Mark of the Gladiator

by Heidi Belleau

  “Good man,” said Marianus.

  The words plucked at a string wound tight somewhere deep inside him. He redoubled his effort, his whole body humming with desire. Every inch he took, every thrust, every wet noise that arose from him—they all conspired to make him painfully hard, so hard he had to lace his hands behind his back to keep from touching himself.

  Later.

  Marianus’s gentle hands cupped his shoulders, mapping the muscle and sinew under his skin. “So powerful, and yet you submit to me. The gods must favor my house.”

  Perhaps that was why Anazâr’s body had responded with such unexpected intensity. Fate, the gods, the genii of this house, ruled him. He twisted his fingers and bobbed his head rapidly, sucking hard on the upstroke. Marianus groaned, hands flying to grip Anazâr’s head, and he knew it wouldn’t be long until the completion of his duty. He tilted his chin and did his best to relax his throat, letting Marianus fuck into his mouth with long, punishing strokes.

  Still some measure of composure, even then, but not for long. Soon Marianus pounded hard and fast, chasing his pleasure, and all Anazâr had to do was not struggle, not fight, just breathe through his nose and hope he didn’t choke too much. Performing these acts, that was expected of him; crying at them—even just as a purely physical response to gagging—that would be shameful.

  Marianus pulled Anazâr close, the soft white tunic folds soothing his burning eyes. And then, with a satisfied shudder, Marianus released deep into Anazâr’s throat.

  He swallowed, and when it was over and Marianus had withdrawn, focused his mind on taking slow, deep breaths to still the frantic beating of his heart and the expectant pulsing of both cock and hole.

  “Very good.”

  “Thank you, Dominus,” Anazâr replied, his voice husky with strain. He leaned back on his heels, brushing his wet mouth and chin with the back of his hand and wrist, but not so enthusiastically as to be read as disgust.

  Marianus let his tunic fall. “Alexandros, see him out. And give him a flask of wine for the walk.”

  “One from the middle amphora,” added Aelia sweetly.

  Anazâr was about to rise again when Marianus’s hand fell, distracted, on the top of his head.

  “Well, this is a novel proof of fighting ability.” A mocking voice floated in from beyond the doorway. “Perhaps you haven’t quite grasped the fact that cocksucking and sword fighting are two entirely different talents?”

  A hot flush hit Anazâr’s face and he stared hard at the floor to keep himself from rising in anger. Back at the ludus, such words could end in fistfights. But not here. There was no room for pride here. He forced himself not to ball his hands into fists. He wouldn’t betray his emotions. He wouldn’t.

  Aelia made a clicking, dismissive noise, and followed it with a sigh of annoyance.

  “Move on, Felix,” said Marianus. “Don’t you have an appointment somewhere to sully my name some more?”

  Felix, the drunken wolf.

  “Yes, it’s off to sully I go. What a pompous prat you are. I hope my brother’s spunk doesn’t curdle your gut, gladiator. Aelia hasn’t been the same since he inflicted it on her.”

  As Marianus exhaled, his anger seemed to fill the room, filling Anazâr as well and crowding out the shame. The insult to a Roman matron . . .

  “Lucius, ignore him, please,” she begged. No question she was often in the middle of these disputes, but despite her tone of womanly distress, Anazâr had the sense that she secretly found them more tiring than anything else.

  Her words triggered a flurry of movement. Marianus hastened to her side and touched her hair again in a gesture of respect and reassurance. Felix departed swiftly; by the time Anazâr rose to his feet, all he saw was the trailing end of Felix’s toga. Finally, Alexandros stepped into the doorway and beckoned, his elderly face composed into an unreadable mask.

  An urge burned in him to say something, anything, to reassert his loyalty to the house and to Marianus in particular. If he had any hope of freedom, it would come through perfect service as a slave—the same service which Felix, in his prattling, vicious arrogance, mocked. There was no dishonor, nothing worth disdain, in what Marianus and Anazâr had done. Anazâr’s body was Marianus’s to use, and Anazâr, for his part, respected and understood that.

