Strength and Honor (41 page)

He took the helmet off. Tossed it at the automaton. “I’m not wearing that one either.”

“He rejected it,” the automaton told the
lanista.

The
lanista
nodded wearily to the automaton. To Steele he said, “Nevertheless, it is yours to wear or not to wear. I am tired of you and I hope you die.”

“Same,” said Steele.

After the
lanista
collected his automatons and left the dungeon, the gladiator pointed across to Steele. “I hope it is you and I.”

This time Steele couldn’t say the same. The man was another big one, a black-haired, bronze titan. The others called him Xeno.

Xeno informed him with a grin, “To yield you lift a finger.”

“This one?” Steele asked.

“No.”

It occurred to Steele that he hadn’t seen this one in a while. Xeno had gone out to the ring one day and had not come back. Steele asked him, “Aren’t you dead?” The gladiator Xeno shrugged massive shoulders. “They like me.” One of society’s dregs called over from the death cage,
“Adamas!
Don’t use your sword for blocking.”

Two others added at once. “Especially not against an ax.”

“Yes. Not against the ax. Don’t use
anything
to block an ax.” Xeno’s head turned with a wolfish snap at the criminals. “You’re aiding the enemy, traitor!”

The criminals smiled. “Yes, we are!” said one.

Another of the condemned said, “What are you going to do to me?” And he cackled, as if he were fatally funny.

Steele doubted how sound the advice could be coming from a piece of crap. He asked the criminal, “Have you been out there?”

The condemned man grinned. “I’ve seen the vid casts from the colonies. They haven’t held games up
there
in a long time.” He pointed at the ceiling.

“They fix the fight?” Steele asked. Not really a question. His fight against the lizard had certainly been fixed.

So the answer surprised him. “You would think,” said the condemned man. “But in front of this crowd? If this crowd spots anything fake, you will both be tied to a bull’s horns. When I go out there, they will want to see groveling and pissing and my insides spilling out. From gladiators they want to see a
fight.”

“I’m not a gladiator,” said Steele. All the expressions changed. The prisoner narrowed his eyes. “You think not,
Adamas?”

Steele’s armor arrived in the morning. A leather cuirass with leather shoulder pieces. There was no metal on his such as he had seen on the Romans’ armor. Good. He didn’t need the weight. Gravity was slightly stronger here already.

He received one of those stout leather oblong shields his guards carried. He bashed it against the cage bars to see if it would really hold up against a pounding.

From across the corridor someone called, “Ah, you go out with the real gladiators,
Adamas.
Today you die.”

He left the helmet behind in the cell when the guards came to get him. Automatons kept the Marines against the back wall, while human beings in full armor shackled Steele. One carried a short sword for him. Another picked up his shield and the discarded helmet and brought that along too.

When the gates opened and the sunlight hit Steele’s white-blond hair, the noise swelled to a riot of cheers and catcalls and roars. The stands drummed with stamping feet.

Steele’s surrounding wall of guards expanded away, leaving his sword, his shield, and his helmet in the sand. Steele immediately seized up the sword and the shield, and moved from the spot, just so not to leave himself where the Romans planted him. He looked up for surprises, glanced around the arena for trapdoors threatening to open. Gates opened, one on either side. One gladiator strode out from each gate.

Steele knew them from the cage.

On the left was a big guy—as if they weren’t all foxtrotting huge—wielding an ax. Didn’t know his name. Steele was calling him the Ax now. From the right came a bulky black man armed like Steele except that he wore a helmet—a helmet not as bad as the metal shroud with eyeholes they had given Steele. This gladiator’s eyeholes were big and insectoid-looking because of the metal mesh which protected the cutouts.

The gladiators closed in with measured steps from either side. When they were far enough into the ring, Steele sprinted to the wall and made a flanking run back around the Ax.

First thing you learned in sparring two opponents was to get them both on one side.

Steele chose the side with the Ax because that was the more dangerous. If Steele didn’t take the Ax down first, he was never getting him down.

