Love of the Gladiator (Affairs of the Arena Book 2)

by Lydia Pax

  It was a particular sort of humbling experience, knowing that Rome had been around for somewhere near a thousand years, and her own tribe had been together in the form Gwenn knew it only for a few generations. Probably no one from Rome would ever have to suffer the complete humbling of being as inconsequential as she did.

  As she entered the house of the Domina for the first time, she recognized quite a few faces who had traveled past her and the other fighters in training during the past few weeks—those same clients. Some part of the patronage system involved patrons inviting the same people they gave money to over for dinner.

  Gwenn suspected that there were others in attendance—senators, imperial officials, wealthy equestrians and the like who were patrons in turn to Porcia. All wore togas, and most if not all of them had their garments decorated with stripes or coloration that denoted the many variations of their office, which Gwenn had no mind for.

  The majority of the guests stood in the atrium, eating olives and grapes held up for them on trays by well-muscled and well-practiced slaves. Music played from one corner; a man with a lyre banding about and crooning about some great, ancient fight in the arena two hundred years ago.

  If Gwenn stopped to listen for too long, she might be overwhelmed with the history of her current task.

  Porcia spoke with a handsome man with curled hair and blank dark eyes. They were the eyes of a predator, crafted from the deep pressure of growing up in a land full of other, bigger predators. He touched Porcia with great familiarity, as if he did not care that he essentially announced their intimacy to the rest of the room.

  He, like several other senatorial guests, wore a toga striped with purple.

  On either end of a table behind Porcia, flanking her, were her guards Karro and Brutillus. They wore long, twisted swords at their sides, their scarred chests bare, with thick leather belts wrapped around their waists. It was a sort of ceremonial gladiator garb they wore, even though they were free men.

  “Here she is now,” said Porcia, eyes lighting up. She addressed Gwenn.“Slave, this is Senator Otho. He wanted to inspect our fighting stock of women, and I told him we’d had some very promising recruits arrive.”

  Otho approached Gwenn and immediately began to grope her body. His hands squeezed at her arms and shoulders, then her rear and thighs and breasts. No one in the crowd found any of this amiss. Porcia had merely allowed Otho to do a hands-on inspection of her property.

  “Very nice,” he whispered in her ear. “Very nice, indeed.”

  Gwenn could do nothing about this without risking her death. She considered it—and a part of her knew that not so long ago, she would have punched the senator without hesitation. But her many weeks of training had prepared her for one purpose in the arena. To risk that purpose now felt sacrilegious.

  “She is hard indeed. Your trainers certainly know how to put a man, or a woman, into good shape.” He eyed her critically. “Her chest is a bit flat for the show, however.”

  “The better for maneuverability, dear Otho.” Porcia smiled. “Why, if she were as shapely as some of us, she’d have too much a target wagging around.”

  They had a crowd now, circled around Otho, Porcia, and Gwenn, and at that comment, they all laughed. Gwenn concentrated very hard on not letting her anger rise.

  I’m not even here. I’m far away. I’m some place better.

  I’m in Lucius’s lap, and he’s telling me how attractive he finds me. He’s telling me that we would leave scorch marks on the bed if we ever went at it. My hand is slipping down into his loincloth and finding the stiff member he has there waiting for me.

  “I’d like to test that theory,” said Otho. He snapped his fingers. “Get me a pair of training swords. You, soldier.” He pointed to one of his own retinue. “Form up. I want you to fight this woman.”

  The soldier looked confused. “But she’s a woman, Sir.”

  “What do I pay you for? Is it questions?” Otho’s nose tilted upward. “She’s a gladiatrix, and that makes her half again more man than you if you won’t fight her. Grab a sword and let’s see it.”

  Another soldier handed Gwenn a sword. The crowd spread out to the walls. Her heart pumped strangely, hands flexing and re-flexing over the cool wood of the training blade.

  This was really happening.

  Chapter 27

  Right away, Lucius didn’t like the exhibition. He had been asked to spar and wrestle on a number of occasions in the past during parties such as this.

