Another flurry of blows began, faster than Lucius could follow. Hilarus was at the top of his form—graceful, fast-moving, laying down a ferocious battery of blows; but Cestinius seemed faster, more agile, and somehow less afraid of what was happening, dancing lithely in and out of the blows, parrying, striking in turn. Like lion fighting leopard, they circled and struck, sword against sword, against shield, again and again, from above, from below—
Then Lucius, Velantinus and Cestinius all saw the same opening—but Hilarus missed it.
“No!”
“There!!”
Cestinius said nothing. But his sword flicked towards Hilarus’s left knee, and suddenly the Thracian was collapsing over a leg that wouldn’t hold his weight. Velantinus was on his man in a moment, fist up, two fingers raised. The umpire signaled too, and medics sprinted forward while Velantinus, swearing steadily, yanked the tall greave aside to get better access to the wound.
“You okay?” Lucius said to Cestinius. He nodded, watching the umpire contacting somebody in the Imperial box with the complex hand-signs that arena staff used to work though crowd noise. Lots of spectators were waving upwards, the “Let ‘im walk!” gesture. But some who’d lost bets were savagely doing the thumb-to-neck “Stick it to him!” gesture for the kill...
Lucius swallowed. There were so many...
Then the umpire nodded, took Cestinius’s arm and raised it high.
“Knights, Vestals, conscript fathers and citizens of Rome,” shouted the repeaters, “by umpire’s recommendation and the Emperor’s confirmation, on points, Hilarus walks! Winner… The murmillo Cestinius, tyro, first victory with crown for technical merit… and the editor’s purse for the best new fighter of the Games!”
The crowd roared again as the payoff crew came out of the gates with the murmillo’s winnings heaped up on a tray. It was just bags of coin at first, but as the victory lap progressed the tray began to fill with jewels, rings and other gifts from the stands…along with one gold-crusted, rose-red veil that draped itself with surprising accuracy over one of the bearers’ heads.
Lucius grinned, watching his winnings get closer and closer. He glowed with pride. It had finally happened. Finally. He reached out—
And clutched a whole fistful, denarii, and golden aureae such as he’d never dreamed of. This is real. I’m rich. There’s enough here to buy my freedom.
But not to buy what’s really important.
He turned to Cestinius and pushed the coins into his hands. “Here—”
“But this is yours, sir,” the gladiator said. “All yours…”
Lucius’s eyes were burning. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s clear the sand…”
Both gladiators headed for the gate together, Hilarus limping, but Cestinius alongside taking some of the weight with an arm across his shoulders. The crowd cheered. Behind them, the bearers carried the tray, now spectacularly fuller than it had been when first brought out.
Waiting inside was one of the Flavian’s bankers and a slave manning a little table with a set of scales. The purse was weighed out then and there, divided among Hilarus, Cestinius, and the house; then came the secondary weighing of the managers’ percentage. Suddenly there were bookies and gofers all around them. Even Mancipuer appeared and made off with his promised cut.
The rest of the day went by in a blur. Suddenly everybody wanted to know Lucius. Wine flowed, there was more food than seemed possible, and everywhere his back was being slapped, his advice was being asked. There was even a party in the downstairs sports bar. For the first time in his life Lucius had enough to eat, enough to drink: but as the night went on, it mattered less and less.
You have a day…
Finally no one was left but Hilarus and his lady. “Until tomorrow,” said the Thracian. “Don’t look so depressed, son! There’ll be other days like this…”
All Lucius could do was clasp his arm and hold back the tears as the big man limped away. Once the bar closed there was nothing for Lucius to do but go back his little sleeping-place, with Cestinius in tow, and wait for the day to end. Cestinius insisted on sleeping across the doorway of Lucius’s little bed-space, and shortly he was snoring.
