The Emperor's Knives (34 page)

He stood in silence as Edius stepped forward and, one man at a time, read out the waiting gladiators’ destinies.

‘
Mortiferum!
’

Marcus started as the champion swordsman stepped out from the front rank, staring at the back of his father’s killer’s head through narrowed eyes.

‘You will fight a pair of fish men from the Gallic School as the last bout of the day in two days’ time!’

The champion gladiator nodded with a look of indifferent confidence and stepped back into his place.

‘
Velox!
The Gallic ludus have sent their number one man in the vain hope that he’ll be able to regain them some pride after last year’s pathetic display. He’s a hoplite, apparently!’

‘Not for long he isn’t!’

A ripple of laughter ran across the waiting fighters, knowing that their champion had the skills required to back up his bravado.

‘Very funny. You’ve got the last fight of the day on the last day of the games.’

The roll call lasted until the horizon had turned from purple to a rosy shade of pink, as individuals and small groups of the less capable men were briefed as to their pairings for the first week of the games. When the last of them had stepped forward and heard his fate, the rotund lanista barked out one last set of names.

‘Centurion, Dubnus and Corvus!’

The three men looked at each other and stepped forward. Edius looked over to his lanista with a questioning expression, and Sannitus walked down the line of gladiators in silence, pushing through to the rear rank.

‘You three will be taking a mid-afternoon slot today. Come the middle of an afternoon’s fighting the plebs need something special to wake them up for the big fights to come, and Procurator Julianus has volunteered the three of you to provide that spectacle.’

Turning away, he raised his voice in a bellow of command.

‘All men fighting today, stay here. The rest of you, get back to your training.
Move!
’

The twenty-eight men who were due to fight mustered around the lanista, who took a swift head count, frowning at one man who had strolled over to join the group.

‘You’re not fighting today.’

Velox shrugged, smiling easily back at him.

‘I thought I’d come along for the parade, and then perhaps take them into the arena to have a look around and get used to the noise.’

Sannitus thought for a moment and then nodded.

‘It’s not as if a day’s missed training is going to trouble you over much. Right then, go and get your equipment, everything you’ll be wearing later on. Let’s give the plebs a show, shall we? You three can stay here, your armour will be provided by the arena staff since you’ll be fighting in military equipment.’

The friends waited in silence for a moment, until Horatius sniffed something familiar and yet unlikely on the air.

‘Smells like …’

He looked at Marcus, who shrugged and took a deep breath.

‘Now you mention it …’

Both men looked at Dubnus, bursting into uncontrollable laughter at his sheepish expression.

‘You
lucky
bastard! It wasn’t that slave girl was it?’ Horatius goggled at the Briton’s nod. ‘Mithras above us! She came to you in the night? Remind me to be a bit quicker off the mark next time those apes try to mess with her, that’s the sort of gratitude a man could use in here!’

Marcus raised an eyebrow at his friend, seeing less amusement in his face than he might have expected.

‘Her name is Calistra. And I’m going to free her.’

‘Now
that’s
impressive.’ Both of them turned to Horatius, who was shaking his head in new-found respect. ‘She’s only done the love thing to him, and all in the space of one quick bunk up. She must come like a fully wound bolt thrower …’

Once the gladiators slated for that day’s entertainment had returned, most of them dressed in what seemed to be more or less the standard fighting equipment for the ludus, the lanista looked about him with a hint of approval in his faint smile. The gladiators were equipped for the most part in wide-brimmed helmets adorned with griffons or crests, each with a face mask perforated by holes large enough to allow clear vision. Their sword arms were wrapped in heavy padding beneath sleeves of segmented metal of the type worn by legionaries on the Danubius frontier, and each man’s leading leg was protected by a metal greave strapped over heavy padding to protect their ankles from the harsh bite of the metal shin guard’s edges.

‘Very nice, gentlemen, you almost look like gladiators! Swords and shields will be issued in the arena, just to make sure nobody decides to start the fighting early, or looks to use their weapons in some desperate bid for freedom! And for those of you who are here as condemned men, let me remind you that the guards accompanying us will beat the blood-stained piss out of you if you so much as look like making a run for it. Come along then!’

