Mark of the Gladiator

by Heidi Belleau

  “Oh apologies, mistress. I sent them away. I assumed you wouldn’t want them sniffing around while you and your husband carried out your various misdeeds. It appears I was wrong? That the tables have turned? Oh, how tragic. Felix! Are you still alive down there?”

  “I am indeed!” Felix called back cheerfully.

  “And Cyrenaicus? The Aethiopian? And the murderess?”

  “All alive, all alive.” Felix grinned, turned to Anazâr, and winked his good eye. He stood, leaving Anazâr on the floor, to stroll to Aelia’s side.

  “What is going on, here? Alexandros, you lower that ladder right now, or I’ll have all of you crucified.” Without the hairpin, Aelia’s hair had fallen, drooping lopsided over one half of her face. Her stola was torn, in the struggle perhaps. When she saw Felix’s approach, she screamed and stumbled backward, drawing Marianus’s pathetic little blade in her own defense. “Don’t you come near me, Felix, you mad fucking dog!” She managed to get one frantic swipe through the air before she tripped over the hem of her skirts and the knife fell away. “Alexandros!”

  But Alexandros’s head-shaped shadow had disappeared from view.

  “The key,” said Felix, evenly.

  Aelia’s cries of “Alexandros! Alexandros!” diminished in volume until, at last, she barely whispered his name. She backed into a corner of the cellar, near the neatly stacked amphorae, and put her hands over her face.

  Footsteps sounded above. Alexandros reappeared. A key fell through the opening in the ceiling; Felix snatched it up and scrambled to unlock Anazâr’s shackles with it.

  “The women first,” said Anazâr, twisting his wrists in their bonds. He could bear them long enough to see the women freed, at least. Felix nodded, moving to where Amanikhabale and Cassia still lay prone in the dirt.

  Cassia sobbed with relief when the hood was removed from her head. When the chains were removed, she and Amanikhabale fell into each other’s arms. Their reunion seemed doomed, impossible, as if Fortune’s wheel had carried them high only to crush them underneath at the next turn.

  But the wheel didn’t turn.

  He believed it when Felix undid his shackles. Anazâr stood and then immediately fell again, his knees giving out. Felix sat him atop the overturned bolt of cloth and stroked his hair in absent affection.

  They’d really survived. Really won free. Except . . .

  Aelia, who’d gone again to stand in the shaft of light, still twisting, face contorting, crumbling to ruin as surely as in a Greek tragedy.

  “Is everyone unchained?” Alexandros called down.

  “Yes, sir!” Felix replied. He gave a soldier’s salute, even though there was no way Alexandros could see the gesture.

  “Very good then! All right, Domina, I’m going to lower the ladder now.”

  “Finally!” Aelia snarled. “I’ll have you whipped for this!”

  Alexandros was unperturbed. “But first, we need to have a little discussion. Namely, I have two very interesting letters here, forged by our Aethiopian friend. Skilled hands, this woman has. I don’t know why you put them to waste by making her a gladiatrix.” He paused for breath, then regained his original line of thought. “Anyway. Two letters. Both from dearly departed Marianus, of course, both spelling out his intent to kill Felix, who’d discovered his conspiracy to support the traitor Cornelius Gallus in a bid against the Emperor Augustus—excuse me, Emperor and Son of the Divine Caesar, Augustus. Except one suggests a third co-conspirator, a woman . . . now hmm, who would that be?”

  “Alexandros,” Aelia said, smoothing her voice to its usual controlled sweetness and demure tone. “Alexandros. Let’s not speak of these letters again. You lower the ladder, we go together to find the guards and tell them Felix had the gladiator kill his brother. You’ll have to be tortured for your testimony to that effect, of course, but when it’s all over and Felix is executed and the gladiator is crucified, I’ll have my new husband free you. As a reward for your many years of loyal service.”

  “Counteroffer,” Alexandros replied. “You free my daughter in my stead. Oh, but no, I suppose you can’t. Well then, I guess the original deal still stands. So tell me, Aelia, just how loyal are you to your traitor husband?”

  Aelia set her chin, her composure regained, and Anazâr knew she’d lost. “I take Lucullus with me. I leave the name Marianus and this cursed house to Felix, seek a new marriage, and our paths never cross again. Those are my terms.”

