The Far Arena (21 page)

'If I did not accumulate money as your slave, how will I keep it as a freedman ? I would prefer to remain yours, where the food is good, where I have my woman, I have my wine, I have a place to sleep which is comfortable, and most of all, my skills are always used well'

'So be it.'

'You have never beaten me,
’
he said, and he wept. He was a bulky man, having once been trained for the arena. The tears wet his fat cheeks.

'You have never deserved it, Plutarch. I have never complimented you here, because under your guidance perfection has become as sure as the sunrise and as plentiful as the air. And, therefore, just as unnoticed in its regularity.
’

Plutarch kissed my hands.

'We need my hands, Plutarch. Stop,
’
I said. All the slaves laughed and so, finally, did Plutarch.

'Since I am free, I tell you, seal your mouth,' said big Plutarch, his eyes still with the tears of happiness. 'Rest.'

He pushed me playfully down, face forward into the linen already darkened by the oils from my body. The first joyous shouts of the people came to us in the lonesome cubicle like calls of birds. There is a pathetic sound to voices from people who know that whatever they think or say at that moment will be meaningless compared to the great event they are going to see. Woe to him who fails to provide it. Domitian would be equally invested in that sand with me.

More than a city-state, more than the village of my birth would come here this day.

This quiet time is always set aside for me to empty my mind and then, bit by little bit, to fill it with my purpose this day. From empty to full.

Perhaps it was because there was Publius facing me who could not strain my skills, perhaps it was my son who confronted me with my mother, perhaps it was remembering that I had been distracted by the latifundia in the bad games that led to this, per
haps because this was the last ti
me I would ever lie like this, so quiet, but this time I allowed myself to think and to remember how I came here, how I became a slave, how I became a gladiator whose single presence could fill the biggest arena with more people than the village I was born in.

It was small, in northern Greece, and my mother was the daughter of the king. King? He could lead twenty men at most and this meant, more than likely, that he was the one who had the helmet and the sword. I remember horses, but I do not remember riding them. We spoke only the Roman language, and my mother reminded me how Roman I was, and that my father, an important man and a Roman, would come back to take us to that great city where he was an important man. In this Greek village, I was raised with the mother tongue of the centre of the earth.

When the villagers told me about my father, they spoke well of Rome, for the taxes did not appear heavy, compared to the previous great taxes demanded by robber bands. Rome ended the rule of the big cities, cleared away the robber bands, and built the first roads giving us access to the wisdom and beauty of the great city of Athens. This I learned from my mother, Phaedra, whom the king married to a Roman merchant Gnaeus, Gnaeus sired me, took the dowry, and did not return until my eighth year. I do not even remember what he looked like.

My mother packed things on a cart and told me everything would turn out fine. I had not been aware until that time that there was something coming that needed a good resolution. I was eight, I was trusting, and I do not remember raising a hand to anyone, it being considered unvirtuous to fight friends.

We travelled many days, with my mother and me in the back of the cart and my father driving. He did not play with me as other fathers did with their sons, but seemed to try not even to look at me. He never called me by my name and gave orders to my mother when he wanted me to get on and off the cart, as though I were a pet of hers.

One day we stopped at a large latifundium with more people than I had ever seen. My father drove off, leaving my mother and me. I would find out when I was older, through agents, that he had lost my mother and me in a game of bones. It was beneath his honour, after the wager was lost, to impose stipulations upon the loss, such as that my mother and I should be used in a city house, that she should weave, and I should be used for reading and writing.

It was the first latifundium I had ever seen. In later years I would have paid five times its worth just to know its name. I do not remember the first night there, but I do remember the second day. I was put on carts, rubbing grease into wheel axles. After a while I grew tired and said my back ached, and I ran away looking for my mother. I wanted to go home because I did not like this place. Another slave stopped me. When I told him my back ached and I wanted to go home, he asked where it ached, and there he hit me harder than I had ever been hit before. I looked for grown-ups to make him stop hitting me, but they were laughing. I remember thinking this is not happening. This could not be happening. Grown-ups do not act this way. This is not happening. I went back to the wheels crying, thinking I could not endure the pain.

At night, when I told my mother, she became angry with me, saying these were ignorant slaves who did not know our special status. We would go home shortly. There were stipulations that we were not slaves but only on loan to this place. The slaves could not know these things because merchants did not take the slaves into their confidence concerning business affairs. My father was using us as a point of honou
r to show the owner of the lati
fundium he could be trusted while he went out to make lots of money. He was going to return for us and make us wealthy. We were going to see Athens, maybe even Rome itself.

The one thing my father did not want was to return here and see that I had turned into a slave. Then he would never take me out. A person was only a slave if he thought himself a slave. She told me not to associate with others because I would pick up their slave habits

But I knew better. On the wagons that brought water to the fields, I knew better. In the cold nights that made me hate the cold forever, I knew better. I knew better in the long barns in which we slept surrounded by a stench that at first made me vomit, but then became welcome because it meant sleep. I knew better, when I stole food and brought it to my mother. She would not eat it, because stealing was a slave's way of doing things. She made me return that handful of barley to the wagons hauling it. The slave I gave it to laughed and threw it on the ground for he worked at the storage houses and had access to wheat itself.There was no condition so low that there was not a lower one.

