Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (20 page)

“That never gets tired,” my cabinmate said with a chuckle. “Like a crab on its back. You should have seen yourself. Never been away from Mother Earth a day in your life, I'd wager. Next time, if someone offers you well-meant advice, you should take it.”

“Come, domina. I'll help you clean yourself,” the Iceni said, helping me to my feet.

“I don't need your help,” I snapped, brushing her away. As I regained my feet, I saw that the redhead was still smiling at my predicament.

“Wipe that smirk off your face before I do it for you.”

“You're very fiery for someone without a house or a guild to protect her,” she said mildly. “You'd do well to remember that you're no princess anymore. I can talk to you any damn way I please.”

“Domina, please,” Alba pleaded, pulling me toward the door. “It will be quicker if I help you. I can take away your used clothes. Come now.”

The servant didn't want me getting in a fight; it would make her job harder if I lost the room for fighting. And the redhead's matter-of-fact tone and lack of aggression helped me get control of myself. It would be all too easy to beat this woman to a pulp and release some of my mounting frustrations, but if I lost the bunk, I could end up being forced into Crassus' bed. Whatever ideas my uncle had, I wasn't going to throw my legs open for any Sertorian.

“Better hurry up, it's almost curfew time,” the redhead said. “The Sertorians have a gods-be-damned list of rules as long as your arm, and they expect them to be followed.”

“It's still too early for a night curfew,” I said. “It's not even lunch yet.”

“We're on arena world time now. Get our bodies adjusted so we arrive ready and raring to go.”

Alba led me to a communal washroom on the other side of the corridor. Thankfully, as most of the passengers had gone to their cabins for the launch, it was empty.

“I didn't see you fall,” I said to the Iceni as she helped me undress.

“We have been traveling through space for millions of years. My people fashion buildings and ships with our very bodies. This amount of force is easy for us to bear, domina.”

Her account reminded me of an article I'd read on the Iceni body ships. It speculated that there was a vast hidden empire of them out there, far beyond the boundaries of Rome, and that we'd only scratched the surface of their civilization with the few planets we'd colonized near the Barbaricum Wall, the boundary marking the edge of the empire. I placed my mother's pin safely in sight on a shelf in the shower. “I can wash myself,” I said to Alba, snatching the sponge from her hand. She blinked her red eye as if confused but then withdrew to stand facing the wall, affording me some privacy.

It took me a moment to work out how to operate the shower. I'd only ever used baths before, like a civilized person, but soon the soothing warm water ran over my body, putting an end to the trembling that had beset me. Holding the bracelet under the water, I tried to use the soap to slip it off, but it only seemed to tighten in response. I jerked at it again and again until it rubbed the skin around my wrist so raw it was about to bleed, then gave up, beating my fist against the wall, cursing Crassus' name.

Humiliores.
A low-class citizen, adrift without a house. A house protected you, upheld your rights. Without a house, you had none. It wasn't until I spoke with my new cabinmate that it hit home: I wasn't just Crassus' slave, I was everyone's slave. Every citizen of Rome with a house or guild behind him or her was my better and could punish me with impunity. Silent tears mixed with the shower water. The sharp light in the showers lit up my pin, covering it with a golden sheen. I squinted; my eyes were sensitive to the light. It was that relentless buzzing headache, droning away in the background.

He therefore who does not view with equal unconcern pain or pleasure, death or life, fame or dishonor … clearly commits a sin.… Despise not death; smile rather at its coming.… I do that which it is my duty to do. Nothing else distracts me.

The quotes that surfaced from the pool of my memory while I showered were from Marcus Aurelius, drummed into me by my mother.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
WAS FOURTEEN,
I saw two large Tullian boys thrashing a homeless boy for sport. I intervened and broke the arm of one, the leg of the other. The next day I was dragged before a magistrate and charged with assault with a weapon. The Tullians had contrived a story that I'd attacked them with a pipe, since they couldn't admit to being beaten by a girl. The injured boy was without a house to represent him and too frightened to testify. The magistrate found me guilty without hesitation—the testimony of two males, the perpetrators, outweighing that of a female. Due to my family connections, I was only fined and managed to avoid the whip and imprisonment.

