The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (8 page)

When the new-comers were settled in their places, Marcus touched his uncle’s wrist, and cocked an inquiring eyebrow.

‘A fellow Magistrate of mine, Kaeso by name, and his wife Valaria,’ Uncle Aquila said. ‘Incidentally, they are our next-door neighbours.’

‘Are they so? But the little maiden; she is no bud of their branch, surely?’

But he got no answer to his question then, for at that moment a great crashing of cymbals and a fanfare of trumpets announced that the Games were about to begin. All round the crowded circus there was a sudden quietness and a craning forward. Again the trumpets sounded. The double doors at the far side were flung open, and out from their underground lodgements a double file of gladiators came marching into the arena, each carrying the weapons he would use later in the show. Shout on shout greeted their appearance. For a small colonial circus they seemed rather a good lot, Marcus thought, watching them as they paraded round the arena; too good, maybe, though probably they were all slaves. Marcus was something of a heretic where the Games were concerned; he liked well enough to see a wild-beast show, or a sham fight if it were well done, but to put up men—even slaves—to fight to the death for a crowd’s amusement, seemed to him a waste.

The men had halted now, before the Magistrates’ benches; and in the few moments that they stood there, Marcus’s whole attention was caught by one of them: a sword-and-buckler man of about his own age. He was rather short for a Briton, but powerful. His russet-brown hair, flung back by the savage pride with which he carried his head, showed the clipped ear that branded him for a slave. Seemingly he had been taken in war, for his breast and shoulders—he was stripped to the waist—were tattooed with blue warrior patterns. But it was none of these things that Marcus saw, only the look in the wideset grey eyes that strained back at him out of the gladiator’s young sullen face.

‘This man is afraid,’ said something deep in Marcus. ‘Afraid—afraid,’ and his own stomach cringed within him.

A score of weapons flashed in the wintry light as they were tossed up with a shout and caught again, and the gladiators wheeled and strode on down the wide curve that led back to their starting point. But the look that he had seen in the young swordsman’s eyes remained with Marcus.

The first item on the programme was a fight between wolves and a brown bear. The bear did not want to fight, and was driven into battle by the long curling whip-lashes of the attendants. Presently, amid a great shouting from the onlookers, it was killed. Its body was dragged away, and with it the bodies of two wolves it had slain; the others were decoyed back into their wheeled cage for another time, and attendants spread fresh sand over the blood in the arena. Marcus glanced, without quite knowing why, at the girl in the dark hood, and saw her sitting as though frozen, her eyes wide and blank with horror in an ashy face. Still oddly shaken by that queer moment of contact with the young gladiator who was so very much afraid, he was filled with a sudden unreasoning anger against Kaeso and his wife for bringing the little maiden to see a thing like this, against all Games and all mobs who came to watch them with their tongues hanging out for horrors, even against the bear for being killed.

The next item was a sham fight, with little damage done save a few flesh wounds. (In the back of beyond, circus masters could not afford to be wasteful with their gladiators.) Then a boxing match in which the heavy cestus round the fighters’ hands drew considerably more blood than the swords had done. A pause came, in which the arena was once again cleaned up and freshly sanded; and then a long gasp of expectancy ran through the crowd, and even the bored young tribune sat up and began to take some notice, as, with another blare of trumpets, the double doors swung wide once more, and two figures stepped out side by side into the huge emptiness of the arena. Here was the real thing: a fight to the death.

At first sight the two would seem to be unequally armed, for while one carried sword and buckler, the other, a slight dark man with something of the Greek in his face and build, carried only a three-pronged spear, and had over his shoulder a many-folded net, weighted with small discs of lead. But in truth, as Marcus knew only too well, the odds were all in favour of the man with the net, the Fisher, as he was called, and he saw with an odd sinking of the heart that the other was the young swordsman who was afraid.

‘Never did like the net,’ Uncle Aquila was grumbling. ‘Not a clean fight, no!’ A few moments earlier, Marcus had known that his damaged leg was beginning to cramp horribly; he had been shifting, and shifting again, trying to ease the pain without catching his uncle’s notice, but now, as the two men crossed to the centre of the arena, he had forgotten about it.

