The Gladiator's Downfall

by Kristen Banet

  “For as long as you live, you play symbol for the Empress of her achievement and victory over us,” one of the males waiting on her said. “Why can’t you just die? It would make everyone feel a lot better.”

  I’m tired of this argument. Comes up practically every fucking decade.

  “It wouldn’t free you,” she reminded him, the ringleader that always said it. Like the others, she didn’t know his name. It was never said to her, never mentioned around her, and their guards only ever said their numbers. He was Number Seventy-Two. “You could kill me here, but you won’t. You would probably all just be executed for it if you did, and you know it. Is that what you want? To kill me and…die for it? What would that get you? Skies, even if I died out there, it would get you nothing.” She didn’t understand this part of their problem. They could hate her, that she understood, but the desire for her to die confused her. It’s not like her death would get them anything. “So here we are. I refuse to die out there for them and you refuse to kill me in here for your own self-preservation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m covered in blood, haven’t made it to the chow hall, and would like some peace. I had the whore rambling to me all day.”

  “Funny, she calls the Empress the whore when she’s one as well,” another male slyly remarked to a friend of his.

  Fury spiked in her, a fury that begged for blood. She pushed it back down. The Andinna, all of them, had vicious tempers if provoked to it. She never gave into hers. It only ever led to terrible mistakes. If she picked a fight with one of the ten males in front of her, they would stomp her into the ground. They would never attack her unprovoked, but they wouldn’t blink at killing her in a group if she tested them outside the sands.

  “Tell me,” one called as she began to walk past them, “is she as cold in bed as she is in public?”

  She closed her eyes as she walked further down the tunnel. She didn’t know the answer, thank the gods. The Empress didn’t bed slaves, only had them beaten - and not even for her amusement. Just to remind them of their place.

  Her son on the other hand…or any of the lords or ladies that could buy a night with her…They hated themselves for it, but still, they bedded the slaves.

  Mave hoped she would get back to her room and not find a summons to bathe and attend. She wasn’t sure she could handle that this evening, not after the long, hot day of death and blood.

  She made it to her small, private quarters in the pit and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. No one was there for her at the door. That was a good sign. The guard right before her room didn’t say anything either. He only moved to open the door to her hall, which she shared with a few other prized fighters that stayed out of trouble and won fights consistently. That was another good sign.

  She walked into the small set of rooms and heard nothing, saw no one. Empty, the way she liked it.

  As one of the best fighters in the ring, if not the best, she was gifted this small suite, like other prized fighters had. A bedroom with old furniture. A small, private spring bath in another room. That was it. It took her two hundred years to earn it, but she had done it and it had been a boon. Keeping it was key to her survival. She roughly kicked off her aggravating sandals first. She hated the standard footwear of the gladiators. Sometimes she wished for real boots, ones that better protected her feet.

  She unbuckled her belt first, sliding the sheaths and swords from it. She laid the blades down gently on her small desk. Her constant and most consistent companions deserved respect. The belt was placed next to them.

  Then she went to her vambraces. She untied and unbuckled them, sliding them off then placing them with her weapons.

  Mave unbuckled her leather armor next and laid the padded chest piece on her cot. She let her pteruges fall to the floor, the ridiculous leather pieced skirt the Elvasi considered armor. It wasn’t nearly enough protection for her legs, but it was what she had. It gave her range of movement, at least, and it was somewhat easy to wear with her tail.

  Finally, her cloth underclothing. Drenched in sweat, she would need to wash them soon or they would be ruined.

  Once she was completely nude, she walked to her small chest and reached inside to find clean clothing. Clean cloth pants and a chest cover. She didn’t have any real shirts, but the front cover with buckles around the back worked. There were ways to tailor real shirts that fit around the wings, but she didn’t know how to get her hands on any. The other Andinna had them, but like everything else, they didn’t share.

  Selfish bastards. I wouldn’t be so different from them if they taught me anything at all, like they teach each other.

  She didn’t put on the clean clothing yet, walking with the bundle into her small side room. She dropped the clothes next to the edge and waded into the waist-deep pool, wiping the sweat and blood off her skin. She wanted to be clean, before anything else. She ran the risk of missing the last call for dinner at the hall, but she wouldn’t eat while covered in sweat, sand, and blood. She had some standards.

  Once she was done, even making sure to wet and rinse her black hair, then scrub her horns and tail, she stepped out. A couple of quick shakes of her wings, whatever she could manage with them bound, dried them off quickly enough. She could still move them where they attached to her shoulders, so they weren’t completely immobile.

  She didn’t bother drying everything else off. She got her pants on, which had a hole for her tail, and walked out of her bathing room as she put on her shirt.

  “Champion. I’m glad to see you are clean. You’ve been summoned.” A human servant stood in the middle of her room. One she recognized. She would like the short-lived man if he didn’t hold the job of bringing her bad news. Plus, in another fifty years or so, he would be dead and she would still be a relatively young Andinna.

  “Who?” she asked softly. “Tell me, Dave.”

