Mark of the Gladiator

by Heidi Belleau

  “Right,” said Anazâr, and switched back to Latin. “I’ve seen these stage-forts in use before. The walls are low enough for the crowd to see all—but too high to vault. There’ll be a corridor about thirty paces long before it opens up. It’s done so that the defenders can beset the first attackers from three sides. They want to see attackers pressing forward over a mound of their own dead.” Stepping on the faces of your comrades and brothers and fellow soldiers. “But if we go through fast enough, break through their line . . . I have the javelins.” He tried to think of some role for the women behind him and could not. He was no brilliant general, no Agrippa, and gods forbid he take Marcus Antonius as his model. “We have to stake everything on moving faster, striking harder than they expect.”

  “Very well,” said Amanikhabale. “Shall we start lining up?” She lowered her voice and spoke to him alone. “You know, I halfway thought Marianus and Aelia would let me live, even though I suppose I really knew better. Felix and Cassia may have a chance, at least. I’ve already cast my dice and it’s a damn poor throw.”

  “I’ll hit you worse than in training if you keep talking like that,” said Anazâr, soldier-rough, although he, too, had to hope that Felix was long gone to Alexandria and safe. Even if he did survive this battle, he doubted he would live through the night. But maybe the gladiatrices . . .

  Anazâr in the front, Cheruscia to his left, Rhakshna to his right, knowing she’d be crouching much of the time so he could throw over her head. Batavia, Cimbria, Penthesilea in the next row—the next-best fighters, ready to step forward, lock shields, and burst to the right. He ordered them all, giving spears to the ones in the rear, even doing a quick drill for positioning.

  There was no movement from the castle. The top of a crested helmet showed over the edge of the wall; judging by the height, they were holding someone up to watch. But they had no javelins, no arrows. He wondered how many were inside, whether they were armed or armored, and how well.

  A little beyond where Rhakshna had capered, there was an archer’s balcony. The man held his bow at the ready in the service of the Circus Maximus, but would not interfere in the fighting in the arena unless called to. He was undoubtedly excellent. Anazâr had seen one of these archers shoot a wall-climbing panther in the eye, first try. No escape, then, though there never was. Win or die. Or perhaps win and die.

  “If your sister falls, you cannot stop for her,” said Anazâr. “Avenge her. Fight on. Go.”

  They surged forward.

  The world narrowed. Darkened.

  At the end of the corridor, a wall of bright shields, red-crested helmets, shadowed eyes. Men who wanted to live as badly as Anazâr. No, more.

  He cast his first javelin. This was what the men of his tribe were born for. The reason they’d ridden halfway across the world, called into the service of pharaohs and imperators. The Numidians have come with their javelins. The Greek in the middle fell back, an iron shaft sticking out of his face, flipping upward to point at the sky like a sundial.

  In the turmoil that followed, a throat left bared. Another javelin, another life. And then he gripped the last, too close to cast, and sank it into the mouth of a man.

  A shield crashed against the side of his head. He jerked away, saw himself about to stumble into Rhakshna, who was hamstringing a Greek.

  He had no sword.

  Penthesilea pressed a hilt into his hand. “Cheruscia has fallen,” she gasped.

  He turned around, ripped away the shield of a Greek and hacked at the closest bare skin until the man’s arm hung by a tendon and he stumbled back, whining.

  Blood. Bodies. His gladiatrices fought bravely, but it was as if they were thrusting into deep raging tidewater. No space opened. No ground taken.

  There were too many.

  “Fall back!” he shouted. “Retreat to the mouth! Hold fast there!”

  The press of bodies washed him back and drew him into its fold.

  They stopped the line of shields at the mouth of the corridor. The foremost Greek, skewered by a spear through his shoulder, struggled briefly until Provocatrix hacked his neck open.

  Over his body, a line of shields stood still. A curse sounded in Latin. “Pull back to where we have the ground! Wait for the bitches to come to us!”

  A javelin came flying out of the corridor, but it was ill-cast and slow. Anazâr knocked it aside with his greaved arm. The shields pulled away, the men rushing backward, obeying the command.

  “What’s our count?” he asked of the women.