  There was no time left to form the proper words, so he tried to put all of that into the bow of his head toward the couch. Perhaps it was his imagination, but even though the dominus and domina’s eyes were full of each other, they still seemed to spare some attention to acknowledge his leaving.

  He held on to that, and silently thanked them for it.

  Back at the warehouse, in a lamp-lit storage room cluttered with giant skeins of thread like a strange, thick, cotton forest, Anazâr thanked the house of Marianus again as he drank the wine. It was very good.

  He set most of it aside, though, out of determination to rise early and well. He would prove his worth, and help the women who slept below prove theirs. What had happened earlier was disturbing to his image of the house, but ultimately, the younger brother was of no account. Marianus held all power by Roman right, merely tolerating his brother’s obnoxious presence.

  Anazâr extinguished the lamp and lay back on his pallet.

  Begin.

  The sense of relief flooded him with twice as much warmth as the wine. Servicing the dominus without touching himself, then being forced to walk in silence with the surly Ursus back to the warehouse, had stretched his self-control to the limit, and it had been so long since he’d known privacy, lain down to sleep without the accompanying snores and shifting of other men, that to lie here now alone with his desire and his willing body seemed a gift from the gods.

  Fresh in his memory, the touch of Marianus guided him downward.

  Good man.

  He stroked slowly, wanting to draw it out, but gave that up after mere agonizing moments. No more need for control, thank the gods. He tightened his fist around the length of his swollen prick, pumped hard, recalled the heat and the taste of Marianus and pumped even harder, enough for a little pain and then a much greater sweetness. It overcame him, dragging him spilling and shivering and gasping over the edge.

  Thank you, Dominus.

  Nothing of his own on hand to clean himself with, so he used his fingers, wiping them across his skin and then licking away the evidence.

  He shouldn’t have enjoyed it. But then, he was a foreigner. A barbarian. Roman honor didn’t matter here.

  Another sip of wine.

  Sleep.

  As Anazâr extended the wooden sword to Rhakshna, he tightened his grip on his own. They were blunt but still capable weapons with a core of iron wrapped cunningly in oak, and he’d seen them ruin mouths and destroy eyeballs.

  She smiled happily, twirled away from him in a half circle, and swung it to test the weight.

  They’d both stripped to loincloths, the better to illustrate proper fighting stance to the watching women. Anazâr had offered her a band of cloth to tie over her breasts, as he’d heard was the custom for women athletes, but she’d shrugged it off. Her breasts were small, high, tattooed with faded blue chevrons, and quite unburnt, disproving the Amazon legend. With her matted hair tied back, he could finally see her face, her knifelike cheekbones, her dark, narrowed eyes.

  “Attend,” he said in Latin. “She stands well: feet apart and planted beneath her hips, knees slightly bent.” And then, to Rhakshna, in Greek, “Do your people fight with straight swords?”

  “No.”

  “Begin by using it as you would a—”

  She stabbed at his groin, a rapid but powerless stroke, and he knocked her sword off course with a defensive sweep.

  “Listen, damn you!”

  She hopped out of range and stepped back in with a slashing attack, again easily blocked, but as he thought hard on how to regain control, how to turn this back into a lesson, some crucial little area of space slipped his vision and the ball of her foot struck har
d on the inside of his left knee, sending him sprawling off balance.

  Gods.

  Someone laughed, the sound starting unguarded, but quickly turning nervous and ashamed when Anazâr resumed his stance. Rhakshna pressed her advantage, slashing at his throat. With undivided attention, he blocked once more, seized her wrist with his free hand, then fell on her, bearing her to the ground with superior weight.

  Her spasming muscles, her hissing shriek—no, this had gone too far. He realized he had no way to keep her pinned without exposing some part of his body to her teeth, and she was prepared to use them. Instead, he pushed off her and pounced to his feet again, extending his sword to her throat.

  “I would have had my knife in your gut, you Roman shit,” she cursed, glaring.

  “I would have had armor and a shield. Get up. Listen next time, or you’ll watch the rest of the day shackled.” He spoke to the women. “Most men you fight will have greater weight, longer reach. You must use better judgment and strike more quickly. Rhakshna has the speed, but her technique . . . her technique . . .”

