“Yes, Domina.” It was hard to keep Aelia in his vision. Not that hatred consumed him—hatred was an emotion he could not afford to suffer—but now that the role of benevolent mistress no longer framed his perception, he had nothing to replace it with. She was a wraith, a crossroads, a new moon.
“I know you a little better than my husband knows you, I think.” He dared a look into her eyes. They gave nothing away. “He thinks playing to your physical desires and dangling the promise of freedom is enough to secure your loyalty, but I’m not so sure. I think you’re a much more complicated thing than you like to pretend.”
Reveal nothing. Anazâr swallowed hard and didn’t speak, didn’t acknowledge or refute her accusation. Wished for Amanikhabale’s talent with words. That woman could talk a lion out of eating her; surely she could handle a battle of wits with Aelia.
“Anything I tell you will stay in this room. If it does not, I’ll have you killed slowly—no, never mind. I’ll have some of your gladiatrices killed slowly. Oh, now that gets a reaction.” She smiled serenely. “You and I are alike, I think, in that both of us play very well the part we are given, regardless of our true desires. You, the loyal slave. Me, the loving wife. The kernel of it? My desired outcome in this world diverges greatly from that of my husband.”
A strange sense of relief swelled through Anazâr as he realized this was no trick to test his loyalty. No. It still could be. Reveal nothing.
But whatever her goal, Aelia at least seemed unperturbed by Anazâr’s lack of reply. Perhaps she was enjoying the freedom to speak at length, without interruption from Felix’s barbed wit or her husband’s patriarchal proclamations. She swept across the floor, circling Anazâr in a certain predatory—no, carrion-seeking—gesture. Her small, soft hand traced delicate patterns over Anazâr’s shoulders. “Don’t mistake me for your pet murderess, however. I don’t hate Lucius. He’s not a bad man. But he is beneath me, a fact brought into sharp relief by this new venture as lanista to this freakish troupe, and the fact that his damnable brother seems so determined to sully their name. Unlike my husband, I don’t have blind faith that Felix’s . . . dispatch . . . will solve all our problems. A higher, better marriage and a return to senatorial circles lies within reach, if my father decides. He’s gotten the money he needs from Marianus, after all. But I’d prefer this marriage ended with Marianus dead or in disgrace. Otherwise, I’d have to leave Lucullus behind.”
At last, a desire he could understand. She’d left one child behind in her first marriage, he remembered Felix saying. But the first real swell of rage washed into him. What of Enyo’s child? Aelia may have a mother’s gentle compassion, but it was a selfish thing of limited influence, and Anazâr would do well to remember that.
“Kill my husband. I’ll have you freed just the same. Or kill Felix, and I’ll have my husband blamed. Deny me, and I’ll have my husband buy your Gaius up and sell him to the mines to die. A colossal waste of money, but he’d do it for me. He’d do anything for me.” She smiled and spread her hands. “But do it my way, and no one else needs to die. Cassia won’t be blamed and crucified. You and I will be free. Felix is irrelevant. Kill him, keep him alive as a lover—” her eyes flashed in triumph as if to say, Oh yes, I know you better than you realize “—as you wish. He’s of no consequence to me.”
He opened his mouth, but it was the reflex of drowning man seeking air. He had no words to speak.
“I think your path will become clear once you understand more of my husband’s plan, and who will suffer for it. So I’ll let you go now without an answer. If you think to curry favor with my husband by revealing me, know that he loves me beyond all measure. He would never believe you.”
“I believe you,” he managed to whisper. At last, he understood why Marianus had set out to kill Felix, when disinheriting him would have been so much easier. It was all Aelia. Marianus was a hollow man.
“Good. We understand each other very well, then.” She lifted her hand from his crawling skin, relinquishing her claim.
For now.
“I hope the sun comes out tomorrow,” she said, as bright and gracious as ever. “In the meantime, you can sleep in the basement, and join your gladiatrices at the Circus in the morning for rehearsals. Go now.”
“Yes, Domina.”
He wondered if his final answer could be anything other than yes. And if she’d have him killed anyway, afterward. Everything was possible. Nothing was forbidden.
