A Gladiator Dies Only Once (23 page)

I left the slaughterhouse and made my way to the armory shed, by night a hanging forest of weird shapes. Navigating through the darkness amid dangling helmets and swords, I located one of the peculiar wood-and-metal tubes I had noticed earlier. I hefted the object in my hand, then put it in my mouth. I blew through it, cautiously, quietly—and even so, gave myself a fright, so uncanny was the gurgling death-rattle that emerged from the tube.

It frightened the other person in the shed, as well; for I was not alone. A silhouette behind me gave a start, whirled about, and collided with a hanging helmet. The helmet knocked against a shield with a loud, clanging noise. The silhouette staggered back and collided with more pieces of hanging armor, knocking some from their hooks and sending them clattering across the floor.

The cacophony roused at least one of the drugged canines. From the kennel, I heard a blood-curdling howl. A moment later, a man began to shout an alarm.

“Gordianus! Where are you?” The stumbling, confused silhouette had a voice.

“Zuleika! I told you not to follow me!”

“All these hanging swords, like an infernal maze—Hades! I’ve cut myself . . .”

Perhaps it was her blood that attracted the beast. I saw its silhouette enter from the direction of the kennels and careen toward us, like a missile shot from a sling. The snarling creature took a flying leap and knocked Zuleika to the ground. She screamed.

Suddenly there were others in the armory—not dogs, but men. “Was that a woman?” one of them muttered.

The dog snarled. Zuleika screamed again.

“Zuleika!” I cried.

“Did he say . . .
Zuleika
?.” One of the men—tall, broad, majestic in silhouette—broke away from the others and ran toward her. Seizing a hanging trident, he drove it into the snarling dog—then gave a cry of exasperation and cast the trident aside. “Numa’s balls, I grabbed one of the fakes! Somebody hand me a
real
weapon!”

I was closest. I reached into my tunic, pulled out my dagger, and thrust it into his hand. He swooped down. The dog gave a single plaintive yelp, then went limp. The man scooped up the lifeless dog and thrust it aside.

“Zuleika!” he cried.

“Zanziba?” she answered, her voice weak.

In blood, fear, and darkness, the siblings were reunited.

The danger was not over, but just beginning; for having discovered the secret of Ahala’s gladiator camp, how could I be allowed to live? Their success—indeed, their survival—depended on absolute secrecy.

If Zuleika had not followed me, I would have climbed over the palisade and ridden back to Ravenna, satisfied that I knew the truth and reasonably certain that the Nubian I had seen earlier that day was indeed Zanziba, still very much alive. For my suspicion had been confirmed: Ahala and his gladiators had learned to cheat death. The bouts they staged at funeral games looked real, but in fact were shams, not spontaneous but very carefully choreographed. When they appeared to bleed, the blood was animal blood that spurted from animal bladders concealed under their scanty armor or loincloths, or from the hollow, blood-filled tips of weapons with retractable points, cleverly devised by Ahala’s smiths; when they appeared to expire, the death rattles that issued from their throats actually came from sound-makers like the one I had blown through. No doubt there were many other tricks of their trade which I had not discovered with my cursory inspection, or even conceived of; they were seasoned professionals, after all, an experienced troupe of acrobats, actors, and mimes making a very handsome living by pretending to be a troupe of gladiators.

Any doubt was dispelled when I was dragged from the armory into the open and surrounded by a ring of naked, rudely awakened men. The torches in their hands turned night to day and lit up the face of Zuleika, who lay bleeding but alive on the sand, attended by an unflappable, gray-bearded physician; it made sense that Ahala’s troupe would have a skilled doctor among them, to attend to accidents and injuries.

Among the assembled gladiators, I was quite sure I saw the tall, lumbering Samnite who had “died” in Saturnia, along with the shorter, stockier Thracian who had “killed” him—and who had put on such a convincing show of tottering off-balance and almost impaling himself on the Samnite’s upright sword. I also saw the two
dimacheri
who had put on such a show with their flashing daggers that the spectators had spared them both. There was the redheaded Gaul who had delivered the “death blow” to Zanziba—and there was Zanziba himself, hovering fretfully over his sister and the physician attending to her.

