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Forbidden To The Gladiator
Greta Gilbert


He’ll fight to the deathShe’ll fight to save him!When her father wagers her hard-earned money on a gladiator battle—and loses!—Arria is forced into slavery…just as trapped as the gladiator she blames for her downfall, rugged Cal. She’s furious, yet also captivated by their burning attraction. Cal’s past has made him determined to die in combat, but can Arria give her forbidden warrior something to live for…and a reason to fight for their freedom?







He’ll fight to the death

She’ll fight to save him!

When her father wagers her hard-earned money on a gladiator battle—and loses!—Arria is forced into slavery, just as trapped as the gladiator she blames for her downfall, rugged Cal. She’s furious, yet also captivated by their burning attraction.

Cal’s past has made him determined to die in combat, but can Arria give her forbidden warrior something to live for…and a reason to fight for their freedom?

“The engaging characters, impossible situation, and the power exchange between master and slave will have readers up past their bedtime.”

—RT Book Reviews on In Thrall to the Enemy Commander

“Singing with atmosphere and with scholarship, In Thrall to the Enemy Commander gives us an enigmatic heroine who fascinates at every turn, and immerses us fully in a world long-gone, but wonderfully-conjured.”

—Romantic Intentions Quarterly on In Thrall to the Enemy Commander


GRETA GILBERT’s passion for ancient history began with a teenage crush on Indiana Jones. As an adult she landed a dream job at National Geographic Learning, where her colleagues—former archaeologists—helped her learn to keep her facts straight. Now she lives in South Baja, Mexico, where she continues to study the ancients. She is especially intrigued by ancient mysteries, and always keeps a little Indiana Jones inside her heart.


Also by Greta Gilbert (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

Mastered by Her Slave

Enslaved by the Desert Trader

The Spaniard’s Innocent Maiden

In Thrall to the Enemy Commander

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.


Forbidden to the Gladiator

Greta Gilbert






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


ISBN: 978-1-474-07432-2

FORBIDDEN TO THE GLADIATOR

© 2018 Greta Gilbert

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


For my beautiful sister,

who has finally found her happily-ever-after.


Contents

Cover (#ue892bb8e-f453-5423-a468-87f3add88300)

Back Cover Text (#u8a76030e-1740-5583-aca2-c9fd4748fbaf)

About the Author (#u66c282d5-e7cd-5ab3-a8bb-d6420a3625bd)

Booklist (#u55359c8e-c852-5a61-b297-a2e2778b02d8)

Title Page (#u04a065ab-6328-5c15-8dfb-2c38ad790587)

Copyright (#u9b48d955-ddf4-5858-baa1-1f977d983327)

Dedication (#u59a2ec53-89d4-587e-ba27-95be23bb04ba)

Chapter One (#u2b226df9-0d18-5a03-bdaa-aab58489ea16)

Chapter Two (#ua501a328-f018-5401-930d-6be5d0839e0e)

Chapter Three (#u853df155-bf04-5a79-9b8f-72dac37eeb62)

Chapter Four (#ue05ee9b1-e495-5370-96d0-ec3f28703c55)

Chapter Five (#u0ace3bc4-e36e-5c9c-aebc-1a06bf5bffcb)

Chapter Six (#u90a81f5d-5c5e-54dd-9394-5cf1ec9cb6cf)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


Chapter One (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

City of Ephesus—west coast of modern Turkey—Roman Empire—AD 99

There were two kinds of Roman men: the ones who lived in search of Gloria and the ones who lived in search of bona fortuna. Arria’s father was the second kind. No matter what family crisis or holy ritual, what call of duty or act of the gods, nothing could keep him from the fighting pits and that was where she found him the night he sold her freedom.

‘No women allowed,’ growled the guard, standing at the entrance to the pit-viewing area. ‘Unless you want to do me a favour?’ He gave himself a rude scratch, then flashed Arria a wine-stained grin.

‘Go to Hades,’ she told him, and in the split second of his astonishment she slipped past him into the rollicking crowd. There must have been two hundred men gathered on the slope before her—portly merchants and seafaring traders, oily-haired plebeians and watchful freedmen, even a smattering of patricians—all vying for position around the large gladiator training pit known as the Chasm of Death.

Arria scanned the men’s torchlit faces, searching for her father. She told herself that it was possible he was not here at all. There was a chance that he had been on his way to the fighting pit that evening and been struck by a bolt of reason.

I am an honourable pater familias, Arria imagined him realising. I should not continue risking my family’s survival on the uncertainties of bets.

Arria almost laughed. As if her father were capable of such Aristotelian logic! No, he was here, as was every other corrupt gambler in the province. The fighting pits of Ephesus were as popular as they were bloody and the Chasm of Death was the largest and bloodiest of them all. The only hope now was for Arria to find her father and seize his purse before the damage was done.

A shell horn moaned. A ringmaster’s voice resounded from below. He was introducing the next set of gladiators—a Dacian and a Berber, whose heights and weights he announced first in Latin, then in Greek. Nearby, a Jewish man echoed the information in Aramaic and Arria thought she heard someone say it again in the Armenian tongue. Second only to Alexandria in influence, Ephesus was the most important commercial centre outside of Rome—a place where people from every corner of the world gathered to live and trade. They spoke different languages and worshipped different gods, though Arria doubted any kind of god was present in this bloody place.

Keeping out of the torchlight, she stalked along the edge of the crowd in search of her father’s stooped form.

The fight below commenced. Arria could hear the metallic clang of weapons and the grunts of effort as the gladiators began their bloody brawl. The Chasm of Death was the training ground of Ephesus’s largest gladiator school and several times a year its owner, Brutus, would invite spectators to place their bets on fights between old or unpromising gladiators in an effort to clean out his stock.

It was a twisted, bloody business and one which the idle and desperate men of Ephesus looked forward to with perverse joy. Arria calculated that her father had lost enough denarii at the pits over the years to equal the cost of a herd of goats, or a fine fishing vessel.

But tonight he had reached a new low. He had seized a purse full of denarii that did not belong to him: Arria’s purse, the purse that contained the denarii that would see their family through the winter.

Arria pushed deeper into the crowd and nearer to the pit’s perimeter. ‘First blood to the Dacian!’ someone shouted. Men cheered and grumbled. Coins changed hands. Someone smashed a wine flagon against a slab of stone.

‘Where are you, Father?’ Arria mumbled, feeling a little dizzy.

She felt a large hand push against her back. ‘Move yourself, boy.’ A man in a purple-trimmed toga brushed past Arria, his eyes sliding to the small bump of her bosom. He paused. ‘What is this?’ He yanked her braid out from beneath her tunic. ‘A woman? At a fighting pit?’

Arria stared into his kohl-rimmed eyes, too stunned to speak. She knew the man’s face: the bent nose, the high cheeks, the oil-soaked hair, combed into perfect rows. She had seen it carved on statues and sketched on walls from the cities of Miletus to Pergamon. ‘Proconsul Governor Secundus?’

‘You are under arrest, woman. Your presence here is an affront to Mars and a disgrace to feminine honour. Lictor!’ He motioned to a bodyguard somewhere behind her.

The governor of the province? At a fighting pit? How was it possible? More importantly, what was she to do? She needed to find her father. It was September already. Fortuna alone would not keep Arria’s family warm and alive through the cold, bleak months to come.

She lurched her braid free from the governor’s grasp and attempted to run, but he caught her by the arm. His bodyguard drew closer.

‘I must go!’ Arria burst out. There was no time to explain. There was no time to even think. There was only her heel slamming down atop the governor’s foot and her teeth burying themselves into the flesh of his gripping hand.

‘Ow!’ the governor howled.

Oh, gods, what had she done? She unlocked her jaws and, as he recoiled in pain, she was able to detach herself from the most powerful man in Ephesus.

‘Little asp!’ he shouted behind her. ‘Lictors!’

A death bellow resonated from the pit below and the crowd erupted in celebration. Seizing on the chaos, Arria tucked her braid beneath her tunic and ducked low, losing herself in the crush of bodies.

Horror rioted through her. Had she really just bitten into the flesh of Proconsul Quintus Vibius Secundus, the venerable governor of the Roman province of Asia?

‘Prepare yourselves my fellow Romans,’ chimed the ringmaster, ‘for in this next bout, limbs will be hewn and innards strewn. I give you the Ox of Germania versus…’

Arria was caught in a sudden rush of movement. She was pulled, then pushed, then pressed backwards. Dizzy and fumbling for balance, she turned to find herself staring down at the blood-spattered sand at a bald, muscle-bound man in a rabbit-skin kilt.

‘The Beast of Britannia!’ shouted the ringmaster.

The barbarian gladiator raked his gaze over the crowd and for a moment his eyes locked with Arria’s. Startled, Arria stepped backwards. She had never seen such eyes. They were neither green nor brown, but some indescribable colour that seemed to change with each flicker of torchlight. Incredibly, she did not feel fear, though she was aware she was being appraised by a killer. It was something else she felt. Something strange. It was as if her breath had become stuck in her chest.

