Colosseum

by Simone Sarasso

  Since they heard the news, Verus and Priscus have thrown themselves into their training with even greater energy. More than once the Gaul has drawn a smile from the instructor’s lips, in between one coughing fit and another.

  It is normally the man of ice who wins the fights. He has a natural advantage, being both larger and stronger than the Briton, but the real difference is inside their heads. Verus often lets himself get carried away by his emotions; when he does gain the upper hand, he tends to throw away his advantage in his haste to finish the bout.

  And Priscus seizes his chance. Every damned time.

  The afternoons slip by, one much the same as another, with the cold of winter on the threshold. The icy touch of Corinthian helmets and the steel manicae on skin sharpens the senses. Verus and Priscus think back on their months of ferocious training. And all the while the temperature drops as they cover one another’s bodies with scars, showing all the diligence of eager students. Those nets of mended skin are the map of a friendship that is becoming a bond between brothers.

  The Gaul and the Briton are killing time, lined up in the courtyard with the other recruits.

  It is dusk and the rats seethe in every corner, like cockroaches blinded by the sun. In the last seven days their numbers have swelled yet further, along with the stale smell that lingers beneath the mist.

  Ircius and the physician have already been there for some time—everyone wants to see which two names have been picked for the first fight.

  The chosen pair will go out there to make a name for themselves, surrounded by the crowd.

  The one who comes back will be classed a veteran.

  From then on, nothing will be the same.

  There is excitement in the air, great excitement.

  Every tiro carefully lined up in the middle of the courtyard has prayed for the blessing of gods and lares. Every last man hopes that he will be the chosen one.

  The waiting slices and gnaws away at them, like the teeth of the big brown rat digging into the ribs of a dead cat in that very moment, a few paces away from the reddened eyes of Decius Ircius.

  Enraged, the lanista grabs a sica from one of the gladiators and slices the animal in two. Black blood gushes from its corpse, along with the smell of shit and death. A black shadow spreads over the waiting rabble. Something has just snapped; the tension is palpable.

  “Where the fuck is Rubius?” Ircius blurts out, shaking with anger.

  They rarely see him like that.

  In fact they never do.

  Ezius answers that he does not know and the lanistacalls Verus and Priscus over to him. The master sends them to look for the instructor.

  The master at arms is not in his lodgings. Nor is he in the armory. He is not in the baths, nor in the canteen.

  Verus and Priscus picture the moment when they find him, intent on having his way with some two-bit hooker, to hell with the house rules. Naked ass and leering face, up to his balls in some middle-aged redhead. Rubius goes crazy for the more senior ladies, especially the slatternly ones.

  He is not in the larder.

  Nor on the second floor, where Ircius lives.

  One place is left, and only one.

  As usual Verus does not sense anything amiss, feeling nothing except frenzy and agitation. He wants to get this over with quickly, find the master at arms and get him to come outside. That way he can finally make the announcement about who will have the honor of first blood.

  The young man has worked too hard for too long to imagine anything other than glory. He has bet his heart and his balls on the gaming table that is life in the barracks. And now he is ready to cash in.

  But Priscus feels the rotten shudder of horror down in his guts. The man of ice has grown up in the shadow of the worst. In his mind the arena is a thousand miles away, bronze greaves and manica are more of a burden than ever and his hefty weapons only add to the weight of destiny.

  Frenzied swarms of rats surge along the gymnasium corridor.

  They are running in the opposite direction to the determined steps of Verus and Priscus, catapulted over the walls like flying rocks, towards the only room they have yet to check.

  The latrines.

  The damned latrines, why the hell had they not thought of them until now?

  The stench grows stronger with every step. The beasts’ squealing is deafening, frightening; it muddles the men’s thoughts. The air is sweet and brackish; it smells of an end with no beginning.

  Verus kicks down the door. And that is when he sees him.

  Rubius’s cadaver is there, right in the shit. Laid out and spent, covered in rats and flies.

