The Far Arena (29 page)

'If you do, and not me, we will lose the effect of this offer. So don't tell her.'

'You have my word.'

'I mean really,' Lew had said.

'My word is my word.'

'Except when it comes to the nun.'

'I don't lie,' Petrovitch had said imperiously.

And so now he ushered her to Lew standing in front of the patient's room.

'I have complied with your request,' said Semyon. 'Not a word.
’

‘
So mysterious,' said Sister Olav, as though being shown a trick by children for whom she had to show the proper awe.

'Semyon, please wait there,' said Lew, pointing across the corridor.

Petrovitch watched suspiciously and quite closely as the large American put a forefinger on the door. He whispered something into the black veil bonnet of Sister Olav. She shook her head. She covered her mouth.

'No,' she gasped.

'Yes,' said Lew and tapped the door. Then he opened it. Petrovitch could hear the constant mumbling of little John Carter with the scarred body.

He saw her wait a moment in the doorway then turn away, her blue eyes rimmed with tears. She blessed herself with the sign of the cross and then took a very deep breath.

'I must get a room within this university hospital complex. Now. I am not going back. Not to my class, not to the convent. It will be all right with the mother superior. Please, Close the door, we must get organized. We must have working rules.'

Petrovitch was agreeing to everything, as Lew took her to Petrovitch's office where she busily began writing a list of needs.

'How ?' asked Petrovitch stunned, as they waited for her.

'Because I come from the same culture as she does.'

'No. You don't. You're American. She's Norwegian.'

McCardle shook his head. 'We are all the children of Rome, without knowing it. Our months are called after Roman emperors or gods; our summer is July and August, named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. When your people scream fascist at us, you are referring to the rods of authority called fasces by the Romans. The idea of law written down and to be observed equally comes to us from the Romans, and our alphabet comes to us exactly from the Roman. From plumbing to the idea that surrounding someone in battle gives victory, Rome gave them to us. Rome is our common, civilized roots, so deep that many of us in the West do not even realize it unless we are educated to it. Rome is our intellectual father, and we have been living off its remnants for two thousand years.'

'But, obviously, Sister Olav knew that before she came here. Better than you,' said Petrovitch.

'You're right,' said Lew. 'I want to show you something that we have talked about for centuries, and only you gave us.' 'What?'

'I want to show you,' said Lew.

As they walked back up the corridor to the patient's room, Lew explained how complicated it was to learn and teach Latin, how many complex rules there were for this very precise dead language.

At the room he put his right
forefinger on the metal fire-re
tardant door as he had for Sister Olav.

'From Berlin to Paris, from Des Moines to Rome, almost every first-year Latin teacher has told every first-year Latin class how sorry he or she is that they must study Latin grammar in such an artificial and complex way ... almost like putting together a puzzle. They have said, for centuries now, to almost every first-year class that the student could learn Latin better and faster and more properly if they talked to a Roman on the other side of a classroom door.'

Petrovitch nodded. He saw Lew's finger pressed white from the pressure on the door. He already knew what he would hear.

'Semyon, for the first time in I don't know how many centuries, we have found the Roman on the other side of the door. And that's what I told her, knowing she had heard the same thing in her first class as I had in mine. I told her simply, "We have found the Roman on the other side of the door." And when she heard him, she knew what we said was true. And she knew what it meant. And she knew it all at once.'

'John Carter is more than a body, more than a medical breakthrough. Is that what you are saying, Lew?' asked Semyon, his voice hushed.

'I
think so,' said Lew McCardle.

Fourteen

Tenth Day - Petrovitch Report

Condition fair. All support systems removed, except intravenous feedings. According to Olav report, patient apparently living through period in life, estimated time, late first century. Confirm on cardiovascular system of athlete.

Armour rustled in the tunnels. Animals bleated from the deep rock cages beneath the seats. Someone in a high tier dropped a metal cup, which banged down marble steps on this great, hot day. It was as though the centre of the world stopped breathing. One hundred and fifty thousand people were quiet. I had never heard total silence in the arena before.

The pommel of my spatha quivered upright in the sand, and I was running. I could not go back and kill Publius without Rome descending on me anyhow, and 1 kept running. Through the portal I had entered, past the new master of the games, who was as still as though 1 had clubbed his skull, past unarmed legionnaires, from the urban cohort who only watched, through the tunnels, and past my chambers. I unsheathed a slave from his brown tunic in a single yank, leaving the stunned man as nude as I had been. I covered myself and ran. Usually, someone running in a slave's tunic would be stopped by someone with a weapon, under the assumption the runner is fleeing his master or someone he had stolen something from. But the silence seemed to still everyone I passed. I was out into the streets and still running when the silence ended with a roar as though the earth had rent.

And I was laughing. Running and laughing and shrieking a lifetime of discipline away, imagining Domitian fleeing under praetorian shields. Our divinity might not live out the day. The thought of Romans erupting on themselves for a second riot at games being held to soothe the passions of the first left me stumbling, giggling, helpless in these streets, like a baby. Prisoners would run, the urban cohorts would run, and the vigiles would run the fastest.

It was not even a choice I made, running through the quiet back streets without a light-coloured tunic in sight, only slaves lazing about their duties because their masters were at the games. I knew I could not save either my fortune or my life. But I could save those jewels of my peristilium: Miriamne and Petronius. I always knew I had loved them, but only while running behind the vacant marble baths of Agrippa, forced to make a choice, did I realize they were the only things I had loved.

