Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  The Nubian guard placed a cautionary hand on Lucius’s forearm.

  ‘Watch out for this one,’ he said in a low tone. ‘He’s a rebellious shit, doesn’t like to do what he’s told. I’ve beaten him black and blue and he still refuses to submit. He’ll stick a knife in your back the first chance he gets, so be warned.’

  Lucius slapped the guard’s leather-armoured back with cheerful glee.

  ‘Thank you for the warning, friend! I’ll keep my eye on him. Don’t worry about me though; I’ve broken far more stubborn savages than this one.’

  The guard nodded coolly, keeping his eyes on the slave and looking somewhat unconvinced.

  ‘Does he have a name of his own?’ Lucius asked.

  ‘These things lose their names when they lose their freedom,’ Sextus said with a roll of his eyes and a frown of disapproval. ‘You know this well enough. Why do you ask? Give him whatever name pleases you. He’s your property now.’

  ‘I find that it makes them more trusting of you and willing to obey if you let them retain their pre-slave names.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Sextus sighed. He turned to the Gaul and muttered a question.

  The Gallic slave turned and fixed Lucius’s gaze with a barbed, defiant stare.

  ‘Viridovix,’ he said, his deep voice ringing out loud and clear over the clamour of the marketplace.

  ‘Viridovix,’ Lucius repeated, nodding slowly and grinning with satisfaction. ‘I like it. Come, Viridovix,’ he instructed. ‘Follow me.’

  The two of them set off through the crowded streets, with Viridovix shuffling behind Lucius as the thin man strode eagerly on ahead.

  ‘This way!’ Lucius barked as he turned and headed down a narrow alley, and then stepped into a wooden building. Inside, the walls and shelves were lined with an impressive array of exotic weaponry. Various suits of armour, mostly foreign, were mounted and displayed on crude mannequins.

  ‘Ramses, you Egyptian dog!’ Lucius called out in a gleeful tone as a chubby middle-aged man shuffled out of a back chamber. His bald head, slick with perspiration, gleamed and glistened like the skin of some sea creature, freshly dredged from the ocean depths, in the light given off from the dozens of candles that illuminated his shop.

  ‘Lucius, my friend!’ he rasped, his voice hoarse and gravelly, with a distinctly foreign lilt to it. ‘Welcome, welcome. Here to outfit another of your hopefuls?’

  His large, bovine eyes sat in sausage-thick eyelids, squeezed, it looked, from chubby cheeks in the centre of which a curved, beak-like nose was perched. Despite having recently shaved, his acne-scarred jaw was dark with a five o’clock shadow.

  ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Lucius answered with a smile. ‘This smelly Gaul I’m dragging behind me.’

  ‘I see. What are you after for this half-man, half-beast?’

  ‘He insists on fighting with a Gallic longsword, and as it is no doubt his forte, I intend to make a Gallus gladiator of him. I think that on top of the longsword, a bronze Gallic breastplate and helmet would suit him quite well, no?’

  The Egyptian rubbed his hairy, perspiration-soaked hands together as he gave the Gaul a quick visual examination, and then he nodded his head vigorously.

  ‘Yes, yes, he would look suitably terrifying outfitted in the war-dress of the northern barbarian tribes. Actually, I have something that just came in from north-western Gaul just a week ago. Would you like to have a look at it?’

  ‘Absolutely, my good man! Bring it out, please.’

  The Egyptian turned to face a door at the back of the store and bellowed out a throaty command.

  ‘Boy! Bring me that Gallic breastplate and longsword we added to the inventory last week! And hurry up about it!’

  A willowy slave boy, attired only in a grubby loincloth, rushed out from the back-room after a few moments, carrying an ornately decorated Gallic sword in both hands, and he knelt at Ramses’s feet, bowing his shaggy-haired head as he presented the weapon to his master. For this, he promptly received a vicious cuff about his ears.

  ‘Not to me, you imbecile!’ Ramses hissed. ‘Present it to the customer for inspection! Gods! I’d deal out more thrashings to you, but I think they only serve to dull your already dim mind further!’

  Wincing from the pain but remaining mute, the boy rushed over to Lucius and presented the sword to him.

  ‘Be a good lad and fetch me the breastplate too,’ Lucius said, ruffling the boy’s dark hair playfully, a gesture that elicited a smile of genuine appreciation from the lad.