I told my mother about that, but she said it was not the food or whether anyone needed it or cared about it. The important thing was that we did not eat stolen food. We were not slaves.

She made no secret about what she thought was our special status. One night, the men in the barn, goaded by the women raped my mother to show her who she was. She screamed they would be crucified because there were special stipulations for her release and that she was only collateral for a business loan made by her husband, her legal husband, a Roman citizen.

At the time I thought the men were beating her up with the help of the women who held her arms. But it was strange because I saw many do it in that large barn, usually without screams. It was, of course, copulation, but I had never seen people do it so publicly. She would not let me sleep near her that night.

In the morning, like all the rest, she was led to the fields. When she complained to the vilicus himself, showing scars about her face and body, she was cuffed back to work. It was harvest, and one did not delay this crucial work or cause commotion in the groups.

A cart was unloading water for the slaves in the field when I noticed a scythe lying at the feet of the first man to assault my mother. He was using his given moment for drink. I slipped between his legs and swung the scythe upward into his chest. It was a wild, sloppy stroke, but it struck just beneath the heart and kept going. I had killed a man. And during the harvest.

He was not cold before I had my first collar on my neck, and I was put in a cart all by myself and driven from the latifundium. My mother, seeing me taken off, ran to me, and only the vilicus and his armoured slaves stopped her. The other slaves stood still, and the woman who had led the goading strangely attacked the armoured slaves to save my mother, and so both were beaten.

She called out my name and my collar restrained me. I cried, but instead of weeping I should have taken note of the mountains the buildings, how long the journey was to the sea, how long the journey was on the sea, what the port we left from looked like, and where the sun was at midday in relationship to the land.

I was eight years old and had killed a man. Instead of being punished I was sold to a lanista at Capua where the best gladiators are trained. A nuisance on a latifundium, I was of value in Capua for not every man will kill by nature, and most must be trained to it with molten rods and flogs. Not even for their own lives will some men kill. I had killed at eight.

The lanista laughed when he saw me crying, saying, This is the killer we paid so dearly for.'

The food was good. Where I had been beaten once by another slave for taking a gnarled pear on the latifundium, here in Capua I had all the pears I wanted, provided I ate my barley first, for barley builds bulk. The food was better than my mother's father ate in the big house with all the horses in the city of my birth.

I was the youngest in the school by eight years and most were no younger than sixteen. Not knowing what size I would be to fit which weapons, they trained me in all forms: net and tridens, secutor minor armoured, Samnite heavy armoured, Thracian dagger, and even the fists of the pugilist, should I turn out to be big and slow. To goad others, the lanista used me as an example whenever I did something right, pointing out that even little Eugeni could do this or that.

This all but exiled me from the others. And learning so young, I learned properly, so that in a time of panic I could only revert to what was right, never having known anything else. Captives, on the other hand, would often revert to what they had learned in their far-off homelands, invariably taught by their fathers who were shepherds or hunters.

When I was twelve, with four years of hard training and somewhat large for my size, Greeks accused me of being haughty because I spoke Latin better than they, always trying to imitate the lanista in speech and manner. I refused to fight, and reported their threats to the lanista. But because it was in my interest to maintain order in his school and because gladiators could earn coins for their peculium in fights, he approved of me and lashed those he didn't

I told the lanista I was willing to fight one of them, but I did not consider it proper to waste his property for anger which, I said, I truly felt. When he asked me which one I hated, I told him 'the slow one'. At this he laughed to tears,, and I thought I was being most grave. He said I would be too valuable to risk just yet, that I had a good seven or eight years until I began my good strength. He said he would punish him.

'If you fear for my life, then that is the best way to lose it, dominus, for surely the punishment would build such resentment that they would see me dead one way or another.'

'And where would you want this match, Eugeni?'

The big arena in Rome. They free gladiators there for good fights. And they give them money.'

'And what would you do with money, little Eugeni?'

'I would buy my mother's freedom.'

'You have a mother?
’

'Yes, dominus.
’

'You should not have been separated. While slaves do not have legal recourse and though slavery is a hard, hard thing, we in all our hardness and sometimes cruelty are not that hard. A child is never separated from his mother. This is an infamy, Eugeni.
’

'Worse than an infamy, dominus. It is a fact.'

The lanista thought a moment. I remember standing before him while he sat, and his large grown-up's head was eye to eye with me. I would find out later that he was one of the few lanistae who comported himself with respect and was honest in his dealings. But being a child, I thought all lanistae were like him and all Romans like him, for he was the second Roman I had dealings with - the first being my father, who was hardly a recommendation for a people.

'What sort of slave was your mother?' What did she do?
’

'She could weave.'

'She may be expensive Eugeni. That would be a lot of money.'

'She was harvesting when I was taken away.'

"Then she would not be too expensive. We can get ourselves a bargain because we know she can
weave, don't we ? But the lati
fundium doesn't That is good. We will make a contract between us. I will buy your mother for a victory. That is our agreement. You have my word.'

'Dominus, why do you pay for what is yours already?
’