Floriana was better, Marcia told me, though weak. Marcia still didn’t understand how Floriana had eaten the rhubarb leaves, because no one had found any remains of them in the house.
I looked into Floriana’s cell to see her sleeping, and snoring, and departed. “Tell her I’ll pay her when I return from Ostia.”
Marcia only nodded and went back to Floriana.
Rome was shutting down for the night, the sun setting. Shops had closed long before, and even the baths were emptying now. At night all would grow pitch dark, and the wise were indoors by then. Shopkeepers would stay awake, awaiting deliveries, which were only allowed at night, and the rest of us would sleep until dawn.
I heard footsteps behind me as I made my way to what was now my home. I tensed as the footfalls matched mine and kept pace with me—this was not someone simply going the same way as I did in the dusk.
I turned a corner and halted, putting myself against a wall. My follower came around the same corner but stopped before he blundered through and sprang my trap.
He was a man, but that was all I could see in the deepening darkness. He wore a cloak, a fold of which was draped over his head, like a priest, but I doubted he was one. A priest had no reason to follow me so stealthily.
With a roar, I charged him. If he were a robber or assassin, I’d make him fight for his spoils.
The man spun to meet me, competent on his feet. I had no weapon, but I knew how to fight without one, my fists and kicks as powerful as any sword blow.
I swung my giant fist, but hit empty air. The man melted back into the shadows, avoiding my attack, and then he fled. I heard his boots click on the stones, the sound dissipating.
I shook out my hand, puzzled. Why follow me and then run? Maybe he’d thought he’d found an easy mark to rob and then realized I was a fighting man, not a weak target. He hadn’t expected me to attack.
I continued on my way down the now-empty street, my back itching as I strode along.
When I entered the apartment, I found the detritus from supper gone, the bowls, which I assumed were ours now, stacked neatly, my stool against the wall. Cassia sat at the table, stifling a yawn as I entered.
“You should sleep,” I told her. “You don’t have to wait up for me.”
I was bone tired, ready to fall on my pallet and not wake until I had to. Cassia rose and took my cloak, again shaking it out and hanging it from its peg. Then she returned to the table, opened her ever-present tablet, and made a note.
“What are you writing now?” I asked irritably.
“The time you came in.”
“Why?” I found all this writing baffling. What was the point? Was she making notes to show Hesiodos? And why?
Cassia shrugged. “It might be useful later.”
“Go to sleep.” I untied my sandals and stepped out of them, shuffling my way to the pallet in the alcove.
Cassia pattered behind me, retrieved the sandals, and placed them against the wall in a neat line.
I started to admonish her for tidying up after me, but then decided that would be senseless. I also had the feeling she tidied not because she believed it her job, but because a shoe out of place annoyed her. Cassia liked a sense of order I didn’t understand.
“I will wake you before the first hour,” she said as I collapsed onto the bed and settled on my back. “We are to meet the senator at the Porta Trigemina at sunrise.”
I rose on my elbows. “We? You cannot come with us.”
“I think I had better. The senator spoke of grave danger, which means there is a chance we won’t be paid. It is important we retrieve our fee as soon as possible and protect it until we settle our accounts.”
Cassia was the most puzzling woman I’d ever met. “I’m the best fighter in Rome—no one will take my payment from me.”
“Not by force, no.”
My eyes narrowed. “You think Priscus will trick his way out of paying me?”
Cassia shook her head. “He seems an honest man, which is probably why he is in such danger. His slaves, on the other hand, know they have a soft place, and will do all they can to keep his money in their house. I know how to not let them.”
“Priscus will pay me in Rome, not Ostia. When I return him safely.”
“That remains to be seen. What if he decides to stay in Ostia? Or breaks the journey elsewhere? Or sends you back alone? I ought to be there to collect our payment at the point you are dismissed, or we might never see it.”
I sat all the way up, and Cassia stepped back in some alarm. But the set of her chin told me she’d not give in on her point.