  He’d been counting the women as he spoke, the eight Gauls, Amanikhabale, the three Germans trying to look as though they understood (he’d have to find a translator soon), surly Rhakshna scrambling to her feet, the Roman Cassia—

  Cassia was gone.

  The third storage room on the second level held skeins of cord so thick they might as well have been ropes, and that was where he found Cassia attempting to escape her servitude.

  She had a slave brand on her right cheek. And she might have been beautiful—more so than Aelia, even—if not for the subtle asymmetry of nose and jawline that spoke of old healed beatings.

  “Where did you think to tie the other end?” asked Anazâr as he lifted the noose from her neck. He hoped to see something in her eyes, some spark of anger or defiance, but her face held no expression but mild frustration.

  After Actium, when the shattered remains of Marcus Antonius’s Numidian auxiliaries were enslaved by the victors and shackled to the galleys, he’d seen many men lose their will to live. The last of the soldiers of his tribe, an older cousin, had simply stopped rowing the second day. He’d ignored the lashing, ignored Anazâr’s pleas to resume, so they’d unshackled him and pushed him over the side. Anazâr still saw it sometimes when he closed his eyes, or when he looked up at a dark ceiling: his cousin’s head, bobbing in the waves before it disappeared forever.

  “You don’t want to die like this,” Anazâr told her, economically tugging the knots from the noose until it was straight again. “I have no way to stop you, if you’re determined enough. But do you want to know what I think? I think the gods have shown you mercy, that you haven’t been thrown to the beasts to be executed. Maybe your fate is to live.”

  It was a terrible, cloying lie, but a necessary one. If he was going to be successful at his task, he had to convince her—convince them all—that there was honor and value and meaning in fighting.

  “Fated to live,” she repeated in a shaky, throaty whisper. “Well, well.”

  “Come, now. You can tell the other women you had a sudden ailment, if you care.”

  “I was a Roman citizen. They’re foreigners. I don’t care.”

  “They’re your sisters now. The lot of a slave is lonely enough without maintaining the distinctions of a life that will never be yours again.” He took her by the forearm and guided her away from the cord, from the temptation of the massive skeins that held enough rope for a legion of nooses.

  A stubborn, sullen look overtook her features. “I may never have my old life again, but those barbarian cunts will never be my—”

  “Cyrenaicus,” came Amanikhabale’s shout from below. “Chaos erupts! Your presence grows increasingly indispensable!”

  A scream sounded, as well, and a familiar laugh.

  He hurried, half sliding, down the stone ramp that linked the levels, jostling Cassia along the inside wall.

  Ursus lay splayed like a frog, ass up, in the center of the circle of women. The Sarmatian’s foot pinned down the back of his neck.

  “Touch one of my women again,” she snarled in her guttural Greek, “And I’ll rip off your withered little testicles and feed them to you raw, like a fucking goat’s. Aethiopian! Translate.”

  “She says she’ll stop immediately now that Cyrenaicus is here, and gives profuse apologies for inconveniencing you,” said Amanikhabale.

  Ursus sputtered wetly through his mashed-down lips.

  Anazâr stalked up to Rhakshna, prepared to strike, but she hopped backward from her perch on Ursus and skittered away, tossing her wooden sword to the side and brandishing her empty hands in hyperbolic surrender.

  “He was feeling up Atalanta while you were gone,” said Amanikhabale in Greek. “He always frots against the women who move too slowly. It’s not as if I haven’t been raped by worse, but still, the indignity does tend to accumulate.”

  Ursus rose carefully, clutching at his midsection. His lower lip was purple and swollen fat with blood. Atalanta, one of the youngest Gaul women, edged farther away from him.

  “Get out,” ordered Anazâr. He only wished it could be so easy, but he remembered the majordomo’s advice well. If this arrangement results in any squabbling, it will go badly for both of you. “You’re on water-carrying duty for the rest of the day. I don’t want to see you until it’s time to—” escort me across the city again “—report to the dominus.”

  The paradoxical reality of their relationship: Anazâr the superior in the warehouse-cum-ludus, but outside its walls, once again a slave.

