The Gladiator's Downfall

by Kristen Banet

  “Let’s get ready for breakfast,” she said quickly. No, sniffing Matesh wasn’t something she was going to do. Yet. Ever.

  Damn, she really kind of wanted to now. Just to see. Curiosity was begging her to take a chance, lean in next time and find out what he smelled like.

  Another one of those wants you can’t have, Mave. Plus, it’s weird. You shouldn’t be sniffing people. It’s weird.

  They dressed while he made his way back in the room. When they were all ready, they silently moved towards the chow hall. The bell rang during the walk and Mave was happy to see they were able to get inside before anyone else. It would grant them some peace. The week had been a long one with the other gladiators. This coming week would only be worse.

  They grabbed their bowls and slop, sitting down just as others were walking in. Everyone was quiet. She knew what they were all thinking about.

  Who of the newcomers would be the most dangerous? Who would they have to fight? Did they bother trying to make allies among the visitors?

  She didn’t care about who the most dangerous would be. To her, they were all threats to be avoided or dealt with. She didn’t care who or what she would need to fight. She was going to survive. And allies? She had two already and that was all she needed. Plus, none of the newcomers would want to know the Champion. She had a worse reputation outside of the pits than she did in them. Most would treat her like a dangerous opponent. Some would forget and think she was a female they could toy with. Those would die.

  “I’m not looking forward to this,” Rainev mumbled.

  “No one is,” she told him.

  The lenasti showed up at that point, carrying scrolls. They were silent as well, handing them out. When one approached her table, he looked between the three of them then dropped three scrolls on the table.

  “These are your schedules. Memorize them and the times. They’re in Common for you to understand.” He turned and walked away, as if it had never happened.

  If I pretend it’s not there, maybe they won’t ask me to read mine.

  After a moment of stillness, Rain was the one who reached forward and grabbed the scrolls. He opened them up and began reading them. He handed the first to Mat, then one to her. She just put hers on the table again, without bothering to open it.

  No. I’m not going to entertain this.

  “I know you said to ignore the schedules since they might change, but it’s still got us fighting against beasts on a few days, and that is something we can prepare for.” Rain gave her a concerned look and she sighed.

  “I don’t care about mine,” she told him. The truth? It brought shame to her.

  “I’ll look at it then,” he said brightly, taking her scroll. She didn’t bother taking it back from him. He rolled it open and frowned. “A chimera? Shit. By yourself.”

  “They like to mess with me,” she answered. “I’ll be fine.” She had never fought one before, but she knew the basics. Everything about a chimera would try to kill her. Heads, tail, legs. Didn’t matter. It’s like everything else in my life. Mean as shit and wants me dead. Fantastic.

  “You sure you don’t want to read this over?” he asked quietly, handing it back towards her.

  Stop asking, damn it. “Positive.” She took it back, then dropped it on the table.

  “You can’t read it, can you?” It was such a quiet statement, she nearly missed it. Mat looked at her scroll, then at her. She gritted her teeth. “No one has ever taught you. Anything. Not even the Empress.”

  “She taught me to speak Common and Elvasi. Slaves don’t need to read. I can tell numbers, for the times, but nothing else.” She lifted the scroll back up and crushed it in her hands. Fury and shame surged in her. “They give me this as a mockery. An insult.”

  “Every other slave here can read,” he pointed out, leaning forward. He was talking quietly. “Pre-War and post-War Andinna here can read, taught by someone at some point. The human criminals can read. The fucking dwarf can read. But you can’t. Do the lenasti even know you can’t read your schedule?”

  “No,” she snapped. “It’s not important. And no one is going to teach me. It doesn’t matter.” Stop. Stop talking about this.

  “We can teach you,” Rain said gently. “We can.”

  “It’s fine,” she mumbled, pulling her scroll closer.

  Stop.

  “Mave-”

  “It’s. Fine.” She growled at the end of it. She didn’t need to be made to feel stupider than she already did. She got up, grabbing her bowl and stormed away from the table. Her eyes landed on Seventy-Two giving his own empty bowl to the dwarf.

