Gladiator

by Theresa Breslin

  ‘Where is my cloak?’ he demanded.

  ‘You cannot fight with a cloak if you have a sword and shield,’ said Linus. ‘You are to be one of the bestiarii and they do not carry cloaks.’

  ‘I need my cloak,’ the Dream Master hissed at Cy. ‘You’ve been back to your own time, I can tell, so where is it?’

  ‘I didn’t bring it,’ said Cy. ‘Things got . . . complicated.’

  ‘Complicated, shmonkplicated,’ snapped the Dream Master. ‘We’ll just have to use your piece of dreamsilk then. Come over here beside me and focus your mind so that I can escape.’

  ‘I can’t use it to take you back to your dreamcloak,’ said Cy miserably. ‘I think there is only enough energy in it to take me and one other back through TimeSpace to the twenty-first century.’

  ‘And what’s the problem?’ snarled the Dream Master. ‘Which A. N. Other apart from myself would you be taking back?’

  ‘Lauren,’ said Cy.

  ‘Lauren!’ screeched the Dream Master. ‘Your sister Lauren?’

  Cy nodded.

  ‘How in the name of Volatile Vulcan did your sister Lauren end up in ancient Pompeii?’

  ‘I suppose it was my fault really,’ said Cy. ‘Your dreamcloak was lying on my bed and she sat down beside it. I was so busy making sure that she didn’t go near the dreamcloak that I forgot I was holding my piece of dreamsilk and then I touched her arm. I was trying not to think about Pompeii. But sometimes when you try not to think about something, that’s the very thing you just can’t stop thinking about. It just sort of . . . happened.’

  ‘Sort of . . . happened,’ the Dream Master mimicked Cy nastily. ‘How many times have I told you, you . . . you . . . Dimwitted Doughnut, that when you are master of a dream things don’t just “happen”. You guide the events, you look after the Story. You . . . you . . .’ The Dream Master slumped against the wall. ‘You really have got to get a grip.’

  There was a silence. Linus looked at the Dream Master. ‘I know now why they say that you have a mighty temper. You will fight well.’

  ‘I have no intention of fighting anyone, anywhere, anytime!’ roared the Dream Master. ‘I will not fight any man. If they drag me into an arena I will sit down in the sand. I WILL NOT FIGHT!’

  Linus leaped back from the door of the cell. ‘We must go now,’ he said to Cy.

  ‘But you do see that before I do anything else I need to take Lauren back first?’ Cy begged the Dream Master as he turned to follow Linus. ‘I’m not deserting you. I mean, just think what it would be like if Lauren realized what was going on. She’d want to use the dreamcloak too.’

  The Dream Master shuddered. Eventually he nodded. ‘All right. Go and return Lauren to her own time.’

  ‘After I do that I’ll come back for you straight away,’ said Cy. He began to walk away.

  The Dream Master reached out through the bars and grasped Cy’s arm with a strong grip. ‘Listen to me. You will be travelling through TimeSpace without me. Because I do not have my dreamcloak I will not be able to come to your aid if things go wrong. You are very inexperienced so you must take care. Be watchful. Consider what you do, say, or think. You are on your own, Cy.’

  Cy ran quickly to the corner of the barracks where Linus was waiting. ‘Where does the actual combat take place?’ he asked him.

  ‘In the Amphitheatre at the other end of the town. There is more room there, seating for twenty thousand people and space for the animals.’

  ‘Animals?’ Cy repeated. ‘Like cats and dogs?’

  Linus shook his head. ‘More fierce than that. It is mainly wild animals, from Africa and India. There is even an elephant which leads the procession of combatants into the arena.’

  ‘Do these animals perform?’ A slow cold dread began to stalk through Cy’s mind.

  Linus gave Cy a puzzled look. ‘Perform?’

  ‘What do they do?’ asked Cy. ‘Why do they have these animals at the Amphitheatre?’

  ‘Why, for the gladiators to fight,’ said Linus. ‘I told you earlier; it has been decided that the little man should be one of the bestiarii. Look.’ He pointed to a poster which was attached to the wall of the barracks. ‘It tells what the holiday programme will be. See there, the first fight of the morning is your friend Dominus Somniorum. They must believe him when he shouts that he will not fight with any man. So they have not placed him in combat with another gladiator. He is matched against a lion.’