“Apollo, may you be increased,” prayed the Circus Maximus custodian. He was a man of middling age named Egnatius; Anazâr had known him for many years. “By your merciful light, the games may begin this day.”
The dwarf, who stood by the custodian’s side, scowled and crossed his arms. It was hard to tell his ancestry, but Anazâr imagined he must not hold to Roman gods. “It’s still too fucking wet. Where will we rehearse?”
“We’ll figure something out,” said Egnatius. “I’ll clear out a few shops on the upper level, if I have to. You’re not scheduled until twilight, anyway. I’ll clear a space after the mid-day show. Yes, that’s it.” He scratched at his head, gaze darting all over the vast archways of the Circus entrance complex, obviously distracted. “The flooding last night was— I’ve got to go again. Go buy your people some breakfast. It’s on me.” He set off for the entrance to the underground staging area, the infernal land of death below the clean yellow sand.
“There’s a decent pastry shop over that way,” said the dwarf as he turned to Anazâr. “I think it’s open already.” And then the dwarf squinted upward at the turbulent sky, at the ranks of towering clouds whipping away from Rome toward the far horizon.
Nearly mid-day. A high white sun glowered down on them, casting the vaulting form of the imperial shrine in silhouette. It stretched above the stands like a white eagle, Jupiter’s avatar, raising a space to the heavens for his chosen representative on earth. Soon, the sun would pass overhead and the shrine’s shadow would stretch down across the stands, onto the ground of the Circus Maximus and beyond, darkening the streets of the city itself. A constant reminder of Rome’s power and dominance, as if the gladiators in the arena who fought and died under its shadow needed such a thing.
They’d stationed the gladiatrices on the second level of the entrance complex, all gathered in an impromptu, wooden-walled pen against the side of a rich little temple whose bricks were painted an eye-popping scarlet. Barbershops and food stalls and vendors selling cheap jewelry made from stained leather lined the rest of the walkway to the stands. The crowd swarmed restlessly, waiting for intermission to end, while guards in the employ of the Circus Maximus kept watch for cutpurses.
“I have some good news for you,” said Anazâr. “I’ve been back and forth, talking to some of my former brothers-in-arms. Your old trainer will fight in the midday event.”
As he’d hoped, every single head raised.
“I thought only condemned criminals would be fighting then,” said Amanikhabale. “Won’t the number of fatalities be too high for someone associated with an elite ludus—someone like that walking excrescence we all know and love so well?”
“Apparently he’s fallen from favor,” replied Anazâr. “A combination of Marianus’s displeasure at the failed contract and skills diminishing with age. He’d already won his freedom and sold himself back, not knowing what to do with it. It’s likely he won’t survive this bout.”
“So I’ll never get to kill him myself,” snarled Rhakshna. “Shit! That’s the opposite of good news.”
“Hard to please as ever, Sarmatian. No matter. Play nicely tonight, like you promised, and I’ll make sure you get a real fight the next game.”
A lie, of course, but perhaps he could beg a favor on her behalf.
Amanikhabale opened her mouth as if to speak, half of Cassia’s name shaped—and then she tightened her lips and looked away.
Venatrix left off translating into Gallic and turned to Anazâr. “Can you go and see? And tell us if he dies?�
�
“I don’t know what he looks like, but I’ll ask around and do my best.”
He smiled as he left their pen and fell in with the crowd that surged toward the stands at the call of the horns. Whatever happened after the fight, at least they would be safe, and perhaps, in some measure, avenged. And then later . . . well, at all costs he’d have to avoid the appearance of having killed a master. Roman law. He wouldn’t be protecting his gladiatrices anymore. He’d be putting them to death. But then, did he really have to kill Marianus?
“I’ve heard it’s going to be Parthians besieging a Greek castle. Plus lions,” the man to his right shouted to his friend.
The friend shook his head in disgust. “Terrible idea! I’m fine with damnati fighting each other to death, or being eaten, but not both at the same time. Too muddled to provide any real spectacle or lesson of moral value.”