  With her temper where it was, she knew she should have just walked away. But she was itching to piss something else off.

  Fuck it.

  He turned and she shoulder-checked him, making him stumble back. Whatever talking had been going on stopped as he looked down at her, angry and wide-eyed. She ignored him, shoved her bowl to the dwarf and walked out of the chow hall. She was nearly twenty steps away when her two allies caught up, following her.

  “Bad mood?” Rain asked her, leaning in close. “Mave?”

  “I’ve needed a lot of skills to survive this world,” she said, trying to explain her stance. “A lot. And I had to be one of the best at them. Do you understand that?”

  “I do,” Rain said cautiously.

  “Then understand it is embarrassing that I’m uneducated. But it has never been a skill I needed. I get by without it just fine and would rather it not get brought up.” She kept walking, hoping they would drop it.

  “It wouldn’t be a big deal for us to use the scrolls to-”

  “Drop it, Rainev!” She nearly roared it. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, horror taking over. What was wrong with her? She hadn’t wanted to give away his name like that. She looked around. There weren’t any gladiators in sight, only a few guards. They were glaring at her, which was bad. Very bad. She grabbed her illi bodyr and pulled him along. Matesh followed, remaining silent. He had a blank face, as if he were trying his hardest to not say anything. Funny how they had switched places - Matesh holding his cool and her losing her temper.

  I don’t lose my temper. I never lose my temper.

  She pulled Rain all the way to her room and closed them in. “No. Don’t push this. Don’t speak of it ever again. Even if I thought it was a good idea, this is the last week we could start.”

  “Okay,” Rainev whispered, looking down to the floor.

  “It’s okay to feel shame, but you needn’t feel it over something that wasn’t your fault,” Mat said, sounding diplomatic.

  “Leave. It.” She turned to him, growling. She bared her canines at him.

  He leaned in closer, baring his teeth in a snarling return. “Calm down,” he ordered. “You say it all the time. Losing your temper doesn’t solve anything.”

  She pulled away before he was too close, close enough for her to smell him. She sat down on her cot and sighed. “It’s hard. To know that they can all mock me for something like that. I do so well at everything, but in the end, I’m an uneducated whore with a nice rack.” It felt painful to admit now. This was her one weakness. It came up rarely, but it came up. She remembered the day the other gladiators found out. “I had been here for a few weeks. Things weren’t so bad right at the beginning, not for the majority of it. I was kind of an unknown and the slavery was still fresh for everyone, less than a hundred years after the War ended. One day, I asked one of them to read me the schedule. He did, thinking I was just too short to see it. I hadn’t hit my last growth spurt yet.”

  “Mave…” Rain sat down next to her. She held up a hand.

  “Later that day, I was staring at the schedule, with no one in my way. Another male asked me to tell him who he was against. I admitted to him that I couldn’t.” She took a deep breath. “The teasing was relentless. I asked one to teach me, to make the teasing stop, but what he wanted in return was something I wasn’t willing to give him. I have always
been the only female down here. At the time, I was even still a virgin. He saw a chance to trade. When I turned him down, he hated me for it. Said I could remain uneducated, but eventually, the pits were going to turn me into the whore I was trying not to be. He’d been right. I became the whore for those who paid the Empress enough for the privilege, and I never did learn how to read.” She chuckled darkly. She leaned back on the wall and closed her eyes.

  Don’t cry, Mave. You haven’t cried in a very long time, not in front of anyone. Don’t break now. They can’t have your tears. Those who ridicule you don’t deserve anything from you.

