“Another batch,” Calvus announced as he passed a scroll to a scribe.
“As sorry a looking bunch of filthy turds as I’ve ever seen,” a voice boomed from the door.
“Better pickings this time, Silo” Calvus smiled. “Something special.”
Cinnia looked up. A big man, once strong, but now going to fat, lounged in the door. His close-set eyes squatted in a face dominated by a knife-blade nose. He spat in the dust. “What’s so special about these scrawny, broken-down, sorry-assed dogs.” He walked down the row, punching slaves in the chest, pulling their arms out to inspect their biceps.
When he got to Cinnia, his eyes lit up. “A female! The Emperor pays well for women in the arena.” He looked her over. “Gaulish bitch? Good fighters, the Gauls. One of their women nearly took my head.” He put his face close to Cinnia’s. “Before I ran her through with my sword and spit her baby on a spear.”
“Iceni,” Cinnia spat.
“Gaul. Iceni. No one cares in the games. You’ll be what I say you are and be happy with it.”
Cinnia kept her face impassive. Her brief anger, drowned by hunger and fatigue.
He turned back to the line of prisoners. “I’m Silo the lanista of this ludus—the best gladiator school in Italy. Until you’ve won in the arena, you’re piles of shit. You got that?” He glared at the prisoners, jaw jutted forward.
He turned to their guards. “Take ’em inside.”
They passed into the chill shade of the building’s entrance; through two more rooms, and back into the sun in the rectangular practice area. There a blacksmith struck off the chains, but left on the leg cuffs. Cinnia could feel the last of her strength draining.
“This way.” One of the ubiquitous guards waved them through another door. “Strip.” He leered as Cinnia removed her filthy tunic.
“Here,” one of three men called her over. His grizzled hair receded from a high forehead. Bushy brows sheltered large brown eyes. “Sit.”
He felt Cinnia’s head, smelled her breath, and checked her teeth. “Stand. Raise your arms over your head.” He clucked to himself at her scars, smiled at her well-muscled arms and legs, and frowned at the lurid bruises on her back. “Blood in your piss?”
“You a healer?”
“Physician. Trained in Alexandria.” He raised an eyebrow. “Ever heard of it?”
“A friend visited there once and told me of it.”
He nodded and asked again, “Blood in your piss?”
“For two days, not now.”
“What’s this?” he reached for the small amulet of Isis hanging between her breasts.
Cinnia slapped his hand away. “Do you wish your manhood to shrivel and drop off? This is sacred to my goddess.”
“Isis?” He squinted at the small figure. “Aren’t you Gaulish?”
“Iceni, a Briton.” She covered the amulet. “My friend gave it to me.”
“Same friend?”
She nodded.
“She’ll do,” the physician said to one of the guards and tossed her a clean, but much patched tunic. “If you piss blood again, come back.”
A guard prodded her toward a scribe with a bored look on his face. The scribe looked up. “Do you vow to follow all the rules of a gladiator; to pledge your body and soul to your master; or, if you fail, to die by burning, beating or by the sword?”
“What?”
“Put your mark there.” The scribe pointed to a list, probably names.
Cinnia wet her thumb in the ink and put it on the paper where the scribe pointed.
“Next!”
The guard took Cinnia and the other slaves out of the infirmary to a long row of small rooms, three steps wide and four deep. Each had two pallets on the stone floor and no pegs to hang clothes. The guard fastened a chain to one of her leg cuffs and grinned. “Be a good girl and you’ll be allowed to sleep without the chain.” He kicked a noisome bucket. “If you need it before morning.”
“Food?”
“Tomorrow. Kitchen’s closed tonight.”
Cinnia slept clutching the amulet and had no dreams.
***
A BLARING HORN, more musical than the carnyx, woke Cinnia. Guards walked down the row, pounding on wooden doors and bellowing, “Out of there, maggots, if you want anything to eat!”
A different guard from the night before pushed Cinnia’s door open and smiled. “They said you were a beauty.” He looked her over. “A bit scrawny for my taste, but better on the eyes than most of those pathetic bastards.”
