Chapter XLI
XLI
THE ROAR FROM THE STANDS SWELLED and faded each time a soul fell in the arena, and with every fade, Telemachus felt his heart chip until he thought it might shatter like pottery.
It had taken all day to become so great a bother that a slave finally informed Emperor Honorius of his presence.
From the look on the slave’s face, he did not expect the emperor to allow him to enter the purple-draped box.
And from the quiver in his knees, Telemachus wasn’t sure he’d expected it either.
Yet the slave ushered him into the open balcony, heated with flickering firepots and carpeted with thick furs that hid his footsteps.
The slave escorted him around a table laden with delicacies and to the front of the gilded throne, where Telemachus dipped his chin in a half-hearted bow.
How could he show proper deference to one who so callously disregarded human life?
Discarded it and cheered its end? And how could he, of all people, judge him?
Honorius dipped his own head in greeting, while the favored rooster gave Telemachus a murderous look from his perch on the back of the throne.
“Telemachus. You came.” Honorius spoke as if Telemachus had been an invited guest, not a nuisance. Still, his youthful face was alight with the look of a child who had seen his hero. Had he forgotten how they’d parted ways? “I am honored to watch the games with such a famed gladiator.”
Wind snapped through the flames of the firepots in the silence that followed.
“Emperor Honorius.” Telemachus cleared his throat, willing the words to come with the same passion pounding through his veins, threatening to snap the restricting calm. “I am here as an ambassador. To plead and beg you for the lives of the Visigoth rebels.”
Honorius clapped his hands, cutting him off. “I thought we ended that discussion weeks ago. Let’s not do it again. Please, sit with me. Wine?” He gestured toward an amphora of dark liquid and Telemachus tasted the acid of the tavern gutter from so long ago.
He shook his head. “When he hears of this, Alaric will bring a force against Rome—”
“Alaric has been forced back to the Balkans where he belongs,” Honorius snapped. He lifted his wine glass toward a slave who quickly refilled it. “We shall not speak of unpleasant things,” he said in a determined voice. “Today is about victory. We have vanquished our enemies.”
“This will not bring the fulfillment you seek.” Telemachus spoke quickly. If anyone knew, he did.
He’d been a small boy, had only asked his mother for more food, something to end the painful gnawing in his stomach.
The cruel merchant who owned them, who’d fathered him, had not been nearby, so she’d slipped Telemachus an extra crust of bread.
The merchant had beaten and used his mother before, but never so brutally as he did that night when he somehow discovered the missing scrap.
Telemachus had tried to intervene, but he was only a child against a monster of a man, and he’d awakened stiff and bruised in the caged cart of a traveling gladiator troupe.
Telemachus had poured out his fury in the arenas of Rome, seeing the merchant in every opponent, desperate to come to the end of his wrath, knowing somehow that it would not leave him until he’d gone back to where it had started.
So he’d marched back to his home, blood hot with the need to be avenger and hero.
And when he’d discovered his mother’s death at the hands of the merchant, he’d gone blind with rage.
Released it on the man who’d crushed out her life, and left Telemachus hollow and searching.
The river had swept away the merchant’s body but never the guilt, the emptiness.
Gaius had found him drunk in the gutter, and later, thanks to him, God had filled the cavern in Telemachus’s chest. Pardoned his guilt as the magistrate had done later—even though the magistrate had only done it because he hadn’t liked the merchant either.
And still, the desire for justice ate at Telemachus, a low simmering just beneath his skin, ready to erupt. But did that desire have to be met with violence? He’d been too terrified of the man he had been to find out.
Honorius turned his attention back on the arena. He pointed to the center of the ring that was slowly being transformed into a forest. “I was told this would be the story of Pyramus and Thisbe—look, it is the .”
The announcement could not have struck a deeper cut. Air feeling suddenly too heavy to breathe, Telemachus turned, following the extension of Honorius’s arm.
Adel pranced into the ring like a girl without a care in the world.
Did she trust his rescue efforts so fully?
It pained him to see her like that. Happy in captivity.
About to die. And then Felix entered. Telemachus knew it was him immediately by his build, by the frantic way he tilted his head to see through the helmet that hampered his vision.