  “It was the thing that got me thrown down here. Trying not to be the whore Andinna slave they all wanted me to be,” she explained softly. “A guard tried to rape me while I was the Empress’ handmaiden. She had been keeping me pure, for some reason, and this guard saw a whore to use. I lost my temper and murdered him for the attempt.” She was lost in the memories now. “The only time. The only time the Andinna temper ever snapped far enough for me to act on it. I was thrown in the Colosseum during the next month’s fights. I was thrown a gladius. She said if I lived, then I could continue to live, but I was thrown down on the sands to die. Untrained, scared, not even an adult. Ninety-seven, nearly an adult, but not quite. Still short and thin.” She remembered the male jumping on top of her, ready to kill her when she had been too exhausted to run and dodge any longer. The crowd had been laughing like it was funny. She’d been able to slide her gladius into his stomach first, shaking and terrified. “I won. I was brought down here. I’ve never been let out. And I’m still a whore for them. In the end, none of it has ever made a difference. Not killing the guard. Not fighting off the other gladiators. None of it.”

  The silence after her words was deafening. Mat sat on her other side slowly.

  Tears pricked her eyelids.

  Arms wrapped around her and pulled her into a chest.

  She didn’t cry; she refused to. She refused to give into those chest-wracking sobs. The tears fell silently, since she was unable to will them to stop.

  “You are not a whore,” Matesh whispered into her hair. “You are the Champion. They beg and buy your time because they are desperate to be in the presence of a great warrior, to have a piece of greatness. You are a gladiator, tested on the sands, a battlefield you must walk on time and time again. And then they take you and test you, a warrior, on a different battlefield. But you are not a whore, Mave.”

  She sobbed then, her heart burst open for the first time in centuries. Kindness was rare in her world, and yet they gave it to her freely. They didn’t ask for more than she was willing to give in return. Her knowledge of the pits. Her time.

  Skies, what have I done to deserve this goodness? Please don’t take it away from me. Please.

  She pulled away as the end of breakfast bell rang. The meal was over, and now they all had to just wait until the next one. Lunch would be the next time she felt safe letting them leave the room.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly to them. “I’m sorry.” She stood up and moved away from them. “I haven’t…I haven’t cried in a long time. It won’t happen again. Please don’t think I’m some weak, simpering female.” Well, she had recently, but they hadn’t witnessed it. They had been sleeping and she had been singing that stupid lullaby that she remembered thanks to Rain. It had brought her more memories of her mother. That had brought her to tears, but they didn’t know.

  “I would never look at you and say weak,” Matesh replied. Rain was nodding in agreement, pain in his eyes. “Or simpering.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She left them in her room and went to her bathing room. She stripped quickly and stepped into the waist-high water, then sank down, trying to fit as much of her in the pool as she could.

  She bowed her head in shame. She had broken down in front of them. None of the other gladiators cried, so she had promised she never would, not in front of others. Now they knew just how this weighed on her soul. How centuries of pain and loneliness and defeat had broken her down.

  Matesh’s words sat with her though, until her skin wrinkled from too much time in the pool. Not a whore. The Champion, a gladiator, a warrior.

  When she went back into her main room, redressed and drying from her long bath, they were both lying out, their eyes closed. They weren’t sleeping, though. Softly, they spoke in Andena, their native tongue. She didn’t understand, and she wanted to. She desperately wanted to know her language. It was foreign to her ears. She could only sing the lullaby, but she had no idea what it meant. She wanted to know everything.

  She wasn’t a whore, Mat had said. Something in her shifted and she found words that rang true in her. Words that would get her killed if she said them out loud.

  I am what I make myself. I am more than what they tell me I am. I’m not a whore, but a warrior on all battlefields. I’m a warrior because I choose to survive. And they can’t take that from me. They can never take that from me.

  She didn’t have to be uneducated either, she decided. It was what they wanted, those who were on the outside of her life, looking in. They liked that they had something up on her. And her males offered her a chance to rid herself of that weakness.

  “Teach me?” she asked softly.

  “Teach you what?” Rain asked back, opening his eyes. She could see the confusion there.

  “Everything.” She didn’t care what. She just wanted to know.

