Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  So I stopped the first Colosso staff attendant I could find, a woman as bald as I. I put my hand on her arm and said as politely as I could, “Are you all taking in people for the fodder pool?” I forgot to smile for a good five seconds, then failed disastrously—if the look on the poor woman’s face was any indication.

  The woman’s eyes went wide as she took in my appearance: the way my white shirt clung to whipcord muscle and the hard lines of my bones. After a moment she nodded.

  * * *

  I sat on the edge of the examination table atop a sheet of sanitary plastic, naked and unafraid. One light flickered in the corner of the low ceiling, sending shadows over the banks of quiescent medical equipment. If you are not from my Empire, then perhaps you are unfamiliar with our greatest game, its mechanics and rules, its traditions. There are gladiators: the heroes of a million operas, champions of the sporting season. Children know their names, wear their colors and their numbers, follow their efforts. Even in wartime the people treat them as heroes almost equal to our knights and soldiers. They fight one another gloriously, one-on-one or in small groups. If they are wounded, they are escorted from the field, given over to scholiasts for treatment before they resume combat another day.

  Then there is the fodder pool, the myrmidons. They come as criminals, as slaves. They come starving for the promise of a meal and the hope that they might survive a round or two. They come desperate or intoxicated or drugged. On some worlds the less scrupulous lords of the Empire kidnap their own serfs from the streets to feed to lions and chimeras and azhdarchs. The myrmidons are broken men, mad men and desperate. They are angry men and suicidal ones. I was none of these things. I was a rarer sort of fool. I was determined.

  In truth, I’d expected them to take me for Colosso fodder without so much as a single page contract waving the rights of any kin for retributive legal action against the games’ proprietors, namely the House Mataro of Emesh and its count, Lord Balian. But I did sign such a contract and was made to submit to a physical exam.

  The Colosso medic wore the bronze collar of a slave and had the slit nostril of a criminal and a punitive tattoo on her forehead that marked her offense clearly: DESERTER. There were other tattoos on her arm: an armorial hawk on the inside of one wrist, a coiled snake on the other to hide what appeared to be burn scars.

  “Another for the fighting pits, is it?” She eyed me from under too-long brows. One eye was clearly glass and pointed the wrong way. The other shone dark in her hard and wizened face. The word inked on her forehead wrinkled as she looked at me with that one good eye, hands on her hips. “What’s your reason? Fame or fortune?” She sniffed, pushing back her grubby sleeves and pulling on sterile examination gloves kept in a bin on the counter.

  I cleared my throat. “Just trying to get by.”

  “Trying to get by, is it?” The woman sniffed again, sidled closer. “What? Does the Ministry of Welfare not need thugs to beat the Umandh into submission anymore?”

  A flash of the old aristocratic hauteur flared beneath the surface, and I bridled. “I’m not a thug.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” the woman said, biting off each word like dried meat. “I thought you were trying to get into the Earth-damned fighting pits. Don’t tell me you’re not a thug.” She slapped my arm. “Budge along. No need to hide your cock, lad. No one here cares.” I moved my hands away slowly, not looking the old woman in her face. “Well, you’re a strong lad, and no mistake.” She prodded at a scar along my ribs. “History of violence, is it?” When I didn’t answer at once, she poked me again.

  “Few fights,” I allowed.

  “No need to be so fucking terse.” She glared at me, glass eye looking off at something I could not see. “You have a name?”

  “Had.”

  “The fuck sort of name is Had?” She broke away, crossing to the counter at the opposite wall, returning with a stethoscope and a scanning probe in her crooked fingers. “Short for something?”

  I held my silence a moment, watching as the woman counted my heartbeats. At last I said, “It’s Hadrian.”

  That single black eye watched me, colored with suspicion like a sheen of oil on the sclera. “Hadrian, is it?” She frowned. “Fancy fucking name for a thug.” My instinct was to deny that I was a thug for a second time, but I sensed danger here. I could not see a camera anywhere in the examination chamber, but that didn’t mean we were really alone. No one is ever truly alone, not in the Sollan Empire. Not anywhere. So I only shrugged, and the doctor said, “Well, have it your own way then.” She pulled the stethoscope out of her ears, left it swinging from her neck. “Name’s Chand, not that you were wondering.”