  “Cheruscia, dead. Rhakshna—there were many men on her . . .”

  “I’ve got a hole in my fucking leg the size of my thumb!”

  He turned to the right. Rhakshna—alive somehow—leaned against the fort’s wall, right at the corner, gone pale as milk under the smears of blood, her mouth a rictus of pain.

  “Keep your thumb pressed in it, then,” ordered Amanikhabale as she tore up strips of Rhakshna’s tunic. “I need leather. Leather I can tie—”

  Anazâr gripped the spear shaft and hauled the Greek’s carcass around the corner. A fisherman of the dead. “His armor has leather ties.” He turned to the rest of the women. “Hand me that javelin. We’ll mount another attack. Their numbers have lessened. We’ll win through.” And two of our best warriors are out of the battle.

  The crowd’s roar took on that discordant edge of irritation, of impatience.

  Batavia’s ragged sobs—less cries of grief than sounds of raw pain, as if her lungs were turning inside out—sawed apart all his thoughts of tactics. There was nothing left to do. Attack, attack, and attack again. They’d die one by one. The Greeks would clamber over their bodies on their way to the open sands and the glories of the crowd.

  The crowd. The coughing sobs. The taunting voice from the end of the corridor. “I know you all! I know the names of your living and dead! I’ve fucked half of you whores and now I’ll kill the rest, and then I think I’ll fuck your whore daughters!”

  Diana hefted her sword and lunged for the corridor, howling in Gallic, and gods help him, Anazâr was too far gone in frozen despair to stop her.

  “Cyrenaicus!” someone called behind him. Too many voices, too many sounds.

  Venatrix and Cimbria hauled Diana back again, gathering her thrashing body between them, patiently weathering the blows from her flailing fists. But Anazâr could see it, the desire that burned in them to follow her on her suicidal charge.

  “Bastard,” hissed Amanikhabale. “I’d hoped to see our old trainer this day, but with his head on a fucking pike. Not like this.” She tied a strip of leather around Rhakshna’s thigh with a vicious, desperate tug to staunch the bleeding. It wouldn’t hold for long.

  “Cyrenaicus! You must look!” Nemesis stood on the other side of the corridor mouth. She’d walked away from the wall and was pointing up to the stands.

  He looked.

  He saw nothing.

  And then he knew. The archer’s balcony was empty. The archer was gone.

  Did they have an ally?

  Felix.

  Anazâr was a master of the javelin and only a decent shot with the bow, but Sarmatians were the deadliest archers alive, raiding a bloody path through the East, whittling down proud armies with their relentless arrows. If they could get a bow to Rhakshna . . .

  “Amanikhabale. Penthesilea.” The largest and tallest. “Take Rhakshna and go! If the weapons are on the sand, lift her up on your shoulders and have her shoot over the side—from behind the fort. Go! And Rhakshna—your wound had better stay closed.”

  “I can’t walk, but I’m not dead yet.”

  That same taunting voice: “Come for your standard, whores, before the crowd turns against you! The games’ masters will unleash the fucking lions on you if you delay!”

  No lions left to unleash, Anazâr thought grimly, but that didn’t mean they were safe from the crowd’s displeasure. “Let him rage,” he hissed. “We wait.”

  He dared to step back from the mouth,
taking enough paces to see past the edge of the fort.

  The protective pit that lined the wall—the rains had made it a moat, half-filled with brown floodwater. Two figures clung to its side. Almost too far away to tell . . .

  Amanikhabale stood out against the yellow sand. She’d dropped to the edge of the moat, leaving Penthesilea supporting Rhakshna.

  She was pulling someone out. Long dark hair lashing wet down her back—Cassia. It was Cassia. Not Felix.

  They fell into each other’s arms.

  A pang of jealousy plucked at Anazâr’s heart at the sight of their embrace. Disappointment that it couldn’t have been Felix coming to their aid. That it wasn’t Felix and himself now, in each other’s arms, touching one another’s faces in disbelief and wonderment.

  It didn’t matter.

  Cassia had a bow across her back, arrows clasped in one hand. Already, Rhakshna was reaching for them.

  They had a chance.

