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A small cringe. A glance at the ground.
‘Ah, so you do have a useless brother,’ he continued gleefully, ‘and his very mention causes you pain. Probably returned from one of Domitian’s foolish campaigns? A drunkard, perhaps?’
Her pink lips pressed into a thin red line.
‘Your father, too, is useless, for he is the kind of man who must be followed by his own daughter to the pits. He has plunged your family into ruin, has he not? And you pity yourself mightily for it. Pah! You are fortunate he has not sold you into servitude.’
Her face turned an unnatural shade of grey.
Had her father sold her into servitude?
‘I curse you,’ she spat suddenly. ‘I curse you and this ludus and everyone in it, but you most of all.’
He spouted a laugh—a hearty, deep-throated laugh that nearly split his chest wound. He swung his legs to the side of his bed and stood, watching her take in the sight of him. He had not washed or changed out of his fighting kilt and the bloody paint on his chest had caked and crusted into what he imagined was some nightmarish rainbow.
She stepped backwards as he approached the bars. ‘I have never had the pleasure of being cursed by a Roman woman,’ he continued. He swept her body with his eyes. ‘I think I rather enjoy being cursed.’
‘Then I curse you a thousand times, Beast of Britannia. Whatever you long for, may it be as sand through your fingers. Whatever your dream, may it turn to dust.’
He had to grip his stomach so as not to howl. ‘Such poetry! But before you go on, I am afraid I must tell you that you cannot curse me, for I am already doomed.’
‘Doomed?’ She glanced around his cell, then scolded him with her gaze. ‘You are one of the finest gladiators in Rome. You are worth as much as twenty common slaves. Your bed is perched two cubits off the ground, by the gods! I will not hear about your supposed doom.’
‘You do not believe me?’
‘Why will you not admit to your wrongdoing? You wronged every single man in that crowd tonight. You wronged Rome.’
No, he had to stop her there.
‘I wronged Rome? Rome that invaded my land and burned my fields?’ He let out a savage laugh. ‘Rome that raped my tribe’s women and sent its men off to the Quarry of Luna?’ He continued to laugh, though his wound had begun to throb. ‘Do you know what it is like in the Quarry of Luna? If you cut less than ten cubits a day you are whipped. Less than five and they remove a toe.’ He continued to laugh, feeling his wound begin to split. He could not seem to stop.
He lifted his foot to show her his missing digits, laughing harder. ‘I dug for worms each morning to fill my stomach. My flesh baked in the sun each day and then froze in the wind each night. And I wronged Rome? Ha!’ His laughter was crazed, like the laughter of a hyena, but he could not make it cease. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ He doubled over, feeling the warmth of leaking blood down his side.
And then suddenly he was drowning.
Chapter Three (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)
He choked and coughed as the cold water poured over his head and dribbled down his limbs. Already there was a pool of it expanding at his feet. The woman had apparently discovered the dipping pot and he watched in horror as she slung it over the lip of the urn for another filling.
‘What…? Why…?’ he sputtered.
‘Your wound. It has not been properly cleaned.’
He peered down at the long diagonal gash across his chest and felt another assault of cold water. ‘Cease!’ he hissed and watched in horror as she returned to the urn for yet another potful.
She approached the bars. Mercifully, she did not give him a third dousing. Instead, she set down the pot and studied the wound. She reached out and touched the skin of his stomach.
A shiver rippled through him, followed by an uncomfortable heat. He grabbed her wrist. ‘What in the name of Erebus do you think you are doing?’
‘Be still,’ she commanded. ‘I am merely assessing the depth of the wound.’ Ignoring his grip, she gently traced the skin around the gash with her other hand. Her audacity was stunning, but her fingers were like soft wax. Their touch sent an unexpected pang of sadness through him.
Fifteen years. That’s how long it had been. Fifteen years since the last time a woman had touched him without the expectation of bedding him. That woman had been his yellow-haired wife.
‘There is sand within the wound that will bring infection,’ she explained. ‘Take this in your mouth.’ She pushed the thick, tasselled end of her tunic belt into his grip. ‘Now bite down. This may hurt a bit.’
There was no time for protest. There was only exquisite, burning pain as he bit down and felt her fingernail razor into his soft flesh. ‘Ugh,’ he groaned.
‘Just a little bit of sand…’ she crooned.
He bit down harder, envisioning certain forms of torture.
