The girl squealed. It was a scared noise, but filled with resignation. She had been a victim all her short life. Rescue had seemed too good to last.
Disgust thickened my throat again. As the old woman madly tried to drag the girl back to her stinking house, I grabbed some brooms from a besom stall. I don't normally attack grannies but this hag was outrageous and I know when to break rules. I beat at the short, overweight figure, thrashing her furiously while I yelled to Albia to escape.
No good. She was too used to cringing, too used to taking punishment. The cathouse-keeper was hauling her along, partly by one arm, partly by her hair. At the same time, the old woman had managed to disarm me of my brooms. As they scrabbled on the pavement outside a vegetable shop, I began to pelt the kidnapper with anything I could grab: cabbages, carrots, neatly tied bundles of hard asparagus. Albia may have been struck by a flying brassica by accident; she was screaming much louder now.
Time to stop being squeamish. The madam snarled, showing rotten teeth and a wine-stained gullet. I've looked down prettier throats on blood-dripping boarhounds. I jumped on her, got my arm around her neck and pulled her head back while I let her feel that I was now wielding my knife. She let go of Albia. Albia's screams only increased.
An elbow jammed me in the privates with the force of a demolition ram. Heels kicked backwards at me with agonising power as the other elbow took my breath away in a vicious waistline battery. Both hands came back and tried to pull my ears off. Then she gripped me with both legs and fell forwards, her great weight toppling me over too.
I tried to roll sideways. She had all the initiative. I was flummoxed by this huge bundle of stinking fat. My legs were pinioned together by her treetrunk thighs. The knife was somewhere under us, not achieving much. I wanted Albia to fetch Petro, but when in the company of racketeers I still had to pretend he and I were strangers. If the girl had only made a run for it I could have gone limp and wriggled free, but I knew she was still nearby, capering in distress. I could hear her strangled little cries.
Deadlocked, the woman and I struggled breathlessly. I had overcome my diffidence about her age and sex. It was like fighting a rank slug that had heaved up from some black lake at the gates of the underworld. As we flailed, her rags loosened so odd ends hung off like long branches of a Stygian weed She bucked and jerked. I was flung around, but clung to her, digging in my nails. I stabbed one boot into a calf, hard enough to break bone, but I met only flesh and she just growled angrily. Filthy hair strands were whipping in my eyes. I nutted her skull. I don't know what it did to her, but it hurt me.
Suddenly my right arm slipped free. I had lost my knife, but I grappled the woman harder. I pulled her up by the shoulders, then banged her face down on the ground, once, twice, and three times. We were lying in the guffer so I was bashing her against the kerb. I could hear my own grunts of effort.
Without warning the situation changed. Other people had arrived. Abruptly I was pulled away, receiving a barrage of pummelling to subdue me. I saw the old woman being dragged backwards up the road, held by her splayed legs. It was her turn to scream; this was rough handling. After being hauled off her, I had been thrown headlong, though I had recaptured my knife. No use: a booted foot trod briskly on my wrist and pinned it down. There was another foot on my neck, applying just enough pressure to threaten breaking it. I lay still.
'Get up!' I can recognise female authority. I scrambled to my feet.
'What's happening?'
'Don't talk!' That old cliche.
I still had my knife; no attempt was made to remove it from me. No attempt was made by me to use the thing, either – not with a pair of swords pricking right through my torn tunic into my back and a third weapon glittering directly in front, aimed upwards at my heart.
I already knew what to expect; I had heard the voices. A glance around confirmed the worst. Albia had vanished. The old woman was lying out cold, dumped near the brothel. And I was being captured by an efficient gang of well-dressed, dangerously armed young girls.
As they marched me away with them, I saw Petronius Longus on the bath house porch. He was watching my removal with a faint sardonic grin.
XXIV
The house to which I had been taken by the women gladiators seemed small, but I sensed there were quite a few occupants. The room where they dumped me was almost dark. By now it was evening. Faint domestic sounds and smells suggested people were occupied with dinner. No food was brought to me. For informers, starvation was the curse of the job.
