Gladiator: Fight for Freedom

5

At first Marcus sensed a dull pounding pain in his skull. Then there was an uneven jolting and the regular shrill squeal of an axle. He became aware of light, and warmth on his face, and he slowly stirred, blinking his eyes open. The world was blurry and juddered about and he felt sick, so he closed them again.

‘Marcus.’

A hand cupped his cheek gently.

‘Marcus, can you hear me?’

He recognized the voice as his mother’s and there was anxiety in her tone. Marcus opened his mouth but his tongue and lips felt too dry to speak.

‘Just a moment,’ she said, and then something pressed lightly to his mouth and he tasted water. He took a few swallows before he turned his face aside and licked his lips.

‘Mother, I’m all right,’ he managed to croak.

Marcus opened his eyes again and forced them to focus. He was staring up at a metal grille. Raising himself on his elbows, he looked around and saw that he was in a large cage on the back of a wagon drawn by a team of mules. A dirty leather covering was tied over the top of the cage, providing shade for the occupants. Besides him and his mother, there were four others, two of whom – tall, thin men – had skins as black as charred wood. The others were two teenage boys, perhaps five or six years older than Marcus.

‘Don’t try to stir so quickly,’ his mother cautioned. ‘You had quite a crack on the head.’

Marcus raised a hand to feel for the place where his skull was hurting and winced as his fingertips discovered a large, solid lump. He struggled to remember what had happened to him. Then it all came flooding back, in a terrible rush of images. Aristides, Cerberus… and his father. He looked at his mother, eyes wide with pain.

‘Father.’

She gathered him up in her arms and held him to her breast, stroking the back of his head.

‘Yes, Titus is gone. Murdered.’

Marcus felt a dreadful pain course through his body, as if his heart had been torn out of him. He wanted his father as never before. Wanted him right here and now. Wanted to feel safe in his strong arms, to hear his hearty laugh once more. The pain was unbearable and he buried his face into the folds of his mother’s cloak and sobbed.

‘Hush, child,’ his mother said after a while. ‘There’s nothing you can do. He’s gone. His shade has joined his comrades in the underworld. Titus is at peace. He is watching us now. You must show him that you are strong. So dry your eyes.’ She paused a moment, then continued, ‘Make your father proud of you. You must honour his memory, even if you don’t yet know…’ She stopped and eased him gently back. Marcus’s eyes were sore from his crying, and his head felt worse than ever, pounding away inside his skull. She stared directly at him and he nodded.

With great difficulty he controlled his grief and looked around the cage again. ‘Where are we going?’

‘They’re taking us to Stratos.’

Marcus frowned. He had never heard of the place. ‘Is that far from home?’

She nodded.

He looked out through the bars. The wagon was rumbling along a broad road. On one side hills rose up, covered in dense forests of pine and oak. On the other, olive groves stretched out. Through the gaps he occasionally caught sight of the sea sparkling in the distance. He did not recognize the landscape.

‘How long have we been in this… cage?’

‘Three days. You’ve been unconscious while we were taken by boat to the mainland and put on to this wagon.’

Three days! Marcus was shocked at the thought. They must already be further from his home on the farm than he had ever been. He felt afraid.

‘Marcus, listen – we’re being taken to the slave market,’ his mother explained as gently as she could. ‘Decimus has ordered that we be sold as slaves to cover the debt. I think Decimus is trying to take us far away from Leucas so that there’s less chance anyone will discover precisely what he has done in order to get his money back.’

Marcus listened to her words with difficulty. The thought of being sold into slavery had hit him like another blow. Of all the fates that could befall a person, slavery was one of the worst of them. A slave was no longer a person, but a mere object. He looked up at his mother. ‘They can’t sell us, we’re free. We’re citizens.’

‘Not if we can’t pay Decimus his money,’ she replied sadly. ‘In that respect alone he is acting within the law, but he knows if word got out that he had killed one of Pompeius’s veterans and enslaved his family, then life might become very difficult for him if Pompeius came to hear of it.’ She lifted his chin with her hand and stared directly into his eyes. ‘We must be careful, Marcus. Thermon said that he would have us beaten if we uttered one word about the situation to anyone. You understand?’

Marcus nodded. ‘What can we do?’

‘Do? Nothing for the moment.’ She turned her head away and her voice continued, broken and despairing, ‘The Gods have forsaken me. They must have. After all that has happened, to return me to slavery is a cruel blow. So cruel.’

Marcus felt a chill in his heart. What could his mother mean? Return her to slavery? ‘You were a slave, mother?’

She kept her face turned from him as she replied, ‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘When I was a child, Marcus.’

‘No.’

She nodded. ‘I was sold into a household in Campania when I was four years old, south of Rome. I was a slave for over sixteen years, until Spartacus and his rebels came to the estate and set us all free.’

‘You joined Spartacus?’ Marcus’s mind filled with memories of the stories his father had told him about the great slave revolt. And all the time, his mother had kept her silence. He cleared his throat. ‘Did father know?’

She turned her face back to him with an expression of bitter amusement. ‘Of course Titus knew. He was there at the end. At the final battle. He found me in the slave camp when the legions sacked it after the battle. He claimed me as spoils of war.’ Her tone had turned bitter. She swallowed and continued more calmly. ‘That’s how we met, Marcus. I was his slave. His woman. For the first two years, until he gave me my freedom, on condition that I became his wife.’

Marcus was silent as he reflected on what she had told him. It had never occurred to him that his parents could have met in such a way. They had always been there, constant and unchanging, and the idea that they might have led quite different lives before was something he had never really considered. True, his father had told him tales of his life in the legion, but in Marcus’s eyes the hero of such stories was not a young man, just a different man. Marcus had always imagined his father as he was now. He felt a stab of grief as he corrected himself – as his father had been when he was alive.

Then something else struck him and he looked up at his mother again. ‘The slave revolt was ten years ago, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I’m ten. If you married father after two years, then that means I must have been born a slave.’

She shook her head. ‘Titus had it declared that you were his son, and therefore free, the moment you were born.’

‘I see.’ Marcus was not certain how he felt. This was all painfully new to him, in addition to what had happened since the men arrived at the farm. His thoughts were interrupted by a bitter laugh from his mother. He looked at her in concern. There was a slightly mad look in her dark eyes.

‘Mother? Mother, what’s so funny?’

‘Funny? Nothing’s funny.’ Her lips quivered. ‘It’s just that I was born free, in Thrace, then enslaved when I was an infant. Then Spartacus freed me, then I was a slave again, until your father freed me. And now? A slave once again.’ She lowered her head and was still for a moment. Then Marcus saw a tear drip down on to her thigh. He shuffled round so that he could put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Mother?’ He swallowed nervously. ‘I’ll look after you. I swear it. On my life.’

‘You’re a boy. My little boy,’ she muttered. ‘I should be looking after you. Yet, what can I do? I am a slave… There’s nothing I can do.’ She raised her head and he saw the grief in her eyes. ‘After all that the Gods have done to me, I thought that they had finally given me some peace on that farm. Peace where I could grow old with Titus and raise a fine son who would never know the terrible burden of slavery.’

‘We won’t be slaves for long, mother. Decimus can’t do this to us.’ He frowned with determination. ‘I won’t let him get away with it.’

She stared into his eyes with pity, then gently pulled him into her arms and held him tightly. ‘Marcus. You are all that I have left.’

Her tears began to flow again, and Marcus felt his own eyes burn with a similar urge to cry. He gritted his teeth as he looked over her shoulder at the other slaves in the cage, fighting back his tears. They looked back with blank faces, too weary or despairing to react. Marcus silently swore a sacred oath that he would never accept slavery. Never.