The Valiant

  At his side sat a woman, Caesar’s mistress—although none dared call her so out loud—the Aegyptian queen, Cleopatra. Her slender frame was draped in the soft folds of a snowy-white cloak, the hood pulled up so that I couldn’t see much of her face. But when she laughed at something Caesar said, it sounded like the chiming of silver bells. I found myself craning my neck to try and catch a better glimpse of her, wondering what kind of woman could so enthrall the most powerful man in the world.

  Standing off to one side of the aristocratic gathering were several soldiers, Caesar’s praetorian guard, and Caius Antonius Varro, dressed in full ceremonial armor. Our eyes locked for a moment, and the ghost of a smile curved the Decurion’s lips, softening his angular face. For a moment, I found myself frozen in his gaze. What did he see when he looked at me standing there, surrounded by my fellow gladiatrices? Did he still see the wild-eyed slave girl from the ship? Or did he now see me as the warrior I’d always known myself to be?

  But then my attention was ripped away from him as, with another blast of the war horn, she appeared: the Lady Achillea, lit by the red-gold flames of the torches, driving a war chariot through one of the far archways.

  No.

  Not the Lady Achillea.

  Sorcha of the Cantii.

  My sister. Returned from the Morrigan’s halls.

  XVIII

  THE FLAMES OF THE TORCHES flared wildly in a gust of night wind, turning the dark air crimson. There was a tremendous roaring in my ears as all the blood rushed from my head, and I thought I might faint. Sorcha of the Cantii stood tall in the war cart, holding the reins steady in her hands. My sister was alive.

  The practice arena spun in dizzying circles all around me as Sorcha drew the horses to a stop in front of us and stepped down from the chariot platform. Gone was the Roman garb of Lady Achillea—the stola and palla, the crested helmet. She was dressed instead in the traditional garb of a Cantii war chief, wearing a forest-green cloak fastened with a massive silver brooch at her right shoulder. I wondered giddily if the statue of the goddess in the courtyard didn’t look upon her with raw envy.

  She was magnificent.

  It was almost exactly how I remembered her from the night she rode out of Durovernum for the last time—to face the Roman legion on our very own soil. She was still as beautiful as I remembered, slender and lean-muscled, with her bronze-gold hair spilling over her shoulders to tumble in loose waves down her back. Something I didn’t remember was the pale streak of silver that ran through her hair above her left eye, which seemed darker than her right. Thin blue lines, painted in woad—the bright blue paste we used to mark the warriors of my tribe—swirled across her cheeks and forehead. A sword, carved with a triple raven, was sheathed on her hip. It was identical to the one Charon had taken from me that first night after my capture. I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood, if only to drive away the memory of the morning I learned she was dead.

  My sister wasn’t dead. My sister would never die. My sister was a goddess.

  Sorcha guided the horses with an expert hand as they drew her war cart in a slow circle around the oath takers, who all stood together with heads held high, shoulders back, and eyes fixed fiercely forward as if searching out the next adversary, the next challenge, the next target.

  “Target or weapon, Fallon . . . Choose.”

  Her voice echoed in my head.

  And what did you choose, Sorcha? How did you come to this?

  With a sudden shock, I remembered Olun the druid’s prophecy: that I would share the same fate as my sister. And here I was, having followed her footsteps all the way to Rome to accomplish just that. In that moment, I would have whispered a prayer to the Morrigan to ask for her guidance, but I suspected she was too busy laughing at me to have heard.

  I glanced at the ranks of the gladiatrices and saw that more than one of them wore an expression that was almost worshipful. Over the years I’d grown up mourning her, my sister had clearly inspired these girls. I swallowed hard against the tightness in my throat.

  Sorcha stepped down and reached into the chariot, drawing forth a bow and quiver. Wordlessly, she presented them to the student named Tanis at the end of the row. The girl dipped her head in respect and took them, her eyes shining. I’d seen Tanis practicing with Ajani and suspected that, in time, she had the potential to become just as good.

