ringmaster stepped towards Arria.
‘Stay back!’ she hissed, slashing the heavy gladius through the air. The ringmaster stepped backwards. He turned to the Beast.
‘You heard the governor,’ the ringmaster shouted at the Beast. ‘You seize her!’
Arria waited for the towering gladiator to make his charge, but he only stood and stared, a rueful smile twisting his lips. He shook his head, and glanced above them. ‘You would do well to run,’ he said.
The governor’s guards were perched at the rim of the pit and preparing themselves to pounce. The tunnel loomed before her: dark, terrifying and her only hope. She dropped the sword, kicked up a cloud of dust and dashed through the iron gate.
She found herself surrounded by a prison of stone. A long, dimly lit hallway stretched past several empty, iron-barred cells. There was the smell of blood and moss, and the sound of dripping water, though she could not determine whence it came.
Drip, drip, drip.
She heard a shout from the arena and a thud upon the sand. Doubtless the first guard had made his jump. Arria could hear him coughing and shouting obscenities while the crowd coaxed him on. Think, Arria.
She seized the nearest torch, shaking it to extinction. She did the same with the other torches until she had plunged the barracks into complete darkness.
Reaching the end of the hall, she pushed against a heavy stone door. Incredibly, it gave way. An exit. She felt a rush of fresh air and paused. The guards would expect her to escape through this door and they would come after her on legs faster than hers.
Think.
She left the door open, then stepped backwards.
She could hear the slap of the guards’ sandals upon the stones now. They were moving down the dark hallway, getting closer to her by the second. They stopped suddenly, listening for her.
Drip, drip, drip.
* * *
Cal heard a splash in the large water urn outside his cell. If he had not known better, he would have thought it a drowning mouse.
‘That was a remarkable show you gave us tonight,’ called Felix the Satyr from the adjacent cell.
‘Well, of course it was,’ Cal replied. ‘For I am the Empire’s finest gladiator.’
‘I am not talking about you, idiot,’ said Felix. ‘I am talking about the woman who has taken up residence in our barracks. Do you not see her there? You need only stand up and peer into the urn across from your cell.’
Cal stretched out on his bed and closed his eyes. In truth, he did not care if Venus herself had taken up residence across from his cell. All he wanted was a little rest before the arrival of his promised reward.
‘I hope she knows that she will not escape this ludus by cowering like a kitten all night,’ Felix mused. ‘If she is going to escape at all, she must leave while darkness reigns.’
There was a long silence and Cal was sure he heard another splash of water.
‘Why does she continue to conceal herself?’ mused Felix.
Because she is a Roman woman, thought Cal. And thus nourishes herself on the melodramatic.
Cal rubbed his bald head. When he had first caught sight of the woman that evening, he had half believed her an illusion—some vision of divinity foreshadowing his own death. In his three years at this ludus, he had never once seen a woman attend the pit fights and thus naturally assumed she had come for him—his personal escort to the Otherworld.
But the fights had gone exactly as planned. He had killed his first two opponents, then taken the fall, just as Brutus, his owner and trainer, had instructed. The governor granted mercy, just as Cal had been told he would, and the governor, Brutus and Brutus’s gold-toothed brother Oppius had all made large sums of denarii on the outcome. It had been business as usual at Ludus Brutus that night, with no chance of a trip to the Otherworld after all.
He should have known she was not divine. When he had glanced up at her that second time, he had noticed her appearance and it was about as far from divine as a woman could get. Her tunic was tattered, her expression was pinched and worried, and a distinct spatter of blood stained her shapely lower legs.
Though it was not her appearance that had finally convinced him of her mortality, it was what happened to her cheeks when she looked at him. A dark crimson hue had spread over the twin mounds and down her neck to the notch at its base. There, a tiny relentlessly pulsing drum of skin had betrayed her racing heart. He had been able to see it even from his position in the pit.
He never tired of witnessing it—the effect he had on Roman women. First came the blush, then the shudder, and then the look of fascinated derision, as if the woman were witnessing the incarnation of her darkest, most forbidden thoughts.
He was like a strange food from a foreign land: they all wanted to try a sample. And though this particular Roman woman was one of the loveliest he had yet seen, he was not so foolish as to let her stir his lust. Roman women were all alike in his experience. They were selfish, bored creatures who used gladiators like men used whores.
Pah! He had only a few nights left upon this earth. He did not wish to waste his thoughts on a Roman woman.
‘We are locked in our cells if that is what you are afraid of, sweetheart,’ called Felix. ‘And even if we were not locked in, you would have nothing to fear. Why not emerge from the urn where you are hiding and dry yourself? We promise not to watch. You see, we are honourable men.’
Still more silence. Then, finally, ‘You are not honourable men.’
It was as if she had spent the last few hours sharpening the words upon a whetstone.
‘We die to honour Rome, my dear,’ said Felix, his tone thick.
She pulled herself from the vessel with feline grace. ‘You die to honour profit.’
He craned his head and saw her shadowy figure lifting the skirt of her tunic and squeezing it back into the urn.
Felix cackled. ‘You wield your tongue as well as you do a gladius.’
‘And you wield your boasting as well as you do your deceit.’
Cal smiled to himself. Perhaps what she lacked in judgement she made up for in wit.
She jumped in place, apparently attempting to dry herself. Finally she drifted beneath the torchlight near Cal’s cell and he gave her a glance.
Her efforts to squeeze herself dry had been for naught. She was still dripping wet. Her large dark eyes blinked beneath thick, water-clumped lashes that glistened in the torchlight and played off her ebony hair, which had come loose from its braid in places in small, distracting spirals. Worse, the top of her threadbare tunic was soaked through, giving a full view of her breast wrap, which was itself so thin that he could see the dark shadows of her nipples beneath it.
He had never seen anything
