Ah! Vortimax’s guard was a shade more open that time! Phaedrus’s blade leaped, and it was the other’s turn to spring back out of touch, with a red gash opening like a mouth in the brown skin over the collar-bone. He had the Gaul now, and began to press him back – back – Vortimax’s turn to feel the waiting barrier. But still the odd sense of fighting in a dream was upon Phaedrus, and the inability to bring his sword-play out of the practice yard and set it to the real work of killing . . .
He saw the flicker behind Vortimax’s eye-slits in the split instant before the deadly low stroke came. He sprang sideways, pivoting on the ball of his foot, and felt a white-hot sting like that of a whip lash across the side of his left knee. The stroke which, had it landed square, would have cut the tendon and left him ham-strung and helpless on the sand. It was a brilliant, wicked stroke, an almost outlawed stroke for it crippled instead of killing, and could bring your enemy down broken and at your mercy; but if it failed, it left your own guard wide open. Like the sudden opening of a cavern in his head, reality burst upon Phaedrus, and in that ice-bright splinter of time he understood at last that this was a fight to the death; that he was fighting, not his comrade Vortimax, whom he had fought scores and hundreds of times before, but death – red rending death such as the stag’s had been, and the hooks of the Mercuries in the dark alleyway. And the man before him was the enemy, and he sprang to finish him. But in the same instant the Gaul, almost knee-down in the sand, twisted aside and up in an almost miraculous recovery, and again sprang back out of touch.
Phaedrus set his teeth and went after him, warned by the warm flow down his leg that he had not much time. He did not hear the crowd cry ‘Habet!’ for the third time, nor the mounting roar as all along the benches they shouted for himself or Vortimax. He had another enemy to fight now: the rising weakness of blood-loss creeping through him. Soon he felt his sword-play growing less sure. No onlooker could guess it as yet, but he knew, and so did Vortimax. Once, the Gaul’s blade was within a nail’s breath of his throat before he turned it aside. His heart was lurching in the sick hollow of his body, his teeth were clenched and his breath whistled through flared nostrils. The crowd had fallen suddenly oddly silent, but he heard their silence no more than he had heard their yelling. He was fighting on the defensive now, he had begun to give ground – a little – a little – and then a little more – and he knew with sick despair that he was very nearly done. Suddenly his blade wavered glaringly out of line, and Vortimax sprang in under his guard. How he avoided that thrust he never knew, but as he leaped sideways without thought – like a wounded wolf, Vortimax’s foot slipped on Phaedrus’s own blood in the sand, and in the instant that he was off balance with lowered shield, Phaedrus gathered the last of his strength and struck home.
Vortimax gave a small surprised grunt, and pitched forward, twisting as he fell, so that he landed face upward, still part covered by his buckler.
Phaedrus stumbled to one knee over him, and caught himself back from crashing headlong. He heard the voice of the crowd now, but distantly, as one heard it from the underground changing-rooms, and stood with raised sword, drawing his breath in great sobbing gasps, while he waited to hear the ‘Habet’ and see the thumbs turned down. But the signal did not come; instead, a long roar of applause, and then he understood. Vortimax’s chin-strap had snapped in his fall, and the plumed bronze helmet had fallen off, leaving his face bare. He was quite dead.
Phaedrus thought without emotion, looking down at him, ‘That was almost me.’
He just remembered to turn and salute the Governor’s box, which swam in his sight as the arena floor was swimming under his feet, then Automedon was beside him, growling in his ear, ‘Hold on! Hold up, lad! If you go down now I swear I’ll get the Mercuries with the hot irons to you!’ And the Captain’s hand was clenched on his arm, turning him back towards the arched entrance of the changing-rooms. The Mercuries were already dragging Vortimax’s body away. ‘Come on now, a drink is what you need!’ And he thought with a sick shock of laughter, ‘I’m being decoyed away, just like the wolves from their kill – decoyed away for another day.’ He managed something of his usual swagger as he passed out of the westering sunlight, leaving a heavy blood-trail behind him, into the gloom of the stairhead and the smoky glimmer of the lamps still burning below. His foot missed the top step, and he stumbled forward, and somebody caught him from a headlong fall, saying cheerfully, ‘Drunk again? This is no time to go breaking your neck!’
He was sitting on a bench, with head hanging, while the long, crowded changing-room swirled around him. They had taken off his helmet, and the Syrian doctor was lashing his knee in linen strips, so tightly that he could not bend it. There was a sudden splurge of voices with his own name and the words ‘wooden foil’ tangled somewhere in the midst of them. They were thumping him on the shoulders to rouse him, pouring the promised drink down his throat. The barley-spirit ran like fire through his veins, and the world steadied somewhat.