‘I fear there is some dirt lodged very deep,’ she said, absently picking a tiny metal hairpin from her braid. She held the pin to her lips and bent it taut with her teeth.
It might have been her proximity. Or it might have been the unusual shapeliness of her lips. Or it might have been the fact that he had just survived an excruciating amount of pain and was savouring its absence. But watching her bend that hair clip was the most deliciously sensual thing he had ever seen a woman do.
Then she plunged the terrible instrument deep into his wound. ‘Ah!’ he shouted.
Across the hall, Felix was laughing. ‘What? Is the Empire’s greatest gladiator crying?’
‘Piss off, Goat-Man!’ shouted Cal.
‘Not much longer now,’ she assured him, probing deeper.
He twisted his body in agony. ‘I did not ask for this.’
‘No, but you must have it if you wish to survive.’
Survival was not exactly the plan.
‘Hold this,’ she said, handing him the hairpin. She lifted the pot and gave him a final dousing.
He gasped for air and for something to say: something scathing and clever, something that would burrow beneath her skin as painfully as she had just burrowed beneath his. But the words did not come and all he could do was stare as she began to dab the wound with her handkerchief.
Her face was lovely in the torchlight. Haunting brown eyes and ruddy red cheeks. Eyebrows so high up her forehead they looked painted. For all her vitriol, her appearance was bright. Cheerful, even. The colour of her skin reminded him of well-fermented beer.
‘I wish I had some dried yarrow,’ she said. She was dabbing his wound with a strange reverence. ‘My mother used to keep some on her night shelf to help mend my father’s wounds.’ Her eyes searched his cell. ‘Ah! I know what we can use.’ She pointed over his shoulder to the distant corner of his cell. ‘Do you see it?’
Cal studied the dark corner, wondering if the woman had lost her wits. ‘Just there,’ she said. She was nodding her head, full of certainty. ‘The spider’s web.’
‘A spider’s web?’
‘You must fetch it for me.’
‘Are you mad?’
‘I am trying to help you.’
‘I did not ask for your help,’ he said.
‘And I did not ask to be…’ She bit her lip, stared at the floor.
Enslaved. That is what she wanted to say, but she could not find the courage to voice it. How could he deny her anything, knowing that she had been condemned to such a life?
He sighed and found himself crossing to the corner of his cell and gazing down at a fine silken temple shining beneath the torchlight. At the temple’s edge, a large black weaver posed regally. ‘How should I…collect it?’ he asked.
‘Just wave your palm through the web gently and gather it on your hand. Do not take it all, lest you incur Arachne’s wrath.’
Cal did as instructed, giving a nod of reverence to the tiny creature whose sanctuary he had just harvested. Reverence for all creatures big and small. It was what the white-robed Druids had taught him in his youth.
He returned to her with the silken prize and was no less fascinated watching her ball up the strands and stuff them into his wound. Why was she helping him? He did not understand it at all. Nor did he have the heart to tell her that her effort was pointless.
‘My mother used spider webs on my father’s wounds, as well,’ she explained. ‘It is an old Greek remedy. My mother is Greek, you see.’
Pride lurked beneath her words. Cal knew that the Romans despised the Greeks in the manner of a jealous younger sibling.
‘Is your father Greek?’
‘No, I am afraid he is as Roman as they come. Born in Pompeii and left before Vesuvius blew. Lucky him. Though he could not escape the wounds of war…and now, I suppose, of peace.’
‘Was your father often wounded?’
She nodded. ‘After he returned from military service he became a lictor for a new aedile here in Ephesus. The young mayor had as many enemies as he had gold auris and my father was paid to protect him. I was always so worried for my father back then. Pah! I had no idea what worry was.’
She pursed her lips, and Cal sensed her trying to stifle her emotion. If there had been any doubt in his mind that she had been sold into servitude, it was washed away by the small tear he watched leak from her eye and trace a path down her cheek.
Without thinking, he pressed his finger to her skin and caught it.
She blinked, stared up at him.
His stomach tightened. He realised that he wanted to kiss her.
‘There,’ she said with finality and her deep blush told him that she had felt it, too—whatever it had been that had just passed between them.
Lust, he told himself. Simple, physical lust, born of the fact that he had not enjoyed a woman’s company in months. But that would be remedied—and very soon, thank the god Gwydion.
