ANNO MORTIS
At least the dead fell behind a little, unwilling to match their suicidal dash. Petronius could see that there were three chariots' full of them, one two-horse affair like theirs and two more that were pulled by four. If they reached anywhere wide enough to let the horses have their head, the larger chariots would easily overtake them. But these narrow streets had dangers of their own.
Petronius pulled desperately on the rein with one hand as he clung to Nero's collar with his other. The horses were slow to obey. Maybe they'd been waiting all these years for a chance to truly let loose. Or maybe they could smell the stench of decay behind them. As they galloped into a small, statue-lined square, Petronius could see a desperate white froth around their mouths and knew they couldn't keep up this pace for long.
He yanked again, harder, and this time the horses obeyed - far too enthusiastically. They reared as they drew to a complete and sudden halt, neighing their fury. Behind them, the other chariots raced on, too surprised to stop in time. The dead were closing in, milky eyes glaring malevolently and mouths stretched wide in grins that anticipated victory.
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First published in 2008 by Abaddon BooksTM, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
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ISBN (.epub format): 978-1-84997-016-7
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
ANNO MORTIS
Rebecca Levene
Dedicated to Helena, David, Sam, Elliot and Kate Derbyshire - for being top-notch friends, and jolly good coves all round.
PROLOGUE
Boda hadn't known there were so many people in the world. The tiers of the amphitheatre rose into the sky, each packed with humanity. And all of them here to watch her die. She hadn't known there was so much hate inside her, either, but she felt it now: for these people, this place, this city.
They'd given her a short sword, stumpy and useless compared to the heavy blade she'd carried since she was a girl. A small round shield had been strapped to her arm. They'd told her she was lucky, that these were the easiest weapons for her first match. But she'd seen in their eyes that they didn't expect her to survive it.
The walls of the arena were white marble, too high to climb. If they hadn't been, she would have taken her sword to the throats of the overfed rabble who looked on the fighters beneath them and saw only a morning's entertainment.
Far above her in the crowd, a man in a white toga rose to his feet. Ripples of silence spread out around him, and Boda guessed that this must be their leader, the Caesar. He raised his arms, and around her the other gladiators did the same.
Boda kept hers by her side. The man beside her, an ebony-skinned giant, gestured for her to join the salute. Boda ignored him. She owed no fealty to her people's conquerors.
A trickle of sweat worked its way between her shoulder blades, beneath the leather straps of her armour. It was so unbearably hot in this country. She searched in her mind for a cool memory to counter the relentless sun, but when she tried to imagine the woodland of her home, the green pine trees faded until they were as white as the marble pillars that held up this city, and the snow turned into the sand beneath her feet.
There was a shuffling, an aura of barely contained excitement, and Boda guessed that the fight was about to begin. She already knew her opponent. She'd trained with him many times in the three months she'd been captive here. He spoke little Latin, a prisoner of war like herself, though from distant Judea. His hair was dark, his skin too, a man the colour of oak.
He was carrying a net slung over his left arm and a trident in his right. His eyes appraised her, but weren't afraid. He'd bested her every time they fought, using his superior weight to overpower her when his technique failed him.
He was a fool. All those weeks she'd been holding back, learning her opponent's techniques, strengths, weaknesses, while revealing nothing of her own. Her people didn't fight as if it was a game. They prayed to Tiu, then bathed their swords in their enemies' blood.
But there wasn't time to pray now. The signal to begin had been given, and already Boda could hear the metal clash of weapons around her and the copper stink of blood.
Petronius had always hated the games. All that bloodshed, and for what? He far preferred the theatre, but lately his father had forbidden his attendance there. His father had said it was unmanly. Unmanly! As if there was anything to a man's credit in watching other people fight and die for his amusement. Petronius knew very well that his father, a prosperous merchant, had never once raised a sword in anger. But he'd be the first to call for blood when a gladiator lost his match.
Below them, the pairs of fighters had engaged with a clash of steel. Petronius's eyes scanned over them, uninterested, until they hooked and caught on one figure.
Her blonde hair and ice-pale skin marked her as a member of the barbarian tribes from the far north. She was tall, too - as tall as him, and he towered over many other Romans. From this distance, he couldn't tell if she was beautiful, but he decided to assume that she was. It would make the fight more engrossing.
If it lasted. At the moment, she was doing little more than defending herself, ducking to slide under the swing of the net, almost losing her footing as she dodged back from a fierce trident thrust. Many dull afternoons spent attending the games had taught him that the gladiator known as the retiarius, who looked so under-equipped against sword and shield, was actually a formidable opponent. And he'd seen this particular fighter before. He was a ten-times champion, undefeated in the arena.