  “Felix, is that agreeable?” asked Alexandros.

  “I get to be a hero of Rome? I get to keep my house and my man and my family coffers?”

  My man.

  Anazâr’s heart was full to bursting.

  “I’ll volunteer to testify,” Amanikhabale put in. She hobbled forward, an arm thrown protectively around Cassia’s trembling, slumped shoulders. “I don’t mind being tortured so much. Will you promise you’ll keep me and Cassia as slaves of your house, Felix? Not gladiatrices? You won’t sell us?”

  Felix turned to Anazâr, tilting his head in question.

  His first decision as paterfamilias of the Marianus house, and he turned to Anazâr.

  Anazâr nodded.

  “You three planned the whole thing,” said Anazâr, later, after the physician had left them alone. “You and Amanikhabale and Alexandros.”

  Felix prodded at the bandage covering his eye, seemingly dissatisfied with its presence there. “I had half a plan at best. I did what I could. Did you think I’d just let my brother and his wife play me like a game piece? Stand by and watch them gamble your life just the same?” He lowered his voice. “The problem was, Alexandros wouldn’t commit. He doesn’t hate me, but he doesn’t trust me either. She never really wrote those letters. I advanced the possibility with Alexandros, that was all. I’d hoped to use them for blackmail. The Aethiopian had no idea; I’ve had no contact with her this last month, but Alexandros must have known she’d feign full knowledge. The thing is, he writes half my brother’s letters anyway; he doesn’t need the Aethiopian to forge the letter he’s showing the praetor now—the one that doesn’t implicate Aelia, that is, because if nothing else, he’s a man of his word.”

  “So this could all still fall apart.” Anazâr walked away from the couch where Felix sat, went to the doorway, listened at the curtain. A praetor was out there in the peristyle, with a full retinue and scribes to take official witness. Pain still chased all over Anazâr’s upper body. That Felix was alive and relatively whole was a fact that floated at the edges of his comprehension, far too new and tenuous to celebrate.

  “Yes. At worst, they’ll arrest me, and take you and Cassia and every slave in the household to the real specialists, the ones with racks. B-but—” he stuttered. Took a deep breath. “But if we can get through the night, get the official version of events established with the praetor, we’ll do well. Everyone has something to gain. Aelia wants to leave this household with Lucullus. Amanikhabale wants a position within the Marianus house for herself and her lover. Alexandros I tried to offer freedom—”

  “I doubt he wants that,” said Anazâr.

  “No. He wants me to adopt his grandson. That’s Alexandros the Youngest. A great big strapping lad, apparently. Who knows, I could have met him at the baths one day—ha!—so he’s not exactly someone I’d think of adopting, but I doubt there’ll be any uncomfortableness, since he’s just going to keep on working in the same cloth-shop business along with his ex-father, but with equestrian status, so with any luck his own sons will probably turn into a pack of backstabbing blackguards like the rest of the Marianii. I did, however, wish to discuss another addition to our household with you . . .”

  A scream sounded from the direction of the peristyle. Anazâr’s hurt-laden skin crawled, and he had to remind himself to breathe.

  “We need to make sure the physician stays for them,” said Felix, who had gone serious very quickly.

  “Where’s papa?” asked Lucullus as Aelia swung him into her arms. She was already dressed in
black, her pale cheeks marked neatly with ashes.

  “Papa is dead and gone to join his ancestors,” she said. “We’re going to your grandfather’s house now. Say good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, house!” said Lucullus. His sleep-confused face fell slack again and he settled in against her shoulder, returning to his dreams. He had no real understanding of death.

  Perhaps Aelia would tell Lucullus in the days to come, when he kept begging for papa, that he would have a new father soon.

  Felix stepped forward as if to say good-bye, but halted himself. Anazâr remained standing by the wall, under the shadows where the torchlight didn’t fall.

  Aelia’s slave helped her and Lucullus into the litter. “I’ll see you at the funeral, Felix. You and I and Alexandros can discuss the unwinding of certain business dealings at that point.” She spoke without rancor, and without looking in their direction. Her arm parted the curtain to give the signal for departure, and she was aloft and gone, floating over the threshold into the midnight street, her slaves and guards filing behind her, heads lowered, cheeks marked with ash.