Lucius stayed awake as long as he could, until his little lamp burned down, unwilling to turn his eyes away. By the last dim spark of the failing wick he could see the piled-up armor glinting outside the door. Then that too was gone, but for a long time he lay propped on his elbow, staring into the dark…
*
He didn’t know, when he smelled roses, what time it was. He opened his eyes, and though it was pitch black, there was no not seeing the still and beautifully robed form before him. She looked very like the lady that Hilarus was seeing; but her veil was the color of shadows. The rose-scent hung about her, and her eyes were sweet—but darkness was within them. Lucius instantly knew that, though she looked nothing like the little wooden carving with the big hips, this was nonetheless the same goddess.
“Was it a good day?” said Venus of the Dark Places.
“Lady—” Lucius scrambled to his knees. “Lady, thank you. It was what I always dreamed of—”
“That was the price of my bet with Mars.”
Lucius’s mouth opened. “Your bet?”
Queen Venus smiled. “We’re Roman. We bet. Mars has bragged about his great worshippers here, how they honor him better than any other god. I wearied of it. I bet him that I had a truer votary here than any of his. He laughed, but you proved me right when you shared your winnings. You didn’t have to; that little meant more to you than great wealth to the rich. So Venus triumphed in the house of Mars. And as your reward, your dream came true.”
“But only for a day!”
“Child, you have enough gold to buy your freedom now. And much more. Take it, use it carefully, and with your sharp wits you can have as many gladiators as you like.”
“But not this one, lady! Not Cestinius! He’s my friend! He’s—”
“A doll. His life comes from me. He loses nothing by losing it.”
“Lady,” Lucius said, “I promised to take care of him! And you have to take care of what you own!”
“You say this,” said Venus Cloacina, “to a goddess’s very face?”
The darkness in her eyes flowed around him, pressing in like the black water under the city streets, smothering, potentially fatal. But Lucius didn’t look away…and very, very slowly, the pressure eased, leaving him with the sense of a test that had been passed.
Venus smiled. “Again I triumph.” She put out a hand to touch Lucius’s brow. “Mars will be so vexed at losing another bet…”
The touch awakened him. Lucius was looking at a little rough wooden thing, all breasts and hips, the gift from a Gaulish slave long ago. And behind him Cestinius Veneris peered past the flame of a refilled lamp and said, “So what’s for breakfast?”
*
Later that morning, the gladiator Hilarus paid a call on the Master of the Games. There was talking, then shouting, and finally the clink of coins changing hands. Lucius sat beside Cestinius outside the closed doors and listened, trembling, until Hilarus came out. He had a piece of parchment in one hand.
“We’ll do the ceremony later,” he said. “Right now I have to get ready. My last fight of the season’s in an hour. Then we’ll dine with some fancy senator, and let him convince us that he should give us lots of money to start a gladiatorial school.”
He gave Lucius the parchment. The boy’s lips moved as he spelled through the words that said his liberty had been bought from the Colosseum’s management company by the freedman gladiator Hilarus. It was his manumission.
Lucius looked up in shock. “But I never told you I was a slave! How did you find out? Why—?”
Hilarus paused, and for an instant his eyes were that of something far older, more terrible and bloodstained than any gladiator.
“Because you helped her win another bet,” said the God of War. “So now I have to pay her off. But this is my place, a
nd if I don’t get you out of here, she’ll start thinking seriously about moving her stuff in.” He grinned. “Go have yourself a life, freedman.”
He turned and walked off, chuckling, suddenly once again just another mortal heading out to have a fight.
*
If you walk down the roughly paved country road which is all that’s left of the Appian Way, you’ll reach the area where the City’s astronomical real-estate values dropped off enough for the more successful gladiators to build their tombs. There, quite close together, are the tombstones of the famous Thracian-style fighter Hilarus, who died old and wealthy, and of another lesser-known gladiator, a murmillo named Cestinius Veneris. Both stones are covered with post-retirement testimonials from their families, many friends, and fans. Between these two stones is a memorial to one Lucius Betellus, coach, trainer, investor, and owner of the Betellian gladiatorial school, which substituted solid training and cutting its pupils in for a piece of the action as a far better motivation than the old method of “burn them with fire, kill them with steel.”
