Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (33 page)

There was no choice but to risk a close-range cast. I'd studied Lurco these last three weeks, his body, how he moved. Putting an angle on Orbis, I threw hard in as tight an orbit as I could manage. My weapon whipped through the air, right at Lurco's midsection. Lurco had been studying me too. He raised the long haft of his hammer to block the discus, and his next move would be to step in and sweep with the hammerhead, crushing in the side of my skull, but he didn't realize that his wounded knee was causing him to drop his guard slightly. Orbis ricocheted off the top of the haft of Lurco's hammer and sliced into the side of his neck, biting deep, practically severing his head. Moving backward, I kept out of range as Orbis returned to my hand. For a split second my opponent could see in my eyes that he was finished before he felt what had happened. I wasn't fighting anymore, just waiting for the inevitable. Lurco dropped his hammer and fell to his knees, his eyes filled with fear. A moment later he toppled forward, crashing face first into the deck, dead.

“How do you feel?” Crassus asked, coming to my side in the arena as the crowd screamed with the excitement and satisfaction. Iceni slaves dragged Lurco's body away ignominiously.

“I feel nothing,” I lied.

“I can see it in your eyes,” Crassus said. “Your heart is racing, the blood coursing through your veins. This is the joy of stealing life, the joy of survival over the enemy. It's how the hawk feels when it snatches its prey.” He took my hand and looked at me proudly, expectantly, like he was the groom at the altar waiting for my vows. And he was right. I could feel it coursing through me. A primal, almost sexual electricity. I hated myself all the more because I liked it. I had never felt so alive.

The crowd became silent as Licinus stood and raised his hand. “And now,” he announced, “the event you've all been waiting for: the Blooding of the Hawk.”

“I thought that was it,” I said. “Lurco's dead now. Isn't that what you wanted?”

“No, the true blooding only takes place when something dear to us is cut away,” Licinus said. “Then we are set free to fly.”

A black steel cage was pushed out into the arena by the menagerie handlers. The last and largest of the animal cages that had remained unopened. Crassus was moving away like everything was going according to plan.

Licinus clapped and the door to the cell was drawn up. I couldn't see what creatures they had waiting in the darkness, but with Orbis in hand, I was ready to face whatever he had in store for me.

“Go ahead,” Licinus prompted. “Sever the ties to your old life. The sacrifice awaits. Prove your loyalty, and I will not question you again. Not once you are truly blooded.”

I took another few steps, peering into the darkness. A form was beginning to emerge now, moving into the light. It was large, a well-built barbarian. Gods. It was no beast at all but rather the wounded and bleeding form of a bronze-skinned Taurii.

“Domina?”

“Bulla!”

How could this be? How could Bulla be there?

“Your father sent her to the slave market,” Licinus called down from the balcony, unable to resist crowing over his little victory. “I think he was a little disappointed with how she performed the duties of managing his daughter. We had just enough time to snap her up, and at a good price too, I might add.” He turned to address the audience. “The barbarian was the family nursemaid, if you can believe such a thing. These Viridians have an unnatural affection for animals. Would a Sertorian hesitate to sacrifice such a beast?”

“No!” the crowd roared.

“So now we shall find out if what we have here is a hawk or a wolf.”

“Domina, why are you with them?” Bulla said. “This is a bad thing.”

“Bulla, you must listen to me. Go back into the cage, let me try to work something out.”

“Kill it quickly,” Crassus said to me. “Don't hesitate, or it will be the worse for you, for your brother, and for this beast.”

I took another step toward Bulla, who turned her head, regarding me with confusion. “Domina, your poor father, he was heartbroken.” She still had nothing bad to say about him, even after he'd sold her.

Crassus was right—I had to do it. One foot in front of the other. But I couldn't. I'd never thought about it before, I'd always taken her for granted, but in my own way, I loved Bulla. She was like a member of the family, always there in the background, always willing to help and give of herself.

“Do it now or I will,” Crassus urged. “It cannot leave this arena alive. Quickly now. Decide if it all ends here or if you will keep moving forward.”

I closed in on Bulla, Orbis in hand.

“Domina?” Bulla asked. “Why do you do this? Why stand with our enemies?”

“They're forcing my hand,” I said quietly. “If I don't kill you now, then they will kill you and then me and then my brother.”

“Little Aulus is alive?” Bulla said, her head rising with renewed energy. “And your mother?

