Blood of a Gladiator

by Ashley Gardner

I watched her a moment, dumbfounded. Then I went to her, lifted the heavy box under my arm, took her by the shoulder, and marched her to the street.

  “How did you know?” I asked Cassia.

  We sat in the garden in the middle of Priscus’s apartment block, the sun setting in a pale blue sky.

  Priscus was inside with his son, Decimus Laelius the Younger. His father had seen personally to having Decimus bathed, shaved, and dressed in fine clothes. The servants, equally astonished and weeping at Decimus’s rescue, hovered around, plying him with food and drink. In fact, many of the residents of the complex had spilled forth to lend their sympathy and offers of help. The young man was exhausted and bruised, with hollows under his eyes, but he tolerated the attention with good cheer.

  Cassia and I, the outsiders, were given leave to sit in the garden with a small meal. The rest of the household quickly forgot about us.

  “I didn’t know.” Cassia adjusted her feet as she sat on a low stool under the portico. “Not until I saw Decimus run to Priscus. I guessed, but I wasn’t certain.”

  “The servants didn’t realize his son had been kidnapped?” This surprised me. Servants knew everything that went on in a household.

  “Decimus is actually his step-grandson. Priscus adopted Decimus as his son and heir, but he’s a grandson of his wife, from her first marriage, the only one of his wife’s family left. Priscus and his wife raised Decimus from babyhood, after Decimus’s parents were killed by marauders.”

  Decimus must have been certain he’d share his parents’ fate. I leaned my back to the marble-faced column, stretching my legs. My muscles were cramped by the fight—no medicus or massage for me today.

  “They knew all that but not that Decimus had been held for ransom?”

  “The household is as stunned as you are. Decimus had recently traveled from Halicarnassus to Antioch. Now that there is peace in Parthia, Decimus wants to try to expand the business in eastern cities, with Antioch as their base. As far as the servants knew, Decimus was still there, sending dutiful letters home.”

  “How did you guess, then?” I’d been taken completely by surprise while Cassia had put together—rapidly—the true purpose of our journey.

  She finished the last of her meal, grapes, which she plucked from the stem and chewed, carefully depositing the pits into a small container provided for the purpose.

  “I thought about how Priscus was behaving. When a man is concerned about costly goods, fearing ruin if something happens to those goods, he’s naturally nervous and worried. But when he’s concerned about a person, especially one he loves deeply, it is different. His fear is more concentrated, and he will also try to hide it. Roman men, highborn ones in particular, do not like to appear sentimental.” Cassia arranged the empty stem neatly on her plate and wiped her fingers on a cloth. “I lived inside a villa my entire life, with a very wealthy and powerful family. I learned much about what people are like and how they truly feel, in spite of what they say to others.”

  I had a vision of Cassia, very young, her serious eyes watching everything going on about her and noting it down on her tablet.

  “Who taught you to write?” I asked on impulse.

  Sorrow crossed her face. “My father. He was the secretary and keeper of the household accounts. He taught me everything he knew.”

  The father was dead, I gathered from her expression. Even I had learned how to understand what a person was feeling.

  I wanted to ask her more questions about him, and how she’d ended up in Rome, but I fell silent. There would be time for that later, and I did not want unseen ears in this house hearing our private conversation.

  “I do not know who kidnapped the poor lad,” Cassia said. “The men who led us to the docks and who were holding him make unlikely pirates. I think they were hired by the kidnapper to convey Decimus from Antioch and collect the money. I wonder what will happen to them when they report to whoever hired them that they only retrieved half the ransom? They didn’t count on you being there.”

  A gleam of satisfaction lit Cassia’s eyes. I wasn’t certain if the satisfaction came from me rousting the men or the fact that we’d saved one casket of coins.

  “They might try to collect the second half,” I warned. “Or kidnap the lad again.”

  Cassia nodded agreement. “If so, we will have to raise our fee. You were hired to protect Priscus while he collected his goods, not fight off pirates and abductors.”

  “Priscus kept the secret well.”

  “It is possible the ransom demand stated that if he told anyone, Decimus would be killed. Priscus would not have risked that.”

