Colosseum

by Simone Sarasso

  Titus watches the liquid seep into the grain of the wood. A lurid stain that will remain forever.

  Such is destiny. Beyond the arched windows of his study, a copper sky sheds tears of death.

  A few months remain until the opening ceremony.

  Rome is ready, ready for the greatest sacrifice of all.

  Wood, Sweat and Leather

  Life gives man nought without some toil

  HORACE, Satires, I 9,59-60

  Rome, AD 79, November–December

  CAREFUL WHAT YOU wish for, boy. Because you might get it. That beer-swilling bastard of a blacksmith Cormac had told him this, time and again. Now, Verus misses him more than ever.

  The old sod was right all along.

  Verus has lain many a night awake nurturing his dream. He has caressed it during the dark hours through the bars of his cage. He has fantasized about it while the others around him slept, has never given up hope, even on the rainiest of days.

  Ever since the first time he heard about it, becoming a gladiator has represented a special road towards freedom, at least inside that crazy head of his. The only damned chance there was for a nobody like him. And now that it is almost a reality, Verus cannot get used to the idea.

  Especially because life in the Ludus Argentum is nothing like he imagined. Perhaps Priscus was right, may the gods of the underworld twice curse him.

  Verus plays at hide and seek with his thoughts, sleep having fled him some time ago, and with dawn soon about to break. Little more than a fortnight has passed since their arrival, but it already feels as though he has passed a lifetime within these damned walls.

  The journey was very short: the barracks of the Ludus Argentumlie less than a mile from the Amphitheater. Decius Ircius has shelled out a small fortune to secure a place right at the center of the world. The lanista’s trade is a tough one, if for no other reason than that he is held in general contempt. In particular, the wealthy nobility cannot abide these merchants of violence, who hail from the rabble but can sometimes earn more than a senator.

  Ircius is from Etruria, the seventh region. His parents are upstanding people with a good nose for business, who know how to give a warm welcome and cook up a tasty meal. When they were young they ran an inn for travelers not far from Florentia, but they had soon realized they were destined for higher things than providing horse fodder and reheating yesterday’s stew for hurried wayfarers. On top of that, the region was expanding fast and offered solid opportunities to those who were willing to put their noses to the grindstone. The pater familias and his lady wife therefore decided to abandon the highway and look for work in one of the stationes—the fabled offshoots of Rome’s public baths, a master class of elegant sculptures, of which fantastic tales are told even in the distant Orient—that were springing up like bluebells in spring around the village of ex-legionaries. After a few years Ircius’s father rose to become the owner of the station. He could boast senators and equestrians among his guests. That was how he met Corconius, a man of some importance in the Eternal City, who took their son Decius under his wing and brought the boy back to Rome with him to study. But Ircius was not made for rhetoric; he preferred sestertii. It took him a few years to emerge from Corconius’s shadow, years in which he learned how to make money out of illegal betting. It was the golden age of clandestine gladiators: there was fighting all over Rome, in the streets as in the public baths, even. And as his nest egg grew, Ircius learned how to distinguish the truly adept fighter from those who were little more than muscle-bound carthorses. A couple of times Ircius came off badly: some of the old guard did not look kindly on the provincial upstart and his unprecedented string of wins. But Ircius showed those bastards how dangerous a man can be when he is armed with a will of iron. That and a cut-throat razor, obviously.

  He gained a few scars himself, which he still wears with pride. But ultimately everyone came to understand what that sly-eyed young tearaway was made of. And within the space of six months he had made his first acquisition: Rubius, the finest gladiator he could buy without going bust. Thanks to Rubius’s brawn and his own determination, Ircius earned enough to set up shop and open his own school.

  Rubius never quit and is still at Ircius’s side, even though the old gladiator is now nearly forty—an age equivalent to at least double that for a “civilian” citizen.

  Rubius is the first person that Verus and Priscus meet when they enter the school. He is the instructor, the master at arms, capable of smashing the bones of half the gladiators who live inside these four shitty walls without so much as breaking a sweat.