  Death and shit. The only two certainties of existence.

  His face is a tangle of bites and burrow-holes. The bubo beneath his armpit bursts and spurts black fluid as one of the vermin nibbles at the soft membrane.

  The worst end of all. The one you did not see coming.

  Verus has no idea what he is looking at, but Priscus does.

  He knows.

  He remembers the tales of legionaries back from the east, the stories told by grandfathers around the fire. He remembers silence and misery, a desert of lifeless bodies.

  The name changes from one country to another.

  The Black Death, the plague, the great evil.

  The rats are the first sign. The rats are what carry it.

  The contagion is in stagnant water. It is in unwashed sheets. Breath by breath, blister by blister, it razes entire civilizations to the ground.

  Verus shouts at the top of his lungs while Priscus gets down on his knees to pray for his soul and that of his brother. He begs the gods for mercy, just this once. He implores Jupiter to get to work.

  No promotions today.

  No festivities or fights.

  No one will become a veteran.

  Life has been put on hold; destiny begs the pardon of the paying audience. The black time has begun, and will not be over quickly.

  The plague has arrived in Rome.

  The Black Death

  Pale death knocks with impartial foot, at the door of the poor man’s cottage, and at the prince’s gate.

  HORACE, Odes, 1.4

  Rome, AD 80, January–April

  THE PLAGUE, MURDEROUS bitch.

  The world has gone mad, another damned time.

  Verus and Priscus ran to give Ircius and the physician the bad news, and the truth exploded in everyone’s faces like a festering bubo. You cannot hide the plague; it devours you. It spreads from breath to breath, it engulfs its victims and there is no way out. It sends even the dogs mad.

  The panic spread rapidly through the school, but this is nothing next to the hysteria that covers the city like a shroud. It is now a question of public knowledge, according to Ircius even a couple of senators have come down with the sickness. Long lines of carts stand at the gates of Rome, trying to escape the city, while the guards make a superhuman effort to maintain order. Faced with peril men revert to beasts, and their first reaction is flight.

  Behind the walls of the Ludus Argentum however, there is limited room for maneuver, and sooner or later the animals begin turning on one another. It is always Cosmos, their number one gladiator, who picks the fights. He is pissing himself with fear and wants to escape, but the oath he swore means he cannot leave. He is a slave; all he may do is follow orders. Even the rhythm of training has slackened now that the master-at-arms is dead, hurriedly burned along with all his meager possessions.

  The job of sorting out the latrine fell to Verus and Priscus. This time they did it properly with the help of a couple of hosepipes belonging to a group of vigiles that happened to be passing by the Ludus Argentum, off to put out a fire a short distance away.

  The room was cleaned from top to bottom, the packed-earth floor scoured with rakes and spades, the water washing away first as mud and then running clear. And freshly planed wood to finish the job.

  Hygiene is no longer a luxury
, but a necessity. Ezius Tortonus repeats it every day: “As long as everything is shining like a mirror, the pestilence will stay outside these walls, remember that!”

  But the contagion has already crossed the threshold. The tirii know it and so do their seniors. As for novices, there are none: Ircius was supposed to go to the slave market and pick out some fresh meat, but his mind is elsewhere. One would never think it to look at him, but Decius Ircius is afraid. Only natural, then, that he should neglect some of the duties he has always seen to, first among them protecting his investment, which means keeping his men in line. And as everyone knows, when the cat is away, the mice go on the rampage. Especially when they are not so much mice as two-hundred-pound rats with the rage of immortal Hercules in their hearts, and with absolutely nothing to do all day long.

  Cosmos is always irritable. With no training he has a lot of free time on his hands, and in the end he generally fills it in the simplest way possible—by picking a fight.

