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But when she turned around she was confronted with a large guard smiling down at her through a mouthful of wine-stained teeth. It was the guard from the entry. He had pursued her, it seemed, and now he had her trapped. ‘Now you really owe me a favour,’ he growled.
She was surrounded on three sides, and there was only one option for escape. She closed her eyes, swung her legs over the edge of the pit and jumped.
‘Criminal!’ commanded the governor.
‘Harlot!’ hissed the entry guard.
‘Daughter!’ shouted her father.
The shouts grew fainter and she knew that she was falling through the air towards a very hard end. And then it came. Thunk. Her legs buckled, her arms, too, and when she looked up she half expected to find herself upon the shores of the River Styx. Instead she was wallowing in the bloodstained sand. There beside her lay the Beast’s fallen gladius.
She commanded her hands to seize the sword and, miraculously, they obeyed. Her legs obeyed her, too, and as she struggled to her feet she became aware of the riotous crowd. ‘Gladiatrix! Gladiatrix!’ they chanted.
Above her, two of the governor’s guards were already straddling the arena wall, preparing to jump in after her. The crowd was taunting them, daring them to take the plunge, and out of the corner of her eye Arria could see more coins changing hands. The men were making bets. On her.
The governor shouted down at the ringmaster. ‘Seize her, you fool!’
The ringmaster stepped towards Arria.
‘Stay back!’ she hissed, slashing the heavy gladius through the air. The ringmaster stepped backwards. He turned to the Beast.
‘You heard the governor,’ the ringmaster shouted at the Beast. ‘You seize her!’
Arria waited for the towering gladiator to make his charge, but he only stood and stared, a rueful smile twisting his lips. He shook his head, and glanced above them. ‘You would do well to run,’ he said.
The governor’s guards were perched at the rim of the pit and preparing themselves to pounce. The tunnel loomed before her: dark, terrifying and her only hope. She dropped the sword, kicked up a cloud of dust and dashed through the iron gate.
She found herself surrounded by a prison of stone. A long, dimly lit hallway stretched past several empty, iron-barred cells. There was the smell of blood and moss, and the sound of dripping water, though she could not determine whence it came.
Drip, drip, drip.
She heard a shout from the arena and a thud upon the sand. Doubtless the first guard had made his jump. Arria could hear him coughing and shouting obscenities while the crowd coaxed him on. Think, Arria.
She seized the nearest torch, shaking it to extinction. She did the same with the other torches until she had plunged the barracks into complete darkness.
Reaching the end of the hall, she pushed against a heavy stone door. Incredibly, it gave way. An exit. She felt a rush of fresh air and paused. The guards would expect her to escape through this door and they would come after her on legs faster than hers.
Think.
She left the door open, then stepped backwards.
She could hear the slap of the guards’ sandals upon the stones now. They were moving down the dark hallway, getting closer to her by the second. They stopped suddenly, listening for her.
Drip, drip, drip.
* * *
Cal heard a splash in the large water urn outside his cell. If he had not known better, he would have thought it a drowning mouse.
‘That was a remarkable show you gave us tonight,’ called Felix the Satyr from the adjacent cell.
‘Well, of course it was,’ Cal replied. ‘For I am the Empire’s finest gladiator.’
‘I am not talking about you, idiot,’ said Felix. ‘I am talking about the woman who has taken up residence in our barracks. Do you not see her there? You need only stand up and peer into the urn across from your cell.’
Cal stretched out on his bed and closed his eyes. In truth, he did not care if Venus herself had taken up residence across from his cell. All he wanted was a little rest before the arrival of his promised reward.
‘I hope she knows that she will not escape this ludus by cowering like a kitten all night,’ Felix mused. ‘If she is going to escape at all, she must leave while darkness reigns.’
There was a long silence and Cal was sure he heard another splash of water.
‘Why does she continue to conceal herself?’ mused Felix.
Because she is a Roman woman, thought Cal. And thus nourishes herself on the melodramatic.
Cal rubbed his bald head. When he had first caught sight of the woman that evening, he had half believed her an illusion—some vision of divinity foreshadowing his own death. In his three years at this ludus, he had never once seen a woman attend the pit fights and thus naturally assumed she had come for him—his personal escort to the Otherworld.