Cinnia pulled her lips into a snarl, but held her tongue, when the guard stroked her leg before loosening her chain. She longed to kick him in the balls; crush his head between knee and fists, but until she knew of Afra, she would do nothing.
“This way.” The guard pushed her out the door to join a line of people. She recognized several from the trek. They walked under a colonnade, heading for the far wall. The line quickened at the smell of food. A boy, with glossy black hair and crooked teeth, shoved a wooden bowl and spoon in her hands as she entered. Cinnia took her place in one of four lines where cooks stood at large crocks, ladling a thick soup of barley and beans into the bowls. She grabbed a mug of watered wine and looked over the room for a place to sit.
The men sat on rough benches pulled up to long wooden tables. Cinnia spied a seat on the end of a bench with an arm’s length between her and the next person. There were occasional grunts and mutters, but, for the most part, the men remained silent, sending curious glances her way. Most bolted their food and went back for more.
Cinnia barely finished when another guard entered and bellowed, “Outside. Lineup, you dogs!” They all jumped up and headed toward the door.
Cinnia blinked at the strong sun radiating off the practice sand.
Silo, with a short leather whip, stood flanked by five other men. “Most of you are slaves, prisoners of war, or criminals condemned to the arena. A few of you are here by choice.” He nodded to a handful of men, better dressed than the prisoners, and wearing no slave collar. “All of you have taken the oath to serve as gladiators or suffer an ignoble death. Unless you train hard and be the best, you will die. But a few, a lucky few, will triumph and earn their freedom. Until then, your ass is mine!
“These are your trainers.” Silo waved his hand to the men at his side. “Each doctore teaches a specialty. Learn it well or…” He mimed a knife cutting his throat.
Each trainer stepped forward and read names off the list. “With me.”
Finally, Cinnia stood alone, looking around, puzzled.
“Females have a special trainer. We work the men so hard you’d think they couldn’t raise their eyelids much less their pricks.” Silo shook his head. “But females cause trouble. I wouldn’t have women here at all, if the Emperor hadn’t become so fascinated with the novelty of it.” He shrugged. “Money is money. Follow me.”
The other new recruits were clustered around their trainers, learning the fine art of jabbing at a stake with a wooden sword. A few were lifting rocks or hauling logs with chains. Cinnia smiled to herself. At least she knew how to do that.
Silo led her to a large room at the far end of the complex, flooded with light from the windows high up on all sides. Most of the buildings Cinnia had been in had natural light from an interior colonnade and three blank walls. The floor was covered in sand. Dust motes danced in the sunbeams. Next to the ever-present wooden stake, three women stretched. Dressed in brief sleeveless tunics, sweat and oil gleamed on their muscular arms and legs.
“Barba?”
A burly man with ginger hair and a grizzled beard—unusual for a Roman—stepped out of the shadows.
Silo shoved Cinnia forward. “Here’s your new recruit. Cinnia.” He smiled at the other women. “Work them hard, Barba. They may be women, but they’ll have to fight and die like men.” He turned and stomped out.
“Turn around,” Barba ordered. He looked at Cinnia in the same way Silo and the physician had, assessing, calcul
ating; nothing sexual at all. “Did those idiot guards put you in the barracks last night?”
Cinnia shrugged.
“Anyone molest you?”
“No.”
“Good. The women have special quarters.” Barba scratched his bushy beard, an action that caught Cinnia’s breath. Dumnor!
She shook her head. Ghosts and shades. Cinnia turned her attention back to the living.
“Meet your companions for the next several months. Gerta.” Barba pointed to a tall blond, with the blunt features of a German, who towered over the other two by a head.
“Portia.” A tall, but stocky, woman with auburn hair and green eyes, ignored Cinnia.
The last woman had a Roman cast to her face—long curved nose and small bowed mouth—and the build of a dancer. Dark curly hair escaped from a braid pinned tightly to her head. “Julia.”
Julia looked up, with startling blue eyes, and smiled. “Welcome.”