  He had told Cassia, before they’d parted, that other lives were depending on hers. He hadn’t really known what he’d meant by it at the time, only that she needed to hear it, but it seemed the gods had heard, because now she was playing savior to all of them.

  New harsh notes sounded in the cacophony: the creak and scrape of metal. The gates of the sally port.

  A full squadron of guards, and Molossian mastiffs on leashes, soon to be loosed upon them. War dogs. He’d rather fight lions. They knew fear. The dogs had had it bred out of them.

  “We have to attack,” he said. “Cimbria, Batavia! Beside me.” He weighed the sword in his left hand, the javelin in his right. “Now!”

  The world narrowed again. The last attack of the last battle—the one he’d never had a chance to fight at Actium. Let this be the end to the slow carving away of my life. Oh goddess, hear me.

  The Germans at his sides never faltered.

  The man who saw him coming flinched, ducked his head under the curve of his shield, and delayed his death a while longer. Anazâr sent his javelin into the right eye of the man standing behind him.

  Shields rang. A woman screamed in pain somewhere, and then a man, and then a voice so agonized it was barely human, a sexless death rattle. Anazâr threw his sword from left hand to right—struck out again and again and again, steel seeking skin, throat, any chink in armor or shield.

  He’d broken through the line. The pole of the standard was almost close enough to touch. And gods, there were still more men. Three advanced on him, closing in from all sides. Number enough to take down even the most skilled gladiator, even one such as Cyrenaicus. As the moment of his death approached, he felt a curious distance, time slowing even further from a stagger to a trickle. All the lives he’d lived, and the man named Cyrenaicus would die holding them.

  The foremost Greek toppled to his knees. An arrow sprouted from the back of neck, just under his helmet.

  “Die, Roman dogs!” screamed Rhakshna. She appeared to float above the far wall like a goddess of the air.

  The two Greeks turned toward her. Anazâr took out the leg of the first with a single sword thrust. Another of Rhakshna’s arrows slammed into the other, the last of Anazâr’s opponents, the last of the men he’d thought would finally deliver him from his worthless sorry life.

  And then she aimed for the rest.

  He fell back into his own skin, felt the warm sun beating down on his shoulders, heard the crowd’s chant resounding all throughout this holy space.

  The crowd’s chant.

  AMAZONAE. AMAZONAE. AMAZONAE.

  The last red crest fell to the sand.

  Anazâr unseated the pole with shaking arms and lowered it to the ground. “Take the standard,” he croaked to the women who now filled the central space of the fort. “We must present it to the crowd and beg for mercy. For having changed the story.”

  “Yes,” said Venatrix. “Soon. We’re taking his head, just now. It’s the way of our people.”

  The Gauls were crouched on the ground surrounding a single Greek body. Anazâr didn’t need their confirmation that it was the old trainer. Of course it was. He didn’t stop them. Maybe before, he would have chastised them or called them away from their barbarian practice when under the watchful eyes of Rome, but he felt no such urge now. Instead, he turned his back on their work and listened to the sound of the hacking sword as it tore inexpertly through skin and sinew and bone.

  When it was done, though, he still persuaded them to leave it behind.

  As they left the fort to face the crowd, he looked behind, only once. He felt no kinship with Orpheus, only simple morbid curiosity. He’d never seen the man’s face.

  Resting there in a darkened circle of blood that seeped from the ragged neck, he looked much the same as any other man without a body. All that selfish petty evil, that specter of rape and violence, that taunting voice . . . extinguished forever. It made him think of Felix: We’re all the same. Bags of bones and blood and brilliance. He didn’t see the “brilliant” part, but then, he never had.

  That was why he needed Felix.

  As they marched out into the open arena and turned to face the roar of the crowd, arms upraised, sun baking the blood on their faces and bodies, broken but standing, Anazâr couldn’t help but search the stands for Felix.

  Held up by her sisters, Rhakshna, with a silent proud tilt of her chin, raised the standard.

  And Anazâr wasn’t sure what he wished for more: that Felix was out there somewhere, watching, or that he wasn’t.

  The crowd spared them.

  But that didn’t mean Marianus would.

