Caligula (3 page)

He removed an eye with a spearing thrust. A casual slash chopped off the other ear. As the tormented animal tried to close with him, he flayed her, expertly replacing the dark rosettes which had made her one of nature's most beautiful animals with obscene patches of scarlet flesh and white bone. Soon, Circe was swaying on her feet, exhausted by her efforts and by the loss of the blood which dripped into the packed earth.

The gladiator turned to walk away. Somehow Circe found the strength to break into a tired loping trot and then a full-blown charge that carried her towards the fighter's exposed back.

The crowd screamed a warning, but Rufus knew the gladiator had no need of it. He had choreographed this moment, just as he had choreographed every second of the one-sided contest. He turned in a single graceful movement with the sword already extended in front of him, and sank the long blade into the leaping animal's throat, driving a yard of iron down the length of Circe's body. The blow split her heart, killing her instantly.

Rufus, sobbing now, but still drawn irresistibly to the dreadful slaughterhouse of the arena, could visualize the grinning, triumphant features behind the mask as the gladiator marched from the arena, acknowledging the tributes of the crowd. But as he traded the harsh glare of the arena for the shade of the corridor, the fighter's confident stride faltered, as if he somehow gained his energy and strength from the sun itself. Hatred welled up inside Rufus like the magma of an erupting volcano and for an instant he was on the point of launching himself at Circe's killer.

Then the gladiator removed his golden helmet.

IV

The saddest eyes Rufus had ever seen gazed from a face as handsome as the mask which had hidden it, and more so, for this was the face of a living, breathing thing and not some soulless metal façade that killed without compassion or conscience. His hair was the colour of a cornfield in high summer, but his eyes were the dull grey of a winter's morning. The sadness in them had depths that Rufus knew he could never – or hoped never to – fathom.

The second surprise was that the gladiator, who had looked and acted like a veteran of a hundred combats, was only a few years older than Rufus himself, probably in his early twenties.

When he spoke, it was in a guttural German-accented Latin that Rufus at first found difficult to understand, and his words were addressed to Fronto.

'This is the boy?'

'Yes. This is him.'

The young gladiator stared at Rufus for a second. 'I am Cupido,' he said, an unspoken question in his voice.

Rufus hesitated, but Fronto replied for him.

'This one is Rufus. He is my slave, but one day, if he learns, he will be my partner.'

'So, Rufus, you hate me now? For what I did to your animal?'

Rufus blinked away a tear, but said nothing.

'I was told you must be taught the reality of the arena. The cruelty? It was part of your training, I think.' Cupido fixed Fronto with a long stare, making the big man shiver. 'It was not something I took pleasure in. It was what I was paid to do. So, I tell you now in good faith, so that we will not be enemies, there is another lesson you must learn – do not waste your hatred on someone who does not have the luxury of choice.'

With a nod, he walked away.

As time passed, Rufus's feelings swung from one extreme to another whenever he went over in his mind what had happened. At first he hated Fronto for his callous treatment of an animal that had done nothing to deserve the terrible death it suffered. He even considered running away from the trader, but he had no idea where he would go. Finally he realized the lesson of Circe was one he would have had to learn for himself. There could be no room for emotion when animals were destined for the arena. Their hearts might beat and they breathed the same clean air as men, but they were doomed from the moment they were captured on the savannahs or in the jungles of their homelands. From now on he must harden his heart and treat them as tools to be worked with. With that realization came another: Fronto was more than his owner. In the few months they had been together he had become a friend, and when Rufus thought back over a lifetime of often being alone, and occasionally even an outcast, that fact counted enormously.

That knowledge opened another door, and introduced a wonderful, unfamiliar feeling. A desire to change his life for the better. His time with the animal trader had been a success. He knew that if he worked hard and made progress he had a real opportunity to become Fronto's freedman and share in his business, perhaps even set up a business himself. Fronto had promised to take him with him on one of his trips to Carthage. Was it possible he might see his mother again? Was she even alive?

The next step of his development came unexpectedly, in October, when the first thunder clouds swept in from the coast, making the animals nervously pace their cages and compounds. Fronto ordered Rufus to pack his few belongings and move them to his villa on the edge of the city. When he had settled in Rufus was summoned before his master. Fronto was not alone. With him was a small, plump man with sparkling, intelligent eyes and unruly tufts of hair growing above each ear, giving him the appearance of a well-fed squirrel.

'This is Septimus. He's Greek. He will teach you your letters.'

So began a long and often difficult journey that opened Rufus's eyes to the wonders of a new world and took him to places beyond his imagination. It was a slow process, but beginning with the simplest children's stories, Septimus taught him the magic of the written word. Fronto had compiled a well-stocked library: tight-wrapped scrolls in protective leather cases stacked neatly round the walls of the room. Rufus enjoyed nothing better than to browse through them, even if many of the words and what they described were beyond his understanding.

