by Lydia Pax
The training grounds for the gladiators were placed just next to the walls, with several plots of sand allotted for their maneuvers. Beyond the training grounds was a raised, green hilly area, where the Dominus and any guests could watch the fighters at work. Trailing upward next to that hill was a long stony stairway, leading up into the hill, into the meat of which was where the Dominus and his family lived in a large house.
Guards were posted at different intervals through the grounds, patrolling regularly. Some were paid for by imperial decree—the games were entirely under the purview of the Emperor, after all—and still some others were personal bodyguards paid for by Rufus. Their weapons were kept razor sharp, and a gladiator approached a guard only with his life at risk. Guards were intrinsically wary about letting gladiators near them.
It was the middle of the day, and so the gladiators trained already. Their toned, heavily-muscled bodies were nearly naked but for sandals, loin cloths, and heavy belts around their waists. This is what they wore at all times—eating, training, resting, and traveling. A great many, Aeliana had found out, slept naked as a result—the only time they could wear something that was not the norm.
She did her honest best not to think too hard about such a great number of perfectly chiseled men completely naked for a third of their lives.
And with that thought, she was suddenly imagining Caius naked—a thought not unwelcome to her mind. He was well-formed in every respect, and even with the teeter-tottering of her anger/apology cycle, her fingers twitched with the desire to slide over his biceps. They were large and lovely, and looked good for biting.
More than any other fighter she had seen in this ludus, she wanted to know what it was like to slide underneath such a man. To feel her hips thrust upward and join him in that most perfect of ways...
But that was folly. Nearly every gladiator she knew was a lout and savage. Her emotions did not need to traffic with such men.
The only time the outfits of the gladiators truly changed was in the arena, when the lanista rolled out their personalized armor and wanted them to look as spectacular as possible. The gladiators trained from dawn to dusk, most days. Their days off were on special holidays like Saturnalia at the end of the year, or traveling on the way to a fight.
If a fighter won a good match, he would be granted a reprieve for, at most, two days. That is, assuming he wasn’t injured—and most gladiators were injured at the end of a fight come win, lose, or draw.
Their ways kept Aeliana busy, that was for certain. As she and Caius entered, several dozen faced off in duels with heavy wooden shields and swords. The weight was to train their muscles so that the sword felt light in their hands. Some dozen more attacked stationary wooden targets, building strength and form. Every man was in remarkable shape, like statues in motion, muscles glistening in the sun.
If she didn't act soon, Caius would be lost in the crowd of fighters, and Aeliana would feel guilty forever. She had learned well over the years that it was best to face these situations head-on.
“I'm sorry if what I said offended you,” Aeliana said to Caius. Her tone was terse.
Caius raised an eyebrow. “You don't sound sorry.”
“Well.” Her feet shifted. “I am. I don't like to offend others.”
“But you do like to voice your opinion.”
Her hands shifted down to her hips. “Yes.”
“It seems those two desires would often run over each other.”
This Caius was a bit more eloquent and incisive than most gladiators she had run across. Perhaps the years in freedom had done him well.
“Even with that being the case,” said Aeliana, “and even if you want to do something stupid with your body and your life like throwing it into a meat grinder for the entertainment of fools, that doesn't mean I should go out of my way to hurt your feelings.”
“If there were medicae for apologies, Aeliana,” he seemed to relish the name on his tongue, “I think yours might be declared dead.”
She was about to snap back with something pithy when a tall, lithe gladiator approached the two with a gentle smile on his face
This was Septus. His beard had made him unique among gladiators for a time, who often were close-shaved. Now the beard was peppered with gray, as was all of his hair. He was old for a gladiator—more than thirty-five years of age. The artifacts of his career were written in his skin in long criss-crosses of scars across his chest and shoulders.
“Ho, Faun.” Somehow the nickname had transferred from the garrison where she had been trained to the ludus. She blamed the guards. “I see you brought back some trash with you.”
“Septus.” Caius stepped forward. “I wouldn’t go around calling people trash. Someone might get ideas and toss your old ass out with it.”
They laughed and clasped each other as brothers. Aeliana struggled not to roll her eyes. Gladiators only knew how to express affection with insults.
“I expected you tomorrow?” said Septus. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes. All is well. I just wanted to get started. No point in delaying.”
Septus shrugged. “I’ll go let Murus know. He’s been excited to see you back in action.”
Aeliana drifted away, letting the two men talk.
For a brief time—far too brief—she’d been very taken with Caius. But now that she knew he was a gladiator, the entire complexion of their meeting had soured. He would ignore her now, as all the gladiators ignored her.
When first she worked at the ludus, it had bothered her. Whenever they were allowed to leave the grounds of the ludus, the gladiators were treated as celebrities—better even than the highest families that Puteoli could offer.
Gaggles of women followed them wherever they went, all so taken with the apex of masculinity that these warriors offered. Built like gods, muscles hard as rock, in peak physical condition for every kind of activity, the gladiators had a definite appeal to the women of the Empire.