  ‘You are too kind to that little imp,’ Ramses growled disapprovingly. ‘Move it boy, the customer gave you an order!’

  As the child scampered off to the back room, Lucius held the sword aloft and marvelled at its exquisite craftsmanship.

  ‘My, my,’ he muttered. ‘This is a finely wrought blade.’

  ‘It is king’s sword,’ Viridovix commented.

  Lucius spun around with surprise.

  ‘You speak our Roman tongue?’

  ‘A little,’ Viridovix muttered warily. His eyes sparkled with wonder as he gazed upon the blade.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Lucius said with a subtle chuckle, his eyes lighting up as he took in the sight of the Gaul with new wonder. ‘You are full of surprises! The king who once wielded this is now a slave, such as yourself – either that or he sleeps the eternal sleep beneath the soil of a battlefield. This sword will be yours—’

  ‘Give me!’ Viridovix demanded gruffly.

  ‘Gods!’ Ramses exclaimed, his mouth hanging open with shock. ‘Such insolence! You must beat him at once!’

  ‘No, no,’ Lucius said firmly. ‘Calm yourself, Ramses. This one is no serving boy – he’ll be a gladiator. He needs that fighting spirit!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the Egyptian muttered darkly. ‘No slave should speak to his master in such an impertinent manner. Humph! Anyway, will you be taking this longsword?’

  ‘I certainly will be. The breastplate and helmet too. I’ll take the sword with me now, and you can deliver the armour to Batiatus’s ludus tomorrow.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  ‘My servants will take care of the payment, as always,’ Lucius said. ‘As you can see, the daylight is fading, and I need to get this beast over to Batiatus’s ludus so that he may begin his training immediately. I’ll be off now.’

  ‘It’s been good doing business, as always,’ Ramses said with a greasy smile, rubbing his hands together.

  Lucius, grinning, strode out of the store, holding the longsword in one hand with a strength that belied the slenderness of his arms.

  ‘Sword, give me!’ Viridovix yelled again as he trailed behind Lucius.

  In response, Lucius simply laughed and shook his head.

  ‘You’ll get it in time, my eager barbarian!’ he said as they navigated the packed streets. ‘When you’ve proved your worth with the wooden swords of the ludus, you’ll get this one. But even then, you’ll only get to use it in the arena, and you’ll be under heavy guard … and I’ll tell you this, they’ll quickly put an arrow through your skull should you try anything foolish with it. Don’t get your hopes up, slave.’

  The Gaul, sullen and reticent, hung his head as he trudged along. After half an hour of walking the men exited the Capua city boundaries and began to traverse a quiet country road, with dusk settling gently about them.

  ‘Ah, lovely evening for a stroll, is it not?’ Lucius remarked to Viridovix, the magnificent longsword gripped lightly in his left hand. ‘Come now, don’t look so glum. You’re going to be a god in the arena! The crowds will worship you.’

  ‘No,’ a raspy voice snarled from behind a clump of bushes. ‘He’ll just be dead, like you, wolf.’

  Lucius spun around just in time to see a man, armoured in the getup of a Roman legionnaire, spring out from behind a broken wall and fling a javelin straight at his chest. With almost superhuman reflexes Lucius shot out his free hand and caught the javelin in mid-air, its point shivering mere in
ches from his sternum. Hearing another whiz, he flung himself to the floor, and a javelin streaked through the air and sailed through the space where his head had just been.

  ‘Kill them both!’ the soldier shouted.

  ‘Huntsmen!’ Lucius gasped, scrambling to his feet.

  As he rose, he spun the javelin in his hands and hurled it with full force at a soldier who burst out of some bushes to his left. The expertly thrown projectile transfixed the man through his throat, and he collapsed, convulsing, onto the floor, but already seven of his comrades were charging Lucius with their swords drawn.

  ‘Give me sword!’ Viridovix shouted. ‘We kill them together!’

  ‘Jupiter’s balls!’ Lucius cursed. ‘Here Viridovix, slay these dogs!’

  He tossed the longsword to Viridovix, who caught it in deft hands and swung it with savage ferocity at the soldier closest to him. The long blade clanged against the soldier’s as the man blocked the strike and attempted a quick parry, but Viridovix dodged the counterattack with dexterous agility and brought the blade down in a whistling arc, severing his opponent’s hand. He followed this up with a slash to the man’s throat, and as his adversary fell back in a spray of blood, Viridovix whooped out a hoarse cry of victory and turned to attack the next assailant.