A second later, the ringmaster stepped in front of the man and the spell was broken.

‘Barbarian versus barbarian!’ the ringmaster cried. ‘Place your bets!’

The cacophony increased as the spectators conferred, staking their fortunes on one gory outcome or the other. ‘The Beast is the obvious choice,’ someone near Arria pronounced.

‘Agreed,’ said another. ‘I do not understand why Brutus has put him in the ring. He is one of the Empire’s finest.’

‘He is old now. His days are numbered,’ said a third. ‘Besides, look at the chest on the Ox. They have fattened him.’

The men might have been discussing fighting cocks, or horses for sale.

‘I say the Beast will prevail!’ said the first. He nudged the back of Arria’s shoulder. ‘What say you, man?’

‘Piss off,’ Arria grumbled, keeping her back to the men and feeling thankful for the low light. Besides, she had nothing to say, no opinion to profess. She did not find any of this interesting, exciting or even vaguely human.

Still, there was something about the gladiator’s name that rang familiar. The Beast of Britannia. Where had she heard it before? Probably at the baths. Women were always talking about gladiators at the baths. They spent endless hours discussing the fighters’ looks and conjecturing about the size of their…weapons. Even if he were not famous, a gladiator with a name like the Beast would never have been safe from their gossip.

Nor was he safe from death, for he wore no armour and was protected only by symbols—haunting blue swirls that had been painted across his chest.

His opponent was scarcely better off. The thick-chested Ox stood on the other end of the arena in a skirt of leather straps and little else.

She wondered if either of the men had any idea how thoroughly they were being mocked. The gladiators who fought and died at the circuses and amphitheatreswore at least light armour—helmets and shields and usually manicae for the arms, depending on the roles they played.

Gladiators skilled enough to perform at theatres were issued additional protections, including greaves to protect their shins and, depending on their assigned role, chest plates. These men did not even don sandals.

Arria gazed down at her own sandals. She had almost worn through the soles. Not that her father would have cared. When she looked up, she caught sight of him at last. He was nodding his head in conversation with a barrel-chested man just across the pit. She motioned with her arms, trying to get her father’s attention, though she could tell by the tightness in his jaw that it was already too late.

The bet had been made. Arria’s savings had been staked. Now there was nothing to do but pray. Arria gazed down at the two hulking barbarians standing in the arena below. But pray for whom?

Two slaves emerged from a tunnel and delivered the gladiators their swords. ‘Die well, gladiators!’ said the ringmaster, then followed the slaves back into the tunnel, closing an iron gate behind them.

For a moment, all was silent.

The Ox of Germania sliced the air with his sword. He danced towards the centre of the ring, feinting and jabbing to the encouragement of his supporters.

The Beast of Britannia was more circumspect. He skulked along the curved stone wall of his own side of the ring, watching the Ox with those bottomless eyes.

Arria saw her father’s lips moving. He was praying to Fortuna herself, no doubt, the goddess who so often wiped her feet with his toga.

The gladiators drew closer. Taunts rained down from the crowd along with a cascade of obscenities in a variety of tongues. The Ox lunged; the Beast dodged. A path of blood streaked across the Beast’s chest. ‘First blood to the Ox!’ someone shouted. A smattering of cheers. The changing of coins.

The Beast was bleeding. Arria had never seen such a terrible gash. It began at the tip of his shoulder and split his muscled chest diagonally, concluding at the thick arc of muscle at the top of his hip.

Arria was not the only one stunned by the wound. The Beast himself appeared utterly perplexed by it, as if he had never suffered a single wound in all his life. He stared in wonderment as blood leaked out and began to trickle down his rippling stomach. He appeared to laugh. In that instant, the Ox charged forward. Arria saw her father nod.

The Ox, then, thought Arria. I must pray for the Ox.

But the Beast dived to the ground and rolled over himself and the Ox’s blade missed its target. In a blur of motion, the Beast jumped to his feet and sliced off the Ox’s head.

It rolled to the edge of the ring, hitting the stone wall without a sound.

‘The Beast has won!’ shouted the ringmaster.

The crowd roared. Arria placed her hand over her mouth, willing herself not to vomit.

The slaves emerged from the tunnel and dragged away the Ox’s convulsing corpse. The Beast made no gesture of triumph. He dropped his sword into the bloodstained sand and spat, then stormed past the ringmaster back through the iron gate.

Arria braved a glance at her father. His face ashen, he reached beneath the folds of his toga and produced Arria’s red-leather coin purse.

As her father handed the purse to his companion, Arria pictured its contents: seventy-six beautiful, shiny denarii. She had earned the precious coins from the sale of four carpets—four Herculean efforts of knots and wool, which had required an entire year and nearly all her waking hours to weave.

Her father’s betting companion leaned backwards into the shadows, tucking the purse in a pouch beneath his bulging stomach. He gave her father a friendly clap on the back. Would you like another bet? he appeared to ask.

No, he would not,Arria thought bitterly, for he is utterly ruined.

But her father nodded vigorously and reached beneath his toga once again.

Impossible. Her father was perennially poor. He was a sand scratcher, a circus rat, a man who lingered outside the arenas begging better men for loans. But a glint of gold caught the light and Arria watched in horror as her father held out her mother’s golden ichthys.

It was the most sacred object her mother owned, a gilded fish, a symbol of her strange faith. The fish had once belonged to a Jewish man named Paul who had come to Ephesus many years before to spread something called the good news. He had secretly converted many Ephesians to his new religion, including Arria’s late grandparents.

The golden fish had been her mother’s inheritance and only comfort. She kept it near her bed and each evening she rubbed it lovingly as she mouthed prayers to her singular god and his son, Jesus.

Now the fat man cradled the fish in his palm, measuring its weight. Arria thought of her own mother’s palms, red and chapped from having to take in other people’s laundry. The man lifted the fish to his mouth and tested it with his teeth, one of which, Arria observed, was made of gold itself.

He gave a satisfied nod.

No, no, no. Arria opened her mouth to scream, then bit her tongue. Out of the corner of her eye, the governor’s ghostly toga came into focus. There he was—not a dozen paces away—on the very same side of the pit where she now stood.

She sank back into the crowd. He had not noticed her, thank the gods, for his attention had been fixed on the dozens of coin purses changing hands beneath his gaze.

Arria pushed backwards against the press of bodies, determined to reach her father before the next bout.

But she was once again thrust forward as the men behind her moved towards the ringmaster’s voice. ‘Behold your champion,’ he announced, holding the Beast’s arm aloft, ‘for he is also your next competitor!’ The crowd howled at the unexpected change of rules. ‘Will this champion survive a second bout?’

‘By Jove’s cock he will!’ someone slurred.

‘Two denarii says he pays the boatman.’

‘I’ll wager five,’ shouted another. ‘The man is losing blood!’

And he was. Blood was still seeping from the long diagonal wound that traversed his chest. It had mixed with his blue body paint to produce a sickening shade of green, which had smeared across his ribs like fetid mud.

Blood. There was too much blood. It pooled at the top of his loincloth and streaked across his furry kilt. It dribbled down his giant legs like paint on pillars. It had even smeared atop his bald head.

He gazed up at the crazed spectators in a kind of wonder. If he were not breathing so hard, and bleeding so terribly, he might have been a statue—some splendid, towering ode to the male form. Or he might have been the figure of an ancient god standing there in the sand. A great spirit brought low—cut down by the ugly world.

An aching sadness overtook Arria. The blood. If only she could staunch the flow of it, or somehow wash it all away.

Instinctively, she pulled her handkerchief from her belt. As if such a small piece of cloth could possibly help this man, or any of the gladiators. They were slaves, criminals, captives of war. Their deaths had not been spared, only delayed for the entertainment of the bloodthirsty mob.

‘I give you the Beast’s next foe,’ announced the ringmaster. ‘The Wrath of Syria!’

The man who emerged through the iron gate was shorter than the Beast, but twice his width, with fat arms and legs like twin logs. The Wrath held a tall trident spear, but was without the net that usually accompanied such a weapon. Across his broad forehead were the large tattooed letters of a field slave.

‘Romans, place your bets.’

She watched in resignation as her father gripped the gold-toothed man’s arm, sealing the next bet. Her mother’s ichthys had been staked.

‘Die well, gladiators!’ said the ringmaster.

The Beast circled the Wrath, who was thrashing his trident about wildly, as if he had no idea of how to use it. In a single swing of his sword, the Beast knocked the weapon away. Incredibly, the Wrath did not even attempt to retrieve it. He simply dropped to his knees and awaited the final blow.

The Beast held his blade to the Wrath’s neck and gazed up at the governor, awaiting his command of mercy. But the governor was not even watching. His head was bent over a collection of coins.

‘Iugula!’ someone shouted. Kill him!