  I already know, Dave. Just say it. Please don’t make me say it. Don’t make me wonder. And for the sake of the gods, don’t pity me for it by beating around the bush like you normally do.

  She got her wish.

  “Lord Fenoth,” he answered gently. “Mave-”

  “Don’t. Just don’t. The pity won’t help. Will I have the two days off like I always do?” Lord Fenoth was going to make her night a living nightmare, but she survived her day in the Colosseum, so she should have a gifted two days of rest. That was something. The timing was impeccable.

  “Yes. Tomorrow and the day after. All the lenasti and guards have been ordered, as always, to leave you be and allow you free reign of the pits. You may even see the new arrivals being brought in, if you want to.”

  “Oh, how fun,” she mumbled bitterly. New arrivals were almost never good for her. They either knew who she was and hated her immediately, or saw a female and tried to get in her bed. Then they hated her afterwards, because the others would educate them on who she was. Or they would see her fight and hate her for what she did.

  “Lord Fenoth will be waiting for you in his…normal quarters.”

  “Thank you, Dave.”

  “Mave-”

  “Go, Dave.” She glared at him until he left. They always tried, the short-lived races, to appease and comfort, to be friendly. They were paid servants, not slaves like her. Only criminals and the Andinna were true slaves in the Empire.

  They had no idea how hard it was to watch them come and go, live and die, and know she would continue on in the same hell, unending, for centuries. She had tried once to be friends with a short-lived servant. It had gone well, until the man had died of old age. He had visited her up to his last days, even after he retired from his work in the Colosseum. Then she was alone again.

  It had been a painful lesson, one she had needed to learn. Even if she made friends with them, every new generation that passed through the pits, they couldn’t change anything.

  “Shit. Lord Fenoth.” She wanted to rage, wanted to break the furniture around her. She wanted to walk into his quarters and slaughter him, watch his head roll
where she hadn’t for Number Forty-Nine. She wanted to revel in the blood where she didn’t in the ring.

  She pushed it back down.

  Killing him changes nothing. I should know that by now. It would only make it all worse. I can’t kill him. I can’t kill the Prince. I can’t kill the Empress. There is nothing I can do to change this, not anything I haven’t tried before.

  She finished getting dressed, grabbing her one pair of nice sandals to wear for the walk. She would miss dinner, but that now didn’t matter.

  She schooled her face. She needed to get through a night with Lord Fenoth.

  2

  Mave

  Mave woke up in her own cot - a blessing. She didn’t remember making the painful walk back, and there had been times before where she didn’t make it.

  She sat up slowly, testing her limbs. An ache in her ribs was the worst, the rest general soreness and an annoying number of healing cuts and bruises. Most of what he had done was already healing. A blessing of being a long-lived race. They could take a good sleep and heal, mostly.

  It hadn’t been the worst night with him. He hadn’t been too angry at his own attraction to a barbarian, the Empire’s cattle. Just used her, beat her, and moved on.

  A good night. A painful one, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. I got lucky.

  She pushed herself off the cot and limped slightly to get to her small bathing room. Her stomach began to growl immediately as she sank in the water to wash the dried blood off. Clean, then food.

  It was still early; breakfast was probably only just getting started in the chow hall. She wanted to get there before the crowds. The rest of the gladiators in the pits were probably finishing up the mandatory pre-dawn training.

  She jumped out of her bath at that thought. She had to eat before them, or they would make her morning more difficult. They would know what she went through the night before. It was one fate they all shared outside of the sands. Gladiators made money in all kinds of ways: from the sands to the private chambers of those perverse enough to want the night with them and sometimes, to be lined up for the masses to pay a copper star to cop a feel.

  Remember, Mave: worthless, except for the price they give you.

  She took a steadying breath as she got dressed before leaving her room. When she stepped out, she was grateful for the emptiness of the hall. None of the other fighters were around, even the ones who had the other few rooms nearby.

  She walked through the cramped, dark, and moist tunnels towards the central area, where the chow hall was located. They were kept down here so they couldn’t fly if their wings were unbound for some reason. None of the other slaves or servants would ever live in the pits where the Andinna fighters were kept. They had their own living area above ground, working below the earth, but not living there.

  She was grateful for it, really. Others didn’t need to see what they went through. The pits changed people, twisted them and ruined them. To keep an Andinna from the sky was...torture. She would know.

  She walked into the chow hall and eyed the small group already there. They had fought the day before as well, so they also had the next two days off. It was a gift from the lenasti, their trainers. Fight well and survive, earn some days of privilege.

  She went to the human criminal slaves that waited with the bowls and took one from them. Then she went to another slave and held it out for him to put whatever the hell the slop was in it. In nine hundred years, she never bothered to learn exactly what she was eating. It was sustenance, didn’t poison her, and didn’t starve her. Sometimes, after her best fights, she would be granted a real meal in private, but the last time she’d earned that was eighteen years ago. A steak, real red meat, and a loaf of bread. It had been one of the best meals of her long life, but then never happened again. She knew it would happen again eventually. The longest time she had lived on the slop was a century.