Cinnia smiled at Julia; nodded to the other two women.
“First we need to get you outfitted,” Barba said. “Julia, take her to the blacksmith to get rid of those cuffs, then the quartermaster’s.”
“This way.” Julia headed back toward the front of the ludus. “Which province are you from?”
“Britannia.”
“I heard the crier in the town square tell of those wars. A mighty victory for the Romans.”
“Aren’t you Roman?”
“My mother claims my father was a senator, but…” Julia shrugged her shoulders. “She was a slave from northern Greece. My master needed money, so he sold me. Calvus spotted me and Gerta in the auction and bought us for Silo. It’s better than a cheap brothel or one of the big farms. At least I have the chance to be free in a few years.”
“My former mistress tried to rent me out to a brothel. I left.”
“Calvus looks for more than height and muscle.” Julia nodded. “You have to have spirit, as well. He picked us out of over two hundred women. Most were timid little mice.”
The same blacksmith as yesterday removed Cinnia’s leg cuffs.
“Better?” Julia asked on the walk to the quartermaster’s
“Much!” Cinnia grinned. “My legs feel so light, I might jump the wall.”
“Don’t joke about escaping.” Julia’s eyes went round. “There are ears everywhere. Silo and the guards look to their backs. They sleep uneasy at the thought of the gladiators taking up arms and escaping. That’s why we’re locked in our cells at night and practice with wooden and blunted weapons.”
“No one has ever tried?”
“I heard rumors of a few in years past.” Julia shrugged. “None successful.”
Cinnia had given no thought to escape. She didn’t know where she would go or how she would live without Afra. But everything changes.
Julia stopped before a window that opened into a store room. Clothes, belts, shoes, blankets, and more graced open shelves in orderly mounds. “Fullo! You here?”
A skinny youth, with sallow skin and spots, came from a door set in the back. At the sight of the women, his face split into an inane grin. He stammered, “J-Julia!”
“Cinnia needs a kit.”
He ducked his head and clucked to himself.
“He’s shy,” Julia whispered. “He came here as a boy and hasn’t met many women.”
Fullo turned to the various shelves, pulling things down, inspecting them. Some he returned to their places, others he put carefully in a pile on a small table under the window. When done, he shoved the pile into Julia’s arms and, not looking at Cinnia, said, “J-Julia will explain.”
“Thanks, Fullo.” Julia smiled at the boy.
He beat a hasty retreat to his back room, blushing.
“Our quarters are over here.”
Julia showed Cinnia a much bigger room than the tiny cell she inhabited the night before. Three narrow beds attached to the walls, reminded Cinnia of the brothel’s arrangement. Here, each bed came with a niche and pegs for storage. A small table graced the middle of the room with two backless stools stored underneath. Brown wool blankets covered two of the beds on opposite sides of the door.
Julia set the pile on the empty bed at the back. “Let’s see what Fullo gave you. Blanket, wooden comb, clay cup, tunic, loin cloth, belt, breast band, hair bands, sandals. Yes, these are the basics. Next winter you’ll get socks and a cloak. If you bleed, we have cloths on that shelf.” Julia indicated another recessed area next to the door, stacked with felted cloth.
“If I bleed?”
“Many women find they stop having their monthlies when they train as a gladiator.”
“You?
“Sometimes. Not regular like before.”
Cinnia looked at the pile. Since she had arrived in this foreign land, she had not had so many possessions: a tunic, a cord belt, a broken comb, no more. She felt almost rich. She fingered the thick blanket; admired the sturdy, but plain, leather belt and sandals. “Do we wash our own?”
“Launderers pick up our dirty things each night and leave clean for the morning.”
Cinnia held up the triangular loincloth. “What’s this?”
“Subligaculum. That, and the breast band, is what we wear in the arena. Actually these are to practice in. The ones we will wear in the arena will be much showier. The men’s have tassels and bells.” Julia took the cloth from her. “Here, I’ll show you. Raise your tunic.”
Cinnia pulled her tunic up to expose her lean belly and bare bottom.