Without looking up, the governor drew his finger across his neck. No mercy.

Arria turned away. She hated them—all of them—the ringmaster, the governor, the spectators, the Roman Empire itself. This was not entertainment. This was Roman conquest writ small.

There was a collective groan, and when she returned her gaze to the arena she saw that the Wrath of Syria had been granted a merciful death. He lay face down in the sand, blood pooling where his throat had been slit. She saw her father bury his head in his hands.

Which meant he had bet on the Wrath.

Her father’s companion patted him on the shoulders consolingly, gently relieving him of her mother’s golden fish. Her father stared down at his empty hand. When he finally looked up, his eyes locked with Arria’s.

He flashed her a smile of recognition, followed by an odd frown. Arria made a gesture of departure. Come now, Father, she mouthed, pointing towards the exit. It is time to go.

But her father’s attention was distracted once again by the ringmaster, who stepped forward holding the Beast’s arm in the air. ‘The Beast of Britannia will fight a final bout!’

The crowd cheered with fresh abandon. The exhausted Beast raised his sword and his gaze found Arria’s once again. Her chest squeezed. His eyes were no longer green, but black, like the darkest part of Hades. She remembered what he had done—the cool indifference with which he had removed the German’s head and the terrifying efficiency with which he had killed the Syrian.

It was no wonder she felt so weak beneath his gaze. So completely exposed. He was a killer of men—a kind of monster. She hugged her arms around her chest, feeling the heat of fear burn in her stomach. The heat could not be contained. It was spreading to her limbs. She could feel it colonising her very cheeks.

‘Gloria!’ someone shouted.

Straight away, a man half the Beast’s size skipped through the gate. He wore a comical goat’s tail and sandals shaped like hooves. ‘Romans, prepare yourselves for a battle that only the Great Jupiter could conceive.’ The ringmaster gazed reverently at the heavens, then returned his attention to the crowd and flashed a wicked grin. ‘I give you the Beast of Britannia versus…Felix the Satyr!’ The crowd disintegrated into laughter.

Now the mockery was complete. The goat-man scuffed his hoof-like sandals in the sand, bleating and bobbing to a cacophony of jeers. Arria assumed he was mad, though his ropy muscles and fast movements suggested an ability to fight.

She returned her attention to the Beast. He was still looking at her assessingly. It was as if he were some terrible predator trying to decide if she was worth the effort to hunt. Or perhaps he had already decided. She swallowed hard.

‘Romans, place your bets!’

Her father and the gold-toothed man were speaking together fervently now and she wondered what they might be saying. Were they haggling over some promised credit? Impossible. Her father was not credit worthy and he had nothing left to bet. At length her father raised his finger. He was pointing across the ring.

At Arria.


Chapter Two (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

The air around Arria acquired a strange weight. It pressed down upon her so hard that she could not lift her feet, or her arms, or even her head, which slumped along with her shoulders in a reflection of her father’s own miserable posture.

She watched beneath heavy lids as her father and the gold-toothed man discussed their wager. Soon they were met by a third man—a scribe. The sober old documentarian scratched hastily upon a scroll, then offered the men his quill. Her father signed the scroll and gripped the gold-toothed man’s arm for a third time.

The bet had been made. Arria had been staked.

She felt tears falling unbidden down her cheeks. There were too many tears. Her handkerchief was not big enough to absorb them all.

‘Die well, gladiators!’ said the ringmaster.

Who was she supposed to pray for now?

Surely the Beast, for only a fool would have bet on the little man with the swinging tail. Even now, the howling Satyr was retreating from the Beast, kicking up sand and scratching at the arena walls. When the two finally engaged, the Beast quickly knocked the sword from the goat-man’s hand.

‘Kill the Satyr! Kill the Satyr!’ the crowd chanted.

It appeared that her father was chanting along with them.

Thank the gods—he had bet on the Beast. For once he had made a sound judgement. Perhaps he even stood to regain what he had lost. Arria could only send a prayer to Fortuna to make it so.

The Beast had the Satyr pinned to the wall and Arria could already feel the weight of the air beginning to lift. She glanced at her father. His eyebrows arched hopefully and his wrinkled old mouth was bowed up into a grin.

Strangely, the gold-toothed man was smiling, too.

That was when Satyr thrust his finger into the Beast’s chest wound. The Beast stumbled to the ground in howling agony and released his sword. The Satyr placed his hoof upon the Beast’s bloody chest, pausing above him for the death blow.

Stunned, the spectators fell silent. The champion was about to lose, right before their eyes. Arria strained to believe her own. Something was not right. The Beast would never have lost control of his sword as he had done. Even Arria could see that he was too experienced to make such an error.

The Beast raised two fingers—the traditional entreaty for mercy.

Was it obvious to no one but her? The Beast had deliberately lost.

‘Mitte! Mitte!’ the crowd thundered. Spare him! All eyes turned to the governor, who gave a simple bow of the head. Mercy. His chest wound still leaking blood, the Beast lumbered to his feet and Arria found herself searching for his gaze. But he kept his head bowed as the ringmaster raised the Satyr’s hand into the air. ‘Romans, I give you Felix the Satyr, your winner.’

Arria should have been relieved. The Beast’s life had been spared. For once this terrible night, mercy had triumphed over bloodlust. But injustice had triumphed, too, for the Beast had deliberately succumbed to the Satyr and Arria had been sold into slavery as a result.

She gazed across the ring. Her new owner was already assessing her. His eyes scraped over her: her hair, her breasts, her arms. He was regarding her physical form just as the bettors had regarded the gladiators’. No, no, no. This could not be.

Desperation seized her. ‘The Beast deliberately relinquished the fight!’ she shouted without thinking. ‘Did nobody see it? The outcome was fixed before the act! You have all been cheated! Robbed!’

Now it was not just the gold-toothed man’s eyes on her. It seemed that every single man gathered around the Chasm of Death had turned his attention to Arria—including the governor.

Oh, gods, what had she done? The governor gave a tight-lipped command, and soon his guards were pushing towards her from the left edge of the arena. From the right, her father and her new master were nearing, as well. The pit sprawled below her. The distance to the ground appeared to be three body lengths or more. There was only one direction in which she could flee—back into the bustling crowd.

But when she turned around she was confronted with a large guard smiling down at her through a mouthful of wine-stained teeth. It was the guard from the entry. He had pursued her, it seemed, and now he had her trapped. ‘Now you really owe me a favour,’ he growled.

She was surrounded on three sides, and there was only one option for escape. She closed her eyes, swung her legs over the edge of the pit and jumped.

‘Criminal!’ commanded the governor.

‘Harlot!’ hissed the entry guard.

‘Daughter!’ shouted her father.

The shouts grew fainter and she knew that she was falling through the air towards a very hard end. And then it came. Thunk. Her legs buckled, her arms, too, and when she looked up she half expected to find herself upon the shores of the River Styx. Instead she was wallowing in the bloodstained sand. There beside her lay the Beast’s fallen gladius.

She commanded her hands to seize the sword and, miraculously, they obeyed. Her legs obeyed her, too, and as she struggled to her feet she became aware of the riotous crowd. ‘Gladiatrix! Gladiatrix!’ they chanted.

Above her, two of the governor’s guards were already straddling the arena wall, preparing to jump in after her. The crowd was taunting them, daring them to take the plunge, and out of the corner of her eye Arria could see more coins changing hands. The men were making bets. On her.

The governor shouted down at the ringmaster. ‘Seize her, you fool!’

The 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 so erotic in all his life. Her big, blinking eyes, her bouncing curls, her small, shapely breasts and thinly veiled nipples: perhaps she was divine after all. Maybe she was the very naiad that had been painted on the urn itself, come to kiss him with her sultry lips.

Although those sultry lips were currently twisted into a Medusan scowl. ‘You deliberately succumbed to the Satyr,’ she accused Cal. She stepped forward and gripped the bars of Cal’s cell gate. ‘Do you deny it?’

Cal did not look her in the eye for fear he might turn to stone. ‘Do you not have some escaping to do?’ he asked.

‘I asked you a question.’ She folded her arms over her bosom and that was a shame. But he could still observe how her skirt clung tightly to the shape of her thighs. She was lovely, female and completely without defence. Did she not understand how quickly he was able to move? That he could simply jump to his feet, pull her body against the bars and have his way?

‘You say nothing because you know that I speak truth,’ she spat. ‘You deliberately succumbed to the Satyr, though it was obvious that you were the better fighter.’

Cal grinned. ‘Did you hear that, Felix?’ he called. ‘She said I am the better fighter.’

‘Rubbish,’ replied Felix.

‘Your second opponent had expected to die,’ she continued. ‘I saw him begging you for a merciful death.’

‘And I damn well gave it to him,’ he grumbled.

He did not wish to think of the Syrian’s death. The man had been a farmer, not a fighter. He had been purchased by Brutus only weeks ago—a field hand who had been put up for sale as a punishment for attempting an escape. He had not been a bad man—not like most of the gladiators who came in and out of Ludus Brutus. Still, the governor had decreed his death and the governor had to be obeyed.

