Jonathan craned his neck to make eye contact with Tao over Seppios’ shoulder. “You are the champion of the House of Pullus, are you not?”
“He is. Now get back to your side.” The point of Seppios’ wooden sword jabbed Jonathan’s chest so hard he had to take a backward step to keep his balance.
It hurt but he pretended it didn’t. Clovis watched them closely, but didn’t intervene. All Jonathan needed was the champion. He met Tao’s gaze. “Teach me.”
Seppios’ blunted sword tip rammed the center of his chest again. “You are unworthy to cross swords with us.”
Jonathan fought back a grimace from the single point of pressure trying to separate his ribs. He ignored the pain in his chest and the man putting it there, still looking past him to the champion. “Teach me.”
The sword flashed from his chest and a painful crack to his wrist knocked his sword from his grip. The wooden weapon dropped to the sand, and the training ground turned silent as a tomb. Jonathan stooped and picked up the sword. He rose and tightened his grip on both the handle and his shield, finding Tao’s gaze again. “Teach me.”
Seppios’ sword thrashed with frightening speed, battering Joanthan’s sword and shield free in a single arc. Jonathan staggered back and grabbed his injured forearm. He squeezed hard and discovered his other arm was injured too but if he kept squeezing, the numbness should go away and his fingers and wrists work again.
Clovis still hadn’t moved. No one had.
Jonathan deepened his breathing to mask the pain building between his elbows and fingertips. He retrieved the sword and the shield and turned to Tao. “Teach me.”
When Seppios attacked again, Jonathan tried to engage him but didn’t know how. Seppios swiftly disarmed him and smashed his shield into Jonathan’s unprotected side. Agony flew along his ribcage and dropped him to his knees. Seppios swung low and delivered another crushing blow to his wrist. Pain throbbed there like a second heartbeat.
“Go back to your side. While you still can.” Seppios laughed again, but this time no one joined him.
Jonathan pushed up from the ground. Slowly, but he made it to his feet. He found his wooden sword and reached for it. He saw the vicious blow coming but couldn’t—
Seppios’ sword pounded his skull, driving his face into the hot sand.
“Stay on the ground where you belong, maggot.”
Get up. You must get up.
On the third try, Jonathan made it to his knees. He crawled toward his dropped sword, the laughter dying away as he reached it. With the sword to lean on, he climbed to his feet. He held his ribs with one arm, his sword with the other, and pulled his battered body erect. Firming his jaw hid the grimace. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth, but he dare not spit it away as he made eye contact again with Tao and took an unsteady step toward him. “Teach me.”
Seppios raised his sword for another attack.
Jonathan flinched, his eyes slamming shut and head jerking sideways.
A sharp crack thundered through his ears—but no pain.
He opened his eyes and Tao’s sword held Seppios’ back. Their swords remained crossed, upper arms bulging from opposing each other.
“Enough.” For a man the size of the champion, his voice seemed small.
Seppios’ surprised expression turned angry. “But he—”
“Enough.”
It took Seppios a long time to withdraw his sword. When he finally did, it was with a venomous glare at Jonathan.
Jonathan didn’t return it. This had never been about Seppios.
Tao looked to Clovis, standing at the edge of the barracks where he’d been the entire time. The trainer nodded and Tao released a heavy sigh.
What did that mean?
Clovis snapped his whip. “Return to training.”
The champion faced him, his gaze sweeping from ears to ankles and back. The frown didn’t bode well. “First, take your hand from your side. Showing me where the pain is invites more in the same place.”
Jonathan released his hold on his side and two-fisted the sword.
Tao circled him, rolling his dark shoulders as he moved past the edge of Jonathan’s vision. “Second, never let opponents have your back. Better to lie upon it than have it exposed.”
Wood pounded Jonathan’s ankle and jerked his injured leg from beneath him. The momentum put him on his back in the sand again, dropping his sword to shield his eyes from the blinding sun directly overhead. A shadow fell over him, and the tip of a wooden sword poked the base of his throat. There was no force behind it, only enough pressure to let him know it was there.
