Mark of the Gladiator
Page 5
A smile.
Bolstered, Anazâr continued: “She should be trained as a thraex with a scimitar. The other women will rally around her . . . eventually. Morale is still low among them, and it leads them to turn on one another.”
A stitch in his perfectly groomed brow.
“Their physical training goes well. They are strong, and will only become stronger. But to accomplish that, I must break down the barriers between them. Unify them. I need a translator, Dominus, for the Germans. They speak a language called Cimbrian.” He forced himself not to wince. He wasn’t afraid of rejection, although it would make his task monumentally more difficult, but what if Marianus chose to punish him for his presumption? “You’ve given so much already, Dominus, please don’t mistake my asking for lack of gratitude.”
Felix, who’d been silently toying with his chicken bone thus far, suddenly sat up. “Grovel, grovel, grovel!” he taunted. “Don’t you kill for your supper? And yet you stand here—a barbarian champion of the arena, who bathes in blood—quaking at the sight of my fucking brother. He’s a jumped-up rug merchant, not a thundering demigod.”
Don’t respond. Anazâr let his eyes fall on that middle distance, standing stock still. Marianus might despise his younger brother, but that didn’t mean he’d let a slave disrespect him.
“I treat my younger brother as an exercise in mental forbearance. A living dumbbell, if you will.” Marianus’s tone was even. The two slaves, seeing some invisible signal that Anazâr missed, stepped forward, quietly gathered up the empty serving dishes, and departed.
“Oh, that’s a good one.” Felix cast his sardonic gaze over one shoulder toward Anazâr now, narrating casually, “He stole it from a friend of mine, a comic actor. Though I can’t place too much blame on Lucius, since I’m an even greater magpie of words. We’re all hopeless thieves, save for Lucullus, perhaps. By the way, I speak Cimbrian. I learned it from a charming whore at the Carmentalian House. He taught me how to play the flute, too. I mean, really play the flute, not the metaphor, although—”
“Enough. Cyrenaicus, a translator will be found and assigned to you by Alexandros. As for you, Felix—I already have a job for you. An incredibly easy, not very consequential job, so you should be able to perform it. I would consider reinstating your allowance, if so.”
Felix threw the chicken bone behind the couch and clapped. “Lovely, lovely money! Well, ever since Alexandros started locking up the silverware at night, my purse is as empty as the deserts of Libya from which your pet gladiator hails. I would gladly replenish it. What is this job. Job-thing. Work. Ugh.”
When he said “pet,” Felix’s eyes flickered to Anazâr. Looking to see if his hit had landed, perhaps. Anazâr let nothing show.
Neither did Marianus. “The largest wool wholesaler in Pompeii has sent his son to Rome for the summer to study the markets here. He arrives tomorrow. I cannot greet him; I’ll be meeting with one of the patrician aediles to discuss an awning contract for the games. I’ve composed a short speech. All you’ll have to do is greet him at the door of the Aventine shop, apologize for my absence, and read the speech.”
Alexandros glided into the room and extended a scroll to Felix, then retreated just as smoothly.
Felix took up the scroll and struck a pose reminiscent of a forum news reader. “All right, let me practice. Ahem. Greetings!” So far so good, but Marianus didn’t look optimistic. “‘I hope that you, your father, and your house are all in the best of health.’ What a tedious, formulaic opening. I should replace it with something more creative and specific, like ‘I hope your balls are still attached to your penis.’ Sorry, I’ll continue. ‘The presence of my much more handsome and talented brother shows the regard I have for your family and our business relationship, which started many years ago at a sheep-fucking contest in the hills of—’”
“A mistake, I see. I’ll strike out the brother line and send a client to read it. Return the scroll.”
“No, no, no! You need me to fix this. You’ll embarrass yourself with this as it is. Now where was I . . .” Felix focused on the scroll, running a hand through his hair as if in concentration.
“The scroll. Return it.” Marianus’s left eyelid twitched markedly as he rose from the couch and extended an expectant hand.