  Usually, the request had been made by Porcia. The game was for him to be shown half-naked, or sometimes completely naked, for Porcia in front of her husband or other women. She enjoyed showing off her toys, in other words. Often she took bets on the outcomes, with Iunius running as a bookkeeper.

  When Gwenn was called away, Lucius followed almost immediately. He stopped only to say goodnight to his friends, wishing Caius and Aeliana a safe trip back.

  So he had been there to see Otho fondle Gwenn. He had seen more than enough to make rage take a long, deep grip on his stomach and twist it all the way around.

  His hands would look good, Lucius decided, wrapped around Otho’s neck.

  The soldier Otho picked to spar with Gwenn was tall and brutish, looking more ape than man. He looked of Gaulish ancestry, and had thick forearms, broad forward-facing shoulders, and a heavy brow. He and Gwenn squared off around the pool in the middle of the atrium. The soldier had been reluctant at first, but now advanced on her with a grin on his face.

  He thought it would be easy.

  Gwenn parried his first several blows and then delivered a whirling roundhouse blow to the side of his helmet. The clang reverberated through the atrium. Members of the crowd gasped and applauded at the showy maneuver.

  Don’t show off, Lucius urged silently. Just finish him and be done with it.

  The longer she fought, he knew, the more interest Otho would take. With a man like Otho, better not to have any interest at all. Even if a lion favored you for a while, it was always still a lion.

  But Gwenn ignored Lucius’s silent advice. She walked in a circle around the fallen guard, allowing him time to get up. She wanted to put on a show for the crowd.

  God, she was a real gladiatrix, sure enough. The tone of her muscles was clear as she moved. Her footing was always solid. She had learned much under his tutelage. A potent combination of pride and lust fought it out in his heart, struggling for advantage.

  The soldier advanced quickly now, done with what little caution he had used before. He struck out wildly, pushing Gwenn to the corner in a bull rush of blows. The crowd split at their approach, wine spilling on the floor. She blocked or parried each blow, and when they were close enough to the wall, she spun around him again and whacked his helmet with her sword. Again he fell to a knee, holding his head in pain.

  The crowd loved it. They laughed and cheered as Gwenn held up her hands.

  “Wouldn’t want to be in the arena with her,” said one.

  “I wouldn’t mind being in a few other places with her, though.”

  Lucius held his tongue. They would have better luck—and fewer scars—in bedding a leopard.

  With a roar, the soldier snapped back up to his feet and charged after Gwenn full bore. She only smiled as he approached. It was nothing for her to step aside at the last moment and trip him, sending him crashing hard into one of the many marble columns. His helmet splintered the marble where he landed, leaving a dusty spiderweb formation.

  The guard’s head lolled on his shoulders, unconscious on the ground.

  “Well done!” said Porcia, clapping her hands in advance of the crowd. “A well fought victory indeed!”

  The rest of the crowd clapped with her. They had been given a show, after all, and the only polite thing to do was clap.

  It would have been different if someone had been seriously hurt or if the rest of the party wasn’t quite so good; but with the help of the others in his contubernium the groggy soldier got back up to
his feet, and the wine still flowed just as freely as before.

  “I think you can see, Senator Otho,” said Porcia, “that you are in for a wonderful display at the anniversary games.”

  Otho smiled grimly. “I can see that she knows a thing or two about avoiding the blows of an oaf. But what would she do with a real Roman fighting man?” He gestured with one hand. “Give me a sword.”

  Lucius’s throat tightened. He did not mean a training sword—and nor did he receive one. The heavy blade now in Otho’s hands was sharp Roman steel.

  Chapter 28

  Gwenn only had a moment of exhilaration from her victory over the soldier. She savored it, that hot pump of adrenaline combined with the unstoppable sense that she had bested a man at his own game.

  And then Otho began to advance on her with his own sword—a real sword.

