The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits (10 page)

I was closest. I reached into my tunic, pulled out my dagger and thrust it into his hand. He swooped down. The dog gave a single plaintive yelp, then went limp. The man scooped up the lifeless dog and thrust it aside.

“Zuleika!” he cried.

“Zanziba?” she answered, her voice weak.

In blood, fear and darkness, the siblings were reunited.

The danger was not over, but just beginning; for having discovered the secret of Ahala’s gladiator camp, how could I be allowed to live? Their success – indeed, their survival – depended on absolute secrecy.

If Zuleika had not followed me, I would have climbed over the palisade and ridden back to Ravenna, satisfied that I knew the truth and reasonably certain that the Nubian I had seen earlier that day was indeed Zanziba, still very much alive. For my suspicion had been confirmed: Ahala and his gladiators had learned to cheat death. The bouts they staged at funeral games looked real, but in fact were shams, not spontaneous but very carefully choreographed. When they appeared to bleed, the blood was animal blood that spurted from animal bladders concealed under their scanty armour or loincloths, or from the hollow, blood-filled tips of weapons with retractable points, cleverly devised by Ahala’s smiths; when they appeared to expire, the death rattles that issued from their throats actually came from sound-makers like the one I had blown through. No doubt there were many other tricks of their trade which I had not discovered with my cursory inspection, or even conceived of; they were seasoned professionals, after all, an experienced troupe of acrobats, actors and mimes making a very handsome living by pretending to be a troupe of gladiators.

Any doubt was dispelled when I was dragged from the armoury into the open and surrounded by a ring of naked, rudely-awakened men. The torches in their hands turned night to day and lit up the face of Zuleika, who lay bleeding but alive on the sand, attended by an unflappable, grey-bearded physician; it made sense that Ahala’s troupe would have a skilled doctor among them, to attend to accidents and injuries.

Among the assembled gladiators, I was quite sure I saw the tall, lumbering Samnite who had “died” in Saturnia, along with the shorter, stockier Thracian who had “killed” him – and who had put on such a convincing show of tottering off-balance and almost impaling himself on the Samnite’s upright sword. I also saw the two
dimacheri
who had put on such a show with their flashing daggers that the spectators had spared them both. There was the redheaded Gaul who had delivered the “death-blow” to Zanziba – and there was Zanziba himself, hovering fretfully over his sister and the physician attending to her.

“I can’t understand it,” the physician finally announced. “The dog should have torn her limb from limb, but he seems hardly to have broken the skin. The beast must have been dazed – or drugged.” He shot a suspicious glance at me. “At any rate, she’s lost very little blood. The wounds are shallow, and I’ve cleaned them thoroughly. Unless an infection sets in, that should be the end of it. Your sister is a lucky woman.”

The physician stepped back and Zanziba knelt over her. “Zuleika! How did you find me?”

“The gods led me to you,” she whispered.

I cleared my throat.

“With some help from the Finder,” she added. “It
was
you I saw at the funeral games in Saturnia that day?”

“Yes.”

“And then again in Rome?”

He nodded. “I was there very briefly, some days ago, then came straight back to Ravenna.”

“But Zanziba, why didn’t you send for me?”

He sighed. “When I sent you the money, I was in great despair. I expected every day to be my last. I moved from place to place, plying my trade as a gladiator, expecting death but handing it out to others instead. Then I fell in with these fellows, and everything changed.” He smiled and gestured to the men around him. “A company of free men, all experienced gladiators, who’ve realized that it simply isn’t necessary to kill or be killed to put on a good show for the spectators. Ahala is our leader, but he’s only first among equals. We all pull together. After I joined these fellows, I
did
send for you – I sent a letter to your old master in
Alexandria, but he had no idea where you’d gone. I had no way to find you. I thought we’d lost each other forever.”

Regaining her strength, Zuleika rose onto her elbows. “Your fighting is all illusion, then?”

Her brother grinned. “The Romans have a saying: a gladiator dies only once. But I’ve died in the arena many, many times! And been paid quite handsomely for it.”

I shook my head. “The game you’re playing is incredibly dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as being a real gladiator,” said Zanziba.

“You’ve pulled it off so far,” I said. “But the more famous this troupe becomes, the more widely you travel and the more people who see you – some of them on more than one occasion – the harder it will become to maintain the deception. The risk of discovery will grow greater each time you perform. If you’re found out, you’ll be charged with sacrilege, at the very least. Romans save their cruellest punishments for that sort of crime.”

“You’re talking to men who’ve stared death in the face many times,” growled Ahala. “We have nothing to lose. But you, Gordianus, on the other hand . . .”

“He’ll have to die,” said one of the men. “Like the others who’ve discovered our secret.”

“The skulls decorating the gateway?” I said.

Ahala nodded grimly.

“But we can’t kill him!” protested Zanziba.

“He lied about his purpose in coming here,” said Ahala.

“But his purpose was to bring Zuleika to me . . .”

So began the debate over what to do with me, which lasted through the night. In the end, as was their custom, they decided by voting. I was locked away while the deliberations took place. What was said, I never knew; but at daybreak I was released, and after making me pledge never to betray them, Ahala showed me to the gate.

“Zuleika is staying?” I said.

He nodded.

“How did the voting go?”

“The motion to release you was decided by a bare majority of one.”

“That close? How did you vote, Ahala?”

“Do you really want to know?”

The look on his face told me I didn’t.

I untethered my horse and rode quickly away, never looking back.