“No. Not her.”

Her head dipped. “I understand,” she said. “Better you kill me than they. The Sertorians took all my calves from me. You and Aulus are the last ones I have raised. I don't want them to take you too.”

She lowered her head as the sacrificial cow had done for Marcus back in Rome, waiting for the deathblow.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I tried to make the blow fast and clean, through the back of her neck in one stroke. But the Taurii neck is thick and I had to hack at it three times to get through. Bulla never cried out once. Finally, her head hit the ground and rolled back into the cage behind her.

“Magnificent!” a voice called out from behind me, but I couldn't tell if it was Crassus or Licinus.

Crassus came forward and knelt down next to Bulla. He placed his hands into her blue blood, washing them until they were completely covered. Then he took my hands and bid me stand. He held up his blood-covered hands to the crowd and they screamed out their approval.

“Blood the hawk! Blood the hawk!”

“Now you have truly been blooded,” Crassus explained quietly. With an air of reverence, Crassus ritualistically drew lines of blood under my eyes and down the sides of my cheeks, the thick blue liquid mingling with my tears. “The marks of the hawk!” he called out. He used two fingers to close my eyelids and smeared the lids. “The eyes of the hawk!” A line down the bridge of my nose. “The beak of the hawk!” Then three lines with his fingers on my forehead. “The feathers of the hawk!” He pulled my armor from my body and traced the blood over my arms. “The wings of the hawk!” And last he turned my hands upward and stained my palms with blood. “The hawk's claws!”

“The hawk is blooded,” they all called as one.

My Sertorian teammates then stood around me, each one stepping forward to streak Bulla's blood over my body.

Barbata reached behind her, where a waiting Iceni was holding clean black robes with long red stripes running down the sides.

“Don't hide it, embrace it, own the kill,” Barbata said as she placed the robes over my shoulders. “It's the finest of wines, a pleasure that surpasses all others. We're all part of the one nest now, Accala. Well done.”

Licinus raised his hand again for silence.

“Congratulations. To all intents and purposes you are as one of us and therefore will be treated as one of us. You are bound to us now by blood in more ways than you know.”

I'd survived Licinus' test, but what had I become in order to do it? The Sertorians were mad, each and every one of them, but when you're surrounded by the madness, it is they who become normal, your sanity becomes insanity, the abnormal thing, by default. I watched dispassionately as Mania knelt down to cut Bulla's stomach open with a sacrificial knife. She pulled out the entrails and began to inspect them.

“The omens are good!” she exclaimed, holding up the organs. They looked like a Gorgon's head, intestines like snakes, blue blood running down her arms. “Accala shall help us win the tournament!”

Bulla dead, her blood smeared over me. I cared nothing for Mania and her prognostications, but the death of my nursemaid was indeed an omen. It signaled to me, in no uncertain terms, that justice had departed, Minerva no longer watched over me. Dark waters had swallowed me up just as I was finding my way back to the surface, and now I was so deep under I couldn't feel a thing. A thick suit of insulation kept me cut off from the world. No more struggling. It had been a mistake trying to resurface, trying to find the self I'd lost. The moment I accepted my uncle's mission, I'd started a metamorphosis into a new Accala.

“You watch now,” Crassus said to me. “The word will spread. The audience will love you.”

I stepped in close to Crassus, grabbed a handful of his hair, and pulled him to me, pressing my lips against his, forcing his teeth apart, and plunging my tongue into his mouth. He pulled away and staggered back, eyes wide.

“Accala!”

Crassus was so self-assured, but he wasn't expecting the prey to turn and become the predator. The crowd broke out into excited cheering.

I walked over to where Lurco's helmet lay. The image of the skull-faced god of death on the faceplate looked up at me. Minerva's neglect of me was not her wrongdoing. Crassus was right, as was my uncle; everyone saw it except me, but my eyes were open now. I had never truly wanted justice. Revenge was what I sought—cold and sharp. For what they made me do to Bulla, for my brother, for the war, for everything. I needed darker gods to serve my needs. If I were to serve any divine power, then from that moment, it would be the Furies, the triple goddesses in whose temple I spilled blood back in Rome. No even accounting, no balanced scales. Servius Tullius Lurco was dead by my hand and, to be honest, I was pleased. A wave of satisfaction passed over me. I wanted blood, rivers of it. More blood than had been taken from me. A hundred, a thousand times more. I would pack the underworld fit to bursting with bodies, see Acheron, the river of sorrow, black and deep, its banks overflowing, brimming with Sertorian blood.

