A Gladiator Dies Only Once (21 page)

“At the funeral of Sextus Thorius,” I said.

“Yes. I wasn’t able to leave Rome until the next morning. I traveled all day. I arrived just when Zanziba’s match was beginning—excited, fearful, out of breath. Just in time to see—”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“Of course.”

“But he wore a helmet.”

She shook her head. “With or without the helmet, I’d have known him. By his limbs and legs. By the way he
moved.
‘Zanziba must have wings hidden between those massive shoulders,’ the master in Alexandria used to say . . .” Her voice trembled and her eyes glittered with tears. “After all my travels, all my searching, I arrived just in time to see my brother die!”

I lowered my eyes, remembering the scene: the Nubian flat on his chest, the Gaul with his sword poised to strike, the uncertain magistrate, the raucous crowd, the death blow, the fountain of blood . . .

“I’m sorry you had to see such a thing, Zuleika. Did you attend to his body afterwards?”

“I wasn’t even allowed to see him! I went to the quarters where the gladiators were kept, but the
lanista
wouldn’t let me in.”

“Did you tell him who you were?”

“If anything, that made him even more hostile. He told me it didn’t matter whose sister I was, that I had no business being there. ‘Clear off!’ he shouted, and one of the gladiators shook a sword at me, and I ran away, crying. I should have stood up to him, I suppose, but I was so upset. . .”

Stood up to him?
I thought. That would have been impossible. A freedwoman Zuleika might be, but that hardly gave her the privileges of a Roman citizen, or the prerogatives of being male. No one in Saturnia that day would have taken her side against the
lanista.

I sighed, wondering, now that her story was told, why she had come to see me. “Your brother did an honorable thing when he sent you money to buy your freedom. But perhaps he was right. You shouldn’t have followed him here. You shouldn’t have tried to find him. A gladiator’s life is brutish and short. He chose that life, and he saw it through to the only possible end.”

“No!” she whispered, shaking her head, fixing me with a fiery gaze. “It wasn’t the end.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t the end of Zanziba!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Zanziba didn’t die that day. I know, because . . . because I’ve seen him!”

“Where? When?”

“Yesterday, here in Rome, in the marketplace down by the river. I saw Zanziba!”

Was the glint in her eyes excitement or madness? “Did you speak to him?”

“No. He was on the far side of the market. A cart blocked my way, and before I could reach him, he was gone.”

“Perhaps you were mistaken,” I said quietly. “It happens to me all the time. I see a face across a crowd, or from the corner of my eye, and I’m sure it’s someone I know. But when I take a second look, I realize the familiarity was merely an illusion, a trick of the mind.”

She shook her head. “How many men who look like Zanziba have you ever seen in the Roman market?”

“All the more reason why you might mistake such a fellow for your brother. Any tall, muscular man with ebony skin, glimpsed at a distance—”

“But it wasn’t a glimpse! I saw him clearly—”

“You said a cart blocked the way.”

“That was
after
I saw him, when I tried to move toward him. Before that, I saw him as clearly as I’m seeing you now. I saw his face! It was Zanziba I saw!”

I considered this for a long moment. “Perhaps, Zuleika, you saw his lemur. You wouldn’t be the first person to see the restless spirit of a loved one wandering the streets of Rome in broad daylight.”

She shook her head. “I saw a man, not a lemur.”

“But how do you know?”

“He was buying a plum from a vendor. Tell me, Gordianus: do lemures eat plums?”

I tried to dissuade her from hiring me by naming the same fee I would have asked from Cicero, but she agreed to the figure at once, and paid me a first installment on the spot. Zuleika seemed quite proud of her financial resources.

It was her idea that we should begin our search in Rome, and I agreed, duly making the rounds of the usual eyes and ears. I quickly discovered that a large Nubian of Zanziba’s description had indeed been seen around the marketplace, but no one could identify the man and no one knew where he’d come from, or where he’d gone. Zuleika wanted to visit every hostel and tavern in the city, but I counseled patience; put out a reward for information, I told her, and the information would come to us. Sure enough, a few days later, a street-sweeper in the Subura arrived at my door with word that the Nubian I was seeking had spent a single night at a seedy little hostel off the Street of the Coppersmiths, but had given no name and had moved on the next day.