They had not bound me, but the door was either bolted or jammed. I stayed calm. Well, so far. No violence had been done to me after the capture. These women were fighters, but they killed professionally – for the winner's purse. If they had brought me here for a reason, it did not seem to be a reason that required me to be dead.
All the same I was wary. They were fighters, and there were a lot of them.
When they had reached the entertainment stage of their evening, where some diners might have called up tumblers, witty dwarves or flautists, they had me fetched. The house was stylish. It must contain a dining room; I thought longingly of leftovers. But they were waiting to amuse themselves with me in a small colonnaded garden. I walked there through quiet corridors on level tesserae. From somewhere came the evocative scent of smoking pine cones, used in arena ritual. From somewhere else a maddening hint of sauteed onion, used merely to torture hungry men.
My captors leaned gracefully on the pillars, while I stood centrally like a disgraced child. If they noticed my stomach rumbling, these girls ignored it, proving that gladiators are immured in cruelty. I must have made a sorry spectacle: grimy and bruised, depressed, puzzled, smelly and exhausted. Such qualities are normal in my trade, but a group of female fighters might not see it as colourful. They belonged to a class that was legally infamous, debarred from all rights in society. Informers may be reviled, a subject of satire whose bills never get paid, yet all the same, I was a free man. I was entitled to vote, to cheat on my taxes and to bugger my slaves. I hoped these women on the edge of society would not envy that too much.
I was uneasy for another reason. All men know from puberty that females in the arena are balls-grabbing sexual predators.
To look at, they hid this aspect courteously. Although the two I had first spotted at the baths had had the air of loose women waiting for customers, when relaxed at home the entire group – five or six here currently – seemed like woodland nymphs with nothing on their minds beyond perfecting scurrilous echoes. Laundered white gowns; endlessly combed long hair; manicured toes showing in beaded indoor slippers. You might discuss poems with these beauties – until you noticed their arrogance, their muscles and their healed scars. They were oddly mixed. Tall or tiny, blonde or ebony: good box office variety. One stood out: a girl who thought she was a boy, or a boy who thought he was a girl.
I wondered at first why they were not slung up in chains in a gladiators' barracks. How could they afford to run a pleasant and sizeable house? Then I worked it out. Yes, untried colleagues would be in thrall to seedy lanistae in the training schools, but these had achieved independence. These were the successful fighters. The unsuccessful were dead.
'Are you planning to let me go?' I asked them meekly.
'Amazonia's coming.' It was an extremely tall, lean Negress who addressed me first.
'Who's that?'
'You'll find out.'
'Sounds ominous.'
'So be afraid! And who are you?'
'Didius Falco is the name.'
'And what do you do, Falco?' Heavy innuendo made me blink. Or was the innuendo all in my mind? Setting aside the urge to joke that I was just a time-waster who played around with girls, I told them straight: that I worked for the governor and was investigating the Verovolcus death. It seemed best to be honest. They might already know who I was.
They exchanged glances. I could not tell whether it meant they were impressed by my social standing, or whether the name Ver
ovolcus was significant.
'How does it feel to be rescued?' sneered a sturdy brunette.
'It stinks.'
'Because we are women?'
'I didn't need help. I was holding my own.'
'Not from where I was standing,' she exclaimed, laughing. They all chortled. I grinned. 'Well, fair enough, ladies. Let me thank you then.'
'Turn off the charm!' exclaimed the boy who thought he was a girl (or the girl who thought she was a boy).
I merely shrugged at him (or her). 'Do you know what happened to the teenager who was being dragged off by that hag?'
'She's safe.' A neat Greek-style blonde chipped in. She had a nose straight off an Athenian temple peristyle but sounded as common as a harbour whelk-picker.
'Don't frighten her; she's endured enough today. She was under my wife's protection -'
'Then you should have left her with your wife, you pervert!'