  CHAPTER X

  WHEN THEY GOT back to the villa Cy lay down and waited until Linus fell asleep. The household was quiet as he walked softly along the passage to Rhea Silvia’s room and drew back the curtain. Lauren was on a little pallet at the entrance. Her breathing was steady and her eyes closed. Cy kneeled beside her and lightly took her hand. With the fingers of his other hand he touched the dreamsilk in his pocket and carefully, carefully, remembering all the Dream Master’s instructions, he lifted them both back to his bedroom in the twenty-first century.

  Cy crept past his sleeping sister. He glided out of his bedroom onto the hall landing. Silently he opened the door of the laundry cupboard and grabbed an old beach towel from the bottom of the pile. Then he tiptoed back into his room and spread it out on the floor beside his bed. Gently lifting the edge of his duvet furthest away from Lauren, he tipped it up so that the Dreamcloak ruffled sideways and fell onto the towel. Was it true what the Dream Master had said? That the cloak was becoming worn out by Cy’s adventures? It certainly looked floppy and lifeless.

  Cy had no idea what to do about it. Did it need its own true owner to energize it? And why had the Dream Master expressly forbidden him to try to reconnect the torn piece? Surely it would meld together in some way, as electricity could run into a battery and recharge it?

  Cy thought for a moment about what the Dream Master had said when he had suggested this. ‘Yes, if you put the two pieces together they might connect. Like a stray atom in a nuclear fission. Think of the sun exploding and you might have some inkling of the outcome.’

  Cy remembered the expression on the little man’s face as he had studied the torn piece when he first noticed that it had changed. The Dream Master had looked afraid, afraid and unsure . . .

  Cy examined the remnant of dreamcloak that now belonged to him. It had changed and – Cy’s eyes narrowed – since his adventure with Lauren, it had changed again. It was bigger and more . . . Cy searched for the right word to describe it . . . more . . . complete. That was it! The edges were less ragged. The energy that it contained seemed to flow out to the perimeter and then back to the centre. But where was the centre?

  Cy felt his skin begin to tingle, a soft itch starting just below the surface of his body. It was coming from inside him, somewhere within his mind, yet he knew that it had been triggered by something outside. The dreamsilk! He felt himself being drawn to do something, to go somewhere, but he was not able to know exactly what it was.

  Cy pulled his mind back to the present situation. He tucked his piece of dreamsilk into his pocket and looked around his room. He must find a place to keep his Dream Master’s dreamcloak and then get Lauren out of his room. He would have to wait until night-time before he could go back to Pompeii and rescue the Dream Master. Cy glanced out of his window to where the hot August sun was beginning to sink lower in the sky. The gladiator games were only two days away. He didn’t have a huge amount of time.

  Cy took the four corners of the towel and knotted them together. Where could he hide the dreamcloak so that no-one would find it? It had to be safe from Lauren’s prying expeditions and his parents’ cleaning excursions. His secret place under his chest of drawers was too small. Cy knelt down and dragged out from underneath his bed the boxes that contained his winter clothes. He opened the lid of one and dumped the bundle on top of some heavy sweaters. Then he shoved the boxes back under his bed. For the moment at least the dreamcloak was safe until he could find a way of reuniting it with its owner.

  Lauren was still sleeping. Cy deci
ded not to risk wakening her. He would go downstairs and let her wake up naturally. If she said anything about a dream of ancient Rome he would just laugh.

  It worked out simpler than he had imagined. As soon as he appeared downstairs his mum asked him to help her unpack the shopping while she began to prepare dinner. Ten minutes later, when Lauren appeared sleepily in the doorway, before she had a chance to say anything Cy’s mum spoke first.

  ‘You’ve obviously been having a nap, while Cy and I have been working here. We’ll make dinner and you can help Dad clear up the kitchen afterwards.’

  Cy avoided meeting Lauren’s eyes.

  His sister yawned and staggered to the fridge, popped open a can of juice and took a few slurps.

  ‘Did I fall asleep on your bed when we were talking?’ she began.

  Cy interrupted at once. ‘Yeah, and don’t ever do it again,’ he said. ‘Mum, will you tell Lauren to stay out of my room?’

