—
The arena, where she was sent to die but didn’t.
The mouth of the beast, with all those faces staring down at her.
That afternoon it had been hard to pull her eyes away from them, but she did. They were not going to kill her, just watch it be done. She saw the man who was to be their executioner. Not a lion or leopard, then. Just a man, pacing on the sand, watching them. He was a large man. He wore a massive helmet that flared out to either side and rose in a high crest. It encased his head completely. He had no face, this man, just a metal head from which he looked out from holes he breathed through. His chest was bare, fleshy, and clumped with hair. Thick legs supported him, and he carried a long-handled mallet with a block of iron at the end. It was a crushing weapon. A skull breaker. A bone destroyer.
Someone grabbed Sura’s wrists. A short man, stout, ugly, he unlocked her wrist cuffs. They fell away and smacked down on the sand, dead there. Just like that, they became powerless. The man turned to her neck collar. He yanked and jerked on it for a time, and then it snapped open. It too fell to the sand. He moved on to the next woman.
Sura was vaguely aware that they were unchaining all of them, but mostly she stared at the chafed, raw skin of her wrists. The sun touched them, and the air. She was unchained. The cruelty of it took her breath away. Unchained, but inside the monster’s mouth, about to be swallowed.
A boy ran up to them, carrying a sword. He was thin, with an upper lip that pulled upward, connected to his nose. He tossed the sword down, and then he ran. A black-haired woman dashed forward and snatched up the weapon. Because of it, she was the one armed when the lumbering man arrived. He dropped the mallet, to stand upright in the sand, and drew his sword. The woman crouched. The others were all trying to escape in different directions. They didn’t get far. The arena slaves grabbed them about the waists and hurled them back.
The black-haired woman attacked first. He blocked her sword with his. Once. Twice. After a third, his sword slashed her arm. It was an ugly cut but not fatal. That came next. His elbow snapped back, and he jabbed the iron deep into her side. He moved his blade within her, controlling the way her body fell. By the time she hit the sand, she was dead.
The executioner turned from her, sheathed his sword, and took up the mallet. He hefted it with his arms and torso and legs, showing just how heavy that block of iron was. That was why he didn’t worry about setting down the mallet. No woman could lift that weapon. He raised it high, his flesh quivering over his tensed muscles, and dropped it onto the dead woman’s head.
The executioner left the weapon where it fell. He picked another target and trudged toward her, drawing his sword again.
The Dii woman snatched up the dead woman’s sword. It was an ugly weapon, dented and worn with age. She pressed her thumb to it. From the expression on her face, Sura knew the weapon was blunted. Useless.
The executioner closed on another woman. She was frantic, doing everything she could to avoid him. As terrified as she was of the gladiator, she had no fear of the herders. She tried to dart between them. She clawed to get past them. It didn’t help. The executioner got near enough to leap at her. He roared forward and slashed at her. He took her upraised arm off near the elbow. He got a grip of her other arm and lifted her, stabbing her belly again and again. He left her where she fell and lumbered to retrieve his mallet.
The Dii woman did something then that surprised Sura. She shouted and ran toward the executioner. She threw the useless sword. It twirled end over end toward him. He swatted it away with his sword. As he moved his blade from one side of his body to the other, she passed him and reached the mallet. Skidding to a stop, she reached for the shaft. She gripped it but made no move to lift it.
The executioner pounded back toward her. He spoke as he walked, and Sura knew he was saying awful things. He was looking forward to smashing her skull. He’d do even more than that. Bone by bone, he would make pulp of her corpse. She knew this as clearly as if he were speaking to her in a language Sura could understand.
The Dii woman watched him through the matted screen of her hair, which was so very red in the harsh light. What the Dii woman did then shouldn’t have been possible. Not for her, a woman, one who had been weakened by ill treatment and thin from the long road walked from Thrace. When the man was near, she lifted the mallet. She swung for his head. It smashed the man’s helmet with such force, the first blow likely killed him. He spun with the impact. He shifted his thick legs and managed to stay upright long enough for the woman to lash the mallet again. Backhanded, with an upward angle. The iron struck so hard, it looked, for a moment, as if the man’s helmeted head were going to fly off. Not quite, though it hung at a sickening angle, spine-broke. He went down.