Now I was beginning to understand why they had grabbed me: this tough sisterhood had been defending Albia. That was fine – but it was unclear whether they saw me as a victimiser. 'I never tried to make her a child prostitute. I wanted to get her out of it.'
Maybe they realised that. (Maybe they didn't care.) The Greek put her foot up on a balustrade, revealing lengths of superb, well-pumiced leg through an unsewn skirt. The action, apparently unconscious, made me consciously gulp. 'She's with us now.' This would be tricky to explain to Helena.
'Well think again, is my advice. Albia is not a slave. Turning a free citizen into a gladiator unlawfully is serious. You could all end up being butchered with the criminals.' That was the morning event in an arena, when convicts were put to bloody punishment: slash and smash with no reprieve. Each winner goes straight into another fight and the last man is slaughtered by the ring-keeper on the sodden red sand. 'Besides,' I tried, 'You've seen her – she's totally unsuitable. She has neither the build nor the body. I can tell you too, she has no speed, no fighting intelligence, no movement finesse -'
As I ladled on the flattery, from somewhere behind me came an ironic burst of clapping. A voice cried loudly, 'Oh why don't you just add that she has flat feet and bad eyesight and her boobs get in the way?'
Rome! The accent, the language and the attitude plunged me straight back home. Familiarity socked me in the empty gullet. I even felt I knew the voice.
I turned. I had lasted long enough in the confrontation so far to be feeling quite relaxed. That was about to change.
'Amazonia,' one of the girls to my left informed me. At least these tough maidens were polite. When they had finished battering thick wooden posts with practice swords, someone must sponge the sweat off them and put them through an hour of gentle etiquette.
When my eyes found the newcomer, I was stunned. Wide apart brown eyes gazed at me playfully. Amazonia wore white like the others, setting off dark and sultry skin. Her hair was pulled up on the top of her head then fastened in a two-feet-long snaky ponytail; flowerbuds decorated the fastening. I was expecting some haughty and humourless group leader, who had plans to humiliate me. I found a little treasure with a flexible body, a warm heart and a deeply friendly nature. Was this instinctive male recognition of a good bedmate? No. I already knew this woman. Dear gods, at one time in my dubious past I knew her rather well.
She had changed her career since I last saw her, but not much else, I guessed. There were extra fine lines around the eyes and an air of hardened maturity, but everything else was just as I remembered, and as I remembered it was all in the right place. A flash of her eyes said that she remembered everything too. She was a Tripolitanian rope-dancer. Believe me, she was the best rope-dancer you have ever seen, a shining circus acrobat – and equally good at other things. There was no way I would ever be able to explain this chance meeting to Helena.
If the so-called Amazonia was surprised to see me, I doubted it. She must have been listening for a while. Maybe she had known exactly what pitiful captive she was coming to inspect. 'Thank you for looking after him. Everyone – this is Marcus! He's not as gormless as he looks. Well, not quite. Marcus and I are old, old friends.'
I fought back feebly. 'Who thought up the nom de guerre? Amazonia? Hello, Chloris.'
She did blush. Someone else tittered, though quietly. I could sense their respect. She was clearly their leader – well, I would expect that; there was a time she could have led me through the flowery meadows all the way to Elysium.
'It's been a long time, Marcus darling,' the girl I knew as Chloris greeted me, with a rapacious smile.
Then I felt the deep-down fear of a man who has just met an old girlfriend who he thought was just a memory – and who finds that she's still after him.
XXV
'Well, well, this is such a treat!' she beamed.
'Missed me?'
'Why; did I know you or something?' she joked.
'Never noticed that I'd gone,' I riposted stalwartly.
'Oh, I left you, Marcus darling.' If she wanted to think that, fair enough. 'The person I was really leaving was your evil old mother.'
'Now then, my mother's a wonderful woman and she was extremely fond of you.'
Chloris gazed at me. 'I don't think so,' she said, sounding dangerous. Here we go, I thought.
I had been led off to a private bower, strewn with very expensive animal skins. Mostly well crushed, I regret to say. Chloris had always liked plenty of places to loll. Whenever she dropped to a reclining position, her intention was not restful. This room had seen plenty of the action she loved, if I was any judge.