  “You . . .” muttered Ursus. He dabbed at his bruised mouth, thought better of speech, and turned and headed for the door. Anazâr knew that expression: he’d suffer for this later, somehow.

  “Rhakshna,” called Anazâr, pointing so that his arm formed one long line with his sword. Pointing to her throat. “I mete out the discipline here. You will return to your shackles, now, and forgo the afternoon outing.”

  She tilted her jaw, sniffing as imperiously as an empress. “It was worth it.”

  Anazâr didn’t miss the tentative softening of Atalanta’s face at that—brief and lovely before giving way to guarded hardness again.

  “You do not have her lashed,” Cassia said in confusion. “Even though she struck her master.”

  “You do not have her lashed,” mocked Amanikhabale, plucking at her filthy tunic in perfect imitation of a fastidious matron. “How the fuck did your people ever carve out an empire? You stupid, snivelling, worthless—”

  Anazâr saw one of his half-formed plans dissolve before formation, and cursed silently. Gods, nothing in his previous life had prepared him for this. “Quiet, Aethiopian. And I’m charging you to speak to Cassia at length tonight. In the morning, I expect a full report on her history and circumstances, or neither of you will have your outing. And Cassia, I am not as averse to lashing as you might believe.”

  Any bond created—even that of hate—might tie Cassia to this world longer.

  “Thank you,” said Venatrix. The other Gaul women echoed her words, speaking in the direction of the Sarmatian as well.

  The inscrutable Germans bobbed their heads.

  Damn, but he needed a translator.

  “Look, a big man,” said Lucullus. “Hi!”

  Aelia ruffled her son’s hair and wiped a stain of grape juice from his chin. Anazâr nodded to the little boy, then leaned back, edging his shoulder blades uncomfortably against the dining room wall in an effort to return to invisibility.

  Easy enough for an unremarkable Greek like Alexandros the majordomo; nigh impossible for a six-foot gladiator like Anazâr.

  Two other slaves stood next to him, poised to clear the dessert plates. They looked vaguely Egyptian and consummately efficient. The flow of food and drink around the Marianus dining table ran smooth as an aqueduct, making the tangle of conflicts at the warehouse seem even more disappointing by contrast.

  He wished he had a be
tter report to make, but lying would only exacerbate the problem. He’d have to hope for Marianus’s patience, hope that Marianus recognized that even if Anazâr didn’t live up to his impeccable standards now, he would in time.

  Give me time, Dominus, he inwardly rehearsed, but no, it sounded like an excuse. Better to make no apology at all.

  Aelia sat at a chair with little Lucullus on her lap; the Marianus men reclined. Their resemblance was striking on the surface, only to fracture as soon they moved, like a reflection in a rain-struck pool. Marianus, reserved in his gestures, relaxed, laid natural claim to the space at the head couch. Felix, sprawling ungracefully, full of nervous energy, played with a chicken bone. Anazâr had the sense he was waiting for an opportunity to act . . . but on what impulse?

  “Give me!” shouted Lucullus, stretching his pudgy arms in the air. He seemed a healthy, happy boy except for an odd darkness under his Marianus-gray eyes, as if from lack of sleep.

  Felix prepared to toss the chicken bone.

  “I think not,” said Aelia, standing up and shifting Lucullus from her lap to her hip. “We’ll retire to the garden.” She walked away without another word, soothing Lucullus’s mild sobs as she went.

  Anazâr felt a twitch in his chest as the soft noises stole, unwelcome, into the land of his memory and called forth the lullabies of his native tongue.

  “Cyrenaicus,” Marianus announced, snapping Anazâr to attention again and dispersing the bittersweet memories. “Report.”

  “Dominus,” Anazâr acknowledged, giving himself a moment to gather his thoughts. He’d planned an entire speech, but with Marianus’s eyes on him now, suddenly the troubles of the gladiatrices were the farthest thing from his mind. Marianus’s hand—no. “The Sarmatian shows promise.”

  No, no, no. Save the good news for last.

  Too late.

  “Her people are good fighters, and she is no exception.” He worked his jaw, Marianus’s steady gaze never leaving his face. “I imagine that’s why you acquired her, Dominus.”