  ‘Lauren,’ said Cy’s mum in a tone of weary patience, ‘please do not go into your brother’s room unless he is agreeable. After all, you don’t want him going into your room when you’re not there, do you?’

  ‘I was only trying to help him with his project about volcanoes,’ said Lauren. She hesitated. ‘He was telling me about Pompeii—’

  ‘No,’ said Cy quickly. ‘You were telling me and then you began to get all mixed up and . . . and . . . fell asleep.’

  Cy’s mum smiled at both of them in her ‘encourage positive behaviour’ mode. ‘It’s good to know that you are supporting each other.’

  Lauren grunted. ‘Yeah, right.’

  Cy could see that his sister was still sleepy and slightly dazed.

  ‘Did you hang up your new school clothes?’ Cy’s mum asked Lauren.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Lauren.

  Cy busied himself setting the table and watched his sister covertly.

  Lauren frowned and took a few more sips of her drink. ‘I’ll leave that box file of mine with the stuff about Pompeii outside your room,’ she told Cy. She drifted towards the hall. At the kitchen door she paused and put one hand up to her neck. She turned and, speaking in a low voice so that their mother would not hear her, she asked Cy, ‘You wouldn’t have seen my new school tie anywhere?’

  CHAPTER XI

  LATER, IN HIS room, Cy took out his notebook and wrote down ‘Find Lauren’s tie’. He gazed dejectedly at his scribbled writing. No wonder Mrs Chalmers and everyone else complained about it. He could hardly read it himself. He climbed into bed and propped himself up on his pillows. Beside him he placed his own piece of dreamsilk. It was quiet and nearly translucent. There was almost no energy there. That meant he would have to wait for a little while before trying to go back to Pompeii and rescue the Dream Master. Meanwhile he really should do some work on his school project. Which shouldn’t be too difficult now that he had Lauren’s notes.

  Cy began to brighten up a bit. Volcanoes were very interesting and the eruption at Pompeii seemed particularly exciting. Also, he thought as he opened up the box file that Lauren had given him, the more he knew about Pompeii the easier it would be for him when he returned to help the Dream Master. Cy took out a folder and saw that inside it was a map. He put the folder to one side and opened up the map. It was a plan of the ancient city of Pompeii!

  Cy drew in his breath. This would be very useful! He shoved everything else down to the end of his bed and began to study the map. There was a main road, the Via Stabiana, running from one end of the city to the other. Cy followed the line of the road with his finger. And the Via dell’Abbondanza intersected it, making a rightangle fairly near the Barracks of the Gladiators.

  ‘Via dell’Abbondanza.’ Cy read the street name out loud. That was where he had first met Rhea Silvia and Linus. In a shop in the Via dell’Abbondanza. What did that street name sound like? ‘Bonanza!’ It seemed a good name for a street full of shops with goods of every kind from all over the world. Cy scrambled across his bed and got the dictionary from his bookshelf. They were going to study the Romans next term and Mrs Chalmers had told them that lots of words in use in many of today’s languages came from Latin. Cy looked up ‘Abbondanza’ to see if there was anything that looked similar, and saw ‘abondance’, which was listed as being French for abundance. So Mrs Chalmers was right. It wasn’t just English, there were French words that came from Latin. Cy felt a bit like a detective as he tracked the meaning through the dictionary. Eventually he found ‘abundant’ – and then all its meanings: ‘copious supply; great amount’. It was a good name for a shopping street, better than naming them after local councillors, Cy thought, as they did today.

  Cy looked at the city plan again and began to search for Linus and Rhea Silvia’s house. He tried to recall the streets that he’d run along with Linus, how they had passed the Temple of Isis beside the Theatre and the Odeon before coming back onto the main road. He lifted his notebook and began to draw a map, marking with a circle the area where he believed their villa was. Next he looked for the Amphitheatre. It would be a building with a circular shape like the Colosseum in Rome. At last he found it. It was more of an ellipse and was situated at the furthest corner of the town, right at the end of the Via dell’Abbondanza.

  ‘Porta,’ Cy muttered. Why were so many of these places called ‘porta’? ‘Port . . .’ It wasn’t a port as he knew it, because that would mean it would be situated by the sea, or on water at least. And these couldn’t be, as they were all round the city.

