Gladiators vs Zombies (3 page)

THE BESTIARIUS

Gedra closed his eyes, taking a deep breath as he clenched his quaking hand into a tight fist. The moans of his new opponents had been ceaseless since they had turned, and rest did not come easily to him on the eve of battle. Now he stood before the closed arena gates, knowing that across the sun-baked sands another gate contained the golem creatures of his dominus. Golems, that is what Lanista Laeca had called them last night during the hero’s feast, a traditional last supper for the men who would fight the next day. Gedra had no appetite during the meal, and as he now prepared to enter the arena he was thankful for the empty stomach, sickened as he was by his enemy.

Gedra had fought in the arena ten times in the two years since being trained as a gladiator. He was one of the bestiari, the beast fighters, and though often an outcast in the company of other gladiators, a certain respect was paid him also. Unlike the other gladiators, who trained to battle armed men, the bestiarius had been taught the art of killing ferocious beasts. Gedra had fought such creatures as exotic as the ostrich bird, with its powerful kicks and sharp talons, and creatures as common but deadly as lions and bears.

Often the animals were sick and starving by the time they were turned out into the arena, and Gedra’s tactics were to wear them down until he could deliver a killing blow. Though he had to give the crowd a good show, and as such would occasionally rush in to strike at the foe. As long as the blood flowed, the beasts roared, and Gedra conducted himself with poise and grace, the crowd howled with joy at the brutal spectacle.

His body was a latticework of scars, as even the best of tactics were incapable of saving his flesh from the claws, teeth, and talons of his enemies. While he had been schooled in the use of the spear and bow that were the common weapons of the bestiari, there were bouts in which the editor of the games would require Gedra to fight with other weapons. If the editor wanted to drag out the time of the bout, or needed to satisfy a particularly bloodthirsty crowd, Gedra would be forced to fight with sword and dagger, or sometimes a spiked cestus glove. It was in these close quarters battles that Gedra would emerge from the struggle nearly as slashed and bloody as his defeated foe.

Today’s battle seemed to be set up to be more traditionally, and Gedra was armed with a short stabbing spear and a small oval shield. It was not the long spear of the beast hunts, but a short spear with a wide blade that could slash or stab. The bestiarius had used such weapons in bouts with larger animals, once against a bear and once against a massive boar. The gladiator was confident, though wary of his new opponents, the way a bestiarius should be.

With a grinding of heavy hinges the gates to the arena opened, and Gedra stepped onto the sand. He held his arms up in salutation to the crowd, who returned his pose with cheers. Though the bestiarius was an outcast among his fellow gladiators, the crowd often cheered for the beast hunter, as he represented a symbolic mastery of man over beast. Though the same crowd that cheered his entrance into the arena would cheer just as loud should be torn limb from limb. The crowd grew silent as the gates on the other side of the arena opened.

The editor had spoken to the crowd of a grand new beasts being offered to the arena by Ludus Laeca, and everyone was eager to see what new horror emerged from the darkness. At first there was only a low moan, and then a golem shuffled out onto the arena floor. He was dressed in tattered clothing, and on his shoulder was the ragged bite would that was reflected in the cloth banner that Lanista Laeca had hung over the gate. The crowd remained silent, confused that a man walked into the arena and not a beast. Gedra knew better, for he had heard the moaning, and knew that the man he now faced had once been a slave in the household.

The golem moaned as its yellowed eyes scanned the crowd, staggering to the side for a moment as if overwhelmed by the presence of so many onlookers. The crowd’s demeanor changed, and someone shouted “This is no beast!” while the crowd began to grow unhappy. Then, as if spurned on by the detractors, the golem’s gaze fell upon Gedra, and it let out a bestial scream as it began moving towards him.

At first the gait of the creature was more of a shuffle, and then within moments it became something between a run and a walk. Gedra stepped forward, hoping to make quick work of this sad creature. He knew not what strange blight the wound on the creature’s shoulder signified, though he felt sorry for the man. Clearly he was suffering from some disease or drug that the lanista had forced upon him to make him more like a beast. Gedra was sickened by the whole affair, the honor of his position as bestiarius being slighted by calling this poor man a beast.

Without breaking stride Gedra deflected the man’s outstretched arms and drove his spear into the man’s mid-section, then, as he had been trained to do, twisting the point of the spear and stepping to the side. As he did so the spear rent apart the man’s belly, and the stinking guts spilled out into the arena. Gedra recovered and stepped back, his shield sinking back into position before him and his gory spear resting against it. Typically when he performed this maneuver the beast would bellow and collapse, ending the fight as it bled out upon the sand.