  “Well, I suppose that’s it,” said Felix. “They’re all gone.” He turned to Anazâr. Reached out a hand, and Anazâr took it in his own, with some concern, because Felix—so calm during the excruciating tension of this evening, gods, how he’d been a champion under the eyes of the lawgivers—was trembling as violently as a reed in a windstorm. “And Lucius Marianus—and Lucius Marianus . . .”

  “He’s dead,” said Anazâr. “You killed him.”

  “Why, yes, I did,” said Felix, and fainted.

  Felix’s hair still smelled of the smoke from the pyre, and there was a light dusting of gray ash in his eyebrows. His right eye socket displayed all the alarming colors of the sunset.

  “Water,” he croaked.

  Anazâr wanted to go to him, but he would only put himself in the way. Already, Alexandros had motioned for a kitchen boy, who darted into the atrium and placed a glass pitcher of cool water in Felix’s hands.

  “It was a long walk from the outskirts of Rome,” said Felix after he’d drained half the pitcher. “And rather lonely, too. Only the hired mourners for company. No business partners, no clients, no cousins. Nobody to appreciate my speech, which I think was rather finely written considering I’m the one who saw him dead.”

  “It’s the name of Cornelius Gallus,” said Alexandros, referring to the forged letter that had sealed all their fates. “Anyone associated with the man is shunned, even in death.” Alexandros seemed in much better condition than Felix, although the bandages on his left hand gave witness to the legal procedure of last week.

  “They’re burning Gallus’s poetry, I’ve heard. Such a shame.” He shook his head, a small rueful smile on his lips. If he felt grief or sorrow after the day, he didn’t show it. But then, Felix was a cypher at the best of times, prone to treating serious matters lightly and light ones with overexaggerated gravity. “Well, I suppose I’d better get with the rest of Rome and denounce his traitorous lines.” He handed the pitcher back to the boy. “I’m for bed.”

  Anazâr watched him limp into the back of the house.

  He waited as the house fell into some semblance of a normal nighttime pattern around him. He hadn’t left its walls since the day Marianus had died, and was unsure of what to do with himself either without or within.

  He waited. And then he followed Felix.

  “I’m here,” he called at the curtain. Felix wouldn’t sleep in Lucius Marianus’s old room, the one with the door. He’d kept his pallet in one of the small rooms to the right of the peristyle garden.

  “Anazâr,” said Felix. “Can you . . .” The exhaustion in his voice was as thick as cold honey.

  “Of course.” Anazâr took off his sandals to go lie down beside him.

  “Don’t go,” mumbled Felix, eyes closed. The whole bed around him smelled of smoke, now, and Anazâr made a mental note to have it cleaned come morning. And then he erased the note, because Alexandros would be the one to have it taken care of.

  “I won’t go,” he promised.

  He lay there awake, Felix wrapped sleeping in his arms, and knew that for the first time he had a choice. Tomorrow, they’d go to the magistrate and fulfill the promise Felix had made, unprompted, when he’d woken from his faint.

  I’ll free you.

  It finally dawned on him. If he wished to leave, tomorrow, he’d be free to. He could walk or find a horse, and return to the lands he came from, or pick a direction and just keep going until he found a place where the TMQF was as meaningless and ornamental as Rhakshna’s chevrons.

  Don’t go.

  Had Felix meant from his bed tonight, or from his life entirely?

  And come tomorrow, how would Anazâr answer?

  “If I do this for you, will you get up?” asked Anazâr, a little wearily.

  “I’m already up, am I not?” Felix grinned, teeth shining in the gray early morning light. He gestured lewdly to his erection, which pointed quite energetically to his navel.

  “Out of bed,” Anazâr elaborated, giving that fat little cock a rough warning squeeze.

  Which didn’t serve as much of a warning at all, of course. Instead Felix sighed in relief and lifted his hips. “Do I really have to?” His decadent, sleepy whine seemed at odds with the enthusiastic pumping of his hips as he fucked Anazâr’s fist.

  “You’re the master of this house now. Unless you want your family to fall to ruin, and take all of us with you, you’re going to have to take on a few distasteful responsibilities. Among them is getting up early.”