Anazâr prayed silently for invisibility, though he had nothing at all to offer any god. Some of the word-sparks that Felix spat out had come close to making him smile, but by this point, he wanted Felix gone, dead even, no longer a weight on Marianus, no longer goading and capering like the frivolous imp that he was.
Felix didn’t hand over the scroll. In fact, he purposefully held it back, clenching his fist to crumple it. Gods help him, Anazâr knew exactly where this was going. At first he’d been happy not to be dismissed immediately, hoping for another chance to be of service to Marianus, to prove his worth and find a scrap of pleasure, but now he’d give anything to be shooed from the room. No, from the domus entirely. Let him return to the warehouse alone and unscathed.
“Cyrenaicus. Retrieve the scroll.”
No more thoughts of escape. He launched off the wall and into the task. He’d trained for rapid striking all his life. Move fast, pluck the scroll, retreat, and finish the sordid fray with as little loss of dignity as possible. Obedience. Loyalty. Efficiency.
Felix danced backward with an entirely unanticipated agility. The dinner table now served as his shield.
Anazâr could close the distance in so many ways. Crash through or over the table, pick up a silver grape bowl like a discus and send it spinning into Felix’s smirking face, slide under to knock Felix’s feet out from under him . . .
Of course not. Violence against a citizen was unthinkable. He edged around the table, arms spread wide, feeling much like an unfortunate ape of the type sometimes imported from the far south to be slaughtered by hunters in the arena.
“You’ll never take me alive!” shouted Felix, and snatched up a wooden ladle as he circled. Laughing, he brandished it like a sword, reciting, “Neptune rushes where the combat burns, while to his tent the Cretan king returns. From thence, two javelins glittering in his hand and clad in bronze that brightened all the strand, fierce on the foe the daring hero drove, like lightning bursting from the arm of Jove—Oww! You’re hampering my Homer!”
Anazâr, reversing swiftly, had grabbed his wrist. “Give your brother the scroll,” he growled.
Felix ripped off a corner of it with his teeth, flung himself away from the table, and tripped backward over a chair. Anazâr meant to let him go, but Felix’s surprisingly strong grip had closed around his own wrist, so down to the floor together they fell.
For just a moment, everything was still: Felix, limp and pliant with shock, body pinned by Anazâr’s. Staring up at Anazâr with those pale, otherworldly eyes gone startled and questioning. His mouth open, caught between expressions. Panting.
And then he bucked, body arching uselessly under Anazâr’s greater weight, and cried out in breathless mimicry of an overenthusiastic whore, “Oh, gladiator! Your strength overwhelms me!” His eyes rolled in false ecstasy and Anazâr, taken aback at first, felt his stomach tighten with disgust. He snatched the scroll, Felix giving it up easily now that he had a new game to play, and disengaged as best he could, considering Felix’s pawing.
Anazâr straightened his spine and pushed back his shoulders, walking calmly to Marianus, where he lowered himself formally to one knee and presented the scroll.
“Brother,” Felix whined from the floor behind him. “Your gladiator likes you better than he likes me!”
“Leave,” Marianus ordered Anazâr as he took up the scroll and clenched it so hard his knuckles went white. Anazâr did not imagine that the strong emotion choking his voice had much to do with gratitude. “Felix will see yet more privileges revoked.”
Anazâr silently thanked Marianus for saying so. For the reassurance, perhaps, or for thinking a slave deserved to hear the inner workings of his rule at all.
Anazâr bellowed a Latin curse in Penthesilea’s ear and slapped her on the side of the head.
Her blow went wild and skidded off the side of the wooden post, striking a weakly harmonious note instead of the deep thud they both desired.
“Five more blows against the pole, undistracted,” he ordered. “Venatrix, take over my position to distract her on the sixth.” Penthesilea might make a good murmillo—she was the strongest and largest gladiatrix, almost Anazâr’s height and thick as a siege engine—but she startled easily.
