The Far Arena (7 page)

EEG (electroencephalogram) reports continued intense brainwave activity for long periods of time. Vocal activity reported at 8:17 a.m.; instruments thereupon set up to record. Apparently it dreams, but the words are barely audible. Language unidentified.

I burn. The sun comes and goes quickly like torches with sudden flames. It is dark, then light, suddenly, as though I have slept a moment and the day has come.

I am on my back. My skin singes. Little bugs in my blood eat their way out of my pores with their hot, sharp little teeth. Pain I know. There are limits and then there is no more.

The pain of the body has a line over which it will give up its senses. The mind, I suspect, is limitless, its pain only shovelled silent with the grave.

I smell rotting flesh. I breathe it. I taste it. I am it.

I hear German talk, grunting barking sounds. If they are the far-north Germans and have followed us to the sea, why don't they take this helpless flesh and end my pain ?

It is not the death but the dying that claims the price. And not the body but the mind that tolerates so many never-ending taxes.

I deserved what happened to me. But my loyal slaves did not. My family did not.

If I could die without thinking, without remembering, without saying to myself, 'if here', 'if there', 'if only'. I am not dying.

This must be death. Death is a quiet thing. My mind bangs like so much clattering armour in the arena tunnels, and not one soft pillow for rest.

This must be life, for no death could give such freedom to the mind for self-torture.

My divinity, my emperor, my Domitian would love to witness this game where I fight myself. But this one he is denied.

He may think he has a right to my pain, and in truth, if there is such a right, this emperor did have it. For he trusted me to pursue my own self-interest. And he did not know that within me was a lunatic waiting for the worst possible time to take charge of my life. If not a lunatic, then myself, hidden so well from Rome, the mobs, and the emperor, that ultimately it hid from me.

None knew the real Lucius Aurelius Eugenianus when all thought they did. What they knew were their own fancies and what my retainers fed to the city in darkest rumours, so flagrant only the well-fertilized Roman mind would root in it.

They said many things about me when everyone thought they knew Eugeni. They knew so much about me. They said I fought in the arena because I would die naturally without the cheers of the mobs. They said an Eastern god gave me the power of eternal victory when I was a baby. They said I had a powerful hex on all my opponents. They said I refused to hear the names of my enemies. They said I only fought gladiators who had cursed the name of the people and the senate of Rome. They said I fought rarely because I felt the gladiators of today lacked the skill of yesterday. They said I fought rarely because I had become afraid. That I had become too slow. Too old. Too rich. Too thin. Too fat.

They said I slept with lionesses. With the empress. With our divine Domitian himself. With both. With no one.

They said I fought for whole provinces and revelled in my wealth. They said I gave my money in donatives to the legions facing the barbarians in the North for every yellow head that rolled, in vengeance for my father who was an officer most brutally tortured by the barbarian, priest of Apollo most brutally tortured by the barbarian, a scholar most brutally tortured by the barbarian, a patrician who had fled his seat in the senate to join the legion and was tortured by the barbarians.

Or Gauls. Or Jews. Or Parthians.
Or Scythians. Or
Dacians.

But most liked Germans. They thought them the wildest. And success in the arena was not so much what went on in the sands but in the minds of the crowds.

Just to see death was nothing. One could wait near the aged for that. But to see one's fears or hates performed in blood, that was the arena. And it was in the mind.

The disaster started, like most truly thorough cataclysms, with a promise of benefit. And it was my mind that was to blame. Perhaps if the negotiations for the match had not taken place on the latifundia themselves, I would have been more suspicious about the sponsors of the games.

But knowing that I trusted no one but myself for the final examination of who would be matched with me, they placed the young man in the middle of the latifundia, so that I had to see these vast farmlands they were willing to trade for my appearance.

I had latifundia. I hate the smell and sweat of the thousands of slaves who labour in these fields without even knowing where they are, only that if they work, they eat. They are the lowest slaves, not even having names on bills of sale, but going with the latifundia, one hundred more or less. And by that, meaning they are not even important enough to be numbered exactly: twenty-eight hundred field workers, one hundred more or less.

All the way through these lands
south of the city, near Brundis
ium, I had kept curtains drawn on my litter. If I could have trusted another to tell whether an opponent was fast enough or trained enough for a good performance, I would not have gone myself.

I did not care that the family sponsoring the games had sold off its armourers and tanners and carpenters from these latifundia and replaced them with field slaves beside cold forges and stilled saws. That was the affair of my chief slave of accounts, Demosthenes, who had used my wealth to make a fortune so vast, numbers could not describe it accurately.

My responsibility to emperor and self was that what happened

on the arena sand did not turn a crowd into a mob. So the opponent, had to be good enough, but not so good that I would pay with my blood.

An aedile, wishing to be named praetor, in which office he would have a whole province to tax, wanted to sponsor games with my appearance to win political favour of the mobs.

The young aedile met me formally at a newly built replica of a wooden arena, placed in the middle of the lands his family wanted to trade. His purple patrician piping was loud and so wide on his toga, it almost made sounds.

He ignored my slave, Demosthenes, in grey-stained tunic with ink-blackened fingers and hair so untonsored it looked as though it had never suffered comb or oil.

Ironically, it was Demosthenes who determined any financial aspect of the match and Demosthenes who, while still a slave, was rich enough many times over to buy all the patrician family's holdings.

