In the warming day, as the mountain mists fade to thin tendrils and disappear, she walks up the hill. She calls softly, trying to bring the sheep back. She’s afraid of being too loud or of going too far up, having no wish to be near the strangers.
“Stupid,” she says, meaning Hustus. And meaning herself.
—
The day Aburius bought Hustus and Mouse, he barely looked at them. Twins, his slaver recorded. He read their names, but he had spelled hers wrong. Like her true name, but the male version of it. Two boys from a village outside Salernum. Sold when their father died, as their mother was Greek and had no rights to them, and the father had never acknowledged them as his offspring. Healthy enough, but only children of ten or so and thus they were cheaply come by.
Aburius asked them if they knew about herding sheep. They didn’t, but Hustus said they did. They could do it, he declared. “Master, show us the sheep,” he said, with deference that Mouse marveled at, knowing it was fake. “We will care for them. No one will touch them.”
Hustus always talked when Mouse prayed for silence. He grew angry when she wished for calm, haughty when she would be meek, bold when she favored caution. It was strange that they were twins. If they had been together inside a single mother, how could they be so different? But, too, she knew that she had known Hustus all her life. She didn’t have life without him. Perhaps, she thought, neither of them was a complete person. Only together were they whole.
Aburius’s men put iron rings around their necks, from which dangled small plaques that named their owner and warned others of abusing them and identified the territory they were permitted to roam. If found elsewhere, they were to be returned. Mouse couldn’t see how they fastened the ring, but once in place, it was solid enough that she could grab it with both hands and pull without budging it. So marked, Aburius sent them into the hills with the older boys. At least they were together. That mattered more than not knowing about sheep and more than not correcting the slaver’s mistake and more than the troubles that would come from having to pretend to be a boy.
In the hills, they learned the things they needed to. It wasn’t an easy life. They grew thin and wiry, legs strong from so much walking and bodies lean. They rarely saw Aburius, but he had as many eyes as he had slaves. So Mouse tried to be a boy. She cut her hair with sheep shears to keep it short. She wore the same linen tunic the others did, belted at the waist and loose fitting, shapeless. Up high, she and her brother were often alone, but not always. Sometimes the other boys gathered to talk, to smoke herbs wrapped in dried leaves and to insult one another. She feigned uninterest in their games. She couldn’t get herself to be loud as some of them were or as rude. She didn’t fight with them. That would have been a problem if it weren’t for Hustus, who was always ready to fight. He took any attention turned toward her and made it his. She wasn’t sure if he did this for himself or for her. Either way, it was good.
She made sure, on occasion, to stand with her back to the others and her legs spread. She pretended to pee, swaying from the hips as if she were drawing with the stream of her urine. The other boys seemed to always do that. When she actually had to pee, she did so in private, hidden. Once another boy came around a rock and spotted her, but she shouted that she was dropping turds. He retreated, saying he should’ve known from the stink.
Days passed, and then weeks and months, seasons and years. She was not found out, but the passing of time wasn’t a comfort. Each day brought her closer to being a woman and to the changes that this would bring to her. Hustus knew it too. He said that once she grew breasts, it wouldn’t be so easy anymore. “Just don’t grow them,” he said. “Whatever you do, just don’t.”
She wished it were that easy, but she didn’t have that choice. Her breasts changed despite her wishes. They grew sore to the touch. Lumps appeared beneath her nipples, as if tiny stones had been slipped beneath her skin. They became fleshy in a way they weren’t before. Hustus was right: her breasts were going to betray her. They were going to be separated. She knew horrible things were coming. It wasn’t a matter of avoiding them. Delaying them—that was the best she could hope for.
—
Mouse awakens in the dark, inside the copse of shrublike trees they’ve cut tunnels into to make hidden shelters. Hustus is there as well. He must have just arrived. He tosses himself down and presses his back against hers.
Mouse asks, “So you didn’t die?”
“I told you I would be fine.”
“Who were those people?”
“You want to know? You should’ve gone after them yourself.”