  The next girl was a Phoenician—I gathered that was a place somewhere on the other side of the Mare Nostrum—named Damya who frequently proclaimed herself “descended from a proud warrior race.” I was inclined to believe her. When her turn came, Sorcha reached back into her chariot and brought forth a heavy rectangular shield and a bronze arm guard, fashioned of jointed metal plates like the scales of a fearsome dragon. And the fearsome Damya burst into tears of joy at the sight.

  I knew that in the weeks since we’d arrived at the ludus, Lady Achillea—no, Sorcha—had been watching us. I’d seen her up on her terrace, observing, analyzing how we fought and what we fought with. I’d never realized just how closely she’d watched us. But that night she presented us with our first earned weapons, matched perfectly to each girl’s talents. It was cleverly done, I thought, as I watched each new recruit’s eyes brighten and their spines straighten with pride. I wondered just what weapon she had chosen to bestow upon me.

  The next three girls, I suspected, had only just made the cut to take the gladiatrix oath. They all showed promise and fierce enthusiasm but had yet to move beyond the basic combat drilling stage to distinguish themselves with a particular weapon. Accordingly, each was presented with the same oath gift of a gladius and small round shield—the standard weapons every gladiatrix learned to master before moving on to other disciplines—but that didn’t mean that Sorcha hadn’t put just as much thought into personalizing them. Each sword was made to fit the hand of the girl, and each shield was decorated with a different animal that was clearly chosen to match their personalities. Wolf, Lion, and Serpent were all delighted.

  Elka was next. She had, of course, distinguished herself over the long days of practice when it came to throwing a spear. And when it came to not throwing it, those long arms of hers, together with the reach of an even longer weapon, made Elka virtually invincible as she wore her opponents down from afar. Accordingly, her oath gift was a small round shield and a slender spear with a polished, pointed iron blade that gleamed in the moonlight. I could tell without even hefting it that the weapon was perfectly balanced. Elka marveled at the craftsmanship when Sorcha laid it across her calloused palms.

  And then it was my turn.

  I stood there, shoulders back, head high, eyes focused somewhere over Sorcha’s left shoulder as, wordlessly, she stalked back from retrieving my oath gift from the chariot. And what she gave me . . . was already mine.

  My sword.

  The only thing other than me that had survived the long journey from Durovernum. The thing that had convinced Charon that I had value and had prompted my sister to buy my life for a ridiculous amount of money.

  It seemed that she had commissioned a new leather sheath for it, dyed black and embossed with the intricate, tortuously beautiful artwork of our people. Sorcha belted the sword around my waist and, as its comforting weight settled against my left hip, my hand dropped reflexively to rest on the hilt. It felt as though a severed limb had suddenly been sewn back onto my body.

  But then I noticed that on my right hip there hung a second—empty—sheath. I frowned in confusion, then glanced up into my sister’s face. With a start, I saw that there was the thin line of a scar, beneath the blue-painted designs on her forehead, running from the shock of silver in her hair down to her over-dark eye. She stared down at me, her expression fierce and hard, as her right hand crossed her body to her own left hip, and she drew the sword she wore.

  It was a twin to my blade.

  The sword she had carried into battle the
last time I’d seen her.

  With a swift, brief-as-lightning flourish, she resheathed the blade in the empty scabbard on my hip. A murmur rippled through the watchers beneath the portico. The dimachaerus technique—fighting with two swords—was a rare choice among gladiatrices, and so the second sword was a rare gift. Of course, no one there watching would come close to understanding the true significance of Sorcha’s gift to me.

  I wasn’t even sure if I understood it.

  But when I looked up into my sister’s face, for a moment I saw something dark and shining moving in her gaze. Then the moment was gone, and Sorcha spun away from me to thrust her arms skyward, fingers splayed, rings and bracelets glittering, and her voice rang into the night air in the ancient war cry of the Cantii. For a fleeting instant, I wondered just what Caesar thought of that. But when he neglected to instruct Caius to step forward and run my sister through with his sword, I decided that he must not care.

