Arena (3 page)

But I never screamed.

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CARTS RUMBLED, and thunder from an impending storm, somewhere south in Campania.

Night must have fallen. The vegetable wagons were never allowed through the city gates by daylight.

I groaned and opened my eyes. Beneath my belly I felt the tangled wool of the blanket on my cell’s stone bed. A golden flame, tallow in a pottery bowl, wavered and leaped. All along my backbone pain roamed.

Dismal shadows flittered on the cubicle’s rock walls. The darkness was thickest in the empty niche above my head. I tried to rise, fell back and floated off in hazy dreams of the past.

Through drifting mists shone the face of my father, a scarred and bearded fighter. He said he found me as a bundle in a hollow alongside the great Via Cassia leading down to Rome from the country of the legendary Etruscans. He was convinced I was a child of more than base blood.

Wealthy fathers often decided they did not wish to burden their pocketbooks with additional offspring. They exercised the right of paterfamilias and left the unwanted young at roadsides on stormy nights. The poor seemed to love their boys and girls too much for such cruel separations, he told me once.

My father Cassius Flamma was a widower long past his prime when he picked me up that night, a year before the current Emperor was born. Cassius Flamma was a lonely man. He cared for me as well as he could, considering that his sole income was derived from running a fly-by-night animal show in the Field of Mars. The performance featured a couple of Mossolian hounds and two toothless mothy lions. He would wrestle the old lions, parade the dogs around on their hind legs and collect a few coppers from the crowd before the watch came along to send him and his rickety cage carts packing.

He died when I was twelve, but he had taught me how to write and read the native tongue by then, as well as the universal language of commerce, Greek. And he’d left me a share of memories.

Tales of how he’d won the wooden sword in the Circus before Tiberius himself. How he’d
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become a freedman before that, and was therefore able to confer Roman citizenship on his son.

He showed me the trick with the hand, maintaining he’d learned it from a Numidian gladiator and put it to use on animals. And he initiated me into the hidden lore of the arches under the Circus, those dark, secret mazes where men diced and planned robberies and pimped for Cappodocian girls who performed lewd dances between acts of games.

Lying with my back torn half open, I remembered him saying that the path to fame, though dangerous, lay straight and sure in the Circus. I’d waited a long time to follow that path.

From my twelfth year to my nineteenth I had worked at various jobs, selling sausages on a tripod in the streets or unloading wheat from Africa at the Tiber wharves or sweating at the kilns of the Afer brick works. Then, only then, had it struck me that I was no longer a boy but a grown man who must make his way. To enter the arena it was not necessary to be a slave or a criminal. I could promise myself for three years to any of the training schools. I chose the Bestiarii School because of my father.

The time was ripe for success. Never before had public spectacles been of such importance to a ruler.

True, the Emperor favored gladiatorial contests, but some said he might be persuaded to enjoy animal exhibitions provided they were sufficiently base and bloody. Once I saw Nero Caesar Augustus at a great distance, when he was passing through the Forum, but the facts of his nature I knew only by hearsay, for I was busy in small outlying circuses where Fabius sent me to practice baiting bears with a veil and sword or to chase deer with a spear from ponyback.

Gossip held that the Emperor was an unbalanced creature whose policy of favoring the nobles at the expense of the liberty of the people was held in check only by the activities of his advisers.

He had three — the learned and wealthy writer Seneca, the Praetorian Prefect Burrus, and his mother Agrippina. Already, though, Nero was beginning to exert his authority. And why not, some asked, springing as he did from rotten stock?

It was widely believed that his own mother had poisoned her husband the Emperor Claudius with a dish of mushrooms. She had obtained the poison from an equally beautiful and infamous noble’s widow named Locusta. That was three years ago. Since then, the boy and his mother had ruled as co-regents. During that time, Claudius’ own son Brittanicus — Nero was Agrippina’s boy by a previous marriage to one Ahenobarbus — had also fallen victim to poison. The Emperor then cast out his mother’s favorite official, the imperial financial secretary Pallus. The most recent to go was Agrippina herself. She had retired to her great private house, stripped of her guard of honor.

