Arena (4 page)

Master of the second beast school in Rome. Rich. Welcomed in the homes of the wealthy. It was a dream worth pondering. And who could foresee the strange turnings destiny might take in the years ahead?

I was dozing off amid the squeals and gigglings of the women when a noisy altercation outside roused me again.

“What’s wrong with a Greek?” a man was saying angrily.

“Nothing, except that they stink and have rough hands!” came a feminine reply.

“Fine talk for a whore,” the man grumbled.

“Acte!” another woman chided. “Xenophon is already a famous fighter. Treat him with respect.”

“Respect? His manners are crude as a hog’s. Look, he’s already torn my gown. I’ll take any other man in the school tonight, but not Xenophon.”

The Greek’s reply was curt. “You’ll take me if I force you, dove.”

Perverse anger pushed me to the door. The women brought in from the brothels along the Tiber were clustered in the stone corridor. They smelled warmly of Parthian musk and jingled with bangles and trinkets of copper. Talk stopped when I appeared, including the bawdy remarks of the students lounging in various stages of undress at the cubicle doors.

Xenophon’s thick fingers circled the wrist of a girl in a white gown and sky-blue shawl. Seeing me, he released her. I enjoyed his look of dismay when I said, “I’m glad you turned her loose, Xenophon, because she’s the one I chose for tonight.”

His black brows thrust together. “Then choose again.”

“No, I won’t. You’ve already had your sport today at my expense. Now I’ll have mine at yours.”

I paused. “Unless you care to settle the dispute with fists.”

Growls from the other inmates stayed the Greek’s hand. Loud complaints that he’d used me unfairly upset him, for he enjoyed and even needed the admiration of his fellows to sustain him. I did not. I was ready to tell them to mind their own affairs when I realized that none of them, except perhaps Syrax, cared a whit about me. Xenophon was a bully and they enjoyed watching him squirm.

The Greek thought over my invitation. Then he moved forward a step. I doubled my hands, ready to fight. A lash cracked as Fabius appeared.

“Into your cells, into your cells! You’ll bring the watch with your racket. We have trouble enough smuggling these women through the streets. Xenophon, what’s wrong with you? You look as though you swallowed poison.”

“Nothing, master Fabius. Nothing we won’t settle later.”

He caught the waist of a plump Phoenician wench and shambled off to his cubicle. There being more than enough women, Syrax managed to procure two for himself. The last I saw, he was entertaining them with anecdotes of his intimacy with many famous persons in Rome. Fabius snapped the whip again and threatened loudly, but he threw me a grudging glance of approval when he noticed the girl had wandered unbidden into my cell.

Turning, I saw the tallow light glow through the cheap cloth of her tunic, limning the slenderness of her thighs and the round high peaks of her breasts. At the hall’s end guards marched in, depositing at each sill the night’s ration of wine. I waited outside until the men passed with mine.

The jar was chilled. Or perhaps the flesh of my palm was hot.

The girl waited. I stepped into the cell and drew the curtain, surprised to discover that I hardly felt the hurting of my back; that an immense loneliness filled me suddenly; and that the girl was very beautiful.

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“DO YOU PLANto stand there all night holding that wine jug?” she asked, laughing.

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Embarrassed, I thrust it to her. “Help yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t care for any right now, thanks.” She sat on the couch and removed her sandals one by one. “I only wanted to see whether you had manners. Not many in this place do.”

She indicated the tear in her tunic made by Xenophon. Her red mouth formed a professional smile. Her hair, brown and lustrous, was piled and piled upon her head in a profusion of coils and ringlets, after the current fashion. She was plainly arrayed except for the whore’s kohl blackening her eyelids. A spiced scent of perfume hung around her. She seemed hardly older than I, but was fully developed, with a woman’s breasts and long legs.

While I helped myself to a draught from the jar, thunder boomed again. Somewhere in the darkened maze of cells a girl shrieked in a frenzied way. I had a peculiar impulse to pull down a rag from a wall peg and scrub this girl’s face clean.

“My name’s Acte. Or did you hear that?” Her voice was pleasant, less shrill that those of her sisters. “Who are you? Perhaps you prefer to remain nameless.”

“Cassius. And that’s a strange remark. Don’t you have any stomach for the work?”

