fear burn in her stomach. The heat could not be contained. It was spreading to her limbs. She could feel it colonising her very cheeks.
‘Gloria!’ someone shouted.
Straight away, a man half the Beast’s size skipped through the gate. He wore a comical goat’s tail and sandals shaped like hooves. ‘Romans, prepare yourselves for a battle that only the Great Jupiter could conceive.’ The ringmaster gazed reverently at the heavens, then returned his attention to the crowd and flashed a wicked grin. ‘I give you the Beast of Britannia versus…Felix the Satyr!’ The crowd disintegrated into laughter.
Now the mockery was complete. The goat-man scuffed his hoof-like sandals in the sand, bleating and bobbing to a cacophony of jeers. Arria assumed he was mad, though his ropy muscles and fast movements suggested an ability to fight.
She returned her attention to the Beast. He was still looking at her assessingly. It was as if he were some terrible predator trying to decide if she was worth the effort to hunt. Or perhaps he had already decided. She swallowed hard.
‘Romans, place your bets!’
Her father and the gold-toothed man were speaking together fervently now and she wondered what they might be saying. Were they haggling over some promised credit? Impossible. Her father was not credit worthy and he had nothing left to bet. At length her father raised his finger. He was pointing across the ring.
At Arria.
The air around Arria acquired a strange weight. It pressed down upon her so hard that she could not lift her feet, or her arms, or even her head, which slumped along with her shoulders in a reflection of her father’s own miserable posture.
She watched beneath heavy lids as her father and the gold-toothed man discussed their wager. Soon they were met by a third man—a scribe. The sober old documentarian scratched hastily upon a scroll, then offered the men his quill. Her father signed the scroll and gripped the gold-toothed man’s arm for a third time.
The bet had been made. Arria had been staked.
She felt tears falling unbidden down her cheeks. There were too many tears. Her handkerchief was not big enough to absorb them all.
‘Die well, gladiators!’ said the ringmaster.
Who was she supposed to pray for now?
Surely the Beast, for only a fool would have bet on the little man with the swinging tail. Even now, the howling Satyr was retreating from the Beast, kicking up sand and scratching at the arena walls. When the two finally engaged, the Beast quickly knocked the sword from the goat-man’s hand.
‘Kill the Satyr! Kill the Satyr!’ the crowd chanted.
It appeared that her father was chanting along with them.
Thank the gods—he had bet on the Beast. For once he had made a sound judgement. Perhaps he even stood to regain what he had lost. Arria could only send a prayer to Fortuna to make it so.
The Beast had the Satyr pinned to the wall and Arria could already feel the weight of the air beginning to lift. She glanced at her father. His eyebrows arched hopefully and his wrinkled old mouth was bowed up into a grin.
Strangely, the gold-toothed man was smiling, too.
That was when Satyr thrust his finger into the Beast’s chest wound. The Beast stumbled to the ground in howling agony and released his sword. The Satyr placed his hoof upon the Beast’s bloody chest, pausing above him for the death blow.
Stunned, the spectators fell silent. The champion was about to lose, right before their eyes. Arria strained to believe her own. Something was not right. The Beast would never have lost control of his sword as he had done. Even Arria could see that he was too experienced to make such an error.
The Beast raised two fingers—the traditional entreaty for mercy.
Was it obvious to no one but her? The Beast had deliberately lost.
‘Mitte! Mitte!’ the crowd thundered. Spare him! All eyes turned to the governor, who gave a simple bow of the head. Mercy. His chest wound still leaking blood, the Beast lumbered to his feet and Arria found herself searching for his gaze. But he kept his head bowed as the ringmaster raised the Satyr’s hand into the air. ‘Romans, I give you Felix the Satyr, your winner.’
Arria should have been relieved. The Beast’s life had been spared. For once this terrible night, mercy had triumphed over bloodlust. But injustice had triumphed, too, for the Beast had deliberately succumbed to the Satyr and Arria had been sold into slavery as a result.
She gazed across the ring. Her new owner was already assessing her. His eyes scraped over her: her hair, her breasts, her arms. He was regarding her physical form just as the bettors had regarded the gladiators’. No, no, no. This could not be.
Desperation seized her. ‘The Beast deliberately relinquished the fight!’ she shouted without thinking. ‘Did nobody see it? The outcome was fixed before the act! You have all been cheated! Robbed!’
Now it was not just the gold-toothed man’s eyes on her. It seemed that every single man gathered around the Chasm of Death had turned his attention to Arria—including the governor.
Oh, gods, what had she done? The governor gave a tight-lipped command, and soon his guards were pushing towards her from the left edge of the arena. From the right, her father and her new master were nearing, as well. The pit sprawled below her. The distance to the ground appeared to be three body lengths or more. There was only one direction in which she could flee—back into the bustling crowd.
But when she turned around she was confronted with a large guard smiling down at her through a mouthful of wine-stained teeth. It was the guard from the entry. He had pursued her, it seemed, and now he had her trapped. ‘Now you really owe me a favour,’ he growled.
She was surrounded on three sides, and there was only one option for escape. She closed her eyes, swung her legs over the edge of the pit and jumped.
‘Criminal!’ commanded the governor.
‘Harlot!’ hissed the entry guard.
‘Daughter!’ shouted her father.
The shouts grew fainter and she knew that she was falling through the air towards a very hard end. And then it came. Thunk. Her legs buckled, her arms, too, and when she looked up she half expected to find herself upon the shores of the River Styx. Instead she was wallowing in the bloodstained sand. There beside her lay the Beast’s fallen gladius.
She commanded her hands to seize the sword and, miraculously, they obeyed. Her legs obeyed her, too, and as she struggled to her feet she became aware of the riotous crowd. ‘Gladiatrix! Gladiatrix!’ they chanted.
Above her, two of the governor’s guards were already straddling the arena wall, preparing to jump in after her. The crowd was taunting them, daring them to take the plunge, and out of the corner of her eye Arria could see more coins changing hands. The men were making bets. On her.
The governor shouted down at the ringmaster.