And Aeliana was the reason they stayed alive to meet that crowd, to enjoy those gaggles of women. She did not want to be treated as some third-rate floozy and be on the receiving end of their (if rumors were to be believed) fevered, rough loving for her efforts.
But she did want some measure of appreciation. A kind word here and there.
She disliked this weakness in her—this seeking out of approval for the people she treated. She was a slave to that more than she was to the ludus.
But, over time, she had grown to rather enjoy the way they ignored her. For the most part, from what she could tell, gladiators were even worse than soldiers when it came to drinking and fighting. They were a savage, brutal lot by and large, and the less time they focused on her, the better.
“Aeliana,” called Caius.
Surprised, she turned to face him. Several silent waves of critique rushed down at her heart for beating so fast at the simple sound of his voice wrapping around the syllables of her name. She was halfway across the yard now, on her way to her office inside the main complex of the domus. “Yes?”
“Perhaps I shall call on you later and you can tell me more of how I am a fool?”
There was a way to say such a thing and be biting about it—to be cruel and petty. And yet there was also a way to say it in a jovial, happy manner, and this is how Caius clearly meant it. She just smiled and nodded and returned on her way.
Perhaps he wasn't completely a brute. Hope throbbed in her—hope to see him more, to feel his touch upon her, hope for a dozen brilliant, aching, thrilling acts that blazed in her mind with a startling urgency.
She would see him again, and that was certain. If only to browbeat him for making her take leave of her senses in the way that he had.
But Aeliana couldn't focus on that for long. The day wasn’t even half over, and there was much to do. Her duties never ceased.
Chapter 3
Three years ago, on the day of the last fight of the Great Bear of Puteoli, Aeliana stitched the arm of an injured soldier
.
Her thrusts were even and measured. Sewing skin back together was an old art, one that required practice and diligence. She had gotten rather good at it in the last two years of her service at the barracks.
“Mind your needling, woman,” said the soldier. “I plan to use this arm again.”
He had started to sit up. Aeliana shifted her weight and slammed him back down to the table. If his head knocked a little on the surface, well—he shouldn’t have moved, should he?
“I mind it entirely, legionary.” She did not know his name on purpose. She did not want to know any soldier’s name. They could die any day on the job. “It is my job to mind it. And your job,” she jabbed her finger into the meat of his shoulder, “to be still.”
Some grunts of discontent erupted from him, but he stilled long enough for her to finish her work.
In a few minutes, she had patched his wound entirely. Taking a rag, she cleaned off the excess blood.
“Return in a week’s time to have the stitches removed. Don’t hoist your shield until then.”
The soldier frowned. “That’s my sword arm.”
“Don’t use your sword, then. You have to let it heal.”
The legionary stood, rotating his arm around. Right away, she could see the stitches strain in his shoulder. She fought the urge to push him down again and wrap his arm to his torso.
“No,” said the legionary. “No, I think it will work fine. My family are fast healers. You’ll see.”
She would see. In a week he would return with an infection, and unless she caught it quick enough, he would lose the arm.
This was a discussion she had held with soldiers like this one—perhaps even this one—many times. But you couldn’t tell a legionary anything. Like all men of the Roman Empire, what mattered most was strength, honor, and toil. Any infringement upon these was not to be tolerated.
And yet a part of her could not help thinking that maybe she should make him see sense. Wouldn’t that be something—to make a man see sense?
If more men saw sense then Aeliana’s job as a medicae wouldn’t even be necessary in more ways than one.
The notion was more than just the simple truism of men valuing blood more than reason. Her father had tasked her to learning the medical profession when her brother Aelianus—a soldier in the Puteoli garrison, like the one she just treated—had been gravely wounded in a bar fight—also like the one she had just treated. He returned home afterward, his belly ripped to pieces, and Aeliana hadn’t been able to save him.
She'd had no experience at the time. A frightened girl desperately holding cloth to her brother's torn midsection, that's all she was.
Aelianus had gone out that night, his head full of revenge on a man who had cheated him in dice, and Aeliana tried to talk him out of it. But she hadn’t been able to save him.
On every account, a failure, and so her father had sold her to a medici to train her so she would not fail again. The medici, in turn, sold her services to the Puteoli garrison—where Aeliana re-experienced her brother’s injuries every few nights.
They used to frighten her terribly. Now, such grisly sights had become old hat. And in fact, that was what infuriated her the most about all of it—it would have been simple to save Aelianus, if only she had known what to do. If only she’d had that knowledge six months earlier than she did, her entire life would have changed direction.
But then, of course, she knew that she would not have been able to have that knowledge without Aelianus dying in the arms of her and her father.
“If the stitches rip,” Aeliana tried with the soldier, “at all...if there is any pain, I entreat you to see me again. You should not suffer unduly on account of a wound already made.”
The legionary harrumphed and left her small office in the bottom floor of the barracks. It was an off-putting place, with its blood-stained tables, dark stone floors, and all the various surgical implements in jars and baskets. Sewing threads spooled in one corner, and a series of stools stood in another, all of varying heights.
