Heart of the Gladiator (Affairs of the Arena Book 1) (8 page)

Lucius grinned. “She has not taught me much. But her wine is very good.” His smile turned more serene for a moment. “And it’s a good, quick way to shut her up and keep her off my back. And the backs of people I like. I see she took my advice about using your drug supply.”

“
You
told her to do that?”

“She felt your very presence an insult for some reason. I had to give you value. It seems to have worked.”

“I should dislike to be on the opposing side of a scheme of yours, Lucius.”

“Then you should seek after Caius, lest I ensnare the two of you together regardless.”

Aeliana wiped her hands together for a moment. In conversation, as in the arena, once Lucius found a weakness he wanted only to return to it again and again.

“He told me he was a father.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “From what I know, his wife died in childbirth on the day of his last fight.”

Her heart swelled with emotion. “That’s terrible.”

“Yes.” Lucius stood up to leave. “Life is hard, little Faun, and harder still for a gladiator. You two have some connection. I say pursue it with all haste before life gets harder still.”

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T
hree years ago, Caius walked with the rest of the regimen of gladiators from the House of Varinius into the Puteoli Arena. The sub-floor of the arena where the fighters gathered was built solidly, but had low-hanging ceilings. Most gladiators sat in long ellipsis, trading jokes and tell boisterous tales of women they had slept with. All wore little else but sandals and a loin cloth. They would armor themselves as they were called to fight.

Low hanging braziers lit the area. Smoke would have filled the lungs but for clever openings in the walls to catch the air flow. There was a breeze, and Caius enjoyed its steady feel upon his skin. It came from the South, which was fortunate. Some directions of breeze in the city carried unpleasant scents. Northern breezes would have brought the dismal stenches from the animal menagerie where dozens of starved, angry beasts waited for their inevitable deaths in the arena.

Being in the primus of the games, Caius would wait a long time—nearly ten hours—before his fight. His nerves were steady, though, and the only nervousness he felt was for his wife Fabiana and the labor she had been in since early that morning.

There was no getting around the day of the games. As a gladiator scheduled to fight, Caius had to be there, dictated by long held religious tradition and enforced by the swords of Roman legionaries.

Best day of your life
, Caius reminded himself.

Interspersed in the jovial, laughing crowd were several men who clearly were going to fight for the first time. They cried or they huddled against the wall on their knees. One man dragged sand over himself in some strange ritual, shivering all the while. Should they try to join the crowds of laughing men, they would be pushed aside and reprimanded—sometimes with fists—for their intrusion.

To be a gladiator meant a man was in a brotherhood, but it meant also that a man had to earn the respect of his new fellows. These novices weren't real gladiators in the eyes of the rest until they had fought and survived in the arena.

Caius reminded himself, with some compassion, that it had not been so very long ago that he had been one of them.

He approached the sand-dragging man, touching him on the shoulder. He was more boy than a man, with wild red hair and eyes the color of the sea.

“It gets better,” he told him. “Much better.”

“I don’t know...I don’t know how to fight,” said the boy. “They didn’t teach me anything. They just gave me a sword and expected me to hack and learn at a post.”

Caius nodded. Better fighters got better training at better ludi. This one wasn't a member of House Varinius.

“It gets better,” he said again. “You just have to survive. That’s all. That’s all that matters. Don’t try for anything else but that.”

“But how?”

With a shrug, Caius smiled. “Pray to Fortune for luck,” he said. “And when in doubt, attack.”

These were the words Caius had lived by. And from the moment of being bought by Rufus up until he held his dead wife in his arms, he had believed every last syllable.

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T
raining in the ludus continued, and just as Murus had promised, he did not go easy on Caius.

Every day he woke, ate a light breakfast, and then readied on the sands. Training began immediately, and discipline never stopped.

When he did something right, he got no more than a small satisfied grunt from the old doctore. When he made a mistake, Murus lashed him with the whip. When he appeared tired, Murus made him run across the grounds—often with a heavy, iron-banded log on his shoulders.