 

ACT III

DEATH RACE

But let him fall before his day and without burial on a waste of sand. This I pray; this and my blood with it I pour for the last utterance …

Let no kindness nor truce be between the nations …

I invoke the enmity of shore to shore, wave to water, sword to sword; let their battles go down to their children's children.

—Virgil,
Aeneid

XVIII

F
OUR WEEKS AFTER LEAVING
Mother Earth, I joined Crassus in his chambers to watch through his wall-length portal as we came in on approach to Olympus Decimus. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a dream. No longer a Sertorian novice, I was dressed in a new uniform, bearing the red circle of the blooded initiate. Six of the seven grooves around my torso were streaked with red.

In the distance, picked out against black space was a perfect shining band encircling a white pearl—the emperor's orbital stadium, the ring-shaped Rota Fortuna (named for the goddess Fortuna's spinning wheel that could grant either favor or destruction), so big that it completely surrounded the ice world Olympus Decimus.

The orbital stadium's ring structure was a symbol of the emperor's unbreakable power, and each year the Rota Fortuna traveled to the chosen arena world and, for the duration of the games, transformed it to suit the editor's vision. At a distance it would be easy to mistake the emperor's planet-encompassing stadium for a natural equatorial ring, like those that encircled Saturn or Jupiter, but as we drew nearer, its breathtaking artificiality became apparent—the gold plate covering the massive ship shone like a calm sea at sunset and the windows sparkled with the same golden light that the distant sun transmitted to the icy planet below.

While the rest of the empire watched via vox populi telecasts, thousands of Rome's wealthiest and most powerful citizens witnessed the contest live from the box seats that lined the station's interior like stacked rows of fish eggs. Each box featured windows of telescopic glass that allowed the games to be observed at any distance.

“Darling, just look at it. Have you ever seen anything more magnificent?” Crassus asked me. He put his arm about my waist and pulled me close.

I tried to make my heart like a lead sinker, falling to the bottom of the ocean, and yet a tingle of pleasure passed through my body when he touched me, when I heard his voice, even when he was standing close. It was the conditioning from his machine combined with the ambrosia. He'd been pushing for me to come to his bed for the last week.
After the tournament,
I told him.
I can't think of anything like that right now. I need to keep focused.
He always seemed astonished that I could resist him, and it only made him more determined, but so far, by allowing him these small moments of intimacy, I'd been able to hold more explicit relations at bay. More important, I'd ensured freedom from the chain that secured me to my bunk at night as well as a continual supply of the ambrosia-laden tisane, and I needed it now more than ever. During the final week, I'd been bothered by the thought that Aulus was already dead at the hands of the Sertorians. Something Mania had said during the second week—
He was very precious to you, wasn't he
—she'd used the past tense. When I quizzed him, Crassus was insistent that Aulus was alive, and I had to believe him. Just the same, to settle my nerves and put any errant thoughts to rest, that morning (and against Julia's advice) I'd consumed a whole pot of tisane. The ambrosia had thrown me into a state where my emotions were only just tangible, like a barely audible voice arising from the cacophony of a busy crowd. My body and mind, on the other hand, were sharp, wired, ready for action.

A steady flow of ships headed into the stadium's external docking bays, carrying the empire's wealthy and noble elite. Their tickets were incredibly expensive and went partway to subsidize the emperor's costs of staging the event. There were even locarii—scalpers who sold a scarce few tickets for exorbitant amounts to privileged sycophants who wished to be seen with the famous and powerful of the empire. Despite the cost of admission, just like at the Colosseum back in Rome, five percent of the seats were kept open for commoners who were selected by way of a galactic lottery. All spectators would have access to the world below to witness the opening ceremony of the Festival of Jupiter, followed by the commencement of the gladiatorial games, though they would spend most of their time enjoying our tribulations from the comfort of their private boxes and making wagers for personal fortunes, lives, planets, slave species, some deals so epic that they would get coverage along with the tournament itself. It only added to the excitement if the fate of a planet, its settlers, and barbarians depended upon the performance of the teams. The orbital spectators had one privilege that set them apart from those who watched via telecast: When the question was asked by the editor, each one of their votes to see a contestant survive or be condemned to death was worth fifty million votes of the viewing audience at large.