  For now, they sat huddled together in some dark holding cell, miles away from the sun and Rome’s warm admiration. Rhakshna, Batavia, and Verecunda had been taken to the same doctors that treated the most famed gladiators. If they died tonight, it probably wouldn’t be because of their wounds.

  Without the strange spirit of battle in him, Anazâr’s body shook, reminding him of the fever that sometimes followed on the heels of a wound and often took men’s lives with it.

  Cassia, filthy with moat water but somehow looking healthier and more whole than she ever had before, wrapped her arm around Amanikhabale’s shoulder and finished her story. “Everyone was calling out, fire! Fire! Save the gold, run for the aedile, drag out the babies and—by the gods, it was chaos. The men who usually guarded me were on the other side of the insula. And then Felix—he wore a Phrygian cap and a false beard, but I could tell him by his eyes—grabbed my arm and we ran into the night. He’d raised the alarm as a ruse. Said he’d gotten an odd message to come the day after the games, but he’d come a day before instead because he wasn’t such a fool as his brother thought. He took me to another insula.”

  The plan had been to send a letter to Felix according to the instructions of Marianus . . . and work out a way of imparting another message, hidden in some code, to come armed and wary. Marianus and Aelia must have simply sent the note themselves, bypassing Amanikhabale. And Felix, of course, had not trusted it.

  “I was supposed to just stay in hiding and preserve my life, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I had to come here, even when Felix told me you were only set to perform a comic act with dwarves. Now I’m glad I did. You could have all died!” She set her chin, which threatened to wobble with the onset of tears, and allowed herself to be gathered forehead to forehead against Amanikhabale.

  “We were meant to,” said Anazâr. “And we may, still. Cassia’s disobedience and my own may have doomed us all.”

  I should have let them die in the arena. Better there than the cross.

  He hadn’t thought it through, at the time. All he’d seen was their blood. Atalanta, who’d never rise again. And after his intervention, too: Cheruscia, Nemesis. He hadn’t seen her die in battle, but she wasn’t here now and wasn’t with the surgeons either, which left only one possibility. Her body, borne out of the arena along with the other corpses. Along with the headless body of their former trainer.

  How long
until Anazâr and the surviving gladiatrices were fated to follow?

  Cassia had come. Was Felix here, too? Anazâr prayed he wasn’t. He may have been able to trick his way to freeing Cassia, but there was no way he could be so lucky twice. Especially not here.

  “Damn good show!”

  Anazâr jumped to his feet and looked through the bars. Egnatius stood on the outside, escorting a troop of dwarves. The games’ organizers must have found them new opponents for the comic act. Which meant it was nearly twilight. Not long, now, until he and his gladiatrices faced Marianus’s wrath.

  One of the dwarves gave him a thumbs up. “I thought you were going to be dog meat, but you really pulled through. That was brilliant with the bow and arrows. Completely against the rules and somebody’s going to get whipped for it, but brilliant.”

  Anazâr should have been flattered by the compliment or nervous about the warning. But all he could think about was . . . what if Egnatius wasn’t here to congratulate him? Did he have a message to pass? News from Felix? A good-bye? A plan?

  The dwarves passed on.

  “Well,” said Egnatius, lingering behind, “this is an interesting development. The aedile and the praetor have been in consultations since the match. There’ve been priests consulted. Entrails read. End result: it’s not unacceptable to let you leave the grounds alive. Even Cyrenaicus. Even the one who punched out one of our archers. Congratulations!”

  “Is our dear master pleased with our resounding victory?” asked Amanikhabale.

  “You’ve certainly made him a lot of money, and that pleases most every man. He received a full fee, plus special prizes, and offers to buy you as bodyguards for outrageous sums. Which he accepted.”

  “Fortune truly smiles upon him!” the Aethiopian said.

  Egnatius’s face darkened. “Except, that is, for you, and the murderess beside you, and Cyrenaicus. You’ll be going back to his house, in shackles. Guards!”

  Two guards shoved Anazâr down the rickety ladder that led to the dim, cool pit of the Marianus cellar. He’d been down here before: it was where he’d slept on that very first night, a lifetime ago. He understood why he was being sent here now. Not to sleep, not this time. It was because it was surrounded on all sides by earth, muffling any sound, and far from the ears of passersby.