A solid week of training had allowed Anazâr to sort them into three levels: the nearly hopeless, the somewhat hopeless, and the Sarmatian. Who fought brilliantly, of course, but relied too much on techniques that were worthless against armored opponents. He understood her weakness intimately because it had been his own. He’d learned to compensate over time, but at the cost of blood. He wished to spare her the same. Sadly, she was proving as obstinate about learning new techniques as he’d once been.
Fifty-seven days until the games. A week since that night Felix had attempted to make a fool of him. Other than a couple of spats in training, especially among the antisocial Germans, it had gone uneventfully, but that didn’t mean he felt even remotely prepared for the test to come. Every night he reported to Marianus on the gladiatrices’s progress, and every night Marianus listened with guarded interest, showing neither praise nor disapproval for Anazâr’s work. Twice, Anazâr had performed further duties, but neither time had been quite so . . . compelling as the first. Marianus had become completely unreadable, distant.
And it wasn’t Anazâr’s place to question that.
“Amanikhabale! I saw you resting. Another circuit with the water buckets,” he called out. She groaned and staggered to her feet again. “Come, I’ll carry with you.” He grabbed a set of the heaviest stone hand weights and paced beside her.
“Have you . . . rethought . . . my offer?” she gasped.
“How does it go with Cassia?” he asked in return.
A banging on the door interrupted her wheezing response.
“Cyrenaicus! Ursus!” It was Quintus, the night watchman. “We’ve been sent to take the women to the baths.”
Once the word spread, the warehouse became a very cheerful place, and a few of the Gaul women shrieked like girls. Anazâr couldn’t blame them for it, really. He’d felt much the same on the occasion of his first trip to the bath with his gladiator brothers.
With Quintus were two other men, similarly ruddy-faced, thickset, and amiable. “My cousins,” he explained, as they worked with Anazâr to line up the women and collar-shackle them. “We’re all clients of Marianus. Where’s that ass?”
That ass being Ursus, of course. “Carrying water.”
“Oh, I’ll bet he hates that. Being put to slave’s work again.”
Ursus plodded slowly into the warehouse, burdened heavily with jugs and scowling even more than usual. And he had a companion.
The white toga, the thin purple stripe, the well-groomed dark curls . . . for a moment Anazâr hoped it was Marianus, here to judge their hard-fought progress. But no. Felix. Gods. He carried the weight of the toga lightly—the mark of the citizen that any slave or freedman would be swiftly punished for assuming—twirling one end of it insouciantly as he stepped into the grim dimness of the warehouse.
“I’m bored,” he announced. “And broke. But I have enough for the baths, so I think I’ll tag along. Who speaks Cimbrian?” He broke out of Latin into a staccato monologue that spurred the Germans to respond in their native tongue. One of them began shaking as she spoke; her tribeswomen clasped her arms.
The tension of the moment disturbed Anazâr for a multitude of reasons he had no hope of even beginning to untangle.
He turned away without greeting Felix—the less contact, the better—and went to find the Sarmatian. She’d need thorough convincing before she’d let them put a collar on her neck.
Two paces later, he wheeled right back around: a loud crash had disrupted the Cimbrian chattering.
“Oh dear. I seem to have totally accidentally kicked over the water jugs.” Felix let out a theatric sigh and clutched at his toga hem as if keeping it safe from a raging flood. “I suppose that means poor Ursus will have to fetch some more. Move, move, you modern-day Sisyphus.”
Quintus and his cousins shrugged. Anazâr averted his glance. Many of the women smiled and gave each other sly looks, even across the tribal boundaries. It was the first time he’d seen them even close to united since—well, since the last time Ursus had found himself humiliated. It was a start, Anazâr supposed. Too bad they couldn’t trot him out into the arena to bark like a dog before their fights.
No. He was absolutely not going to find amusement or worth in Felix’s antics. He smothered the twitch of a smile that was tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“That’s enough,” he commanded gruffly, hoping his tone would convey what his language couldn’t. Slowly, the laughing and whispering among the women died down into antsy, excited silence.
“Alexandros has a running tab set up at the baths,” said Quintus. “There’ll be an ornatrix and a masseuse reserved for them. Let’s go, eh?”
