Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (64 page)

A flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, but before I could react, I was hit and fell backward to the ground. It was the bull chief, my old friend. The spine on the back of his fist was raised, and I looked down to see a large wound in my chest. He'd stabbed me in the heart. Somehow I'd managed to keep hold of the javelin, though. The child was only five feet beyond me, on the other side of the bull chief. The child's diamond body was bright, reflecting my face, capturing the image of a hundred Accalas in its facets, but the Accala they reflected was one I barely recognized—body broken, without armor, hair billowing about me like black ghosts. The radiation from the child had burned away my nerves. I couldn't feel a thing. I was gnarled like a root, eyes darting forward, red skin peeling away, hands tense like claws. Haggard, raw, wired. Ready to kill, ready to die. If this was the price of absolution, if this was how the empire would be saved, then so be it. I got to my knees and started crawling forward. A great blow struck me in the back, throwing me forward to the ground, face-first. I got up again. Only a few more feet. The bull chief grabbed my hair and yanked, and a second later I was hanging in space, blood and black ambrosia leaking from my wounds like a fountain.

I stuck the javelin into what passed for his face, and he dropped me. I threw myself forward. The bull chief grabbed my hand and ripped the javelin from it, then lifted me up again, holding me out from his body with one hand while the sharp spine on the other sailed in toward me—a swift swallow soaring through the air. Then, just like the bird, I felt light and free. I was falling, and at the same time it was like a great weight had been lifted from me. I hit the ground. There was something beside me. I could only turn my eyes, and it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. My charred body, still smoking, black ambrosia seeping from countless wounds only to be licked away by the intense, radiant heat. He'd cut off my head.

My head had come to rest on its back and slightly to the right side, angled so I was looking up. I could see stars. How strange. And above that a shining band tracing the bowl of the sky—the Rota Fortuna. Black spherae were swarming into the collapsing mountain, recording everything. I felt like laughing. I'd meant to bury this place once and for all, and instead the mountain had partially collapsed in on itself, exposing everything. I'd revealed the ichor store and the ruined alien city to the entire empire. Now the emperor would know; he'd see what the Sertorians had been keeping hidden down here and move to stop them. And what of my father? He was up there. Would this be the last thing he saw of me? Beheaded and alone? The fate of his rogue daughter whom he'd tried to reason with.

I lay there, staring up at the stars, thinking about my brother, my mother, Julia, Bulla, all the beings in my life who meant anything to me. All the people I'd disappointed or betrayed. I thought about them until an irresistible darkness began to move over me. The experience reminded me of when I was a little girl. I'd lie in bed and Mother would create a wavelike action with my blanket. One moment everything would be dark and then light as she rolled the blanket up. That's when I'd see her smile at me before the sheet fell and it was dark again. A good last memory. As I lay dying, the sky was suddenly aflame. Fire and explosions erupted on the orbital stadium. I couldn't see anything in detail, couldn't even focus my eyes, but I knew it was Aquilinus. He was back in his body. He couldn't have this, couldn't permit the emperor to stop him, to take away his ambrosia source, not now. He'd ordered
Incitatus
to fire on the stadium. He was staging a coup, making his move for the throne while the emperor and the empire's elite were all in one place. And I could do no more. Now for the last journey—to join my mother and brother in the halls of Hades to suffer eternal torment, eternal shame. There was no redemption, no good that would come from any of my deeds. Perhaps they'd turn my story into a tragedy play. The tale of a woman who betrayed her house and her father so she could fight and die in the arena. More likely it would be written as a comedy—the story of Accala, greatest of fools.

 

PART II

OLYMPUS FALLING

He could not control his natural cruelty and viciousness, but he was a most eager witness of the tortures and executions of those who suffered punishment, reveling at night in gluttony and adultery.

—Suetonius,
Lives of the Caesars

All the previous fighting had been merciful by comparison. Now finesse is set aside, and we have pure unadulterated murder. The combatants have no protective covering; their entire bodies are exposed to the blows. No blow falls in vain. This is what lots of people prefer to the regular contests, and even to those that are put on by popular request. And it is obvious why. There is no helmet, no shield to repel the blade. Why have armor? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death.