“I can’t understand it,” the physician finally announced. “The dog should have torn her limb from limb, but he seems hardly to have broken the skin. The beast must have been dazed—or drugged.” He shot a suspicious glance at me. “At any rate, she’s lost very little blood. The wounds are shallow, and I’ve cleaned them thoroughly. Unless an infection sets in, that should be the end of it. Your sister is a lucky woman.”

The physician stepped back and Zanziba knelt over her. “Zuleika! How did you find me?”

“The gods led me to you,” she whispered.

I cleared my throat.

“With some help from the Finder,” she added. “It
was
you I saw at the funeral games in Saturnia that day?”

“Yes.”

“And then again in Rome?”

He nodded. “I was there very briefly, some days ago, then came straight back to Ravenna.”

“But Zanziba, why didn’t you send for me?”

He sighed. “When I sent you the money, I was in great despair. I expected every day to be my last. I moved from place to place, plying my trade as a gladiator, expecting death but handing it out to others instead. Then I fell in with these fellows, and everything changed.” He smiled and gestured to the men around him. “A company of free men, all experienced gladiators, who’ve realized that it simply isn’t necessary to kill or be killed to put on a good show for the spectators. Ahala is our leader, but he’s only first among equals. We all pull together. After I joined these fellows, I
did
send for you—I sent a letter to your old master in Alexandria, but he had no idea where you’d gone. I had no way to find you. I thought we’d lost each other forever.”

Regaining her strength, Zuleika rose onto her elbows. “Your fighting is all illusion, then?”

Her brother grinned. “The Romans have a saying: A gladiator dies only once. But I’ve died in the arena many, many times! And been paid quite handsomely for it.”

I shook my head. “The game you’re playing is incredibly dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as being a real gladiator,” said Zanziba.

“You’ve pulled it off so far,” I said. “But the more famous this troupe becomes, the more widely you travel and the more people see you—some of them on more than one occasion—the harder it will become to maintain the deception. The risk of discovery will grow greater each time you perform. If you’re found out, you’ll be charged with sacrilege, at the very least. Romans save their cruelest punishments for that sort of crime.”

“You’re talking to men who’ve stared death in the face many times,” growled Ahala. “We have nothing to lose. But you, Gordianus, on the other hand . . .”

“He’ll have to die,” said one of the men. “Like the others who’ve discovered our secret.”

“The skulls decorating the gateway?” I said.

Ahala nodded grimly.

“But we can’t kill him!” protested Zanziba.

“He lied about his purpose in coming here,” said Ahala.

“But his purpose was to bring Zuleika to me . . .”

So began the debate over what to do with me, which lasted through the night. In the end, as was their custom, they decided by voting. I was locked away while the deliberations took place. What was said, I never knew; but at daybreak I was released, and after making me pledge never to betray them, Ahala showed me to the gate.

“Zuleika is staying?” I said.

He nodded.

“How did the voting go?”

“The motion to release you was decided by a bare majority of one.”

“That close? How did you vote, Ahala?”

“Do you really want to know?”

The look on his face told me I didn’t.

I untethered my horse and rode quickly away, never looking back.

On my first day back in Rome, I saw Cicero in the Forum. I tried to avoid him, but he made a beeline for me, smiling broadly.

“Well met, Gordianus! Except for this beastly weather. Not yet noon, and already a scorcher. Reminds me of the last time I saw you, at those funeral games in Saturnia. Do you remember?”

“Of course,” I said.

“What fine games those were!”

“Yes,” I agreed, a bit reluctantly.

“But do you know, since then I’ve seen some even more spectacular funeral games. It was down in Capua. Amazing fighters! The star of the show was a fellow with some barbaric Thracian name. What was it, now? Ah, yes: Spartacus, they called him. Like the city of warriors, Sparta. A good name for a gladiator, eh?”