“Men to the right, women to the left,” cried the guard at the archway that led to the stands.
A hand fell on Anazâr’s arm.
“Cyrenaicus. We need to talk. There’s been a change of plan,” said Egnatius.
Kill.
The passages of the underground were ankle-deep awash in foul water, worse than galley bilge, reeking of death-fluids. A line of slaves mopped and bailed furiously, paying Anazâr no mind as he stalked onward. He had no need of a guide; he knew this place well.
Kill him. Make him pay with his life.
But that would never happen. In Rome, the masters never paid.
He’d seen people he cared about die in the arena before, watched helplessly as they risked their lives. Gaius. But it had never hurt like this, never terrified him and made him so impotently furious. He didn’t know where to throw the rage. Not yet. So he walked.
We had the Parthians in one of the stone cells on the lowest level. Mistakes were made. The floodline went up to the ceiling. And the lions are either drowned, too, or vomiting up their guts. The aedile got on his knees and begged your master—
Lies. He wouldn’t have had to beg. Maybe once, Anazâr could have believed that, but no longer.
How much did it cost, you bastard? How much did that sniveling fool have to pay you for their lives?
Their lives. Anazâr pressed the heel of his palm to one eye, smothering the urge to punch the closest wall. A stupid, adolescent compulsion.
—passed the new script to the announcers. It’s to be the Amazonomachy. The Amazons attack the Athenians to recover the sister of their queen, but are repulsed and annihilated, symbolizing the triumph of Greek civilization over barbarism. They already have blunted weapons laid out anyway, so it won’t be too hard to ensure the outcome.
Anazâr had reassured Egnatius that he was, above all, a professional. Disappointed at the waste of his training, certainly, but life was uncertain, and one had to be prepared for losses. Anazâr would skip the spectacle and drown his disappointment in a wine flagon at one of the taverns on the third level that served well-off slaves. After all, he was no stranger to wasteful death. That was what he told Egnatius.
Egnatius believed him.
And once he had gone, Anazâr went straight down to the underground.
A group of guards with long spears came at him from the other end of the hallway. He moved aside for them, flattened his back against the slimy stone, made eye contact with them and nodded as if he had every right in the world to be here. They moved on.
He made a sharp right and climbed a short stairway. These stones were dry. The smell receded. The sound of the roaring crowd increased, pulling at him like a tide.
A man stood silhouetted in the passageway: one of the usual guards who was posted at the sally port to repel cowards with a spear thrust through the gate’s iron grill. He and Anazâr had never come to blows during Anazâr’s time in the arena. Now, Anazâr approached him with the same confidence that had allowed him to win through this far.
“Cyrenaicus! What are you doing here? No one told me you were on the program.”
Anazâr walked up to him, smiled crookedly, spread open-palmed hands—orders, you know, there’s nothing to be done—and headbutted him.
They both stumbled back, the guard clutching his head with a low groan, Anazâr shaking stars out of his.
As it often did during such violence, time slowed. The roar of the crowd diminished. Anazâr grasped the guard by the head and pounded him into the stone wall. Crushed his fragile face with a barely perceptible crunch of his nose and a sad little gush of blood.
The guard groaned weakly as Anazâr crouched and methodically stripped him of his armor. A leather over-tunic and greaves—weak protection. The sally port offered nothing better.
A bundle of javelins left by the gate, though, he’d take those. And the guard’s spear. And—there was a dead woman propped by the gate, her throat a mass of twisted flesh. Atalanta.
No more.
He unbarred the gate and burst out onto the sand and sunlight, running. Running for their lives. Not his own, not anymore.
There was a castle. And there was an Amazon army. Not the fierce women of legend, but a ragged gang with blunted weapons who milled in confusion. Soldiers who clung to each other and wept.
There was a story and it wasn’t being followed. The crowd shrieked, the chorus rising into the painful upper registers of rage.
Anazâr noted the displeasure as he pounded over the sand. Rally, move, fight back. Don’t let the crowd turn against you.
A detachment of crest-helmeted Greeks—or the rebels, brigands, or criminals who played at the role—came at the women with long spears. One, two—five of them.
