Past Crimes

by Ashley Gardner

  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, Cassia’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; fo
wl 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.

  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 contin
ued 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.”