  It is often Verus on the receiving end; he acts as a kind of magnet for trouble. He is standing next to the pole, chatting with Priscus, when the braggart of a titan squares up to them with his usual air of intimidation: “Look at them, the lovebirds! Always together, like fever and diarrhea! Verus, when are you going to make an honest woman out of this Gaulish bastard? Have you set a date yet?” And with that he plants a foot in Verus’s backside. A jumble of thoughts fills the Briton’s brain as he tries to get back up but Cosmos is already standing over him, landing him a series of backhanders strong enough to fell a pine tree.

  But he has had his fill: Verus leaps to his feet and charges into Cosmos like a bull. Priscus joins the fight as well to help out his friend, breaking the ancient gladiatorial rule that there must only be two men to a fight, never more.

  But in the end, what does honor matter here? This is nothing but a damned street brawl.

  It does not take long for the solo scuffle to swell into a full-blown chorus, an ensemble melody of boredom and gratuitous violence. Tigris and Bato enter the fray to back up the leader of the primi, Marcus of Capua fights against everyone, throwing punches left, right and center, a bunch of tirii take the side of Verus and Priscus, and not even the untores or the physician can do anything to control the chaos of muscle. All about is a master class of pushing, kneeing and punches to the face.

  The perfect melee, wind in the hair and sweat on the skin.

  The air smells of salt and adrenalin.

  And stinks of fear.

  Decius Ircius observes the scene from the upstairs balustrade, and feels a twitch in his stomach. Terror has been his bedfellow since Rubius died. The terror that snatches his breath and tortures his sleep.

  He is not afraid of dying. He made his pact with the gods of the underworld a long time ago, when he decided to gamble his life on the throw of a die, betting wealth and honor on the dead men he sends into the arena. He does not fear for himself, Decius the lanista; it is only when he thinks of his family that the trembling takes hold of him. His wife Paola, the root of his precious tree, and his children Marius and Nerina, so small that they cannot tell that which is right from that which is too easy. The thought of his loved ones, destroyed by the senseless violence of the gladiator horde, is unbearable. Not to mention the thought of the plague calling at his gates, seizing innocent souls and dragging them back down to the bottom of the abyss.

  Ircius’s thoughts now dwell on another lanista, long since dead but who still burns brightly in the imagination of all who do this fucking job. He thinks of Batiatus, master of the school at Capua, obliterated by the fury of Spartacus and his army of servants in severed chains. Almost a hundred and fifty years have passed since those bloody deeds brought the Roman army to its knees, but the fear of it still stalks through the populace. A fear now fused with legend.

  Just as the pestilence stalks today through the filthy streets of the Eternal City. All around is destitution and disease, lifeless bodies sprawl in the streets alongside madness and pain; the jackals have already started breaking into abandoned houses, plundering larders and gorging on supplies laid by for the winter.

  Massacre is the order of the day and Ircius’s poor nerves decide to shatter all at once. At the sight of the blood smeared on the chaotic rabble down in the courtyard, his guts turn to ice water. Big, honest tears streak his face as he launches a last, desperate curse at them before taking his leave.

  “You will die alone, you damned spineless ingrates! Because that is how you have chosen to live.”

  He goes back inside without waiting for the gladiators’ reaction, gathers all the money he can lay his hands on, then opens the door and steps into the street.

  There is no fear in his mind now. No indecision.

  There is only a goal: survival. For himself, for his family, for the whole world.

  Survival.

  At any cost.

  He walks past the insulae, dagger clutched tightly beneath his cloak, ready to kill if need be. To cut his way through another life in order to preserve his own.

  His heart is heavy as lead, the thought of what he leaves behind him a wound that cannot heal.

  His silver dream turns to rust with each step he takes away from the ludus. The awareness that, although he is a man, he is a father first and foremost swells in him like egg whites beneath a whisk. His front door, still locked and bolted as he left it this morning: his family does not live at the barracks. The ludus is no place to bring up children.

