Blood and Sand

by C. V. Wyk

  But that would end soon enough. His lips creased in a pained, determined smile as he turned his gaze to the iron gates that opened to the arena.

  It would be the last time he walked through those gates, the last time he took his weapons in hand and put on the show these animals wanted. He would go out and lose his first match in ten years, and finally face the long column of broken men who waited for him on the banks of the Styx.

  His dominus would undoubtedly rage about his death being a terrible waste, as though Xanthus hadn’t been a helpless nine-year-old boy when he was first shoved into an arena.

  No, Xanthus wouldn’t—couldn’t—waver.

  After everything, he was just so tired.

  His heavy sigh broke the uneasy silence of the hypogeum—the massive chamber beneath the arena where gladiators and slaves waited for their turn to fight or die. The hypogeum was a shadowy, damp space with tables and shelves groaning under the weight of weapons and armor. The only light came from flickering torches hung at uneven intervals on the walls. Broad pillars covered in chains and harnesses stretched down the middle of the room, and nearly half a dozen men were bound to them. They weren’t gladiators, they were fodder—their sole purpose to entertain by dying in sand and blood.

  A man chained to the nearest pillar was sobbing, his tears dripping down to cover the front of his tunic. All morning, he’d been muttering under his breath about the Christians’ god and praying for an apocalypse. The Cult of Christ had been causing the Republic problems as of late, and the poor fool was probably in the Coliseum precisely for speaking such blasphemies. Xanthus pitied the man. It didn’t matter what god he worshipped. All of them were already in hell.

  There were other men, too. Unchained, silent, hulking men. At a glance, they looked massive and muscled, but after so many years, Xanthus recognized a different sort of strength in them. These men were hardened by experience, cloaked in apathy. They were veteran gladiators, just like him, and they had learned to equate killing with survival. Still, few were willing to meet his eyes, and when they did, they looked quickly away. Xanthus’s reputation preceded him.

  Of all the men waiting in the hypogeum, only a handful could hold his gaze. They sat apart from the rest because they too had reputations. One by one, they lifted their eyes to look at Xanthus, and their expressions were heavy with unspoken comprehension. Albinus, Gallus, Lebuin, Iduma, and Castor—the men who had been forged beside him in the ludus, who had become his blood-brothers in every way that mattered. He hadn’t said anything to them about what he planned to do. But after all these years, he didn’t have to. They knew him.

  Lebuin tried to smile at Xanthus, but the expression faltered and fell. Gallus and Iduma, usually so quick to laugh, lowered their heads to hide the shadows gathering in their eyes. Castor simply stared, sadness tightening his mouth into a grim line.

  Xanthus looked away, closed his eyes, and leaned his head against the wall. He just wanted a moment—one last, single, solitary moment to pretend that he might see Britannia again, that his family might someday be made whole. That he was not the thing they’d carved him into.

  One last time, he thought. Just one.

  But as soon as he closed his eyes, the wall against his back began to shake in heavy, pulsing beats. Outside, the trumpets sounded off, high and resonant like the wailing of the Little People who lived in the bogs back home. They were followed by a voice Xanthus had heard for more than half his life.

  “Rome’s champion needs no introduction,” the dominus shouted. “Call his name! Release his fury!”

  And the crowd dutifully responded. “Xanthus! Xanthus! XANTHUS!”

  After all, no man chooses his own name. Why should he be any different? He wasn’t in Britannia; he was in the Coliseum. The trumpets were blaring, and it was time.

  The iron of an unsheathed blade hissed in his ear. Opening his eyes, Xanthus looked up to see Albinus standing beside him with two swords—long, straight spathas—held ready in his hands. The man’s white-blond hair hung down around his scarred face like a shroud. Albinus didn’t speak, but he and the others were all silently pleading the same thing as they looked at Xanthus: Live.

  Well, life was full of disappointment.

  Xanthus put a hand on Albinus’s shoulder—the closest he would come to saying goodbye—and accepted the swords. Then the iron bars rose, and bright, shifting beams of sunlight crossed his face. Xanthus sheathed the swords at his back and walked slowly out into the arena, not once looking behind him.

