Blood and Steel

by Harry Sidebottom

  A connecting door led to a bedroom. Not waiting for the gladiators, Timesitheus kicked it open. The cover on the couch was rumpled. A papyrus roll and a glass stood on the bedside table. Timesitheus put his hand on the couch. It was still warm.

  Armenius had fled moments before. Signing the gladiators to silence, Timesitheus wondered what he would have done. There were two choices: run or hide. If the latter, Timesitheus would have hidden in the servile quarters, hoping the mob would overlook them as containing little worth looting. Flight was a better option. There was only the one rear door, and that also was through where the slaves lived.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Outside, under the colonnade, Timesitheus ran to the opening on the left. The passage was narrow, the unmortared bricks nearly brushing his shoulders. It was unlit, the air close. His own breathing and the boots of the gladiators were loud in his ears. Tiny cells opened on either side. Check the rear door first. The third opening on the left led there.

  As soon as he turned, Timesitheus suspected that he was mistaken. Another corridor led to a storeroom, and no further. Forcing past the gladiators, retracing his steps, he took the next left. A longer passage. It doglegged left then right. The place was a rabbit warren, or a paltry vision of Hades.

  More cells on either side. Cheap lamps burnt in some, illuminating tawdry trifles, pathetic attempts to humanize the occupants’ servitude. Timesitheus glimpsed a daubed scene on a wall. A large, pale woman sprawled, naked on a painted bed. Between her meaty thighs a diminutive darker man licked her cunt. He was all eyes and tongue, degraded forever by his unnatural desire.

  Shouting ahead. A change in the air. Nearly at the door. Timesitheus rounded a corner, and almost impaled himself on the tip of on outthrust sword. Flinging himself sideways – pain flaring where his left shoulder crushed into the wall – the blade missed his ribs by a hand’s breadth.

  His assailant recovered his balance with surprising grace for a large man. Another gladiator. He dropped into a fighting crouch. Timesitheus did the same. The eye slits of the mask restricted his vision; pantomime artists did not often have to fight for their lives. Sword up, he flipped his cloak around his left arm as an improvised shield. The space was too confined for his own gladiators to help. At least they were not crowding his back.

  The bodyguard waited. He was there to delay. Timesitheus would have to take the attack to him. Too narrow to cut, it would have to be at the point of the sword, the steel close and deadly.

  Timesitheus felt the rodent breath of fear. He would not let Armenius escape. He steadied himself, forced his terror away, heard the scrabble of retreating claws.

  He feinted at the face, thrust to the stomach. The gladia-tor caught the blade on his own. Steel rasped on steel, high up near the pommel, near their fingers. They were almost chest to chest, an unwanted intimacy. Their breath hot in each other’s faces. Garlic and stale beans repulsive in Timesitheus’ nostrils.

  Both stepped back, careful to give no opening.

  Armenius could not escape. Not after all these efforts.

  ‘Ten thousand sesterces, let me pass.’

  The gladiator did not answer.

  ‘Twenty.’

  The gladiator spat.

  Timesitheus did not see if the saliva hit him. Peering out from the mask, his eyes never left his opponent’s sword.

  ‘Suck my prick,’ the gladiator said.

  He talked too much. He was a fool. Everyone had a price. Timesitheus had given him a chance. Now he would have to die.

  Timesitheus moved his sword to the right. The man’s eyes followed the blade.

  Without warning, Timesitheus flicked the trailing edge of his cloak up at the gladiator’s head. Instinctively, his oppo-nent brought his weapon across to protect his face. Ducking low, Timesitheus drove the point of his sword into the man’s guts, twisted the hilt, and withdrew.

  Steel clattered onto the brick floor. Both hands clutching the wound, the gladiator dropped to his knees.

  Timesitheus seized his victim’s hair with his left hand, yanked his head back. With precision, he thrust down into the man’s throat. A painful death, the steel scraping down inside the ribcage, but quick. One convulsion, and it was over.

  Recovering his sword, Timesitheus pushed the dead man to the floor.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Timesitheus stepped over the corpse. He was covered in blood, his hands and forearms slick.