“Tell me.” When he doesn’t, Mouse says, “Or did you get scared?”
“I followed them. I even spoke to them. I know who they are. They are gladiators.” He lets that sit. Mouse stays quiet, knowing he wants to talk and only her asking for more will stop him. “They escaped from Capua and say they are free now to do as they please.”
“They took our sheep, didn’t they?” Mouse says.
“That doesn’t matter. Listen. They were slaves, and now they’re not. Others are joining them already. They said I could join them too. I’m going to.”
Mouse sits up. “They are going to be hunted and killed. You know that. Aburius will—”
Hustus laughs. “Aburius would shit himself if he ever stood before them. They’re gladiators! They want slave owners to come after them. They want to kill them and take their weapons and armor and then call more slaves to join them.”
“To what purpose?” Mouse asks.
“What did I just say? They want slave owners to come to them, to kill and take their weapons and get more slaves to join them. That is a purpose!”
Mouse isn’t sure about that. It seems to her a short-lived purpose, one that will end badly. “What I mean is—”
“Stop talking! I can’t talk to you anymore. I shouldn’t even have come back.”
Yes, you should, Mouse thinks. You should always come back. She stays quiet, though.
—
Hustus tugs the wooden gate closed, trapping the sheep they’ve retrieved into the stone-walled holding pen. Only about half as many as they should have, a distressing number. Mouse names the things they must do and fast. Tell Aburius what’s happened. Find more sheep. Check the other fields and pen those sheep as well. So many things occur to her.
Hustus isn’t thinking about any of it. His mind holds only one thing at a time within it. Right now it’s full of gladiators. “Listen to me,” he says, chewing on a long stalk of grass. “You should come with me and see them.”
“I don’t want to.” She woke up with a constellation of red welts on her arms, insect bites. She can’t help but scratch at them, though she knows that just makes them larger and more irritated.
“Their camp isn’t far, but they won’t stay in it long. They’re going to climb the mountain and stay at the summit. You don’t need to be afraid. There are women with them. We should join them, too.”
“No,” Mouse says. She doesn’t want to climb the mountain. The boy they call Rabbit claims that high on the slopes, the country is wild, teeming with boars and wolves, tangled with massive trees and vines that hide snakes. He claimed a god lives at the summit and grumbles when anyone goes there. “They have made enough trouble for us already. Why don’t you run down to the estate? Tell Aburius what’s—”
“We don’t need to tell him anything! You don’t understand that everything has changed. Listen. Just listen.”
Mouse pinches her lips closed, crosses her arms, tries to stop scratching. Hustus tells of how the gladiators broke out of Capua. Now they go where they please and do what they wish. An army pursued them from Capua, but they destroyed it. Real soldiers, but they killed each and every one of them. He talks of a prophetess, a red-haired woman who speaks with the gods and knows the future because of it.
“She cannot know the future,” Mouse says.
“She can if the gods tell it to her. Just because you can’t see b
eyond your nose doesn’t mean everyone else is blind also.”
“I’m not blind.” But neither does she speak to the gods. She can’t deny that if this woman can truly speak to the gods, then it’s possible that she might know the future. Everyone’s fate is determined already. The gods know this. Only the fools who live and die don’t know the shape of things to come. So, it’s possible, but…“How do you know she is real?”
He tells of how the Thracian prophetess predicted the night when the gladiators would be freed. She said it would happen before it did and that the Thracians would be the first ones to escape. Her god unlocked their cells. She breathed hot breath on their bars and melted them. She gave them power to fight unarmed against the guards who came against them. She is powerful, this goddess, and angry with Rome.
Mouse asks, “Which goddess?”
Hustus frowns. “I don’t know her name. She is one of theirs.” She was strong enough to lead them to weapons, two wagons piled high with them. Because of this, they are armed and ready to stand against any who will come for them.
“How do you know all this?”
“They told me. They saw me watching them and waved me over. They gave me bread and a cup of wine. If I join them, they said, they would get me a sword and teach me to fight like them. They think I’ll be big when I grow and a good fighter.” He looks grave, an expression strange on him. “You’ll come with me.”