The golem staggered several steps away from the pile of guts on the arena floor, though did not fall. The crowd had grown deathly silent, and Gedra began to realize that he was in more peril than he’d realized. The man was not a man at all, but some manner of creature, indeed deserving of the lanista’s name golem, though the bestiarius had no idea as to the word’s meaning. The golem screamed once more and careened towards Gedra, heedless of its tremendous wound. The bestiarius backed away several steps, and then lunged again, sinking his spear into the golem’s chest.

The creature only halted briefly, then pushed forward against the point of the spear as it continued to attempt to grasp the bestiarius. Gedra’s grip on the spear loosened, and it was torn away as the golem twisted its torso in an attempt to get past the gladiator’s shield. The crowd erupted in a combination of cheers and booing as the bestiarius took several hasty steps backwards from the creature. The golem kept coming, heedless of the spear jutting from its chest, its arms outstretched once more.

Gedra knew that he could not keep retreating, for in doing so he would lose the favor of the crowd, and shame his ludus. He had been trained to control the fight, and never to let the beast gain the upper hand in determining where the battle moved. Without any additional weapons the gladiator waited until the beast was a few steps closer then moved to the side and as he went delivered a crushing blow with his shield. The shaft of the spear snapped, and the creature’s bottom jaw exploded in a spray of blood and bone. The crowd howled its delight, and the creature fell to the ground.

Gedra let himself relax for a brief moment, the fight seemingly done, and then suddenly the creature was again on the attack. From the ground the creature had grabbed the gladiator’s greave, and had begun to haul itself up using his leg. Gedra took a step back, though the creature’s grasp held, and it sank its teeth into his exposed thigh. Gedra had been bitten and clawed many times, though there was something additionally terrifying about being bitten by a man. The creature wrenched
its head back and forth and tore free a huge chunk of meat from the gladiator’s leg, sending the man crashing to the ground.

Gedra screamed in pain and lost his grip on the shield as the creature batted it aside. The golem and the gladiator grappled for several moments, rolling around on the arena’s sand floor, until the creature bit down into Gedra’s left hand. The gladiator yelled in pain and began punching the golem in the face with his free hand, though no matter how many blow he landed nothing seemed to slow the attacker. The creature began using its hands to tear at the flesh of the bestiari’s belly, and despite the punishing storm of fists the golem was able to lend its teeth to the task.

Gedra’s screams became whimpers as he continued to struggle against the creature, though once its hands slid into his belly through the holes torn by its teeth the fight went out of him. The bestiarius died to the sound of his guts being torn out and eaten by the golem, while the crowd looked on in stunned silence. Soon the golem stood up from the partially eaten gladiator and began staggering around the arena, moaning and looking at the crowd.

Many people had vomited in the stands, others too shocked to even do that. Not a sound was made save the moaning of the golem, until the bestiarius stood up. What was once Gedra looked out at the crowd, now a golem, and began moaning and staggering towards the crowd. It was then that a very satisfied Lanista Laeca gave the signal to the editor, who shouted for the arena tenders to recover the golems. From the gate that the golems had emerged several men with long poles that had looped ropes fastened to the ends of them. The men wrapped the loops around the necks of the two golems and dragged them back into the darkness within the arena gates.

After a few more moments of stunned silence the editor applauded Ludus Laeca for its incredible display, and soon the crowd joined him in their applause. Soon the cheers were deafening, as the crowd began to realize that what they had seen, while horrific, had indeed been marvelous. And it was so that the golem became the favorite enemy of gladiators in the arenas of Rome.

THE SECUTORES

Drust ran his hands across the tattooed skin of his arms, chest, and face, the ancient story of his people inked upon his living flesh. Violence had always been part of his people’s way, and beauty too, for according to the tree-seers these were the two forces that held together this world of mist. He was thankful today, as he was often, that he had been a warrior in his life before being enslaved as a gladiator. In his time he had seen plenty of slaves hacked to pieces in the arena having only first taken up the sword a scant few days prior. For Drust, as with many of his barbarian brethren, be they celt or gaul or goth, the life of a gladiator was not that different from the life of a warrior.