  That’s who this bastard Rubius is.

  Ircius gives the orders and Rubius makes sure they are followed. But there is a third character without whom the Ludus Argentum would be little more than a dump full of corpses: Ezius Tortonus, the house physician. Stubby fingers like bunches of carrots, smooth skin like an overgrown child, no eyebrows or hair. He looks like a giant, slippery worm. The new arrivals were told to stand in line while Ezius inspected them one by one. When Verus’s turn came, his simple Briton’s heart began to race, so unused was he to anything new. The doctor noticed it as well. He examined the youth’s mouth, felt his neck and his joints, had a quick look at his feet and, finally, a feel of his scrotum. Verus had not been expecting this, and it set him off hiccupping.

  How embarrassing…

  The physician showed no emotion whatsoever. If he had been a veterinarian examining horses in a country villa, it would have made no difference to him. He certainly takes no pleasure in touching stranger’s grimy genitalia, but that is his duty. Decius Ircius wants to make sure he has spent his money wisely and, whether Ezius likes it or not, you can get a better idea of a man by squeezing his balls than you can by watching him brandish a sword. Thank the gods—in particular Priapus and Venus, who took care of that sort of thing—Verus showed the necessary vigor despite the surprise, and the lanistasmiled with satisfaction when he noticed that the Briton had just passed the test.

  But tests make up the backbone of gladiator life, as Verus would soon learn, before he had even managed to memorize the complicated layout of the school.

  Indeed, the Ludus Argentum is made for taking in, not for giving back. Essentially it is a prison. There are individual cells for every inmate, little more than a few paces wide and all of them windowless. They are positioned one after another beneath an ample portico of blood-red Doric columns which match the color of the roof tiles.

  There is a canteen filled with filthy tables where the same slop is served up for everyone, day in day out: a tepid soup of barley and beans accompanied by a ridiculous ration of water.

  The latrines are the worst part. The task of keeping them clean falls to novices like Verus and Priscus, although even a full team of vigiles with their water hoses would not manage to cut through enough of the slime to see the surfaces underneath. The floor is a compacted mound of foul human waste, and the channels to the main drains work one day in three. As a result, it would be easier to grow sweet-smelling herbs there than it is to clean those damned shitholes.

  The baths, where the gladiators of the familia can relax and scrub away the day’s grime, are a different story. They are the pride of Ircius’s ludus. It is said that there are few schools in Rome with such facilities dedicated to personal hygiene. Every cubicle is equipped with running water via a system similar to that of a fountain, having a long stick with a sponge attached to one end. There were even strigils for the more refined bathers.

  The first time Verus went in there he felt embarrassed. Apart from taking the odd dip in the river or in frozen lakes, as a slave he has never washed himself much. When he found himself in front of the waterspout had he thought it was a fountain, and had begun to take great gulps of it. Only when he noticed his naked companions mocking him as they rubbed away dry skin did it register that he was supposed to take off his sandals and give himself a s
crub.

  But this is only the surface, the shiny gloss on Decius Ircius’s powerful war machine.

  The rest of it, every last bit, has to do with violence. And that is the reason why Verus, in spite of his exhaustion and the state his back has been reduced to by training, cannot close his eyes as dawn edges slowly nearer.

  He had not expected this.

  Truly, he could not have imagined anything like it.

  The day begins like every other: with the shouts of the untores, the masseurs tasked with getting the fighters fit for the slaughterhouse. Around here every last crumb of glory is earned on the sand, there are no shortcuts. Upon entering the school they are novices, or to use Rubius’s term, “useless stacks of shit.” To become a tiro, or recruit, they must undergo the tirocinio, the grueling training that constitutes the meat and drink of every warrior in the Ludus Argentum. But until a fighter has spilled his blood in the arena, until he has faced another gladiator in public and survived, he cannot boast the title “veteran.” Once a veteran, a gladiator receives a prize from his lanista, a small bone or ivory tablet carved with his name—or stage name. It is basically a symbolic act. For all Verus knows they might be writing something charming about the owner’s mother on those damned tablets, especially given that most of Ircius’s champions are illiterate.