The woman stepped away from him and he was glad of it. If she had not, he might have taken one of those small, coiling curls of hair and wrapped it around his finger. He might have made the mistake of reaching through the bars, catching her by the waist and pulling her close enough to drink the tiny bead of water that had lodged itself in the small crevasse of her shapely upper lip.
He might have violated one of his most important rules: never to kiss a woman.
‘It will heal quickly,’ the woman was saying, nodding confusedly at his wound. In truth, the gash already felt much better.
‘I am in debt to you,’ he said. Not that the debt would ever be repaid. Not that any of this mattered at all. A dressed wound was of no benefit to a man whose days were numbered.
‘I suppose you are in my debt,’ she said. It was just the sort of thing a Roman woman loved to say and he knew what came next. ‘So tell me, how will you pay it?’
Reflexively, his eyes slid down the length of her. Curses. What was the matter with him? ‘I do not know,’ he said.
‘Why not tell me the truth as payment?’ she asked. The woman was like a dog with a bone. ‘Why did you agree to take the fall tonight? Tell me, I beg you.’
‘Because of a woman.’ There, he had said it. Surely it would be enough to put her off.
But she only frowned. ‘I do not understand.’
He could tell that she wanted him to confess totally. But if there was one thing he held sacred in this wretched world it was the memory of his wife and he was not about to cheapen it by admitting how much he missed her, or what he planned to do to honour her memory. ‘I took the fall for a woman and that is all I am going to say. I do not expect you to understand.’
‘Come now, you must do better than that, Briton.’
Briton. She might as well have called him a butter eater or a beer guzzler.
‘I am not a Briton,’ he said through his teeth.
‘Not a Briton? But you are called the Beast of Britannia, are you not?’ There was the Roman arrogance again. It rankled him.
‘That is what you Romans like to call me, because you know nothing about the lands you call Britannia.’
‘Are you a Briton then?’ she asked. His stomach twisted into a knot.
‘I hail from the island that the Romans call Britannia, yes. But I am not “a Briton” as you say.’
‘So what are you?’
I am a Caledonii warrior, proud and true, and I cannot trust you to ever respect that.
‘Do you wish to escape this ludus or not?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Because if you are here arguing with me when the guards arrive, I promise that they will have you for breakfast. You are a slave now and your body is no longer your own.’
She looked at him as if he had just slapped her face. ‘Yes, I know that you have been sold into slavery,’ he continued, ‘and by your own wretched father no less. Now listen to me. You have no more legal protection now and your security depends on the whims of men who regard you little better than a vase of flowers.’ There were tears at the edges of her eyes and he knew that he had put them there.
‘Do you not see that I am trying to help you? Get tough, woman. Toughness is the only thing that will serve you now.’ Along with a dose of humility. ‘You have one chance to escape this ludus and that chance will come very soon, when a group of guards will open the door to the barracks to bring us our rewards.’
‘Rewards?’
‘You must hide yourself behind the door as it opens and, as soon as the group passes through it completely, you must slip out the door and run, do you hear? As fast as you can. Then you must find your way back to your new master and beg his forgiveness. You must do this all in haste, lest you be caught by a slave catcher on your way.’
She shook her head and he could sense the mix of anger and panic at war inside her mind. It was illegal for a pater familias to sell his children into slavery, but few paid attention to such rules outside Rome. She was as doomed as he was now, though she had no idea what that meant. Yet.
She was studying the floor again. ‘And do not even think about trying to escape into the wilds,’ he continued. ‘You cannot live for ever off wild berries and grass. Believe me, for I have tried. You will be caught eventually and your new master will be forced to pay for your return. Ask yourself if a few days of starving in the wilderness is worth your master’s name tattooed across your forehead.’
That was the punishment for most escaped slaves, after all, though he could tell that she had not appreciated the reminder. ‘I curse you,’ she whispered.
‘That again? It is the Empire of Rome you should be cursing, my dear, for it consumes us all.’
And he was done with it.
No more selling his soul for some elusive hope of escape. No more doing the bidding of his cursed lanista, Brutus, who valued gold and silver over flesh and bone. It was true that Brutus could control where Cal ate and lay and pissed, could decide when Cal was beaten and when he was bedded, could even control how often Cal was allowed to lift his face to the sun. But there was one thing Brutus could not control—the moment in five days’ time when Cal would choose to die.
There was the sound of creaking hinges as the barracks door began to open The woman froze in terror. ‘Get tough,’ he told her. ‘Now go!’
Chapter Four (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)
