people, Velus appeared in the doorway, his round face flushed, his breathing labored. “Is all well with you, Velus? You look as though you’ve run the marathon.”
The steward ambled into the room and closed the door behind him. “Everything is as it should be, master.”
“Excellent. Where did you take Tibi?”
“I’ve sent her to the arena.”
Alexius’s heart stopped. “You did what?”
Velus blanched, obviously realizing he’d made a rare misstep. “I thought she’d be well-protected with your men. I gave her slave’s garb and made Darius responsible for keeping her safe. No one in her family will suspect she’s there.”
“How could you possibly think that beautiful girl would be safe surrounded by men who plan to face death within hours?” Alexius grabbed a gladius from the display of weapons on the far wall and ran for the back of the house. He was shaking with fury and a sickening, unfamiliar sensation he could only equate to fear.
Outside in the courtyard, he called for his horse and vaulted into the saddle the moment his slave delivered the gray stallion.
Velus arrived on the doorstep, wringing his stubby hands.
“See to the shrew,” Alexius ordered over his shoulder as he spurred the horse through the gates. And if the gods have any mercy, I’ll see to her sister before my men do.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Darius, the young, ginger-haired gladiator trainer Velus had charged to ensure Tibi’s protection. Rather than calming her, Darius’s warning served to raise her anxiety as she followed Alexius’s troupe through the torch-lit path leading into the dank underbelly of the Coliseum.
“The competitors from the other ludi are slaves for the most part,” Darius continued. “They’re shackled and weaponless until moments before they’re armed and released to fight in the arena. If one of them escapes and happens to notice you’re a woman he wishes to molest, we’ll keep you safe.”
His dubious tone suggested such an event was as likely as the arena crumbling around them. Convinced that any slave given the option of running for freedom or ravishing her meager charms would choose freedom every time, Tibi tried to relax and reminded herself that she was here by choice. Although the circumstances were less than ideal, a few hours in the protective custody of gladiators were preferable to a lifetime of servitude to a goddess she didn’t believe in.
Unable to see through the wall of burly warriors encircling her, Tibi tugged the cowl of her dark wool cloak more tightly around her face. The distant roar of lions and the clang of metal against metal echoed in the passageway, competing with the thunderous din of the crowd that bled down the stairwells from the upper levels.
In the staging area, pandemonium reigned. The noise of hundreds of men and beasts reverberated through the cavernous space. Air whooshed through huge bellows, stoking fires used not only for light but for blacksmiths forging hasty repairs on a variety of iron weapons. Big cats—lions, tigers, spotted leopards—prowled in cages stacked against the pitted concrete walls. Bears, horses, boars with huge twisted tusks and even elephants awaited the ring in iron-barred stalls.
Sickened by the sharp stench of fetid hay and human degradation, Tibi watched the maelstrom of activity in awe. Life beneath the amphitheater spun like a well-oiled mechanism. Guards shouted orders to various troupes. Pulleys groaned as multiple lifts filled with dead warriors and animals were lowered from the arena’s sandy floor above them. Tibi cringed when the bodies were kicked aside. Just as Darius had said, trainers from the various gladiator schools unshackled their men. The fresh combatants lined up and traded their wooden practice weapons for polished shields, swords and tridents made of iron before being loaded onto the platforms that were raised back to the field.
“We’ll wait in here.” Darius waved her into a side room divided from the staging area by a low wall. Flanked by stone benches, the converted game pen held a large, chipped ceramic pot filled with water at the far end. The bulk of Alexius’s gladiators filed in behind her, while the rest remained beyond the wall to practice their battle stances.
Tibi tugged her cloak around her and buried her nose in a clean patch of itchy wool. The frenzied cheers of the mob blended with the tempest of activity clashing all around her. Doing her best to fade into a darkened corner, she studied the scarred, fierce-looking men. Some of them laughed and joked as though they were boys awaiting a romp while they played dice on the hay-strewn floor. Others were solemn, melancholy even. She wondered at the difference. Unlike most gladiators who were sold or sentenced into the profession, the men of the Ludus Maximus were volunteers who’d sworn their loyalty to Alexius, a tradition Caros began a few years earlier when, she suspected, he became a Christian and no longer wished to keep slaves.
The crowd’s muffled chant of “iugula, iugula,” demanding a fallen man’s death, chilled her. The gladiator games were a pillar of the Empire, but she’d never been allowed this close to the carnage before. Nausea swirled in the pit of her stomach. “How many men do you expect to lose today?” she asked Darius when he sat down beside her.
The edges of his mouth turned downward as he mentally took a head count. “Ten. Maybe twenty,” he answered prosaically. “The sponsor arranged battle re-enactments instead of a single man-against-man. The group fights are more expensive in lives and coin, but priceless in terms of buying the mob’s goodwill.”
Cringing, Tibi nodded. Everyone knew authority in the capital depended on keeping the public amused and satisfied. The emperor and other rich men who wished to influence or keep power did so by providing food and sponsoring an endless array of entertainments. The chariot races and gladiator games—the bloodier the better—were by far Rome’s favorite sports.
“What drew you to this life, Darius? Why did you volunteer?”
His dark eyes questioned her sanity. “The money’s good. So is the acclaim. Where else can slaves, foreigners, the condemned or poverty-stricken men like me go to earn freedom or fortune if not in the arena? We gladiators embody Romans’ worst fears. Because of that fear, most people look on us with a mix of repugnance and awe. But train a man with weapons, teach him how to entertain the crowd and in return the mob will give him a godlike reverence few men can ever hope to attain.”
“I know, but—” Another loud cheer signaled that the fallen gladiator was dead. She swallowed and wiped the sheen of perspiration from her upper lip with a shaky hand. “Some of you have wives and children. What good is fame and fortune if you’re dead? Why not be farmers or blacksmiths or—”
“It takes coin to set up a farm or a shop, mistress. Except for a few men like the master who fight their own rage in the arena, a volunteer does so because his plans require funds to prosper.”
Tibi frowned. She’d always sensed an underlying danger in Alexius and assumed his hardened life was the cause, but his charming smiles and easy humor made it difficult to imagine he possessed true menace in his heart. Now, she saw that her instincts had been correct. She’d been right to keep her distance from a man filled with anger.
“What are your plans, Darius?” she said, realizing she’d allowed the conversation to dwindle.
The hard angles of his narrow face softened. “My son is two years old and my wife is with child again. We want to leave Rome, to give our children a better life.”
“Where do you plan to go?” she asked, touched by the gladiator’s