The Emperor further scandalized the Senators by learning the harp and racing his chariot like a commoner. The mob loved him for the games he gave, though. So did the Praetorians. The Emperor was shrewd. The more circuses for the people, the less time they had to dwell on his countless infidelities to his wife Octavia and his liking for roaming the streets at night with noble friends, attacking helpless citizens for sport.

Fragments and snatches of all this floated in my head as I lay in my cell after the whipping.

Perhaps the winds of change that blew down the Tiber were not healthy, tainted as they were by the boy Emperor’s own mad breath, but they were strong enough to make me think dizzily that I must wake up and begin to move again or I would die no better than my father. I knew somehow that tonight I was a changed man, and would make my vow to become an eques come true or die doing it.

Then I heard a voice.

“Cassius? Here’s a sponge of wine and a handful of parched peas. Wake up!”

I rolled over. I blinked. A wily young face, deeply olive, and a golden ear hoop blurred, then sharpened. He extended the dripping sponge. I knocked it aside.

“Leave me alone, Syrax. I need no one’s help.”

He chuckled. His small, dark eyes gleamed. He juggled the peas and from the folds of his sleeveless tunic produced a small bowl containing a messy yellow paste. He put the bowl on my
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couch.

“I’m well aware you won’t ordinarily accept a hand when it’s offered. But never let it be said that a Syrian provincial doesn’t recognize his duty when he sees it. Smear some of that hideous stuff on your shoulders. It’s meant to soothe the pain and heal flesh. The school physician’s drunk somewhere. That’s why I brought it myself. They gave you quite a hiding, didn’t they? You bore it well, though. Stop scowling! I’m your friend. I was at some pains to steal that bowl from the physician’s rooms.”

“How did you have time, talking so much?”

“I’m glad to see you can smile, even though it’s a sour one. I came to ask — hold on!”

Hastily he threw himself into the corner of the cell where the shadows were deep. I gave several loud snorts to show I was still breathing. The guard paused outside the curtain, then passed on.

The corridors were patrolled at night to prevent men from killing themselves in despair over being sentenced to train for the arena.

When quiet fell again, Syrax scuttled back to the couch. He stared down at me with interest. Was he one of those types enamored of Greek love? His interest had other motives, as it turned out.

“When you killed the leopard with your hand, Cassius, I knew you were the sort I needed for a partner.”

I raised myself on my elbows and gaped. “Partner? In what?”

“Why, in the beast school you and I will found and operate once we’re granted wooden swords.” He seized my arm, his narrow foreign eyes glowing with the scheme. “Hear me out, Cassius. The Emperor may not have much taste for beast shows yet, but I’ll wager that within a year or more, the animal business will double. Triple, even.”

“You’re hasty, Syrax. You’ve only been here a few months. The term is a full three years.”

He waved the quibble aside. “The mob or the Emperor or both can grant the wooden sword any time they want. You know that. It could happen the first time we hunt in the Circus Maximus. I’m not promising it will, mind you, but it’s possible. So are many things. A large villa.

Riches. Rank. Fine food. The caresses of fine ladies instead of the gigglers they ship in once a week. I know a great deal about you, Cassius, though you’ve never bothered to do more than nod to me. I know you seldom have a woman in this cell, for instance. And not because you favor the Grecian style, either. Because you stand alone, needing no one. I admire you, my friend.”

“I do stand alone, Syrax. That means I don’t need you.”

I said it seriously, though I was amused by his nerve. His bold, bright speech wiped out awareness of the pain in my back. I studied him critically, both fascinated and repelled by the naked, laughing greed on his thin Southern face. Some inner sense whispered that for all his clever talk and quick grins, I would be safer to stay clear of him. He was a man driven by an ambition as furious as mine. But I was curious too.

“Since I admit I travel my own way, asking no favors, what convinces you I need your assistance?”

He raised both palms in the manner of a Levantine trader. “Our school.”

“Oh? How do you propose we build it? Even granting we manage to stay alive, win freedom with the wooden sword and find ourselves at liberty? Will the Emperor donate the land? Will he furnish us the money to build dormitories, import beasts and hire whores for the students?”