  A modest home but a comfortable one. This is where the lanistakeeps his untainted flowers, all he really has to show for a squandered life. At the end of the day, beneath the thick skin and the fiery eyes, Decius Ircius is a good man. A devoted parent, the sort this city barely knows. He enters and smiles, his exhaustion vanishes. Paola greets him with their children held tightly to her hips. They show him their perfect, ivory teeth, snowy diamonds set in gums of silk.

  He hugs them tightly, as though there were no tomorrow.

  But there will be a tomorrow, that much is sure: fuck the plague, fuck the school and the dying rats, fuck fate and the wrathful gods—this family will survive.

  Decius Ircius swears it.

  The bags are already packed: Paola knew. Paola always knows. That is why he loves her.

  He sneaks out of the back door and into a shack. Inside there is an old friend; it only takes a nod from the lanista for the man to yoke a tired-looking donkey to a creaky cart. In no time at all their entire lives have been loaded onto the boards, together with those four beings without which Decius truly could not live, and the She-wolf’s cobblestones begin to rumble beneath the crooked iron wheels.

  The old man knows the streets of Rome better than he does the holey pockets of his cloak. What is more, Ircius’s sestertii open doors the common citizenry can scarce imagine. Within two hours the group is out of the city walls breathing the fresh air. Headed north, where Paola the pretty weavers’ daughter comes from.

  North, by Jupiter, away from death and illness. To safety.

  Decius Ircius bids farewell to the Eternal City, his heart full of hope and the future pumping through his veins. But in his mouth the bitter taste of lost days lingers, and he swears it is not over with.

  Ircius is a man of integrity.

  Decius Ircius will return.

  Meanwhile, in the abandoned school on the other side of the city, there are no more masters and servants.

  Only mouths, gaping wide with amazement.

  Verus and Priscus do not know what to do, their world suddenly filled by an unsettling emptiness.

  The Ludus Argentum is almost deserted. When the lanista abandoned the place, he sowed more doubt and confusion than even the fight had. At the sound of his words the gladiators’ blood froze in their veins. There was no time to answer back; Ircius was in a hurry to be elsewhere. A moment after he left the
uproar suddenly died down. In the time it takes the wind to turn, the gangs of makeshift enemies were transformed into a flock of frightened fledglings.

  Freedom is disorienting.

  There is a story about an old prisoner who, released from the dungeons upon the wishes of Emperor Augustus, spent the whole day wandering around aimlessly, prey to an unbearable attacks of anxiety. He ended up hanging himself on the bars of the prison cell that had held him for thirty long years.

  Some animals die if deprived of their chains, incapable of adapting to the outside world.

  Many of the school’s “students” are in the same state of confusion. They do not know what to do with this newfound independence. When even the dejected untores abandon the ludus, leaving the gates open, everyone recognizes that it is over.

  That there is something tremendous out there. And they must face it.

  The crowd of semi-naked gladiators shuffles out of the main gates, frightened and bewildered. The moment they set foot outside the school and onto the city streets, it is clear who is a lion and who a lamb. Idols like Cosmos and Tigris are worshipped by the crowd for what they are: living gods. The women of Rome go crazy for gladiators, the arena bears witness to scenes of mass hysteria. Some rip up their clothes and throw the shreds into the arena, decorating the blood-soaked sand. Others become aroused and tense their thighs with every lunge, pushing hard up against the press of bodies that fills the tiers, simulating the embrace of the man of their dreams. Desire drips like honey from the eyes and mouths of these fans; social status counts for nothing here, all women’s blood boils the same. The gladiators are gods of sex, of sheer brute force. All women desire them.

  They all want them, inside.

  Cosmos has no trouble finding someone to pass the night with: a big-breasted barmaid looks him over and offers him a drink, and in the time it takes to turn an hourglass they are in the backroom, hot breath on their faces, hips thrusting. Many of the newly promoted novices melt away into the streets of the city center, disappearing into the alleyways in search of food and action. Other veterans make the most of the crowds; before the evening is out they will enter the ranks of some cutthroat gang hunting for treasure. The ailing city belongs to madmen and fools.