Another thrust of the trident, a bright red line on the barbarian woman's thigh, and Petronius looked away. Such a terrible waste. If only her captors had sold her to him, and not to the gladiator school, he could have found a much more pleasant use for her. One he'd wager she would have enjoyed far more.
His father's slave girls certainly never had any complaints. Although, to be fair, they would have been whipped if they had.
Narcissus knew he had to pretend to watch the games. His master Claudius had brought him here to reward him for his hard work. There were other slaves in the arena, but they were standing far above, hidden from their betters behind a wall. The least he could do was pretend to enjoy the privilege of being here.
He tried. It was certainly dynamic. Below him, the pair who had first caught his eyes, the barbarian and the Judean, were already dripping red droplets of blood onto the yellow sand. She was slighter than him, but nimble on her feet, and the bigger, darker man had been underestimating her, allowing her to use the same move twice to slip i
n beneath his guard before he realised his mistake. Now he looked angry, and Narcissus doubted he'd hold back from a killing blow if he got the chance.
The crowd loved it. They roared their approval every time a blow was struck, the sound doubling and redoubling itself as it echoed from the high stone walls. Narcissus felt overwhelmed by it, and the sour-sweat smell of the 50,000 plebeians all around them.
He'd seen gladiators die before. He'd seen slaves beaten, or crucified, or just left to rot slowly away from diseases it wasn't worth paying the doctor to treat. And every time, he thought: that could be me. One day soon, it might be.
Despite himself, his eyes were drawn away from the match, back into the stands to the seated figure above him.
Caligula held all their lives in his fine-boned hands. He seemed to sense Narcissus' regard, and for a moment he was trapped like an insect in the frozen blue ice of the emperor's gaze. Then Caligula looked away, eyelids drooping languidly, as if even getting angry with an uppity slave took more effort than he could spare.
Narcissus let out a long, shuddering sigh of relief. Caesar's curly blond hair was lank and greasy, plastered close to his puffy face, and the dark circles around his eyes were as livid as bruises. He'd heard rumours about Caligula, that the young ruler had started suffering nightmares that woke him screaming in the middle of the night. But then, Narcissus thought bitterly, a man who'd done the things Caligula had didn't deserve an untroubled sleep.
He switched his gaze to his own master, sitting on the cold stone beside him. Claudius was hunched in on himself, as if he was trying to make his frail body even less visible. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle, holding his face out of Caligula's line of sight. Narcissus wanted to tell him that it was futile, that the less he wanted his nephew to notice him, the more likely it was that Caligula would single him out for the torment that seemed to be his main delight these days.
Not that standing up to Caesar would help, either. Caligula had been known to kill men simply for kneeling too slowly in his presence. Claudius had been kept alive when all around were slaughtered only because he amused Caligula.
Claudius also seemed to feel Narcissus' eyes on him. He jerked a startled look in his slave's direction, then smiled warmly. "En-en-en-joying yourself?" he stuttered.
A thin trickle of saliva seeped out of the corner of his mouth along with the words, and Narcissus quickly reached up to wipe it away before anyone else could notice.
"Yes, dominus," he said. "I'm grateful you brought me here."
That, at least, was true.
Caligula watched with disgust as Claudius chattered to that thin-faced, awkward Greek slave of his. The soft-hearted fool treated the boy more like a son than a possession. Caligula had often thought of having the slave killed, or maybe just disfigured in some way. He imagined the look on Claudius's face as he watched his favourite branded or flogged. But in truth, it was more fun to keep as a threat held over his uncle's head. Not that he needed threats to keep the old stutterer in line.
There was a sudden roar from the crowd around him, deep-throated with satiated blood lust. No doubt one of the matches below had ended in a kill. Caligula didn't bother to look himself - these games bored him now. He'd considered abolishing them altogether, but that blustering bore Seneca had persuaded him that the lower ranks of Rome would take ill to losing their entertainment.
Not that he feared the people. Hadn't they lined the streets to cheer him when he'd returned in triumph from his conquest of the sea itself? He'd showered them with seashells, the spoils of the ocean taken on his daring campaign, and they'd cheered till they were hoarse. He knew that they adored him.
And if they ever ceased to love him, well... When a legion rebelled, decimation was the prescribed punishment, the death of every tenth man.
Caligula amused himself by imagining which of the crowd around him he'd kill in a decimation. Claudius's beloved slave, of course. And there, three rows above, that broad-hipped woman in the blue tunica was far too ugly to live. Her beautiful young daughter would be spared, at least until she'd served her purpose, but the bearded man behind her would have to go. Caligula wondered if he'd scream as his throat was slit, and smiled to imagine it.
