“A long time, clearly. That explains the strength of the arms and chest.” A plump finger traced over Arius’s shoulders. “Hauling rocks of salt up and down mountains for years; oh yes, it builds fine men.” A last lingering stroke. “One doesn’t learn to use a sword in the mines, however. Where did you learn that, eh?”

Arius turned his face toward the wall.

“Well, no matter. Time to listen. You’ll do your fighting for me from now on, when and where I say. I am a lanista. Know what that is? No? I thought your Latin was a little rough. Everything about you is a little rough, isn’t it? A lanista is a trainer, dear boy, of gladiators. You’re going to be a gladiator. It’s a good life as they go—women, riches, fame. You’ll take the oath now, and begin training as soon as those bones patch up. Repeat after me: ‘I undertake to be burnt by fi re, to be bound in chains, to be beaten by rods, and to die by the sword.’ That’s the gladiator’s oath, dear boy.”

Arius told him hoarsely what he could do with his oath, and collapsed back into blackness.

It had been days before he could get out of bed, weeks before his bones were whole, and nearly five months before his training in the gladiators’ courtyard was complete. His fellow fighters were petty criminals and bewildered slaves scummed off the bottom of the market: a cheap cut-rate bunch. Arius slid indifferently into the school’s routine: just one more thug with Gallus’s crude crossed-swords tattoo on his arm. Better than the mines.

Rudius. The word came back to him. Sounded like a snake, not a wooden sword. He didn’t see how getting a wooden sword from the Emperor made you free, but the mist-shrouded mountains of home rose up before his eyes, impossibly fresh and green and lovely.

A wooden sword. He used wooden swords every day when he trained. He always broke them, hitting too hard. An omen? He thought back to the white-robed Druids of his childhood, dimly remembered, smelling of mistletoe and old bones, reading the gods in every leaf’s fall. They’d call it a bad omen, breaking a wooden sword. But he’d never had many good omens in his life.

He shook off the thought of home. The Mars Street school wasn’t bad. No women and riches as Gallus had promised, but at least no merciless sun, no chains eating the flesh off his ankles, no uneasy sleep on bare mountainsides. Here there were blankets and bread for the days, wine to drown the nights, a quick death around the corner. Better than the mines. Nothing could be worse than the mines.

The applause of the games fans flickered uneasily through his mind.

THEA

FROM the moment I saw Senator Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus, I longed to fix him up: give him a proper haircut, get the ink stains off his fingers, take his slaves to task for pressing his toga so badly. He had been divorced for more than ten years, and slaves take advantage when there’s no mistress of the house. I would have bet five coppers that Marcus Norbanus, who had been consul four times and was the natural grandson of the God-Emperor Augustus, poured his own wine and put away his own books just like any pleb widower.