A few slaves tried to stop me, thinking I fled a master and that they might return me for a reward. They hardly required a break in stride. I had exercised every day of my life since I was nine and the run home proved no obstacle. Yet the coming revenge of Rome showed itself in the empty temples and the quiet forums I dashed through. I had never seen the forums without the hum and clang of business and rhetoric. On the days of the games, I had always been at my home or on the sand.

It was as though some plague had removed all the patricians and freedmen and equestrians from the workings of the empire and had left only the slaves, who did not realize fully that their masters were gone. A pair of slaves, for some reason, were fornicating at the gates of the House of the Vestal Virgins, while armoured slaves looked on.

Fortunately, living in the arena and through the arena, I had prepared for a possible eruption of the arena. It was a sword I had always known could someday turn against me. I had not realized I would grab the pommel and do it myself.

As I reached the first high houses of the warren of houses that made the complex of my fortifications, some of my slaves, seeing my dusty, brown tunic, tried to stop me. But when I ordered them to prepare for riot, they realized who I was. There was always a chance they would join a mob, these gatherings excluding no one but its victims. I had prepared for that, too, with all the strategies and tunnels and only I knew them all. In my vestibule I found my armoured slaves lounging and drinking wine, which they tried to hide when they saw me, all the while apologizing to me for fear of a beating.

'Riot,' I said and they ran to their positions. A slave of accounts sat behind my expensive citrus-wood table as though he were the master and fell off the sella when I ran in.

'Riot,' I yelled. 'All slaves to the walls.' Miriamne, her gentle face confused, ran out to the atrium and saw me sweating in the heavy arena oils and wearing the slave tunic. 'Eugeni, what happened?'

I touched her fine white stola, tugging her gently with me into the peristilium as slaves ran yelling, some with sticks, some with swords, and some with spears, through the passageways of the house towards the positions for which they had been prepared for so many years. Miriamne stumbled and I pushed her upright.

'Petronius,' I called out. 'Petronius.'

A slave ran into Miriamne and I threw him against a wall.

'Petronius, Petronius,' I yelled.

'He is here,' said Miriamne. I looked behind me and Petronius was following, his cheeks pale, his eyes teary, his white boy's tunic grey with sweat. He was sobbing.

'What happened to you ?' I asked.

'I saw, I saw,'
he said.

'Mars's ass. You were there?'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I saw you take off your clothes, and I ran. I'm sorry, father.'

It was a blessing that he had left at the beginning of the match, for he never could have made the run in my time. He had no more stamina than a patrician of his age. I grabbed a bunch of his tunic in my fist and dragged him to the cubicle of Mars. In both hands I took the heavy marble statue and lifted it above my head bringing it down on the seventh tile, diagonally from the north corner. The flooring cracked, and the head sheared along some hidden flaw into two parts. I ripped at the ground with hands becoming bloody until I found the edge of a blackened, heavily oiled cloth. I dug around it and eased it out of its burial place along with a dagger that was underneath it, a precaution. For who knew when I would want to give death, not jewels, while I pretended to get jewels. It struck me that I had taken precautions against almost everything and everyone but myself.

As I showed the jewels to Miriamne, who still appeared not to understand, and to Petronius, flushed with his run, his tender young cheeks so red from so strange an exercise to him, I told them I had failed to kill Publius, and all Rome would be down on us. This did not mean that we could not escape, but
it meant that from this moment
forth everyone would have to think coldly and logically, and do exactly what I said.

'We wil
l be slaves,' cried Petronius. ‘I
had a dream. We were all slaves and Publius owned us.'

I slapped Petronius across the face to bring him to the problem at hand.

"That is a patrician fear. You cannot afford those things now. There is enough to fear without creating more things. You will not be a slave if you think and act with cunning. People do not easily become slaves, and there are different kinds of slaves, and there are worse things.'

Petronius said he had a dagger and showed me a jewelled pin no more useful than the one Miriamne used to hold her stola in place. I gave him a teak one with a solid blade.

'Hold it. Not that way,' I said seeing him caress the pommel. 'Hard, like you want to strangle it. When you strike, thrust. Never slash. Thrust and do not stop thrusting. People do not die as easily as young boys think.'

He nodded.

'Always hide it and do not show it unless you will use it. Once that blade shows, you must kill. It ends all negotiations. Do not threaten with it. You have no friends but your mother. I want her alive. If you lose her, I will kill you. The world is not small enough for you to hide from me.'

'Do not say that, Eugeni,' said Miriamne. 'You cannot kill your Petronius.'

I slapped her face. I had never done that before. She was more surprised than hurt. I showed her the contents of the purse. It contained coins of gold and silver and several jewels, a large ruby being the most valuable. I told her she was a Roman citizen from Judea, named Gor. It sounded Hebrew. Most importantly it would sound Hebrew to Romans. She was to board a vessel at the port here, Ostius. To Athens, then to Jerusalem where her own people were. Petronius would be her Roman cousin. They were not to be mother and son. If she felt she needed legal protection, she should marry a weak man and use his name.The empire was descending on us like a great timber upon three small grapes. I could manoeuvre better knowing she and Petronius were safe.

Two going one way and one going another had a good chance.