Calgaich the Swordsman (50 page)

"The eye?” Calgaich asked.

"Blinded by a hot iron.”

Calgaich shook his head in horror. “Can you talk?” he asked Fomoire.

“You must leave this place,” Fomoire whispered. “Morar found out somehow that I had been here to see your grandfather. She knows of my skill as a leech. They know your grandfather is dying. They plan to have you arrested as soon as the old man dies.”

“Why
did
they maim you, Fomoire?”

“It was because of Bronwyn. She was living a life of hell with Sextillius. Drugs and aphrodisiacs turned her into an animal. A few times her mind seemed to clear itself, and then she would appeal to Morar for help, to no avail. It was as though she didn't exist in Morar's mind.

“The Perfumed Pig held an orgy composed of the most licentious and depraved men and women of Rome. At the height of the evening Bronwyn appeared. She was as naked as the day of her birth, painted and gilded like a peacock, and performed the most suggestive dance I have ever seen. At its end she threw herself to the floor and crawled to the feet of Sextillius, to fawn upon him and then perform an act of fellatio on him. While she was doing this Sextillius beckoned to Murranus, a gladiator and beast in human form, who thereupon approached her from the rear and sodomized her.”

Calgaich raised a hand as though to strike Fomoire. “Enough!” he shouted hoarsely. His eyes were wide in his head.

Fomoire drew back in alarm and weakly raised his hands to defend himself. “If was not my doing, Calgaich!” he cried.

“Let's get on with this!” Lutorius snapped.

Calgaich nodded. “I'm sorry, Fomoire.”

Fomoire smiled faintly. “When one sees the battle flame in your eyes ... To go on—the depraved sex acts being performed before the others excited them into a frenzy. They coupled with each other, men and men, women and women, whoever was next at hand, and in the middle of the debauchery Sextillius had his slaves release some of his trained hounds into the room. The last I saw of Bronwyn was when she was under a huge stud of a hound.” His voice died away as the horror of the scene came back to him.

“Calgaich,” Guidd pleaded, “we must leave!”

“You and Lutorius find Marcus. You know what to do.” “And Nepos?”

“He’s done us no harm.”

“He can talk though,” Lutorius put in quickly.

“Use your own judgment. We can take him with us. His life will be forfeit here anyway.”

Lutorius and Guidd drew their knives and left the room. Calgaich looked down at the Druid. “Tell me the rest,” he said quietly. The fire was gone from his eyes. His features were as though carved from stone. No emotion showed in them, but Fomoire knew what hatred and vengeance must be stored within Calgaich’s mind like bitter gall.

“Just before dawn light,” Fomoire continued, “Bronwyn crawled into my cubicle in the slave quarters. ‘If living is this horrifying, dying must be easy,’ she said. I nodded as I took her into my arms.” His voice died away on a broken note.

“And you showed her how to die?” Calgaich demanded. Fomoire nodded. “Forgive me, Calgaich. Had you seen her, the terror in her lovely eyes, and the loathing with which she considered herself when she realized what Sextillius had done to her.”

“Poison, Fomoire?”

“The best, or worst. There was no pain.”

“Go on.”

“I carried her to her rooms.”

“And Sextillius discovered you then?”

Fomoire shook his head. “By the gods, when he found out what had happened to his golden whore, as he called her, he became almost mad. He didn’t know how she got the poison.”

“An easy enough commodity in Rome.”

“Yes. But he suspected me.”

“Why did he not kill you?”

Fomoire smiled a little. “I was too valuable a slave. He said, ‘We will remove the fingers of the hand that might have helped Bronwyn die, and one of your eyes as a warning that the other eye may be taken at any time.’ I couldn’t escape until this evening, and came directly here. They will be looking for you and the others, Calgaich, as well as me.”

“We’re leaving here tonight. Are you strong enough to travel?” Calgaich asked Fomoire.

“I barely made it here. Go on without me. They will not find me alive.”

“Or dead. You’re coming with us if I have to carry you on my back all the way to Ostia.”

Marcus, the steward, was in his darkened room. The leather bags he was handling were heavy with
sesterces.
He grinned to himself. There was a fortune in those bags. He would leave the house that night, while Calgaich and Lutorius were fully occupied in the death watch of the old bastard, Rufus Arrius Niger. Marcus had already taken two of the bags from their hiding place in his room to bury them on the hill slope behind the mansion garden. It would be easy enough to retrieve them some dark night after the old man’s death.