  “Chand,” I repeated, trying to place the name’s provenance and the heavy gutturals in her accent. “Don’t you have somatic scans?” I indicated the stethoscope. “You really need to use that?”

  “Nosy for a thug, too. Scanners get confused.” She held up the scanner in question, a metal cylinder long as my hand. “Better to listen, but we’re still going to run the full battery. Stand up.”

  I complied, followed her gesture to the scale at one corner, allowed myself to be weighed and measured. She took other measurements, too, besides my height. “Want to get armor as fits you,” she said by way of explanation. Then, “You’re proper fit, aren’t you? I’ve seen actual gladiators in worse condition than you.”

  “What did you mean, ‘full battery’?” I asked, slapping her hand away.

  “I mean you’re getting a proper physical, boy. I may not look it, but I’ve been chief medic here since before you were a dram in your daddy’s balls, so how about we cut the questions, eh?”

  Undeterred, I asked, “Including blood work?” Without replying, the doctor reached up and flicked my ear. I yelped.

  “Thought I said to cut the questions.” She glared up at me, the tattooed word on her forehead crumpling as the leather-brown skin creased. When I didn’t break eye contact with her, she laughed. “You’re a tough one, aren’t you? That’s critical, that is. A proper myrmidon. Crowd likes the ones that don’t piss themselves first time they see the Sphinxes squaring off with them in full kit. You’ll give a good show of it.” I had no response for that. I hoped she was right. When she caught me still glaring at her, she said, “Yes, it includes blood work.” She eyed me seriously. “Any reason it shouldn’t? You a user?”

  “User?”

  “Drugs, boy.” She directed me back to the examination table and began to measure my reflexes, to check the dilation of my eyes with a penlight.

  This brought a renewed frown to my face. “Why’s the Colosso care if its sending addicts to the fodder pool?”

  “They don’t,” she said, tutting over another thin scar on my leg, “but if you are a user, they want to make sure they get that pretty nose of yours clipped. Make you more fearsome.” She pulled a face, baring snarled and yellowing teeth. Glancing at my shaved head she said, “Well, at least I can say you don’t have lice. Shame.”

  I looked down at her, unsure how to respond to this latest confounding piece of conversation. At last I opted simply to repeat her word. “Shame?”

  Chand pulled a smile so wide it buried her face in wrinkles, reducing her glass eye and her black one to mere slits. “Never known a palatine with lice before, have I?” The last two words fell flat, choked off as she backed against the wall, retreating as I rocketed to my feet. I realized mid-action that this was precisely the wrong thing to do, that it would serve only to confirm whatever suspicions the doctor had about me. I hunched my shoulders, turning half away from the slave woman, who laughed. “I take it I’m right, then? I can tell one of your lot a mile away. Have to be an idiot not to.”

  I didn’t deny it, but I didn’t answer her, either. Suddenly my brilliant plan to enter the Colosso as a fodder myrmidon struck me as incredibly foolish. Snatching up the pair of pants I’d folded on the counter, I made to dres
s myself.

  “Where in Earth’s holy name do you think you’re going?” Chand asked, an unseen frown evident in the lining of that guttural voice. She hurried past me to stand against the door, one true eye trained on me as I slipped on my pants.

  I could have moved her aside, struck her, thrown her down in an instant, but I waited, worked on the fastenings of my new boots. “You can’t help me. This was a mistake.”

  “Mistake, was it?” The slave’s face arranged itself into a thoughtful expression, tattooed crime distorting as she cocked an eyebrow. “Never met a palatine as didn’t want his name trumpeted from the temple minarets.”

  “I’m not a palatine,” I insisted, eyes trying to pick out the surveillance gear I felt certain was in the dingy little exam room.

  “And I’m not a slave. I’m the meretrix of the Imperial harem and get my ass oiled by muscled bronze eunuchs every second Thursday.” She did not move from the door. “Answer my bleeding question, boy. Ain’t no one here but us.”