The woman dropped the mallet. It fell with all its weight to the sand and stuck there.
—
That was why Sura didn’t perish in the arena that day. Instead, the remaining women were chained again and sent back to Vatia’s ludus. Sura learned then that the Dii woman’s name was Astera. She said that she was powerful because her goddess, Kotys, gave her strength. She told them that, and they believed her. That’s why Sura cannot deny Astera. She does know the way to Vatia’s bedroom. She hates that Spartacus will understand what was done to her there. It is not her fault, any more than his fate is. But it churns in her belly. She tries not to think about it. Tries just to move, fast and quiet.
When they spill out into a square courtyard with a pool of water at its center, she knows they are near. The roof is open to the sky. They step out into the moonlight again. Sura finds her reflection in the rippling surface of the water. She stares at it, but the air stirs the water too much. She can’t see herself clearly. She’s still looking when the other two bend to scoop handfuls of water to their mouths.
A woman emerges from a corridor at the edge of the courtyard. She wears a thin shift and walks with a hand held to a yawning mouth. Wife or mistress, Sura isn’t sure. House slave, perhaps, coming from having labored in Vatia’s bed. She walks in from the left, out to the right. She doesn’t turn her head to see the shapes lit by the starry sky. When her bare footfalls fade, they move again. They enter the corridor the woman exited. It leads to a suite of rooms, crowded with furniture and partitions. And then there is Vatia.
Sura stops.
The first time she ever saw him, he stood before her draped in a black cloak. His face square, strong-jawed but fleshy in the cheeks, jowly as it slipped down into his thick neck. He had stretched and rolled his shoulders, as if he thought himself a gladiator warming up. He unfastened the clasp at his neck and shrugged the cloak from his shoulders. Beneath it he was naked. Wide chest. Wider belly. His legs were spindly by comparison. His penis hung limp, curving to one side. She would not have looked at it, but he held his hands out at his waist, framing his sex as the very thing he wanted to reveal to her.
So he had been when he first forced himself on her. He took pleasure, he told her, in having her in the same bed his wife slept in. Only, he did things to her that he could not do to his wife. They were things for his pleasure, not hers.
Now that same body lies on an ornate wooden bed. It is narrow, held high by long, intricately carved legs. Naked yet again, with a thin sheet bunched down at his feet. He sleeps. His snores attest to how deeply. Sura knows his snores. She’s heard them before and remembers how he slept so quickly after having his pleasure, so deeply. She remembers being there, sometimes trapped beneath him, his body a dead weight on her and she powerless to move him.
Astera creeps toward him. She places one foot on the padded stool beside the bed. She tests her weight on it, then steps up. The mattress gives beneath her foot. Sura knows that if she were closer, she’d be able to smell the scent of the perfumed wool that stuffed it.
There is a gasp. It’s from the drowsy woman. She’s returned, and she isn’t drowsy anymore. She takes in the intruders. Sura can see her mouth opening and knows it holds a scream inside it. Spar
tacus has her before she lets it out. He pushes her back against a pillar and clamps his hand over her mouth. He looks back. Vatia’s snoring has stopped, but he sleeps on. He whispers, “Slash him. Cut him now, before he wakes.”
Astera doesn’t slash him. She holds the knife pointed toward his throat. With her other hand, she reaches out. Slow. Slow. And then fast. She grabs a fold of his neck skin in a tight fist, twisting it. The man’s eyes open. He bucks on his mattress. He tries to grab her, but she writhes. He punches her, but she twists and turns. His blows only graze her. She clenches his neck all the harder, the small, hard muscles of her arm quivering.
“What are you waiting for?” Spartacus asks, not whispering anymore. “Kill him!”
She doesn’t. Not yet.