  Gwenn backed up, unsteady. She scanned the crowd for a hint that this might be some kind of joke—a jest that Otho performed readily. Any sort of boredom from over-exposure or mirth in the eyes of the onlookers. But they all seemed as surprised as her. Some seemed aroused by the thought of watching Otho have his bladed way with the gladiatrix in the flimsy clothing.

  She saw Lucius in the crowd. Fear ran wild in his expression. And somehow, that steeled her.

  Nothing so much mattered to her in that moment but letting him know that he had nothing to fear. She would take care of this madman. Shame him into behaving a little more according to his station.

  Otho swiped at her, almost casual, and Gwenn dodged easily. He swiped again, playing with her, and again she dodged. This continued, with Gwenn continuing to back up and considering how to attack.

  She waited for openings, tried perhaps to goad him into rushing like the soldier had. But Otho was not impatient. He could do this all night if he had to.

  There was a calm, effortless madness in his eyes that set Gwenn’s insides cold. She truly believed that he would kill her if she gave him half a chance.

  Luckily, she did not intend on doing anything of the sort.

  He made another casual swipe with his sword, and Gwenn made him pay for it. She parried the blow and then immediately hammered her sword’s pommel into his hand. His sword clacked and clanged across the atrium until it landed, with a splash, in the pool.

  Otho sniffed. “Retrieve that.” His soldiers moved, but he held up a hand. “No. You.” He pointed at Gwenn. “Retrieve my sword.”

  She hesitated, but after a moment she nodded and said, “Yes, Senator.”

  As she bent over to grab the sword from the water, Otho kicked her from behind. Her head landed awkwardly on the marble steps around the pool, and she slid across the floor. Blood sprouted from a long cut on her forehead.

  “Never take your eye off your enemy!” Otho pulled his sword out from the water. “Don’t they teach you that down there in the sands?”

  Gwenn’s training sword was far away. Otho attacked and she scrambled backward, avoiding one strike and then another. Either would have chopped deep into her thighs. Otho’s face was red, blood rushing into every part of his body.

  She did not like to think where else this display of her helpless form was guiding blood in his body. She remembered the shameless way he groped her body. He attacked in long slashes and heavy thrusts, hoping for blood.

  Finally he got it. She misjudged a slash and was struck high on her arm, sending red into the crowd. The sword carried the blood, spraying it onto an equestrian woman who looked close to fainting. Gwenn rolled forward after the blow, though, leaping across the atrium and snatching up her sword again.

  Otho was right on top of her, raining down blows. The training sword was hard wood, lacquered and molded to stand up to the heavy everyday uses in the ludus, but it was still just wood. Bits of the length chopped away under the strength of a fully-grown man battering at it with a soldier’s steel sword.

  A deep, old instinct arrived in her belly, immediately taking grip on her actions. She let him strike her sword again and again until it was almost cut through.

  Then, in one blinding-fast spinning maneuver, everything changed.

  Her body clung to his and there was a quick wrestling for position. She struck him in the temple with her bloody forehead, stunning him just briefly. A mark remained above his eyebrows, like a wet red kiss.

  When they separated again, he held the training sword and she the steel. With a furious chop, she clove the training sword in two and held the point of the steel to Otho’s throat.

  Not missing a beat, Otho stepped away and began to clap, a smile on his face.

  “Well done!” he shouted. “Well done!”

  The crowd took several seconds to catch up to him. They had all been stunned at the severity of the violence in display. First by Otho’s dedication in maiming Gwenn, and then by her defiance in emerging victorious.

  Soldiers advanced steadily on Gwenn, still holding the sword. With a curt smile, she dropped it and kicked it over toward them.

  After a moment, Otho turned back toward her. He was smiling still, and clapping, playing to the crowd, but his eyes had changed.

  His eyes were still the eyes of a madman—but they were not emotionless anymore. Anger filled him now, and it burned on Gwenn with all its force.

  She understood, then. The fear in Lucius’s eyes. It wasn’t that she might lose.

  It wasn’t that at all.