The lanista led the group down a stairway and into a sloping tunnel lit at intervals by freshly set torches. Velox laughed at the look of bemusement on Dubnus’s face.

‘You didn’t think we were going to stroll over to the Flavian through the sort of crowd that will already have gathered, did you? We’d be mobbed the second we set foot outside the gates, and it’d take an age to push our way through. This is much quicker …’

The tunnel ran downhill at a slight gradient for fifty paces before joining another, larger underground corridor, and Marcus realised that they had reached a junction of several such concealed walkways.

‘This is where the tunnels from all of the schools meet. It’s not far from here to the arena.’

The group marched on in a direction that Marcus judged to be eastward, and after a moment’s walking the dim light ahead of them resolved itself into a stairway leading upwards into the morning sunlight, while the dimly lit tunnel ran on to the west and, he presumed, into the bowels of the arena itself. At the top of the stairs they stepped out into a crowded space filled with gladiators of all types, the city folk kept at a respectful distance on all sides by a ring of arena guards, and Sannitus raised his voice as he pushed his way into the crowd.

‘Now then you Gauls, you beast men, you fighters of the Great School, make way for the greatest gladiators in the world! Make way for the men of the Dacian Ludus!’

A barrage of ribaldry and foul language met his apparent bombast, but Marcus could see that most of it was good natured despite the obvious nerves on display among the men that would fight and possibly die that day. Another man of roughly the same age as the veteran lanista stepped forward, a giant of a man with a bald head whose scalp was scarred as if by the claws of some vicious beast, and with one eye socket concealed by a patch. He wrapped the Dacian lanista in a bearlike hug, lifting Sannitus clean off his feet with a growl of welcome, and two more men crowded in to make their greetings, mutual respect evident on the faces of all four.

‘We’re not too late then?’

The one-eyed man laughed.

‘With this lot organising the parade? Not likely.’

Sticking together in their tight group, the Dacians looked around them with the understandable curiosity of men who might well be looking upon either their victims or their killers to be. One or two of the more experienced veterans recognised previous opponents, and stepped out of the huddle to make the clasp and enjoy a moment of conversation with men who, mortal enemies though they might briefly have been, were now simply fellow professionals, subject to the same hopes and doubts with which they themselves were struggling.

‘Gladiators!’ A strong voice rang out over the throng, snapping heads round as the fighters anticipated the command to move. ‘Follow the usual path to the starting point please …’

The three friends went along with their group, most of whom clearly knew where they were going, walking around the towering arena past the eastern gate.

‘That’s the Gate of Life.’ Velox hooked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Win your bout, or lose well enough to avoid a fatal wound and win the emperor’s favour, and you’ll make it back to the ludus even if they have to carry you back.’ They walked on around the amphitheatre’s curved walls, and at length he pointed forward at the gate in the amphitheatre’s western side. ‘On the other hand, if you die, or lose so badly that you have to receive the mercy stroke, or simply incur the big man’s wrath for not fighting hard enough, then you’ll be carried out through
that
gate. The Gate of Death.’

He was silent for a moment, as the straggling procession passed under the infamous arch in silence.

‘There, see?’ He pointed to a tunnel opening close to the gate. ‘From here that tunnel runs back to the east, under the arena all the way from here to the spolarium on the far side of the Morning School. If you die in the arena, then the staff take your corpse in there to be stripped of its weapons and armour, and to keep the poor sods that weren’t good enough or fast enough from putting off the lads that haven’t fought yet. And here’s the worst part of it …’ He pointed to the crowds gathered about the gate. ‘They’ve been waiting there most of the night, making sure they get the prime spots, and get to see the dead men as they’re carried out.’

‘Fucking ghouls.’

A fighter walking before them in the smooth egg-shaped, full-face helmet of a secutor spat the words over his shoulder, and Velox laughed in response to the venom in his voice.

‘Ghouls they are, that’s true enough. But if you couldn’t take a joke then you shouldn’t have joined!’