  The rear door gaped wide. No one was on guard. The rain-swept street was bright after the gloom of the corridor. Everywhere men shuffled and stooped, picking things up from the wet paving, like demented farmworkers harvesting some inedible crop. They straightened, bright things in their hands.

  The oldest of ruses. Throw a purse in the air, and watch the plebs scramble for coins. They could not be blamed. Like dogs, they had been well trained in such tricks at the spectacles. It was their nature.

  Armenius had got away. The rain beating on his back, Timesitheus wondered how to win something from this defeat. The antique bronze statue would go well in his house. No, with Armenius alive, it would be too easy to trace. This had been about principle, not short term gain. Another day.

  Timesitheus would take a clean cloak from one of the gladiators, remove his mask in the shade of its hood, and slip away. Only three men knew he had been here, and Castricius and the gladiators had been well paid for their silence. Armenius could wait until another day.

  Chapter 11

  Africa

  Carthage,

  Seven Days before the Ides of March, AD238

  Gordian the Younger stood outside the governor’s residence. The quickening north wind fretted at his dark clothes, tugged at the black fringes of his cloak. They carried the corpse feet first, out through the door decked with its doleful branches of cedar. With much solemnity, they lifted Serenus Sammonicus onto the bier.

  It would have been a comfort to believe they would meet again in some afterlife. But that could not happen. This world was just one among an infinite number created and destroyed without design or purpose, just unceasing atoms moving in the void. A soul was so fragile, composed of such minute particles, it dissolved with the last breath.

  If death was just sleep, then it could not in itself be a bad thing. A true Epicurean believed that no death could come too soon or too late. Yet, if pleasure was the true aim of life, what of those who died before they had enjoyed all the pleasures they desired? At least Serenus had been old. Devoted to his books, to scholarship, in his quiet way Serenus had lived exactly as he wished: eight decades of reading and writing, eight decades of pleasure. Perhaps, when you lived to be very old, death lost its dread. Gordian found that hard to believe. Unless you were in agony, you would always plead for another year. All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals. Serenus had no children, but in a sense, a very attenuated sense, he would live on in his books, both those he had written and those he had gathered from all over the empire. It had been an unexpected, yet characteristic gesture of his old tutor to leave Gordian his library. An estimated sixty-two thousand volumes, too many to read in the longest lifetime.

  Under the stern, marble eyes of the Capitoline triad high on their temple, the cortège set out across and out of the Forum. In the streets, warned by the sounding trumpets and wailing women, the citizens cleared the way. When the procession passed, they stopped what they were doing, put down their tools, and watched.

  First came the torchbearers, their role symbolic in mid-morning, and then the musicians, flautists mingled with the trumpeters. In front of the bier, tearing their hair, scratching their cheeks, ripping their clothes, and beating and gashing their exposed breasts until the blood ran, the hired women acted as macabre midwives to the chthonic life to come. Serenus lay on a double mattress placed on a litter carried by eight strong men. The mourners followed. The locals aside, they were pitifully few in number: just Gordian himself, his father, and Sabinianus. Gordian remembered when the fellowship had been tog
ether, when the Gordiani had been gods. A summer evening, not two years before, in the villa of Sextus, outside the city walls, close to where they were going. He had worn the helm of Ares. His father had wielded the thunderbolt of Zeus, Valerian the trident of Poseidon. The winged hat of Hermes askew on Arrian’s head. Serenus as Pluto – now the religious might take that as some omen – Sabinianus as Hephaistos, Menophilus as Dionysus. Their women half-naked as goddesses, a wonderful dinner. They had been so drunk, so happy, so very united. And now they were scattered. And they were in danger. And it was all Gordian’s fault.

  Slowly, they left the city, and in due course, reached the burial ground by the aqueduct, not far from the fish ponds on the Mappalian Way. A member of the city council, a gloomy looking rhetor called Thascius Cyprianus, oversaw the sacrifice, as if he had doubts about the whole procedure. The sow dead, and the grave consecrated, Gordian’s father stepped forward to speak the eulogy.