  She must make him a lot of money, I thought bitterly.

  Thalestris stepped forward to join my sister, her deep voice ringing out with the words that we, as initiates, were compelled to echo back.

  “Uri . . . vinciri . . . verberari . . . ferroque necari.”

  I will endure to be burned . . . to be bound . . . to be beaten . . . and to be killed by the sword. It was the sacred gladiatorial oath, sworn by men and women alike when they joined the ranks—willingly or no—of the gladiatoria.

  “I don’t really care to endure any of that,” Elka muttered, “given a choice.”

  But there was no choice. That was the whole point.

  “Simple words. Simple promises,” Sorcha said as Thalestris’s voice echoed to silence. “This oath is the oath we all swear. Not to a god, or a master, or even to the Ludus Achillea . . . but to our sisters who stand here with us. Our sisters. This is the oath that binds us all, one to one, all to all, so that we are no longer free. We belong to each other. We are bound to each other. In swearing to each other, we free ourselves from the outside world, from the world of men, from those who would seek to bind us to Fate and that which would make us slaves. We sacrifice our liberty so that, ultimately, we can be truly free.”

  I swallowed the hard knot of fear and uncertainty that stopped up my throat and joined my voice with the others that rang out like chimes in the darkness. And once I did, I felt as though someone had unearthed a box buried deep inside of me. There was a lock on the box, rusted shut, but I could almost feel the turn of a key. I had not come to this place of my own accord, and I had not come looking for my long-dead sister. But the Morrigan had nonetheless led me to find her again. And now, within the confines of these walls, in this place of women warriors, with my sword back at my side, maybe I could begin to look for myself.

  But that would come later, on the training grounds.

  First, there were the formalities of the rest of the evening to endure. As our voices died away into the darkness, Caesar stepped down from the dais and approached his newly sworn-in gladiatrices, the other ludus masters following in his wake for what seemed to be an informal inspection of our ranks, which meant we were obliged to stand there while Caesar and his guests paced back and forth across the torchlit yard, discussing our various physical attributes as if we were a flock of new lambs and they were a gathering of discerning butchers.

  It was unbearable. My sister was there—right there, not twenty paces from where I stood—and I couldn’t go to her. Even if I could, I didn’t know what I would have done. Scream at her? Throw my arms around her? I honestly didn’t know.

  With the Aegyptian queen on his arm, Caesar beckoned my sister over. I watched Sorcha approach him and was struck by what seemed like a flutter of hesitancy in her step. My sister, who was afraid of nothing and no one. At least . . . she hadn’t been. It had been a long time since I had known her.

  “It was careless of you to lose Ismene,” he said quietly. “She was one of our best.”

  Ismene. That was the name of the dead girl at the funeral my first night at the ludus. A pained expression flashed across Sorcha’s face, but Cleopatra and I were probably the only ones close enough to see it.

  “I don’t like to lose, Achillea.”

  The silent implication hung in the air. Caesar let it.

  And then, a moment later, he shifted his shoulders beneath the heavy drape of his toga and continued to move down the line of girls. Mighty Caesar had made his point. Sorcha followed him without once glancing in my direction.

  “These new initiates hold great promise,” Caesar said, raising his voice so the other guests could hear. “I’ve no doubt you’ll train them to take their place as champions in the arena. You always do. Don’t you agree, Aquila?”

  Caesar made a show of searching Aquila out in the crowd. Of all those gathered dignitaries, only one man had remained seated when Caesar stood. The man known as the Collector seemed vastly unimpressed by Caesar’s newest additions to his collection.

  Caesar glanced back at his other fellows and spread his hands. “Pontius Aquila does not seem to agree,” he said.

  Up on the dais, Aquila stiffened in his seat.

  “You don’t approve of my new acquisitions?” Caesar’s mocking tone acquired a note of warning. “Or perhaps you don’t approve of me. Of my winning ways.”