“If you come with us to Ostia, I have to protect you as well as the senator.” I hadn’t forgotten the ruffian who’d accosted Cassia outside the barber’s and how angry the incident had made me.
“I will be one more servant with the other servants. No one will notice me.”
It was true she moved silently through the streets, slipping between people as though she didn’t want to touch them. Priscus wouldn’t be traveling alone, but have a caravan of his servants to cater to his every need.
I imagined that if I forbade Cassia, which I had a right to do, she’d find a way to follow. I’d never encountered a woman with such a strong will, but maybe scribes were a different breed.
I flopped back down to the blankets. “Wake me before the first hour then.”
I arranged the covers around me and turned my face to the wall, rapidly sinking into sleep. I heard Cassia scurry toward her own pallet, and her footsteps sounded distinctly satisfied.
In the morning, I joined Priscus’s party on the far side of the Aventine at the Porta Trigemina, the triple gate to the Via Ostiensis.
Fog coated the city. The nearby river lent its murk to the mists rolling from the hills and we stood in a haze, the gates a dark bulk in the stone wall. The arches of a nearby aqueduct were lost in the white, like a ghostly ruin.
At the blare of a horn signaling the dawn hour, we proceeded through the gate. We were among the first out, Priscus having the standing to be at the front of the line.
Priscus was mounted on a horse, his seat easy. A cart pulled by a mule carried his baggage. His retinue, including me, followed him, both on foot and on mules. Priscus had seemed confused as to why I’d wanted to bring Cassia, but he didn’t begrudge me a servant.
Cassia had been right when she’d claimed she’d be absorbed into the household slaves and ignored—no one looked twice at her bundled in her cloak as we exited the city. Their gazes were on Priscus, an obviously wealthy man, and on me, his gladiator bodyguard.
Priscus led our small caravan, which annoyed me. If he worried so about assassination, he should be surrounded by people, not out in front like the head of a spear.
“Habit,” he told me when I pointed this out. “I ride in the lead to keep others from accusing me of being the coward I am.”
Priscus found himself amusing, but I strode solidly next to him, keeping a wary eye out.
The Via Ostiensis runs alongside the Tiber to Ostia’s large port. The road is the artery from Rome downstream to ships waiting to take people and money to the ends of the empire and beyond. Likewise, goods from the entire world are trundled up the river and this road into Rome, to be unloaded to vast Emporium warehouses.
The Via Ostiensis was lined, like the Via Appia, with tombs and monuments to the dead. No one was buried inside Rome, and so the wealthy sought the closest proximity. Prominent families erected large memorials to their ancestors.
The trouble with the tombs was that they made a good place for brigands to lurk, especially on a foggy morning. Mist rose from the river on our right, met the colder air of the hills, and clung to us like a white shroud. Spaces between the tombs were gray with shadows. Marauders could also wait on top of the tombs behind convenient statues or decorative urns, ready to leap down and rob the unwatchful.
Priscus rode without worry, as though he were in an ambulatory—a covered walkway in a villa, protect
ed and private. I kept alert constantly, peering into each foggy shadow and around every bend, halting our train until I made certain the next stretch of road was safe.
At least Priscus accepted my admonishments to wait with good humor. I’d guarded men in the past who’d snarled at me every step, and I appreciated Priscus’s willingness to obey me.
The tombs thinned and ceased after a few miles, and the fog began to burn away, but the open countryside was no safer. Instead of knives coming out of nowhere, I had to worry about arrows shot from clumps of trees or from behind small rises in the land.
The first half of the day passed, thankfully, without incident. Cassia rode quietly on a mule, her palla pulled over her face to keep out the mist and dust. She didn’t speak at all.
Priscus, on the other hand, was voluble. Possibly from nervousness, though his body didn’t betray any tension.