‘So you admit it?’ she pressed.

‘Admit what?’

‘That you deceived everyone.’

Why were Roman women so unrelenting? ‘I admit nothing.’

‘The only true fight was the first one,’ she observed. ‘You relieved the Ox of his head with little effort.’ She pushed her face between the bars. ‘You lie there acting as if you are proud of your deception. They call you Beast, but in truth you are a snake.’

Ha! If only he were a snake. Then he could slither through the bars of his cell and devour her whole. Surely that would shut her up.

Her scowl deepened and he waited in dull irritation for her next accusation. Would she remind him of the gladiator’s sacred oath, perhaps? Or would she explain the Roman code of honour and then recite it for him ad nauseum while she shook her little plebeian finger at his nose?

‘You defied the gods,’ she spat.

‘Which gods? Whose?’

‘You ruined my father.’

‘Your father ruined your father.’ This was almost as diverting as swordplay.

‘I know that you are famous,’ she said. ‘I have heard your name at the baths and seen it scrawled in graffiti. Why would you deliberately destroy your own reputation by rolling beneath the Satyr’s blade?’

‘And what of my reputation?’ Felix called cheerfully. ‘Have you also heard it spoken at the baths?’

‘And mine?’ called another gladiator from down the hall.

But the woman paid the other gladiators no mind. She seemed bent on making Cal alone suffer.

‘Do you think I care a wink for my reputation?’ Cal asked mildly, but her scowl remained fixed, as if she had not heard him.

Typical. In his experience, Roman women never heard what they did not wish to hear, never did what they did not wish to do and rarely saw beyond their own toes.

She was staring down at her own toes now, as if they alone could tell her everything she wished to know about what had happened that night. ‘By the gods, it was all theatre!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘All of it! You were told to kill the German spectacularly and that is what you did. And the Syrian knew he was going to die before he even set foot upon the sands. Those first two bouts were designed for you to win the crowd’s favour so that they would call for mercy when the time came. Your lanista knew it. The ringmaster knew it…’

She gazed up at the stone ceiling, thinking, and Cal observed the elegant length of her neck. ‘Even the governor knew it! And the gold-toothed merchant—he knew it, too. That is why he smiled when you had the Satyr at the tip of your blade. He already knew you were going to lose.’

Cal did not know whether to be impressed or furious. He settled for a smirk. ‘You are remarkably perceptive for one so naive,’ he said.

‘I am not naive.’

‘Your denial of your own naivety is itself naive.’

‘You speak in knots. I assure you that I am quite the opposite of naive.’

‘And what is that exactly?’

She paused, searching the air, and he observed the fine cut of her jaw. ‘Un-naive.’

‘Your cleverness slays me.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You are clearly trying to distract from admitting to your deception.’

Her accusations were growing tedious. Fortunately, he knew how to shut her up. ‘And you are trying to distract from admitting that you wish to lie with me.’

The woman gasped. And there it was, that look of fascinated derision—though on her face it more closely resembled straightforward disgust. ‘That is absurd,’ she snapped, then added, ‘The very thought is an abhorrence.’

An abhorrence? Well, at least she was original. ‘I know you want me.’

‘I want nothing to do with you. You are a mon—’

She bit her lip.

‘A what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I know what you are thinking.’ You think me a monster.

‘You cannot read my thoughts,’ she said.

‘I know you are Roman and that is all I need to know.’

‘You know nothing about me.’

‘Nothing about you?’ His mind churned. ‘Let me see. You illegally shoved your way into a house of men. Only an innocent would be so stupid. You either have no brothers to act on your behalf, or if you do have a brother, he is useless.’

A small cringe. A glance at the ground.

‘Ah, so you do have a useless brother,’ he continued gleefully, ‘and his very mention causes you pain. Probably returned from one of Domitian’s foolish campaigns? A drunkard, perhaps?’

Her pink lips pressed into a thin red line.

‘Your father, too, is useless, for he is the kind of man who must be followed by his own daughter to the pits. He has plunged your family into ruin, has he not? And you pity yourself mightily for it. Pah! You are fortunate he has not sold you into servitude.’

Her face turned an unnatural shade of grey.

Had her father sold her into servitude?

‘I curse you,’ she spat suddenly. ‘I curse you and this ludus and everyone in it, but you most of all.’

He spouted a laugh—a hearty, deep-throated laugh that nearly split his chest wound. He swung his legs to the side of his bed and stood, watching her take in the sight of him. He had not washed or changed out of his fighting kilt and the bloody paint on his chest had caked and crusted into what he imagined was some nightmarish rainbow.

She stepped backwards as he approached the bars. ‘I have never had the pleasure of being cursed by a Roman woman,’ he continued. He swept her body with his eyes. ‘I think I rather enjoy being cursed.’

‘Then I curse you a thousand times, Beast of Britannia. Whatever you long for, may it be as sand through your fingers. Whatever your dream, may it turn to dust.’

He had to grip his stomach so as not to howl. ‘Such poetry! But before you go on, I am afraid I must tell you that you cannot curse me, for I am already doomed.’

‘Doomed?’ She glanced around his cell, then scolded him with her gaze. ‘You are one of the finest gladiators in Rome. You are worth as much as twenty common slaves. Your bed is perched two cubits off the ground, by the gods! I will not hear about your supposed doom.’

‘You do not believe me?’

‘Why will you not admit to your wrongdoing? You wronged every single man in that crowd tonight. You wronged Rome.’

No, he had to stop her there.

‘I wronged Rome? Rome that invaded my land and burned my fields?’ He let out a savage laugh. ‘Rome that raped my tribe’s women and sent its men off to the Quarry of Luna?’ He continued to laugh, though his wound had begun to throb. ‘Do you know what it is like in the Quarry of Luna? If you cut less than ten cubits a day you are whipped. Less than five and they remove a toe.’ He continued to laugh, feeling his wound begin to split. He could not seem to stop.

He lifted his foot to show her his missing digits, laughing harder. ‘I dug for worms each morning to fill my stomach. My flesh baked in the sun each day and then froze in the wind each night. And I wronged Rome? Ha!’ His laughter was crazed, like the laughter of a hyena, but he could not make it cease. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ He doubled over, feeling the warmth of leaking blood down his side.

And then suddenly he was drowning.


Chapter Three (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

He choked and coughed as the cold water poured over his head and dribbled down his limbs. Already there was a pool of it expanding at his feet. The woman had apparently discovered the dipping pot and he watched in horror as she slung it over the lip of the urn for another filling.

‘What…? Why…?’ he sputtered.

‘Your wound. It has not been properly cleaned.’

He peered down at the long diagonal gash across his chest and felt another assault of cold water. ‘Cease!’ he hissed and watched in horror as she returned to the urn for yet another potful.

She approached the bars. Mercifully, she did not give him a third dousing. Instead, she set down the pot and studied the wound. She reached out and touched the skin of his stomach.

A shiver rippled through him, followed by an uncomfortable heat. He grabbed her wrist. ‘What in the name of Erebus do you think you are doing?’

‘Be still,’ she commanded. ‘I am merely assessing the depth of the wound.’ Ignoring his grip, she gently traced the skin around the gash with her other hand. Her audacity was stunning, but her fingers were like soft wax. Their touch sent an unexpected pang of sadness through him.

Fifteen years. That’s how long it had been. Fifteen years since the last time a woman had touched him without the expectation of bedding him. That woman had been his yellow-haired wife.

‘There is sand within the wound that will bring infection,’ she explained. ‘Take this in your mouth.’ She pushed the thick, tasselled end of her tunic belt into his grip. ‘Now bite down. This may hurt a bit.’

There was no time for protest. There was only exquisite, burning pain as he bit down and felt her fingernail razor into his soft flesh. ‘Ugh,’ he groaned.

‘Just a little bit of sand…’ she crooned.

He bit down harder, envisioning certain forms of torture.

‘I fear there is some dirt lodged very deep,’ she said, absently picking a tiny metal hairpin from her braid. She held the pin to her lips and bent it taut with her teeth.

It might have been her proximity. Or it might have been the unusual shapeliness of her lips. Or it might have been the fact that he had just survived an excruciating amount of pain and was savouring its absence. But watching her bend that hair clip was the most deliciously sensual thing he had ever seen a woman do.

Then she plunged the terrible instrument deep into his wound. ‘Ah!’ he shouted.

Across the hall, Felix was laughing. ‘What? Is the Empire’s greatest gladiator crying?’

‘Piss off, Goat-Man!’ shouted Cal.

‘Not much longer now,’ she assured him, probing deeper.

He twisted his body in agony. ‘I did not ask for this.’

‘No, but you must have it if you wish to survive.’

Survival was not exactly the plan.

‘Hold this,’ she said, handing him the hairpin. She lifted the pot and gave him a final dousing.