  I thought of how Priscus had clasped his son to him and wept, and how abrupt Priscus had grown when any questions I’d asked while we’d waited grew too penetrating.

  I’d seen men condemned to death, afraid of what they would face, but I’d rarely witnessed fear for another person. Had only felt it in myself once, and then the fear had been realized all too soon. The greatest friend I’d had in the world had vanished from my life between one heartbeat and the next.

  Cassia, I suspected, had felt the same fear and grief. I’d seen its remnants when she’d spoken of her father.

  The garden was quiet, the household attending to Decimus and Priscus. I wondered if we’d return immediately to Rome or if Priscus would remain here with his son. Would Priscus want me to stay with him, or dismiss me?

  It was odd to not know what I would do from one day to the next. In the ludus, I always knew. Aemil had kept us to an unvarying routine.

  Cassia must feel the same. If she’d lived as a slave in the same house for her entire life, her day-to-day existence would have been mapped out, her duties and restrictions carved in stone.

  We both were forging our way into the unknown, like travelers breaking a trail into the wilderness. No roads, no maps to guide us. I wasn’t certain whether to rejoice or panic.

  At the moment, the need to sleep washed over me, the usual aftermath of a fight and a good meal. My eyes grew heavy, my limbs warm with fatigue.

  I mumbled something to Cassia, rose, and shuffled inside to lie down in the atrium next to the silent fountain. Cassia remained in the garden. As I settled myself, folding my arms for warmth, I saw her turn her face serenely to the moonlit sky and the glitter of tears on her cheeks.

  In the morning, Priscus summoned me to him. He and his adopted son took breakfast in a large room off the atrium, with wall paintings framed in red and yellow. Satyrs capered with maidens, and a hunt trailed off along another wall, painted to look as though the animals and their pursuers rushed into a wild landscape.

  Priscus and Decimus sat on stools at a table of plain wood in the middle of the room. I’d learned in my years of visiting grand domii that eating couches were used only for lavish banquets, where guests would recline to partake in a feast. Everyday meals were eaten around a table, as Cassia and I did in our much smaller space.

  Priscus smiled warmly as I entered and awaited his instructions. His son regarded me curiously. Decimus bore signs of exhaustion, plus a nervousness that might never leave him. He had dark hair, thick and wavy, and deep brown eyes. He was perhaps a few years younger than I, but plenty old enough to be in charge of a branch of business far from home.

  “I haven’t had a chance to thank you, Leonidas,” Priscus said. “And to apologize for not being more forthcoming about what I faced.”

  I bowed my head in deference. “I understand. Cassia explained how dangerous it was.”

  “She is a bright young woman,” Priscus said. “Please thank her for her presence of mind to save the money. I’d have left the coins behind. Not bothered about them at all.”

  “Which is why Mother put me in charge of interests in the eastern sea.” Decimus sent his father a fond but exasperated look.

  “She was indeed wise. You have done well, Leonidas. You may journey back to Rome. I will remain here for a time—we have things to sort out. Send your Cassia to collect th
e fee from my scribe at home.”

  I hesitated. I was happy to be finished with this task and pay the merchants Cassia owed, but uneasiness niggled at me.

  “Are you safe here? What about the assassin trying to kill you? Was he trying to stop you from rescuing your son?”

  Priscus gave me a gentle smile. “I invented the assassin. A plausible reason, I thought, to hire a former gladiator to protect me. I could not tell anyone the true reason. They only knew I was worried.”

  I went over the journey in my head, understanding now why Priscus had been indifferent about being in the open. Even so, I’d had the prickle in my shoulder blades that told me of a watcher the entire distance, and I’d definitely been attacked in Rome.

  Before I could answer, the young man who tended the door rushed inside.

  “Sir,” he blurted.

  I’d witnessed more than one dominus beat a slave who dared interrupt or even enter a room without being summoned, but Priscus only waited for the lad to speak.

  “I heard word from the port, sir,” the boy went on, eyes wide. “The sailors what held our young man—all dead, sir. Every one of them.”