  Lucius was scared she might win.

  Chapter 29

  The following morning, Lucius waited for her outside the cell blocks. She’d had trouble sleeping, and the bandages that Nyx had put on her wounds were coming loose, but all the same her mood was high. Another day living, and still she was a gladiatrix.

  “We need to talk.”

  Rage began to fill Gwenn. A reprimand, was that it? For defending herself? She wouldn’t have it.

  The previous night, she had thought long and hard about what had gone down in the atrium. She did her very best to consider herself blameless.

  The man had ordered her to fight, and twice she had done it. There had been no orders to lose. No orders to let a senator have his way with her. He could be well damned with his expectations that a slave might take it easy on him simply because of his standing. What did she care about standing? What cause had she to ever care about what others thought of a senator?

  And a nagging voice kept telling her: he can make you care. One way or another.

  “I did the right thing, Lucius, and you know it.”

  He did that little eyebrow shrug of his that she found so intolerably cute. “I don’t know about that. But—”

  “He’s lucky I didn’t draw blood. I could have. I had my sword less than an inch from his throat.”

  Lucius laughed. “You’re lucky you didn’t draw blood, and you’re also insane if you think otherwise. You think slaves can draw the blood of senators and it’s nothing? You would have been crucified—actually crucified—and probably burned alive just for the trouble of stringing you up.”

  Her rage receded. Then, like a wave, it returned. Just because he was right didn’t mean Gwenn was any less mad about what made him right.

  “That’s all shit, and you know it.”

  “I do. But it’s the shit we live in, Gwenn. Vent on me all you want. I don’t mind. I just don’t want you mouthing off to Murus or worse.”

  He meant Porcia, of course.

  “Was that what you wanted to talk to me about? Watching my mouth?”

  “I’d watch your mouth all day, and talk about it twice as long.”

  She grinned, despite herself, at the open flirtation. Not for the first time since that night in her cell, she thought about grabbing him, pinning him against the wall, and showing him what a real kiss felt like.

  “But,” he sighed, “sadly, no. Otho didn’t take his defeat as kindly as his pronouncements might have made him appear.”

  “I didn’t think he had. He had to cheer me to save face.”

  “Yes. And saving f
ace is something that a senator like Otho, or any senator really, hates having to do. He’s changed your fight.”

  “I’m no longer fighting a murmillo?”

  “You’re no longer fighting one murmillo,” Lucius said. “And you’re fighting in the tradition of Horatius on the bridge.”

  “I’m fighting how?”

  He guided her to the sands, gesturing with his hands as he went. “Horatius was an ancient Roman. Fought for the republic, or something like that. I don’t really know. The bottom line is, a long time ago, he was on a bridge and he held off a bunch of attackers. And so, in the arena, they’re going to set up some platforms in the arena. You’ll stand on them. Below you will be fire or spikes. Maybe animals. It changes. You’ve been ‘honored’ by Otho to fight in the role of Horatius. So, on your platform will be some gates. In front of that, a narrow bridge. You’re standing between the bridge and the gates. You’ll have attackers come at you. If any one of them reaches the gates, you forfeit.”

  “You said attackers. Not ‘one murmillo.’ How many do I have to fight?”

  “It’s one at a time, okay? The number is almost inconsequential.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “If it’s inconsequential, then tell me.”

  “I mean the bridge is so narrow, they’ll only be able to take you on one at a time, all right?”

  “I understand, Lucius. How many?”

  “I don’t think you have any reason to be afraid, is what I’m saying.”

  “Lucius, you’re making me nervous.” That was an understatement. “Tell me.”

  “Seven. One for each of the thousand attacking Rome.”

  Chapter 30

  The games were at the end of the week and Lucius trained the women harder than he ever had. He woke them early and ran them for an hour before the men woke. As they ran, he ran next to them, urging them forward. Kav fell back often and he had to drag her by the arm to keep her in line.

  He didn’t want a single one of them to fall behind. Any of them could fight at the arena this week.