A Gladiator's Tale

by Ashley Gardner

  “The past does not necessarily repeat itself.”

  Cassia gazed across the rooftops before us. Above the low buildings on this street, we could just see the hills beyond the river.

  I wondered if Cassia reflected on her own experiences. Though born a slave, she’d been raised in some comfort, as her father had been a trusted member of the household. Cassia had enjoyed her father’s protection, and he’d taught her everything she knew.

  Her exit from that house had been hard on her—her mistress angry for her husband’s attentions that had been no fault of Cassia’s. A slave, even a learned one, was at the mercy of her master’s whims.

  I’d made clear from the start that I did not expect Cassia to warm my bed. If I wanted to sate myself, there were plenty of women in brothels up and down Rome’s seven hills. I was supposed to take care of this woman, and I felt protective of her, even from myself.

  “I believe I will tell Gallus I would like to work with him,” I said after a time of silence. “I’ve found all Aemil’s gladiators for him, which is what he originally hired me to do. We should collect our fee, and be done.”

  Cassia smoothed a thread of her already neat hair. “The killer is still out there. Gladiators from other ludi might be next.”

  “The urban cohorts will have to find him, then.” Though I knew she was right, I did not want to endanger Cassia any more than I already had. She’d been hurt when I’d pursued a killer before.

  “Nero instructed you to find him, remember? The urban cohorts will simply nab whoever is convenient.”

  She was reminding me in her gentle but pointed way that my entire life had changed because I had been a convenient suspect. I might condemn another to my fate if I gave up now.

  I wanted to argue that Ajax’s and Rufus’s deaths had nothing to do with me. Aemil had asked me to find his missing gladiators, and I’d found them. Regulus had brought himself home, and now he was locked in, his lock pick out of reach.

  I knew, though, that if I woke in the morning to hear that another gladiator had been found in pieces and I’d done nothing to stop it, I’d not forgive myself for a long time. Even more so if an innocent was condemned to death for it, as I had been long ago.

  I leaned back again, studying the tattered clouds in the blue sky, the storm spent, and let out a long breath. “I will find whoever it is and make sure it stops. But I don’t know how to go about it.”

  “We will think on it,” Cassia spoke with confidence, then both of us fell silent as we watched the clouds disperse on the warming wind.

  In the morning, I was awakened by a thumping on the door at the bottom of the stairs. Cassia, already up and having fetched water and bread, started toward it.

  I passed her in my musty tunic and went down the stairs in my bare feet, my knife in the palm of my hand.

  I wrenched open the door to find Merope and Gaius on the doorstep.

  “Chryseis is preparing a funeral for Rufus,” Merope said, her brows furrowed in an uncharacteristic frown. “She will not let us have anything to do with it. Your lanista is providing the funeral pyre for him, but Chryseis is having a funeral of her own. Can you help us, Leonidas?”

  Chapter 15

  Cassia had the two upstairs and supplied with a cup of watered-down wine before I reached the upper room once more. She shared our breakfast with them as well.

  I leaned against a wall, folding my arms, as Merope and Gaius plopped themselves on stools and proceeded to heartily eat and drink. Recalling their barren rooms over the popina, and the meager meal they’d offered me, I concluded they hadn’t consumed this much in a while.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  Merope wiped her mouth to answer while Gaius remained deep in bread and lentils.

  “Will you ask your lanista to let us come to the burning? And any feast he has after? We often dance at funeral feasts.”

  “Do you want him to hire you?”

  “Only if he won’t let us be there as guests,” Merope said. Gaius nodded around his mouthful of food.

  “I don’t know if Aemil has planned a feast,” I told them. “He’s not extravagant when it comes to his gladiators.”

  Gaius swallowed noisily. “Then at least to the pyre. We need to give old Rufus a proper sendoff. He was good to us.”

  Merope rose from her stool. “We can keep the dance simple, but we want to honor him. Like this.”

  She shed her threadbare cloak to reveal a tunic of thin, worn linen. Raising her arms, she began to step from foot to foot, her body bending gracefully. Gaius licked off his spoon and started banging out a rhythm on the table with the spoon and his hand.

