B007IIXYQY EBOK (108 page)

“Now the lamp,” he whispered to Diocles. His steward produced a sulfur match, ignited a bronze hand lamp and passed it to Julianus.

And Julianus saw before him, on the floor of a small chamber, a red-and-black-painted Egyptian chest that he guessed was a thousand years old, robbed from some tomb at the time of the conquests of Pompey the Great—Caenis had a passion for things Egyptian. He opened it slowly, reverently, half fearful it might crumble to dust.

Inside were dozens of papyrus rolls tied with linen. Blood beat in his temples. Patiently he pulled out a single letter and unrolled it, willing his hands to remain steady.

Diocles discerned only the fine, sensitive outline of his profile illumined by the lamp as Julianus’ attention was riveted by what he read.

“Are those the ones?” Diocles asked.

“Silence a moment,” Julianus whispered tensely, tossing one down and taking up another. “Yes! Here is an account of the time Domitian tried to poison Titus with aconite in spiced wine. Even better, here is one of Titus’ replies in his
own hand.
Anyone with a knowledge of handwriting could authenticate it. And…this one tells the tale of the time he tried to arrange a hunting accident. And here—Minerva be praised—an acknowledging reply in
Vespasian’s
hand. It is incredible. They
knew,
yet they let him live and carefully covered everything over to preserve the dynasty. Titus’ dying words, ‘
I
made but one grave mistake in my life,’
must have referred to his allowing Domitian to live.”

Julianus looked up, gloom and regret glinting in his eyes. “Poor Caenis. No love she ever felt was as sincere and complete as the hatred she felt for Domitian. Perhaps now she will lie content.”

“And finally, Domitian succeeded,” Diocles said, his voice hushed. “I wonder how.”

“Look at this one.” Julianus read silently for so long that Diocles became impatient and snatched the letter from him.

“What are you doing? You’ve no sight for reading.”

“Read it aloud then. Penelope could not wait for you!”

“It appears to be a scheme to…to forge a physician’s order. Caenis writes Domitian planned to wait until Titus was stricken with a common illness, a cold, a light fever…. Then he meant to order a treatment for him in use in those times among fashionable physicians…. The patient is packed in a chest of snow. There are no replies to this one. It is dated just before she died herself.” Marcus Julianus felt a cold grip of certainty close round him.

“Diocles, I would swear it before all the gods,
that is how he managed it.
Remember the quantities of water found outside Titus’ sickroom after midnight…as if someone had taken a bath in there and the tub overturned? I would wager my life it was
melted snow.”

“He murdered him with snow…?”

“The clever monster. Now I must find a way to arrange a private reading for certain influential members of the Guard…without being betrayed myself. I’ll have to feel my way in the dark. One wrong man, and those of us already in on this are dead men. It will take time…too much time. Curses on Nemesis.”

“Too much time for what?” Diocles sneezed loudly in the dust.

“To rescue a certain woman from her fate.”

“That barbarian woman? Of what importance is
she
next to this? And you need time, anyway, to find a suitable successor.”

“She is nobler than all of them, from magistrates to the mob. All my life I’ve watched tyrants destroy what is great and good. This time it shall not happen.”

Diocles shook his head sadly. “You
mean
that. There’s no madness in your family that I know of—I cannot guess where this comes from. This is not a Clodia or a Berenice or Helen of Troy we are speaking of. This is a female
animal.”

CHAPTER XXXV

A
URIANE WAS TAKEN TO THE
L
UDUS
Magnus, or Great School, largest of the city’s four government-maintained institutions for the training of gladiators. All the demons of Lower Earth, she swore, could not have schemed a sadder, more unholy place than this. This enclosed world was a mocking imitation of their whole society, dreamed by some madman.

None who dwelled within the multistoried hall of bleak gray stone were free, Auriane observed, even those who claimed they were. Rather, all were stacked in importance like neatly piled logs, with the many below bearing the weight of the few above. At the bottom were fresh captives like herself—a huddled collection of frightened chattel abducted from many nations, bewildered to find crude weapons thrust into their hands. By day, they lived between the whip and the brand. At night, they were thrown moldy mush she swore pigs would not touch and herded into windowless cells in a warren of passages that lay in eternal, moonless gloom, where the cries from nightmares were predictable and constant as the lowing of cattle at home. This quarter of the school was known as the Third Hall.

The next layer of men was made up of those who had survived the Third Hall and managed to murder one of their fellows to appease Nemesis and Mars at one of these people’s frequent, noisy festivals. These men were, as nearly as she could determine, a sort of slave-mercenary or criminal-turned-warrior. Though subject to savage discipline and kept closely confined, they were given careful care, much as useful draft animals are. The school’s physicians examined them frequently; they were fed only foods their doctors prescribed, given daily massage and regular visits from prostitutes—for the act of love was said to cure the
melancholia
rampant in this place. These were housed in a quarter of cells known as the Second Hall.

Set above them were the slave-warriors who had murdered their way to fame. These had fiercely loyal followers, as though they were celebrated chieftains. They needed no prostitutes because free women came to them willingly and in baffling numbers. Noblemen gathered to watch when they sparred in the school’s great practice ring; the people of the city brought them gifts and scrawled their names over the walls. They were free to visit taverns and move about the city, yet to her amazement they always returned to this ghastly place as if it were a proper dwelling and not one of the tributary caverns of Hel. These were the men of the First Hall.