After six months he began to accompany Fronto to meetings with the men who organized the great games in the arena. Men who answered to senators and consuls, even to the Emperor himself. At first, he sat silently in the background concentrating on what was being said, and, sometimes more important, not said, trying to understand the intricate detail of the negotiations. Near-invisible signals of hand or eye could mean a difference of thousands of sesterces. They were hard men, all members of the same guild, who survived by their wits and their ability to drive a tougher bargain than their rivals. He grasped very quickly that to underestimate them or to treat them lightly was to court disaster.

By and by, there was a subtle change in his status. Now Fronto would occasionally bring him into the conversation, asking his opinion on some small matter or his advice on the qualities of one of the animals he knew so intimately. It was never mentioned directly, but everyone on the couches round the negotiating table was aware of it. Slave or not, Fronto had adopted Rufus as his heir.

As he worked with his animals, Rufus often thought of the young gladiator. He had long since stopped blaming Cupido for Circe's death. The leopard was always destined for the arena. It was his, Rufus's, own stupidity which had hastened her end.

They met by chance in early spring, at one of the first shows of the new season. By now the name Cupido was spoken with reverence among enthusiasts of the amphitheatre. He was fêted by the rich and the powerful. Rufus was surprised and flattered when the gladiator approached him and asked politely how he was.

'I am well, but I hear you are better. They say you have killed twenty men.'

The grey-eyed fighter gave a dismissive laugh. 'What do they know, these pederasts and wife-beaters who bay for blood from the cheap seats? Not every fight is to the death, and not every fight that seems to end in death produces a corpse.'

Rufus had heard rumours that it was not always the crowd who decided who lived and who died in the arena. Cupido seemed to be confirming this, but the gladiator clearly felt he had revealed enough and Rufus decided not to delve further. Instead, as they walked among the animal cages under the arena floor, he asked Cupido about his unusual name.

The fighter shrugged. 'That is my ring name. My true name is of no significance now. The person who owned that name is gone for ever. I was a prince of my people, but when the men of my father's tribe rose against the Romans and were defeated, I became a slave like all the others. The Romans put me on a farm. Not a healthy place. Many of us died in the quarries. They would have worked me to death if I'd stayed there.'

'How did you come to escape?'

'Escape? I didn't escape. The overseer was a man who used his whip and his feet too freely. He used them on me only once,' Cupido said, his tone proud. 'I took the whip from him and beat him until he screamed for mercy and the skin was stripped from his backbone.

Perhaps I should have killed him. When he recovered he would surely have killed me. I was fortunate. The local magistrate gave me the choice of the cross or the ring. I chose the ring.'

The sad smile touched his lips. 'Now great men treat me like a prince again. One senator pays me to be his bodyguard, to impress his friends and as a warning to his enemies. He knows I despise him and all his kind, but still I must teach his children to use the sword and to defend themselves, and he showers me with gifts. Last week, another rich knight sent me a beautiful woman because I had won him money. She seemed disappointed when I sent her away unused.'

Rufus was astonished that Cupido could take so little satisfaction from his achievements. He himself had often wondered what it would be like to experience the acclaim of a huge crowd in the arena. Sometimes, he dreamed he was in Cupido's place, his blade singing as he scythed down opponents, but there always came an awful moment when the sword point wavered and he woke up sweating in the certain knowledge that the next victim would have been himself.

'You have a wonderful talent, a great name and the acclaim of half of Rome. On a good day I work as a clerk and on a bad one I might wipe a hippopotamus's backside. Which life would you choose?'

The fighter turned to him with a flash of irritation. 'Yes, I have acclaim, but for what? One day the blood spilled in the arena will be mine. Then what good will all the past cheers of the mob do? I will be just another punctured bag of guts and bones to be dragged from the arena and fed to your lions. And yes, you are right, I do have a talent. A talent to take life and make it look easy. But such a talent comes at a price. Some of the men I would call my friends take pleasure from the kill. They live for that split second of another man's death. They savour the feeling as the blade pierces skin and the flesh closes round it and embraces it like a welcoming host. Nothing in life gives them greater satisfaction.

'And me? I despise myself, because killing is so easy. It's as if they offer themselves to me. In the arena there are only two types of men: the quick and the dead. The men who face me on the dirt are already dead. It is as if they fight with their feet trapped in mud. They wait until I have positioned myself for the thrust. They place themselves where I will them to be. Their weapons flash, but they are made of air, they cannot touch me. Then I kill them. Does a butcher have talent? Does a slaughterman? Then yes, I have talent.'

He turned and walked off, leaving Rufus utterly bemused.

V

In Rome, a rumour could pass from the Palatine to the Aventine quicker than a dog's bark. But the latest one turned out to be true. Tiberius was not the same man who had led his legions across the Rhine to conquer Germany. The Emperor took his ease now on the island of Capri, where there were stories of debauchery that would make even the most broad-minded Roman blanch. The ageing ruler had bested every rival for over twenty years and was secure in his power. He did not need to court the popularity of the mob and he was shrewd enough to take advantage of the fact. He refused to sponsor any further games.

Rufus thought Fronto would be concerned about the fall-off in trade, but where others saw a crisis the trader perceived opportunity.