The roar which greeted the pair of fighters had fallen to a breathless hush. In the centre of the arena the two men were being placed by the captain of the gladiators; placed with exquisite care, ten paces apart, with no advantage of light or wind allowed to either. The thing was quickly and competently done, and the captain stepped back to the barriers. For what seemed a long time, neither of the two moved. Moment followed moment, and still they remained motionless, the centre of all that great circle of staring faces. Then, very slowly, the swordsman began to move. Never taking his eyes from his adversary, he slipped one foot in front of the other; crouching a little, covering his body with the round buckler, inch by inch he crept forward, every muscle tensed to spring when the time came.

The Fisher stood as still as ever, poised on the balls of his feet, the trident in his left hand, his right lost in the folds of the net. Just beyond reach of the net, the swordsman checked for a long, agonizing moment, and then sprang in. His attack was so swift that the flung net flew harmlessly over his head, and the Fisher leapt back and sideways to avoid his thrust, then whirled about and ran for his life, gathering his net for another cast as he ran, with the young swordsman hard behind him. Half round the arena they sped, running low; the swordsman had not the other’s length and lightness of build, but he ran as a hunter runs—perhaps he had run down deer on the hunting trail, before ever his ear was clipped—and he was gaining on his quarry now. The two came flying round the curve of the barrier towards the Magistrates’ benches, and just abreast of them the Fisher whirled about and flung once more. The net whipped out like a dark flame; it licked round the running swordsman, so intent on his chase that he had forgotten to guard for it; the weight carried the deadly folds across and across again, and a howl burst from the crowd as he crashed headlong and rolled over, helplessly meshed as a fly in a spider’s web.

Marcus wrenched forward, his breath caught in his throat. The swordsman was lying just below him, so near that they could have spoken to each other in an undertone. The Fisher was standing over his fallen antagonist, with the trident poised to strike, a little smile on his face, though his breath whistled through widened nostrils, as he looked about him for the bidding of the crowd. The fallen man made as though to raise his hampered arm in the signal by which a vanquished gladiator might appeal to the crowd for mercy; then let it drop back, proudly, to his side. Through the fold of the net across his face, he looked up straight into Marcus’s eyes, a look as direct and intimate as though they had been the only two people in all that great amphitheatre.

Marcus was up and standing with one hand on the barrier rail to steady himself, while with the other he made the sign for mercy. Again and again he made it, with a blazing vehemence, with every atom of will-power that was in him, his glance thrusting like a challenge along the crowded tiers of benches where already the thumbs were beginning to turn down. This mob, this unutterably stupid, blood-greedy mob that must somehow be swung over into forgoing the blood it wanted! His gorge rose against them, and there was an extraordinary sense of battle in him that could not have been more vivid had he been standing over the fallen gladiator, sword in hand. Thumbs up!
Thumbs up!
you fools! … He had been aware from the first of Uncle Aquila’s great thumb pointing skyward beside him; suddenly he was aware of a few others echoing the gesture, and then a few more. For a long, long moment the swordsman’s fate still hung in the balance, and then as thumb after thumb went up, the Fisher slowly lowered his trident and with a little mocking bow, stepped back.

Marcus drew a shuddering breath, and relaxed into a flood of pain from his cramped leg, as an attendant came forward to disentangle the swordsman and aid him to his feet. He did not look at the young gladiator again. This moment was shame for him, and Marcus felt that he had no right to witness it.

•
    
•
    
•
    
•
    
•

That evening, over the usual game of draughts, Marcus asked his uncle: ‘What will become of that lad now?’

Uncle Aquila moved an ebony piece after due consideration. ‘The young fool of a swordsman? He will be sold in all likelihood. The crowd do not pay to see a man fight, when once he has been down and at their mercy.’

‘That is what I have been thinking,’ Marcus said. He looked up from making his own move. ‘How do prices run in these parts? Would fifteen hundred sesterces buy him?’

‘Very probably. Why?’

‘Because I have that much left of my pay and a parting thank-offering that I had from Tullus Lepidus. There was not much to spend it on in Isca Dumnoniorum.’