  Chapter 9

  Priscus half-rose at the lad’s announcement, and Decimus gaped in shock. “How?” the younger man demanded.

  “Don’t know,” the door slave said. “They were found laid out on the dock, every one of them with their throat cut.”

  As though they’d been executed, I thought.

  Decimus swallowed, color leaving his face. “A few were kind to me.”

  Priscus sank to his seat, laying a hand on his son’s arm. “I counted more than a dozen, in the end. All murdered?”

  The door lad nodded. “Seems so.”

  Priscus turned to me, as though I could explain. “How could so many be killed, on a deserted dock?”

  “With twice as many armed men than the sailors,” I said. “Well organized. Like soldiers.”

  “Hmm. I reported the ship to the harbor authorities, but the crew would have been arrested, not simply executed in place.” Priscus seemed less perturbed than his son, but he lightly tapped the table, his focus in the distance. “I had thought to linger here for a time, but I believe we should return to Rome. Leonidas, would you be so good as to guard us on the way?”

  The journey from Ostia, which we began the morning after the slave’s announcement of the sailors’ murders, took less time than the journey down. Priscus wanted to keep a faster pace, with fewer rest stops.

  Decimus was clearly not recovered, but he sat his horse competently and never complained. A resilient young man. Priscus’s servants doted on him, which was plain as we went along. He barely had to mention he was thirsty before they fell over themselves offering him a wineskin.

  We reached Rome and Priscus’s large house on the Esquiline a few hours before nightfall. Priscus’s scribe, Kephalos, duly handed Cassia a pouch of coins, which disappeared inside her robes.

  Cassia’s step was lighter as we traversed the streets toward home. We stepped against a wall as a procession came through, the tinny sound of jingling bells brushing the air. A priestess of Isis, with a cobra on her arm walked sedately along, her eyes on the snake, while the crowd melted out of her way.

  The first thing Cassia did when we reached the apartment, after removing her cloak and shaking the dust from her shoes, was to pour out the money we’d received and count it.

  I rubbed my close-cropped hair, finding it coated with dust. In spite of the December chill, I smelled of sweat and the road.

  “I’m for the baths,” I told Cassia as she whispered numbers. Her stylus flashed as did the beads of the abacus she seemed to have acquired.

  Cassia nodded at me, not taking her attention from her figures. I think this was the happiest I’d seen her since she’d been thrust into my life.

  I had to pay a quarter of an as, the smallest copper coin, which Cassia had pushed at me before I left, to enter a bathhouse on the Quirinal, not far from our apartment. These were not a huge complex like the baths built by Agrippa or the ones Nero was currently having constructed. This bathhouse had a modest tepidarium, a larger caldarium, and even bigger frigidarium. I had to pay another as to buy a strigil—the one I’d used in the past years was still at the ludus, with the rest of my meager belongings I hadn’t bothered to collect.

  The strigil was cheap and thin, but it would do. I stripped down, paid an attendant to look after my clothes, and went to the small yard to work up a sweat.

  Men and women crowded to watch me, curious as to what sort of exercises a gladiator would do. I lifted various weighted stones, which had been carved to be easy to grip. I followed this with kicks and lunges, plus arm swings I’d done to warm my body before sword training. Younger men studied me carefully, and when I quit the yard, began to copy my movements.

  I handed my strigil to another attendant, who used it to scrape sweat and sand from my body, then I plunged straight into the cold water without bothering with the hot or tepid. This bathhouse had a room even hotter than the caldarium, where people went for extra sweating to cleanse their bodies, but the heat of that made me too sleepy.

  The cold bath, on the other hand reinvigorated me. The water in the large pools was constantly replenished by a fountain flowing out of the wall in the shape of a fish’s gaping mouth. The excess overflowed the sides, running down into the drains to the great system of sewers beneath the city.

  When I emerged from the bath, I noticed I’d drawn a crowd there too. Pretending to ignore the spindly men who watched me, I dried myself, dressed, and departed.

