Chapter IX
IX
“Go get a drink.”
Ignacio barked the command and all the fighting pairs of gladiatrices broke apart.
Adel’s wooden rudis hit the dirt in a puff of dust. She gripped her knees, breathing hard as the others headed toward the fountain at the edge of the courtyard.
The break had not come a moment too soon.
With each strike her injured arm had begun to throb, a heartbeat that shot jarring pain to her bones.
She scooped up the sword and dropped it into a rack before angling for the stone fountain at the edge of the courtyard.
Hanging back at the edge of the group, she propped her hands on her hips and waited her turn.
The air was cool and crisp, and she tilted her face to the sun, relishing the mix of the two.
The fountain cleared and Adel rested her hands on the smooth stone lip, then ducked her whole head under.
In an instant, the shock of cool water brought her home, running over forested hills, leaping into the shadows of a cold river in the heat of summer, water closing overhead, muffling her sisters’ laughter as they leaped in beside her.
A heavy hand pressed the back of her head, pushing her forehead to the bottom of the fountain.
She rammed an elbow backward, making contact somewhere that made the hand disappear.
She jerked upright, swinging before she could see clearly.
The hand caught her wrist, staying the blow as laughter erupted.
“Come now, it was only a joke.” The words struck her ears in Visigoth instead of Latin, carried by a voice like a mine. Deep and cold. Wulfula raised an arm across his dark eyes as if to shield his face as she spun.
His black hair was braided back into a mass of different-sized plaits that hung down his back, tied together with a leather string. Somehow, even with the outdoor training, his skin had remained pale. As if he too had emerged from a mine.
Adel shook off his grip and muttered a name her aipei would have scoured from her tongue had she heard it.
In Alaric’s army, Wulfula had been no more than a common foot soldier, but in the arenas of Rome, he was touted a Visigoth general.
The lie had gone straight to his large head, until it was clear he believed it.
“Will they let you fight next week?”
She shrugged and wiped a hand across her mouth. “What do you care?”
Few had sought his company in the war camp. He’d been slithery and sly, hanging around the fringes of the camp with other ne’er-do-wells. Even then, they’d chosen someone else to lead their slinking pack.
“We Visigoths ought to look out for each other, is all.” Wulfula knotted his arms over his wide, bare chest, an attempt at concern pinching his face in odd lines.
“Oh?” She nearly laughed. Look out for each other? The way they had on the battlefield? All she seemed to recall were shoulders and soles of feet as the others ran.
Wulfula leaned close, the odor of training clinging to his clammy skin and clogging her nose. “We could be great together, you and I. Think of it.” He lowered his voice. “The Visigoth general and his fierce warrior princess. The crowds would be wild over it.”
Adel tried to mask the jerking of her stomach, refusing to allow him the pleasure of knowing how his very presence nauseated her.
She’d trained to guard the supplies in camp, but had only become so good a fighter to ward off Wulfula’s growing advances.
The monk Telemachus had intervened once, and then taught her to defend herself.
She’d latched on to his every instruction.
So, perhaps, she did owe her success to Wulfula.
She swallowed back her revulsion and forced her eyes to widen and meet his, her lips falling apart as if she could barely believe his suggestion. Indeed. She could not.
“Oh, Wulfula,” she breathed, as if he’d offered her the world.
The change in his expression was slight. The darkening of his pupils, the satisfied tilt to his mouth. The look of a man triumphant. She inched closer, letting her eyelashes flicker just so. He followed her movement, his eyes dropping to travel over her body.
Her tone went tender and deadly. “I would rather die a thousand deaths than be anything of yours.”
Pain shot through her injured arm as he wrapped his hand around it, fingers digging into her wound. She clenched her teeth, strangling the cry of alarm in her throat.
“You think you’re so great.” He jerked her close, lowering his voice to her ear. “But you know the crowds only love you because they like to laugh.”
Adel gripped his wrist and spun, breaking his hold and twisting his arm behind his back. She shoved a foot into the back of his leg and dropped him to his knees. “They love me because I am good.”