Drust had been a skirmisher, conducting lightning raids against the Roman invaders who defended the outposts that stood before Hadrian’s Wall. Small war parties would gather in the dawn mists, no more than a score of warriors, and harass the outposts. They would rush the walls, some hurling spears at the guards, while others would toss lit torches in high arcs to land within the defenses. Sometimes the torches would catch, and fire would rage through the outpost, then while the Romans fought the fire the skirmishers would scale the walls unmolested. Once over the walls they would rampage through the outpost, each man following his own course, sowing chaos and death through the camp. Often the Romans would rally, and begin to organize a defense, and it was then that the picts would melt away again into the forest, refusing to engage the Romans in the kind of stand-up fights at which the legions excelled.

These tactics worked well to slow Roman expansion into pictish territory, and prompted the Romans to build their massive wall. It was during one of these raids that Drust fought Legionnaire Lucius Meridius, and was bested by the Roman as they fought man to man in the firelight of the raid. Drust’s life was spared, and the legionnaire sold the pict to a slave trader on the other side of the Wall. The further south that Drust was taken the more exotic he seemed to the buyers, and he was bought and sold several times before finding himself being trained as a gladiator in Ludus Laeca.

Being a man of callous pragmatism, Drust took to the life of a gladiator with the same tenacity with which he had once defended his homeland. The picts typically fought with shield and spear, using their short swords as secondary weapons, though Drust had always excelled with the sword. As such Lanista Laeca and the doctore trainer soon tapped him to be a Secutore style gladiator. Drust deeply disliked the unwieldy helmets that gladiators were forced to wear, though after having his life saved several times in the arena by the helmet’s protection, he learned to accept the sacrifice of vision and mobility.

Drust now stood on a small platform stationed below the center of the arena. On the platform stood two other secutores, both men of Ludus Laeca, though their names were unknown to the pict. Drust kept few friends in the ludus, and apart from the old man Heraus, few knew much of Drust beyond his fearsome reputation in the arena. The old lanista, Felix, had established Ludus Laeca as a house of mass battles and discount gladiators, and despite Lanista Laeca’s attempts to change the house’s reputation, it still stood. Perhaps now it was no longer even the lanista’s desire to change it, as the golems had become the largest craze in Rome.

The pict thought back to the fate of the first man to fight the golems in the arena, Gedra the Bestiarius. So poorly did he die, and all for ignorance of how to kill the golems, though certainly the knowledge of their weakness was no guarantee of survival. As the appetite for golem fights and carnage had reached a fever pitch in Rome, the pict knew that anything could be waiting for them in the arena. Arena tenders began to pull on the ropes attached to the platform, and gears creaked as the platform rose into the air, growing ever closer to the gateway hidden in the floor of the arena.

The three secutore on the platform stood silently, the harsh sunlight glinting off of their armor as the gates opened. The platform was raised flush with the arena floor, and the gladiators could see what awaited them. Over a dozen of the golems had been released into the arena, and were all milling about the space, snapping and moaning at the jeering crowd above.

“If we stand together, we’ll fare better,” uttered the secutore to Drust’s left, “Back to back at least they will not be able to flank us.”

Drust nodded in ascent, though the other secutore shook his head and began to move away from them, “Do what you will brothers, I’ll take my chances alone.”

The golems in the arena were beginning to notice the men in the center, and had begun to move towards them. The lone secutor rushed out to meet the first of the golems, while Drust and his comrade secutor stood their ground, standing back to back and slowly moving in a circle to cover all of the angles. The lone secutor bravely attacked the nearest golem, displaying his fighting skill as he used his shield to knock aside the golem’s outstretched hands. While the golem reeled from the blow the lone secutor brought his gladius around in a wide arc and swept the creature’s head from its shoulders. As blood fountained upwards from the neck stump the body collapsed, and the crowd roared its applause as the lone secutor took a step back and held his sword and shield high in a victory salute.

Drust hated the showmanship that was required of gladiators in the arena, preferring to do his butcher’s work and return to his cell without pomp and circumstance, though as a slave it was not his choice to make. The lone secutor had struck first blood, and there was glory in that, so he was required by the rules of the arena to share it with the crowd. For the greater glory of Rome, scoffed Drust silently to himself. The golems seemed to be shifting their attention to the lone secutor, and while that took pressure off of the other two gladiators, it was a mark against them if they stood idle while another took all the glory. So it was in the bloody protocols of the Coliseum.

“Moving right!” shouted the comrade sectuor, and as a unit Drust as the other gladiator took several steps to the right and engaged a golem that had been closing in. While his comrade sliced off one of the golem’s hands Drust darted forward and separated the golem’s calf from its leg with his gladius. The golem continued to moan as it fell to the ground, bouncing off of Drust’s shield as he deflected the falling golem away. The comrade secutor drove the point of his sword into the back of the golem’s skull, and after a spasm it lay still.