  The sand, the shouts, the coppery scent of blood in the air, and the steady drums that followed his progress across the wide-open space were all too familiar. He knew exactly what the Romans wanted.

  In one smooth motion, Xanthus drew his swords and struck them together over his head in the shape of an “X.” The iron flared briefly in the autumn sun, and he held the position for a long minute, letting the crowd get a good look.

  Xanthus was always surprised by how excited they were to see him. Then again, some of these spectators had watched him fight since he was a boy. He wondered if they felt like they knew him, if they considered him one of their own. And he wondered if there would ever be forgiveness for what he’d done to please them.

  He would find out soon enough.

  Before the cheering faded, Xanthus lowered his swords and turned to watch his opponent approach from the southern end of the arena.

  The Taurus, the Butcher of Capua, had been happily butchering all day long, and Xanthus could see why the crowd was so eager for this fight.

  The Taurus was barely a man at all—nearly seven feet tall with the bulk of a bull. His skin was mottled and scarred and looked almost monstrous in the light of the midday sun. Bleached bone horns erupted from the crown of his helmet, and he eyed Xanthus with an eager, hungry expression.

  Xanthus recognized his kind—the sort of godforsaken animal that actually relished its enslavement, that saw its chains as adornment and its task of destruction as a giddy pastime. He immediately despised him.

  In one hand, the Taurus raised a long spear, and in the other, he gripped an impressive double-sided axe. His fierce, bellowing roar echoed against the walls of the Coliseum.

  Sheathing his swords, Xanthus put his hands together in slow, sarcastic applause. “Impressive,” he said. “I thought only livestock could make a sound like that.”

  The Taurus narrowed his eyes. Confusion and irritation warred across his face before settling into scorn. “They call you the Champion of Rome, but you’re only a pup,” he taunted, loud enough for the crowd to hear. They booed in response, but the Taurus didn’t falter. “Have you even been weaned yet, boy?”

  “We should salute the Princeps now, even if he’s not here,” Xanthus said. “Custom, you understand.” He turned to the veranda at the end of the arena and inclined his head. The Taurus grudgingly followed suit.

  The morituri—that’s what they called those who were about to die. After so many years, Xanthus knew the Romans’ language as though it were his own. He still had the slight accent of a boy who had grown up speaking a foreign tongue, but these next words had been carved into his very bones.

  “We who are about to die salute you.” Even the words tasted like blood.

  When he faced the Taurus again, he reached for his swords before pausing. “Do you prefer Jupiter or Mars?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Stop talking to me!” the Taurus growled.

  “I only ask so that I know which god to send you to. A courtesy between … men.” Xanthus followed the significant pause with a taunting, lopsided grin—the kind of cocky expression that had charmed so many drunken patrician ladies and infuriated so many opponents.

  The Taurus reacted precisely as he was meant to. He snorted—literally, as though he was the bull he was named for—and charged straight at Xanthus.

  Xanthus stood perfectly still, entirely unfazed as he watched three hundred pounds of
death hurtle his way. Then, at the last possible moment, he stepped aside and lightly smacked the back of the Taurus’s helmet with the broad side of his sword.

  The Taurus was so shocked he nearly lost his footing. Humiliation made him turn a bright, blistering red. The crowd’s roaring laughter only infuriated him more, and he wasted no time before charging again.

  Again, Xanthus used the broad side of his sword to slap him away. He couldn’t help it. The Taurus was too foul not to play with. Just for a little while. Besides, Xanthus wanted the man to put some effort into the kill.

  Their epic battle soon became a violent comedy. The Taurus would lunge, and Xanthus would dance just out of reach until the whole stadium was alive with mockery. The laughter turned to jeers, and the jeers turned to taunts.

  “Tame that bull, Xanthus!”

  “Charge, Taurus, charge!”

  “Lose your horns, you fat calf?”

  “Xanthus! Stop playing and kill him!” That last voice caught Xanthus’s attention.