The rumble in the stands rose to a frenzied murmur. They’d recognized him too, somehow, as the man from the chariot. The Pyramus to her Thisbe. When the shouts of the crowd shifted from cheers to cries of warning, he wondered if the two of them might succeed in kindling the mob’s compassion.
Thanks to the young monk’s infiltration of the Ludus Gallicus as a guard, they’d discovered the reason Felix had disappeared. They’d persisted in the rescue plan. They must not fail.
Oh, God . . . Telemachus could not finish the prayer, watching in breathless horror as Adel turned on Felix, attacked him. He defended her blows like a man newly trained. Reacting the way he’d been taught, but too slowly.
The stands went quiet as the fight stretched, as if holding a collective breath, or drowsing in boredom—it was difficult to determine which.
Were they drawing out the time before the battle?
Sacrificing themselves for the ones even now being secreted away in the sewer tunnels deep beneath these stands? The time for words dwindled.
“Excellency, please reconsider—”
A portion of the floor dropped away behind Adel, and Telemachus could not contain his strangled shout of warning as a lion leaped onto the ring with a snarl and swipe toward her.
Felix grabbed her arm and hurled her behind him, an act that betrayed the falseness of their battle.
The lion was tethered by a retractable chain that could be released at the whim of the game master.
They had not included this fight in their rescue plan, but the story of doomed lovers played in tragedy across the sand was a brilliant improvisation that lured the crowd’s emotions closer to compassion.
Could it do the same with the emperor? Telemachus turned to Honorius, to beg his intervention, and found him rapt by the scene.
Gripping the armrests of his gilded seat in white-knuckled fists.
God, how do I stop this? Help me stop this.
A second lion bolted from the trapdoor and Felix lurched away from it—and into Adel’s blade. It might have pierced Telemachus’s own ribs for the pain that shattered his chest as the heartrending scream emerged from the arena.
“Look!” Honorius pointed. Adel wrenched the helmet from Felix’s head and wrapped her arms around him, dropping to her knees as his buckled. “Look at that love,” he whispered breathlessly. “It almost makes you feel something, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” Telemachus grasped onto the idea, praying it was more substantial than morning mist. “It is compassion for your fellow man.”
Honorius frowned. “Fellow? They are nothing like me.”
Trumpets blared in the arena below and Telemachus could not bring himself to look at it again. “They are men and women made in the image of God. Souls He gave his own Son to save—can you not extend that same love?”
“And how would it look if I showed mercy now?” Honorius growled, compassion draining from him faster than the waters in the Baths of Titus. “I would be the laughingstock of Rome. They need a strong emperor they can depend on for security and safety.”
“And what kind of emperor do your mercenaries need?” Telemachus pressed, flinging a hand toward the arena. “The world has enough hatred and vengeance; what we need is grace and mercy.”
Honorius’s gaze flickered back to the arena as a cluster of Visigoths—not as small as Telemachus had hoped—trotted into the ring only to be met by a tripled force of brass and scarlet.
An overwhelming wave of helplessness crashed over him, followed by a second that tasted of bitter failure.
Lord, it cannot end like this. Give me the words .
. . Fire licked to life in his veins as the first gladiator fell, life draining into the sand.
There was a time for words.
And there was a time when words were not enough.
He couldn’t tell the moment his feet began to move, to cross the box toward the balcony that overlooked the arena, only that by the time he noticed, he was running.
Pushing past a slave carrying a tray of warmed wine, the way was finally clear.
He could not sit by another moment. Not another moment. He could not witness more death.
Lord help me. I cannot.
There was no plan. No strategy this time.
Only a flood of peace and that deep-seated knowing that had drawn him to Rome at the first. He need not fear the man he’d been.
He was not the Battering Ram of the East anymore, no longer controlled by the violence of his bitterness.
It was love, not rage that compelled him now.
Telemachus reached the low wall of the emperor’s box, and before anyone could stop him, he hurdled over the side and dropped into the ring below.
Sand stung his palms, his face, his eyes. Pain shot up his wrists and into his knees, but he pushed himself to his feet and rocked forward. Fire ignited in his chest. He’d known all along he would fight one last battle in Rome, and now . . . now he knew what that meant.
This ended now.