“Think he’d sell me to a gladiator school?” Vix socked one scarred fist against the other. “Then I’ll learn how to cut ’em! I’ll take ’em apart! I’ll—”

“You’re going to my room, not a gladiator school.” I twisted my hand into his russet hair and dragged him down the hall. He tried out a few new curses culled from the docks, and I smacked him a little wearily as I hauled him into my room. He’d decided this year that he was too big to sleep with his mother and had moved out to sleep in the choirboy loft. I doubted the choirboys thought it an improvement. My son was big for seven years old, and his hard little sunburned body already had a lot of scars: from a battle with a local bully, from a game of Julius Caesar and the Gauls, from a tavernkeeper who’d beaten him for stealing beer. My son Vix, short for Vercingetorix. I’d thought of naming him—well, naming him something else—but the name hurt my throat. So he was Vix.

I wouldn’t have been able to keep him if Larcius hadn’t bought me from the waterfront brothel. Whores didn’t get to keep their children. My pimp would have ordered him left out on the hills to starve with all the other unwanted babies, no matter what I might have had to say about it. My son, left to die on an abandoned hillside when he was only days old. The thought of that still made me shiver.

“You gonna thrash me?” He caught the momentary softness in my eye.

“Not today. But you’ll stay here the rest of the day. And no dinner.”

He flopped down on my bed, grinning. He didn’t know who his father was, of course—few slave children had legitimate fathers. Vix never dreamed that his was Rome’s greatest gladiator. He would have loved that, my son who dreamed of ringside glory and gravitated toward weapons like a moth toward a candle. Brundisium had no arena, thank God, and this my son regretted deeply. If I told Vix his father was Arius the Barbarian, he’d get to the Colosseum if he had to crawl every step of the way. And that I wouldn’t do to Arius. Let him think it ended with us. Never let him know that, two hundred miles away, he had a seven-year-old son growing up into a tough little russet-haired copy of himself. Never let him know, because it’s the knowing that kills.

ROME

A naumachia!” Gallus drew eager figures on his account slates. “A sea battle for the Saeculares games! Oh, won’t that draw the crowds. Ever seen a naumachia, boy? They flood the Colosseum with water pumped out of the Tiber, and bring in warships manned with gladiators. Can you swim?”

Arius drained the last drop of wine from his mug. “Yes.”

“Good, good. I’ve seen quite a few good gladiators get knocked into the water and simply sink. Pity if that were to happen to you.”