I got into a different kind of fight the following week, just after my nineteenth birthday, on a warm damp morning when I celebrated my day off by being stupid and going to the Colosseum. I didn’t want to go, knew I’d hate it, but the other guards jeered at me for missing the Vestalia games, so I went. I watched spearmen die on leopard claws and leopards die on spears, and by the time the midday executions rolled around I was drunk. “Games’ve gone downhill since my day,” I belched as a line of shackled runaway slaves were brought out for brisk beheading. “I remember when the rules weren’t so damned strict. Then you’d really see the blood flow.”

“What do you know?” the other guard jeered.

“I fought down there, I’ll have you know.” I waved my mug down at the bloody sand where a guard was forcing a struggling man to kneel, and spilled my beer. “I’m the Young Barbarian.”

“Who?”

“The Young Barbarian,” I repeated, outraged. “Youngest ever to fight in the Colosseum! Youngest to fight a bout anyway—” There were plenty of children who died in the arena, heretics or escaped slaves or prisoners, but they didn’t get a sword to defend themselves. A few children huddled down there now, waiting in paralyzed terror beside their parents for the blade through the neck, and I averted my eyes. “Come on, you remember the Young Barbarian!”

They looked at each other and jeered. “Sounds to me like you’re making it up. You weren’t never no gladiator!”

I hit at them with the mug, and one of them hit back, and a fight broke out in our section of the stands—a free-for-all that got me thrown out before the main bouts, and I wasn’t too sorry about that. I staggered out with a spectacular black eye and a bleeding ear, puked in a gutter, then puked again as I heard the roar of the crowd rise up from the Colosseum and knew it for a signal that the gladiators had fallen on each other. Poor bastards, I thought, and my knees gave out and I sat down on the paved curb with my hands dangling between my knees. “No loitering,” a housewife admonished me, pausing to adjust the basket on her arm.

“I’m the Young Barbarian,” I snarled at her. “You don’t want to get too close to me!”