Now he lifted two more of the bags and tiptoed to the door of his room which opened onto a balcony that overlooked the atrium of the house. He peered down. Faint lamplight shimmered on the surface of the large
impluvium,
or pool, centered in the atrium.

“Where are you going, Marcus?” Lutorius asked softly out of the darkness at the far end of the balcony.

Marcus dropped the two money bags. He ran in panic to the stairway at the other end of the balcony and plunged down the steps.

A shadowy figure stood near the vestibule at the front of the atrium. “What’s your hurry, Marcus?” Nepos suddenly asked.

Marcus whirled. He splashed through the knee-deep water in the
impluvium.
He scrambled out of the pool.

Another man stood near the rear of the room. “Where are you going, Marcus?” he asked.

Marcus backed slowly into the center of the pool. He could feel the little fish in the pool nibbling at his bare legs. He looked back over his shoulder. Lutorius leaned against a pillar while fastidiously cleaning his fingernails with his knife. Nepos squatted at the edge of the pool. There was a half grin on the face of the Iberian. He had always hated Marcus. The one-eyed barbarian was standing at the edge of the pool with bared knife.

“Did you take the good
sesterces
down to Ostia, as your master asked you to do, Marcus?” Lutorius asked, “He trusted you above all others, you know.”

Marcus nodded quickly.

“All
of them, Marcus?”

“Yes,” Marcus blurted.

Lutorius slanted his eyes upwards toward the balcony. “You left your own savings up there then. Is that so?” “Yes! Yes!”

“By the gods, you were a frugal man, steward.”

“That is so!”

Lutorius sauntered to the edge of the pool. He squatted there. “How many bags did you have, eh, Marcus?”

“Only four,” Marcus replied.

“Search his room, Nepos. He dropped two bags on the balcony,” Lutorius said.

While Nepos searched the room, Guidd and Lutorius thoughtfully watched the steward. It was very quiet in the beautiful atrium.

Nepos came down the stairs, laden with four heavy bags. “These are all I could find, master.”

“Now will you let me go?” Marcus pleaded.

“Of course.”

“It
is
all of the master's money.”

“All
of it, steward?” Puzzled, Lutorius scratched his head. “It seems to me that
six
bags of
sesterces
were to be delivered to Ostia.”

The man was a devil. Marcus smiled wanly. “There are two more bags hidden on the slope behind the garden, at the base of the largest oleander there.”

Lutorius nodded. “There is one other matter, Marcus,” he said quietly.

Marcus stood by the edge of the pool. “What do you mean?”

“Your good master is dying this night. He was poisoned,” Lutorius continued relentlessly.

“By Nepos!”

“Nepos?” Lutorius asked, looking at the slave.

The Iberian shook his head.

Marcus turned to run. Guidd merely thrust his knife out in front of himself and as the steward ran into it, he pushed it into the man's plump belly and twisted it. Marcus fell sideways into the pool with outflung arms. His blood began to tint the water.

“Good hunting, woodsman," Lutorius said. He dragged the steward from the water. “Wipe up the blood on the tiles.” He then lifted the steward across his shoulders and dogtrotted out into the garden. He pitched Marcus over the parapet. Lutorius then dropped over the wall, found the largest oleander, and dug up two plump money bags. He hid them at the base of the wall and then returned to the garden.

Calgaich was shearing off Fomoire's long hair when the others came into the bedchamber. He had already shorn off his own long mustache and hair. “Guidd,” he said over a shoulder, “get rid of that long, barbarian hair and mustache. You'll have to look like a Roman at least until we escape from Ostia.”

They worked swiftly. Calgaich got his sword and spear and wrapped them in a bed coverlet to conceal them. Guidd, Nepos and Lutorius armed themselves with short swords they found in the house. Calgaich shoved the haircutting shears and a razor inside his tunic.

Outside they helped Fomoire to the parapeted wall at the rear of the garden. Guidd then dropped over the wall with Nepos. They caught Fomoire as he was lowered to them. Calgaich then lowered Bron over next.

Lutorius rested a leg on the parapet. “Are you ready, barbarian?” he asked.

Calgaich shook his head. “Take my sword and spear. There is something I must do, Bottle Emptier. I'll meet you at the bottom of the hill.”

