Chapter XXXVI
XXXVI
The air was wild with anticipation and smoke. Laurel crowns wreathed the heads of the statues filling the arches of the Flavian Amphitheatre, as if the gods and goddesses standing guard over the place had already claimed the victor’s status. And indeed, they might have.
All Telemachus could feel was his failure weighing heavier than the plate armor of a crupellarius. That this day had come at all was a failure in itself. He could feel the death on his hands already. So much death.
All of his best-laid plans and ideas had come to this. This final desperate measure.
He shuffled his feet, sliding further ahead in the line snaking through the plaza around the amphitheatre.
He tugged the hood of his cloak down farther over his face.
He could easily feign chill; the winter breath of the first day of Ianuarius carried no hint of comfort.
It would be a cold day in the stands. The plaza swarmed with merchants selling hot spiced wine and steaming bags of roasted nuts.
The scents were familiar and made his stomach churn with memories.
None of them good. He could nearly hear the stands echoing with his name, see the blood edging the tip of his gladius.
But the crumpled body he saw in his mind was not that of a fallen gladiator, but of his father.
Lord, forgive me. Have mercy on me.
He’d had his glory days in the sun. He’d had his hands in the making of this day.
And God be his help, he would have his hands in the undoing.
“One, please,” he murmured to the ticket hawker at the gate.
The man eyed him but said nothing as he slid a worn wooden tile across the table. “Down this hall,” he said with a jerk of one thumb over his shoulder. “Through gate nineteen and up to row thirty-seven.”
His throat closed over a reply, and he could not utter a thank-you.
He only nodded, palmed the tile, and rushed inside before he could change his mind and leave.
The entrance arched far over his head as he entered and pressed through the crowds, not toward his seat but toward the emperor’s balcony, draped with purple bunting and green laurel garlands.
Honorius might not agree to see him, but he had to try. One last time.
The halls of the amphitheatre towered high and echoing.
Covered in frescoes and carvings of men and beasts locked in perpetual animosity.
Could this place be different? Changed? Filled with hallowed silence for the souls lost here?
Must it forever be known as a place of blades and blood?
Or might that only be perspective? This day it would all change. One way or another.
Let it be so.