by Albert Noyer
“Stay here? Where are they, in the clinic?”
“In bathhouse, Master.”
“My bathhouse? Why would you let them in there? Never mind, I’ll go.” Annoyed at the intrusion, Getorius stalked through the corridor past the furnace room to a side entrance. When he entered the tepidarium room, he saw two well-built men lounging in the warm water. A completely nude, muscular woman sat on the edge of the pool, scraping her oiled thigh with a curved bronze strigil. He was stunned to recognize the gladiatrix, Giamona, and instinctively clutched his left arm. Christ! Her friend lost the arm and she’s come to take a tooth for a tooth, or rather an arm for an arm!
After Giamona looked up, she chuckled at his stare of surprise. “What’s the matter, Surgeon, you’ve seen tits before, haven’t you? Mine aren’t very big, but they’re the last nice thing a lot of men in the arena saw before they went to meet whatever god they believed in.”
“Forget your tits, Gia,” one of the men called over gruffly. “Now that the bone-cutter is back, we got more important things to do.”
“Ita,” she agreed. Her look of amusement vanished. “Surgeon, Tigris is waiting for you at our camp. Bring all the medical instruments you have.”
“I knew that his arm could only get worse. He shouldn’t have bolted from me that day—”
“We’re losing furcing time!” Giamona snapped. “Get what you’ll need.”
The two men heaved themselves out of the pool to towel water off their bodies and dress. When Getorius came back with his medical case, Giamona was wiping her legs and feet dry. He saw the ugly white scars on her arms, upper chest, and the curve of one breast. Her remark about men she had fought in the arena was not an exaggerated boast. Undoubtedly the gladiatrix had killed opponents.
“Tigris’s arm didn’t heal well,” Giamona said, picking a narrow cloth band off the bench where she had left her tunic. “That’s why he needs you.”
“I warned him. The damage was severe.”
“You did what you could. Tigris shouldn’t have run, but his fear was different from the one he feels facing an opponent on the sand.” She wrapped the band around her breasts, then slipped a short tunic over her head and arranged a hair net on short blond curls.
She’s attractive in a sort of hard, muscular way, Getorius thought, and certainly healthier looking than the prostitutes who work the street by the Theodosius Gate.
“Ah, where is this gladiator camp of yours?” he asked after Giamona looked back at him.
“Where’s your woman?” she hedged, bending to lace a sandal cord around her ankle.
“In Lauretum Palace. Leudovald arrested her.”
“The bastard. He’s been trying to track down our camp…” She gave the lace a final tug and straightened up. “Arrested her for what?”
“I’d rather not say just now, but it was a mistake. Look, Giamona. Am I going to fight Tigris, or treat his arm?”
“Treat him.”
“Then it would be better if he came here, where I have the proper implements.” Getorius avoided mentioning anything about amputating the limb, although he felt sure the woman realized it might be necessary.
“I told you to get what you need.” Giamona turned to the two men, who had finished dressing. “He’ll tell you what to bring with us.”
“Leudovald said I could take clothing to Arcadia.”
“Her house slave can do that, and also tell her that you went somewhere to treat a patient. Let Bellelus know what you want.”
After Getorius directed the man in packing a small surgical saw, scalpels, cotton dressings, and a cauterizing iron, he went to tell Childibert that Brisios should take the clothes Silvia selected, together with some food, to Arcadia.
Giamona led the way to a narrow alley off the Via Honorius. A boy held the reins of two horses which were harnessed to a wagon with enclosed wooden sides and a door to admit passengers. Its curved top was covered in heavy waxed sailcloth.
“Go home,” she ordered the child, tossing him a bronze coin. “Bellelus will drive. Surgeon, sit in back.”
As Getorius climbed in, he saw the second man walk on through the alleyway. “Isn’t he coming with us?”
Giamona ignored his question to call up to Bellelus, “Get us there by sunset.”
Getorius helped her up through the door. Arcadia’s perfumed oil on the woman’s body made her smell teasingly like his wife. When Giamona sat opposite him on the leather seat, her short tunic revealed more scars on her legs, white against the tanned skin. He reached to push aside a curtain over the window on his right side, to see where they were going.