Julia leaned in close to reach around her back. Her hair smelled of meadow flowers.
“You put the wide area at the back and tie two corners in front. Pull the third corner between your legs, under the knot and the extra fabric hangs down over the knot like this.” She grabbed the wide leather belt. “This goes over the top of the whole thing to keep it from falling off and to cover the knots.”
“Women wear these?” It felt strange. “I thought we’d fight in short tunics.”
“Women and men. What do you normally wear?”
“Nothing. In cold weather we wear trousers, but nothing under them.” Cinnia looked into Julia’s blue eyes and smiled. “Thank you. Few have been so kind.”
“I’m the best you’ll get here.” She laughed. “Gerta knows little Roman and speaks less. Portia is a stuck-up bitch and has her own room. I heard she came from a senatorial family and ran away to the gladiator school to avoid a hated marriage. She doesn’t wear a slave collar. Personally, I think there are less dangerous ways to avoid marriage. Keep away from the men, especially the non-slaves. They think there’s only one use for a woman. If Silo or Barba catches them, they’ll be flogged, but the damage will already be done. Calvus is all right.”
A horn sounded in the courtyard.
“Jupiter’s balls! We need to get back to the practice room or Barba will have my hide for a belt.”
Cinnia smiled. Hacking at a wooden stake is much better than serving as a whore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Pompeii prison and arena
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EXECUTIONS, Afra huddled with Bassa, Corva, and Celer, sharing their body warmth. After two weeks, her ribs felt better and the swelling was gone from her face, but hunger wracked her body and hopelessness blotched her soul.
Most of the condemned prisoners shared her misery. Afra listened to a steady murmur of prayers, curses, and ravings. Priscus wrote in the dirt, digging with his long fingernails.
Mother Isis warned of great pain and possible death. Is this my fate? Did I not honor the gods well enough? What choices did I have?
Afra shook her head. Everything she did—trying to save Asata, doing her best for Marcius, rescuing the cubs, loving Cinnia—was who she was. She could not have done differently without being a different person. Her mistake had been losing her temper with Clio. The woman had always been a goad. In her fatigue and fear, Afra had acted rashly. In most cases, that instinct for action played her fair, but this time it had betrayed her.
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She sat twisting the braided hair around her wrist. Cinnia, I’m sorry. I failed you. Live long and may happiness find you.
“Afra?” Bassa put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve worked with beasts. Do they kill quickly?”
“If you run from a great cat, it will land on your back and bite through your neck. That is fairly quick.” She ran her hands over her head. Her hair grew longer and she twisted strands into tiny knots. “Wolves, dogs, hyenas will go for the throat or belly. The throat is fast. You can live for several minutes with your belly torn out.”
“So we should run?”
A scene flashed from a half-forgotten hunt: a line of people beating drums and thrashing the bushes to drive all the animals before them.
“No.” Afra sat up straighter; hope giving her a measure of strength. “I have a plan. I don’t know if it will save us, but it is better than running.”
***
THE NEXT MORNING THE GUARDS put them in irons and paraded them through the streets of Pompeii to the amphitheater. Everywhere they went the people jeered and pointed. A few threw dung or rotted food at the condemned.
The city looked different after nearly three weeks: most of the rubble cleared, unbroken statues put right. No builders scrambled on scaffolds surrounding the civic buildings. It was a public holiday. Almost the entire population wended its way to the arena.
Afra’s stomach grumbled as they entered the open plaza surrounding the arena. The city fathers evidently hadn’t wanted to waste even rat stew on the condemned criminals. The rich smell of roasting meat vied with the comforting smell of baked bread as the guards herded them through the plaza. Afra, standing taller than nearly everyone, noted the vendors selling food, wine, and trinkets from niches in the solid stone walls of the amphitheater.
A small boy ran past screaming with delight, waving a small clay figure of a gladiator. A slight smile tugged at her lips, until her thoughts turned to her own fate.
Mother Isis, give me—give us all—strength. Whatever my destiny, I put my life and fate in your hands.
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