  I’d once used a niche for my clothes instead of paying an attendant to care for them, and an enterprising thief had stolen every stitch, knowing that the used garments of a gladiator would fetch a huge price. My friend Xerxes had rescued me, arriving with a tunic in response to my summons, so I wouldn’t have to trudge naked across the cold city. He’d laughed so hard he could barely walk as we’d made our way back to the ludus.

  I missed Xerxes with an acuteness that jabbed my gut.

  As I emerged onto the street, a woman ran straight into me. She was wrapped in a cloak against the chilling wind, and she clutched at me, out of breath. A fold of cloak fell, revealing overly bright red hair.

  “Lucia,” I said in surprise.

  “Leonidas. I’ve been looking for you for days. You weren’t home.”

  “Had to go to Ostia. Job.” Not unusual for me.

  Lucia gulped a sob. “Floriana. She’s dead.”

  Dead? I seized Lucia by the arm and pulled her with me down the hill and through the side street to my new abode. I tugged her inside.

  “What happened?” I demanded as we climbed the stairs. “I thought Marcianus cured Floriana of the poison.”

  Marcianus could work miracles. If he said the woman would recover, she should have.

  “He did. She was healing.” We reached the apartment, which was empty, Cassia nowhere in sight. “She felt well enough to go out again. There was a fog, a heavy one—oh, five days ago. Someone stuck a knife into her. Leonidas, I’m so afraid.”

  I sat down heavily. The morning we’d left Rome, six days ago, the fog had been dense, opaque, typical. “What happened? Who did this?”

  Lucia hadn’t bothered with cosmetics today, and her face was blotchy, her eyes red-rimmed where they were usually lined with kohl. “They will kill me next. Where can I hide, Leonidas? You are free now. Take me away from here.” Her panic was true.

  I grasped her wrist, trying to calm her. “Who are they? And why would anyone want to kill you?”

  “Whores know secrets.” Lucia’s lips twisted. “At least, people think they do.”

  “What secrets?”

  Lucia pulled from my hold. “I don’t know. But they will think she told me. All the girls have fled. Marcia ran off to find that medicus of yours—I don’t know what good that will do her. I thought of you, but you weren’t here.”

  She began to weep, sobs j
erking her body. Lucia folded her arms over her stomach, trembling in her frayed linen gown.

  I rose and drew her into my arms. Lucia did not embrace me but leaned against me, as though taking comfort in my strength.

  Cassia found us like this, me stroking Lucia’s hair and trying to quiet her. Cassia set down the basket of bread and the clay pot that smelled of stew and turned to me inquisitively.

  “This is Lucia,” I told her.

  “Ah.” The word was quiet but held understanding.

  Lucia jerked from me in alarm. When she saw Cassia she relaxed, as though dismissing her as unthreatening.

  “Give Lucia some of the money,” I ordered. “She needs to leave Rome. Floriana is dead.”

  Cassia made no move to obey. “Dead? But …”

  “Stabbed. The morning we left. Lucia is afraid. She must go.”

  Cassia regarded Lucia dubiously, and Lucia frowned. “Do not stand there gaping at your betters, girl,” Lucia snapped. “Do as he says.”

  She might have been a fly buzzing about the room for all Cassia paid attention. Cassia directed her words to me. “If Floriana is dead, are her women released by her will? Or owned by someone else?”

  “Floriana freed all of us a few years ago.” Lucia also spoke to me as though I were alone in the room. “She’d been a slave herself but was freed by her husband, or a man she called her husband. Fat lot of good he was. He’s somewhere in Etruria. He probably doesn’t even know she’s dead.”

  “Someone will inform him,” Cassia said. “He’ll come to wrap up her business, or send a retainer to do it.”

  “None of this matters. I need to leave.” Lucia turned to Cassia. “Fetch the coin.”

  Cassia glanced at me for confirmation, and I gave her a nod. “Enough so she can journey … somewhere.”

  I had no idea where in the empire Lucia would be safe. If Floriana’s murder had been on impulse—a robber chancing upon her in the fog—Lucia might be fine a few miles out of the city. But if Floriana been killed by important men, fearing she and her women knew things they should not, Lucia might be hunted with persistence. I would have to warn Marcianus to hide Marcia.