Without knowing she’s doing so, Mouse starts picking at her bites with a fingernail. She says, “No, I won’t.”
—
The next morning Hustus leaves Mouse to tend the sheep. He returns with others. Drex—who is of Thracian blood, though he was born here in Italy and has never seen his homeland—and Rabbit and another whose name Mouse doesn’t know. They are shepherds of a different master who tend flocks on the western slope. Talking nonstop as they pepper him with questions, Hustus leads them up toward the gladiators.
Mouse wants to pull Hustus aside and argue with him. She can’t say the things she wants to, though. Not with the boys there and with Hustus talking to them with such enthusiasm. She trails behind them, pulled reluctantly in their wake.
The gladiators’ camp is in a grove of ancient pines set among boulders and craggy fingers of rock. Mouse goes only far enough to hear them and to smell their fires and to see the smoke that rises from them. Behind them, the bulk of Vesuvius rises and rises. She can’t see the top of it. She won’t go any farther. Hustus leaves her, saying fine, stay if you’re afraid.
Before night falls, Mouse heads back to the things she knows: the sheep, the lower views, the tunnels within the copse of shrubby trees. Alone in the bushes, she thinks of the missing sheep, and of the feel of the curves in the lamb’s wool, and of her brother—whose back is not there to give warmth against hers. She thinks of her breasts. She doesn’t move her hands to touch them, but she feels them there, warm and growing.
—
Hustus comes back for her the next morning. He’s angry that she didn’t stay near the encampment. He calls her stupid and frightened and as dumb as a sheep. They broke camp this morning to climb the mountain. They could’ve gone with them. He rails at her until his annoyance is spent. Then he sits down, empty of anger and deflated. He says, “This is our chance. If we stay here, things will be bad for us. You know it’s true.”
“I know,” she says. And then, hoping he isn’t cruel to her for saying it, she adds, “I’m afraid.”
For once, he isn’t cruel. He looks up at her and says, “Yes.”
That’s all he says. All that he gives her. But she knows exactly what he means, what he’s saying in the spaces before and after that one word.
—
Part of the way back up the hill, they hold hands. Mouse has the thought that it is the last thing they will do as children. Whatever is going to happen here is new, and they won’t be able to step back from it. Whatever he is offering to her through the warmth of his palm, he’ll withdraw it in a moment. She keeps thinking that, but as they climb, he clings to her.
It’s easy to follow the gladiators in the open country, through orchards of grapevines. Mouse wouldn’t dare cut through the rows normally, but the gladiators seem to have swept the slopes clean of the slaves who tend the vines. Higher, the land is as Rabbit said. They have to break their grip to navigate into the forest, which is thick and darker than Mouse likes. Each step is a fearful thing, at once taking her closer to one thing she dreads and farther from another, each dread rising in pitch as they gain altitude. Her ears are keen for any noise, be it the fugitive slaves or an angry god, but in the high air she hears mostly the screech of hawks and the wind stirring the trees.
When they enter the camp, they walk side by side. She can’t tell if this is the summit. It’s flatter, the trees somewhat shorter and spaced widely. Though they’re not climbing anymore, Mouse finds it hard to breathe. The gladiators are everything she feared. Big men with hard faces. Long-haired men. Smiling men. Laughing. Men who roll the muscles of their shoulders. Men with strange stigmas on their chests and arms and backs. Scarred men. Blond ones. Men who speak gibberish as they pass. Men who sit at campfires, smoking and eating, who lounge in wagons or beneath them. Men sitting under sheets tied between trees. Others who sharpen weapons, who argue, who clash blades, who dash about at tasks. Men who watch them, faces like wolves, bodies heavy with muscle. There is too much flesh to them. More than her eyes want to see. As much as anything, she smells them. The air is heavy with their musk. She has smelled it before but never so thick as this.
A man calls Hustus by name. Mouse wants to run. Hustus grabs her hand. “Don’t be afraid,” he says, and pulls her toward the man. “It’s Kastor. He is the one who talked to me.”
