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.’