Silhouetted in the sun, Jonathan couldn’t see Tao’s face as the champion spoke in his broken Greek. “What changed?”
Everything. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Answer me, or I teach you nothing else.”
Jonathan turned his head to spit the blood collecting at the back of his throat and secure a moment to think. The more who knew, the greater the danger she would learn the terrible truth. If he lied simply to get what he needed, he was no better than Caius. “If I don’t fight, another will be injured.”
“Who?”
“Someone who is innocent.” Or had been. He shoved the anguish back down with a single breath. He couldn’t look back, only forward. He must learn to fight, and win.
After a long moment, Tao’s sword lifted. “Stand up.”
Jonathan set his jaw and rolled forward, climbing to his feet without grabbing for his side or his wrists.
Tao handed him his own wooden shield and sword and then retrieved Jonathan’s from the sand. “Watch me. Then do exactly as you see me do.”
Jonathan had learned much from the champion of Caius Pullus when Clovis’ whip signaled the end of the day’s training. He could now block, thrust and parry, but the cost had been high. Purple and blue mottled his skin, rivaling his first days here. When he headed for his cell, Clovis waved him away and used his whip to point to the group of gladiators and recruits disappearing into the barracks.
Jonathan followed at the back, and felt the steam before he saw the baths. It seemed obedience, no matter how ill-begotten, had its rewards. Thankfully, other than pointed stares and whispered conversation, the others left him alone. Even Seppios. The hot water soothed his exhaustion and infused his battered body with relaxing warmth. He would have soaked all night, but eventually a slave brought word he needed to return to his cell.
Guards watched him from their posts in the corridor and on the walls once outside. In his cell he found Clovis on the stool beside his bed.
The trainer pulled a roll of linen from his lap and swung his chin toward the bed. “Come sit. I’ll change that dressing.”
“Do you plan to never send me to the medicus chamber again?”
“That depends. Are you going to tell her?”
“No.”
“You don’t know if I meant Caius threatens her life, that you fight to defend it, or that I was innocent of this when I took Quintus with me that day.”
“I will tell her nothing, but you are not innocent. Nor am I.”
Clovis removed the wet wrap in silence. The long scab on the claw mark had dissolved in the bath. The wound appeared narrower, with clean edges. Healing slowly, but healing. Clovis finished the new dressing and rose from the stool. “You will train with the other recruits before midday meal, afterwards with the other gladiators. I’ll pair you as I see fit.”
“Tao is the champion. I must learn from him.”
“You’re no challenge to him and I can’t have him losing form while you gain it.”
“Fine.” Jonathan reached for his cup to pour himself some wine.
Clovis put his palm over Jonathan’s cup until their gazes met. “It’s not your place to consent or refuse. Don’t forget that.” He left and shut the cell door, the bolt grating as it slid into the lock. How did Clovis expect him to ever forget he had no choice about anything?
Not even to live.
Days became weeks filled with blows, bruises, and blood. Always Jonathan’s, but he remained an apt pupil under Tao’s instruction.
“If you think you’ve been wounded, check. If blood flows out, so will your strength. Your strategy must change.”
The fee for that lesson was a bruise on his hip the size of a stew bowl.
“Watch my eyes, not my hands. They will tell you where the sword will swing.”
Jonathan had been slow to acquire this skill, earning cracked ribs that made it difficult to raise his shield for days.
“Learn to fight even after you have fallen. Most men are seized with fear once flat on their back.”
His bath that night had been most welcome, though he doubted he would ever get all the sand out of his hair and throat.
“Your mind is your most powerful weapon, not your sword.”
That was hard to believe, since Tao’s sword left a dozen marks on him that day. The champion had been holding back.
“If it distracts you, force it from mind. If it fuels your focus, use it.”
The champion was relentless in punishing Jonathan every time a slave passed through his field of vision and shared his attention. That should have conditioned him to remain focused—but it didn’t. Sometimes the slave was Nessa and the blow was worth it.