  Cassia watched, enraptured, as Merope swayed, her leg coming up to spin her around in one fluid motion. When I thought she’d overbalance, Merope finished the turn with precision and continued the dance.

  I could see that she was very good. Gaius’s rhythm was exact, practiced, with the competence of a professional.

  Cassia clapped along—she loved music. Merope glided to her, holding out her hands. To my surprise, Cassia took them, allowing herself to be pulled into the dance.

  Cassia did not know the steps, but Merope slowed her pace, and Gaius expertly matched their rhythm. Merope demonstrated how to slide and kick, wafting an arm while she held Cassia with the other hand.

  Cassia copied the movements, learning them quickly. She’d had training in music, she’d once explained to me. Likely she’d had it in dance too.

  She was not as practiced as Merope and stumbled a few times, but always caught herself. Cassia’s cheeks flushed, and a smile lifted her lips, her eyes shining.

  The reason for the dance was mourning, but I saw Cassia come to life with Merope’s tranquil guidance. The dance was to celebrate the man, I understood, to honor him, and there was joy in that.

  Gaius sped the rhythm. Merope pulled Cassia around a bit faster, and Cassia soon adapted. The two women dipped and swayed, feet landing softly on the stone floor.

  Around the room they went, returning in a sweep to the center. Merope made some signal to Gaius, who sped into a rousing, rushed rhythm that abruptly quieted and died into silence.

  Merope spun to a close, drawing Cassia to her. The two ended in a pose fit for a sculpture, and everything went still.

  I thumped my hands on my knees, making noise to show my appreciation, as did Gaius. Merope made a graceful bow as though it was her due, but Cassia ducked her head and rushed back to her stool.

  My cheeks ached for some reason. I put my hand up to touch them, and I realized I was grinning, smiling harder than I had in a long while, since the days I’d laughed without worry with Xerxes, my closest friend.

  I promised to have a word with Aemil about hiring the dancers. Merope and Gaius departed, a bit more hopeful than when they’d arrived.

  Cassia, embarrassed by her unrestrained display, opened all her tablets and pretended to be engrossed in them. I wasn’t certain whether to reassure her that what she’d done had been beautiful or pretend nothing had happened.

  Never good at deciding what to say, I took myself to the baths instead.

  The baths I’d recently began frequenting were about forty paces up the Quirinal Hill from our lodgings. They were not as immense as the public baths of Agrippa on the Campus Martius or the complex Nero had recently opened near the Pantheon, but they suited me. There was a charge to enter, one as, which I paid over to the man at the front doors.

  The baths were small but sumptuous, with high arched ceilings and one large mosaic depicting Neptune among strange sea creatures, another Bacchus and his maenads.

  Residents of the Quirinal, including senators and praetors, frequented this bath. They frowned on plebs joining them, but I’d discovered they didn’t mind sharing this space with a former famous gladiator. I kept my distance and occasionally suggested routines for the younger men who exercised next to me in the gymnasium. For the most part, people left me alone.

  Women were allowed in th
is bathhouse, though they had separate changing rooms. Today as I handed my strigil to an attendant after I’d been rubbed with oil and sand, a procession paraded past the courtyard on its way to the caldarium.

  Procession was the only way to describe it. Two tall, solidly built men—obviously bodyguards—led the way, and two more brought up the rear.

  Lady’s maids in plain but luxurious tunics bore boxes and bags for shoes, clothing, cosmetics, hairbrushes, jewelry. They surrounded a woman in layers of red and blue silk, her head covered with a shimmering cloth. I imagined a grandly appointed litter waiting for her outside.

  Her voice came to me as she strolled. “Slowly, pests. I shall not run to keep up with you. If I have to run, you’ll be out on the streets.” She laughed, the tone rich and musical, but the words were sincere.

  The bodyguards immediately paused, and the attendant women took smaller steps, only one daring to laugh with her, but nervously.