  “Sit down and we’ll use our off time to get started,” he promised, patting her cot next to him. She settled in as he opened his scroll and pointed to something. “This says I’ll be fighting against another male from a different ludas. We’ll break this down and make it simple. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”

  “Okay.” She looked down at the scroll. To her, the weird markings had always been just strange symbols. He got information from them, could read them. She wanted it, but she wanted more too. “I also want to learn Andena.”

  “Will be harder to do that, since it’s banned here in the Empire. We shouldn’t even be using it, but it’s a comfort from home.” Mat sighed, staring at the ceiling. “We’ll try.”

  “Thank you.”

  When the lunch bell rang, Mave’s head hurt, but she felt better for it in her own way. They were patient, sounding out words, explaining the alphabet. They had no writing utensils, no quills and ink, so they had to make do with the scrolls and hope she learned from them as best she could.

  She felt like it was impossible, but she wasn’t defeated by it, not yet. It was the first day she had ever tried. She knew it would take time, if she ever did get it. It had taken her decades to feel even slightly confident in her ability to fight. This was just another type of training.

  “Why is the chow hall so loud?” Rain asked as they drew closer to it.

  “The outsiders are here,” she reminded him. “They’ve been arriving all morning.”

  When they entered, Mave looked out over the rowdy new males and the regulars. There was shoving and shouts. Guards were trying to break up scuffles and keep it from devolving into a riot on the first day.

  Mat took point, forcing them a path to get their slop. Rain and Mave stayed shoulder to shoulder, since there was little space for much else. Her eyes fell on her table, and she saw new people sitting at it. She debated how the best way to approach the situation was.

  “Hey, a female! You must be the Champion, right?” A male grinned down at her and she curled her lip in disgust as she looked up to him. “I’ve never been in the Colosseum. I’ve only fought in the smaller rings around the city and down in Myrsten. Look, you might hear this all the time, but I would love to see you in private some time. Maybe some tutoring?”

  She didn’t respond, grabbing her bowl of slop and following Matesh towards their occupied table. The male called out to her, angry she had completely blown him off. She ignored the name-calling. Slut. Bitch. Whore. She really only wanted to eat and get the fuck out of the chow hall.
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br />   “We need a different place,” Rain said as they drew closer.

  “No, we don’t,” she said, backing up Matesh as he went to the table. Only two males sat there. They had the new outsiders outnumbered.

  “You done eating?” he asked pointing to the empty bowls of the two new gladiators.

  “Yeah,” one answered, looking up at Mat. Then his eyes fell on her and Rainev. “I see. We’ll move.”

  “You should just leave the chow hall,” she told him. “We’re not allowed to hang out in here once we’re done. By the way, this is always my table. Don’t come back to it.”

  “Of course, Champion. We don’t want any problems.” The male stood up and motioned for his friend to follow. They were both gone without issue. Mave knew it wouldn’t last. Sooner or later, there was going to be a fight. The outsiders weren’t even all there yet. They would be showing up late into the evening.

  “How long until a full-blown riot?” Matesh asked her. “I’m giving it an hour.”

  “I say during dinner,” Rain said, looking out over everyone.

  She watched the crowd. It was there already, under the surface. She had hoped she would get something to eat before it happened, but it had taken too much time to get their food, even with Matesh forcing them a path.

  Someone just had to light the match.

  Seventy-Two throwing a punch at an outsider was the spark. The other gladiator went over the table at him in retaliation before she could even say anything.

  “Right now. Fuck the food. We need to get out of here.” She jumped up and began to run as the fighting broke out. Matesh and Rain were on her heels as swords were drawn by the guards. Nets were being tossed out. Gladiators went through tables, into walls. Guards went down. People screamed.

  Mave made it out before anyone could stop her and she grabbed Rain, pulling him along as well, a protective swell in her chest forcing her to make sure he was okay the moment they were free from the brawl. She checked everything about him then held him close. Matesh made it through last, sporting a red spot on his cheek he hadn’t started with. He must have gotten clipped during their exit.