  Gordian the Elder was unshaven, his hair unkempt and matted with dirt. It was excessive. Friends were like figs, so Menophilus often said, they did not last. Death was just sleep. Gordian’s father did not share his son’s Epicurean philosophy, but he put much store in the mos maiorum. Gordian thought the way of the ancestors should have curbed this immoderate display of grief, should have held his parent to the restraint of antique Roman virtus.

  Yet his father was old. Serenus had been his lifelong friend. Gordian knew his father needed his support as never before. Already he had done what he could to use this ceremony to gather popular support. A distribution of meat after the funeral had been announced, and a gladiatorial show would follow in a few days. The populace would appreciate both, the more so if the rituals went well. Gordian just hoped his father would not mention either the portent or the words of the astrologer.

  ‘Where shall I begin my lamentations? How shall I share my grief at what has happened?’ The wind plucked away the words, but the voice of Gordian’s father contained no more tremor than age should allow. ‘Serenus was, as it were, a shining torch lit for our example, and Fate has put it out.’

  It was four days since Serenus’ death. Gordian the Elder had spoken of attending the ninth-day funeral feast. That would be unwise. Menophilus’ messenger had made port first thing this morning, his ship running before the wind. Vitalianus was dead. The Senate had declared for Gordian father and son, voted them all the customary powers of Emperors. Rome was theirs. And yet, Gordian knew, it had to be secured. Valerian was a loyal friend, but not a natural leader, and Menophilus was young. The plebs urbana were fickle, and Senators trimmed their sails to the prevailing breeze. Rome needed to see its new Emperors, and Italy had to be defended from Maximinus. And then there were the provinces. Arrian would secure Numidia, Sabinianus keep Africa safe. It was unthinkable that friends such as Claudius Julianus in Dalmatia, Fidus in Thrace, and Egnatius Lollianus in Bithynia-Pontus would fail to come out in their favour, but what of the others? Above all what of the East, with its great armies? Perhaps Gordian could travel ahead to Rome, leaving his father in Carthage? Or go and rouse the East, while his father went to Rome?

  ‘I feel convinced that he who has gone dwells in the Elysian Fields. Let us therefore praise him as a hero, or rather bless him as a god. Farewell, Senerus.’

  Gordian’s father had done well. The eulogy had been of moderate length, measured in tone, yet full of real sentiment. Now it remained for Gordian to play his part, try not to dwell on it too much, keep his thoughts on superficial actions.

  The pyre was well made; the logs neatly layered, each at right angles to the one below. Only the faintest waft of corruption under the scents of cinnamon and cassia. Serenus lay with a scroll in his hands. Gordian took a coin from an attendant, and placed it in the cold mouth. The ferryman would be paid. One hand gripping the waxy, repellent skin of the face, with the other Gordian forced the dead eyelids up. At the last a man should have his eyes open to the heavens. Mastering his reluctance, Gordian leant down and kissed the cold, dead lips.

  The papyrus caught easily. The fire spread to the kindling, and with a whoosh to the incense-soaked timber. Tongues of flame licked up at the corpse.

  Gordian looked up at the sky, distancing his thoughts. The smoke was pulled away into the interior. Dark clouds scudded high up. A storm was coming down from the North, racing in across the sea. If the gods existed, it was as if they were mocking his plans to leave Africa.

  Chapter 12

  Rome

  The Mint, near the Flavian Amphitheatre,

  Seven Days before the Ides of March, AD238

  The die-cutter turned off the Via Labicana and limped into the alley. A man came the other way, and both turned sideways, their backs brushing against the bricks. The door to the Mint was about halfway along, on the left. He went down the steps and out into the open courtyard. Blue sky showed between the grey clouds. It did not lift his mood. The die-cutter had much on his mind. Work would help, it always helped.

  Unshuttering his cubicle, he dragged his bench and stool to the front. His leg hurt. The wound had been long, but not too deep. Castricius and Caenis had washed the cut, stitched it, and bandaged it with clean linen. God willing, it would heal well. Man was born to suffer; life a vale of tears.