But the fights had gone exactly as planned. He had killed his first two opponents, then taken the fall, just as Brutus, his owner and trainer, had instructed. The governor granted mercy, just as Cal had been told he would, and the governor, Brutus and Brutus’s gold-toothed brother Oppius had all made large sums of denarii on the outcome. It had been business as usual at Ludus Brutus that night, with no chance of a trip to the Otherworld after all.
He should have known she was not divine. When he had glanced up at her that second time, he had noticed her appearance and it was about as far from divine as a woman could get. Her tunic was tattered, her expression was pinched and worried, and a distinct spatter of blood stained her shapely lower legs.
Though it was not her appearance that had finally convinced him of her mortality, it was what happened to her cheeks when she looked at him. A dark crimson hue had spread over the twin mounds and down her neck to the notch at its base. There, a tiny relentlessly pulsing drum of skin had betrayed her racing heart. He had been able to see it even from his position in the pit.
He never tired of witnessing it—the effect he had on Roman women. First came the blush, then the shudder, and then the look of fascinated derision, as if the woman were witnessing the incarnation of her darkest, most forbidden thoughts.
He was like a strange food from a foreign land: they all wanted to try a sample. And though this particular Roman woman was one of the loveliest he had yet seen, he was not so foolish as to let her stir his lust. Roman women were all alike in his experience. They were selfish, bored creatures who used gladiators like men used whores.
Pah! He had only a few nights left upon this earth. He did not wish to waste his thoughts on a Roman woman.
‘We are locked in our cells if that is what you are afraid of, sweetheart,’ called Felix. ‘And even if we were not locked in, you would have nothing to fear. Why not emerge from the urn where you are hiding and dry yourself? We promise not to watch. You see, we are honourable men.’
Still more silence. Then, finally, ‘You are not honourable men.’
It was as if she had spent the last few hours sharpening the words upon a whetstone.
‘We die to honour Rome, my dear,’ said Felix, his tone thick.
She pulled herself from the vessel with feline grace. ‘You die to honour profit.’
He craned his head and saw her shadowy figure lifting the skirt of her tunic and squeezing it back into the urn.
Felix cackled. ‘You wield your tongue as well as you do a gladius.’
‘And you wield your boasting as well as you do your deceit.’
Cal smiled to himself. Perhaps what she lacked in judgement she made up for in wit.
She jumped in place, apparently attempting to dry herself. Finally she drifted beneath the torchlight near Cal’s cell and he gave her a glance.
Her efforts to squeeze herself dry had been for naught. She was still dripping wet. Her large dark eyes blinked beneath thick, water-clumped lashes that glistened in the torchlight and played off her ebony hair, which had come loose from its braid in places in small, distracting spirals. Worse, the top of her threadbare tunic was soaked through, giving a full view of her breast wrap, which was itself so thin that he could see the dark shadows of her nipples beneath it.
He had never seen anything so erotic in all his life. Her big, blinking eyes, her bouncing curls, her small, shapely breasts and thinly veiled nipples: perhaps she was divine after all. Maybe she was the very naiad that had been painted on the urn itself, come to kiss him with her sultry lips.
Although those sultry lips were currently twisted into a Medusan scowl. ‘You deliberately succumbed to the Satyr,’ she accused Cal. She stepped forward and gripped the bars of Cal’s cell gate. ‘Do you deny it?’
Cal did not look her in the eye for fear he might turn to stone. ‘Do you not have some escaping to do?’ he asked.
‘I asked you a question.’ She folded her arms over her bosom and that was a shame. But he could still observe how her skirt clung tightly to the shape of her thighs. She was lovely, female and completely without defence. Did she not understand how quickly he was able to move? That he could simply jump to his feet, pull her body against the bars and have his way?
‘You say nothing because you know that I speak truth,’ she spat. ‘You deliberately succumbed to the Satyr, though it was obvious that you were the better fighter.’
Cal grinned. ‘Did you hear that, Felix?’ he called. ‘She said I am the better fighter.’
‘Rubbish,’ replied Felix.