Wulfula shifted, grabbing her arm and flinging her to the ground. “On your back, perhaps.” He spat and shoved to his feet.
“!” Ignacio barked, interrupting the scuffle. “Jovan would speak with you.”
Adel held Wulfula’s glare until he turned away, then rolled to her feet, skin burning from the scrape of gravel.
She brushed pebbles from her arms and moved toward Jovan’s office, heart thundering in her chest, pulse hammering in her arm.
What she wouldn’t give for a cup of Ignacio’s wine just now.
Crossing Wulfula was a stupid thing to do.
Even with guards and trainers surrounding them most of the time, the school was not a place of safety.
Only last week one of the gladiators had been beaten in the baths.
Left nearly dead in a matter of moments.
As far as she’d heard, no one knew who did it.
The lanista stood waiting in the doorway, hairy arms crossed over his paunchy stomach.
He met her gaze and turned inside, a silent invitation to follow.
Adel swiped drips from her chin, and sand from her knees.
Would this be the moment Jovan made good on his promise to make her a magister over the gladiatrices?
She wished she could clean up first, don a tunic instead of the training garments, but Jovan would not wait.
And she hadn’t bought a new tunic yet anyway.
“You called for me, sir?” Adel bowed as she entered the dimness of the office.
“Shut the door.” Jovan crossed to his desk and eased into his chair. The chair creaked and crackled as Adel closed the door at her back.
“Magnus tells me you’re doing well.”
Warmth spread in her chest. Compliments from the doctore overseeing the gladiatrices were something of myth and legend. To receive one felt as incredible as a Pegasus sighting.
She swallowed back her surprise and dipped her chin. “I am honored he thinks so.”
Jovan tipped his head, squinting at her before opening a book on his desk. “He tells me you have great influence over the gladiatrices. That they look up to you.”
In the ludus, perhaps. It had not been so back in camp. Tragedy had flipped the scales. She neither confirmed nor denied his words.
He laced his fingers together atop the book. “I’ve made a list of improvements for each gladiatrix. I want you to work with them. Encourage them. Make them better.”
A surge of hope swept over her and she fought to keep her expression still. “That is the job of the magistri.” Was he offering the position? He’d hinted at it before. More than hinted, really but—
“It is the job of a leader.”
Not a yes, exactly. Adel pressed, boldened by the turn of the conversation. No one would fight for her, if she did not fight for herself. She was done relying on others. “If I do this, improve them, you will make me one of the magistri?”
Jovan shifted, as if his chair had suddenly become too small. “A woman has never held that position before.”
“But you have never had a woman with as much skill as I have.” Realization bolstered her courage. “And you make this request of me because Ignacio and the other magistri have not given the results you seek.”
Another shift. “They have not.”
She lifted her chin. “I will accept. And if I do this, you will award me the position?”
Jovan studied her, then dropped his gaze to the stack of papers on the desk, uncertainty giving way to resignation. “Of course.”
Hair dripping and leaving dark patches on her plain gray tunic, Adel stepped into the triclinium.
She scanned the room as she made her way to the table reserved for the gladiatrices, taking care to avoid direct eye contact with the men.
Even so, a chorus of ear-burning comments followed her to her table.
She tried to ignore them. Lashing out only brought on laughter and waves of base suggestions about what she could do with her energy.
Best to let them think she was immune. Her quick scan of the room revealed several spots that remained conspicuously empty.
In a school of only sixty-odd gladiators, no one went missing in obscurity.
Perhaps they were late. Still in the baths.
Confined to the rumored punishment cells beneath the school. Likelier yet, sold.
“What did Jovan want with you?” Dreda leaned across the table.
“He had a job for me.”
“I’m sure he did,” one of the Hildas clucked.
Adel pressed her lips together at the insinuation. “He gave me a list of complaints against you all.”
That shut their mouths more effectively than the bread.
“What . . . sort of complaints?” This, in a trembling voice from Berit.
Adel pointed. “Lack of boldness.”
Berit’s dimpled chin touched her chest.
“Head up,” Adel snapped, and waited for the wide blue eyes to meet hers. “You are strong, Berit. Quick. You need only to believe this and fight as if you know it to be true.”