  Sighing, he sat, and picked up the two obverses he had made the day before. He held them close to his face. His myopia was an advantage for his work. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had no need of polished lenses or other optical devices. Near-to, things had a jewel-like precision. He did not think his long range vision had got worse recently, but it was best whenever possible to work in natural light.

  The Gordiani, father and son, gazed off to his right. They had a strong family resemblance; the long nose, the unbroken curve of the jaw from earlobe to chin. The cheeks of the older man were slightly sunken, the hair of the younger more receding. They were good pieces; no sign of hurried or careless workmanship.

  The young magistrates in charge of the Mint had been amazed when Menophilus had appeared the day before. All three of the Tresviri Capitales had fawned on the Quaestor, even though he was little older than them. Toxotius was not too bad, but Acilius Glabrio and Valerius Poplicola as ever were contemptible. Menophilus had addressed them with a weary politeness, but mainly talked to the die-cutter. The Quaestor had said what was wanted and produced portraits that he had brought from Africa.

  It was very different from the accession of the last Emperor. Initially no one had had the faintest idea what Maximinus looked like. The die-cutter turned that reign over in his mind. He did not hate the Thracian as did most of the plebs. He had had no objection when Maximinus had curtailed the games and spectacles or taken treasures from the temples, no objection at all. Making reasonable money, he had not suffered when the grain dole was cut back. Most likely the condemnations of leading men had been justified. The Emperor fought the northern tribes for the safety of Rome. The obscenely rich Senators and equestrians should have volunteered their wealth. Certainly the die-cutter had felt keen pleasure at the news of the execution of Serenianus, the governor who had persecuted his brothers in Cappadocia. But that had been before Pontianus and Hippolytus had been taken and sent to the mines of Sardinia. Their arrest had left the Gathering leaderless. He had been afraid before, but in the last year the terrible cellars of the imperial palace had haunted his thoughts and dreams; the ghastly pincers and claws wielded with refined cruelty by men without compassion. Once they knew who you were, they treated you worse than a murderer.

  He replaced the obverses and studied the reverse dies he had cut. For practical reasons, as well as the greater variety of messages they carried, there always had to be more of them. Taking a greater strain in the minting process, they wore out quicker. Menophilus had issued general, but clear guidelines: traditional values, the mos maiorum, the centrality of Rome, nothing foreign or outlandish, the political experience and the unity of the Emperors. So far the die-cutter had produced Romae Aeternae, Providentia, and Concordia.
He wondered how things would be under the Gordiani. They had been appointed by Alexander, and that Emperor and his mother had been gracious to some of the brethren. Better still, three of the freedmen in the Domus Rostrata, the great house of the Gordiani on the Esquiline, belonged to the Gathering. If Gaudianus, Reverendus and Montanus had influence, all should be well.

  But the war was still to be won. The die-cutter shuffled through the papyri on his desk until he found his sketches: personifications of Victoria, Securitas, and Virtus Exercituum, the latter an innovation of his own, suitable for the circumstances. He took from his bag and unwrapped the three different drills, the burin and graver, the tongs and pincers, the cutters and files, the compass and pouch of powdered corundum. Taking a disc of bronze, he fixed it in a vice. He would start with the Virtue of the Armies.

  Virtue meant different things to different men. Whatever the definition, the die-cutter knew he was far from it. For four years he had been an apprentice, not a full member of the Gathering. The usual time was two years, three at most. Four years of being watched, his behaviour scrutinized. And for all of them – the watched and the watchers – there was the constant fear of betrayal. As he had heard Pontianus put it, they must consider their closest friends, their own relatives as worse than their enemies, in fear that they would denounce them. The informer could be anyone. It could be Castricius or Caenis.

  The die-cutter tried to put away his doubts. This life was good, but the life he longed for better. His own sins had prolonged his apprenticeship. Twice he had been demoted to the status of a Hearer, reduced to standing by the doors of the Gathering. The offence both times had been fornication. Soon he would have to go to his instructor Africanus and admit to the fight in the street. If he expressed true contrition, his punishment might be light.