My mother entered my bedroom that evening, not with a chastisement or to lecture me about violence begetting violence, but instead quoting philosophy.

“You can rise above pleasures and pains, you can resist the urge to clamber for adulation, you can keep your temper with the foolish and ungrateful, yes, and even care for them.” She smiled and sat down on my bed. “That was Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antonius Augustus, the greatest leader of the empire's first Golden Age.”

“I'd rather you tell me how I can get back at those Tullian thugs and the idiot magistrate who let them walk away unpunished.”

“Philosophy will give you everything you seek,” Mother said. “I know you only want to know about fighting and be like your father, but this is not something that weak, navel-gazing bookworms have made up to fill their spare time. Philosophy is about survival. It's about making sense of the chaos of existence before we succumb to its emptiness and destroy ourselves.”

“I don't need philosophy, I need justice. If I were a man, I would never have been charged. I wish I'd killed those boys and saved myself all that trouble.”

“They deserve death because they bullied a boy? What they did was wrong, but does it merit that severe a punishment? Is that justice?”

“What if it was me they thrashed? Or raped? What would your conclusion be then?”

“You are too smart for your own good, Accala Viridius. Try to grasp the point. It's how we perceive a situation that can mean the difference between life and death, satisfaction or misery, hope or despair.

“In this empire, a woman must be more intelligent, more perceptive than a man if she is to exercise power for the greater good. We are constrained by custom and history, but our minds and spirits give us the power to transcend any boundaries.”

“A thousand barriers stand between a woman and real power,” I exclaimed.

“The only true barrier is within yourself, and if you learn philosophy, you can learn to transcend it.”

Even though she herself was a Platonist at heart—seeking to realize the perfect world of ideal forms in the muddy reality of the everyday—my temperament, she counseled, would be best managed by following the Stoic school, the path embraced by Marcus Aurelius when he was a young general.

“Stoicism is the philosophy of the practical, of the individual, so that no matter what storms life throws at you, you will be armed with a grim determination to tough it out and see things through to the end. You embrace the law, universal galactic citizenship, rationalism, the laws of nature, the benevolent workings of Providence, and the divine reason that permeates the universe as a designing fire. Moral ideals will become your shield and sword when you have no physical ones.”

“Those are fine words. The kind Father bandies about in the Senate. Swords and shields are real. They make a difference.”

“You remember when you started at the Academy? How difficult the initial training was.”

“They said they had to weed the weakness out of our limbs.”

“And to learn philosophy, you must weed the weakness out of your mind by not taking our beliefs and opinions for granted but by examining them. First, though, we begin with memorization.”

I groaned and resisted every step of the way, but she read and then made me recite Marcus Aurelius'
Meditations
in its entirety until I hated it and would hear the words in my dreams. After that followed Epictetus and Seneca.

“Don't complain, Accala,” Mother said. “If you know something by heart, then it is always with you. Your body can always be confined and tormented, but your mind is your own. No one can take away from you something you know by heart—it's there with you for comfort and counsel, yours for all time.”

*   *   *

M
OTHER WAS WISE.
I
T
was her voice I heard when I recalled Marcus Aurelius' words. I reminded myself of my duty again and again. What I endured aboard this ship would be nothing compared to seeing my brother alive. Every indignity the Sertorians visited upon me would be accounted for in good time.

“Crassus had my trunk. Is it on board?” I asked Alba as she dried me off. Everything had been moving so quickly, I had forgotten about it. As it stood, the only possessions I could be certain of were the vomit-stained robes and Mother's precious pin.