Fifty paces away. Close enough to see Rhakshna screaming and pushing at the Germans, ordering them into position in a language they didn’t understand.
“Cyrenaicus! Cyrenaicus is with us!”
No time to turn, no time to tell who’d called. He rounded the gladiatrices. On his left now was the castle, a squat square of wood painted to look like brick. If there were archers inside, he was exposed and as good as dead. I’ve fought through a hail of arrows before. To his right, the gladiatrices.
He had a clear shot at the Greek detachment.
“Shields up! Attack!” he shouted, and threw his spear.
The guard’s spear was ill-balanced for throwing, and clanged off the shield of a Greek. But the missile shocked them into faltering their march, gave him time to ready a javelin—
And then Rhakshna was upon them. Rebellious as ever, she’d cast her shield aside to throw herself tumbling under the wall of spears. She rose up under the chin of a Greek and swung her scimitar into his face. Even blunted, it slashed across the unprotected softness of an eye socket—the man howled like a dog. She took his short sword, cut his throat, and rolled away as another Greek dropped his spear to stab at her.
Anazâr sent a javelin high into that one’s chest, where the armor left him bare. He fell. Rolled through the sand. Didn’t get up again.
The Germans followed after Rhakshna, shields held at the same height, as good as locked. The other gladiatrices rallied in their wake, a Gallic war chant sounding high and steady over the roar of the crowd. Fickle as ever, the crowd’s anger had turned to delight at the Sarmatian’s antics.
Three men left now, their longspear angles thrown into chaos by the advancing Germans. Rhakshna came at them from the back. Anazâr sent a javelin over Cheruscia’s shoulder and into the throat of another.
Red crests on the sand—the sand, stained dark red.
“They’re all dead!” shouted Rhakshna. She faced the teeming stands to the southwest, both fists raised, but basked in the glory of applause for only a moment before turning to her sisters. “Now tell these sluggish bitches to get to work. We’ve got to take their weapons and cut out these javelins.”
Amanikhabale—she was here too, they all were, thank the gods, except for poor Atalanta—was already translating into Latin along with Anazâr. The women rushed forward and pulled at swords, wrested spears from loose h
ands.
“What were the instructions?” Anazâr asked Venatrix, who seemed stolid as ever, and he thanked his goddess Ifri for that. “What did they tell you at the sally port?”
“That we must fight as we were. We didn’t go easily. We thought it was a mistake. Then they killed Atalanta. If we capture the standard in the castle, we can live, that’s what they said. I didn’t know you’d fight with us. We had no hope before, now I have—”
“How many do we face inside the castle? What weapons?”
“I know nothing.”
Of course. Why give them the tools for tactics, when they were meant only to be gruesomely and gloriously slaughtered? The thought didn’t dishearten him, it made him furious.
Just then, Diana tossed Venatrix a sword, and as she weighed it in her hand, the sun struck a savage light from its mirror-polished surface.
“We hold real steel,” shouted Anazâr in the booming voice he’d used every day in the warehouse. Not a performer’s voice, meant to whip up the passions of the crowd. This conviction, this expression of genuine feeling, was for his gladiatrices alone. “We fight damnati without training.” A damnatus sentenced to die in the arena was what he’d once been himself—another life, another time. But he knew their weaknesses well. “We’ll march into the heart of the castle and take their fucking standard! We’ll live! As victors!”
“Would this be a bad time to inquire about strategy?” asked Amanikhabale.
“Tactics, I think you mean,” said Anazâr, grinning madly, to his surprise—a strange soaring mood had come upon him. He switched to Greek. “We have to keep the crowd on our side, and they love bravery above all else. An all-out frontal assault through the entrance, our strongest fighters in the lead. We’ll need to position everyone carefully, but we can’t take too much time. Even now, the crowd’s cheers are dying.”
“I’ll take care of that,” said Rhakshna. She pulled up her breast band to her armpits, exposing her chevron-etched chest, stalked to where the vast rows of spectators could best look down upon her, and raised her hands to the heavens and howled. The cheers rose again.
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