travel via the tunnels that ran beneath the streets, as unsavory as they were. There, at least, it was quiet and not crowded.

  We turned into the macellum, which was lively this morning. Vendors sold everything from produce and live chickens to cloth, carpets, lamps, beans, and cheap jewelry. Romans and travelers from all over the empire came to the market, many to use the money-changers who stood by their benches to switch the currency of far-off cities for Roman coin. On the fringes of the shops were cutpurses and thieves, waiting to relieve these foreigners of their gains.

  Shopkeepers and their clients were too busy to gawp at a former gladiator striding in, his modest slave behind him with her basket. We moved without hindrance to the interior shops of the macellum, the sun shining brightly into its atrium.

  Boards were in place over the counter of Selenius’s shop, but I spied movement within the open door. I ducked inside, Cassia at my heels, to find a young man bent over a cupboard, a flickering oil lamp lighting the gloom. A male slave, middle-aged with a surly face and gnarled hands, swept the floor.

  The young man looked irritably over his shoulder when he heard us enter, then he jerked upright and gaped at me.

  Before I could speak, he saw Cassia. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, losing his worry. “The medicus’s assistant.” He must have assumed she belonged to Marcianus. “What do you want?” he asked as he returned to rifling the cupboard.

  Cassia stepped in front of me. She kept her voice quiet and demure, her head bowed, showing the expected deference to the young man I gathered was Selenius’s nephew and adopted son. She was good at playing her part.

  “This is Leonidas, sir,” she said. “He found your uncle.”

  Gaius Selenius the Younger jerked around again. He had a jutting chin, short, flyaway hair, and small eyes. He looked much like the older Selenius, but with youthful vigor.

  “Oh,” Gaius said. “The gladiator.” He concluded his assessment of me dubiously. “I’ve never seen you fight. I’m too busy to go to the games.”

  Most of Rome shut down during games, as they were public spectacles, often held in conjunction with religious celebrations, like Saturnalia. I wondered if his uncle or mother had kept him from going or if young Gaius was squeamish.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “My mother is expecting me home. I am here to fetch my uncle’s records.”

  “Leonidas offers his condolences,” Cassia extemporized. “It is sad to lose one of the family. Your mother said you were very close?”

  Gaius shrugged. “My mother loved him. He was her younger brother. I found him demanding and strict, but he raised me when my father died. He became a father in truth …”

  The lad broke off, mouth twisting, eyes filling with tears. Cassia moved to stand next to him without touching him as she radiated sympathy.

  Gaius cleared his throat. “I’m the head of the household now.” The thought obviously terrified him. “My uncle shall have a grand funeral. And I will take over his business.” More trepidation.

  Cassia smiled encouragingly. “I am certain he would be honored.”

  Gaius didn’t look so certain, but he accepted Cassia’s polite concern.

  The room had been cleaned of blood, though I could see where it had seeped into cracks in the floor. The wall where Selenius had lain had been scrubbed, the patch he’d leaned against now a bit whiter than the painted brick around it.

  I studied the door to the tunnels. Cassia, catching my gaze, pointed at it.

  “What is there?” she asked Gaius, as though curious.

  Gaius glanced at the door but turned away, indifferent. “Don’t know. Uncle never opened it.”

  “Maintenance tunnels to sewers,” the slave with the broom volunteered. “Old part of Rome coming up to meet the new.”

  Gaius wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Have it sealed up.”

  The slave leaned on his broom, as though happy of the excuse to stop. “Costs. ’Swhy the master never did it.”

  “Yes, well,” Gaius said impatiently. “We’ll see the state of his finances, and if there’s money, we’ll seal it up. I don’t want the smell coming in here.”

  “Deep part’s too far down to bring bad air here,” the slave went on.

  Gaius scowled at him. He obviously wasn’t having an easy time convincing his uncle’s slaves he was in charge now. Some slaves were freed on their master’s deaths, but not all, and some remained as freedmen doing the exact same jobs they had before, suffering the exact same blows when their masters grew irritated with them.

  “Come,” I said to Cassia, a slave who hadn’t obeyed me from the moment I’d met her. “My condolences,” I said to Gaius. “May the gods bring you prosperity.”

  Gaius bobbed his head at my politeness, looking as though all the gods together with Fortuna leading the charge wouldn’t do him much good.

  Cassia gave Gaius a bow and meekly scurried to me as I turned to leave. She was the very picture of the demure, duteous slave. She would have made a fine actress, though she’d be offended if I told her so.

  Once outside the shop and out of earshot of Gaius, she whispered, “We should look inside the tunnels.”

  I agreed, but there was nothing we could do while Gaius went through his uncle’s things and the slave swept up.

  We wandered through the shops instead, which were lit by the oculus above the atrium as well as arched openings high in the walls, and asked about Selenius and the day he’d died. That is, Cassia asked, and I frowned at the shopkeepers who tried to dismiss her outright.

  No one had seen much of interest or out of the ordinary the morning of Selenius’s death. Selenius had arrived at his normal hour, his nephew in tow. As per usual, young Gaius had left at midmorning to return home, as business was most brisk in the early morning. Several more customers had gone to Selenius and come out without being covered in blood or remarking on finding a dead body. A few described seeing Balbus go in—a hairy slave probably on an errand for his foreign master, they said—but they’d not observed him come out again. And
they’d seen me.

  They hadn’t, to my relief, noticed Sergius. The boy must have traveled back and forth through the tunnels, unnoticed.

  The shopkeepers within the macellum, even the other money-changers, hadn’t thought much of Selenius. He was successful, but less than honorable, happy when a customer didn’t thoroughly count his takings.

  Cassia, who was good at suggesting things until others opened up with what they knew, pried out from some of the other money-changers that they suspected Selenius of his forgeries, but they didn’t know for certain whether he was guilty of them.

  What they did know was that Selenius bullied his slaves and was firm with his nephew, though perhaps no harder on him than a master would be to an apprentice.

  No one, it seemed, was very sorry Selenius was dead.

  Cassia casually mentioned the network of tunnels that ran beneath the area, but none seemed to be aware of them. Rome was an ancient city—buildings fell to ruin and were rebuilt or burned, the ashes leveled and more built on top of it. I, like most Romans, was aware of the most important ancient monuments, like Romulus’s hut and the rostra in the Forum, but the day-to-day buildings, even some of the most prominent temples, came and went. It was not so surprising that the shopkeepers didn’t know much about the sewers that ran beneath us, only that they worked.

  I found the garum vendor who’d noted my entrance to the macellum that day. The same two Gauls I’d seen lingering before were there again. Most Romans loved the fish sauce made by fermenting fish in salt—Cassia and I were exceptions.

  The two slaves were quite tall and had very fair hair, which meant they’d come a long way from their northern homeland. Some of the prisoners brought back from the Claudian campaigns in Britannia had been very tall and pale, others small and dark. The larger ones made good gladiators—they were arrogant and ruthless fighters. The one who’d defeated Xerxes had definitely been merciless. He’d died under my sword in a later bout.