“Master has seen to your clothing,” Alba said. She left, only to return a moment later with a small, sheer black silk night gown. This was what he wanted me to wear in his cabin. It was little better than being naked. “Find something else,” I instructed. “Something practical.”

The alien nodded, bowed, and scuttled away, returning quickly with a full-length black sleeping robe, warm and modest. When I returned to the cabin, the small portal framed a field of bright and distant stars.

“You look much better,” the redhead said from her bunk. “I thought I'd been bunked with a leper when you first came in.”

Ignoring her, I studied my reflection in the portal. The woman who looked back at me had wide, frightened eyes. It wouldn't do to wear my heart on my sleeve. The Blood Hawks must see only strength when they looked at me. A woman able to withstand any battering like the walls of the Wolf's Den back in Rome. Thinking of home triggered the memory of my father hugging me at the end of the procession.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you after they died. Please, you are my child. I don't want to have to disown you. Come home.

Right now I wished for nothing more than just that. To hug Father as I did when I was a child, to curl up on my bed back home, but I was an adult now with my own share of family commitments. Father would forgive me everything when I returned Aulus to him. He must be home by now. And Bulla, I never had a chance to say good-bye to her. Was she outside the door to my chambers, lowing at my sudden absence as she had for my mother and brother?

“It's not much of a view,” my cabinmate said, interrupting my thoughts.

“I'm imagining that I'm somewhere out there, anywhere but here,” I said.

“You don't like the Hawks much, huh?” she asked.

There was no point replying to such a stupid question. How could anyone like the Sertorians?

“I try not to get involved in politics,” she went on. “It's the collegia way. We just keep our heads low and do what we do. I work on machines. They're slow, I make them run faster; they're broken, I put them back together.”

“Some things can't be put back together,” I said, climbing up the ladder and onto my bunk. The bed had a hard, rectangular pillow and no sheets, only a radiant heat plate built into the mattress. While the Sertorians slept on plush mattresses, those who served them received only the bare essentials.

Alba was hovering about the foot of the bunks, a length of thin chain in her hands. One end of the chain was fixed to the bed's steel frame.

“What are you doing?”

“It is the rules. All slaves are to be chained at night. It is the same for me. I will go from here to the place my people are kept and be secured in my cot.”

“For what purpose? There's nowhere to run to.”

“It is to remind us that we are slaves,” she said. “That we have no freedom other than that which our masters provide.”

“Don't fight it,” the redhead said. “Take my advice—pick your battles aboard this ship.”

“I will return to free you in the morning, domina,” Alba said.

The Iceni touched the calcedonius strip at the free end of the chain to the bracelet on my wrist and they melded together, joining as one unbreakable piece. I was secured, unable to move far from the bed. Would I have suffered this same humiliation if I'd stayed in Crassus' quarters?

A chime signaled curfew. The lights faded to darkness, and I curled up, clutched my pin, and tried to pretend I was back home in my room, surrounded by the comforting noise of the capital. But my constant buzzing head, agitated by the vibration and roar of the ship's engines—the sound of a wave always moving forward, never crashing or coming to rest, never pausing, eternally constant—stopped me from indulging in escapism.

I silently mouthed my prayer to Minerva:
Please, goddess, forgive me my neglect and any wrongs I have committed. I offer you my life. My life for my brother's, my life for justice, and if this is the trial I must endure, then so be it, but do not disappoint me. Stand with me. Bless the way ahead.

Three weeks. Three weeks to prove myself to the man I hated more than any other. I buried my face in the hard pillow to muffle the great sobs that racked my body.

XI

T
HAT NIGHT
I
DREAMED
of Aulus. I was sitting in the family compound's library studying an old book when he came rushing in. I didn't look up to acknowledge him. The Wolf's Den was an enormous labyrinth of buildings, and I'd made myself intentionally scarce so I could study. Aulus demanded attention and wasn't past irritating the hell out of me to get it. It was about a week before he was due to leave for Olympus Decimus with mother. I was seventeen, he almost nine.