And then Vatia goes still. His eyes widen with recognition. He manages to speak. “You? How dare—”
Astera stabs. Not just once. Again and again and again, her arm working with furious speed. Vatia manages a few shouts, but they garble, lose power. Then it’s just Astera’s arm thrusting, the wet impact of her balled fist punching into his torn flesh, the audible splash of blood on the tile floor. Blood sprays in a fan when the artery in his neck is severed. It drenches Astera. She opens her mouth like a child catching raindrops. Like a goddess of vengeance drinking tribute.
The woman Spartacus is holding screams. He must have loosened his grip. She screams to wake the dead. Spartacus moves to cup his hand over her mouth, but he hits her too solidly. Her head bangs against the pillar, and she drops like a child’s doll, limp on the floor. He spins away from her, scowling. “Stupid woman,” he says. But it’s not disdain in his voice. It’s something else.
Astera climbs from Vatia’s body like a sated lover. “He knew me,” she says. “I took him for Kotys, and he knew it was I that did it.”
Spartacus hooks an eyebrow. “Not the way I would’ve done it.”
“That’s why you didn’t do it,” Astera says. She drags the fingers of one of her bloody hands down his chest. “You would have wasted his death.”
Astera yanks a sheet from a second bed and piles it atop Vatia’s corpse. Sura grabs pillows from the couches. Spartacus shoves other furniture against Vatia’s bed. He pours oil from a lamp over it. He shatters a carafe of oil on the floor. When Astera touches flame to it, the oil and fabric and wood whoosh into an instant fury.
They leave the room thick with smoke, the fire spreading into the rafters of the roof. Spartacus hefts the unconscious woman up over his shoulder. For an exhilarating moment, Sura thinks he is going to toss her into the fire. Instead he carries her back the way they came. They meet Gaidres in the courtyard. He steps out of the shadows, butcher’s knife jammed under the twine at his waist. Drenis is there as well. Gaidres motions for Spartacus to whisper with him.
Spartacus leaves the unconscious woman half submerged in the pool in the courtyard. At first Sura doesn’t know why he bothered. She looks at the woman, the rippling water, the stone tiles around her and the open sky above. She studies the woman’s form. She kneels and looks at her face. It’s not a Thracian face. It’s darker-skinned. Her hair is dark. Her lips are full. Sura wonders if she is the wife whose place she took so that Vatia could do the vile things he lusted to do. She’s young, but is she pretty? Sura can’t tell.
The men leave. And then Astera does as well, motioning for Sura to follow her. Sura stays beside the pool, puzzling over the Roman woman. Spartacus left her to live, though he didn’t have to. She pinches her tongue between her teeth as she thinks of this. As before, she tries to see her own face reflected in the pool’s water. The surface is stiller now than before, but her face is in shadow. She sees where it should be, but she is only a silhouette. That seems wrong. She is not a woman without a face. Why can’t she see herself?
The unconscious woman stirs.
Sura takes her head in her hands. She checks that Astera has not returned, and then she presses the woman down into the water.
Philon
Philon of Heraclea is dreaming of throwing stones to dolphins from the heights of a Sicilian cliffside. He dreams often of Sicily, the island of his birth. He was a slave there, as he is in the ludus of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, but it was a life he looks back on with fondness. With his first master, he barely understood the inconvenience of his lot. This throwing stones at dolphins was something he had done with other boys long ago. In life, the dolphins paid the stones no mind. In the dream, they do. In the dream, Philon is a boy again and is delighted.
It doesn’t last.
Someone pulls him up into consciousness by the hair. One moment he is dancing near the edge of the cliffs, clapping at the foolishness of the dolphins, who are catching the rocks in their mouths. The next moment he feels certain his hair is going to be pulled free of his scalp. Shapes hulk above him, lit from behind so that they are but dark silhouettes. He tries to reach up, but hands clamp his arms down on his cot. He opens his mouth to scream but the palm of another hand smashes up from under his jaw, slamming his mouth closed with a jarring impact of his teeth.
He knows what is happening. He is going to be raped, and by more than one assailant. He has had close calls, many as a youth. Most recently, as he marched alone from Tarentum to Capua to begin his service for Vatia, a man with no teeth offered him wine and friendship. Then he tried to screw him while he was sleeping. He must’ve tried that on others. Perhaps that was why he had no teeth.