  It was clear to me that there was more to the animosity between the two men than a simple rivalry between their ludi. I remembered what Cai had said to me about how the games were almost an extension of the power struggles between the Roman political elite. I glanced over to see that Cai’s gaze was fixed on Aquila, his expression stony.

  “Since your fighters cannot beat mine in the arena, perhaps you’d best find another pastime,” Caesar continued. “Politics, perhaps. Come then, Aquila, take back the Republic from me, Tribune.”

  Aquila stood—slowly—and turned to Caesar.

  “Your pardon, Caesar,” Aquila said through gritted teeth. “I find myself indisposed from the heat of the day.”

  It hadn’t been an unusually hot day, and the chill of the evening had turned almost biting. Caesar turned back to the others, rolling a sardonic eye.

  “Someone fetch the Tribune a cup of wine then, to cool his fever,” he said. “And so that he may toast my noble warriors who have taken their oaths this night.”

  Then the matter was dismissed, among guffaws and mockery of Aquila, and Caesar turned to converse with his other guests about his upcoming Quadruple Triumphs. The event would celebrate his victorious military campaign, including his conquest—such as it had been—of my own home.

  “Will they run for an entire month, as I’ve heard?” asked one portly man wearing rings on each of his fingers and both thumbs.

  “How else do I properly honor the legions and their conquests these past years?” Caesar answered. He tilted back his head to look up into the dark sky, but his gaze turned inward. “And I will dedicate them to the memory of my dear daughter, Julia, the brightest light of my life, too soon gone.”

  I leaned forward, listening to the men talk. I had heard that Caesar’s only daughter had died in childbirth while he was away, busy ending the lives of so many others on my island. A part of me wanted to gloat—to think that he deserved to lose his beloved kin—but the pain of losing Sorcha was too raw in my own heart.

  The pain of thinking I’d lost her.

  I stole a glance at her where she now stood at Caesar’s elbow, but Sorcha’s expression betrayed nothing of her thoughts.

  “I’m thinking of reenacting my conquering of Britannia as one of the major performances in the Triumphs,” Caesar mused, turning to her. “I remember only too well how fiercely you and your women fought against my legions, Achillea. Only this time, I thought I’d turn it around and have your girls fight one of the other ludi, dressed as the shining spirit of my legions.”

  The suggestion was met with much nod
ding and exclamations over Caesar’s brilliance. I gritted my teeth. I’d sooner die than reenact my people’s loss, let alone playing the role of a hated Roman soldier.

  “And we’ll throw in a few of the showier gladiators dressed up as Briton princes, just for the excitement. With the bounty of talent I’ve seen in your stables, and even at Pontius Aquila’s House Amazona, I think a large-scale gladiatrix battle would go over well, don’t you?”

  “Of course, my lord.” Sorcha nodded. “I’ll have the drill instructors intensify the girls’ practice so that they will be ready.”

  “Thank you, Achillea, I knew I could count on you.” He turned and gestured for the others to follow in the direction of the guesthouse, while Sorcha led Cleopatra in the opposite direction.

  Thalestris stepped forward to round up all the girls and send us back to the barracks for sleep. My feet followed the others, but my mind stayed with Sorcha.

  My dearly departed sister had some explaining to do.

  XIX

  I LAY ON MY PALLET in my cell, staring up at the full moon as it crossed the deep black square of sky framed by my tiny window. It felt as though it were the unblinking eye of the Morrigan staring down at me, silently admonishing me for doing nothing about the fact that she had brought me to my sister, who was alive and well and currently enjoying her robust health within shouting distance.

  What, the goddess seemed to be asking, was I going to do about it?

  After the oath ritual had been completed, Caesar and the men had retired to the guest quarters to drink wine and, I imagined, brag to each other. Cleopatra, I’d heard two of the kitchen slaves say, kept a pleasure barge—gifted to her by Caesar and reserved for her personal use—moored at a villa on the far side of Lake Sabatinus. Her entourage had rowed it across the water for her visit to the ludus, and that was where the Lanista would privately entertain the Aegyptian queen with wine and delicacies late into the night.