Heart of the Gladiator (Affairs of the Arena Book 1) (3 page)

For a brief time—far too brief—she’d been very taken with Caius. But now that she knew he was a gladiator, the entire complexion of their meeting had soured. He would ignore her now, as all the gladiators ignored her.

When first she worked at the ludus, it had bothered her. Whenever they were allowed to leave the grounds of the ludus, the gladiators were treated as celebrities—better even than the highest families that Puteoli could offer.

Gaggles of women followed them wherever they went, all so taken with the apex of masculinity that these warriors offered. Built like gods, muscles hard as rock, in peak physical condition for
every
kind of activity, the gladiators had a definite appeal to the women of the Empire.

And Aeliana was the reason they stayed alive to
meet
that crowd, to
enjoy
those gaggles of women. She did not want to be treated as some third-rate floozy and be on the receiving end of their (if rumors were to be believed) fevered, rough loving for her efforts.

But she
did
want some measure of appreciation. A kind word here and there.

She disliked this weakness in her—this seeking out of approval for the people she treated. She was a slave to that more than she was to the ludus.

But, over time, she had grown to rather enjoy the way they ignored her. For the most part, from what she could tell, gladiators were even worse than soldiers when it came to drinking and fighting. They were a savage, brutal lot by and large, and the less time they focused on her, the better.

“Aeliana,” called Caius.

Surprised, she turned to face him. Several silent waves of critique rushed down at her heart for beating so fast at the simple sound of his voice wrapping around the syllables of her name. She was halfway across the yard now, on her way to her office inside the main complex of the domus. “Yes?”

“Perhaps I shall call on you later and you can tell me more of how I am a fool?”

There was a way to say such a thing and be biting about it—to be cruel and petty. And yet there was also a way to say it in a jovial, happy manner, and this is how Caius clearly meant it. She just smiled and nodded and returned on her way.

Perhaps he wasn't completely a brute. Hope throbbed in her—hope to see him more, to feel his touch upon her, hope for a dozen brilliant, aching, thrilling acts that blazed in her mind with a startling urgency.

She would see him again, and that was certain. If only to browbeat him for making her take leave of her senses in the way that he had.

But Aeliana couldn't focus on that for long. The day wasn’t even half over, and there was much to do. Her duties never ceased.

––––––––

T
hree years ago, on the day of the last fight of the Great Bear of Puteoli, Aeliana stitched the arm of an injured soldier.

Her thrusts were even and measured. Sewing skin back together was an old art, one that required practice and diligence. She had gotten rather good at it in the last two years of her service at the barracks.

“Mind your needling, woman,” said the soldier. “I plan to use this arm again.”

He had started to sit up. Aeliana shifted her weight and slammed him back down to the table. If his head knocked a little on the surface, well—he shouldn’t have moved, should he?

“I mind it entirely, legionary.” She did not know his name on purpose. She did not want to know any soldier’s name. They could die any day on the job. “It is my job to mind it. And your job,” she jabbed her finger into the meat of his shoulder, “to be
still
.”

Some grunts of discontent erupted from him, but he stilled long enough for her to finish her work.

In a few minutes, she had patched his wound entirely. Taking a rag, she cleaned off the excess blood.

“Return in a week’s time to have the stitches removed. Don’t hoist your shield until then.”

The soldier frowned. “That’s my sword arm.”

“Don’t use your sword, then. You have to let it heal.”

The legionary stood, rotating his arm around. Right away, she could see the stitches strain in his shoulder. She fought the urge to push him down again and wrap his arm to his torso.

“No,” said the legionary. “No, I think it will work fine. My family are fast healers. You’ll see.”

She would see. In a week he would return with an infection, and unless she caught it quick enough, he would lose the arm.

This was a discussion she had held with soldiers like this one—perhaps
even
this one—many times. But you couldn’t tell a legionary anything. Like all men of the Roman Empire, what mattered most was strength, honor, and toil. Any infringement upon these was not to be tolerated.

And yet a part of her could not help thinking that maybe she should make him see sense. Wouldn’t that be
something
—to make a man see sense?