Yet it was on me, in my white toga with thin equestrian-rank piping, that the concern was focused. Equestrian rank required only wealth. Patrician required bloodlines, granted only to those with the brilliance to select the right womb to be born from. Still, freedmen were becoming equestrians nowadays, as I had become, and their sons could marry into the right blood and rise to the rights of the oldest of Roman families. I dismissed conversation about the land and went right into this small arena. The wood smelled of fresh sap - probably built by the carpenters just before they were sold off. His mother, her grey hair piled like a pyramid above her head, her face an old pedestal with heavy cosmetics to distinguish the triumph of time over flesh, sat with her jewelled hands resting on her formal white stola. Behind her was the lanista, a trainer of gladiators. He hoped that his secutor would be acceptable to me. For then he would be paid many times over the cost of the training and purchase.

There were many formal greetings from the son, the mother, and the lanista. 'Greetings, Lucius Aurelius Eugenianus, most Roman of them all.'

'Most Roman of them all,' I said to the people, without mentioning their names or looking at them. Down there in the sand beneath me was my proposed match.

He was a beautiful young boy with sharp muscles and clean features. Yet back in Rome, features would be meaningless, especially since this was a secutor who would wear a helmet. I never liked large arenas because one is never fully in control of so large a mob, and only the most gross movements are noticeable. A really fine match that would be appreciated in Pompeii would bore the Roman mob, and a bored mob could threaten the city. Many a riot had given courage to an assassin's hand, and every emperor knew this. I had Domitian's valued trust, and I was not about to squander it for three latifundia.

'With water rights,' said the mother of the aedile, who was directing his career as she had directed his father's. My slaves dismissed this as a relatively minor addition to the contract, although they knew quite well it was crucial. They had not become wealthy making me poor. I pretended to heed their comments.

'He looks very agile and skilled,' I said, pointing to the young secutor who was showing his moves to us in the aedile's small private arena. A thrust here, a parry there. At first basic strokes, then becoming more elaborate with thrusts off blocks and double blocks and thrusts. His feet skipped lightly over the sand. His body was not oiled, and I saw no sweat. He could go a long time. I mentioned this also.

'Should he but break skin, I would personally have him strangled,' said the lanista, like most, always in need of money.

"There will be much blood and elephants before your match. I have already paid for this. The mob will have a surfeit of blood,' said the aedile's mother.

'It is my secutor who should fear for the mob, for if they are not satisfied, it is his life the mob will demand. The mob loves you, Lucius Aurelius Eugenianus,' said the lanista.

'Assuming my blade at his chest and his back on the sand,' I said.

'You are Lucius Aurelius Eugenianus,' said the mother with real amazement in her voice. 'This is a sapling.' 'I am past thirty years,' I said.

'You have my oath on my life that he will provide a performance and a performance only,
’
said the lanista.

'I give you my Roman word,' said the aedile, looking to his mother. 'And I give it before this lanista and this secutor that should in the heat of the arena any damage come to your person, they shall not live to reap rewards from such a victory. Thus, my word is given.'

'There will be elephants ?' I said.

'A score in combat. And lions,' said the aedile.

'Everyone has lions,' I said. 'Romans have seen so many lions they are as common as street dogs.'

'Lions with women,' said the mother, grinning.

'It won't work,' I said.

"That is our problem,' said the mother.

'It becomes my problem when a mob wants more blood. And while I believe your Roman word, and the lanista believes your Roman word, it is another thing for this secutor to give his life freely for that Roman word.'

'It is not his life to give or to save,' said the lanista, who should have known better. But looking at the sand, I knew I did not need his assurance, and I was right.

'I guess there have been many pairs here this day,' I said.

'No,' said the lanista. 'The secutor has been alone.'

It was all but done. I did not trust my life to a Roman word, of course, but rather to what I saw: deep heel marks in the sand. The lanista need not have added that the secutor had worked only against wooden and fabric dummies. I knew that, just as surely as I knew the secutor had one set of strokes to show me and another he killed with.

Many lanistae, seeking to save expense, work their gladiators against dummies too much. The gladiators develop unnecessarily heavy thrusts this way because it is more satisfying to drive a spear or sword deep into lifeless objects.

It also makes them look more powerful to untrained eyes. But when they do this, they must plant their driving foot deeply into the sand. And while practising, this is barely noticed. In the arena, it begs death because they announce their blows as though praetorian horns led the way. First the foot, and then the thrust. It is only a small moment, but to a seasoned gladiator it is a gift of the man's life. A far greater guarantee than a Roman word. The secutor was all right for me.

I looked to Demosthenes lest he have any final word on the value of the property. He had stayed quiet behind me all this time.

'Plus three million sesterces,' he added. 'We must buy ships to import carpenters, tanners, ironsmiths, potters, and armourers. There are none here. I don't know how these latifundia managed without them, but we need them. They will cost.'

Caught in their own chicanery, the patricians stammered their way through denials, through accusations, through everything, saying that the skilled slaves they had sold had brought in only a fifth at most of what Demosthenes had estimated they would cost.

I did not wish to go against Demosthenes, so I feigned concern. Domitian had requested the family to provide me, so they too had a goad behind them for this match. Also, if the games were successful, and with me they should have been, the aedile would become a Roman praetor, who while governing a land would make back three times what he invested in the games. A praetor could tax the eyes out of a beetle.