“Would I be here if I didn’t? I’ve visited the school several times in the past two months. So you’re Cassius. I’ve heard about you. They call you Cassius the Cur.”

A tightness filled my throat “Who does?”

“Oh, men here. They say you growl whenever you speak.”

“Fools. They imagine soft words and friendliness will make them rich.”

“Is that why you’re a slave to the school? For riches?”

“Can you suggest a better reason? But I’m no slave. I bound myself voluntarily.”

Changing the subject, she glanced about the cell and noticed the empty niche. “Where’s your god? The rest have one.”

“Tell me which of the gods is most reliable and I’ll put his statue there.”

A curious light, a mixture of amusement and pity, filled her dark eyes. “Then the stories are true after all. You’re quite as strange and bitter as they make out.”

I hauled back the curtain on the dark, whispering hall. “Get out, no rule requires me to endure lectures from a whore.”

I spoke harshly because, for a moment, I’d found myself wanting her, and it hurt to discover she was an imperious bitch free with opinions about everyone’s state except her own. She did not stir. She reached for the wine jar and drank a little, with surprising grace.

“Did you hear me, woman? I said leave.”

She shook her head.

“You refuse?”

“I refuse. Perhaps I deserve your contempt for selling my body. But I’m also a human being. I mean to be civilly treated.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Acte, the world doesn’t turn on civility, but on copper coins and the whims of the boy on the Palatine.”

She leaped up. “I don’t believe that. The gods will protect and help any who appeal to them.”

“No doubt they help you pull up your hem several times every night.”

She leaped at me across the dim cell, cattish and quick. Her nails tore a trail down my cheek. I seized her wrists and held her, laughing. She spewed out a string of street oaths surprising even from one of her profession. Soon her anger turned to tears. I couldn’t help puzzling. One instant, she behaved like the lowest harridan, the next like a girl-child barely old enough to know the difference between men and women.

Fighting her off, I said, “I repeat, Acte, you’re free to leave. I picked you only because Xenophon laid these marks on my back. I’m in no mood for sermons on the gods. Cassius the Cur, as you call him, can only growl.”

“Certainly I’ll go,” she said acidly. “I expect you’re a Greek at heart anyway. Outwardly you’re dark and mannish, but secretly you probably prefer plump little boys who —”

With a knotted fist I struck her, spun her onto the stone couch where she lay gasping. Her gown
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tangled around her hips. Her breasts rose in sharp thrusts under the material.

“I’ll show you who’s Greek and who’s not, whore!”

I flung off my waistcloth, dropped and pinned her hands on the blanket. Though she was agile and strong, it was not enough. I hurt her at first. She beat her fists against my shoulders and cried out.

Suddenly her tinted mouth was very close, breathing out a sweet scent. I lost my stomach for such coward’s work. The rest of it was gentle enough, but neither of us took any pleasure. At the end, when I went for the wine jar, she sat up wearily, her breasts gleaming like rubies at the ends, a moment before she covered them. She set about adjusting a boxwood comb that had come loose from her dark hair. Dumbly I offered the wine. She drank, then searched my face.

“Thank you, Cassius. They have no right to call you names.”

“Oh? Am I a more tender lover than you’re accustomed to in your trade?”

“Don’t say it with such a sneer.”

“Answer, my question.”

With a sad look she murmured, “Yes, you are.”

Glowering at the empty niche where no god was worth to stand, I wondered what had stopped me when I wanted to hurt her. The touch of her flanks had been painfully sweet. Abruptly I recalled Syrax and our wild scheme. It seemed wild no longer.

“The rest of them, any of them,” Acte said at last, “would have finished it roughly. The way you began it. Even that Syrian provincial with the ring in his ear —” A shudder rippled her shoulders. “He’s the worst of the lot.”

“Syrax? He’s harmless.”

“Have you ever looked closely in his eyes? Seen what he wants and how far he means to go to get it? And her forces his smiles. At least,” she added with a toss of her hair, “I needn’t feel ashamed on that score. I never pretend feelings that aren’t real.”

“Most of your sisters do.”

“I am what I am, Cassius.”

I sat beside her. “Then you’ll have a short and unhappy career in the brothels.”