Giamona pulled his hand away and looked hard into his eyes. “Leave it covered.” Getorius shrugged and sat back, with the medical case on his lap. She’s keeping the location of this camp secret. In a moment he heard the wheels clatter through the alleyway and onto paving stones, then felt the wagon sway and himself being squeezed against the right side. Turning left onto the Honorius. We could be going to the Via Popilia and either Bononia or Arminum, or out the Theodosius Gate. Bononia, the next large town north along the Popilia, had been known for its gladiatorial games before the ban.
When Getorius heard the vendors’ shouts and breathed the mingled smells of the market square at the Via Theodosius, yet did not feel the carriage turn in, he knew they were headed for the Porta Aurea and the Popilia. He had lost all sense of time in the confusion after disembarking from the galley—Arcadia’s arrest, the report of Thecla’s imprisonment, this unexpected appearance of Giamona and her companions. The drawn curtains dimmed the light inside the carriage, but he guessed it was around the ninth hour. If so, there were another three hours until sunset, and a fairly long twilight, but Bononia was a good fifty miles inland from Ravenna. Arminum, on the coast, was at least thirty. The camp would have to be closer, within a ten-mile distance, probably along some little-used trail that led into the Pines.
Getorius fidgeted with the cover of his medical case. The prospect of amputating a putrefying limb alone was not a pleasant one, even less so if done in a camp of renegade, possibly hostile, gladiators.
And neither Arcadia nor anyone else knew where he had gone.
Forum Livii
Chapter thirteen
Early afternoon cart traffic on the road was light. The heavy wagon swayed along the paving stones to the clomping of horses’ hooves, a jingle of harness equipment, and the creaking of leather straps.
Getorius noticed that, despite the jostling, Giamona had settled back to doze. He slowly pushed the curtain aside and looked out at marshes swollen by winter rains, where wildfowl were returning to establish nesting sites. A few hunters with nets were standing at pond edges, trying to snare ducks. Glancing to the far right, he noticed the buildings of Maximin’s chicken farm shimmering in the glare of the afternoon sun, and recalled that the Villa of the Red Rooster was where the Hibernian abbot had been found dead in a supposed accident. A case strapped to his body had contained the apocalyptic charter of a fanatic sect named the Gallican League. Had they disbanded after the abbot’s death?
He thought of Arcadia. It’s the wrong time to be away from her. Leudovald already knows about the counterfeit ‘Valentinians,’ since he recognized the three in her purse. When he questions her, she’ll have to tell him where they were found. That will move the suspicion onto Virilo and Maximin, but Leudovald will go after the galleymaster before implicating a powerful senator.
Getorius pushed the curtain open further. Now the marshes had receded and he was surrounded by level farmland of a peculiar yellow-colored earth. Newly plowed fields, whose furrows glittered with pools of standing rain, were dotted with tile-roofed stone buildings of the same ochre hue. In a few farmsteads where vineyards were planted, high trelliswork supported the pink-budded gray canes. In others, orchards of almond and plum trees were in bloom, their pink blossoms mimicking sunlit patches of winter snow on the Apennine Mountain foothills in the far distance.
Lining the sides
of the road, tall greening poplar trees and dark cypresses were the only vertical elements on a horizon that looked as flat as that of the Adriatic Sea. Getorius inhaled the clean smell of plowed earth and the blossoms’ perfume—a welcome change from the stench of Ravenna’s sewers.
The wagon jolted, and Giamona started awake. Getorius dropped the curtain back in place. Her body had slid down on the seat until her knees touched his. She had not put on a loincloth; with her tunic hiked up, he noticed her pubic blondeness and felt an involuntary stirring in his loins. The woman straightened, tugged her tunic lower, and moved the curtain aside to look out the window.
Getorius wondered if it was the glamor—if that was the correct term—of her profession, that made him find her closeness arousing, despite his concern about Arcadia.
Giamona might not be willing to tell him where they were going, but several hours of total silence would be unbearable. To add to the discomfort of the lurching ride, his head ached, his throat was still raw, and his nose was running. Trying to suppress his sniffling, he decided to try and start a conversation.
