leaden feet through the Koressos Gate, trying to ignore the catcalls of the guards, which transformed in her mind into the jeers of a heartless mob.
She must accept suffering. That is what she repeated to herself as she passed the state marketplace, her stomach churning at the sight of the sausage cart and the smells of freshly baked bread.
She must do her duty. That is what she remembered as she passed the newly constructed Temple of Domitian, the Emperor who had not done his duty.
She must be a good daughter. That is what she knew as she turned on to Harbour Street and headed towards the cluster of crumbling tenement buildings that comprised Ephesus’s Greek slum. She was almost home.
When she had finally escaped the ludus the previous night she had run into the forest, fully intending to flee.
She had deliberately ignored the Beast’s warning against escape, for he knew nothing of the art of disappearing. How could he? He was foreign, famous and rather conspicuously bald. He could not escape his own ludus without being noticed.
Arria, on the other hand, was a perfectly forgettable little pleb. She knew she could survive in the wild. She would pick berries and gather olives and hunt for fish in the Roman Sea. Surely she could weave a net and though she had no practice in making fire, she could certainly steal it from somewhere, just like Prometheus from Mount Olympus.
But what would become of her familia?
In the end, it was the thought of her family that had convinced her to return. If she disappeared, the gold-toothed man would be within his rights to bring a lawsuit against her father. He could claim that Arria’s escape was deliberate and that he had been deceived. He could seek compensation for his loss. Arria’s mother would not be safe.
Arria turned a corner and her home insula came into view. A crow flew into one of the shutterless windows of the top floor, and Arria watched for her mother’s snapping handkerchief to emerge, gently shooing the bird out.
Every day for the past seven years, Arria had watched her mother wage daily battles against birds, sun, wind, cold and even the walls themselves, which seemed to be crumbling all around them. Though since her mother’s unexpected pregnancy, Arria had noticed that she seemed to be giving up even those small battles.
Arria had told herself that she had enough determination for all of them. It did not matter that her father’s gambling had only got worse, or that her brother was a wastrel. She could support them with her weaving. The proof of it had come just a week before, when she had managed to sell four carpets to a single buyer for a fine price.
She had been so thrilled by the sale that she had etched her elation on to a piece of pottery: a list of everything she planned to purchase with her earnings. She would buy honey, salt, oil and wood to see her family through the winter. With what remained, she would buy a sandal for her brother’s remaining foot, wooden shutters for the window and coin to pay the midwife when her mother’s time came.
And of course more wool.
Careless in her happiness, Arria had left the list beside her bed mat. She should have known that her father would find it there. Sick with the gambling disease, it had not taken him long to discover the purse itself, which Arria had hidden beneath their small clay hearth. And now their hearth would be cold and empty as a result. And so would their bellies.
A small farm was all she wished for—a place where her mother could tend a garden and worship her god in peace, where her brother could drink rain instead of wine and where her father’s delusions of riches could go no further than the boundaries of a fine wheat field.
It was a fantasy she had clung to since her brother Clodius had come home from the campaigns in Britannia. After his legion had defeated a barbarian tribe called the Caledonians, he had been granted a small plot of land somewhere beyond a Roman fort called Eboracum.
But he had refused to claim the land, had said that it was made of rock, not soil, with evil winds and wicked winters and local barbarians spoiling for a fight. ‘I do not care how many battles we won, the barbarian tribes still rule the north of Britannia,’ he had argued.
Arria and her family had no choice but to believe him, though Arria had her doubts. Soon after her brother had returned from his service, Arria had found him lying in a puddle outside the public latrine. ‘How is a man supposed to till a piece of land when he cannot even get himself to the toilet?’ he had despaired.
Now she found him lying in the gutter outside their building, dozing over the mouth of his flagon.
‘Hello, Brother,’ she said, giving him a gentle kick.
He lurched his head forward and gave a thready grin. ‘Hello, dear S-Sister. Lovely morning, is it not?’ Arria no longer nagged Clodius about his reckless spending on wine, for he had come to depend on it as others did bread.
‘You are drunk, Clodius,’ she said. And have managed to lose another tooth.
His crutches lay beside him, their dented wooden grooves tracing a history of tantrums. Humiliation was an ailment that even the medicine of drink seemed unable to cure.
‘Come, I will help you upstairs. Father and I have some news.’
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