Uncle Aquila’s brows cocked inquiringly. ‘Are you suggesting buying him yourself ?’

‘Would you give him house-room?’

‘I expect so,’ said Uncle Aquila. ‘Though I am somewhat at a loss to understand why you should wish to keep a tame gladiator. Why not try a wolf instead?’

Marcus laughed. ‘It is not so much a tame gladiator as a body-slave that I need. I cannot go on overworking poor old Stephanos for ever.’

Uncle Aquila leaned across the chequered board. ‘And what makes you think that an ex-gladiator would make you a suitable body-slave?’

‘To speak the truth, I had not thought about it,’ Marcus said. ‘How do you advise me to set about buying him?’

‘Send down to the circus slave-master, and offer half of what you expect to pay. And sleep with a knife under your pillow thereafter,’ said Uncle Aquila.

T
HE
purchase was arranged next day, without much difficulty, for although the price that Marcus could afford was not large, Beppo, the master of the circus slaves, knew well enough that he was not likely to get a better one for a beaten gladiator. So, after a little haggling, the bargain was struck, and that evening after dinner Stephanos went to fetch home the new slave.

Marcus waited for their return alone in the atrium, for Uncle Aquila had retired to his watch-tower study to work out a particularly absorbing problem in siege warfare. He had been trying to read his uncle’s copy of the Georgics, but his thoughts kept wandering from Virgil on bee-keeping to the encounter before him. He was wondering for the first time—he had not thought to wonder before—why the fate of a slave gladiator he had never before set eyes on should matter to him so nearly. But it did matter. Maybe it was like calling to like; and yet it was hard to see quite what he had in common with a barbarian slave.

Presently his listening ear caught the sound of an arrival in the slaves’ quarters, and he laid down the papyrus roll and turned towards the doorway. Steps came along the colonnade, and two figures appeared on the threshold. ‘Centurion Marcus, I have brought the new slave,’ said Stephanos, and stepped discreetly back into the night; and the new slave walked forward to the foot of Marcus’s couch, and stood there.

For a long moment the two young men looked at each other, alone in the empty lamplit atrium as yesterday they had been alone in the crowded amphitheatre, while the scuff-scuffling of Stephanos’s sandals died away down the colonnade.

‘So it is you,’ the slave said at last.

‘Yes, it is I.’

The silence began again, and again the slave broke it. ‘Why did you turn the purpose of the crowd yesterday? I did not ask for mercy.’

‘Possibly that was why.’

The slave hesitated, and then said defiantly, ‘I was afraid yesterday; I, who have been a warrior. I am afraid to choke out my life in the Fisher’s net.’

‘I know,’ Marcus said. ‘But still, you did not ask for mercy.’

The other’s eyes were fixed on his face, a little puzzled. ‘Why have you bought me?’

‘I have need of a body-slave.’

‘Surely the arena is an unusual place to pick one.’

‘But then, I wished for an unusual body-slave.’ Marcus looked up with the merest quirk of a smile into the sullen grey eyes fixed so unswervingly on his own. ‘Not one like Stephanos, that has been a slave all his life, and is therefore—nothing more.’

It was an odd conversation between master and slave, but neither of them was thinking of that.

‘I have been but two years a slave,’ said the other quietly.

‘And before that you were a warrior—and your name?’

‘I am Esca, son of Cunoval, of the tribe of Brigantes, the bearers of the blue war-shield.’

‘And I am—I was, a centurion of auxiliaries with the Second Legion,’ Marcus said, not knowing quite why he made the reply, knowing only that it had to be made. Roman and Briton faced each other in the lamplight, while the two statements seemed to hang like a challenge in the air between them.

Then Esca put out a hand unconsciously and touched the edge of the couch. ‘That I know, for the goaty one, Stephanos, told me; and also that my Master has been wounded. I am sorry for that.’

‘Thank you,’ Marcus said.

Esca looked down at his own hand on the edge of the couch, and then up again. ‘It would have been easy to escape on my way here,’ he said slowly. ‘The old goaty one could not have held me back if I had chosen to break for freedom. But I chose to go with him because it was in my heart that it might be you that we went to.’