Again I counseled patience. But days passed with no new information, and Zuleika grew impatient to commence with the next obvious step: to pay a call on Ahala, Zanziba’s
lanista,
the man who had turned her away when she tried to see her brother’s corpse. I remained dubious, but made preparations for the journey. Ravenna is a long way from Rome, especially when the traveler suspects in his heart of hearts that at journey’s end lies bitter disappointment.

Zuleika traveled with me and paid all expenses—sometimes with coins, but more often, I suspected, by exchanging favors with tavern keepers along the way, or by plying her trade with other guests. How she made her living was her business. I minded my own.

During the day, we rode on horseback. Zuleika was no stranger to horses. One of her brother’s acrobatic tricks had been to stand upright on the back of a cantering horse, and she had learned to do so as well. She offered to show me, but I dissuaded her; if she fell and broke her neck, who would pay my way home?

She was a good conversationalist, a skill that no doubt contributed to her ability to make a decent living; men pay for pleasure, but come back for good company. To pass the hours, we talked a great deal about Alexandria, where I had lived for a while when I was young. I was amused to hear her impressions of the teeming city and its risible inhabitants. In return, I told her the tale of the Alexandrian cat, whose killer I had discovered, and the terrible revenge exacted by the cat-worshipping mob of the city.

I was also intrigued by her newcomer’s impressions of Rome and Italy. Her search for Zanziba had taken her to many places, and her livelihood had acquainted her with men from all levels of society. She knew both the city and the countryside, and due to the nature of her search she had inadvertently become something of an expert on the state of gladiators.

“Do you know the strongest impression I have of this land of yours?” she said one day, as we passed a gang of slaves working in a field along the Flaminian Way. “Too many slaves!”

I shrugged. “There are slaves in Alexandria, too. There are slaves in every city and every country.”

“Perhaps, but it’s different here. Maybe it’s because the Romans have conquered so many other people, and become so wealthy, and brought in so many slaves from so many places. In Egypt, there are small farmers all along the Nile; they may own slaves, but they also till the earth themselves. Everyone pulls together; in years of a good inundation, everyone eats well, and in years when the Nile runs low, everyone eats less. Here, it seems to me the farmers are all rich men who live in the city, and slaves do every bit of the work, and the free men who should be farmers are all in Rome, crowded into tenements and living off the dole. It doesn’t seem right.”

“The farms are run well enough, I suppose.”

“Are they? Then why does Rome import so much grain from Egypt? Look at how these field slaves are treated—how shabbily they’re dressed, how skinny they are, how hard they’re made to work, even under this blistering sun. An Egyptian farmer would be out in the fields alongside his slaves, pushing them to work harder, yes, but also seeing just how hard they do work, and making sure they’re healthy and well fed so they’re fit to work the next day, too. To an Egyptian, slaves are a valuable investment, and you don’t squander them. Here, there’s a different attitude: Work a slave as hard as you can, invest as little as possible in his upkeep, and when you’ve used him up, dispose of him and get another, because slaves are cheap and Rome’s provinces provide an endless supply.”

As if to illustrate her point, we passed a huddled figure in the gutter alongside the road, a creature so shriveled and filthy that I could tell neither its age nor its sex—an abandoned slave, kicked out by its master, no doubt. As we passed by, the creature croaked a few unintelligible words and extended a clawlike hand. Zuleika reached into her traveling bag and threw the unfortunate a crust of bread left over from her breakfast.

“Too many slaves,” she repeated. “And far too many gladiators! I can scarcely believe how many camps full of gladiators I had occasion to visit since I arrived here. So many captured warriors, from so many conquered lands, all flowing into Italy. What to do with them all? Put on gladiator games and make them fight each other to the death! Put on a show with six gladiators, and three will likely be dead by the end of the day. But ten more will arrive the next day, bought cheap at auction! Not all of them are good fighters, of course; the ones who turn out to be clumsy or cowardly or nearsighted can be sent off to a farm or a ship’s galley or the mines. The ones who remain have to be outfitted and trained, and fed reasonably well to keep them strong.