Don’t try to block an ax with a sword, the condemned men had said. Looking at the weapon, Steele believed it. Don’t use
anything
to block an ax, they had said.

The ax looked like it could cleave iron bars.

They don’t fix the fights, my ass,
he thought.

But the guys may have been right about the crowd recognizing fight-fixing when they saw it. There was an awful lot of contempt in the crowd noise as the two gladiators stalked toward him, and the derision didn’t all feel directed toward him.

The Ax took the point position as the two closed in. This was going to be like boxing a bigger man with a longer reach. Steele was only six feet, so he had done that often. The only way to box a man with arms like an orangutan was to jam him up. Steele dropped his shield and edged forward with just his sword.

An enormous gasp sounded from all round, punctuated by titters and jeers. He had given up his shield.

The shield would slow him down.

The heavy ax was rising up for a killing stroke. Steele barreled in like a fastball. In before the blade came down. The long ax handle hit his shoulder as he ran into the holder. He bodily collided with the Ax full length, jarring his teeth. Felt the crunch of flesh and bone against his blade as his sword drove in low. Steele rolled off to the side, wrenching his sword out with him.

The ax fell limply from the gladiator’s grip. Steele jumped aside to get clear of the wounded man, who was tottering and trying to hold his guts inside the horrible wound.

Sounds of delicious revulsion oozed from the crowd. Groans, deeply felt, rose from their own intact guts. They loved it. Intoxicating, to be so close to death and to take their next breaths without pain, exhilarated to be alive.

Steele was busy locating the shield he’d dropped and keeping an eye on the other gladiator.

He kept the tottering, mortally wounded Ax between himself and his fresh opponent. When the Ax fell in the sand with a ghastly spill, Steele bounded over him, landed low to snatch up the ax and jabbed it toward the other gladiator to back him away.

The gladiator danced out of the long weapon’s reach. He tapped the ax blade with his sword, testing, watching for his opening.

Steele stalked forward, jabbing, keeping his opponent at bay until he was standing over his shield.

The ax was too heavy to be of use to him beyond poking his opponent away. If he tried to wield it in earnest, he would die like the man behind him.

He chucked the ax forward. The startled gladiator made a huge leap backward from the enormous blade as Steele took up his shield and lunged forward. He roared on a furious high, “Come on! Come on!”

The crowd rose in a wave, roaring.

Two men with swords and shields clashed. The spectators liked this much better than two against one. All of them screamed at their chosen fighter.

The gladiator smashed his shield at Steele. Steele met it with his own shield. Mistake. If his shield was engaged—

The sword was coming in low. Steele deflected it at the last instant with his own blade, not quite in time. He felt its edge draw a line of fire across his thigh.

A second blow from the gladiator’s shield knocked Steele on his back. Steele kicked the man’s ankles. As the gladiator stumbled and caught his footing, Steele sprang to his feet.

The noise swelled. A bizarre current he could feed off of. The burn in his thigh was nothing. The noise pushed him into an adrenaline high, too hot to care about the pain.

The two circled round the ax. The gladiator kept glancing down at it. He had to move his whole head to do it because of the limited field of vision his helmet gave him.

To Steele seeing was life.

He would not be lured into moving his shield too far from center, because that was apparently what the gladiator wanted him to do.

At a wild overhead strike, Steele jumped back. At a sword swing coming in from the side, Steele dodged to the other side.

The gladiator tried slamming his shield into Steele’s shield again; Steele was ready to take the hit—and not straight on this time, but at an angle that blocked the gladiator’s sword arm. Steele was already reaching around him with his sword for the man’s hamstring. Got the back of his knee instead. The gladiator folded hard onto the knee and pitched backward, unable to hold himself upright. His helmet hit the arena floor, and sat askew on his head, blinding him.

Steele dashed in, stabbed into the crease of his groin. Arterial spray and sounds of enthusiastic disgust from the crowd answered him.

As the spectators relished the sickening horror, a whole cadre of fully armed soldiers came out of a gate. One commanded Steele to drop his sword.