And in a museum not far from there, you can find a slab of stone originally discovered in the Colosseum, scratched with a little graffito by some nameless sports fan. It’s a sketch of two gladiators fighting, a Thracian and a murmillo. By the Thracian are his name and stats: HILARUS NER XIV/XIII, and ‘M’ for missus: ‘He walked’. It’s the same for his opponent, except the superscript says C VENERIS T V. Tyro. Victor.
Sports aficionados who understand the fight business of that day, and how the stats worked, still read those stats with some interest…
Because they know that, one way or another, the fix was in.
Here are two stories that are connected, and an interesting example of what can happen when a writer hasn’t fully worked out an idea in the first pass at it.
In 1991 the new Murdoch newspaper The European did a short story contest, the only restrictions being that the stories could not be more than 2000 words long and had to have a European theme. So I did a little story, a riff on a theme from mythology, and sent it along. It didn’t win, but I got a very nice letter back from one of the editors saying that if they’d been considering publishing a fantasy story, it would have been a strong contender…
The Rizzoli Bag
Barbara hated Ron. She had told him so at the farewell dinner they had planned for the night before he went away to finish his doctoral work on the Continent—the dinner at which he was going to give her the ring. Ron had caught his plane and train as scheduled, but without the scheduled elation—shattered, instead, feeling it was probably all true, and that she had good reason to despise him. In his misery he had planted himself in the train’s dining car and eaten his way from Amsterdam right down to Basel. Besides scholarship, food had always been Ron’s great love and Achilles heel, the heart of much of his life’s sensuality, comfort and consolation: and now that he and Barbara weren’t talking, he had definitely been eating for comfort and distraction. But it hadn’t worked. Everything on the train had tasted like wallpaper paste, even the gulaschsuppe, and Ron had been left with nothing but the calories, and heartburn of both kinds.
It should have been delightful, this most hands-on part of his doctoral research on the effects of Etruscan languages on the Sursilvan dialect of Romansh; but it had all gone dry as dust. Not even strolls in the cobbled back-streets of Chur’s old town, and much red Veltliner drunk with his friends from the Ligia Rumantscha, had been able to jar him out of his dolefulness. Ron deplored it, as well as the pity with which his academic interviewees looked at him—somehow immediately sensing his sorrow and treating him with dreadful gentleness. He resolved angrily to do something definite to shake himself out of this mood. On his first free weekend, Ron took the narrow-gauge railway over from Chur to Andermatt, then the shuttle to Goschenen, and fell willingly down the Gottardo tunnel, the thirty-mile rabbit-hole, into the warmth and light of the South. Or so he had thought. Instead, all he got in Rome was humidity and smog, and Ron found himself praying for any wind to stir the brown air. But no breeze came. And here he was eating again, and getting no good of it, in this prosaic cafe by the Piazza Santa Maria. The sidewalk was grimy, the pasta was sodden, the sauce was tasteless, the Orvieto was flat. And it was all his fault: he knew it. Barbara—
A whirl of early dry leaves went by, etched with the scarlet and golden vein-scribbles of premature autumn. It had been very cold here at night the last week, they told him at the hotel. Ridiculous weather for the beginning of September. Global warming, the El Niño, who knew the cause? Nothing was working right any more. To Ron it all seemed a symptom of the emptiness inside him, in the chair across from him, where she should have been, laughing.
That was when he looked up and saw the old woman standing there staring at him, seeming slightly like a bag lady at first glance, all in sober, rusty black, and scuffed, "sensible" shoes. The bulging bag, though, was from the Rizzoli bookshop in the Piazza Colonna, and was that-morning new.
"Bien di," the old woman said.
"Bien onn," said Ron, without thinking, and glanced away—then looked up in shock. No reasonable person expects to be addressed in Romansh in Rome.
She came right over and sat down across from him, businesslike. He stared at her face as she signaled the passing waiter for another glass. It was old, but surprisingly unlined. Those eyes were where where the age lay couched, serene and amused. "You’ll want to look at these," she said, and lifted the purple-and-gold Rizzoli bag onto the table.