“Never become parted from your weapon.”
Jonathan fought his way back up from the sand under a steady rain of well-placed blows. He nearly broke his arm that day, but never lost his sword. The next morning his swollen wrist wouldn’t bend at all so Clovis kept him strength training with the recruits until it would flex again.
“If your opponent gives you an opening, charge it with purpose.”
When Tao gave him one, he charged. The champion knocked him to the ground and nearly unconscious. Jonathan lay there in the sand while Tao’s laughter bellowed to the clouds above and he kicked Jonathan’s dropped sword toward him.
“Of course, sometimes, dropped guard is a trap.”
Rain fell one of those days, but still they trained. Clovis paired him with Seppios. From the man’s expression, he’d been waiting a long time. But covered in sweat, sand, and bruises, Jonathan was in no mood for the man’s mouth. Seppios insulted his mother and Jonathan snapped. He lost his temper, then his shield, and finally his sword. He ignored the solid blows striking his frame to tackle the man like a raging bear.
It took both Tao and Clovis to separate them.
“Ignore a man’s taunts. Answer them with skill, not blind rage.”
Tao was intent on driving this lesson home. For three days he called Jonathan’s mother every foul name that existed in Greek. And a few in Tao’s native tongue Jonathan remained grateful he didn’t know. Lying awake that night the insults trekked through his thoughts. They no longer made him see red or hasten to defend her memory. He was losing the last shreds of himself, his spirit hardening as much as his muscles under the training.
“Embrace pain.”
He had to, simply to keep training. Day by day he learned to ignore the pain. Think through it. Not react to it. Until at long last, the unthinkable happened.
He’d been sparring with Amadi and gained the upper hand. The gladiator lost his footing and Jonathan’s sword went to Amadi’s chest in victory.
“To underestimate an opponent is to have already lost.”
Jonathan thought Tao said that more for Amadi than him, and all the other gladiators who had fallen silent to watch. Jonathan knew that better than anyone. He’d underestimated Caius and Nessa suffered for it. He was still afraid to face her. To see the revulsion in her eyes if she knew the truth or the horror if she learned her life hung in the balance of Caius’ making.
The few times Clovis suggested Jonathan visit the medicus chamber, after particularly fierce bouts of education, he refused. Unless a bone protruded or the bleeding refused to stop, he could endure it. After all, he was learning to embrace pain. The more pain he learned to stand in his body, the more he hoped one day to be able to stand the pain in his heart. The festering wound where the loss of his freedom and the pain of inflicting Caius’ cruelty on Nessa remained.
By December, the biggest games of the year, Jonathan bore no resemblance to the slave Fabricius Clavis had carted to the ludis. Eight weeks of training had made iron of the muscle beneath skin burnished copper from the sun. The other recruits presented no real challenge for him, and he held his own against roughly half of the gladiators. He had yet to mount a real offense against Tao and Seppios, but could stay on his feet much longer when sparring with either of them.
The gladiators still did not accept him. Nor did the recruits, especially after Jonathan decided he’d eaten his last meal on the floor. He took the open place on the bench. Conversation paused, then resumed as if he weren’t there. For one day, Jonathan thought he’d been accepted. The following day he returned to the table and found it empty. He glanced over at them, packed elbow to elbow at the table beside his now private one, and sat down to his bread and barley porridge alone. Embrace the pain. Don’t show them where you’re wounded. He forced the biggest smile he could, and slid to the center of the empty bench while they stared.
Chapter 18 – Yours
The morning of the final test, Jonathan stood with the others near a chest-high platform formed from lashed timbers. Ten recruits remained of the original sixteen. One had died in training, collapsed under a beam never to rise again. Another had cut his wrist open in the night with a shard of his broken cup. Another, the quiet one with the long black hair had been bought by one of Caius’ balcony visitors—a woman that reminded him too much of Valentina. Two of the weakest remaining hadn’t shown one morning and Clovis refused to answer why. Later that day, the roaring of the cats, mingled with desperate wails, was heard from the arena on the other side of the barracks.