  Verus, for his part, is beginning to get the hang of letters and words, although he is certain that this new skill will be about as much use to him in here as a feather cushion is to a donkey. For the first few months, the name of the game will be survival, pure and simple: surviving the violence, the abuse, the sheer nerve of the more experienced gladiators, who were known as the primi pali, or “first poles,” because they have spent countless hours at the palo, or training pole—when they are not out on the arena gutting riffraff, urged on by the crazed shouting of the crowd.

  When he first saw one of the poles, the Briton felt his knees tremble and a jolt run through his joints. The pole is not all that different to the trunk the boy used to train with by night, near his village on the Island.

  The instructorgives a lash of the whip as the sun peeps timidly over the horizon on the first day inside the barracks. For a moment, Verus’s mind returns to a world that no longer exists. He feels at home.

  The sensation, however, lasts barely a moment, instantly shattered by the shrill voices of the masseurs and guards. Verus sits upright on his bunk and picks up the thin rag that constitutes the sum total of his clothing during his waking hours, tying it round his waist. No sandals, no tunic: novices do not deserve such luxuries.

  The cell door is flung open and Verus steps out into the corridor. He looks along the line of his companions, roused from their sleep just moments ago, and recognizes each crumpled face. One of them belongs to Priscus, apparently unconcerned both by the brusque wake-up call and by the thought of what might await them outside, in the courtyard that will soon be transformed into an oven.

  Priscus is the sort of person that has already suffered so much that nothing else can faze him. Verus is getting to know him better as the days pass, and if it were not for the stiffness and introversion of the man-mountain, their budding regard for one another could quite easily grow into genuine friendship. But Priscus is in no hurry, especially where it comes to his relations with the rest of the world. He needs time, and Verus has decided it is worth his while to concede it.

  A nod of greeting from the Gaul and then everyone goes outside, where time is measured by the instructor’s whip.

  Rubius gets the men in line, but not before the novices are forced to pass beneath a rain of slaps and spit courtesy of the primi pali, the old guard of the school. “Old” is a relative term here, as the average life expectancy of a gladiator—a gladiator with well-honed skills and plenty of luck—is a man around thirty years of age. In Ircius’s stable, only Rubius and Ezius have seen more than three dozen summers. The oldest of the “brothers in blood” at the Ludus Argentum is Cosmos, a twenty-seven-year-old titan weighing two hundred pounds. The murmillo that every noblewoman in Rome dreams of taking to her nuptial bed.

  When the new arrivals are also correctly lined up in the courtyard, the training may commence.

  It is a damned serious business, and it lasts from sunrise to sunset. First of all everyone is given a rudius. These are wooden swords, made in such a way as to prevent the newbies from tearing one another’s guts out before they have learned how to do it properly. For two straight hours, the only activity is running: round and round like oxen at a wheel, rudius held up above the head or clenched tightly to the chest. For those who do not manage to keep up, for those who are too tired, too thirsty, or simply could not care less, Rubius’s whip is always on hand with a reminder: nothing is owed you. Until you swear the oath, you miserable worms, you will be nothing but scum.

  Ah yes, the oath. Verus dreams of it night and day.

  When a gladiator makes the transition from novice to recruit, he places his own life in the hands of his lanista. In theory, if he is a freedman, he may leave the school before it is too late. The time spent as a novice serves as an opportunity to weigh up the true risks of the trade, for those citizens who are about to voluntarily give up five years of their life in exchange for first-rate training, the hope of unfading glory and a miserable wage of two thousand sestertii, rising to twelve thousand if, at the end of those five years, the gladiator signs on for another five. Are you sure you want to get beaten, battered and trampled bloody for another sixty months of your life? Then swear it, you son of a sow in heat!