He gasped for air and for something to say: something scathing and clever, something that would burrow beneath her skin as painfully as she had just burrowed beneath his. But the words did not come and all he could do was stare as she began to dab the wound with her handkerchief.

Her face was lovely in the torchlight. Haunting brown eyes and ruddy red cheeks. Eyebrows so high up her forehead they looked painted. For all her vitriol, her appearance was bright. Cheerful, even. The colour of her skin reminded him of well-fermented beer.

‘I wish I had some dried yarrow,’ she said. She was dabbing his wound with a strange reverence. ‘My mother used to keep some on her night shelf to help mend my father’s wounds.’ Her eyes searched his cell. ‘Ah! I know what we can use.’ She pointed over his shoulder to the distant corner of his cell. ‘Do you see it?’

Cal studied the dark corner, wondering if the woman had lost her wits. ‘Just there,’ she said. She was nodding her head, full of certainty. ‘The spider’s web.’

‘A spider’s web?’

‘You must fetch it for me.’

‘Are you mad?’

‘I am trying to help you.’

‘I did not ask for your help,’ he said.

‘And I did not ask to be…’ She bit her lip, stared at the floor.

Enslaved. That is what she wanted to say, but she could not find the courage to voice it. How could he deny her anything, knowing that she had been condemned to such a life?

He sighed and found himself crossing to the corner of his cell and gazing down at a fine silken temple shining beneath the torchlight. At the temple’s edge, a large black weaver posed regally. ‘How should I…collect it?’ he asked.

‘Just wave your palm through the web gently and gather it on your hand. Do not take it all, lest you incur Arachne’s wrath.’

Cal did as instructed, giving a nod of reverence to the tiny creature whose sanctuary he had just harvested. Reverence for all creatures big and small. It was what the white-robed Druids had taught him in his youth.

He returned to her with the silken prize and was no less fascinated watching her ball up the strands and stuff them into his wound. Why was she helping him? He did not understand it at all. Nor did he have the heart to tell her that her effort was pointless.

‘My mother used spider webs on my father’s wounds, as well,’ she explained. ‘It is an old Greek remedy. My mother is Greek, you see.’

Pride lurked beneath her words. Cal knew that the Romans despised the Greeks in the manner of a jealous younger sibling.

‘Is your father Greek?’

‘No, I am afraid he is as Roman as they come. Born in Pompeii and left before Vesuvius blew. Lucky him. Though he could not escape the wounds of war…and now, I suppose, of peace.’

‘Was your father often wounded?’

She nodded. ‘After he returned from military service he became a lictor for a new aedile here in Ephesus. The young mayor had as many enemies as he had gold auris and my father was paid to protect him. I was always so worried for my father back then. Pah! I had no idea what worry was.’

She pursed her lips, and Cal sensed her trying to stifle her emotion. If there had been any doubt in his mind that she had been sold into servitude, it was washed away by the small tear he watched leak from her eye and trace a path down her cheek.

Without thinking, he pressed his finger to her skin and caught it.

She blinked, stared up at him.

His stomach tightened. He realised that he wanted to kiss her.

‘There,’ she said with finality and her deep blush told him that she had felt it, too—whatever it had been that had just passed between them.

Lust, he told himself. Simple, physical lust, born of the fact that he had not enjoyed a woman’s company in months. But that would be remedied—and very soon, thank the god Gwydion.

The woman stepped away from him and he was glad of it. If she had not, he might have taken one of those small, coiling curls of hair and wrapped it around his finger. He might have made the mistake of reaching through the bars, catching her by the waist and pulling her close enough to drink the tiny bead of water that had lodged itself in the small crevasse of her shapely upper lip.

He might have violated one of his most important rules: never to kiss a woman.

‘It will heal quickly,’ the woman was saying, nodding confusedly at his wound. In truth, the gash already felt much better.

‘I am in debt to you,’ he said. Not that the debt would ever be repaid. Not that any of this mattered at all. A dressed wound was of no benefit to a man whose days were numbered.

‘I suppose you are in my debt,’ she said. It was just the sort of thing a Roman woman loved to say and he knew what came next. ‘So tell me, how will you pay it?’

Reflexively, his eyes slid down the length of her. Curses. What was the matter with him? ‘I do not know,’ he said.

‘Why not tell me the truth as payment?’ she asked. The woman was like a dog with a bone. ‘Why did you agree to take the fall tonight? Tell me, I beg you.’

‘Because of a woman.’ There, he had said it. Surely it would be enough to put her off.

But she only frowned. ‘I do not understand.’

He could tell that she wanted him to confess totally. But if there was one thing he held sacred in this wretched world it was the memory of his wife and he was not about to cheapen it by admitting how much he missed her, or what he planned to do to honour her memory. ‘I took the fall for a woman and that is all I am going to say. I do not expect you to understand.’

‘Come now, you must do better than that, Briton.’

Briton. She might as well have called him a butter eater or a beer guzzler.

‘I am not a Briton,’ he said through his teeth.

‘Not a Briton? But you are called the Beast of Britannia, are you not?’ There was the Roman arrogance again. It rankled him.

‘That is what you Romans like to call me, because you know nothing about the lands you call Britannia.’

‘Are you a Briton then?’ she asked. His stomach twisted into a knot.

‘I hail from the island that the Romans call Britannia, yes. But I am not “a Briton” as you say.’

‘So what are you?’

I am a Caledonii warrior, proud and true, and I cannot trust you to ever respect that.

‘Do you wish to escape this ludus or not?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Because if you are here arguing with me when the guards arrive, I promise that they will have you for breakfast. You are a slave now and your body is no longer your own.’

She looked at him as if he had just slapped her face. ‘Yes, I know that you have been sold into slavery,’ he continued, ‘and by your own wretched father no less. Now listen to me. You have no more legal protection now and your security depends on the whims of men who regard you little better than a vase of flowers.’ There were tears at the edges of her eyes and he knew that he had put them there.

‘Do you not see that I am trying to help you? Get tough, woman. Toughness is the only thing that will serve you now.’ Along with a dose of humility. ‘You have one chance to escape this ludus and that chance will come very soon, when a group of guards will open the door to the barracks to bring us our rewards.’

‘Rewards?’

‘You must hide yourself behind the door as it opens and, as soon as the group passes through it completely, you must slip out the door and run, do you hear? As fast as you can. Then you must find your way back to your new master and beg his forgiveness. You must do this all in haste, lest you be caught by a slave catcher on your way.’

She shook her head and he could sense the mix of anger and panic at war inside her mind. It was illegal for a pater familias to sell his children into slavery, but few paid attention to such rules outside Rome. She was as doomed as he was now, though she had no idea what that meant. Yet.

She was studying the floor again. ‘And do not even think about trying to escape into the wilds,’ he continued. ‘You cannot live for ever off wild berries and grass. Believe me, for I have tried. You will be caught eventually and your new master will be forced to pay for your return. Ask yourself if a few days of starving in the wilderness is worth your master’s name tattooed across your forehead.’

That was the punishment for most escaped slaves, after all, though he could tell that she had not appreciated the reminder. ‘I curse you,’ she whispered.

‘That again? It is the Empire of Rome you should be cursing, my dear, for it consumes us all.’

And he was done with it.

No more selling his soul for some elusive hope of escape. No more doing the bidding of his cursed lanista, Brutus, who valued gold and silver over flesh and bone. It was true that Brutus could control where Cal ate and lay and pissed, could decide when Cal was beaten and when he was bedded, could even control how often Cal was allowed to lift his face to the sun. But there was one thing Brutus could not control—the moment in five days’ time when Cal would choose to die.

There was the sound of creaking hinges as the barracks door began to open The woman froze in terror. ‘Get tough,’ he told her. ‘Now go!’


Chapter Four (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

Arria lunged behind the door just as the guard opened it, pressing herself into the corner as an entourage of women swept into the barracks on a perfumed breeze. They were followed by a cluster of guards, the ringmaster among them, along with Master Brutus himself, whom Arria recognised by his gaudy, gold-trimmed toga.

‘Gladiators,’ Brutus said, ‘Governor Secundus sends his gratitude for your performance tonight.’ He gestured to the women with a bejewelled hand. ‘You have already received your allotted wine and here are your promised women. You will be rewarded similarly for a performance of equal merit at the Festival of Artemis this spring.’

One of the guards began to unlock the Beast’s cell, and Brutus gestured to a blue-eyed woman with a nest of yellow hair atop her head. ‘Here she is, Beast. Long blonde hair, blue eyes. Just as you requested.’

‘Whence does she hail?’ asked the Beast.

Brutus nudged the woman. ‘You heard him. Where do you come from?’

‘Germania.’

The Beast gave a nod and the guard let her into his cell.

‘And the second woman?’ Brutus asked the Beast.

‘Do not want a second.’

‘You do not want a second woman?’ Brutus laughed. ‘Then you are a fool.’