‘Now – up with you!’ Automedon said. ‘Up!’
And he was being thrust back towards the entrance stairway and the evening sunlight wavering beyond the great double doors; and all at once the truth dawned on him!
Somehow – the barley-spirit helped – he pulled himself together and put on the best swagger he could with a rigid knee, and managed the few paces to the Governor’s box with a kind of stiff-legged, fighting-cock strut. Sylvanus’s coarse, clever face seemed to float in clouds of bright nothingness and the rest of the world was the merest blur so that he never saw the sandy, withered-looking man with silver and coral drops in his ears, who leaned forward abruptly from a near-by bench to stare at him out of suddenly widened eyes.
He saw nothing but the Governor’s big fleshy nose and small shrewd eyes, and the foil with its blade of smooth ash-wood as white almost as the silver guard. He took it from the Governor’s hands into his own, feeling how light it was after the heavy gladius that he was used to, how lacking in the familiar balance when he brought it to the salute.
The crowd were shouting for him: ‘Phaedrus! Red Phaedrus!’ The fat woman who had tossed him the briar-rose threw an enamelled bracelet at his feet, and two or three others followed her example. But Phaedrus was scarcely aware of the gifts. He knew only that he was a free man; that he had come to one of the two thresholds that had waited for him, and for all the triumph and the shouting, he must step over it alone, into the unknown world that lay beyond.
2
CORSTOPITUM BY NIGHT
HE STOOD OUTSIDE the gateway of the Gladiators’ School, under the sculptured helmet and weapons of the pediment, and pulled his cloak round him against the chill mizzle rain that was blowing in from the moors. It was a new cloak, very fine, of saffron-coloured wool with a border of black and crimson and blue, and had been given him by a certain admiring merchant who had seen him kill Vortimax and win his wooden foil. A tall man, dried and withered and toughened like a bit of old weather-worn horse-hide, but with heavy drops of silver and coral swinging in his ears. He had brought his gift in person, on the morning after the games, and stared into Phaedrus’s face as he gave it, so intently that the gladiator laughed and said, ‘You’ll know me another time, even if I should not be wearing this sunburst of a cloak!’
And the man had lowered the fine-wrinkled lids over his eyes, but gone on staring, under them, and said, ‘Aye, I’d know you another time,’ with something in his tone behind the words that had made Phaedrus suddenly wary. But he had kept the cloak; it was a rich cloak and he had not lived four years in the Gladiators’ School without learning never to turn down a gift.
He looked up the street towards the transit camp, and down the street towards the baths and the lower town, wondering which way to go, now that all ways were open to him, and feeling suddenly a stranger in the town that he knew as well as he did the cracks in the wall plaster beside his sleeping-bench. Well, no good standing here all day; he must find another sleeping-bench. He hitched up the long
bundle containing his few possessions, including the wooden foil, and set off down the street, limping because the half-healed gash on his knee (they had kept him until it was half healed; a clear fortnight) was still stiff.
He found lodgings at the third attempt, a filthy room in a house down by the river, kept by an ex-army muledriver with one eye, and leaving his bundle there, went out again to the baths. He had the full treatment, with a breath-taking cold plunge after the scalding steam of the Hot-room, and then lay like a lord while a slave rubbed him with scented oil and scraped him down with a bronze strigil; finally, he had the tawny fuzz of his young beard shaved. It cost a good deal, but there was the fat woman’s bracelet and a few other bits and pieces in the small leather bag which hung round his neck, and in the circus one got out of the way of saving for tomorrow in case there was no tomorrow to save for. Also it helped to pass the time.
But the Depot trumpet was only just sounding for the noon watch-setting when he came out again into the colonnade. Two or three men strolling there looked at him and said something to each other, recognizing him. The rain had stopped and a pale gleam of sunlight was shining on wet tiles and cobbles and drawing faint wisps of steam from sodden thatch. He went down the colonnade steps, the red hair still clinging damply to his forehead, and the beautiful cloak, flung back now from his shoulders, giving him a kind of tall, disreputable splendour like a corn-marigold, and strolled off along the street as though he were going somewhere, because he knew that they were still watching him.
For the next few hours he wandered about Corstopitum. He bought a brown barley loaf and strong ewe-milk cheese at a stall, and ate them on the river steps in another scurry of rain, and then wandered on again. He was free! A free man for the first time in his life! His official manumission, signed by the circus master and a magistrate, in the small bag round his neck, his name struck off the muster roll of the Gladiators’ School with the words ‘Honourably discharged’ instead of the more usual ‘Dead’ against it. No man was his master, there was nowhere that he must report back to after his day’s leave. Yet more than once that day he found himself back at the double doors with the sculptured weapons over them, or wandering in the direction of the turf-banked amphitheatre beyond the South Gate.