  The words of the oath are not chosen at random: every tiro gives his permission for the master of his gladiator school to “burn him, bind him, beat him, kill him.” Without reserving for himself so much as the right to object.

  The road to glory is paved with beatings.

  Of course, this is for freedmen. And there are a lot of them, to be sure—roughly half the souls in the Ludus Argentum—but they tend to be less accustomed to the rigors of life. For slaves like Verus and Priscus, their time as novices is a farce. Even if they wanted to, they could not leave.

  The oath, therefore, is the first milestone on the way to the summit. It is both an affirmation that the dream is within reach, and a sentence to endless toil.

  After two hours of running beneath the sun, even the imperturbable Priscus is panting like a hunting dog, tongue lolling from his mouth and muscles crying out for mercy.

  The crack of the instructor’s whip puts a stop to the first training exercise. The novices fall to the ground like so much rotten fruit. The untores move rapidly through the group, soothing torn calves and handing out a few bowls of water. This is not kindness, merely good sense: twenty overgrown lads suffering muscle cramps are no use to Rubius. Especially now that the game is getting serious. The instructor was quite clear: warmed muscles and hydration. Otherwise they are going nowhere.

  Verus and Priscus get their breath back and look one another in the eye. Amazingly, it is the Gaul who speaks first: “Did you sleep?”

  “Like a log,” lies Verus. “You?”

  Priscus shakes his head as he watches his thigh muscles contract beneath the expert hands of masseur: “Not a wink. Bad dreams…”

  The man of ice speaks without a hint of shame. As though it were the most natural thing in the world to expose his weakness, there in the sand. His companion does not understand what has brought about such openness, but he is pleased by the sudden show of trust. All at once, he feels closer to his brother in blood. He does not even consider making fun of him.

  “What did you dream about?”

  “My mother. She died when I was small, I can barely remember her face.”

  The Briton swallows the information with difficulty, along with the saliva in his mouth. Thick and unpleasant, it tastes of death.

  “In the dream…did she talk to you?” the wind carries his voice away.

  Priscus nods. “She told me to stop hoping. Because, sooner or later, e
veryone gets what they deserve…”

  Verus is no longer sure it was a good idea to ask the Gaul about his dreams. By the gods, life is already hard enough in this den of wild beasts. What need is there for another cupful of melancholy this early in the morning? The young man has a fire that still burns within him. He wants to shout in Priscus’s face that he needs to stop dwelling on the past because the future, out there beyond those walls, glints with all the promise of a diamond in a heap of shit. You need to hold your nose, dive in and retrieve it, without worrying about what you will look like when you are rich.

  But he does not have the time, because the instructor’s whip reaches his companion’s ear before his words have left his lips. The kind of lash that can make a man look like a lizard from the side on.

  For the rest of his life.

  Priscus screams as the blood begins to flow, jumping to his feet and raising his guard.

  Rubius sinks his gaze into the ice-cold eyes of the slave: “That was for your whore of a mother, boy. Tell her to get lost, no one disturbs my men. Not even when they’re asleep!”

  Priscus is stunned by the pain and staggered by the trainer’s words. Something hot is spreading through the deep of his chest. He cannot help but show a grateful grin. The same smile a condemned prisoner reserves for his headman, a moment before the ax falls.

  “And now get back in line—everyone back in line, you useless damned scum!”

  Training begins once more, heralded by another crack of twisted leather. It is time for the pole.

  The veterans sit sniggering in the arena while two of their number attack each other relentlessly. On the other side of the courtyard, however, the novices wait their turn to face an opponent that, although rather more innocuous, is every bit as tough. The pole is just as one might expect, apart from the pair of straw arms girded in iron. The game consists of delivering as many thrusts as possible without blunting the end of the rudius.

  The instructor’s shouts rise above all the other noise: “No cutting! Only sissies cut! You can heal a gash, but a blade to the throat or the heart and it’s game over. Thrust, may Jupiter Pluvius twice curse you! THRUST!”