Berit’s lips rolled inward, biting back the words Adel knew she was thinking. I just want to go home.
“This is your home now. Your life.” Adel reached across the table and gripped the girl’s hand. “Fail, and you will be used to warm the beds of the men.” She squeezed her hand in warning. “You do not want that.”
Berit gave the tiniest nod and Adel withdrew, taking a drink of the ash-water before turning to the other women, who waited in dread expectation.
To Dreda: “Sluggish feet.”
Tilla: “Sword work lacks finesse.”
The Hildas: “You fight like a pair of hens, fluttering and scratching.”
Adel turned to the newest acquisition, a Visigoth woman with shorn hair who offered the greatest challenge, and not just because she’d arrived infested with lice. Her bruises bore witness to her abject lack of skill. “You lack everything.”
The woman’s eyebrows flickered with resignation. “Nothing I did not already know.”
“But you have heart. All of you.” Adel studied each woman. “We may have been divided in the camp, but we can have a new start here. In Rome, we can earn names and fortunes of our own. We have only to work for it. To fight for it. If you do not fight for yourself, no one else will.”
The women didn’t have a chance to respond.
A loud clanging from the doorway silenced the dining hall as Jovan entered, holding up his hands and a square of parchment creased with folds and a broken wax seal. The room stilled.
“An invitation has come from Emperor Honorius for the best of my fighters to participate in the Victory Games he will sponsor in our city at the first of the year.”
A low rumble spread through the room as the words found their mark. There had not been Victory Games in years.
Victory. The word sent acid to Adel’s throat.
She’d much rather greet the boy emperor with a fist than curry his favor in the games.
And yet, the chance to fight in the Flavian Amphitheatre was a high honor and one that could bring wealth and fame.
The games would be days long, magnificent.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of fights. Costumes, sets, choreography .
. . wealth and freedom granted to the favorites.
That thought alone was enough to send an uneasiness thrumming through her veins. What would she do with freedom? She couldn’t go home. Perhaps she would stay on as some of the magistri did. If Jovan made her a magister. When Jovan made her a magister.
Jovan’s assistant clanged the bell again for a second silence that was longer in coming than the first.
“Only the best of the gladiators will be allowed to fight before our illustrious emperor. The results of preliminary matches between the four ludi will determine who will go. I have great expectations for you all, and I know you will meet and exceed them. Training for the games begins at first light. Rest well tonight. You’ll need it. ”
With that, Jovan left and the room erupted in a jumble of voices, cynical and excited at once.
“Fighting before the emperor?” Dreda breathed, her skin somehow paler now. “I can hardly speak for thinking about it. Can you imagine the spectacle that will be? The costumes and sets . . . I wonder what the theme will be. Oh, I hope it’s something good. I look sickly in yellow.”
One of the Hildas spoke up. “Not all of us will go. Jovan said so. Only the best.”
“What are you suggesting?” Dreda’s voice took on an instant chill. “That I’m not good enough?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Dreda turned to Berit. “At least I don’t cringe and run away from the blade.”
Berit straightened, eyes narrowed to smug dagger points. “It matters little when the crowds favor blondes over brunettes.”
And yet, they were all considered barbarians.
“They will need us all.” Adel’s voice went steely, brooking no argument. “Do not give them the power to divide us.”
Tilla wiped her wrist across her mouth as she set her mug of ash-water down. “That doesn’t mean we’ll please the emperor. Or be liberated. The Ludus Magnus has Vesuvia and Calypso, and the Dacian School has the Tigris and Strix—even you have only beaten her once.”
“With enough work, anything is possible.” Adel lifted her chin and her mug, hoping she could convince them. Needing to convince them.
Dreda shrugged and raised her own mug. “As long as they don’t give us yellow costumes.”
The Hildas followed suit, thudding their mugs against Dreda’s and reaching to salute Berit’s half-raised cup. Tilla only raised hers to her mouth.
“To wealth, and status, and the love of the people,” Dreda said.
Adel raised her own mug in a tiny salute on the way to her lips. To independence.