  A tall, thin man with white hair was leaning over the marble railing of the veranda, one push away from falling straight onto the merciless ground of the arena. His name was Josias Neleus Timeus, but for ten years, Xanthus had known him simply as “dominus.”

  Timeus’s bright blue eyes glared down at Xanthus. “You hear the crowd! Finish him!”

  Like well-trained sheep, the people in the stadium took up the cry. “Finish him! Finish him!”

  There was no avoiding it now. Timeus and the mob were growing impatient. It would have to happen soon.

  The Taurus and the entire stadium went silent with shock as Xanthus dropped to his knees, letting his swords fall to the sand on either side of him. With closed eyes, he tried again to think of home: of the mist that surrounded the Tor, of chalk on the hillsides. Of his mother, his father, his baby sister, his older brother.

  And Decimus.

  The hated name wormed into Xanthus’s thoughts, but he pushed it violently away. He couldn’t think of him right now or else it would weaken his resolve. He’d rather the faces of his family be the last images in his head before—

  “Xanthus! Xanthus, damn you! Get up! Don’t leave him to that blubbering heretic!” Timeus shouted.

  Heretic? What heretic?

  Xanthus grudgingly opened his eyes. The chained Christian from the hypogeum had entered the arena and was already strapped into huge, poorly fitted armor. He held a sword as though he’d never seen one before and gaped up at the crowd in open-mouthed horror.

  Xanthus thought they’d send Albinus out next, or one of his other blood-brothers. He had no doubt that any of them would easily defeat the Taurus. But no. They hadn’t even sent out a real gladiator. Xanthus realized with a sinking feeling that once the Taurus was done with him, that terrified, untried Christian would be next. Xanthus squeezed his eyes shut and muttered under his breath. “Well, shit.”

  The Taurus’s labored breaths and heaving pants grew louder, and Xanthus knew by the sound of the crowd the very second the other man raised his axe.

  And his decision was made.

  The Taurus launched himself forward with a great lurch and charged.

  Xanthus waited until the Taurus was no more than a foot away before his eyes snapped open. Still kneeling, he grabbed his twin swords and thrust the deadly blades outward. The iron reflected the sunlight in a blinding flash.

  It was the last thing the Taurus ever saw.

  Dark blood sprayed hot and sticky across Xanthus’s chest as he buried both of his blades into the man’s thick neck. The massive gladiator fell to his knees, and Xanthus forced himself to look straight into his pale eyes until the moment when he pulled his swords free and let the Taurus’s head topple to the ground.

  Just like that, it was done.

  The crowd screamed his name with delight. “Xanthus! Xanthus! Xanthus!”

  But Xanthus stayed on his knees afterward. His eyes focused on the blood drenching his hands and arms and chest. His shoulders bowed beneath an oppressive weight. His ears drowned in the deluge of the crowd’s cheers.

  No one heard when he finally turned his face upward and whispered a prayer into the swirling dust.

  “Please,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Even before Xanthus entered the great room of Timeus’s house, the gathered throng of lanistae and noblemen were shouting his name. It was like being trapped in the Coliseum all over again. And when the guests finally saw him—completely unharmed from his match with the Butcher of Capua—they broke into raucous cheers, a perfect start to the evening’s celebrations.

  Xanthus forced a tight smile on his face.

  The massive, octagonal room was heavy with incense. The scented smoke curled up in the folds of the silk drapes and curtains before releasing again in intoxicating waves when the breeze blew in from the sea. The westernmost edge of the room had no wall, only a row of evenly spaced pillars separating it from a wide balcony. The floor was a sophisticated pattern of impossibly small and perfectly fitted pieces of white and gray stone. Torchlight flickered off the seven sparkling mosaics on the walls inlaid with gold, brass, silver, and copper. One mosaic showed a man seated on a white throne wearing a tunic fashioned out of deep purple amethysts, his head and fingers lined with rubies. Another depicted Xanthus himself—his eyes made of two large emeralds, his swords inlaid with garnets meant to look like drops of blood, and his feet standing atop a mound of ivory carved into the shapes of hundreds of human bones.