“A long time since I’ve journeyed to Ostia,” he reflected. “Ten years, I’d say. Gracious, how time passes. My wife owned warehouses there. She had the money, not I, at least when we first married. I was flattered that she loved an old warhorse like me.” He chuckled. “She left all her wealth to me when she went to her ancestors.” Priscus lost his smile and let out a sigh. “But I’d rather have her next to me.”
His sadness was genuine. “I am sorry.” I knew such sorrow, and Xerxes’s widow still held on to it.
“Her death was not unexpected, unfortunately. She’d been ill a long time. Now she’s young and healthy again, in the fields of Elysium, if you believe in that sort of thing. I used to be quite a skeptic, but now I want to think of my Porcia happy there. One’s outlook changes as one grows old.”
He appeared hearty enough to me, riding well without fatiguing.
“Tell me about Leonidas the Gladiator,” Priscus said. “Why were you a gladiator? The story will pass the time as we go.”
I’d prefer to pass the time making sure assassins didn’t shoot at him, but I’d learned to not argue too much with those who hired me.
“I was accused of a crime. Murder.” I stated it bluntly, no reason to evade the truth. “Locked in the Tullianum for it. I was a citizen, even if I look a bit like a Gaul. They gave me the choice of execution or the games. I chose the games, knowing I was a good fighter. A few days ago, I was given the rudis.” And Cassia, and a place to live, by a person unknown to me.
“That is a very short summation of a life.” Priscus eyed me in curiosity. “Did you commit the murder?”
Chapter 7
“No.” The word was harsh, and I closed my mouth.
Another had done the crime I’d been accused of but I did not know who, and I had been in no position to find out. I’d often wondered if the murderer was still out there or if he’d died in the dangerous world we inhabited.
“Who are your people?” Priscus asked me, his interest continuing.
I shrugged. “I was abandoned as a lad of five. I learned to live on my own.”
“Then how do you know you were a citizen?”
“There’s a record of my birth.” I hadn’t seen it, and couldn’t have read it if I had, but I’d been told this by the man I’d worked for. He’d had to check before he took me on as his apprentice.
“Hmm.” Priscus halted his horse, and I came alert, looking about for whatever had startled him. “We should stop for a time,” he said, noting my tension. “The others are growing tired.”
I sensed Priscus could have ridden straight on without stopping. Despite his declaration of his aging, he was healthy and strong. I realized he was resting for his retainers’ sake, a fact that told me much about him.
I remained next to Priscus as he dismounted and did not let him out of my sight, not even when he left the road to relieve himself. Especially not then. A man is at his most vulnerable when he’s giving up his water.
The journey continued in this way—we’d ride for a stretch, then rest while Priscus’s servants tended his horse and the mules. When we halted for a meal, the retainers nibbled on bread, and Priscus had his valet serve them watered-down wine.
I did not see much of Cassia, who stayed close to the two female servants of the group. She proved her word that she’d keep herself safe, never straying from the middle of the caravan.
We traversed the twenty miles to Ostia in easy stages and arrived at the port at the twelfth hour, just before the gates closed.
Other men I’d guarded to Ostia put up at inns, sometimes taking over half of one for their party, but Priscus led us to a large apartment block that surrounded a wide green space with fountains. These were not typical insulae, but a two-storied complex that held dwellings as large as a middle-class man’s domus in Rome. The door guard of one of these units gave a shout when Priscus dismounted, and half a dozen servants streamed from within to collect the horse and mules and escort Priscus inside.
Priscus owned this entire building, I learned—another he’d inherited from his wife. I was offered my own cubicle in the spacious two-floored apartment set aside for his use, but I decided to sleep in front of the door to Priscus’s room. Any would-be assassin who broke in, or had been hiding inside already, would need to step over me to reach him.
Priscus ate a simple meal alone and soon turned in for the night. I spread blankets before his large bedroom near the atrium and reclined on them, my back to the door.
Cassia appeared out of the darkness after the slaves extinguished the few lamps. She began to straighten my blankets, pretending she’d come to look after me.