She had only moments alone before Tatius entered. With wrinkled, gray skin and cloudy black eyes, he was an old man—old enough to have seen Trajan as emperor as a child. He had lived through a golden age in Rome, and lamented that he could see it coming to an end.
“I dislike this Severus. Truly, I do,” Tatius would say. “Smacks too much of the tyrant for my tastes. Nothing like Trajan. Trajan. Oh, Trajan. There was an emperor. But this Severus? All he wants to do is pay the soldiers and damn the rest. I don't trust him.”
There was no such grave talk foreshadowed on Tatius’s face today. Usually Aeliana could read him like a book—after serving under his hand for more than two years, she felt sure she had learned his every mood. She was more than sure she had learned all he was able to teach her, but, as she was a slave, she couldn’t exactly pick herself up and start her own office.
“My dear, I have news for you.”
“Oh?” She straightened. “Another training exercise gone wrong?”
It was a safe guess. Life as a Roman legionary was about as harsh as a life could come, and the recent waves of the Antonine plague had wiped out many veterans. As a result, there were more trainees than ever—and more injuries than ever.
Even the unskilled or unsuited were being given a shot at military life in efforts to bolster the ranks; if the plague was going to kill a certain percentage of everyone anyway—it had even killed Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Commodus’s father—then it only made sense to train as many soldiers as possible. But, that meant a lot of bloody, awful work for Aeliana.
“Oh,” said Tatius, a small smile on his face. “Probably. But that’s not what I mean. I’ve arranged the papers. You’re no longer my apprentice.”
This was a surprise. “Truly?”
“Truly. You are to be known as a medicae from now on. And,” he said, face barely changing expression, “I have extended your contract to five years for a term serving the House of Varinius.”
In her life, Aeliana was well-accustomed to words biting at her.
She had never been worthy enough for her father. She imagined herself presented to him as a panacea of disappointments. Her attitude never virtuous and stoic enough, and yet he chastened her for the lack of warmth he received upon arriving at home. Likewise, her mousy appearance and small frame was never fetching enough for a proper husband—he imagined her slightness of body would kill her in childbirth—and yet on the rare chances she had to be presented to society he would proclaim her whorish.
Meanwhile, in his estimations, her intelligence was not sharp enough to off-set any of these.
Such disparaging remarks had only evolved over the years for Aeliana in the company of other men as she progressed to the garrison, where the only thing looser than a soldier’s tongue were his hands around his cock. Her father's views of her worth were shared, whether they knew it or not, by many a soldier.
Her appearance—small of stature, short dark hair in a severe bowl cut around her head—was boyish enough to keep her from certain kinds of unwanted attention. Only once had she been cornered by a drunken soldier, but a scalpel held to his neck had warned him off. She told him she carried the scalpel everywhere she went—and he told the rest of the garrison. And so the insults had started.
The Boy Doctor. The Faun.
She earned the name of Faun after stomping on a soldier’s bare feet one morning when he’d called her a boy. She didn’t understand what the problem was. Didn’t boys stomp on toes all the time? Aeliana had been proving him right.
And so, after the soldier’s many complaints of her having feet like hooves, she had become “The Faun” to these men. Goat legs, human torso.
So yes. Words had hurt her. But over the years she had developed a great series of walls and moats, doubts and redoubts built to withstand the most severe destruction that could be lobbed at her from the mightiest siege engines in the world.
But these words from Tatius—these w
ords had snuck directly to the heart of her fortress. A direct hit.
“Five...five years?” Her voice was heavy with disbelief.
Her contract had been set to expire a little more than six months from that day.
“Yes, dear. My son, you see, is getting married. I required a significant down-payment for his celebrations. And the ludus is in need of a skilled medicae. Which you now are. So you see, it all worked out nicely.”
The man was actually smiling. He said this as if his recognition of her skill would soften the blow.
It did not.
Five more years as a slave. And not just that...but in a ludus. A training school for gladiators. The one place in Puteoli where she was likely to stitch and mend more bloody, mangled bodies than in the garrison.
Tatius could not see well from the clouds in his eyes. But perhaps he could sense her mood anyway.
“Yes, I know, it was not what you expected. But this life has many turns. You will find your way, Aeliana. I am quite certain of it. If anyone can, it is you, little Faun.”
Slowly, she nodded. With all her resolve, she gathered her breath, and hoped for the best.
Chapter 4
Fortune’s ways had ever been a mystery to Caius.
Three years before, as Aeliana learned that she would be sold to a ludus, Caius expected the best day of his life.
That was the plan, at any rate.
For a long time, his life had been one miserable struggle after another. Raised as a slave. Trained to fight to stay alive. Surrounded by death and violence at all ends of his existence. And then he met Fabiana, and his life had turned for the better.
Caius stood in the hot sands of the arena, about to put his life on the line—with freedom and a massive purse as the prize should he win. At the other end of the city of Puteoli, his wife was in labor, their child on its way.