  ‘Port . . .’ Cy kept his eye on the map and flicked through the pages of his dictionary. ‘Port’ – he found the word in his dictionary and groaned aloud. There were half a dozen different meanings listed! This was the trouble with language, thought Cy. Just when you thought you had a grasp of it there was always more.

  ‘It’s too complicated,’ he had complained to Mrs Chalmers one day when she had asked him to wait behind to copy out extra words while she marked exercise books. ‘I know that you’re trying to help me, but it’s not worth all this effort.’

  ‘Oh yes, Cy,’ she’d said gently. ‘Yes, it is complicated and difficult, but it is worth the effort. Language is beautiful, it’s versatile, compelling, and very wonderful.’

  What’s to be wonderful? thought Cy as he read his dictionary definitions. He stumbled down the list, which included his first known meaning – a port by the sea – and then a type of wine – a drink, for heaven’s sake! Cy’s finger stopped as he found what he was looking for. ‘Port – a gate or portal in a town or fortress: from the Latin porta – a gate.’ Below that was: ‘Portal – any entrance, gateway, or doorway, especially one that is large and impressive: from Latin porta – a gate.’

  Cy felt quite pleased with himself. He decided to write it all down. It was bound to come in useful, if not for the volcano project, then certainly later in the term when they were studying the Romans.

  Cy went back to the city plan. At the opposite end of the Via dell’Abbondanza was the Porta Marina. Now that last word he did know. A marina was to do with boats. He went back to his dictionary and found the word and its meaning – ‘a docking facility’ – so he guessed that the Porta Marina must be the gate which led to the harbour and the Mediterranean Sea. His eye wandered back along to the place where the road crossed the Via Stabiana. At the bottom of the map, near the Porta Stabia, were the barracks where the Dream Master at this very moment was waiting to fight for his life. Cy shivered. He let his eye follow the Via Stabiana back up to the top of the map, where the road left the city – the road which headed inland and northwards towards the mighty city of Rome. The name of the gate leaped out from the page: ‘Porta Vesuvio’.

  ‘Porta Vesuvio,’ Cy whispered.

  He didn’t need any dictionary to help him translate that. Vesuvius was the mountain in Italy which had once been an active volcano, a very active volcano. His grampa said it had been erupting when he was there during the Second World War. After the fighting in the Western Desert, Monty and Grampa had
led the Eighth Army across the Mediterranean to Italy, and there, Grampa said, ‘was old Vesuvio, crackling and thundering like nobody’s business’. But it hadn’t been such a huge explosion then. The most famous was ages earlier, in ancient times.

  Cy wondered if Linus or Rhea Silvia would remember anything about it. How great would that be! He would have the best description in the whole class of a volcanic eruption if he could hear some first-hand accounts of what had happened! When he returned it would be the first thing that he would ask Linus. As Cy read a bit more a restless feeling began to come over him. It was a warm August night but he drew the duvet cover around his shoulders.

  There were drawings showing the volcano spouting fire, smoke and molten lava. Hot ash and deadly fumes were pouring down the hillsides. The eruption had been so vast and so awful that almost everyone had been killed. The city had been buried under the ash for centuries.

  It must have happened after Linus and Rhea Silvia’s life there, Cy reasoned, if the city had been covered over and lost for more than a thousand years. He remembered his conversation with Linus as they had taken the short cut at the Odeon to the gladiators’ barracks. Linus had known of some kind of disaster at Pompeii, but it was not a volcanic eruption that Linus had spoken of, but an earthquake.

  ‘They are still repairing buildings from the earthquake which happened many years ago,’ Linus had said.

  Then he had told Cy that he did not remember anything about the earthquake as it was before he was alive. It had happened the year Rhea Silvia was born.

  Cy looked again at his book. It gave a few details about the earthquake at Pompeii and said that it had happened in AD 62. Cy knew that Rhea Silvia was seventeen years old because he had heard her tell Lauren that this was her seventeenth summer.

  Cy snapped the book shut, lay down in his bed and closed his eyes. His stomach was beginning those painful cramps that he knew so well, when events in life began to grow too big for him to handle. Now he knew that he must get back to Pompeii as soon as he could. This problem was so large that he dared not even think about it, let alone write it down.