This was the Hell Log—and Caius knew it well. Its weight and burden were legendary among the gladiators of House Varinius. Rumors abounded that the original lanista of the estate had ventured deep into the underworld to find the perfect tool with which to mold his boyish fighters into men of valor and honor. The joke was, after a few laps carrying the Hell Log around, death did not seem so harsh a fate.

This was how Murus treated everyone else. And Caius was glad for it all—even the whip. A lack of that attention—even that negative attention—would have shown that Murus didn’t care.

Caius received double-duty with Murus. The beginning of the day started with the gladiators fighting tall posts stuck in the ground. This was for attending to their posture and positioning, and making sure they could keep their defenses up when placing a blow. Murus oversaw all of this with the help of his other doctores, of which there were three.

At midday was a brief lunch. It was the same food as breakfast—a thick barley gruel that kept the men strong and fit, with plenty of energy for their work.

After lunch was training in sparring matches with the weapons of each gladiator’s style. Murus was the doctore for the thraex style, and so oversaw Caius again. If Caius dropped his shield too low, he was flogged. If he attacked when he should have defended, or vice versa, he was flogged. If he hesitated in his actions, he was flogged.

Caius had to do his absolute best to not get flogged at all, which was the entire idea. The flogging hurt—enough to leave a few bruises on his back and shoulders—but would not leave permanent marks. The whip had a thick head, and would not cut the skin unless Murus wanted.

It was a martial world he had re-entered, and it was unforgiving. But a whip in training was preferable to a sword through the gut in the arena, and so Caius worked.

He would die in the arena, of that he was sure. But he would not be an embarrassment. He would go down with honor, or not at all.

This routine went on for many days, and Caius felt little improvement. He ended the day beaten, hungry, and tired—and that was how he woke as well.

In his free time, what little there was of it in the evenings and late afternoon, he tried his best to catch sight of Aeliana. She was the bright spot in a hard time.

They had conversed—what? Twice? And yet there was a connection he felt with her that he could not deny. Every time he saw her his heart began to race and his mind deluged with images of what skin she bared in her stola. The shape of her calves, the long lines of her neck and jaw, the fine muscles of her arms. He wanted her body, and all of it

When she made her rounds through the training grounds in the early afternoon, checking on who needed treatment and re-examining those who had been injured previously, he had a hard time focusing. Part of him wanted to train better, harder just to catch her eye and impress her.

A stupid, boy’s notion that he couldn’t exorcise completely, no matter how he tried. Another part of him wanted just to stop, sit, and stare as she worked—to memorize the lovely turn of her chin, the sweet angle of her petite breasts in her robes, the rich chestnut color of her hair.

But one way or the other, they had not been able to talk. A slave’s time was never truly his or her own, and always when there might have been a free moment long enough to be with her, she was gone. And once or twice, when he had been commissioned by Murus or Rufus to attend to some manual labor around the house (for who better for such heavy lifting than the strongest slaves in Rome?), he heard upon returning that Aeliana had wandered the barracks of the gladiators.

His thoughts went wild at the knowledge. Had she been looking for him? It was possible.

On the seventh day of his new tenure, he had a visitor in the evening.

His living space was a small cell, the same as every gladiator’s except for the real champions like Lucius. Once upon a time, Caius had Lucius’s quarters—which contained room enough for living spaces for his wife Fabiana (a slave to the House of Varinius herself) and even for a child.

For the past several nights, feeling generous, Lucius had called Caius in. Amphoras of wine littered the living space now. One corner was populated exclusively by shards of clay, the remnants of amphoras Lucius drunkenly tossed into the wall.

Caius worried about his friend and all that drink.

Women were thrown regularly at gladiators after victories in the games. Lucius had won enough that he could have a woman anytime he pleased, so long as he petitioned Murus and Rufus for one. But his affairs with Porcia—a miserable open secret if ever there was one—kept him committed to one woman. Wine seemed to be taking the place of all those other escapes he might have had.