“That’s my part,” he grinned back. “I may look like nothing to you since I’m a foreigner. But I know Rome. I was shipped here with my parents when I was small. They died in an insulae fire, the miserable creatures. Since then I’ve managed to ingratiate myself with quite a few equites and senators. I am also a man of wide business experience.”

He ticked off on his fingers an astonishing collection of occupations including notice writer, oracle, fortuneteller, physician and professional actor at important Senatorial funerals, where he impersonated, as was the custom, the dead man in the burial parade. He concluded in a tone that reminded me of the upstart Tigellinus, “My last position was one of considerable authority. I
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served a wealthy landowner as his chief steward.”

I laughed. “Then why are you here?”

Unsubtle anger blazed in his eyes. “A little matter of using the master’s signet ring on some documents. The damned magistrate called it forgery. He offered me a choice. Leave Rome or bind myself to one of the schools.”

“Naturally you couldn’t leave Rome when there are so many fortunes awaiting a clever man.”

His fingers were hard on my arm. “Don’t joke, Cassius. That is, unless you enjoyed the whipping you got today. I heard your promise to Tigellinus. That you’d wear the eques toga. Did you mean it? Or are you like the rest in this miserable place? A braggart, full of nothing except wind?”

For that I would have struck him, except that I felt again the humiliating bite of the thongs on my back. A dark sense of fate swallowed me as I said, “What I told Tigellinus will come true. I swear it. I’ll let nothing stand in my way. Does that answer you?”

“Not quite. When you say nothing can stop you, have you the will to back it up?”

My resolve was suddenly hard and cold as marble. “Yes.”

He threw back his head and laughed, the ringlets of his hair shining. From the faraway plain rolled the boom of the thunderstorm, like nameless fate sealing our bargain. With surprising skill, and another reminder that he had practiced for six months as a physician, since the law required no examinations or even any training for doctors, he shoved me over on my belly and began to apply the messy unguent. The stuff stung cruelly at first, but soon produced a soothing numbness. I fell into a drowsy state while he prattled on.

Syrax elaborated on how we would found a successful competing school as the beast games increased in popularity; how his numerous contacts among the upper classes would help us locate the required financing; how I, by virtue of my size and strength, would be the lanista while he tended to the commercial side of our affairs. He was an accomplished improviser.

“Who knows,” he said, finishing with the ointment and wiping his hands on his tunic, “perhaps we might even uncover a few real unicorns to increase our fame, not those clumsy rhinos they pass off in the Circus while the mob hoots in derision. Or we might learn the secret of training a beast to mount a woman.”

“What?” I said angrily.

“It’s never been done before, and I understand things like that appeal to Nero.”

“If that sort of depravity is to be our stock in trade, I’ll have none of it.”

“I thought you said you’d do anything —”

“Except the unthinkable.”

Quickly he put on a sympathetic smile. “Sorry, Cassius. A joke only.”

“That’s better,” I growled. “What you suggest is an insult to a man’s nature, and our profession as well, low as it may be. At least on that point I agree with master Fabius.”

“Fabius is behind the times,” he said under his breath. “Still, we can worry about it when we —

What’s all that racket?”

He peered out the curtain into the darkened hallway, then turned back, grinning. He extended his hand to clasp mine.

“Best I hurry to my cell. They’re carting in the ladies for the weekly health session. I intend to indulge. Why don’t you? By way of celebration?”

I felt nothing but an overpowering urge to sleep. “Celebration of what?”

“Our pact, my friend. The only reason you’ve played your lone game this long is because you’ve never encountered a man with wits to match yours. Now you have. The two of us together —

we’ll force Tigellinus and his kind to bow to us, one day.”

He said it with such quiet force that I wondered what poverties and indignities had been his lot as a child. He was nakedly hungry behind his light, grinning manner. Thunder drummed across the Capitoline and the foundations of the building shook. With a laugh and a salute Syrax sped out the door.

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He carried a greeting to the women trooping into the vestibule at the hall’s end. I turned my face to the wall, pretending to sleep. I was amused by what he had proposed, yet intrigued by it too.