“That’s how the
best
camps are run. But those
lanistas
charge a lot of money to hire out their gladiators. Not everyone can afford the best, but every Roman wants to host games at his father’s funeral, even if it’s only a single pair of fighters spilling each other’s blood in a sheep pen while the family sit on the fence and cheer. So there’s a market for gladiators who can be hired cheaply. You can imagine how those gladiators are kept—fed slop and housed in pens, like animals. But their lives are more miserable than any animal’s, because animals don’t fall asleep at night wondering if the next day they’ll die a horrible death for a stranger’s amusement. Such gladiators are poorly trained and armed with the cheapest weapons. Can you imagine a fight to the death where both men are armed with nothing better than wooden swords? There’s no way to make a clean, quick kill; the result is a cruel, bloody farce. I’ve seen such a death match with my own eyes. I didn’t know which man to pity more, the one who died, or the one who had to take the other’s life using such a crude weapon.”

She shook her head. “So many gladiators, scattered all over Italy, all trained to kill without mercy. So many weapons within easy reach. So much misery. I think, some day, there may be a reckoning.”

When we reached the outskirts of Ravenna, I asked a man on the road for directions to the gladiator camp of the
lanista
Ahala.

The man eyed the two of us curiously for a moment, then saw the iron citizen’s ring on my finger. “On the far side of town you’ll come to a big oak tree where the road forks. Take the left branch for another mile. But unless you’ve come to hire some of his gladiators, I’d stay clear of the place. Unfriendly. Guard dogs. High fences.”

“To keep the gladiators in?”

“To keep everybody else out! A while back, a neighbor’s slave wandered onto the property. One of those dogs tore his leg off. Fellow bled to death. Ahala refused to make restitution. He doesn’t like folks coming ‘round.”

Leaving Zuleika at a hostel near the town forum, I made my way alone to the oak tree on the far side of town and took the branch to the left. After a mile or so, just as the man had said, a rutted dirt road branched off the stone-paved highway. I followed the road around a bend and came to a gateway that appeared to mark the boundary of Ahala’s property. The structure itself was probably enough to keep out most unwanted visitors. Nailed to the two upright posts were various bones bleached white by the sun, and adorning the beam above my head was a collection of human skulls.

I passed through the gate and rode on for another mile or so, through a landscape of thickets and wild brush. At last I arrived at a compound surrounded by a high palisade of sharpened stakes. From within I heard a man’s voice shouting commands, and the clatter of wood striking wood—gladiators drilling with practice swords, I presumed. I heard other, more incongruous noises—the bleating of sheep and goats, a smith’s hammer, and the sound of men laughing, not in a harsh or mean-spirited way, but quite boisterously. I approached a door in the palisade, but had no chance to knock; on the other side, so close and with such ferocity that I jerked back and my heart skipped a beat, dogs began to bark and jump against the gate, scraping their claws against the wood.

A shouting voice chastised the dogs, who stopped barking. A peephole opened in the gate, so high up that I assumed the man beyond was standing on a stool. Two bloodshot eyes peered down at me.

“Who are you and what do you want?”

“Is this the gladiator camp of Ahala?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Are you Ahala?”

“Who’s asking?”

“My name is Gordianus. I’ve come all the way from Rome.”

“Have you, indeed?”

“I saw some of your gladiators perform at Saturnia a while back.”

“Did you, now?”

“I was most impressed.”

“Were you?”

“More to the point,” I said, improvising, “my good friend Marcus Tullius Cicero was impressed.”

“Cicero, you say?”

“You’ve heard of him, I presume? Cicero’s a man to be reckoned with, a rising politician and a very famous advocate who handles the legal affairs of some of the most powerful families in Rome.”

The man lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t think much of politicians and lawyers.”

“No? Well, as a rule, Cicero doesn’t think much of funeral games. But he thought your men put on quite a show.” So far, everything I had said was true; when lying, I have found it best to begin with the truth and embellish only as necessary. “In his line of work, Cicero is frequently called upon to advise the bereaved. On legal matters such as wills, you understand. But they often ask his advice about all sorts of other things—such as who to call upon to produce a truly memorable afternoon of funeral games.”