  “A moment.” The woman in silk had caught sight of me. I couldn’t see much of her through the folds of her palla, but her dark eyes skewered me. “Who is that?”

  The women began to babble that they didn’t know, but one of the male attendants leaned to her. “Leonidas the Spartan,” I heard him say.

  “Oh, yes?” The woman gave me such a long stare that my skin prickled. I wore a loincloth only, but I might be naked for the lurid interest of her gaze. “Such richness in a lowly bath house. But enough.” She clapped her hands, gold bracelets jingling. “Stop dawdling, toads. I have much to do today.”

  She set off at a brisk pace, and her maids and bodyguards scurried to keep themselves around her.

  I signaled the attendant to begin scraping, and he sent me a knowing grin. “Fortunate man. She is very rich.”

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Severina Casellius, married to one Tertius Vestalis Felix, an old man who doesn’t care what his wife gets up to. She surrounds herself with gladiators and pays them well, from what I hear. You might have a chance to make some coin.”

  Severina Casellius was Domitiana’s daughter, the woman Cassia and I speculated about having killed Ajax. Her bodyguards were massive, and she liked to have gladiators and others at her home.

  I watched Severina until she was out of sight while the attendant flicked dirt and oil from my skin.

  I remembered now where I’d heard the name Tertius Vestalis Felix. Cassia had told me he was Severina’s husband, and Gallus had indicated that the same man was planning to build a warehouse in the Emporium. The building site would give Severina or her servants an excuse to be in the area, and perhaps gain access to Chryseis’s warehouse, where I’d found the feather from Rufus’s helmet.

  I wanted to get closer to Severina and discover if our speculations had merit, but I realized I would have to make it seem her idea. A woman like that would not respond well to demands.

  Once the attendant finished, I strode to the frigidarium. After a swim, I pulled on my tunic, and on a whim, headed for the caldarium into which Severina’s party had disappeared.

  Three of the four bodyguards stood in the arched doorway, forming a wall of muscle, not letting anyone in, not even the slave who fetched and carried towels.

  The fourth, a big man with a shaved head and beaked nose, stepped forward out of a niche where he’d been watching over Severina in the caldarium. He folded his arms as he faced me, saying nothing.

  I looked the guard over, met his gaze without flinching, then turned and departed.

  Days passed, and we approached the Ides of the month. Aemil kept his gladiators locked in at night, none to be allowed out on pain of death, and he meant it. The gate guards, who had sometimes let us slip away without Aemil being the wiser were threatened until they were too terrified to do anything but obey. So Septimius told me, the large man’s eyes tight.

  No more gladiators were found cut into bits, none dead at all. When no more excitement came from these events, Rome forgot and found new things to talk about.

  I managed to persuade Aemil to allow Merope and her family to perform at the double funeral for Ajax and Rufus. He did it grudgingly, not wanting to make too much fuss.

  “If he has to have a grand funeral for those two, he will be expected to do so for every gladiator he loses,” Nonus Marcianus told me after I’d finished speaking to a snarling Aemil. “He doesn’t like losing them at all.”

  True, Aemil did everything he could to keep his gladiators alive. He was hard on us in training, because once we were released onto the arena floor, he had no more control. He had to watch us die with the rest of the crowd.

  Three days before the Ides, Cassia and I, Marcianus, Gaius and his cousins, and all the gladiators walked out of the ludus and west up into the hills to the place Aemil burned the remains of gladiators who’d fallen.

  Others from the collegia of gladiators joined us, men from ludi on the outskirts of Rome, ready to send off a fellow gladiator. The collegia was footing half the fee for Merope and Martolia, as well as for the cremation. I was part of the organization myself, contributing what sums I could to the burial funds plus the collection for widows and children.

  Romans came out to watch as we processed. Gaius carried a drum under his arm, beating it in a sad and slow rhythm. Merope and Martolia, in thin gauzy, pure white tunics, moved in a graceful pace to the beat of the drum, tiny bells on their wrists and ankles jingling.