'Don't worry, boy, the games will be back. They say the youngster Tiberius has chosen as his heir can't get enough of the spectacle. Meanwhile, we are given the opportunity to improve our stock.'

Cupido, interested to learn more about the beasts being readied for the arena, became a regular visitor to Fronto's enclosures. Dressed in his white tunic, he might have been any other handsome young slave of average height and build, but there was a fierceness of spirit in him, a tension and an awareness, that made other men shy away.

He assessed the farm's stock with a professional eye, commenting on the hardiness of one antelope and the stamina or nimbleness of the next. They stopped at the stockade containing what Rufus now knew as the rhinoceros. Cupido laughed aloud when the young slave explained how Fronto had introduced him to the massive animal, which eyed them curiously as they stood by the fence.

'She must be much faster than she appears,' said the gladiator appreciatively. 'And that skin looks as tough as thrice-tanned leather. I wouldn't like to take her with only a sword: it would just bounce off. I think her horns are as much to frighten as to kill, but she'd crush a light infantryman, even a
hoplomachus
, without any trouble. Perhaps it would take a double team of a netsman and a heavily armoured
murmillo
like Sabatis to best her?'

Cupido commented on the many empty cages and stockades at the farm. Rufus explained that Fronto was on another trip to Africa to buy fresh stock and assured him they would be full again in a few weeks' time. A shadow clouded the gladiator's eyes.

'Do you think there are enough creatures in the world to keep the Romans amused? Look at them. They are as beautiful as they are wild. Each one has a purpose and a place, from the fiercest of the cats to the most docile of the antelopes. Do they not deserve life?'

'That is a curious point of view for someone who does what you do.'

'When I enter the arena, I leave my feelings in the arming room,' Cupido replied. 'Afterwards, when the blood-letting is finished, it is different. Every life I take, be it animal or man, weighs heavy on my mind. Each individual adds to the burden I carry. I know one day that burden will crush me. But do not be sad for me, Rufus. My fate was decided from the first moment I entered the arena. The
rudis
is not for me. Give me a clean death and a quick one and I will be satisfied.'

Rufus was surprised at his friend's fatalism. The
rudis
was the carved wooden sword presented to a gladiator on the day he won his freedom.

'But you are the most celebrated fighter in all Rome. The crowd loves you. Great men seek you out and reward you with gifts and money. The day will surely come when that gift is a wooden sword?'

Cupido shook his head and changed the subject.

'I remember the first day we met, when you cried for the leopard. Soon there will be no more leopards, or antelopes, or rhinoceros. They will all be gone, fed into the insatiable maw of the games. What will you do then?'

'Fronto knows what he is doing. He will find more animals for us,' Rufus said with more confidence than he felt.

'This time perhaps, and the next time. But there will come a day when he cannot. Think on that, Rufus. Think on a means of providing entertainment without blood. I have studied the mob. They don't come only for blood. If you can give them something different, something they have never seen before, perhaps they will be satisfied with a little less of it.'

It was a weary and disheartened Fronto who returned from his mission. The animal dealers at the trading camps on the coast all told the same story. They had few animals to sell and those they did possess were low in quality and high in price. He had hired guides and made the arduous trek into the mountains, but the news was the same. The game either was hunted out or had fled south, and the predators that lived off it had followed. He was venting his frustrations on Rufus by the menagerie gate when they were interrupted by a shout.

'Cornelius Aurius Fronto, you old lecher. You were in Mauretania, but you did not tell me you were going. I might have put some business your way.'

Fronto excused himself and went to meet his visitor, a tall, bald man in a threadbare tunic which hung loose on his thin frame. He spent thirty minutes in deep conversation with his guest, and when he returned to resume his discussion with Rufus the big man looked uncharacteristically thoughtful.

'Who was that?' Rufus asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. Fronto shrugged as if it was of no consequence, but Rufus persisted. 'One day it might be important for me to know this man. You are always telling me knowledge is profit.'

'His name is Narcissus,' the trader said reluctantly. 'He buys and sells commodities.'

'What kind of commodities?'

Fronto didn't answer directly. 'He is the freedman of one of our senators, a minor member of the imperial family. He is very clever, perhaps the cleverest man I know. He speaks seven languages and a dozen native dialects. Sometimes I use him as an interpreter. Sometimes I do him a favour.'

'A favour?'

'Yes. When it suits me I will carry a message to a certain person in a certain port. In return, I receive another message, which I pass to Narcissus.'

'So the commodity he buys and sells is information? Then he is a spy?'

Fronto turned to face Rufus with a dangerous look. 'No. Not a spy. A businessman. He buys and sells, just as I do. If the information eventually reaches the ears of Tiberius that is of no interest to me.'

'He must be an important man, this Narcissus,' Rufus said thoughtfully.

Fronto answered with a superior wave of his meaty hand. 'Oh, Narcissus would like to be important. And rich. But he will be neither. His senator is a crippled nobody and Narcissus's choice of horse is as poor as his choice of sponsor. It is well known at the Circus that if Narcissus backs Red, the gods will favour Green. Come – we have work to do.'