Jonathan pitied them, and the one recruit who’d attempted to run away the next day. Caius had made an example of him, and Jonathan wasn’t the only one to leave his porridge untouched that evening.
Today Caius stood observing them from his balcony with a look of superiority that all but shouted he considered himself a god. Above them all, looking down, deciding their fates on his whims and wishes. Perhaps he was. After all, the God he’d once believed hadn’t been any different.
The gladiators watched from the other side of the platform. The test was simple, though not easy. Disarm the guard on the platform so he yields, or knock him to the pile of straw below.
Clovis called for Jonathan first. Jonathan tightened his grip on his wooden sword and shield, and stepped forward toward the short ladder.
For a man of few words and typically quiet even then, Tao’s voice carried to all four walls of their ludis. “Do not fail, lion killer, or I will look weak.”
A few gladiators laughed, and Jonathan grinned. He climbed the rungs to the platform, brimming with confidence. Confidence well earned, for he bested the guard in a short volley of blows, taking none anywhere but his shield. The guard lost his wooden sword and threw his arms out in surrender.
No one cheered. It was not the gladiator way. He received nods of approval from Clovis and Tao and a scowl from Seppios Jonathan took as further proof he’d done well. Three others passed, and together they received the double P tattoo on the back of the neck. He would wear the mark of a Pullus gladiator the rest of his life, like the scar on his cheek that put it there.
That evening, the gladiators assembled in the courtyard to watch the recruits who failed the final test leave the ludis in chains, bound for the slave block, the mines, or worse. Clovis must have seen the pity Jonathan felt for them. “They continue on their path, as you will on yours. You’ve done well, though it should not surprise you Caius orders you be kept from the pregame feast tonight.”
“What feast?”
“There is always a feast given by the sponsor of the games. The gladiators mingle with their followers and more often than not, privately entertain their most avid admirer
s, depending on what the host and Caius permit. I’m afraid you will not be coming.”
“I passed the test. I bear the mark. Am I not a gladiator?”
“Caius intends to give you none of the pleasures of gladiator life, only its yoke. It would not be my way, but he is the master.”
No one knew that better than Jonathan. “Tell him I’m grateful to be excluded so I may spend the night better preparing for my match tomorrow.”
“I will, but without your insidious tone.” It was the first time Jonathan saw Clovis with anything resembling a grin. The trainer’s seriousness returned. “You fight en masse tomorrow, with the newest of the gladiators. The first fight is always the most dangerous. Spend tonight preparing your mind. Should you be victorious, and perform well, you may be chosen to pair in the next games.”
“I will be.”
Clovis did not reply as Jonathan brushed by him to enter his cell. Clovis locked him in and Jonathan turned and watched him through the grate in the door. When he was a good distance to the gate, Jonathan yelled, “Have some roast peacock for me.”
The faint chuckle that carried to him could have been Clovis, but he’d never heard the man laugh before so couldn’t be sure. The possibility it was brought a smile all the same. He removed his sandals and unbuckled his belt. Dried sweat caked the inside of the wide leather. A good scrubbing and oil would not only preserve it, but keep it from chafing as much. Clovis would probably have a slave see to the task if Jonathan mentioned it, even though he’d rather do it himself. He set the belt on the table, rolling his neck to alleviate the residual discomfort of the tattoo.
This evening his pitcher held water, not wine, but at least it smelled clean. He poured himself a cup but over the low trickle, the door bolt scraped behind him. “Forget something?” he asked Clovis as he turned.
Nessa.
She stood smiling in the door, holding a basket against her hip. “No, but you have.” She laughed and pointed to the water flowing from the tilted pitcher in his hand to the floor, nowhere near the cup in his other hand. He yanked the pitcher upright and lost his hold on the handle. The vessel shattered on the floor with a splash.
Chasing the Lion Page 14