Arria watched the chosen woman float into the Beast’s cell. She wore a flowing white-linen tunic and matching long shawl which she let fall to the floor just as the gate clanked shut. She must have been from far in the north, thought Arria, for her eyes were a startling blue and her hair was as yellow as wheat. She was beautiful.

But the Beast did not even look at her. He reached for a flagon of wine and guzzled it, then offered it to the woman without meeting her gaze.

She accepted it eagerly, taking a long draught herself.

If Arria was going to run, it had to be now, while the entourage of guards and women made its way deeper into the barracks. Unfortunately, she could not bring her legs to move.

She could only watch in quiet awe as the yellow-haired woman removed her tunic, revealing a landscape of dips and curves. She was the kind of woman Arria would never be—fleshy and abundant. Lovely as a bowl of fruit.

Arria was studying the woman so closely that she did not notice the guards turning back towards the door. ‘They are yours for two hours,’ announced Brutus.

Arria cowered in the shadows as Brutus and the guards exited and the door to the barracks closed with a slam.

And that was that. She had missed her chance to escape. Now she would have to wait two hours and pray that she could keep herself concealed as the men and women…as they…

From somewhere further down the hall came a long, ecstatic moan.

Oh, gods.

The Beast’s cell was only steps away from where Arria squatted. Arria could see his muscular figure sitting at the end of his raised bed. His head was stooped. He was studying the floor, though the German woman stood only a breath away from him, her body exposed, her tunic in a pool at her feet. ‘You are handsome, Gladiator,’ she told him.

‘Do not call me Gladiator.’

‘Beast?’

He shook his head.

‘What shall I call you, then?’

The Beast paused, looked up. ‘Call me Husband.’

Call him Husband? What a strange request. Arria closed her eyes. She should not be watching this. Whatever this was. A ritual of some kind? A fantasy? Arria’s sense of propriety was duelling mightily with her curiosity and she sensed her curiosity quickly gaining ground.

Why should she not watch? It had been a night of firsts, after all: her first pit fight, her first discussion with a gladiator and now, it seemed, her first real lesson in the act of love. She might as well watch, for this first lesson was also likely to be her last. Propriety be damned. She opened her eyes.

‘It is well, ah, Husband,’ the woman said. She reached up to her golden bun and pulled out a comb. Her hair tumbled on to her shoulders in a curtain of yellow silk. She shook it hard and the strands danced in the torchlight like shiny ribbons.

The Beast stared up at her, his head cocked in contemplation. ‘I shall not kiss your lips, understood?’

The woman shrugged her assent.

‘May I have the comb?’ he asked.

She placed the comb in his palm. He reached beneath his bed to produce a small brazier pan full of coals. He moistened a single tine of the comb with the tip of his tongue, then dipped the small instrument into the black residue of the pan.

‘May I adorn your face?’ he asked.

The woman nodded. He stood and touched the blackened tine to her chin, gently dabbing the coal stain into a mark of Venus. He dipped the comb into the coals once more and thickened the mark, then leaned backwards to behold his work. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

He returned to sitting and reached again for the jug of wine. He took a long draught, never taking his eyes off the woman’s face. ‘Rhiannon,’ he whispered. He might have been a sculptor naming his bust—his lusty, lifelike bust that seemed to have been polished by the very hands of Venus.

‘Will you not make love to me, Husband?’ she asked in soft, melting Latin.

The Beast sighed, then bowed his bald head so that it came to rest against her smooth white belly. ‘Ah, Rhiannon,’ he said. ‘Wife.’ He reached to the woman’s hips and pulled her closer, burying his face in the creamy white flesh of her stomach.

He sat there for a long while, his head resting against her stomach, as if she were some familiar, domestic goddess and he had come to offer his daily prayers. And then he did begin to pray, or so it seemed, for a torrent of words sprang from his lips. They were strange, tangled words—words so full of breathy desire that they might as well have been kisses themselves.

Arria had no idea what language he spoke, but she could feel what he was saying in her very bones. He was speaking of love and lust, of sweetness and yearning, of things that Arria had never known. They were words so lovely, they might have been birds, or tiny fishes swimming beneath some invisible wave of emotion that Arria could sense was about to crash.

And then it did. He rose to his feet to face the naked woman, speared his fingers through her hair, and lavished her neck with the hungriest, most passionate kiss Arria had ever witnessed.

His mouth rioted down the long column, biting and tasting and sucking in a torrent of urgency and lust. He gripped the woman by the waist and pulled her against him, and Arria had to brace her shoulder against the low wall to keep her own legs from buckling beneath her.

And then, just when she thought the wave had dissipated, just when the bruising neck kisses had subsided into soft, tender caresses, he bent to take one of the woman’s breasts into his mouth.

Blessed, sweet Minerva.

A strange heat invaded Arria’s bones—pleasurable, radiant, alarming. He released the woman’s nipple and followed a winding path down her belly, festooning it with small kisses, until he was sitting once again on the bed before her and his lips came to a halt at the soft curly mass atop her Venus mound.

Was he going to…? Arria covered her eyes, then peeked between her fingers. Yes, he was going to. Arria watched in fascination as his tongue slipped into the woman’s sacred opening.

‘Oh,’ the woman sighed and Arria felt another disconcerting wave of heat. The woman arched her back, gripping the Beast’s naked skull as he began to move his mouth around her folds, kissing and sucking and…licking. It was the most forbidden thing Arria had ever seen in all her life. The woman began to whimper and Arria noticed her own breaths growing short.

What could it feel like to be kissed in such a way? In such a place? She strained to imagine it and found herself growing warmer still. She watched his hands slide slowly from the woman’s hips to her backside, which he squeezed and caressed as he continued to pleasure her with his tongue.

Arria could not look away. She could not close her ears, even as the woman’s moans transformed from soft sighs into low, rhythmic groans of the sort that Arria occasionally heard outside the baths. The woman’s arms stiffened. Her body shuddered. Her moans crescendoed as her whole body convulsed and Arria felt a shiver ripple across her own skin.

Slowly, the woman’s breaths subsided. She was still whimpering when he pressed his head against her stomach once more and hugged her close. He was breathing her in—deep, gulping breaths whose exhales sounded like sighs.

If the woman had been a goddess, he might have been her truest acolyte. But Arria knew she was even more than that to him. She was his beloved wife.

The cruel, hardened gladiator had disappeared. The monster that had taken life with cold efficiency had retreated to some faraway arena and in his place was a man—a gentle, loving man who seemed to overflow with tenderness.

At last he raised his head and stared up at the woman. ‘Wife,’ he said. In a single motion, he stood and guided her on to the bed and Arria noticed an alarming protrusion inside his loincloth. He closed his eyes and began to speak again: husky, lilting words that made Arria’s heart beat faster still.

What was he saying to the woman? What lavish words of passion were trilling off his well-used tongue? He stretched out on to the bed beside her and placed a series of small kisses down her arm. Leaning closer, he continued to whisper—a never-ending stream of small words strung together like kites.

They were words of love—Arria was sure of it. The kinds of words she imagined passing between a husband and a wife. The kinds of words, Arria realised, that she was certain never to hear.

Slowly, he arched over the woman, leaning on his arms as he kicked off his kilt and deftly untied his own loincloth. His taut, muscled form made a kind of arch above the woman’s prone body, dwarfing her in size and strength. Arria tried to imagine what it would feel like to lie beneath such a titan and an unfamiliar muscle deep inside her flexed with yearning.

His loincloth dropped to the floor. Arria stared, then looked away. She looked again, blinked. She told herself to breathe. It was nothing that she had not seen before, after all. Practically every corner of Ephesus was etched with some depiction of male desire or another. The images were common as clay: they were painted on walls and chiselled above doors, not to mention their prominence in statues and mosaics. Such figures even functioned as signposts, helpfully pointing the way to bars and brothels.

Why was it, then, that she could not take her eyes off his? Perhaps it was because she had never seen one in the flesh. She had always gone early to the baths, long before the patrician matrons arrived with their male slaves. And she had never even dreamed of lingering into the ‘trysting hour,’ or so was called the middle of the day when the women’s and men’s hours overlapped.

Now she wished she had lingered at the baths, if only to observe the variety of male forms, for she was sure she had nothing by which to compare him. Were the images lying, then? Did they universally under-represent the immensity of a man’s desire in its fully engorged state?

A small quake rumbled through her. She should not be watching them. It was indecent. Surely she was incurring the wrath of one god or another. But how could she not watch as he slowly settled his desire between the woman’s thighs?

Arria’s throat felt dry.

He took the lobe of the woman’s ear in his lips and began to suck. Suddenly, the woman gasped and Arria saw her hips rock upwards. The Beast was pushing himself into her. They had joined.

Arria gulped, looked away. She felt herself flush with the shame of a spy. Or perhaps it was another kind of shame pumping so much heat into her cheeks.