  I stopped midway through the act of buttoning my shirt. “What question? You haven’t asked one.”

  “Why aren’t you shouting your fancy-ass name from the temple minarets?” she asked, rephrasing an earlier statement. “We could be fitting you for a proper suit of armor upstairs right now, your lordship.” There was an odd note of mocking in the slave doctor’s voice when she said those last two words, something that jerked me upright, forced me to my full height.

  “I’m not a lord,” I said again.

  She snorted, put a hand against the door to stop me from leaving. As if she could. She stood tall as she was able, her wispy white hair swaying in the air from the vents. “Answer the question, momak.”

  It finally clicked. The strange accent I couldn’t place. Durantine. She was of Durannos, or had been. The tattoos on her arms were Imperial Legion, plain as day. An auxiliary? I wanted to laugh, to cry. A plan had come from nowhere, sprouting full formed like Pallas Athena from my head.

  “Ti si od Resganat?” I asked, speaking the heavy tongue of that distant Republic. You are from the Republic?

  The woman’s eyes went wide, and in the same language, she said, “You speak Durantine?”

  “Haan,” I replied, inclining my head. I had to play it carefully, though I had an advantage already in that the woman was hearing me out. Perhaps she was bent; perhaps she let myrmidons into the fodder pool unqualified all the time. I reached into the back pocket of my new trousers, fingers skating over my ring on its tangled cord. I fished out one of the hurasams I’d stolen with Rells’s gang. I held it out for her to see, the Emperor’s aquiline profile gleaming in the light. “Take it.”

  The doctor looked like she wanted to spit. “The fuck do I want with your gold, boy?” She hooked a finger under her collar and pulled, indicating her slavery and how little coin was worth.

  Offering money like that was exactly what she would have expected of me, and I didn’t want to disappoint. That offer made and rejected, I plowed ahead, counting on the republicans’ stiff-necked assertion that class and caste meant nothing. “Fine, then. Look.” I paused, sucked in a deep breath. “I don’t want to be a lord.”

  She eyed me with her one good eye. “Why’s that, then?”

  I was perfectly happy to lie to her. “No one should be.” She snorted, clearly disbelieving. “The worst that happens is I get killed in the pool and the universe will be short another palatine. You were a soldier, right? An auxilium?” I indicated her tattoos. “Here’s your chance to order a nobile to his death and not the other way round.”

  She gave me a very strange look, said, “Why would you want this?”

  “I don’t have anything else,” I said. She looked about to argue, and I said, “I’ve been sleeping on the streets in this city for three years now. I don’t have anything else.” Maybe she took pity on me, or maybe it was delight at seeing a nobile in a position like my own, but I sensed she was on the edge of a decision and added, “Put me in the pool. Please.”

  CHAPTER 34

  MEN OF GROSSER BLOOD

  “YOU OVEREXTENDED ON THE thrust again, Switch!” I called, ducking a blow from Siran, one of the other myrmidons on the team with which I’d been barracked. The red-haired kid didn’t listen, throwing himself at Kiri, who parried with the haft of her dummy lance and struck the young man in the back of his knee. Switch toppled into the dirt with a grunt, his short sword beneath him. Farther off, the other myrmidons laughed.

  Ghen called over, “Leave him alone, Had. Let the boy figure it out. It’s not our problem.”

  Holding up a hand for Siran to stop, I pulled off my helmet and scratched at the shadow of stubble growing back over my scalp, trying not to think about how much I surely resembled Crispin. “It will be if he goes down at the end of the week, Ghen.”

  “They’re giving us shields!” Switch said. “I heard the techs saying. We’re getting shields.” The boy had opted against wearing a helmet, and his huge ears stuck out from beneath his angry red hair.

  “They ain’t giving us shields!” called one of the others from across the yard. “Shields is for the proper gladiators. Got to protect their investments!”

  “They won’t matter none if you fall on your fool face, anyhow,” Siran said. She wasn’t the oldest of our little platoon, but she’d been in the pits the longest, more out of a talent for keeping her head down than out of any particular skill in combat. An offworlder like me, she was paler than most of the natives, though still much darker than myself: her skin a warm brown, hair cropped short under her brass-plated helmet. Her face was marred by the gash in her right nostril, same as Ghen’s, each for some crime minor enough not to merit a tattoo on their foreheads—or else they’d paid the fine to avoid that fate.

