Acco stopped reading, turned his sad, equine face to them, and said, “In the next days we’ll select ten of you to take part in the grand chariot-procession on the opening day, and these will be fitted out in our colors of vermilion and gold and”—he paused to swat drowsily at a fly, seemed to forget entirely what he had been saying, then plodded on—“I say, these will practice again and again the presentation of arms before the Emperor until they can do it without bringing shame upon this school.”
When Acco dismissed them, Sunia’s knees slowly gave way. Auriane caught her up just in time to break her fall, and they sat huddled together on the sand; Auriane held her tightly to her breast. She said nothing, struck mute by unsettling visions of her own past.
The Hall ever burns. Mother, you lie so still. I am weaponless, I cannot help you. I spent seasons and ages building round myself a wall of iron. Now the circle’s complete—and I find myself weaponless once more.
Thorgild stood over them. “Sunia, you shame our people.”
“Get off from us if you have no pity,” Auriane replied in a soft, warning tone. Thorgild did not move, keeping his punishing gaze on Sunia.
“I think you hate her, Thorgild,” Auriane said then, “only because you see your own terror reflected in her face as in a pool.”
Something swiftly, furtively, withdrew in Thorgild’s eyes; Auriane saw anger, disavowal, then spirit-fright there. He took a step back, then sullenly spun about and joined the other novices as they moved silently toward the dining chamber.
“Thorgild!” she called after, voice hoarse with pain. He did not turn round. Auriane suddenly had the sense her house broke apart.
Coniaric knelt by them in the dwindling light. “He acts the fool,” Coniaric said, nodding after Thorgild, “but he’ll make amends—do not bother over him.” He returned his gaze to Sunia. “What an unholy thing. They cannot be allowed to use her so.”
Their eyes met as they envisioned Sunia’s fate: With twenty-two other women novices she would take part in the reenactment of the massacre of the provisions women. The Chattian captives would defend the wagons against novices of the Claudian School, garbed as the men of the legions.
“If we could get her onto one of the morgue carts…,” Coniaric said in a low voice, casting a furtive eye about the yard.
It was Sunia who objected. “I would rather die in their stinking sand-pit than wander alone among this demon race.”
“She would not get farther than the gates, Coniaric.” Mustering a confident tone, Auriane said to Sunia, “I’ll go to Erato once more.”
She had little faith in these words as she spoke them. Earlier she had argued Sunia’s cause before Erato with no success, and it seemed now he had even less control over their fates. For now they were in the hands of the Imperial Procurator of the Games, the Palace official who arranged the spectacles at Domitian’s pleasure. If Sunia were removed, Erato would be obliged to pay into the Treasury an amount equal to her value or immediately replace her—and there was not time enough to train another woman. Erato had the usual anxieties of a man elevated above his station and was eager to prove his merit by doing everything with exaggerated correctness.
A guard snapped his whip. “You there. Move! This lash is thirsty for lazy blood.”
Coniaric hauled Sunia to her feet. Auriane took Sunia’s hand and pressed it to the sacred mold. Sunia gripped it tightly, drawing on its nether strength.
“Sunia! Trust in the power of my kin-luck. You will live. I swear by sun and moon, I will find a way.”
Further into that same night Auriane was taken to the west yard where Erato waited. The small, sandy expanse was lit with torches affixed to posts set out in the form of an ellipse. The single guard posted outside the door was a lifelong friend of Erato’s; he alone knew of these occasions. Erato feared he could not justify to the Finance Ministry all this time and attention lavished on one novice.
Auriane practiced in Samnite armor modified for her with a lighter shield. Erato judged this equipment most suitable for her—the double-edged short sword the Samnites carried more closely resembled the swords to which she was accustomed than did the Thracian swordsman’s long, curved blade. Auriane thought it unaccountable the Romans termed it armor, for all that shielded her from an enemy blade were the leather greave on the left leg, the arm guard on her sword arm, a plumed, richly decorated helmet and the oblong Samnite shield fashioned of wooden planks covered with bull’s hide. The chest was normally left exposed or covered inadequately by a short calfskin tunic such as Auriane wore. The people were not to be cheated of the sight of grievous mortal wounds.
Erato did not greet her; with brusque, angry movements he began to strap on his greaves, as if even these small acts took too much of his time. When he threw down his cloak, a collection of thin wax tablets fell out onto the sand.
Her eager question burst out before she could contain it. “You carry a library in your cloak. What is written there?”
He looked at her as if she asked the color of the sky. “A list of times for grain deliveries and of prices. Fascinating, no?”
“Your people leave nothing to memory. Your minds must be vastly empty.”
“Vastly empty, is it? Why am I listening to this? Listen to me, Auriane, we’ve grave matters to discuss. It seems someone at the Palace has a grudge against you. You’re to be matched with a man. A certain Perseus. I know him. He’s more than passingly good—he won his first bout handily.” Erato watched her face to see if she was properly alarmed by this, but she regarded him with soft, bold deer’s eyes, quietly waiting for more. It angered him.
“Overconfidence killed more fools than lack of skill,” he said irritably, fumbling angrily with the buckle of the arm guard. “It’s past time you learned respect for the dangers you face. Listen or perish.”