In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears. At mid-day they are thrown to the spectators themselves. No sooner has a man killed, than they shout for him to kill another, or to be killed. The final victor is kept for some other slaughter. In the end, every fighter dies. And all this goes on while the arena is half empty.

You may object that the victims committed robbery or were murderers. So what? Even if they deserved to suffer, what's your compulsion to watch their sufferings? “Kill him,” they shout, “beat him, burn him.” Why is he too timid to fight? Why is he so frightened to kill? Why so reluctant to die? They have to whip him to make him accept his wounds.

—Seneca

 

ACT V

LUMEN

O sprung of gods' blood …

Easy is the descent into hell; all night and day the gate of dark Dis stands open;

but to recall thy steps and issue to upper air, this is the task and burden …

Yet if thy soul is so passionate and so desirous twice to float across the Stygian lake, twice to see dark Tartarus, and thy pleasure is to plunge into the mad task, learn what must first be accomplished.

—Virgil,
Aeneid

XXXIV

D
EAD IN
H
ADES' HALLS,
I was flotsam, the splintered remains of a wrecked ship adrift in a vast black sea. Hunger for ambrosia infused my being. I longed to die. I prayed that the crashing waves would swallow me and send me down into peaceful oblivion. A great figure towered above heavy storm clouds. It was Jupiter, but at the same time it was Proconsul Aquilinus. He scowled at me as I sank, and cast a lightning bolt. The sharp shock charged the sea around me, electrocuting my entire body, refiring the hunger, throwing me back up to the surface, denying me peace. Each bolt carried an additional barb, a momentary reliving of my sins.
Flash.
My brother's eyes flicked open and his throat was cut, but the hand did not belong to Aquilinus or Crassus—it was my own. His blood pooled out over the ice floor unceasingly, gushing like a fountain. Aulus looked at me, confused, the hope draining from his eyes.
Flash.
There I was, tiny, the size of an insect, looking up at Aulus, who was now a giant, his torrent of blood a rising flood. His body, transparent and made of ice, held within it the great Hyperborean city as it was destroyed. I saw that the city was a living thing, a great organism—the Hyperboreans like blood cells, transporting ichor back to the heart, where it could be cleansed of the pollution of ambrosia and stored, a hidden celestial machine, a magnificent temple. I watched while what should have been regarded as one of the Seven Galactic Wonders was destroyed. Again and again I watched myself lead the Sertorians into it, transforming their sacred space into my private battleground. All taking place within Aulus' body. The towers and bridges were his bones; the vapor that rose from the ichor waters, his energy; and the collection chambers above the city, his lungs. A city inside a body, and as it fell, he died. Then the darkness and floating again for so long that I thought I was finally going to be allowed to die before the lightning strikes started up once again.

This was the punishment of traitors, of those who betrayed all that was dear to them. Like Sisyphus who eternally pushed a giant boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll down again, or Tantalus, who must starve with the food and drink always just beyond his reach, this was my eternal torment. I prayed for the end; I welcomed my torture; I deserved it. I wondered if the shades of my mother and little brother watched me. Was Aulus laughing or crying at my fate?

Time passed. The same cycle repeated itself again and again, so many times that I began to notice that there was one change, one small difference each time. Every time a bolt struck, it affected the water that buoyed me up. The dark sea was gradually lightening, and the storm clouds parted until, after an eternity, after countless repetitions, the sea was now clear and bright, so brilliant it hurt my eyes, and then I was finally falling below the waves, not into darkness and peace but instead to an agonizing awareness.

I grew used to the light—my eyes adjusted. I was in a cell carved into solid crystal, eight feet square without any visible entrance. The perfectly smooth walls generated their own penetrating brightness.