The last time it happened, he pulled up cursing, and looking about him, saw that it was dusk and a little way down the street someone had hung out the first lantern of the evening. The first day was drawing to a close, and suddenly he thought, ‘This is only one day, only the first day, and there’ll be another tomorrow, and another and another . . .’ And panic such as he had never known in the arena, where one only had to be afraid of physical things, whimpered up in him so that for a moment he leaned against a wall, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. Then he laughed jeeringly and pushing off from the wall, turned back the way he had come, towards the narrower streets where the less respectable wine-shops were to be found. ‘Fool! You want a drink, that’s what’s the matter with you – a lot of drinks. You can get as full as a wineskin tonight, and sleep it off like an Emperor! Won’t have to be out on the practice ground with a head like Hephaestus’s forge and seeing two of everything, at first light tomorrow.’
The first wine-shop he came to, he passed by. It was a favourite haunt of the gladiators on town leave, and he didn’t want to run into old comrades. It was odd how he shrank from that idea now – a kind of embarrassment, a feeling that they would not know quite how to meet each other’s eyes. There was only one of them he would not have minded meeting again, and he had killed him the week before last.
Jostling and jostled by the people who still came and went along the streets, he pushed on until the ‘Rose of Paestum’ cast its yellow stain of lamplight and its splurge of voices across his way. He went in, swinging his cloak behind him with the play-actor’s swagger of his old trade, and thrusting across the crowded room to the trestle table at the far side, demanded a cup of wine. He grinned at the girl with greasy ringlets hanging round her neck, who served him, and flung down the price of the wine lordly-wise on the table, with a small bronze coin extra.
She half moved to pick it up, then pushed it back. ‘This is over.’
‘Best keep it for yourself then.’
‘Best keep it for yourself,’ she said. ‘I reckon you’ve earned it hard enough, lad.’
‘Sa, sa, have it your own way. This instead—’ Phaedrus leaned across the table, flung an arm round her shoulders, and kissed her loudly. She smelled of warm unwashed girl under the cheap scent, and kissing her comforted a little the coldness of the void that had opened before him in the street.
He picked up his cup and the extra coin – she was his own kind, part of his own world, and to leave the coin after all would have been a sort of betrayal – and lounging over to a bench against the wall, sat down.
He gulped down most of the wine at a draught, though it hadn’t much flavour somehow, and sat for a long time with the almost empty cup in his hand, staring unseeingly over the heads of the crowd towards the opposite wall and the faded fresco of a dancing-girl with a rose in her hand which gave the wine-shop its name.
What was he going to do with the days ahead? It had been stupid, that moment of panic in the twilit street, the appalling vision of emptiness that was simply today repeated over and over again for all eternity; stupid for the beautifully simple reason that to go on living you had to eat, and to go on eating you had to work – the fat woman’s bracelet wouldn’t last for ever. What about the Eagles? Oh, not the regular Legion, the Auxiliaries of the Frontier Service? It might be worth trying, but he didn’t see old, one-armed Marius who commanded up at the Depot taking on an ex-gladiator. Well then, if he could get a job as a charioteer? Any kind of job to do with horses? But men who owned horses didn’t want free grooms and drivers when they could get a slave for twelve aurei. No, sword-play was the only trade for him; he could probably get himself taken on by a fencing-master somewhere in one of the Southern cities, and end up teaching the more showy and safest fencing-strokes to young sprigs of the town. The prospect sickened him.
There was a movement in the crowd, and a shadow fell across his hand holding the winecup, and he looked up quickly to see that a young man had risen from a near-by table and checked beside him. Phaedrus knew him by sight, Quintus Tetricus, the Army Contractor’s son, and recognized one or two others among the faces at the table, all turned his way.
‘See who sits drinking here alone!’ Quintus said, clearly speaking for the rest. ‘Ah now, that’s no way for a man to be celebrating his wooden foil!’
‘I fought for it alone, and I may as well drink the Victory Cup alone – the wine tastes just as sweet,’ Phaedrus said harshly, ‘and snore alone under the table afterwards.’
‘Come and drink with us, and we’ll all snore under the table afterwards,’ Quintus said, and the men about the table laughed.
‘I do well enough where I am.’ In the mood they were in, if a showman’s sad bear had shambled in through the door they would have called it to drink with them, and Phaedrus was in no mood to dance to their whim.
‘Even with an empty cup? Na, na, my Red Phaedrus! Come and drink off another with us; we’ve got a flask of red Falernian – Eagles’ blood!’