  Lucius, meanwhile, had drawn his gladius and was engaged in a furious duel, fending off two of the attackers with desperate swiftness as they launched simultaneous attacks on him. Viridovix hacked through two more attackers with vengeful fury, leaving their bleeding corpses jerking in the dirt as he waded into the thick of the fray, whirling the singing blade wildly about his head and roaring the guttural war cries of his tribe.

  Lucius had dispatched the two soldiers with whom he had been duelling, and he was now busy with the final man, although it was now obvious that he was losing; he was fatigued and outmatched by the skill of this one, who seemed to be their leader. Lucius was being beaten further back with every attack, and finally he tripped and stumbled backwards over a large stone in the road, falling heavily onto his back. The impact of the fall sent his sword flying into the bushes and drove the air out of his lungs. He lay gasping like a fish drowning in air, and the man sprang on top of him and raised his sword to strike the killing blow.

  ‘Send the Huntsmen’s greetings to the rest of your cursed animal comrades in Hades, wolf,’ the soldier snarled.

  However, before the man could slam his sword into Lucius’s throat, Viridovix’s blade tore through the air. With a stroke of terrifying power, it severed the soldier’s sword arm at his shoulder, sending both the arm and the gladius it gripped flying away in a spurt of blood. Without hesitation, Viridovix turned the blade on the upswing, and with a vicious horizontal slash he separated the man’s head from his shoulders. The now headless and armless corpse flopped forward, landing on Lucius and drenching him in a gush of hot blood.

  ‘Gods, get this thing off me!’ Lucius bellowed, struggling beneath the weight of the blood-spurting cadaver.

  Viridovix, still in shackles, dragged the corpse off of Lucius, but then he pressed the sharp point of his blade into his master’s throat.

  ‘I can kill you,’ he snarled. ‘Kill you, take you gold, be free man.’

  ‘Now listen, listen my friend,’ Lucius spluttered, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Let’s talk before you do something foolish.’

  ‘Talk, little man,’ the Gaul growled. ‘You words be you life now.’

  ‘If you kill me, you’ll become a wanted fugitive,’ Lucius said, doing his best to keep his cool. ‘Do you know what they do to escaped slaves?! Especially those who kill their masters! You’ll beg for death for days before the torturers allow you that mercy. You don’t want to die like that, trust me. Now just, r-, remove the sword from my throat and help me up, and I’ll free you, officially. I’ll sign the p-, papers right now. I’ll give you all the gold in my purse as well!’

  ‘How I know you do this?’

  ‘You have my word, which is my honour as a Roman,’ Lucius said, his countenance suddenly grave and solemn. ‘I swear on all of the gods, if you take that sword off of my throat, I’ll make you a free man.’

  ‘Swear it! On all you gods!’

  ‘I swear on the souls of my ancestors, and the gods they have worshipped since time began, that if you spare my life I’ll free you. My word is my bond.’

  ‘Good,’ Viridovix muttered, and he removed the point of the blade from Lucius’s throat and helped him to his feet.

  ‘Thank you Viridovix, thank you,’ Lucius said with a sigh of relief and a warm smile, and he gripped Viridovix’s arm appreciatively. ‘However, there is one thing I wish to point out.’

  ‘What?’

  Lucius jerked Viridovix’s forearm forward in a sudden and unexpected burst of speed and strength, in the same motion he crashed his pointy elbow into the Gaul’s bearded jaw with brutal precision.

  ‘My word as a Roman only counts when I say it to a fellow free citizen,’ he muttered sardonically as Viridovix crumpled to the ground in a daze from the knockout blow. ‘You’re nothing but a slave, barbarian. Never forget that. And never trust a wolf either.’

  These words were the last thing that Viridovix heard before his mind drifted off into a sea of dully roaring darkness.

  14

  LUCIUS

  July, 78BC. A country road outside Capua

  A wolf, a great grey wolf.

  Howling, tearing at the hanged yellow moon with curved fangs.

  A slash of the jaw; a sickle-rip of blood-streaked saliva a macabre decoration across the navy skyline, paralysed in time.