‘Your second opponent had expected to die,’ she continued. ‘I saw him begging you for a merciful death.’
‘And I damn well gave it to him,’ he grumbled.
He did not wish to think of the Syrian’s death. The man had been a farmer, not a fighter. He had been purchased by Brutus only weeks ago—a field hand who had been put up for sale as a punishment for attempting an escape. He had not been a bad man—not like most of the gladiators who came in and out of Ludus Brutus. Still, the governor had decreed his death and the governor had to be obeyed.
‘So you admit it?’ she pressed.
‘Admit what?’
‘That you deceived everyone.’
Why were Roman women so unrelenting? ‘I admit nothing.’
‘The only true fight was the first one,’ she observed. ‘You relieved the Ox of his head with little effort.’ She pushed her face between the bars. ‘You lie there acting as if you are proud of your deception. They call you Beast, but in truth you are a snake.’
Ha! If only he were a snake. Then he could slither through the bars of his cell and devour her whole. Surely that would shut her up.
Her scowl deepened and he waited in dull irritation for her next accusation. Would she remind him of the gladiator’s sacred oath, perhaps? Or would she explain the Roman code of honour and then recite it for him ad nauseum while she shook her little plebeian finger at his nose?
‘You defied the gods,’ she spat.
‘Which gods? Whose?’
‘You ruined my father.’
‘Your father ruined your father.’ This was almost as diverting as swordplay.
‘I know that you are famous,’ she said. ‘I have heard your name at the baths and seen it scrawled in graffiti. Why would you deliberately destroy your own reputation by rolling beneath the Satyr’s blade?’
‘And what of my reputation?’ Felix called cheerfully. ‘Have you also heard it spoken at the baths?’
‘And mine?’ called another gladiator from down the hall.
But the woman paid the other gladiators no mind. She seemed bent on making Cal alone suffer.
‘Do you think I care a wink for my reputation?’ Cal asked mildly, but her scowl remained fixed, as if she had not heard him.
Typical. In his experience, Roman women never heard what they did not wish to hear, never did what they did not wish to do and rarely saw beyond their own toes.
She was staring down at her own toes now, as if they alone could tell her everything she wished to know about what had happened that night. ‘By the gods, it was all theatre!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘All of it! You were told to kill the German spectacularly and that is what you did. And the Syrian knew he was going to die before he even set foot upon the sands. Those first two bouts were designed for you to win the crowd’s favour so that they would call for mercy when the time came. Your lanista knew it. The ringmaster knew it…’
She gazed up at the stone ceiling, thinking, and Cal observed the elegant length of her neck. ‘Even the governor knew it! And the gold-toothed merchant—he knew it, too. That is why he smiled when you had the Satyr at the tip of your blade. He already knew you were going to lose.’
Cal did not know whether to be impressed or furious. He settled for a smirk. ‘You are remarkably perceptive for one so naive,’ he said.
‘I am not naive.’
‘Your denial of your own naivety is itself naive.’
‘You speak in knots. I assure you that I am quite the opposite of naive.’
‘And what is that exactly?’
She paused, searching the air, and he observed the fine cut of her jaw. ‘Un-naive.’
‘Your cleverness slays me.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You are clearly trying to distract from admitting to your deception.’
Her accusations were growing tedious. Fortunately, he knew how to shut her up. ‘And you are trying to distract from admitting that you wish to lie with me.’
The woman gasped. And there it was, that look of fascinated derision—though on her face it more closely resembled straightforward disgust. ‘That is absurd,’ she snapped, then added, ‘The very thought is an abhorrence.’
An abhorrence? Well, at least she was original. ‘I know you want me.’
‘I want nothing to do with you. You are a mon—’
She bit her lip.
‘A what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I know what you are thinking.’ You think me a monster.
‘You cannot read my thoughts,’ she said.
‘I know you are Roman and that is all I need to know.’
‘You know nothing about me.’
‘Nothing about you?’ His mind churned. ‘Let me see. You illegally shoved your way into a house of men. Only an innocent would be so stupid. You either have no brothers to act on your behalf, or if you do have a brother, he is useless.’