I had a sense of my body, but it was completely sapped of strength, unwilling to move, like a spoiled child refusing to obey her parents. My nerves were on fire, my bones like frozen pipes, every muscle and tendon taut with cold. The ice vapor burned my bare skin, but I was alive. I was awake and alive, I was absolutely sure of that, if nothing else. And I needed ambrosia. Gods, but I needed it. Ambrosia would take away the pain of reality.

There were no tools, no means of escape, no sign of Orbis or my armor or armilla. There was something in the ice just beyond the cell wall, though, right opposite me. It was a strange form, like a piece of abstract art, and I stared at it for some time through watery eyes trying to discern its nature. Looking beyond the object, I realized that there were no landmarks on the other side of the clear cell wall, just a solid sea of crystal that went on and on in every direction.

A wave of pain hit me. Gods, what was happening? It wasn't just the cold. I felt like I was being turned inside out. I tried to ride out the pain, but after withdrawing for a few seconds, it returned with a vengeance. I needed to move, to dig my nails into my thighs—a sharp, localized pain would help distract me.

When I finally worked out what the object opposite me was, I just stared at it, numb with shock. It was my body. Like Mania, my head lived on apart from the rest of me. My body hung in the ice like an old toga, just as Labeo's had. It was yellow, a sickly cyan color. Hundreds of clear, needle-thin fibers entered it horizontally, pushing through the suit of flesh before exiting the opposite side. My naked carcass looked like a bass viol strung the wrong way. Ambrosia was slowly being drawn out through the needles. And I could feel them. Despite the disconnection, I could feel everything that was going on in my body.

This was an eerie fusion of biological technologies. I had never thought of it before, but the human body could be seen as a vehicle for storing and transporting water in the same way that these aliens stored and transported ichor. In the process of leaching the substance that was most precious to them from my body, they would deliver me a second death, the darkness I so desired. The ambrosia sustained me. It kept me alive even though I was apart from myself. Perhaps this head of mine would be left there as some kind of totem, a trophy to display as I had done with Mania's head.

A day passed, maybe more, it was impossible to say, as the light that illuminated the cube never altered in any way. The ambrosia was drawn from me with agonizing slowness. My body was starving for that alien drug, wracked with the pain of withdrawal. I fantasized about being whole—clawing my way through the solid rock, excavating it in an instant, and drinking so much ambrosia that, like the Lotus Eaters in Homer's
Odyssey,
I would forget everything—my name, my past, my hopes and dreams, my nightmares. No memory, only an oblivion of pleasure.

As each drop was pulled from my body by the needles, I inched closer toward true death. Or perhaps I was already dead and this was some underworld torment.

It was all too much to get my head around. Too much to get my head around—that made me laugh, and once I'd started I couldn't seem to stop laughing even though no sound escaped my lips. I was literally off my head, and what did it matter? What else was there to do in hell to pass the time but to go mad?

Trojan horse. Hero. I told myself that I hadn't paid any heed to the thick, sticky flattery my uncle laid on back in Rome, but stick it did. Those words had weight. They lingered. I'd actually believed it, especially when the ambrosia was driving my every thought and action. Destined for greatness, prepared to achieve it at any price. I wasn't sure that I ever wanted victory for my house or justice for my family more than I wanted to be renowned for bringing it about. It wasn't about defeating the Sertorians for the good of the empire; it was about crushing them beneath my heel and about them knowing that I was the one doing it. That sentiment felt like a distant dream. Like looking at a snake through the force shield of a zoo enclosure.

Some distant figures moved toward me. It was like spotting some tiny specks of habitation on a desert horizon. They grew in size as they drew near. How strange—they must have been moving right through the crystal rock itself. It was the alien child from the heart of the city, and behind him was the bull chief. The solid mineral around the child seemed to liquefy and part as they walked, not daring to restrict his passage. As far as I knew, the Hyperboreans didn't have sexes, but I found myself unable to think of the child as being anything other than male, an alien boy. I could hear his wordless song again.
Buzz, buzz.
By the time they came to a stop outside my cell, it was like having a beehive lodged between my ears. That damn alien song had plagued me since I left Rome and for what? What was the point of it all? Unintelligible gobbledygook.