“When have I not fought men?” she asked.
“Not the same. I don’t care how many raids you led or how many fellow barbarians you slaughtered out in the woods. This is different. You’ve nothing to compare with this. Fighting someone in the forest wilderness and fighting a man who is cornered are as unlike as fire and water. There’s no one to back you up and cover you if you slip. There is no advantage of terrain to seek, nowhere to retreat to, and nowhere to hide, even if you are badly wounded. There will be only you and a man taller and stronger than you, who’s been trained exactly as you have been trained. A woman and a man—and fifty thousand people ready to crush you like a cockroach if you displease them. Now put aside that stubborn overconfidence and wake up before you find your entrails spilling out on the sand.”
She is hopeless or hopelessly mad, Erato thought. You would think I spoke of a contest of knucklebones.
“It is not meant to spite you. What you call overconfidence I call the grace of Fria.”
“The only goddess I honor is Victory and so should you. Now let me see your wrist.”
She extended her right hand and he lightly felt the wrist. “It’s still swollen slightly, but it’s better. Be careful with it in the next days. Don’t let anything strike it and do not lift anything. Now I’m going to give you a sword with a slightly heavier pommel to lighten the balance.” She took the sword from him; on this night their blades were fitted with leather guards.
Briskly he continued, “Tonight you’ll use a different strategy. I think you’ll find this Perseus, when you test him, will favor the first and second parries, and from what I’ve seen of him, I doubt he’ll vary them. Now, stand here.” He was aware of how attentively those soft gray eyes watched him, and he had the uncanny feeling that, in spite of her seeming compliance, she tolerated him only because his instructions happened to coincide with some secret design of her own.
“Good…. I will play the part of Perseus. Begin by feigning weakness. My guess is, with this man, it will be the right way to open. He’ll draw you out to see what makes you parry. He will be asking what you can do. And you must lie.”
He took a position oppos
ite her. “Start by limiting yourself to the first parry and the fundamental advance,” he went on, “and then wait. Let his confidence grow. Soon he’ll stop watching you so closely. Remember, too, you’ll be tiring him out—you’ll be facing a Thracian sword, and your man will be committed to broad, sweeping movements. Keep your parries narrow. Conserve your strength. And don’t thrust. Make him begin to wonder if you even know your weapon has a thrusting point. Save that for later. We’ll engage awhile, then I’ll cry out a signal. When I do, come at me as hard as you can. Spare me nothing. Come to kill. Do you understand?”
Calmly Auriane nodded. Aggravating wench, Erato thought. She almost looks bored by all of this.
What he had not told her was that he planned to teach her a lesson in humility. He meant to come for her at the same time, intending to catch her off guard with a vicious version of the vertical jump attack that he had perfected himself. It would probably knock her off her feet, and he hoped, awaken her to a healthy respect for the perils she faced.
They started sparring. She followed his instructions precisely. He let long moments pass, engaging her with an even rhythm that lulled them both with its monotony. Once he briefly reconsidered his plan, fearful he might injure her.
No. The lesson is too important.
Finally he shouted, “Now!”
From that instant, Erato’s plan went awry. He began his own lunge a fraction too late, so startled was he by the change in her face as she hurled herself at him. An exultant light flared in her eyes; she was transformed from woman to night predator, some remorseless hunter of men that might have risen from her own vaporous bog-lands. He remembered the shock of their shields’ impact. But he never did fully untangle the whip-quick succession of events that followed. Later he realized she used a maneuver Trebonius had taught her, but it was incorporated so smoothly into a series of baffling cross-cuts he could not believe she had been taught it but two days ago. These things demanded practice, and she had had no time. And she was ready for his upward thrust before he began it, forcing his blade down with a stroke so cleverly placed he felt a hammer blow drove it to the sand.
How had she known? She could not have known. He saw his sword intercepted and trapped; then her foot was where he least expected it—and he tripped and went down hard. This too, however, he deduced later; at the time it seemed he lunged at her only to find himself caught, entangled, then thrust downward by a subtly irresistible force. He was next aware of lying on his back, gasping for breath, looking up at a black sky, a ring of torches, and Auriane, who crouched over him.
Then he saw naked steel poised above his heart. Terror surged through him. Somehow she had managed to remove the leather guard.
This is a madwoman. She planned this well. Only one guard knows I’m here, and I ordered him not to interfere.
Auriane’s eyes were hot and liquid; her chest heaved.
“You must release Sunia,” she said through heaving breaths.
Gods, no, Erato thought, struggling to mentally regain his feet. This is too horrible and ludicrous at once.
“Auriane, you will destroy yourself. Let me up now.”
“You can buy her back. Do it!”
“Auriane,” he said carefully, as if quietening a dangerous animal, “lay down that sword like a sensible wench now, and get off of me.”
She looked at the sword then, and Erato saw a start of surprise in her eyes. He felt immense relief. She had not intentionally removed the guard; it had been knocked off accidentally. Quickly she tossed the sword aside. As his wits returned and his frozen blood began to warm, he realized her eyes were filled not with hatred but fierce sadness. Of course, Erato thought. She does not have a treacherous nature, but she does have a monumentally stubborn one.