The smile slid away into nothing as the crushing boredom descended once again. It seemed nothing could amuse him for long these days. Ever since he'd realised that he was a god, the petty concerns of these mortals had left him yawning. He turned to ask Drusilla if she felt the same -
- and realised, as he always realised, with a sickening jolt of grief, that she wasn't there. That his sister hadn't been there for two years now, and would never be there again. Because no prayer, no offering, no sacrifice of his had been able to bring back the only person he'd ever loved from the shadowy realms of death. And what was the use, really, of being a god, if you couldn't do the one thing you desperately wanted?
Caligula leaned back, closing his eyes so that those around him couldn't see the hot tears gathering beneath their lids.
Seneca watched the procession of emotions chase each other across his emperor's face. He was thinking about that wretched sister of his again, Seneca could tell. Every time he thought of her, he'd spend a few hours - or sometimes a few days - in the depths of the blackest despair, before suddenly switching to a quite lunatic happiness, gorging himself on the pleasures of the flesh until he sickened of them and sank back into despair once again.
Seneca had seen the same cycle play through a hundred times by now. He'd never paid half the attention to his studies in rhetoric that he paid to studying Caesar, though he was regarded as one of the greatest rhetoricians of the age. But then, his ability to move crowds could bring him fame and wealth. His life depended on his ability to read Caligula's capricious moods.
Now Caligula's petulant features were slowly melting into the slackness of sleep, and Seneca looked away at last and back to the fighting below. He knew that, as a man of learning and philosophy, he shouldn't take quite as much pleasure in these things as he did. But this was life in the raw, stripped down to its bare essentials - kill, or be killed.
Just such a decision was being made at this moment in the arena below. It was the barbarian woman he'd noticed before. She was a beauty, he supposed, if you cared for that unhealthily white skin and hair the colour of straw. But he'd marked her for death the instant she stepped out, matched against the undefeated Josephus.
An error in judgement, as it turned out. She'd beaten the bigger Judean down to his knees, his trident thrown to the sand behind him and his own net tangled hopelessly about his feet.
The barbarian woman raised her short sword high, poised for a killing blow. The crowd around Seneca drew in its breath, a hissing susurration as if from the throat of one vast creature, ready to call for clemency. But she didn't give them time. Her sword flashed in the sun as it fell, and then her pale skin and hair were streaked with scarlet, pumping up in great gouts from the fallen man's throat.
The roar of the crowd that followed was a strange noise, half disapproval, half joy in the brutal slaughter. The barbarian made no acknowledgement of it, kneeling calmly to wipe her sword on her fallen opponent's tunic.
Beside him, Seneca felt his companion stirring. He turned to look at her, but beneath the hood of her cloak, only the cherry-red pout of her lips was visible. They were smiling.
"A fresh body," she said. "Young and virile. It will serve our purposes admirably."
Seneca nodded. Everything was already arranged at the gladiator school, so getting his hands on the corpse shouldn't prove to be a problem. And then...
Then Caligula would see who held the real power in Rome.
PART ONE
Et In Arcadia Ego
CHAPTER ONE
At first, Boda thought the other gladiators were staring at her because she'd stripped herself to bathe in the fountain in the school's central courtyard. The Romans were like her own people, comfortable in their skins and untroubled by others'. But some of the
men here, the easterners, treated women's bodies as if they were something filthy from which the world needed to be carefully shielded.
To spite them, she turned round as the cool water splashed over her, washing the last vestiges of blood away, and gave the other gladiators a good view of her small, high breasts.
A few of the men did seem transfixed by them, eyes swinging in time with her pink nipples. But the bulk of them kept their gazes on her face, glaring with an anger so fierce it seemed to charge the air around her, like a lightning storm.
"You killed him," said Evius, the bald Greek whose head was as round and smooth as an egg.
"Yes," she said. "Sorry to disappoint you." The Latin words still felt sharp and awkward in her mouth, but she'd learnt the language well enough to make herself understood. She'd known it even before she was taken prisoner, a useful skill when there were captives to be interrogated or enemy camps to be infiltrated.
Evius made a grab for her arm, but she twisted out of his reach, reaching for a sword that no longer hung at her side.
He saw and smiled unpleasantly. "You didn't need to kill him," he said. "He was popular, he fought well - the crowd would have spared him."
Around her, Boda saw the others nodding and murmuring their agreement. "It was him or me," she said, "and I chose me."
"It could have been neither!" That was Josephus's fellow Judean, Adam ben Meir. "We're professionals, not barbarians - well, most of us, anyway. It doesn't have to be a fight to the death. The idea is to put on a good show, not get anyone else killed."
For the first time, Boda felt unsure of herself. She hadn't bothered to talk to the other gladiators in her weeks of training. None were of her tribe, and she didn't make a habit of befriending enemies. Could it be that she'd misunderstood?
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