“That’s the kind I want. If I told you why I put myself in Sulla’s house in the first place, no doubt you’d make sport of my story. But I’ll say this. It wasn’t because I liked it, or had much choice.”

She sat quite close, her legs warm as down near mine. She held the gown to her breasts and stared beyond the stone wall to some unhappy past. Through the gloomy labyrinth of the school echoed laughter and other, less genteel sounds. Someone plucked a hand harp against the rumble of the storm-swollen night sky.

The story she told, plainly and without excuse, was simple enough. Her father and her four brothers and sisters had originally been slaves. They were freed when she was young. Her father’s master, a Senator, had been instrumental in obtaining for him a modest position in the Imperial Treasury under Claudius. When that ruler swallowed Agrippina’s poisoned mushrooms and Nero was hailed to the throne, first by the Praetorians, then by the Senate, Acte’s father was among several hundred losing jobs in the Treasury. Nero replaced the quaestors of Claudius, as well as the whole staff the two treasurers employed, with his own appointees. Rome swarmed with thousands of similar victims of the change in power, poorly trained for any job but one.

The older ones, like Acte’s father, were out of luck. Places like the Afer brick works gave preference to young men.

So her father earned a few coppers operating a wretched public barber stand, clipping locks over a tripod while the family crowded together in one of the insulae, teetering wood tenements that contained innumerable foul apartments, not to mention pestilence and death. Barbering was not profitable enough to feed six mouths. Unknown to her father, the girl had looked for work, finding nothing that would pay half so well as a place at Sulla’s. The brothel was located along the great bend of the Tiber on the far side of the Field of Mars, close by many others. She had been there a little over two months.

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She finished her story by saying, “As soon as my brothers are old enough to work decently, I’ll walk out of Sulla’s and never look back. The gods will help me, too. They favor honest people who don’t mock them.”

Our glances held a moment. Abruptly I was afraid of her. Of what she might do to me.

“In that way we’re alike, Acte. Both inmates of establishments we care little about. Are you being honest, though? Will you stop? I won’t.”

“Or even give it a thought? The arena is dangerous.”

“I mean to make a mark in Rome. One that stands out as clearly as these stripes they put on my back. And I’ll do it alone.”

“To forsake the gods brings disaster, Cassius. Even a whore ought to pray.”

“The only gods I recognize are a full belly, a full purse and a respected name.”

“That may be so. Yet you’re not as hard as you pretend. It’s a long time since I was treated with any gentleness. Oh yes, you did, for all your growling and ranting to the contrary. I wouldn’t —

lecture you, as you call it, if I felt — well, that you were another Xenophon or Syrax or worse.”

What in the name of the nameless powers was she doing to me?

Staring at her, so soft and lovely despite her black-painted eyes, I felt my will melt and my heart go out. I wanted her again. The tallow burned low, throwing off acrid smoke. Back in Sulla’s house, would she chortle with her sisters over making a fool of Cassius the Cur? No, she wasn’t the kind —

Dangerous nonsense. I had made a vow. Listening to her talk of gentleness and gods would weaken me. I moved stiffly to the curtain.

“This time, Acte, when I say leave, you must.”

“Must I? We have until morning. Only then will the real world come back.”

“This is the real world. This cheap little room.”

“Looking at things only with your eyes, Cassius, brings death creeping inside you.”

“A few more months romping with Sulla’s guests and you’ll change your mind.”

She shook her head. “No, Cassius. Not since I came here.”

“What do you want, Acte? To glorify yourself by saving me? I don’t need saving.”

She walked toward me slowly, the gown fallen. Her nakedness was warm and incredibly desirable. “You need it very much, Cassius. We all need it. Rome needs it. The old gods and the decent things they stood for are being killed. Killed under chariot wheels in the Circus. Killed by cruelty and our believing that gods are no more than men who can be bribed at an altar.”

She touched my face. “Your eyes are black and hard but the greed in them isn’t quite real. Not yet, anyway.” Her palm stole up my cheek. “Don’t let it become real, Cassius. Fight if you must, but hold back part of yourself. The way I have. Until now.”

Her hair floated near my face as I whispered, “Acte, when the sun comes up, they’ll fetch you out of here. Why spend a night making ourselves miserable with talk? If you want to take pleasure —”