“Medicus,” a voice whispers, “do not struggle if you want to live. If you want to die, struggle.”
The speaker’s Latin is clear enough, though blunted by a Thracian accent. One of the Thracians, then. A gladiator.
“So you want to live?”
Philon realizes he has stopped struggling. Not a conscious decision, but he has to admit that he does want to live. He does his best to nod. The tension on his hair lessens a little.
“We are going. Will you come with us? Speak softly and answer me. Yell, and you die.”
Such a fine line between life and death, Philon thinks. The hand at his jaw changes position. It loosens, slides around so that its fingers hold him around the chin and lips. They squeeze and relax, then do so again, with more insistence, demanding an answer.
“Going?” Philon manages. That is not what he expected to hear. They are slaves in the ludus of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia. They cannot go anyplace. The statement makes no sense. Unless they mean to take him elsewhere to do whatever they are going to do with him. “Going where?”
Another voice answers. “We leave here tonight. Will you come?”
This voice Philon recognizes. He knows it, but he cannot place it. Not in the current circumstances.
“Medicus, are you coming?”
Philon needs more information to make a decision. He stammers for a time, trying to explain this with all the respect he can manage.
“Listen!” the second voice cuts him short. The man reaches back and takes the lamp from the one holding it, the young Thracian with lips fit for a woman. The man who grabs the lamp brings the naked flame up close to his face. His rough-cut features flare into view. Strong, broken nose, a gold-flecked beard that catches the flame’s colors. Stone-gray eyes. “I am Spartacus. You know me. You mended my leg. Have you mind of me?”
Philon realizes the man is speaking Greek. And he does have mind of him. The wound had been ugly but not deep, made by a trident that slashed three parallel grooves down the Thracian’s buttocks and upper leg. Philon had tended the wound and been surprised at how quickly he healed from it. The Thracian carried scars to show for it but had none of the attending weakness of muscle damage. The man who had made the wound had not been so lucky. Spartacus had writhed away before the prongs could press deep. He whirled, suddenly the attacker instead of the prey. He sunk his sword into the unarmed side of the retiarius’s neck as he stumbled past him, cutting down into his chest. He was good at doing that. True to his name in the ring, a secutor—a chaser. The death had come so fast t
o the retiarius that Philon had almost believed Spartacus had baited him by offering his leg. But who would do such a thing?
—
For that matter, he remembers the very first time he saw Spartacus and Gaidres and the other Maedi that arrived with them. He was new to the ludus, so the shipment that Vatia brought in was the first he’d seen arrive. They came in at night and slept chained together in the open space of the training ground, with the winter sky close above them, damp and cold. The next day Vatia called in the veteran gladiators and made the new meat—as the recent arrivals were called—stand before them. They were mostly easterners. The magister, one of the ludus trainers, informed him that they were mostly Thracians, with a few Bithynians. Philon knew little of either and could not tell them apart. They were big, bearded men with unkempt hair. Most of them were bare-chested and stigmaed, with murderous eyes.
Vatia wore only a wrap around his waist, bare-chested, muscled but soft. He called out to the veterans and got hails in return. He grinned and tossed insults to them. He knew men by name and spoke like a friend to them. He asked after Oenomaus’s cough and Goban’s back injury, like a beneficent employer or a general to troops he loved. Even then Philon suspected it was all false, but he didn’t yet know how false.
And he didn’t know why the guards brought in a chained boy of fifteen or so. Young, thin, his abdomen concave and his ribs horribly prominent. His feet were chained to eyebolts attached to a stone set into the earth. His arms were pulled taut to either side by ropes attached to stout poles that stood upright for just such a purpose. He hung between them with his legs trembling. His eyes darted around, looking at the burly collection of veteran gladiators in front of him, snapping around to gaze at the chained men behind him.
Vatia paced, telling the men that they should be glad to hear that their fates were now assured. They would each and every one of them die a violent death. It might be today or tomorrow or next week or a year from now. But the day would come. How many other men were so blessed, so fortunate as to know they would die with a weapon in hand and other men’s blood to slick their way into the next world?
The Risen Page 3