The anonymous gladiator laughed bitterly, his face hidden by the helmet’s smooth iron face and his eyes invisible in the holes cut into the mask to allow him some limited vision.

‘As if I had any choice in the matter.’

‘Ah yes, that was true for the first few years, wasn’t it Glaucus, but it’s not quite the case these days. You’re no longer the bankrupt who was forced into the arena to pay off your creditors, are you? How much did it take to tempt you into the games this time round?’

Glaucus, who Marcus supposed was easy enough to identify despite the anonymity of his enclosed helmet given the absence of the little finger of his sword hand, turned his head to be better heard, a wry note in his muffled voice.

‘Not as much as they’re paying to see you, eh “Master of Carnage”?’

Velox grinned back at him.

‘Probably not, but I’ll bet good money that getting a nice big payment isn’t all the attraction, is it? Some of them may be ghouls, but there’s something about their adulation that just hooks us back into the game, isn’t there, even though we know we might end up leaving the arena feet first that last time?’

The gladiators marched through the Arch of Titus and down into the Forum, through crowds gathered on either side of the road behind a barrier of praetorians. In the shadow of the Capitoline Hill, the remainder of the procession was gathered awaiting the order to march.

‘Acrobats, dancing girls, musicians, gladiators, dwarfs pretending to be gladiators …
Fuck me!
’ What in the name of Cocidius are
those
?!’

Velox smirked at Dubnus’s stunned reaction.

‘Elephants. They come from far to the south of Africa. Big bastards, aren’t they? Imagine facing a dozen of those on the battlefield.’

The Tungrian stared up at the closest of the beasts as they walked past, grimacing at the sizeable heap of dung that had accumulated beneath its hind quarters.

‘I reckon a few hundred well-thrown spears would give them something to think about.’

Velox raised an eyebrow.

‘And I reckon all you’d do with your spears would be to get them angry. Do you really think you’d want to see something that big angry at close quarters?’

Dubnus shrugged.

‘I’ll worry about it when I have to deal with it.’ He looked up and down the parade. ‘They do this for every day of the games?’

‘Every day. It gives the public a chance to see the gladiators, to prove that they’re in good condition for the fight and to see what’s in each man’s face. Does he look ready to fight for his life, and to kill, or does he just look like a victim? That and the elephants. Everybody loves elephants …’

Dubnus shook his head in wonder, then noticed something else that made him frown.

‘And the big man with the hammer? Is he going to fight with that?’

The gladiator smiled.

‘That’s Charun, or at least it’s the man who plays his part. If you die in the arena, then before you’re carried away to be stripped that bastard gives your head a sharp tap with the hammer and stoves in your skull, just enough to make sure you really are dead. I suppose it’s the quickest way of making sure that no one’s faking it, and to put anyone that’s still breathing out of their misery, but even so …’

They joined the tail end of the parade, watching as a group of a dozen lictors pushed their way through to the front with the customary bundles of fasces resting on their shoulders. Marcus saw his friend’s baffled look and explained their function, while Velox accepted the plaudits of those members of the crowd who had realised who he was.

‘They’re a sort of state bodyguard, although the twelve men assigned to escort Commodus when he goes out and about are really there to look after the emperor’s dignity rather than act as bodyguards. The bundles of rods they’re carrying represent their right to beat some respect into anyone who’s stupid enough to get in their way and by association impede the great man’s progress, and they’re here to make sure that the parade progresses to schedule, once he’s entered the arena. It’s not just the emperor that gets them, most senior public officials have a few to make sure that nobody gets away with showing them any disrespect. Even a Vestal Virgin will have a lictor to escort her to a ceremony, if her attendance is requested—’

‘Although that’s more to safeguard the men of the city than to prevent her from being ravished!’

They laughed at the old joke and Glaucus bowed, clearly enjoying himself behind the faceless helmet.

A moment later the distant arena erupted in a roar of approval, and Glaucus turned to hail Velox, who was chatting with several excitable-looking matrons at the crowd’s edge.