If more men saw sense then Aeliana’s job as a medicae wouldn’t even be necessary in more ways than one.

The notion was more than just the simple truism of men valuing blood more than reason. Her father had tasked her to learning the medical profession when her brother Aelianus—a soldier in the Puteoli garrison, like the one she just treated—had been gravely wounded in a bar fight—also like the one she had just treated. He returned home afterward, his belly ripped to pieces, and Aeliana hadn’t been able to save him.

She'd had no experience at the time. A frightened girl desperately holding cloth to her brother's torn midsection, that's all she was.

Aelianus had gone out that night, his head full of revenge on a man who had cheated him in dice, and Aeliana tried to talk him out of it. But she hadn’t been able to save him.

On every account, a failure, and so her father had sold her to a medici to train her so she would not fail again. The medici, in turn, sold her services to the Puteoli garrison—where Aeliana re-experienced her brother’s injuries every few nights.

They used to frighten her terribly. Now, such grisly sights had become old hat. And in fact, that was what infuriated her the most about all of it—it would have been
simple
to save Aelianus, if only she had known what to do. If only she’d had that knowledge
six months
earlier than she did, her entire life would have changed direction.

But then, of course, she knew that she would not have been able to
have
that knowledge without Aelianus dying in the arms of her and her father.

“If the stitches rip,” Aeliana tried with the soldier, “at all...if there is any pain, I entreat you to see me again. You should not suffer unduly on account of a wound already made.”

The legionary harrumphed and left her small office in the bottom floor of the barracks. It was an off-putting place, with its blood-stained tables, dark stone floors, and all the various surgical implements in jars and baskets. Sewing threads spooled in one corner, and a series of stools stood in another, all of varying heights.

She had only moments alone before Tatius entered. With wrinkled, gray skin and cloudy black eyes, he was an old man—old enough to have seen Trajan as emperor as a child. He had lived through a golden age in Rome, and lamented that he could see it coming to an end.

“I dislike this Severus. Truly, I do,” Tatius would say. “Smacks too much of the tyrant for my tastes. Nothing like Trajan. Trajan. Oh, Trajan. There was an emperor. But this Severus? All he wants to do is pay the soldiers and damn the rest. I don't trust him.”

There was no such grave talk foreshadowed on Tatius’s face today. Usually Aeliana could read him like a book—after serving under his hand for more than two years, she felt sure she had learned his every mood. She was more than sure she had learned all he was able to teach her, but, as she was a slave, she couldn’t exactly pick herself up and start her own office.

“My dear, I have news for you.”

“Oh?” She straightened. “Another training exercise gone wrong?”

It was a safe guess. Life as a Roman legionary was about as harsh as a life could come, and the recent waves of the Antonine plague had wiped out many veterans. As a result, there were more trainees than ever—and more injuries than ever.

Even the unskilled or unsuited were being given a shot at military life in efforts to bolster the ranks; if the plague was going to kill a certain percentage of everyone anyway—it had even killed Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Commodus’s father—then it only made sense to train as many soldiers as possible. But, that meant a lot of bloody, awful work for Aeliana.

“Oh,” said Tatius, a small smile on his face. “Probably. But that’s not what I mean. I’ve arranged the papers. You’re no longer my apprentice.”

This was a surprise. “Truly?”

“Truly. You are to be known as a medicae from now on. And,” he said, face barely changing expression, “I have extended your contract to five years for a term serving the House of Varinius.”

In her life, Aeliana was well-accustomed to words biting at her.

She had never been worthy enough for her father. She imagined herself presented to him as a panacea of disappointments. Her attitude never virtuous and stoic enough, and yet he chastened her for the lack of warmth he received upon arriving at home. Likewise, her mousy appearance and small frame was never fetching enough for a proper husband—he imagined her slightness of body would kill her in childbirth—and yet on the rare chances she had to be presented to society he would proclaim her whorish.

Meanwhile, in his estimations, her intelligence was not sharp enough to off-set any of these.