On my first day back in Rome, I saw Cicero in the Forum. I tried to avoid him, but he made a bee-line for me, smiling broadly.

“Well-met, Gordianus! Except for this beastly weather. Not yet noon, and already a scorcher. Reminds me of the last time I saw you, at those funeral games in Saturnia. Do you remember?”

“Of course,” I said.

“What fine games those were!”

“Yes,” I agreed, a bit reluctantly.

“But do you know, since then I’ve seen some even more spectacular funeral games. It was down in Capua. Amazing fighters! The star of the show was a fellow with some barbaric Thracian name. What was it, now? Ah, yes: Spartacus, they called him. Like the city of warriors, Sparta. A good name for a gladiator, eh?”

I nodded, and quickly changed the subject. But for some reason, the name Cicero had spoken stuck in my mind. As Zuleika had said, how strange are the coincidences dropped in our paths by the gods; for in a matter of days, that name would be on the lips of everyone in Rome and all over Italy.

For that was the month that the great slave revolt began,
led by Spartacus and his rebel gladiators. It would last for many months, spreading conflagration and chaos all over Italy. It would take me to the Bay of Neapolis for my first fateful meeting with Rome’s richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and a household of ninety-nine slaves all marked for death; but that is another story.

What became of Zanziba and Zuleika? In the ensuing months of warfare and panic, I lost track of them, but thought of them often. I especially remembered Zuleika’s comments on Roman slavery. Were her sympathies enflamed by the revolt? Did she manage to persuade her brother and his comrades, if indeed they needed persuading, to join the revolt and take up arms against Rome? If they did, then almost certainly things went badly for them; for eventually Spartacus and his followers were trapped and defeated, hunted and slaughtered like animals and crucified by the thousands.

After the revolt was over and the countryside gradually returned to normal, I eventually had occasion to travel to Ravenna again. I rode out to the site of Ahala’s compound. The gate of bones was still there, but worn and weathered and tilted to one side, on the verge of collapsing. The palisade was intact, but the gate stood open. No weapons hung in the armoury. The animals’ pens were empty. Spider webs filled the slaughterhouse. The gladiator quarters were abandoned.

And then, many months later, from across the sea I received a letter on papyrus, written by a hired Egyptian scribe:

For many years I have saved that scrap of papyrus. I shall never throw it away.

T
here are days when you wake up and you know, you just
know
, that this one’s going to be a bastard.

All right. As a soldier, you get used to bad days. There are days when you have to stand watch all night, days when you have to break camp and carry all your belongings miles to some other gods-forsaken spot, days when you’re detailed to dig the new latrines, or clear the old ones . . . Yes, as a legionnaire, you get enough shitty days for the average lifetime. And every so often there are the other days, when you get to do what the citizens back home expect you’re doing the whole time, and risk getting a blade in the guts or an arrow in the face as your glorious general orders you to shove some barbaric, painted scum from some boggy wasteland
just so that the general can claim his glory. They’re all bastards, believe me. Especially generals. They’re no better than any other politicians.

Not that my low estimation of the intelligence and ability of the average general has anything to do with this particular bad day. No. This bad day was caused by my own mates. For my offences against the gods, which must be many, as soon as my comrades learned that I had some education, they elected me as their own private leader. Silly sods.

And now these same silly sods had let the King’s son die.

King? He was a chieftain of the Britons; one of those with a tongue-breaking name that any sensible man would refuse to try to repeat. There never seemed much point. The bastards were never around for long. Either they’d submit to our authority, or they’d die. Either way, they wouldn’t be with the army for long.

His son was taken to ensure his father’s good behaviour, along with eight other close relatives: some other of the chieftain’s family, including his own brother, and so on. We didn’t piss about when it came to taking folks. And now, as I stared down at his bloody body, a great gash in his chest like a second sodding mouth, I knew that my mates and me were all in trouble. We’d been in charge of this pen of hostages, my mates had all been guarding them, and me? I’d bloody fallen asleep, hadn’t I, with no chance of an excuse if our general got to hear of it.

Not that I was safe anyway. Not with the most important hostage, the second in line after the tribal chief, lying dead on the packed earth in front of me.

Of course, you’d think that he was killed by someone left in that stockade with him, wouldn’t you? But I knew that the first thing a hostage learned was, no knives, no swords, nothing. They’d have been patted down before they were
put in our stockade. And when the body was found, my boys would have searched the lot of them for a weapon. Since they had all been frisked and checked clear before they’d been allowed through the door, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that they were all clean.

Yup. No weapons in there. Other than the good old Roman ones in my lads’ hands.

I guess I should explain what we were doing there.

It was already late in the year when the army was sent on its recce of Britain. Two legions had been selected for this operation: mine, the VIIth, and another well-blooded legion, the Xth. I had only just joined. A free man, I had little cash, and couldn’t join one of the greater cohorts. No, I was stuck in the mob called the “
velites
” of the VIIth legion. The cohorts weren’t split into the four groups now, but the front line, the skirmishers, still got that nickname.
Velites
– men with little money and no standing. I suited them perfectly. And, my, wasn’t I glad to learn that I was to be attached to the force going over the sea to attack a land filled with hordes of particularly vicious pagans. I had hardly learned how to use my
gladius
or
pilum
when I was told I was to go.

The men of my band were a shabby lot. We all had the same woollen tunic, leather coat reinforced with bands of steel, leather caps, greaves, a cloak and all the paraphernalia of a soldier, but somehow my companions managed to make all appear filthy and worn, no matter how new it might be.