Bemused beyond reaction, he pulled it to him and peered in. Rolls of white paper, the kind that you might see feeding into old-fashioned telex machines: nine of them. He pulled one out, unrolled it slightly. The inner surface was closely written in an exquisite copperplate hand, in a very old- fashioned Italian which caused him some trouble until he worked out the abbreviations and the peculiar grammar, more typical of medieval vulgar Latin. Vitello alla salvia, he read, and lifted his eyebrows, scanning along further. ...filetto all’ uva...
"Forty-six million lire," she said.
He looked up again and did the math in his head, dropping three zeroes and dividing by two. "What??"
She had poured out wine for herself, was now drinking it, smiling at him. "Too high?"
"For recipes? Madam, I don’t know what kind of joke this is, but— "
She upended the bag onto the table, picked out three of the rolls of paper, apparently at random, and pitched them into a nearby wire-mesh litter bin: then took the matchbook from the ashtray, lit a match, and tossed it in after them. The rolls went up in flames with ridiculous speed, as if made of flash paper. People at nearby tables glanced over, then away again, hurriedly.
Ron shook his head and took a drink himself, pushing the roll of paper further along the table and winding up the slack onto the stick attached to the leading edge. Risotto con pernici— He glanced up at the old woman. "I suppose I get a discount now for the ones that you burned?"
She shook her head. "Forty-six million lire," she said, and drank her wine again.
In the litter bin, the flames were sinking. Ron shook his head as he wound the roll along. "I don’t—" he said, as she picked up three more of the rolls. Into the bin they went, one after another, and flashed enthusiastically into fire, like logs soaked in petrol. The people at surrounding tables were beginning to get up and edge away.
Ron stared at the woman. She simply smiled back.
"Still forty-six million lire?" he said.
She nodded.
Ron reached for another of the rolls, laid it down on the first-opened one, wound it out too. It was like the first one: recipes. This has to be a con of some kind— But very shortly he put that thought aside. They were really astonishing recipes: just reading them, you could taste them as if the dishes sat steaming before you with one bite just taken. This slightly mad mushroom dish, for example—and the chicken recipe after it—they were examples of a cuisine with sheer intense flavor at its heart; and the hunger tha
t had died at the sight of the lunch put in front of him, now woke up and raged in Ron as he read. This last one, who would have ever thought of doing that to a chicken? Even the wretchedest watery battery hen would become something noble—
He looked up at the old woman again. She sat, patient, while in the cafe a small flurry of people went around in circles like those leaves in the sudden wind, and shouted about fire extinguishers. Ron swallowed, tasting the chicken and its sublime sauce, though his mouth was empty. This was, of course, a scam, and his response to it was madness.
"Lire," he found himself saying. "Would you take a Eurocheque—” He stopped himself. The amount was ridiculously over the daily limit.
"A sterling cheque will do," she said, with a look of gentle humor. "It’s two thousand one hundred thirty-four lire to the pound, today."
Ron got out his calculator and tapped at it hurriedly, while the manager rushed by and began spraying foam in the bin. It was, of course, exactly the amount that should be in his current account, rounded up to the nearest pound, plus an amount exactly equal to his overdraft facility. Madness, of course: but this craziness was strangely invigorating, the first thing he had really felt since the terrible night with Barbara, and he was beset with the feeling of a chance that had to be taken swiftly, for it would not be offered again. Ron wrote out the cheque, while the manager shouted about the police, and the old woman took the cheque from Ron graciously and finished her glass of wine. She rose, said "Scusi" to the manager, slipped past him. The manager turned to yell at her, and found himself shaking his fist at nothing but sunlight in empty air, and a couple of blotchy, bobbing pigeons on the pavement. Ron gathered the three remaining rolls back into the Rizzoli bag, and said in his best phrase-book manner, "Posso avere il conto?"
He was brought the bill with indignant speed. It included the cost of recharging the fire extinguisher. Ron paid and got up, pausing only to glance at another of those early dry leaves, inscribed with lines of gold on its scarlet, which had blown across the table and lodged against the milk-glass Cinzano ashtray. Instantly recognizable in the elegant vein-pattern was the Etrurian letter-syllable si. It had the look of a signature.