  Xanthus turned away, craning his neck to look for his brothers. After the match, they’d waited for him in the hypogeum. One by one, they’d gripped his shoulder hard enough to bruise, their grasps expressing the relief they were careful to keep from their faces. Not one of them said a word.

  Now, Iduma was likely somewhere in the room, flirting shamelessly with one of the courtesans Timeus had rented for the evening. Lebuin was probably drinking himself into oblivion in a dark corner. Castor had no doubt remained in his quarters because no one would miss a man who never spoke.

  Albinus appeared at Xanthus’s side, a cup of wine in hand.

  “They look like cattle, don’t they? Fat, lazy, angry cattle,” Xanthus said.

  “Moooooo,” Albinus replied before draining his cup.

  Xanthus shook his head and chuckled. “Where’s Gallus?”

  “Probably tending to Ennius’s leg.”

  “I thought so,” Xanthus said. Ennius had been the one to train them from the very beginning—to teach six lost, stolen boys how to become gladiators. Watching him try to limp around the household was as painful for Xanthus as an injury to his own body.

  “I still can’t believe he was taken down by some slave,” Albinus said.

  “A Thracian slave,” Xanthus said. “You know how they’re trained.”

  They all knew. When word had reached them of the fall of Thrace, they could hardly believe it. It seemed that the entire world was crumbling under the heel of Rome, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Not even the legendary Maedi of Thrace.

  From across the room, Timeus caught Xanthus’s eye and raised a wiry arm, beckoning his champion forward.

  “The master calls,” Albinus said.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  Albinus clicked his tongue. “Poor Ennius and his broken leg. I really ought to offer my expertise.” Xanthus wasn’t surprised. Like Castor, Albinus preferred the solitude and quiet of the gladiators’ quarters, especially during Timeus’s parties. They grasped each other’s arms.

  “Watch your back in there,” Albinus said, and left.

  Xanthus walked across the room, nodding at the men and tolerating the suggestive, fleeting touches of the women. Much as some of the male guests might want to sample his talents outside of the arena, Timeus had never forced such trysts on him. If anything, the old man allowed Xanthus liberties that no one else enjoyed. All he demanded in return were constant victories, and he had ye
t to be disappointed.

  “Good evening, Dominus,” Xanthus said. He glanced at the woman at Timeus’s side. “Lucretia.”

  “Champion,” she replied. “I believe congratulations are in order.” Her dark eyes were already turning away with disinterest while she fiddled with a curl of her smooth black hair.

  “You’re late,” Timeus said. “And the guest of honor must never be late.” But his words were softened by the expression on his face—an expression that immediately made Xanthus wary.

  “My apologies, Dominus.”

  Timeus swatted the words away with a flapping hand. “Come. We need to talk.” He dismissed Lucretia with a careless snap of his fingers.

  She turned away without sparing a second glance at either of them and went to stand by Timeus’s empty chair, where she would wait until he called for her again. She casually rested a hand on the back of the chair, her light brown skin complementing the white and gold cushions. No one spoke to her, but many stared at the dominus’s young and beautiful concubine.

  “I have another match for you,” Timeus said.

  Xanthus sighed. Another match, another kill. Or perhaps another chance to do what he couldn’t do against the Taurus. “Does this next one have a proper name?”

  Timeus’s smile darkened. “Decimus.”

  Xanthus pinned Timeus with a penetrating glare. “What?”

  “Do I have your interest now?” Timeus said, his voice laced with just a hint of aggravation. He waved to the crowd and pulled Xanthus out to the balcony. All at once, the drunken, jovial persona that he’d put on for his guests evaporated, and he became the hard, calculating man that Xanthus knew so well.

  “When?” Xanthus demanded.

  “Two months ago, Decimus killed his old master and was facing execution. He’s nearly as good in the arena as you are. His death would have been a terrible waste, don’t you think, Xanthus?”

  “When?”

  “Tycho Flavius seemed to think so, and so he purchased Decimus and took him to his estate in Capua,” Timeus continued.

  Xanthus clenched his jaw to control his breathing. Red spots blossomed in the corners of his vision and swam before his eyes. “When?”