  A mule-pulled cart, led by Aemil himself, bore only the body of Ajax. The day before, Chryseis had abruptly announced she’d take Rufus’s body for a private funeral, which she’d conducted yesterday afternoon. She’d burned her late husband with very little ceremony and interred his ashes in her family’s tomb, so Cassia had learned. Chryseis of course had not allowed Merope or Martolia anywhere near. They had to honor Rufus, as the rest of us did, in spirit, and from afar.

  Ajax’s body had been kept cool in a cellar under the ludus while Aemil and the collegia made the arrangements. At the crest of the hill, where a bare patch around the fresh stack of wood attested to previous pyres, we halted. Aemil and I carried Ajax’s body to the unlit pile.

  Gaius increased his tempo. Merope and Martolia swayed and spun, tears glittering on Martolia’s cheeks. No one had hired professional mourners, as Aemil didn’t like them, but the two young women showed the grief that losing a gladiator, one marked for death by his very profession, could bring.

  Aemil lit the pyre. Smoke stung my eyes, the sensation taking me back to the day we’d burned Xerxes. His wife had stood by my side, upright and stiff under her veil, the children she’d had by Xerxes huddled against her. I’d lost a friend, she a husband and lover.

  I found my eyes wet, a burning in my heart.

  A touch brought me back from the past. Cassia, who’d insisted on attending, brushed my bare arm with her fingers. I glanced down at her, but she dropped her hand to her side, her gaze on the flames.

  The pyre would burn for some time. I turned and led Cassia away before long, while Merope and Martolia danced their mourning, Gaius weeping as he banged the drum.

  Smoke drifted toward the river, the monuments and aqueducts of Rome glittering in the late winter sunshine.

  Aemil and the collegia had contributed to a marker, which would be erected outside the ludus with those of other gladiators. The stonecutter had been instructed to write:

  Ajax, captured in battle in the borderlands, secutor, lived twenty-two years, won thirty matches, lost five, with six draws.

  Rufus, freedman of Rome, myrmillo. Lived twenty-five years, won forty matches, lost six, with ten draws.

  We fellow gladiators put up this stone to honor them.

  Later, someone would scratch under Rufus’s name, Beloved of M., M., and G.

  The day after the funeral, which was the second before the Ides, I was invited to Domitiana Sabinus’s villa, along with Herakles, for a banquet.

  Aemil took me aside when I reached the ludus that evening and told me I needed to bring Herakles home to
night alive or throw myself into the river.

  Regulus was furious that Herakles had been given leave—Domitiana must have paid Aemil well. Regulus’s voice echoed through the cells, his language foul.

  I ignored him, but Herakles gloated. “Don’t wait up, Mother,” he shouted at Regulus, laughing in glee as we walked out the gate.

  I was not the only person venturing into Domitiana’s villa this evening. As Herakles and I reached the front gate, a cloaked figure slipped through the small servants’ door in the wall.

  I’d argued with Cassia about her accompanying me to the villa, but I’d lost. She’d won me over by pointing out that if Domitiana proved to be the woman sending gladiators to their doom, she and Helvius, her trusted friend, could run for help.

  This was only true if Helvius was more loyal to Cassia than to his mistress, and if Helvius himself had nothing to do with the murders. I also knew that further argument was futile, and I reasoned silently that I would be there next to her if anything went wrong.

  I finally conceded, if she promised to run at the first sign of danger. Cassia had turned away and murmured, “Of course.”

  The doorman ushered Herakles and me into the atrium. He barely hid a sneer as he did so, making it clear what he thought of his mistress inviting gladiators to supper.

  He shut the gate behind us, the latch clanging into the silence like a cell door closing.

  Chapter 16

  The doorman led us along the colonnaded garden to the villa and through its enormous atrium, the house rising around us. We passed empty rooms that had oil lamps flickering inside them, illuminating wall paintings and floor mosaics. Domitiana was indeed wealthy if she could place lights for effect in dark, unused portions of the house.

  A dining room opened from the peristyle garden, screens pulled closed after we entered to cut the night breeze.