“Giamona isn’t a Roman name, is it?”
“Celtic.” She did not glance away from the landscape.
“Does it have a meaning in that language?”
Giamona turned to look at him with eyes that were as blue as the late April sky outside. “I was named after one of our months. Some say the first summer one, or the first month of winter. At those seasons you can find either the blue color of gentian blossoms, or of lake ice.”
“I see.” Named for the color of her eyes. I opt for ice at the moment. “How…how do you gladiators survive, now that the contests are illegal?”
The blue eyes flashed contempt. “You’ll be paid your fee, Surgeon.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that it must be difficult for you.”
“We manage.”
“Do you use actual weapons? Short swords, tridents, and the like?”
Giamona straightened her legs and hiked the tunic back up to show her scars. “Do these look like they were made by wooden swords? Did Tigris’s slash?”
“Of course not,” he mumbled. “A stupid question.” Getorius decided to keep quiet before he made a total fool of himself with this obstinate blue-eyed woman warrior.
The farm villas and their cultivated fields became sparser, replaced by a forest of oak and pine that stretched to the west until the trees disappeared into the golden haze of foothills.
After jolting along in silence for a time, Getorius risked another question. “Have you considered fighting with blunted weapons? Putting on exhibitions? That might be legal.”
Giamona flipped the curtain over the window again, then tucked her legs beneath herself, leaned against the wagon side, and closed her eyes without answering.
So much for helpful ideas. Getorius lay back, feeling feverish now, and aware that his stress had been exacerbated by fatigue. The combination had probably brought on his body’s wet humor imbalance. Can I trust that Giamona isn’t lying about Tigris? I’m being taken to an undisclosed location, by an uncooperative woman, to treat an untreatable wound, or perhaps take part in an unwinnable contest.
A rough careening of the wagon shook Getorius awake. He glanced at Giamona. She was still asleep, so he chanced looking outside again. Roadside trees now cast blue shadows, and the sun had lowered to about three finger-widths above the Apennine crests. Bellelus had turned off into a narrow path that was rutted from the spring rains, and overgrown with newly sprouted weeds. The wagon passed the yawning ruins of an abandoned walled villa. Its entrance gate hung off the hinges, marked by a sign painted with a crude skull and the warning, PESTILENCIA.
At another jolt, Giamona stirred and glanced out her window. “We’re here. Bellelus made good time.”
“That ruined villa back there. Is there plague?” Getorius asked.
“Intruders don’t stay around long enough to find out.”
One good way to insure privacy. This must be where her troupe hides out.
The path led through a grove of trees that screened an open space a short distance on. In the center of the clearing, a sunken hollow had been enlarged into an arena set with wooden benches on opposite slopes. Two wooden barracks, deteriorated, but with covered porches like the ones in the legion camp at Ravenna, were at the far end, in the first shadows of a dense pine forest that continued on behind them. A few women tended children, while others cooked the evening meal over open fires near a butchered deer hanging from a branch.
Several men were in the arena, watching three contestants who seemed ready to stage a mock fight.
Giamona scowled. “What the furc…one of them is Sabatis. He’s on my team, but who are those two strangers? Spies?”
Sabatis was armed with an arm and shoulder guard, a blunted practice trident, and a rope net, and was facing a pair of brawny, dark-skinned men who confronted him with padded lances.
“Stop here, Bellelus,” Giamona ordered. She jumped from the door and called out, “Pluto’s Prick, Sabatis, who are they?”
He looked toward her. “Numidians from around Carthage. Got away before the Vandals made them slaves.”
“Are they any good? Why aren’t they using shields?”
“Didn’t want them. I thought I’d give them some retiarius… ‘netter’…experience. They’re lance-horsemen.”
“Sabatis, give me your net and trident.” Giamona gave a throaty chuckle. “Let’s see if they’re man enough to stick me.”
The Numidians laughed. Getorius guessed they understood enough Latin to catch the sexual pun, but undoubtedly it was the thought of a woman challenging them that spawned their amusement.