  “I’m a creature of pleasure, Anazâr. I can’t help my nature any more than that Sarmatian ball-crusher can help hers. What say you—we sell the domus and move to something a little smaller and secluded, where I can write. Just the two of us, oh and of course we’ll take one or two slaves—”

  Anazâr abruptly stopped his ministrations. “And what of the others? We all depend on you.”

  “Don’t say ‘we’ like that when your freedom’s all but secured. You’re already a freedman in my eyes.” He groaned, flung himself on his back and pulled the sheet over his eyes to block out the light.

  “Your eyes don’t hold sway over Roman law, if you haven’t noticed. And even freed, I’d still have a responsibility to other slaves. Only a heartless man forgets that bond.” He pulled the blanket away.

  “I’ve heard freedmen make some of the harshest owners,” said Felix. “I’m glad that won’t be true of you. However inconvenient your morality proves with regards to my inherent love of leisure.”

  Anazâr gripped him by the hips, rolling him onto his hands and knees, and slid one hand down between his legs, from hole to cock in a single teasing stroke. “There are pleasures better than lazing about talking about radish rape. And you’ll have them, if you please me. ”

  Back arched, ass thrusting upward, Felix trilled with pleasure. “Do tell me more—”

  “Lucius Marianus Felix! Your clients continue to wait!” barked Alexandros from just outside the curtain.

  “The circling hounds of Cocytus! Damn them all,” groaned Felix. But he rose to his feet and stumbled for his under-tunic.

  “You’ll make a good businessman,” Anazâr said, sitting up. “I have faith in you. You’ll talk circles around all those other fools and double the Marianus wealth in no time.”

  “Unlikely,” said Felix, the word muffled as he wriggled the tunic over his head and down onto his lithe body, a movement that stirred Anazâr toward desires they’d never be able to consummate in the time remaining. He sighed. Felix, however, smiled enigmatically and rushed forward to press a quick little peck of a kiss on his chin.

  “I won’t beat around the bush,” said the client first in line. It was a short and ragged line, compared to the last one Anazâr had seen in the Marianus atrium, but it was a line nonetheless. “Your brother said he’d loan me some money to expand my shop. Never got around to it.” He worked his eyebrows
in a hopeful motion.

  “Alexandros, is there any reason not to lend it?” asked Felix. His toga folds crisp and properly placed, he looked fairly respectable from where Anazâr stood as bodyguard. Which showed, however, his good side, the one with the undamaged eye.

  “Yes, Dominus. Two reasons, in fact.” Alexandros lowered his voice. “One, we do not have the money.” He raised it again. “Two, he has not repaid the last one we gave him.”

  “Oh dear,” said Felix. “No, no, no, this won’t do at all. Go away for a while, would you please?”

  The man hung his head and left.

  The next man had a complicated legal problem involving his wife’s ex-husband suing to recover her dowry. Felix promised to bring it to the attention of the Marianus family lawyer. Then there was a woman, a widow named Tullia, who owned a bakery that supplied the Marianus textile factory with bread, complaining that the factory manager was shortchanging her. Felix again promised to look into the matter.

  A thin young man in an equestrian toga came next, carrying a scroll and smiling in a somewhat unctuous manner. “I’m working on a book of poetry,” he said. “Since you’re a patron now, Felix, I was hoping you could—”

  “Just because we had sex once doesn’t mean I’m going to throw money at you. Well, perhaps if you were a whore I would. Are you a whore?”

  Alexandros looked to Anazâr and lifted an eyebrow. Anazâr was helpless to do anything but shrug.

  Felix, whose face was turning an alarming shade of red, didn’t wait for an answer. “And anyway, your verse is more inept than your handjobs, if that’s even possible. So apparently, even if you were a whore, I still wouldn’t throw money at you. Begone, before I set my gladiator on you!”

  My gladiator. Anazâr schooled his features into something neutral, suppressing the strong urge to pull some kind of face.

  “You’re just jealous,” muttered the man over his shoulder as he made quickly for the exit.

  The next man was Quintus. “I come here for my salary every week,” he said. “You give me—I mean, your late brother gave me—”