It was stunningly painted with much drama: dark red walls, punctuated with black details. If you dared to look closely, the illustrations featured violent myths where unhappy people were torn asunder or tied to wheels. These pictures were mostly tiny. I did not disturb myself too much by looking at the wildly plunging bulls and maddened victims; it was rash to take your eyes off Chloris.
'What's happened to the teenager?'
'Run off again.' At least Chloris was never a girl to engage in subterfuge. That was the trouble in the old days: she had always liked Ma to know exactly what was going on. My mother was shocked, since I wisely never told her anything.
'You let the girl leave?' I showed my annoyance. 'Look, if any of you spot her again, will you haul her in, please? She's an urchin in trouble. Name's Albia. I don't want any harm to befall her.'
'She will probably run straight back to the brothel, little idiot.' Chloris was unfortunately right, I guessed. 'What's your interest, Falco? Is she a witness in your case?'
'The drowned man?' I had not thought of it, though it was possible. Albia had scavenged around the Shower of Gold; she might well know something. 'I never even asked her. No, my wife took her in.'
'Your wife?' Chloris shrieked. 'What – some poor bag finally moved in with you? Do I know her?' she demanded suspiciously.
'No.' I was certain of that.
'What's she called?'
'Helena Justina.'
'Helena is Greek. Is she a slave?'
'Only if her noble papa has been telling very big lies for twenty years. He's a senator. I went respectable.'
I knew what kind of raucous reaction that would cause.
When Chloris stopped laughing, she wiped the tears from her eyes. Then she was off again, helplessly. 'Oh, I just can't believe it!'
'Believe it,' I ordered levelly.
My tone stopped the hysteria. 'Don't go pompous on me, Marcus love.'
I gave her a grin. It was fake. Just like a lot of things had been in our relationship. It would be tactless to say I was married now because once she had dumped me, I had at last found true love. Chloris, a demonstrative girl, would probably throw up.
'What about you? What's all this?' I asked.
'I knew how to use a sword.' In her circus act Chloris had had them as balancers, when she was not waving parasols or feather fans. Males in the audience had liked the frisson of the swords, though most preferred the fans because it looked
as if she wore nothing underneath. I happened to know – because she had told me – she wore leather undergarments to prevent rope burns anywhere sensitive. Her motto was: keep your equipment in good order. I expected she still followed that. 'I wanted a change when I ditched you, darling. I took up fighting professionally. I knew the organisers already; they soon took me seriously. I'm good!'
'You would be.'
A gleam lit her face, half boasting, half invitation. She scrabbled upright on the quicksand of furs then began working off her boots – high, tightlaced items with hard soles for kicking and thick thongs for protection. With her near-transparent feminine white drapery the contrast was unsettling. That had always been the attraction: a petite girlish figure on someone unexpectedly strong. As she wriggled her bare toes, I began to sweat with erotic recollection. Chloris owned feet that were trained to grip ropes and trapezes; she could use them to curl fiercely around pretty well anything…
'Tell me about your British set-up.'
'Ooh, Marcus. It sounds as if I'm under investigation.'
'Just curious. Why here of all places?'
'Britain? I heard about it enough from you. We formed a team specifically to come out here. Plenty of bored men, with few outlets for entertainment. Perfect spot. A brand new arena. Best of all, no built-in male gladiator groups, hogging the action and ganging up to stop us working.'
'Who's your fixer, your lanista?'
'Stuff that!'
Wrong question. I should have known. Chloris had always been independent. Being prey to managers, who were ignorant of her skills and who stole the appearance fees, had annoyed her in the circus life too. Having a trainer was really not her style.
'We can train ourselves,' she said. 'We practise every day, and observe each other's progress. Women are damned good analysts -'
'Yes, I remember you used to spend a lot of time analysing what was wrong with me… You lead the team?'
'Analysing your faults was too exhausting, darling!' she interposed.
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