Even the Sarmatian went willingly at the promise of that.
“We’ll have to wait here,” Quintus told his cousins.
“All of us? Right here, for as long as it takes to clean that filthy lot? Damn it, I want a bite to eat,” complained one of them.
This section of the antechamber was right next to the women’s entrance. In the other direction lay an atrium, and beyond that, an outdoor courtyard filled with food vendors, from which the alluring smell of roasting sausages and fresh-baked pastries came wafting on the spring breeze. Anazâr’s mouth watered, but he had no coin to his name. The peculium he’d won in the arena was probably enough to bury them all in pastries, but its cash value was utterly dependent on the will and whim of Iunius.
He could borrow from Quintus, but no, better to play the stoic gladiator, especially with Felix around and likely looking for ways to cause trouble.
“Gladiator!” called the troublesome man himself. “Come with me. You dampen my spirits, sitting there like you’re awaiting your execution.” Anazâr’s expression must have betrayed some hesitance or unease, because Felix added, “It’s not a request. My brother says you’re to bathe. Don’t worry about your keeper, I’ll keep an eye on you.”
It didn’t seem likely that Marianus would hand down such an order, especially not to his notoriously undependable brother, but even that tiny fraction of a chance that Felix was speaking true could mean terrible consequences if Anazâr refused.
Quintus shrugged. He did that often and eloquently. This particular shrug expressed an emphatic lack of opinion. No help there, then.
Anazâr, groaning within, stone-faced without, rose and stalked into the men’s changing room two paces behind Felix, who didn’t deign to ask again and didn’t even look to confirm that Anazâr had followed. So there was something of his brother in him, after all.
The changing room was crowded with men in various states of undress, some rushing through the motions while others lingered in conversation, discussing politics or telling dirty jokes. Felix went to one of the benches along the wall, greeting an elderly man who sat there in the nude before quickly stripping down himself.
Anazâr couldn’t help but note points of resemblance to Marianus. Both of them cut a lean, aristocratic figure, bodies shaped by swimming and exercise rather than hard work. In fact, there was only one major point of difference: Felix was entirely depilated. Perhaps that meant something.
And perhaps you’d be better off not to think about it, he reminded himself, quickly averting his gaze when F
elix cast him a suspicious look over one angular shoulder. He set to undressing, hoping he’d avoided notice, but Felix’s laugh said otherwise.
“I saw you looking, gladiator,” he teased. “Pretending I’m my brother?”
“I have a name,” Anazâr retorted before he had a chance to stop himself. He bit his tongue hard, too late.
But Felix just tilted his head, squinting his eyes. Maybe even he realized he didn’t have the right to lecture others on their disrespect of authority. Or perhaps not. “I believe you do, but if so, I haven’t heard it.”
Of course he had; he’d been present for several of Anazâr’s evening reports to his brother. Not that Anazâr could say so, especially not now that he’d tempted fate once today already.
“I am called Cyrenaicus,” he said, thankfully keeping the incredulity out his voice.
Felix looked disappointed. He turned, neatly folded his clothes, and stuffed them into one of the high cubbies set into the wall. “Like I said. You might have a name, but I haven’t heard it.”
Anger flared, burning hot enough that Anazâr’s hand trembled as he pushed his folded tunic into the neighboring cubby. How fucking dare he. He took a deep, cleansing breath. If Felix pressed, he’d lie, and speak some random name from the folktales of his people.
They walked silently through the short corridor that led to the calidarium. Felix, mercifully, did not press.
The heat enfolded him, infiltrated him, and he staggered a little at the shock. Sweat sprang up along his arms, and ahead of him, he could see that Felix’s skin had already built up a sheen. Men filed back and forth with great care in the dim light, trying to avoid brushing against the heated bricks of the wall.
Felix found an empty bench attended by an elderly bath slave carrying oil and strigil. Which meant Anazâr would not be expected to clean him. Good. The man went straight to work on Felix’s back, applying oil in neat circling motions and then scraping it off, the strigil leaving strips of lighter, cleaner skin in its wake.