Fireball (6 page)

Simon thought of the five who had crouched naked beside them throughout that broiling afternoon, especially of the little old man who had been in the cellar with him. What was going to happen to them? he asked Bos.

Bos shrugged.
“Damnati ad bestias.”

Simon had enough Latin to know what that meant. Condemned to the beasts—sent out into the arena, weaponless, to be savaged and eaten by starving lions, for the amusement of spectators. He almost did feel he was lucky.

•  •  •

During the ensuing days and weeks, Simon gradually got the hang of his new way of life. At the top, with absolute authority, was Gaius Turbatus, the
lanista,
or director of training. This was the man in the red cloak who had picked Simon out in the forum. He appeared frequently but at unpredictable intervals, sometimes accompanied by his deputies, sometimes alone. He studied the recruits very carefully, observing their progress with a keen, cold eye. Certain men were dismissed from the ranks following a word from him to an instructor, and did not reappear. They had been
condemned to the beasts, too, Bos explained, having failed to make the grade as gladiators.

The trainers were mostly superannuated gladiators. Apart from general training, they supervised the individual disciplines, of which there were many different kinds. Some, whose training took place not in the square but in an arena behind the barracks, had to do with horses; like the
essedarii
who fought from horse-driven chariots. All the rest fought on foot, but in a number of ways.

There were several varieties of heavily armed fighter, under the general title of
secutores.
A
secutor parmularius
had a small shield, for instance, while a
scutarius
had a big one. And there were
thraeces,
who had light shields and a sort of sickle, and the
retiarii,
who were by way of being the stars of the show. These wore neither helmet nor breastplate—they fought bareheaded in tunics—and were armed only with a net with which to snare their opponents, a three-pronged trident, and a small dagger. Apparently they took on not only heavily armed foot fighters but even
essedarii.
Their skill and therefore their advantage lay in their agility; their aim was to dance
round their more powerful foe, provoking and angering and eventually exhausting him—only then did they move in, tangle him in the net, pin him with the trident, and dispatch him with the dagger.

Simon, Bos said, was not the right type for a
retiarius
—too heavily built, young as he was, and not fast enough on his feet. Simon did not feel any great regret over that judgement. He did not relish the notion of going into the arena at all, but if he had to, he wanted to have something more than a yard or two of netting to protect him.

There were a lot of other people in the barracks, apart from the gladiators and their trainers and the poor devils in the north wing who had nothing to do but wait for their appointment with the lions. (And tigers and wolves, Bos added, and occasionally the chance of being trampled to death by maddened elephants, though that was something of a rarity.) There was a host of auxiliaries, playing their separate parts in this little world: cooks and their assistants, storemen, bootmakers, tailors, armourers, masseurs, doctors, and medical orderlies . . . they seemed to outnumber the gladiators, but it wasn't easy to estimate their numbers accurately. For one thing they
had the right to pass in and out of the barracks without restriction. Simon had a thought of getting out himself by passing as one of them, but abandoned it; however hard he found it to keep track, the guards seemed to know them all, and a botched escape, he was fairly sure, would, like a poor showing in training, condemn him to the beasts.

He did not try to discuss any of this with Bos. Even with their limited comprehension of each other's speech, he had come to realize that Bos's basic attitude was one of acceptance of things as they were. After being taken captive as a boy, he had been a farm slave for many years before being sold to the gladiatorial school on the death of his master. For several years since, he had fought as a
secutor,
surviving dozens of single-handed combats and several mass battles. None of this, obviously, would he have chosen, but he did not seem to resent any of it and would, Simon guessed, have thought anyone mad who suggested trying to escape from it.

But while he could not confide his own intentions to Bos, he could learn from him. He learned, for instance, that the present rigid confinement to barracks normally applied only to those like himself
who had not yet fought: the
tirones.
The
veterani,
such as Bos, were usually permitted to go in and out, as the auxiliaries did. The exception to this was in the month immediately leading up to the Games.

So once the Games were over, there would be a relaxation, and by that time, too, he would be a
veteranus.
Bos talked, with anticipation but not impatiently, of the things and places he would show Simon in the city; it was Londinium as he had assumed. There was a little wine bar in particular which was Bos's home, insofar as he could ever know one. His girlfriend kept it. She would like Simon, he said.
And
she had a young sister. He made a gesture indicating feminine beauty and winked an eye.

Simon played up to this. The important thing was getting out of the barracks. It was safer to keep his counsel as far as the step after that was concerned. One thing of which he was sure was that, however attractive the wine bar or the younger sister, they could not begin to make up for the unpleasantness of staying on as a gladiator.

Or the risks. He reminded himself of something else: Everything depended on his actually making the
transition from
tiro
to
veteranus
—in other words, on fighting at the Games and winning. Whatever his intentions for the future, fitness and skill as a gladiator were important
now.
It was not something like a school examination or cricket trials which loomed ahead, but a matter of life and death.
His
life.

With that in mind, Simon put effort into the training in a way he never had for anything before, and would scarcely have thought himself capable of doing. He exercised and practised not only during the long periods scheduled by the
lanista,
but outside them as well. Bos heartily approved, joining him and encouraging him. As he frankly said, other things being equal, the odds were not on Simon's side. The greatest fatalities were always (and understandably) among the
tirones;
in addition, Simon was a lot younger than was usual and, although tall and reasonably well built, was a long way from peak condition. So Bos welcomed the enthusiasm and drove Simon on when he showed any sign of flagging.