“He is paying much money for the cargo he’s retrieving,” Cassia said in a low voice as she worked. She leaned close, her breath brushing my ear. “So much that he will not leave the collection of the goods to others. But he won’t say what the shipment is, not even to his servants. Celnus and Kephalos don’t know. This annoys them, rather.”
Gold, spices, silk. Such things could double a man’s fortune, but only if he brought them safely to the markets. Priscus was wise not to leave the transport in another’s hands—a portion of it might vanish by the time it reached his warehouse in Rome.
Another thought occurred to me. Priscus might be buying items he was not licensed to import, such as spices or cloth meant only for the imperial family.
“Do they know where the goods are coming from?” I asked.
“No, but the suspicion is it’s something his son is sending. The son, Decimus, is an aedile in Halicarnassus, and the apple of Priscus’s eye.”
Young men of patrician families were often sent to the provinces to make their names and begin their careers. The more people they pleased, the higher they could rise. Aediles were the men who organized games and negotiated the price of the gladiators who would fight in them.
“Does Celnus or Kephalos know who’s trying to kill him? Is it to stop Priscus from receiving the shipment?”
“No one seems to know,” Cassia said. “There have been several attempts in the last days, but Priscus has shrugged them off. Celnus finally convinced him he should hire you to guard him on this journey. That’s how I found out about it. One of the servants from a family I know told me that Kephalos, the scribe, had gone to the Forum to search for a bodyguard. So I sought him out. It’s curious … Kephalos was pleased when I approached him. It seems that when he and Celnus convinced Priscus he needed a guard, he immediately thought of you. Or, as Kephalos told me, Priscus said, That gladiator who just retired. He looks sturdy.”
This fact was not surprising. Many who’d hired me to bodyguard asked for me by name. Those with much to lose wanted the top gladiators defending them.
“He’s told me very little about the attempts on his life.” I spoke in irritation. Some men could be too reticent about important things.
“Nothing has happened at home. Only when he goes out. A knife in the street. A falling block from the top of a tall insula. That one nearly killed a woman, but the senator pulled her to safety in time.”
“Good.” I meant that the attempts had been phy
sical, and not poison, as with Floriana. Much easier for me to grab a knife-wielding assassin and hold him upside down than to puzzle out who had poisoned wine or food, and how and when.
“Priscus’s servants like him. He’s a reasonable man.” Cassia sounded admiring.
So, of course he was marked for death. Men who were monsters were cunning and careful, making them more difficult to eliminate. Kind men were too trusting.
“Priscus has no lictors,” I observed. No men whose job it was to carry a bundle of staves, merely symbolic these days, to signal that the man they accompanied had power.
“He says he’s not important enough, and finds lictors useless.” Cassia’s mouth quirked into a smile. “I like him too.”
I’d met reasonable and seemingly kind men before, benevolent when all was right in their world. But when things went wrong, they could turn into the monsters I’d mentioned.
Cassia hovered, re-straightening the corner of my blanket. Waiting for me to dismiss her, I realized. I’d have to grow used to that.
“Thank you,” I said. “Sleep well.”
Cassia shot me an unreadable glance then bowed her head and slipped away. I leaned against Priscus’s bedroom door, folded my arms, and pondered all Cassia had told me. When I exhausted that, I turned my thoughts to the change in my own life.
From one breath to the next, I’d become a different man. I could barely remember the youth I’d been before my arrest for murder and condemnation to the games.
I was no longer that lad. But I was also no longer Leonidas the Spartan, champion of the world.
I had no idea who I was now. I stared at the dark entrance to the atrium and hoped I would soon find out.
We stayed in Priscus’s large apartment three days waiting for the arrival of his goods. Cassia went out to the port with the other servants every morning to watch for the ship that was bringing them from Antioch. At home, Kephalos and Priscus, with argument on the scribe’s part, put together two caskets of gold coins to pay for the shipment.
Blood of a Gladiator Page 6