  Trees … trees everywhere, living pillars radiating in all directions outward from this point: the centre of the world and all existence.

  Freedom.

  Fire-aching legs running, sprinting, pushing, struggling through glutinous mud – mud gushing and flowing now, an avalanche cascading down from the Alps.

  A grey wolf in pursuit, gaining ground, coming closer.

  Fly! Flee!

  No. A coward flies.

  Turn and fight.

  But … fear.

  No mere wolf. It is a monster, and with each step that it surges forward it grows, grows … grows.

  Now the size of a bear.

  Now the size of an elephant.

  Now the size of a dragon.

  Voracious, gaping jaws, the red maw of hell itself opening to swallow—

  Viridovix awoke with a start, his heart hammering madly in his chest. The metallic aftertaste of blood soured his mouth, while a dull ache throbbed on the left side of his jaw.

  ‘Ah, back in the world of the living, are you?’ a vaguely familiar voice asked, speaking the hated tongue of Rome.

  Viridovix peered up and saw a blurry face leering down at him. As the confusion lifted, dissipating as quick as morning fog retreating from the sun, the man’s features came into crisp focus, and it all started to come back to him.

  ‘Liar! Oath-breaker! I kill you, I kill you!’ Viridovix snarled through gritted teeth, struggling against the bonds that now restrained him.

  ‘No, you won’t kill me. You’ll kill your opponents in the arena, like a good slave.’

  ‘Let me go! Take chains off! I kill you, you dog!’

  Lucius smiled; a serene curving of his lips, as if he had not a worry in the world.

  ‘“Wolf”, if you please, not “dog”,’ he responded calmly. ‘Now, if you can show me that you’ll behave, I’ll loosen your leg irons enough for you to hop along behind me. If you try anything though, and I mean anything at all, I will lock you up here and return with a horse, behind which I will drag you to Batiatus’s ludus. Your choice, Viridovix.’

  Viridovix growled and wriggled and writhed against the chains, but try as he might, he could not loosen the bonds.

  ‘I save you life! You say free me!’ he roared.

  Lucius grinned, and his eyes sparkled with a devious gleam.

  ‘Yes, yes you did save
me!’ he exclaimed, his words dripping with mockery. ‘Should you have, though? Despite your current circumstances, I’d say yes, for you saved your own life in the process. After they dispatched me, those Huntsmen would have slaughtered you too, or at best sold you as a galley slave or a quarry slave. Any of the aforementioned fates would have been far worse than the glory of the arena that now awaits you.’

  ‘I want freedom! You say! Liar! You lie!’

  Lucius’s lips curled into a mocking smile, ripe with sardonic glee.

  ‘Ah, freedom!’ he said, walking around the chained slave in a slow circle, his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a teacher gripped by the fervour of passionately delivering a stimulating lecture. ‘The dream of every lowly slave! But what would you do with your freedom, Viridovix? Go back to your land, which is now in Roman hands? Your people are all gone; dead and buried, or sold into slavery. It’s sad, perhaps, but it’s a fact, a truth that you can do nothing about, and you would do better to accept it than to fight it. Listen, try to be positive about your current circumstances, why don’t you? You’re about to be given the greatest and most glorious position any slave could aspire to: a gladiator! If you do really well, why, in two or three years you could be out of the insignificant fighting pits in Capua, and swinging your blade in the Colosseum of Rome! Thousands of voices cheering your name in the greatest arena in the world. Think of it, Viridovix, think of it! Women would bare their breasts and get slick between the thighs at the mere sight of you. Men would kill to be you. Boys would take your name as they battle with wooden swords, dreaming that they are claiming the victories that you win on the sands of the arena.’

  Viridovix grimaced and spat a mouthful of blood-slicked saliva onto the soil.

  ‘No! I don’t want! Freedom I want!’

  Lucius stopped walking in his circle, shook his head, sighed, and folded his arms across his chest.

  ‘You certainly are of a stubborn sort, aren’t you? I suppose that that’s good though, and it is promising in a way. Why, it means that you’ll have spirit as a gladiator – you’ll not go quietly to your death like some broken, empty shell of a man. It will, however, make things difficult for everyone else, unfortunately. Batiatus is not known for his kindness towards new recruits … especially those with a rebellious spirit.’