“Gia,” Sabatis protested, “my arm and shoulder protectors are too big for you.”
“Shit, we’re only playing. Help me put them on.”
Sabatis slipped the leather bands over Giamona’s left arm and hand. The top end was fixed with a curved bronze plate, so the woman could duck down behind it and protect her head from a sword stroke.
“Galea?” the Numidian asked, patting his helmet.
“A ‘netter’ doesn’t wear a helmet,” she replied. “And I’m not using a dagger in this game either.”
After she pulled the top of her tunic down below her breasts, Giamona undid the retaining band and retied it around her waist, then crouched low, net and trident at the ready position.
One of the men spoke to the other in Berber, then turned to Sabatis and said in accented Latin, “We not fight woman.”
Giamona heard him and flipped the spear he was holding out of his hand with her trident. The other gladiators laughed, but the second tribesman scowled and leveled his own lance at her.
She grinned. “Good, you have spirit. What’s your name?”
“He said it was Aspar,” Sabatis told her.
“Well, Aspar,” she taunted, “how about a lesson in what a Celtic woman can do besides screw you senseless?”
While she was talking, Giamona had used feints with the trident to maneuver her opponent around until the low sun was at her back, and in his eyes. As Aspar crouched, squinting, with the padded point of his lance leveled at her, she let her rope net unfold to the ground and kicked it behind her. A novice intent on avoiding the three deadly prongs of a trident often forgot that the entangling mesh was there. She would use that knowledge, the distraction of her breasts, and the sun’s brightness to overcome the advantage of Aspar’s long spear. Even padded, it could inflict a disabling injury.
Bending forward to make herself as small a target as possible, Giamona kept her three-pronged weapon at the level of Aspar’s throat. She knew he would be impatient to make the first move, both to avenge the ridicule he had heard when she challenged his manhood, and to move out of the sun’s glare. Her trident thrusts at Aspar’s neck kept him in position, yet she knew her advantage of sunlight was only for a short time longer, and his lance was almost twice as tall as she was. She provoked him with
a quick jab that scraped the Numidian’s shoulder.
Squinting at the brightness in his eyes, Aspar clenched his teeth and thrust out at her with his lance. Giamona side-stepped, caught the long handle between the prongs of her weapon, and pushed it into the ground in a spray of sand. He easily pulled it out and repeated the maneuver several times, but Giamona kept deflecting the weapon away from her body, and teased his groin with flicks of the net.
The man’s companion was calling out to him in Berber, what sounded like mockery. Aspar’s nostrils were flared from frustration, and sweat glistened on his blue-black skin.
Getorius realized that Giamona’s tactics were to spare the man direct attack, but goad him into a reckless move. Since he had decided to not use a shield, she could easily have disarmed him by sliding the trident up the lance shaft and into his hand.
Aspar tried another strategy. Feinting with his usual thrust, suddenly he crossed over his hands and swung the lance sideways, to his opponent’s right. The unexpected blow hit Giamona on the shoulder and staggered her around until she was facing the low sun, but instead of following through, the Numidian only stood grinning at his success.
Fool. Giamona’s ice-blue eyes were expressionless as they fixed on his brown ones. Time to end the game. Now that he thinks he’s found my weakness, his next swing will be twice as hard. If that shaft hits me in the head, Bellelus and Sabatis will have to perform as a duo. After my funeral.
A slight movement of Aspar’s eyes betrayed his imminent blow. When his lance flailed to the right again, Giamona caught it in the prongs of the trident and pushed it up, away from her head. At the same instant her other hand swung the net out toward Aspar’s legs. As his limbs became entangled in the mesh, she jerked the rope toward her. He tumbled heavily to the sand. Before his eyes had lost their look of surprise, she had thrust the trident at his neck, to feint a kill, then stepped back.
Giamona noticed the other Numidian applauding her move, along with her comrades. Good. She wanted fighters who respected their opponents, not those whose pride or recklessness made them underestimate the skills of the other contestants. She decided not to further injure Aspar’s pride by extending a hand to help him up, and went over to his companion instead.