Such disparaging remarks had only evolved over the years for Aeliana in the company of other men as she progressed to the garrison, where the only thing looser than a soldier’s tongue were his hands around his cock. Her father's views of her worth were shared, whether they knew it or not, by many a soldier.

Her appearance—small of stature, short dark hair in a severe bowl cut around her head—was boyish enough to keep her from certain kinds of unwanted attention. Only once had she been cornered by a drunken soldier, but a scalpel held to his neck had warned him off. She told him she carried the scalpel everywhere she went—and he told the rest of the garrison. And so the insults had started.

The Boy Doctor. The Faun.

She earned the name of Faun after stomping on a soldier’s bare feet one morning when he’d called her a boy. She didn’t understand what the problem was. Didn’t boys stomp on toes all the time? Aeliana had been proving him right.

And so, after the soldier’s many complaints of her having feet like hooves, she had become “The Faun” to these men. Goat legs, human torso.

So yes. Words had hurt her. But over the years she had developed a great series of walls and moats, doubts and redoubts built to withstand the most severe destruction that could be lobbed at her from the mightiest siege engines in the world.

But these words from Tatius—these words had snuck directly to the heart of her fortress. A direct hit.

“Five...five years?” Her voice was heavy with disbelief.

Her contract had been set to expire a little more than six months from that day.

“Yes, dear. My son, you see, is getting married. I required a
significant
down-payment for his celebrations. And the ludus is in need of a skilled medicae. Which you now are. So you see, it all worked out nicely.”

The man was actually smiling. He said this as if his recognition of her skill would soften the blow.

It did not.

Five more years as a slave. And not just that...but in a
ludus
. A training school for gladiators. The one place in Puteoli where she was likely to stitch and mend more bloody, mangled bodies than in the garrison.

Tatius could not see well from the clouds in his eyes. But perhaps he could sense her mood anyway.

“Yes, I know, it was not what you expected. But this life has many turns. You will find your way, Aeliana. I am quite certain of it. If anyone can, it is you, little Faun.”

Slowly, she nodded. With all her resolve, she gathered her breath, and hoped for the best.

––––––––

F
ortune’s ways had ever been a mystery to Caius.

Three years before, as Aeliana learned that she would be sold to a ludus, Caius expected the best day of his life.

That was the plan, at any rate.

For a long time, his life had been one miserable struggle after another. Raised as a slave. Trained to fight to stay alive. Surrounded by death and violence at all ends of his existence. And then he met Fabiana, and his life had turned for the better.

Caius stood in the hot sands of the arena, about to put his life on the line—with freedom and a massive purse as the prize should he win. At the other end of the city of Puteoli, his wife was in labor, their child on its way.

What sort of day was it that so many circumstances aligned together? A small slip here, a tiny misstep there, and all these favorable outcomes could be lost. And yet if they went well...

If they went well, then Caius could deem himself the luckiest slave in the Empire. The luckiest
freed
slave.

Across from Caius, standing tall in the hot sands, was the man who would kill him if Caius let it happen. He did not intend to. But then, there was no place like the arena for Fortune to express her favor—or displeasure.

Between Caius and Vox—the handle of the opposing gladiator—was a referee. A large, bald man in a brief tunic and loin cloth, sweating profusely in the heat of the day. They all were covered in sweat. The referee held a whip in one hand to urge the gladiators on if they refused to fight.

Such a thing was more tradition than necessary in this fight. If Caius won, he would be a free man. And if Vox won, he’d earn a bigger purse than any in his life, and his name would be carved out on the Wall of Turmedites as a legend of the arena. With such stakes, there was no need for the urging flogs of the referee—the two warriors were more than willing to fight.

They waited only for the signal from the editor sitting in the stands. Today, the editor was Senator Otho, the nephew of the Emperor Severus. Puteoli was not where the Roman Senate was held, of course, but it was within a day's riding distance, and Otho made special trips to every arena in the peninsula to see as many fights as he could. The crowd waited for the signal too, urging the fighters on with cries of support. This, the last fight of the day, was sure to be the most spectacular.