Calgaich walked through the darkened, echoing house. He found some large jars of lamp oil and carried them to the pavilion.

Rufus Arrius Niger, once tribune
legatus legionis
and senator of Rome, lay still in death. His eyes were open. The knife lay on the tiles beside the couch. Calgaich closed the eyes of the old soldier. He thrust the knife inside his tunic. He gathered furniture from other rooms of the pavilion and stacked it around the couch. He drenched the furniture and the coverlet of the couch with the lamp oil.

For a moment or two he stood there looking down at his grandfather. Tears trickled slowly from his eyes. It was eerily quiet in the garden.

Calgaich struck a light and held it to the edge of the couch coverlet. The flame ate eagerly into the oil-soaked material and lighted the calm, hawklike profile of Rufus Arrius Niger. Soon a chair caught fire. Tongues of flame licked along the dry wood and set fire to a fine table of cypress wood. Calgaich tore loose a piece of the flaming coverlet and cast it upward so that it caught in the dry latticework which shaded the open-roofed room. The oil-soaked furniture was now all aflame and eerily lighting the stiffening body of the old soldier.

“Ave,
Tribune,” Calgaich murmured.

There was a sudden loud thudding at the barred front door of the mansion. The sound echoed hollowly through the building. The door crashed open just as Calgaich dropped from the wall to join his comrades.

When the sub-prefect of the guard ran through the house followed by his men, he saw the glowing of flames within the pavilion. The garden was empty of life. They watched as the latticework roofing collapsed and sent up a roaring pillar of sparks and smoke. The illumination lighted the steep slope of the Pincian Hill and the dense shrubbery that covered it. There was no sign of life to be seen.

Calgaich, Bron and his four companions stood inside a dark doorway on the side street next to the Ludus Maximus. No sounds of revelry came from within the high, vine-covered walls of the gladiator school.

‘There are not too many students in school,” Lutorius whispered. “Maybe ten or fifteen outside of our barbarians. The
veterani
and the instructors are probably out in the streets or in the wineshops."

“Would the students, outside of our comrades, give the alarm if we enter the school?" Calgaich asked.

Lutorius shrugged. “Who knows? They might, to curry favor with Togatus."

“How many guards might be on duty tonight?"

“Ten maybe. Twenty at the most. Those off duty would be in the guardhouse or in their quarters."

“What about Togatus?"

“He's probably in Quintus's old quarters."

“On such a festive night?" asked Fomoire.

“Why should he leave the school, weasel? He has the best of everything in there, as Quintus did. Fine food, excellent wine and perhaps a whore or two. Anyway, he'd be a damned fool to roam the streets during the Saturnalia. He's not too popular in Rome."

Calgaich handed his sword and spear to Nepos. He turned to Lutorius. “We'll need the keys to the armory and the outer door of the prisoner barracks."

“Quintus always kept them in the anteroom of his quarters."

Calgaich looked at Fomoire. “Lutorius, Guidd and I will go over the wall. If the alarm is sounded and we are seen, escape any way you can. Nepos here knows the city. You'll have plenty of money with which to grease any palms if you want to escape from Rome!”

“And what of you?” Fomoire asked quietly.

Calgaich grinned wryly. “We escape, or we die.”

“If you die, there will be no escape for us. We can’t make it alone, Calgaich.”

Calgaich pointed toward the school. “And what of our comrades? I won’t leave Rome without them.”

“Well need a place to meet once we get out of the school,” Lutorius added. “There is a deserted temple two blocks away, at the foot of the Street of the Pear. It was once dedicated to Dionysius, but has been abandoned since he went out of favor many years ago.”

Calgaich nodded. “Nepos, do you know where it is?” “Yes, I think so.”

“Good! You and Fomoire hide the money bags there. As our comrades escape take two or three of them at a time to the temple. Tell them to wait in the temple until we are all there.”

“And if you don’t show up?” Nepos asked.

Calgaich shrugged. “Then you’re on your own. You know of my grandfather’s boat at Ostia?”

“The
Lydia?
Yes.”

'“Cunori, her master, is one of us. Try to reach her.” Nepos grinned wryly. “With a maimed man, a savage wolfhound and six bags of
sesterces?
You honor me, master!”

“I am
not
your master! There are no masters here! We are all comrades this night and henceforth until we escape or die. One more thing: If you are caught, you must tell no one our plan to escape. Do you understand?”