  She felt the ache that morning. She wanted some real food, like that steak and loaf of bread.

  Skies, why couldn’t I have earned some of that yesterday?

  She pushed it back down. Wanting it wasn’t going to get her anything. She needed to do something they wanted inadvertently to get a real meal, and she was on a stubborn streak. She wasn’t going to give them what they wanted, therefore she would get nothing.

  She sat at her table in the back corner, where she could see everyone else in the room as they came in, got their slop, ate, then left. She ate slowly, not feeling the need to rush. She had nowhere to be after breakfast.

  Male Andinna strolled in, already sweating, some even bloodied from the first round of training before breakfast. She took a moment to just watch them.

  She didn’t hate the men around her, even though they hated her. She actually thought them very attractive. Their horns, even those with broken ones, were impressive. They all had rugged, masculine faces that they refused to shave. Their wings were well cared-for, even bound. Those wings, which had once darkened the sky, looked strong. Their tails were scarred, but capable of deadly maneuvers.

  None of them wore shirts or chest pieces either, only the loincloths and pteruges. She could appreciate the feast for eyes even if she couldn’t appreciate the actual men in the tanned skin. The Elvasi people, their rulers, their captors, had nothing on the warrior Andinna in her mind, not physically. Too angular, too perfect and pretty, and many times too lean. The Empress was a shiny example of an Elvasi. Chilling and detached, cunning, but she would cry if she broke a nail.

  Mave wanted the ruggedness of the males in front of her. Not the soft, whining of Prince Lothen, who would undoubtedly summon her again soon. Or the hard cruelty of Lord Fenoth.

  She wanted to be in one of those groups, a deep thing inside her calling her to find a place among her people, among the males. Among the rugged sort of men that appealed to her. Why can’t I just not think about them? Why do they call to me in every way? I’d think after nine hundred years of living with them, feeling their disdain, that I’d finally believe I don’t need them, want them.

  No, here I am. Staring at them, wanting a connection I’ll never have.

  She remembered the new arrivals at that point. New arrivals were always a pain, but it was the best chance for her to have that need fulfilled in a way she enjoyed - at least part of the need. The guy would get heat from the others for going to her cot, but they would both have gotten something none of the others could get. A consensual night with the opposite sex. It wouldn’t give her the community she deeply wanted, but it would give her something.

  “Look at her, just staring at us like we’re cattle. Like the Empress does,” one of the males mumbled at a table near hers. She didn’t even have to resist a reaction to the comment. She had been eyeing them like meat for a moment. She just stood up, silencing other comments and conversations all over the chow hall.

  She walked slowly through the now-overbearing crowd to the last slave she needed to see. The dwarf reached out and took the bowl from her, and she turned on her heel to head for the exit. Her eyes went over the males slowly as she walked back through them to leave.

  They might hate her, but they all stared at her as she left with different things in their eyes - some even wanting. She knew she had to be very careful about turning her back on some of the males in the pits. The pits broke the Andinna, twisted them. Every day, some would draw closer to a breaking point that they couldn’t return from.

  She would kill them the moment they hit that point, the moment they tried to corner her in her room or in a dark cell. So she made note of those who looked like her major threats, who drew closer to that line. She would commit those faces to memory and always know where they were in relation to her, if she could manage it.

  No matter how many she cut down, there were always more thinking they would be the males who could break her on or off the sands.

  She didn’t hate her people, but she damn sure didn’t trust them either.

  Mave moved to the training yard, up one
of the only staircases out of the pits from the chow hall, where the new arrivals would be unloaded soon. She didn’t have anything to pass the free time with. She hadn’t cleaned her blades and armor the night before, but the idea of missing the show of newbies seemed like a bad idea on this day. I’m too curious to go hide today. Maybe I’ll meet someone that I could like.

  She considered what had just run through her head. Don’t be an idiot, Mave. It’s going to be the same sort of new arrivals we always get. She would give the new arrivals a thorough look-over, then head back to her room to deal with her equipment, she decided. Her blades and armor deserved more respect than anything else she had ever come in contact with in the pits. She couldn’t begin to neglect them now, not after so long with only them between her and the grave.

  Breakfast was over before anything interesting happened. All of the Andinna gladiators were in the training area now, readying to begin their next morning workout. There were three required trainings every day, on good days. When they were all in trouble, there were four.

  They currently had four.

  Only last month, Mave had to kill one of them for trying to drag her into a cell and shank her. Or rape her. She had never given him a chance to explain which. She could remember his brain matter when she got a lucky hit off and cracked his head open against the wall.

  So, instead of post-breakfast, post-lunch, and post-dinner trainings, they had the added pre-breakfast training. She didn’t feel bad for it, even though she would be back on that dirt in only a couple of days. She could handle four-a-days. They only made her a better fighter.

  “They’re here!” one of the males called out, sounding unreasonably excited. Mave looked to the gates. They began to swing open slowly and a large group of Elvasi soldiers walked in, creating a wall between any Andinna and the gate. One even walked up behind her, and she felt the sword point touch her between her shoulder blades.

  What in the Skies did I do now?