She crawled sideways, giving him room to rise. Disgustedly he brushed sand from his hair and wiped tears from his sand-stung eyes.
“I warn you, don’t test me anymore on the matter. You know we’re short of women. Yesterday one of Aristos’ lust-maddened brigands skewered one of them with a spear, right in front of the guards—who looked the other way. And that one, on top of the four we lost to the quartan fever, makes five, five I’ve lost. I am not the Fates, Auriane. I did not bring her here.”
“Nor did she bring herself here. This is monstrous. Slavery is ignoble enough, but at least set her to tasks to which she is fitted. Help her!”
“Enough I say!” He kicked hard at the sand, throwing it high in the air. She whirled away, shielding her eyes. “Remember where you are. Surrender to fate, you little fool, it is all a man or a woman can do. You will not speak of this again!”
She accepted then that he would never bend. Though he seemed a king in his kingdom, he was, in the end, the creature of others. She would have to find some other way.
When Erato saw surrender in her eyes, his anger eased away. “Auriane,” he said finally, cautious awe creeping into his voice, “a moment ago when you threw me,…how did you know in advance what I was going to do?”
“I watched you.”
“You watched me? What did you watch?”
“Your gestures, your eyes, your hands. I do not know exactly. Even your anger told me many things. And…there is something else, for which I do not know the word in your language.”
“Try. Sorcery? Witchery? Second sight?”
She frowned. “No. A knowing. A knowing that feels certain.”
“I don’t like this, I tell you.”
“But it does not come always—I cannot summon it.”
“Once is too often. I give no credence to such things,” he said, while discreetly making the sign for protection against the evil eye. “What you did was impossible. Therefore, there must be an explanation for it. Now we’re going to walk through this, step by step, and you’re going to show me exactly what it was you did.”
Privately he thought, by Charon’s eyes, after this night I set no limits on what this strange creature can do.
The next night in the dining chamber Auriane’s attention was caught by a certain kitchen slave, visible through the open door as he sat chopping onions. She had seen him before, but now she tensed with interest as she watched him. He was powerfully built, and had suffered some grievous injury to his knee. The man always seemed out of place to her—most of the school’s kitchen slaves were slender Syrian youths or maids. She got up from her place and sat beside Celadon.
“What happened to that man?” she asked him. “Do you know anything of him?”
He followed her gaze and laughed genially. “I’ll wager you’ve Greek blood in your veins—I’ve never known a barbarian so astir with curiosity. That one there, that’s Pylades. He’s a lucky fellow, happy as a mudlark, I would say. He was a novice who got himself too badly cut up his first time out. He’ll never walk again, much less fight, so they put him in the kitchens. Now his only tears are over onions.”
Auriane was greatly surprised. The guards would have them believe such unfortunates were thrown to the animals, but that made little sense now that she considered it carefully, for these were a practical people—why would they waste a useful pair of hands?
“Auriane,” Celadon said, moving protectively close. “You plan some mischief. I pray to good Diana you tread cautiously.”
She gave him a bare smile of acknowledgment, then turned to look at Sunia, who sat without eating, her cheeks shadowed, her eyes full of death. Sunia, she wondered, would you be content working in the kitchens?
Fria had at last granted her a way.
The city prepared to embrace the coming Games like a long-absent lover. Most people’s first thought upon arising, whether they lived in a stifling tenement room between a brazier and a chamber pot or in marble halls amid the splash of fountains, was—how many days remain? For too many generations the common people of Rome had been allowed no hand in governing, and their state religion had long since mummified into dry rituals that never touched ordinary passions. It was inevitable, proclaimed the dour schola
rs of the philosophical schools, that the Colosseum would become their chief temple and the fortunes of gladiators would be watched as closely as the rise and fall of nations. In streets and taverns, talk of the war with Dacia rarely brought more than a halfhearted response—it might be amusing if Domitian bungled another war, their shrugs said, so long as the barbarians did not actually swarm over the frontier and sack Roman towns. But the Emperor’s grand blunders, diverting as they were, could never hope to rivet the attention as much as the coming spectacle of Aristos, their own King, and Hyperion of Capua, the Beast of the South, bent on carving out each other’s hearts.
And their lover, the Games, teased them unmercifully. Every day the notice-writers made their rounds; wherever they could find space on the walls of public buildings they posted that day’s amended list of the gladiators who were to appear. And every day they failed to add the one name all longed to see—Aristos. Wherever the notice-writers set up their ladders, they were surrounded by an ardent crowd. The people cheered when the name of a favorite appeared and shouted abuse when the notice-writers climbed down without writing the name of the favorite of favorites. The appointed day drew maddeningly close—and still, no Aristos. When but nine days remained, a notice-writer plying his trade in the fly-ridden Subura district was murdered by a testy mob clamoring for Aristos. It was well known that Aristos had recovered from the injuries he sustained in his last bout with his archrival Hyperion. With so many noblewomen praying for his recovery, it was often said, he had no choice. For what perverse reason was he withheld?
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