And over all these grades reigned a king, successor to a long line of temporary kings—the august and terrifying Aristos. From the talk about the school she learned he had risen to this height with remarkable speed. In his first bout he had slain the most formidable heavy-armored fighter in the city, Craxus of the rival Claudian School. Within six months there were none left alive to seriously challenge him. She heard him spoken of as though he were a minor deity; crude busts of him were sold in the markets. Among his devotees was Domitian himself, who curiously counted Aristos’ victories as his own, as though they shared one soul. She had learned to despise Aristos without ever seeing him; he was a pettish, pampered prince. If the men of the lower grades made too great a din at their meals and annoyed him, guards came to silence them. Once when a cook put fish sauce on Aristos’ favorite pike—all were expected to know he liked it bare of seasonings—the man was flogged nearly to death, then sold away. If Aristos disliked the weather on the day of the games, he refused to fight. When he stalked the passages of the school preceded by his troupe of ruffians, novices scattered from his path. For he took great pleasure in seizing a novice and handing him over to his brutes, who would toss their victim high in the air on a cloak stretched between four men, catching him most of the time.

Alongside these slave-warriors the
Ludus Magnus
housed a second group, the men who maintained it; these too were stacked in importance. At the bottom were the wretches who cleaned the gladiators’ damp cells, carried out the slops, hauled water, and during the games turned the bloody sand between bouts. Equally without honor were the physicians’ masseurs and the swarms of kitchen slaves. Faring better but still not free were the school’s skilled armorers, morticians, tailors and leatherworkers. Then there were the physicians, haughty and independent, and the secretaries and accountants, cloaked in the mysteries of writing. Finally there were the trainers of the three Halls, who were as fiercely competitive as the gladiators themselves. All these cowered before a second king, the Prefect of the school, a man called Torquatus. She glimpsed Torquatus once as he was borne by in a sumptuous litter; within the shadowed interior she saw a malevolent Cupid’s mouth eased into a contented smile, the soft swell of an extra chin, and restless, rapacious wolf’s eyes.

Finally there was the school’s regiment of guards, who fiercely protected one another and formed a clan of their own. And all this strange madness existed, as far as she could tell, for the sole purpose of instructing prisoners of war—sane men in their own countries, men with no quarrel with each other—in the art of killing one another with skill and grace. For this was what the Roman people enjoyed, she realized to her astonishment, more than their horse races or theaters, more than the practice of their religion or going to war. Here was firm evidence a whole people could go mad.

Auriane stood in a sandy practice yard with two hundred fellow captives arranged in ragged ranks and files. The yard’s dun-colored walls were higher than the tallest pine; they pressed so close her arms felt bound to her sides. Clouds moved briskly, impatiently across the small patch of sky, taunting her with their freedom. Her masters were stingy with the sky—she found herself turning her face to it often, hungry for the sun.

Before them swaggered Corax, an undertrainer of the Third Hall, a short, thick, muscular man whose oily movements reminded her of a rat swimming in a river. He seemed to be caught up in a shouting match with himself; his bullying barks ricocheted off stone. Corax shaved not only the hair of his face—a curious Roman habit to which she slowly was becoming accustomed—but the hair of his head as well, a practice she eventually learned was meant to combat lice. With his too-smooth skin, his frequent flushes that turned his nose scarlet, his fat, balled fists and pink, puckered lips, he put her in mind of an outsized babe on the rampage.

“You are filth and dung,” he cried out. “Today you’re worth more as meat for the beasts than you’re worth alive. Will you be worth more tomorrow? Some will, most won’t. Give thanks to your barbarous gods that in this city we’ve a taste for fine swordplay or of what
use
would your wretched hides be?”

Auriane found herself assessing his soul more closely than she listened to the meaning of his words. We are indeed filth and dung to him, she determined. But he says it a bit too dispassionately; it means nothing to him, nor does any appetite of his, nor does any other human creature claim much of his attention. This man lusts for one thing: to move up to the next higher post.

Sunia stood at Auriane’s right, frowning as she struggled to follow Corax’s tenement-bred Latin. Auriane did not know if Sunia and the five other women in this yard were meant to be condemned to the arena from the first, or if the Emperor decided this in the wake of her own condemnation. She did know the women’s presence was grumbled about among the undertrainers, as if their Emperor had brought shame down upon the school. All together, sixty of her tribespeople had followed her here, Coniaric and Thorgild among them. There were as well two distant kinsmen of Witgern’s, a son of old Amgath of Baldemar’s retinue, and a dozen or more warriors who had survived the final assault of Five Wells. The rest of the Chattian captives, she surmised, had been sent off to rival schools.

In addition to her own people she saw men taken from distant places known only from legend—pale-eyed men from beyond the northern sea, Arab nomads, Sarmatian tribesmen whose faces were fierce and closed, and elegantly tall men with dark, polished skin from the southernmost extreme of the world. Of the women, all were of sturdy frame save one, a native of the isle of Albion who stood in the rank ahead of her. This woman was a finely made creature with hair that was gauzy and golden and small white hands that had never known work rougher than spinning. Auriane found her presence disturbing. Most of the others, if not yet adept with weapons, at least looked as if they
could
be. This woman should have been sold into some noble house as a lady’s maid. Again and again it happened that just when she thought she had begun to make sense of this situation, she would be confronted with some odd and sad puzzle like this.

Corax halted and faced them, shifting smoothly to a practiced, confidential tone. “Life’s plain and simple here…some animals can be trained, some cannot. But if you heed well my words, a good many of you have a chance of life…a few, perhaps, even a chance at glory.”

His voice rose to strident pitch. “So listen well, you crop of villains! Second of your virtues will be
courage.
The faster you acquire it, the fewer scars you’ll bear from the brand. You will learn not to flinch when a naked blade is thrust in your face. Life, death—to you, it will be the same. You will learn to strike first and take bold risks—the crowd loathes a man too covetous of his own life. And at the moment of defeat, you’ll not shame us more by shrinking from death—you will offer your neck willingly
to your opponent’s blade.