The cell Caius lived in now was just a little taller than himself and about five paces deep to four paces long. Torches burned along the wall, leaving a thin layer of smoke in the air. The cells were constructed to catch breezes to air them out continually, but there was no such breeze tonight. He was just settling down to rest his battered body from the day when Aeliana arrived at the front of his cell.

“Greetings.” Caius sat up. “I’m happy to see you.”

Aeliana smiled. “And I you. But I found someone wandering the grounds who looked rather lost.”

Fabia burst into his cell, hopping up on his bed like a cat and tackling her father with a hug. A mix of surprise, affection, and concern passed through Caius.

“Daughter!” He held her tight. Her arms were small around his neck. “What are you doing here?”

“We came to see you, Papa.” She pushed her head into his chest and shoulders, holding tight. “I missed you.”

Her speech was slightly garbled by the coils of youth, not all the way understandable for the untrained ear. But Caius knew her words well enough to hear her perfectly.

Behind Fabia now, he saw the forms of his sister Camilla and her husband, Seneca. Camilla was younger than Caius, but was the third wife of Seneca, some twenty years her elder. His previous wives had died from the Antonine Plague shortly after marrying.

Camilla was a stout woman, looking almost as Caius in female form with a sweeter face. Seneca had two children from his previous marriages, and she did her best to raise them—and now Fabia—as Seneca brought in the main income for the house. Occasionally, for extra money, she would set herself back to basket weaving, which was a skill she learned as a slave and which she had used to help pay for her freedom at a young age. Caius had donated his winnings to her to make up the remainder when she came close to the requisite sum.

The two had been separated at a young age when Caius was sent to the mines. She thought him dead for years, and only discovered that he lived after his fifth year of victories in the arena.

In that way, if nothing else, Caius had to be grateful for the arena. It had reunited him with his family.

Seneca, gray-haired and shorter than most men, worked as a barber. The shop he operated was, covertly, a front to bring in more income for a Puteoli nobleman (who, due to his noble status, was not allowed to own any businesses himself).

Unfortunately, the noble was not a fan of Caius, having lost several million sestercii by betting against him. A job there for Caius had been out of the question.

For a few moments, Caius held Fabia still, enjoying her warmth against him. Gods, but she was a bright sight for his eyes! His daughter would no doubt grow into the spitting image of her mother. She had the same serious dark eyes, the same wild black hair that refused all attempts to tame it.

His first instinct was to scold his family for coming to this terrible place—an instinct which he knew was wrong. Better to find out the whole story first.

“I’m so glad to see you, little one.” He hugged Fabia again. “But what are you doing here?” The question was directed now to Seneca and Camilla. “I thought we had discussed how it was best for me to see my tenure through without visitations.”

“Aye,” said Seneca. “You did at that.”

His eyes flitted nervously from Camilla to Caius. Despite never having spared a harsh word in Seneca’s direction, Caius knew the older man was deathly afraid of him. As if, because he was a gladiator, his rage could be unleashed at any moment.

Caius couldn’t blame him. He knew men like that. He trained with them every day, in fact.

“We wouldn’t have come, Caius,” said Camilla. “Except that...we thought you should know what’s happened.”

“And what’s that?”

“The money from your sale. It’s wonderful. But two nights past...” she drifted. “We would have come sooner, but everything had to be set in order.”

Caius recognized the worry in his sister’s face. “What are you talking about?”

“There was a collapse,” said Seneca. “At our house. Everyone is fine, don't worry. It started next door, actually. Their roof caved in all the way through and the weight folded the house in. That house fell into ours and brought everything down. They’re not fine, the neighbors. But, we are. As I said. But the house is gone. And I can’t have my children living in the streets.”

“No.” A slow, cold realization slipped over Caius. “No, you can’t.”

“I should go,” said Aeliana. “I’m going to go.”

Caius shook his head. He gestured for her to enter his cell completely. “No. Please. Stay.”