  Switch was an offworlder too: a milk-skinned, freckled catamite off one of the deep-space commercial haulers, his muscles all for show. He’d been trained to dance, to serve tea, to entertain the men and the rare woman to whom his master sent him. He wasn’t a fighter, not by a long shot. By contrast, Kiri and Ghen were both native Emeshi, their skin darker than Cat’s had been but from the same plebeian stock. Ghen had the thick arms and thicker neck of a day laborer and a strong, square jaw that made me think he’d spent his life chewing stones and not food. Kiri was an oddity, a plebeian woman in early middle age. Not a criminal like Ghen or Siran nor a vagrant like myself or Switch, but in the pits because she wanted to be there. “Trying to put me son through the service exams,” she’d said brightly my first night in the barracks when I’d been introduced to the team by Doctor Chand. “He’s so clever, Dar is.”

  “We’re fighting as a team,” Siran said, speaking to the problem at hand, running her tongue nervously over her teeth. “The boy’s a liability.”

  “Not with a shield-belt on, I won’t be!” Switch tapped his sword anxiously against one armored calf. Without warning I threw my steel helmet at the boy. I meant to strike him in the breastplate, but the unbalanced thing slipped in my hands and took him in the belly instead. Switch doubled over, wincing, spluttering for words. He dropped his sword. The others all froze, none of them sure how to respond. Kiri sucked in a breath, surprised. “The hell was that?”

  “His Radiance has finally gone mad,” Ghen said, laughing his deep laugh. I wanted to snarl at him, but the big convict was not our weak link—the boy was. So I ignored the nickname, crossing the open ground of the quadrangle, kicking up clouds of dust as I went. I may have been a poor thief and a poorer beggar, but I’d been schooled for the sort of formal combats common in the Colosso. I may never have liked it, but it takes more than a couple of years to take the shine off muscle memory.

  “A shield-belt wouldn’t have stopped that helmet!” I shouted. “It won’t stop swords or thrown spears, either.” Stopping about five paces from Switch, I spoke softly, emulating Gibson more than Felix in that moment. “We aren’t getting shields, Switch
. Whatever you think you heard.”

  “I don’t think I heard anything!” Switch said, color rising in his freckled cheeks. “I heard that—”

  “Even if we were getting shields, they wouldn’t help us.” I kept a piece of my attention on the others in the yard, listening to the clangor of their arms as they sparred, swords and spear-shafts tangled in the geometries of combat. “Shields are for high-velocity weapons: firearms, plasma burners, lances. They won’t help once you’re in range of the long knives.”

  “You should listen to the Emperor here, whore-boy. Help him shove that stick farther up his ass.” Ghen barked a laugh, made an obscene gesture with his thumb. He never took his eyes from Switch’s face. “You won’t last a nanosecond when the shit hits.” The big man tapped the flat of his sword against his shoulder, the metal slapping the interleaved plates there.

  Ever the mother, Kiri hurried forward and placed a hand on Switch’s shoulder, offering mute support. She murmured something to the boy, something soft. Siran punched Ghen in the arm. “Would you shut up?”

  “What?” The big man rubbed at his ruined nose, trying to hide his embarrassment. While they bickered, I took a breath to compose myself, in small part regretting throwing my helmet at Switch. Since I’d come to the coliseum two weeks earlier, I’d come to realize how hard-edged my time in the streets had made me. Those weeks, those months since Cat’s death had done their damage. I recalled the robbery I’d carried out with Rells’s gang—the way I’d betrayed them and the knife I’d buried in the shopkeeper’s shoulder. The temperate edges that had separated me from the others in my family had been chipped away, a mosaic defaced by the iconoclast. These past days amongst the myrmidons had made that clear, had become an exercise in reconstruction. I held that breath a long time, glad of the cooler night air, thick with the haunt of flies and the hiss of ornithons. I wiped the sweat from my brow.