Bos also used his influence with the cooks to get Simon even more of the precious meat which in one meal a day accompanied the basic mess of barley and
beans. Simon became an object of professional pride to him; he would stare at him with the approval of a farmer surveying a prize steer.

The other and even more important thing he did was to teach the tricks of his trade—the manoeuvres and dodges he had learned in the long years of fighting. He had already fixed it that Simon, after the initial basic training, should join him as a
secutor parmularius.
The advantage of having a lighter and less cumbersome shield, he declared, more than made up for the lower level of protection even when one was up against a
scutarius,
and against a
retiarius
the difference was much more marked. Especially, he added, for a youngster like Simon.

There was one particular trick he would reveal only when they were off parade, with no one watching. It was for use against a
retiarius,
as a last resort if one had been netted, and involved falling in a particular way, rolling, and coming up again with a special leap which took you sufficiently clear of your opponent to have a chance to cut your way free of the net. Bos managed to get hold of a net for them to practise with in one of the unused storerooms. It was agonizingly difficult, involving the
use of muscles Simon had not imagined existed. Practising went on a long time before Bos expressed grudging satisfaction.

Something else happened in the aftermath to this, while they were relaxing and resting. Bos's barrel chest rose and fell with his breathing, and the fish design on it did the same. At the beginning Simon had wondered idly about the tattoo, but later it had become something he took for granted, like the trumpet reveille soon after dawn or the grainy coarseness of the bread. In the beginning he would have felt diffident about asking, but he felt more sure now of Bos's amiability.

Bos did not look surprised or put out by the question. He said simply:
“Christianus sum.”

It should not have been too much of a surprise; Simon recalled that the fish had been one of the earliest Christian symbols. It was just that he did not easily associate the remark with someone like Bos—especially with someone of Bos's calling. How did he reconcile being a Christian with a lifetime commitment to kill people in the arena? He decided it would be unwise, especially with his limited command of Latin, to pursue that point. He
contented himself with saying:
“Et ego.”
Bos looked at him, and this time was surprised. Simon nodded.
“Christianus sum.”

The big face split into a grin, and a moment later he was enfolded in a hug that made him feel Bos ought to have been called after a bear rather than an ox. He did not grasp all, or even half, of what else was said except that Bos was going to take him to meet a priest, after the Games. That might be useful, Simon thought. Whatever the priest thought about Bos's being a gladiator, surely he would lend a hand to help someone else to escape from the business. He wondered again, just where in the past he was. Before Christianity took over, presumably, but he had forgotten when that happened. And it scarcely mattered, compared with what lay not much more than a week ahead.

•  •  •

Although Bos was his close and constant companion, Simon had inevitably come to know other people in the barracks, particularly in the dormitory. Apart from the Celt, who kept his distance, he got on well with all of them, though he realized that might well be connected with the fact that Bos had befriended him.

The one he got on best with was Tulpius, the slave who had been picked with him out of the seven in the forum. In such a world as this, shared experiences—common disasters and common strokes of luck—were very likely to forge bonds of real, if transient, friendship. At any rate, he talked quite a bit with Tulpius, who was unlike Bos in having been a
verna,
a slave from birth, bred on a big country estate. He, too, had been sold, not on the death of his master, but on the dissolution of the estate. He was vague about the reason for it—there had been some talk of a fortune's being lost in sea-trading ventures. The result was all that mattered. He had found himself in a much smaller household, and in the city, not the country. He had not liked it; there had been only six slaves altogether, which meant a lot more work than he had been used to.

Then his new master had been murdered. There was no evidence as to who had killed him—he had been stabbed in the street, just outside the house. It was lucky that it had happened outside rather than inside. The magistrates had varied the normal ruling that all slaves of a murdered man should be put to death (for not having protected him) and had
ordered that only the chief slave should be executed out of hand. The rest had been sold to the
lanista.
He had been lucky again in being young and strong enough to be chosen for the sword, instead of going like the rest to the beasts.

Bos had not shown any interest in Simon's life prior to joining the gladiatorial school—he had very little curiosity in general—but Tulpius did ask questions. Simon's near-total ignorance of the language immediately stamped him as a barbarian—someone from foreign parts. So he said he hailed from a land across the sea, leaving it vague as to whether he meant Ireland or Scandinavia or Ultima Thule, and had been captured by pirates and sold here in Britain. Tulpius found that acceptable; just another run-of-the-mill story of life in the Roman Empire. He asked other questions about his earlier life, and Simon duly invented what he could and fell back on his poor Latin when things started looking sticky. But they rarely did; very little was known of lands beyond the borders of the empire, so almost anything would do.

•  •  •

The weather had been unsettled for a week, and a lot of the final practising had taken place in pouring
rain, but the day of the Games dawned fine. Simon awoke to the trumpet call with a strange feeling of excitement mixed with fear and a dragging sense of doom. The meal the night before had been a special one, with an extra ration of meat, and even jugs of wine passed from hand to hand along the trestle tables. There had been a lot of jollity and laughter and much bellowing of songs. Simon had put up a show of joining in, but had been acutely aware of the macabre nature of a situation in which men now singing and laughing together would tomorrow be intent on killing one another.

The day of reckoning had come, and he felt a sick conviction that all the effort had been inadequate and to no purpose. There was a different atmosphere in the dormitory—a quietness and tenseness and preoccupation in place of the usual jesting and horseplay. And the others were all older than he was, most of them a lot older, and most of them experienced. Bos put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a grin and a word or two of encouragement, but even he was grim-looking and taciturn. It was a weird and awful thing to look out into the morning light, with the sun rising over the east wing of the barracks, and know
that the odds were one wouldn't live to see it set.