The lone secutor was greeted by more cheers as he sprinted forward and shield bashed a golem to the ground, and then stabbed downwards to finish the kill. Several more golems were beginning to surround him, so he sprinted away from their grasping hands and towards another lone golem. The secutor tried his shield swipe move once more though instead of it knocking the golem’s hands away the creature was able to get a first grasp on the shield, and as it stumbled back from the force of the blow it pulled the secutor along with it. The gladiator lost his balance and fell to his knee, and the golem pressed upon him, pulling back and forth on the shield. As the golem ripped the shield away from the secutor the gladiator bunched his legs beneath himself, and sprang upwards. The secutor thrust his blade through the underside of the golem’s jaw, and the point was driven through the top of the creature’s skull.

The crowd went wild with praise as the secutor pulled hard and drew the gladius from the golem while it collapsed to its knees, then falling to the side. The lone secutor made to recover his shield, though had to leap backwards as another golem swiped at him with its hands. The gladiator opened a furrow in the creature’s chest as he lashed out with this sword by instinct. The blow bought the gladiator enough space to turn and sprint away from the growing number of golems chasing after him.

Drust and his comrade secutor moved in a tight circle, each one of them engaging a golem. Drust was a measured and careful fighter, not prone to showboating or fancy moves. He fought at he drilled, with precise movements, relying upon speed and persistence to win his battles. Drust had won in the arena many times by wearing down his opponent with a constant barrage of attacks, and this battle was no different. Drust protected himself from the grasping hands and tackle attempts of the golem with the his shield as he lashed out with the gladius in repeated attempts to deliver a killing blow to the golem’s head. The pict struck again and again, the sword hacking out chunks of flesh and bone as it bit into the golem’s neck, shoulders, and head. On the fifth blow the pict was able to sink his gladius through the temple of the golem. It twitched and fell to the ground in a heap as the pict chanced a quick glance over his shoulder to see his comrade secutor thrust the point of his gladius into the eye socket of the golem he had been fighting.

A hiss went up from the crowd, and Drust turned to see the lone secutor limping away from the bodies of two more felled golems, his right thigh a ragged mess of bite marks. At least he still has his sword, thought Drust as the pict pivoted to deflect the awkward tackle of a golem, bringing his gladius around over his head and slamming it into the base of the golem’s neck. His comrade secutor rushed to Drust’s left and body checked another golem, then the two of them dispatched it with simultaneous strikes to its head. Before they had a chance to recover another golem hurled itself at them, tackling Drust to the ground. His sword fell from his grasp, though he managed to keep the golem firmly on the other side of his shield as it clawed and snapped at him.

“Lift your shield!” bellowed his comrade secutor, and Drust grunted with the effort of pushing his shield upwards, lifting the golem up with it. The secutor swung his gladius like a scythe and buried it halfway though the creature’s skull, directly between its eyes and nose. The secutor’s sword was hopelessly stuck, so he stepped back and began to unfasten his helmet. Drust lopped off the arm of a golem that charged them, then knocked it to the ground with his shield and finished it with the point of his sword.

The two secutore stood back to back and continued to fight, Drust with his calculated barrage of attacks and his comrade secutor swinging his helmet as a bludgeon. In a matter of moments they stood alone on the arena sands, save for the lone secutor, whom had turned into a golem himself. The man was large, even by gladiator standards, and he roared as he charged them. The golems so far had not seemed inclined or capable of using weapons, and yet the secutor golem still grasped its sword, and raised it as it charged.

“Ill go low and you go high,” spoke Drust as the two gladiators stepped forward to engage their former brother. Drust snaked forward, keeping his legs bent and shifting his weight in a successful attempt to feint right. The golem awkwardly swung its gladius downwards, its strike hitting the sand where Drust had been moments before. The pict lashed out with his gladius and severed the hamstring of the secutor golem’s right leg, then its left. As the creature sank to its knees Drust’s comrade secutor sprinted forward and put all of his momentum behind a mighty blow with the helmet.

The golem’s face exploded from the impact, painting Drust’s shield in blood and bone chunks. The golem fell backwards from the force of the strike, and did not move again. Drust and his comrade secutor raised their arms in victory, and Drust found himself screaming with exultation in spite of himself. It had been the greatest golem fight since they had been revealed in the arena, and though the glory of Rome meant nothing to the pict, he took a fierce pride in knowing that once again he had come face to face with death and overcome.