I nodded and quickly changed the subject. But for some reason, the name Cicero had spoken stuck in my mind. As Zuleika had said, how strange are the coincidences dropped in our paths by the gods; for in a matter of days, that name would be on the lips of everyone in Rome and all over Italy.

For that was the month that the great slave revolt began, led by Spartacus and his rebel gladiators. It would last for many months, spreading conflagration and chaos all over Italy. It would take me to the Bay of Neapolis for my first fateful meeting with Rome’s richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and a household of ninety-nine slaves all marked for death; but that is another story.

What became of Zanziba and Zuleika? In the ensuing months of warfare and panic, I lost track of them, but thought of them often. I especially remembered Zuleika’s comments on Roman slavery. Were her sympathies inflamed by the revolt? Did she manage to persuade her brother and his comrades, if indeed they needed persuading, to join the revolt and take up arms against Rome? If they did, then almost certainly things went badly for them; for eventually Spartacus and his followers were trapped and defeated, hunted and slaughtered like animals, and crucified by the thousands.

After the revolt was over and the countryside gradually returned to normal, I eventually had occasion to travel to Ravenna again. I rode out to the site of Ahala’s compound. The gate of bones was still there, but worn and weathered and tilted to one side, on the verge of collapsing. The palisade was intact, but the gate stood open. No weapons hung in the armory. The animals pens were empty. Spider webs filled the slaughterhouse. The gladiator quarters were abandoned.

And then, many months later, from across the sea I received a letter on papyrus, written by a hired Egyptian scribe:

To Gordianus, Finder and Friend:
By
the will of the gods, we find ourselves back in Alexandria. What a civilized place this seems, after Rome! The tale of our adventures in Italy would fill a book; suffice to say that we escaped by the skin of our teeth. Many of our comrades
,
including Ahala, were not so lucky.

We have saved enough money to buy passage back to our native land. In the country of our ancestors, we hope to find family and make new friends. What appalling tales we shall have to tell of the strange lands we visited; and of those lands, surely none was stranger or more barbaric than Rome! But to you it is home, Gordianus, and we wish you all happiness there. Farewell from your friends, Zuleika and her brother Zanziba.

For many years, I have saved that scrap of papyrus. I shall never throw it away.

POPPY AND THE
POISONED CAKE

“Young Cicero tells me that you can be discreet. Is that true, Gordianus? Can you keep a confidence?”

Considering that the question was being put to me by the magistrate in charge of maintaining Roman morals, I weighed my answer carefully. “If Rome’s finest orator says a thing, who am I to contradict him?”

The censor snorted. “Your friend Cicero said you were clever, too. Answer a question with a question, will you? I suppose you picked that up from listening to him defend thieves and murderers in the law courts.”

Cicero was my occasional employer, but I had never counted him as a friend, exactly. Would it be indiscreet to say as much to the censor? I kept my mouth shut and nodded vaguely.

Lucius Gellius Poplicola—Poppy to his friends, as I would later find out—looked to be a robust seventy or so. In a time wracked by civil war, political assassinations, and slave rebellions, to reach such a rare and venerable age was proof of Fortune’s favor. But Fortune must have stopped smiling on Poplicola—else why summon Gordianus the Finder?

The room in which we sat, in Poplicola’s house on the Palatine Hill, was sparsely appointed, but the few furnishings were of the highest quality. The rug was Greek, with a simple geometric design in blue and yellow. The antique chairs and the matching tripod table were of ebony, with silver hinges. The heavy drapery drawn over the doorway for privacy was of plush green fabric shot through with golden threads. The walls were stained a somber red. The iron lamp in the middle of the room stood on three griffin feet and breathed steady flames from three gaping griffin mouths. By its light, while waiting for Poplicola, I had perused the little yellow tags that dangled from the scrolls which filled the pigeon-hole bookcase in the corner. The censor’s library consisted entirely of serious works by philosophers and historians, without a lurid poet or frivolous playwright among them. Everything about the room bespoke a man of impeccable taste and high standards—just the sort of fellow whom public opinion would deem worthy of wearing the purple toga, a man qualified to keep the sacred rolls of citizenship and pass judgment on the moral conduct of senators.