The sword dropped from his hand of its own accord. The guards surrounded him in their box formation. Heat was leaving with the end of danger. Steele was feeling his wound now. He saw his leg coated with blood.

The guards held ranks around him, while all eyes turned to Caesar’s box.

Romulus of late appeared only for the games’ commencement, then gave his seat over to some picturesque damsel while he tended to weighty affairs of state and war.

The yellow-haired
lanista
walked out in his sparkling robe to the fallen Ax, whose guts had fallen from his abdomen.

The designated sweet of the day in Caesar’s box stood up. She came to the gilded rail and spread her bangled arms to the crowd, soliciting their opinion.

The enormity of sound swelled, most of the thumbs voting down.

The young woman’s thumb made a slow feint upward to boos. Then, with a foxy smile, she thumbed decisively down. The cheer soared to the sky.

One of the guards strode over to the Ax and plunged a sword into his neck. A spurt of blood said that the Ax had not been quite dead yet. But he had been a gladiator so he got the sword, before Hades could poke him with a spear, and the slave with the hook came out to collect his carcass.

The
lanista
proceeded to the other gladiator. This time the crowd was demanding, “Live! Live! Live!” and the young woman obliged with a thumb up. The crowd cheered, though it really seemed too late. The bleeding from his severed femoral artery had stopped. That one was already dead.

Still, men rushed out with a litter and physically carried the fallen gladiator out of the arena at a run.

So that was what the bronze gladiator Xeno meant by
they like me.
If they like you or they need you, they don’t let you stay dead. Roman medical technology for resuscitating the newly dead was unrivaled.

Steele’s muscles were cooling, trembling a little from dehydration. The wound in his thigh
hurt
now. He was ready for a shower and one of those nice intradermic injections.
Come on, let’s go, guys, take me in,
he thought.

He heard the
lanista
announcing something in Latin. Crowd cheers spiked. Steele tried to see what was happening through the armed wall of his guards.

Got a glimpse of a gladiator in shining armor, bounding out the gate and collecting adoration, tens of thousand of voices chanting his name: XE-NO! XE-NO! XE-NO! The champion himself, back from the dead.

Steele’s wall of guards started to separate around him. One commanded Steele to pick up his sword.

They were making him fight again.

33

^S
TEELE PUSHED ASIDE MORTAL
disappointment and picked up his sword from the sand.

Dissonance roiled within the crowd voices. Sympathy for the devil. This fight was fixed and their favorite villain deserved better. Their champion deserved better.

They wanted to see Xeno go against the mighty
Adamas
in full strength, not a defanged tiger.

Instead they were getting the championship bout with the villain lamed. A champion was only as strong as his strongest enemy. Someone had seen fit to prechew Xeno’s meal.

Steele’s guards were leaving him, keeping their shields toward him.

The
lanista
was striding toward the gate.
I am tired of you and I hope you die.

Xeno waited.

And Steele charged sideways, to hell with the pain in his thigh. He ran all out to catch up with the
lanista
headed for the gate. It was not wise to expend strength on someone without a weapon, but this man had already killed him. Steele could not survive this bout and every one knew it. He was going to take his real killer with him.

The amphitheater filled with sounds of surprise, alarm, screams. The
lanista
became aware of his peril, looked back in time to see Steele’s face just before Steele took off his ridiculous yellow hair and his head with it. It surprised even Steele that his blade went all the way through muscle and bone, but he didn’t think he had ever been so angry. Through his blur of rage he heard the shrieks and laughter. And applause.

He turned to his opponent. Xeno was pounding his shield with his own sword. Took Steele a moment to realize that Xeno was applauding too.

Steele looked up to the crowd, gestured at the
lanista’s
body with his sword, soliciting a thumbs down.

And got it, with riotous laughter.

He turned to face Xeno across a length of sand. The noise died away, came back in a slow tide of chants and roars, rising and rebounding off the enclosing walls, to become a physical force.