She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes. Other sounds of lovemaking filled the stony barracks. They made a strange, stirring kind of music that seemed to collapse time. When the chorus of gasps and moans began to diminish, Arria dared to glance at the two lovers once again.

The Beast was posed on his side, his stony expression transformed into a wistful smile. He appeared to be playing with the woman’s hair. ‘Fy nghariad,’ he said, and the words were so sweet and mysterious that Arria could do nothing but sigh.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked suddenly. Arria held her breath as she watched his eyes search across the darkness.

‘I heard nothing,’ said the woman. ‘Probably a mouse.’

The woman was right, in a sense. Arria was a kind of mouse. A large, skinny, lonesome mouse who lingered in the shadows relishing her crumbs.

She had been relishing crumbs all her life, in truth. The first crumb had come when she was fourteen—the usual age of marriage for a Roman woman. One evening, her father had invited a fellow lictor to dine with them—a handsome, ambitious young man named Marcus. When Marcus pulled her into an alcove after the meal, her heart had begun to pound. He was so very handsome and he wore his earnest goodness like a fine mantle. She remembered thinking that he would make a splendid husband. ‘Arria, I want to ask you…’ he had begun saying, then hesitated. ‘I want to tell you that I wish to pursue marriage…’ Another hesitation.

Remembering that moment still made her insides dance, then turn to stone. ‘I wish to pursue marriage…’ he repeated, ‘with your friend Octavia. Would you counsel me, Arria? You are so amenable. How is it that I may win her affection?’

After that night, Arria had retreated into her weaving and the Greek and Latin lessons that her family had still been able to afford. ‘There is time,’ her mother assured her. ‘But you must go out more. Join your friends at the festivals. Come with me to the market. And hold your head high when you walk. A towering lion will never notice a cowering mouse.’

But Arria did not want a towering lion; she wanted a soft, baying sheep: a man who was gentle and kind—someone who would respect her tender heart.

The second crumb came a full year later. By then her youngest brother had returned from the army without a leg and her eldest brother not at all. Overcome with grief, Arria’s father had lost his job and begun to gamble away Arria’s dowry.

One day in the marketplace, a greying man spotted Arria puzzling over a tower of onions. ‘They may appear wilted and old,’ he chirped, ‘but just beneath the skin they are young again.’ Arria had been charmed and when he invited her family to break bread in his home, they went eagerly.

But the man’s wealth had been modest and when he learned of the diminished size of Arria’s dowry, his wrinkled grin became a wrinkled frown.

A year later, after her father lost the remaining half of her dowry to a fellow gambler called Verrucosus, the man had offered to return his winnings for a single night with Arria.

‘She is a lovely woman, your daughter,’ Arria had overheard Verrucosus tell her father. ‘So young and unsullied.’

It was her father’s endless begging that finally convinced Arria to accept the offer. ‘You can redeem me, Daughter, and thus save yourself.’

She remembered the faint smell of urine when she arrived at Verrucosus’s room and the flies buzzing over the thin reed mat that was to serve as the bed where she would lose her maidenhood.

Verrucosus emerged from a corner reeking of pomegranate wine, his face decorated with warts. When he moved to embrace her with his sticky hands, she whirled out of his grasp and out the door.

As it happened, Verrucosus was the kind of man who embellished his anger with lies. ‘Oh, I had her,’ he bragged all around the city. ‘And I can tell you that she is as cold and hard as a slab of marble.’

The gossip spread with the speed of arrows. ‘He does not speak truth,’ Arria assured her friends, but she could see that they did not wish to associate with a woman whose family had been brought so very low.

‘Your beauty alone will attract a husband,’ her mother continued to assure her. ‘And your skills and education are beyond what would be expected from…’

‘From a pauper?’ Arria asked.

She was nineteen by that time. Most of her friends had already borne their first children. She tried to believe her mother’s words. She was beautiful and worthy and as long as she believed it, the world would, too.

But she did not believe it. She was poor and without a dowry, and rumoured to be impure. How could she hold her head above so much shame and disgrace? How could she be desired by any man?

Thus she fashioned a third crumb for herself. She told herself she was, in fact, fortunate that no man wanted her. Indeed, she was blessed to be free of a husband. Men were careless and inconstant, after all—prone to gambling and drink. Her father and brother were burden enough. She could not even imagine what she would do with a husband.

She fed herself this crumb in moments of yearning—moments such as this one, as she observed the intertwined limbs of the Beast and the woman he had pretended to be his wife. No pleasure of the flesh could be worth the burden of matrimony, though to be fair this particular couple was not married at all. And they had shared something beautiful.

In that instant, Arria realised that she was tired of crumbs. She wanted the whole pie and now it was too late. Somewhere in the course of her life, she had managed to miss one of its greatest pleasures. The opportunity for love and passion had passed her by.

And now she would be invisible for the rest of her life.


Chapter Five (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

The guard placed a bowl of barley mash on the floor of Cal’s cell, then slammed the iron gate and pulled the lock into place with a clank. The ritual was wholly unnecessary, at least to Cal’s mind. Even if the gate were left open wide, he would not attempt to flee.

There was no point in flight. He had learned that lesson well enough after his fourth attempt at escape—or was it fifth? They always caught you. They always won. He had the lash marks to prove it—twenty of them, or was it twenty-one?

The Roman citizenry had been divided since time immemorial—the patricians versus the plebs, Romulus versus Remus, the red charioteers versus the whites. But Roman citizens were remarkably united when it came to the control and policing of slaves.

They were especially vigilant here in Ephesus, one of the largest slave markets in the Empire, whose number of slaves made up a full one-third of the population and whose number of professional slave catchers grew with each passing day. The Romans feared an uprising and justifiably so. A proper slave revolt would bring revenge killing, looting and, gods forbid, the loss of slave labour.

Cal himself had tried to start such a revolt once. He had the stab wounds to prove it. Five of them—or was it six?

There was no escaping the Empire of Rome. That was the lesson he had finally learned. At least not in this miserable world. Thus, in four short days, he planned to depart. He would lay himself bare before his opponent and position himself for a clean death.

And thus he would finally escape Rome for ever.

He glanced at his possessions, which he kept neatly arranged in a small cubicle in the wall. The concavity was meant to be a shrine—a place for gladiators to place their religious idols and offerings. But Cal had long ago given up on his gods and so he used the cubicle as a storage space for the few objects he called his own: a clean loincloth and lavatory sponge, a toothpick, a bottle of olive oil for washing, a shell from the beaches of his homeland. A spoon.

And now, it seemed, a hairpin. He picked up the tiny metal object. It was too small to be of use as a weapon, or as a pick for any kind of lock. It was so very delicate, in fact, that he wondered of what real use it could be in a typical woman’s hair.

Though the woman whose hair it had graced had been anything but typical. And when she had bent it with her teeth before his eyes, it had seemed the most incredible object in the world. He could hardly remember the pain that had followed when she had plunged the pin into his open wound. All he could remember was the woman’s lips around the pin and the quiet, savage confidence she exuded in bending it.

Strangely, it was the memory of the Roman woman that had lingered in his mind—not the German woman he had bedded. The German had been familiar; the Roman a living riddle. How perfectly appalled the Roman had been when she realised that the fights had been fixed. As if justice were a thing to be expected in this world. As if it were some kind of birthright.

Yet her birth itself was obviously quite common. Only a plebeian woman would dare thrust herself into a crowd of drunken men. And by the look of her threadbare tunic she had been lowborn indeed. Not an exchange-and-trade kind of plebeian. A bread-and-circuses kind of plebeian.

Not that Cal knew very much about plebeians at all. Winning gladiators mixed almost exclusively with patricians, who frequently paid lanistas like Brutus to place gladiators on display at banquets. In his tenure at Brutus’s ludus, Cal had had seen the inside of more luxurious villas than he could count. He had bedded an equal number of luxurious matrons—women willing to line Brutus’s pockets for a tryst with a killer.

As a reward for his obedience, Cal was also sometimes granted the company of expensive harlots—women like last night’s German. Over the years, Cal had discovered little difference between the patrician matrons whom he serviced and the expensive harlots who serviced him. Both types of women spent their days looking in mirrors and in so doing seemed to lose a good measure of their souls. Painted, bejewelled and reeking of costly perfumes, they floated from one banquet to another in search of attention and diversion.

Such women cared little about justice. What interested them most was the size of Cal’s member.

The Roman woman he had met last night was altogether different. She had been totally unadorned and by the looks of her thin limbs had not seen a banquet in all her life. She had not smelled of perfume but of musk and wool—a strange, earthy aroma that he yearned to smell again, though he could not say why. And her hands had been healing, not lustful, though her touch had nonetheless provoked him.

Even now, as he fondled her hairpin, he felt his blood getting a little warmer. Curses. There were a million pretty women in the world. Why did this one insist on lingering in his mind, distracting him from his goal of death?