“This is the brother you spoke of,” the man says. “A twin to you. Yes, I see it.” He is tall and lean but broad at the shoulders. His face is composed of outsize features, nose and lips and eyebrows competing against one another for prominence. There’s a scar on his left cheek, but mostly it’s his eyes she can’t help but stare at. Blue, like no eyes she’s ever seen.
“You two will bring us luck,” Kastor says. “Good thing, too. We’re going to need it. The Romans, they’re coming for us. Have you heard?” He makes it sound like a joke, even as his eyes flare wide with alarm. “I tell you what. Come, I’ll make you free.” He motions them toward the array of things he has laid out around a fire glowing within a ring of stacked stones. Kastor picks up a chisel and a hammer with a thick iron head. “Who wants to go first?”
Mouse doesn’t understand what’s happening until the man makes Hustus lie down and rest his head on a flat slab of stone. He positions the chisel just behind his neck and whispers something she can’t hear. Then he lifts the hammer. That hammer could smash Hustus’s head. It doesn’t touch him, though. The man drops it, precisely, on the butt of the chisel.
When Hustus rises, he tugs at the metal loop he’s worn since Aburius bought them. He pulls it off his neck and stares at it, the ring broken now.
“You’re next,” Kastor says.
He does the same to her as he did to Hustus. One blow, the snap of metal breaking, and then she’s up. Hustus pulls the ring from her neck, scratching her as he does so. He holds it before her, telling her to look at it.
Kastor smiles. “See how easy it is to make a slave free? Put those in there.” He motions toward a bucket already half full of scraps of metal.
Hustus tosses both neck rings—and the metal tags they carry—in. Just like that, it’s done.
—
Everyone is welcome and will be safe here, they are told, but everyone must work as best suits them. Warriors care for weapons and armor, sorting through what they’ve grabbed and distributing it. Others tend horses and livestock, or cook, or repair wagons and camp supplies. Some patrol the hills, looking for signs of the Roman forces that will come against them soon. Many spend the days scouring the valleys below them, plundering, coming back laden with spoils. The l
eaders, Mouse has heard, jostle among themselves for control. They don’t agree on what’s to be done and why. Sometimes Mouse hears the rise of their angry voices. She doesn’t go near, though Hustus does and brings back news.
The camp may be one great and growing host with rules to blanket them all, but there are hundreds of subsets not strictly adherent to the rules. There are the gladiators. They began this, and they’re the greatest killers, the most fearless, the most disdainful of the horrible deaths that are likely coming toward them. Even gladiators separate by clans, by tribes, or short of that, by language, by affinity to specific gods. These grouping of gladiators draw others to them. All finding—or claiming—bonds to gain them entry. All paying for it with their labors, assigned different roles, with different expectations.
Mouse watches the knots of women and how they protect themselves. She’s not one of them, being a boy yet, but she watches. The women tend to stay tight under a group’s protection. The leaders have ordered that no women be abused, and they mean it. Hustus told her of a gang of men from Napoli who raped with too much abandon. Oenomaus, the leader of the Germani, had them tried and, by his own judgment, convicted. They were punished in some way, but Hustus wouldn’t say how.
Is it better to be a boy? Perhaps, though it’s not easy. Mouse wishes she and Hustus had a clan claim to make. At the moment, though, they run with a wild pack of boys with no affiliation, many of them shepherds. Just like the men and like the women, the children too are governed by their own shifting, brutal hierarchy. The strongest at the top, the weakest, like Mouse, always facing the threat of abuse. Hustus is protective and never afraid to fight in her place, but he’s not with her always. She has the bruises to attest to it.
Mostly Mouse keeps her head down and works harder than the others. She makes herself useful, both to the pack and to the adults she wants to gain the notice of. That’s why her arms are piled high with firewood the first time she sees the red-haired woman. She has seen other women in the camp already. Once she stopped seeing only the bulk of men, she realized that women did move among them. But she hasn’t seen this woman, and it stops her.
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