Perhaps he pitied her. He had known few female slaves in his experience, but he was sensible enough to see that their lives were particularly miserable. Like all slaves, she would be expected to labour and endure hardship. She would also be required to be available for the carnal gratification of her owner, anywhere, any time.

The very thought of it sent a chill through him. He knew what it was to be made available in such a way, though at least he held the right of refusal. He never refused, however, and often cursed his own body, which was always ready to rise to the invitation lurking beneath a rich woman’s silks.

Still, he knew that the act of love was different for women. It was more profound, more intimate and vastly more dangerous.

The more he considered the Roman woman’s situation, the more he feared for her. She was obviously an innocent. Her shock at discovering the fights were fixed was matched only by her righteous indignation—a trait that would not serve her in her trials to come. She was as naive as a daisy and sure to wilt at her first beating. And if she did not wilt, she would inevitably be plucked.

Though he supposed she did have one weapon hidden beneath her tattered shawl: she was brave. Recklessly, stupidly brave.

When she had jumped down into the arena, he had almost believed she had been pushed. No person in his right mind—male or female—would ever make such a jump on purpose, or so he had thought until he had witnessed it with his own eyes.

He hardly believed in the gods. He believed even less in Roman women. But now he wondered if she had not been sent to him as a kind of muse—a woman to give him the courage to throw off the yoke of Rome for ever. If she could take such a terrifying plunge, then surely he could, too.

Satisfied with his assessment, he placed the hairpin on his shelf and gazed out at his cell. The rest of his possessions were on loan to him and soon would belong to someone else. The water pitcher and bedpan were standard issue, as were the brazier, bowl and cup. The raised bed he had earned after his tenth kill, as was custom. The table and chair had been issued after his defeat of Darius the Red, and the pillow and blankets in Antioch, when he slayed four Parthian warriors in a single afternoon. The wine ration was granted to every winning gladiator who did Brutus’s bidding.

He poured himself a cup of wine and toasted the calling roosters. Their throaty, mournful cries seemed a just welcome to one of his final days on earth. He drained the cup and poured himself another. Now he was ready to consider his most treasured possession of all. He reached beneath a loose stone. There it was: a bundle of his wife’s hair.

He ran his fingers through the thick cluster of blonde tendrils. They remained as soft and silky as the night of their wedding, when she had cut the strands and bound them with yarn. It was the traditional gift of a Caledonii bride to her husband and been followed by the even greater gift that she gave him that night.

He studied the silken bundle, imagining her long white fingers spinning the yarn that bound it. The hairs’ striking golden hue had faded with the years, but the love he felt upon touching them remained.

His throat squeezed. He raised the bundle to his nose and took a long whiff, remembering how he used to bury his face in his wife’s hair. Somehow, it had always smelled of smoke and earth—an intoxicating mixture of burnt oak and mint, of sunshine and the sea.

He tried to picture her face, though over time the image had changed, fading like the hair’s colour, until all that remained was a vision of her heavy-lidded eyes, constant as the sky, and that irresistible black mole, taunting him from just beyond the smooth knob of her chin. He remembered her large nose, the noblest of his clan, and her thin, frowning lips that he could always coax into a grin.

The German woman who had shared his bed that night had looked nothing like Rhiannon. Her eyes had been small and guileless, her lips plump and quick to smile, and her nose of perfectly average size. The only true similarities were the mole he had painted, the azure colour of her eyes and, of course, her hair, which had been as yellow as the gilded dawn.

And thus it had all been worth it, for Cal had been able to bury his face in a yellow mane one last time. The joining itself had been unsatisfying, but had he not expected as much? There was no one in the world who could possibly replace his Rhiannon. There was only the opportunity to close his eyes and breathe deep and remember his wife when she had been alive and his own life was still worth living.

He quaffed another cup, hoping to numb the pain that had already begun to writhe in his gut. Fifteen years had passed and he had been unable to avenge her. In twelve years of hauling stones and hewing rock there had been only a single chance for freedom and he had failed to attain it.

That failure had landed him in the arena, where he had been forced to take other men’s lives for the preservation of his own. With each kill, there was less of him. With each bloody blow, the image of his wife’s face faded just a little more.

To take one’s own life was the coward’s way, or so he had been raised to believe. But to succumb to death on one’s own terms—that was something different. He needed only to be brave when the moment came.

And he would. Just like the Roman woman had done when she’d jumped from that treacherous height. He would bare his neck to the blade and let come what may.

He had failed to attain his freedom. He had failed to get his revenge. But by his honour, he was not going to let the Romans win.

He kissed the bundle of hair and placed it beneath his belt. ‘Forgive me, Rhiannon. I am coming home.’


Chapter Six (#u0da4ebb0-04cf-5d50-8d9f-ad872c2b14ee)

It was the most dismal dawn Arria had ever known. She walked with leaden feet through the Koressos Gate, trying to ignore the catcalls of the guards, which transformed in her mind into the jeers of a heartless mob.

She must accept suffering. That is what she repeated to herself as she passed the state marketplace, her stomach churning at the sight of the sausage cart and the smells of freshly baked bread.

She must do her duty. That is what she remembered as she passed the newly constructed Temple of Domitian, the Emperor who had not done his duty.

She must be a good daughter. That is what she knew as she turned on to Harbour Street and headed towards the cluster of crumbling tenement buildings that comprised Ephesus’s Greek slum. She was almost home.

When she had finally escaped the ludus the previous night she had run into the forest, fully intending to flee.

She had deliberately ignored the Beast’s warning against escape, for he knew nothing of the art of disappearing. How could he? He was foreign, famous and rather conspicuously bald. He could not escape his own ludus without being noticed.

Arria, on the other hand, was a perfectly forgettable little pleb. She knew she could survive in the wild. She would pick berries and gather olives and hunt for fish in the Roman Sea. Surely she could weave a net and though she had no practice in making fire, she could certainly steal it from somewhere, just like Prometheus from Mount Olympus.

But what would become of her familia?

In the end, it was the thought of her family that had convinced her to return. If she disappeared, the gold-toothed man would be within his rights to bring a lawsuit against her father. He could claim that Arria’s escape was deliberate and that he had been deceived. He could seek compensation for his loss. Arria’s mother would not be safe.

Arria turned a corner and her home insula came into view. A crow flew into one of the shutterless windows of the top floor, and Arria watched for her mother’s snapping handkerchief to emerge, gently shooing the bird out.

Every day for the past seven years, Arria had watched her mother wage daily battles against birds, sun, wind, cold and even the walls themselves, which seemed to be crumbling all around them. Though since her mother’s unexpected pregnancy, Arria had noticed that she seemed to be giving up even those small battles.

Arria had told herself that she had enough determination for all of them. It did not matter that her father’s gambling had only got worse, or that her brother was a wastrel. She could support them with her weaving. The proof of it had come just a week before, when she had managed to sell four carpets to a single buyer for a fine price.

She had been so thrilled by the sale that she had etched her elation on to a piece of pottery: a list of everything she planned to purchase with her earnings. She would buy honey, salt, oil and wood to see her family through the winter. With what remained, she would buy a sandal for her brother’s remaining foot, wooden shutters for the window and coin to pay the midwife when her mother’s time came.

And of course more wool.

Careless in her happiness, Arria had left the list beside her bed mat. She should have known that her father would find it there. Sick with the gambling disease, it had not taken him long to discover the purse itself, which Arria had hidden beneath their small clay hearth. And now their hearth would be cold and empty as a result. And so would their bellies.

A small farm was all she wished for—a place where her mother could tend a garden and worship her god in peace, where her brother could drink rain instead of wine and where her father’s delusions of riches could go no further than the boundaries of a fine wheat field.

It was a fantasy she had clung to since her brother Clodius had come home from the campaigns in Britannia. After his legion had defeated a barbarian tribe called the Caledonians, he had been granted a small plot of land somewhere beyond a Roman fort called Eboracum.

But he had refused to claim the land, had said that it was made of rock, not soil, with evil winds and wicked winters and local barbarians spoiling for a fight. ‘I do not care how many battles we won, the barbarian tribes still rule the north of Britannia,’ he had argued.

Arria and her family had no choice but to believe him, though Arria had her doubts. Soon after her brother had returned from his service, Arria had found him lying in a puddle outside the public latrine. ‘How is a man supposed to till a piece of land when he cannot even get himself to the toilet?’ he had despaired.

Now she found him lying in the gutter outside their building, dozing over the mouth of his flagon.

‘Hello, Brother,’ she said, giving him a gentle kick.

He lurched his head forward and gave a thready grin. ‘Hello, dear S-Sister. Lovely morning, is it not?’ Arria no longer nagged Clodius about his reckless spending on wine, for he had come to depend on it as others did bread.

‘You are drunk, Clodius,’ she said. And have managed to lose another tooth.

His crutches lay beside him, their dented wooden grooves tracing a history of tantrums. Humiliation was an ailment that even the medicine of drink seemed unable to cure.

‘Come, I will help you upstairs. Father and I have some news.’




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