Jupiter Myth

XXIV

The house to which I had been taken by the women gladiators seemed small, but I sensed there were quite a few occupants. The room where they dumped me was almost dark. By now it was evening. Faint domestic sounds and smells suggested people were occupied with dinner. No food was brought to me. For informers, starvation was the curse of the job.

They had not bound me, but the door was either bolted or jammed. I stayed calm. Well, so far. No violence had been done to me after the capture. These women were fighters, but they killed professionally-for the winner's purse. If they had brought me here for a reason, it did not seem to be a reason that required me to be dead.

All the same I was wary. They were fighters, and there were a lot of them.

When they had reached the entertainment stage of their evening, where some diners might have called up tumblers, witty dwarves, or flautists, they had me fetched. The house was stylish. It must contain a dining room; I thought longingly of leftovers. But they were waiting to amuse themselves with me in a small colonnaded garden. I walked there through quiet corridors on level tesserae. From somewhere came the evocative scent of smoking pine cones, used in arena ritual. From somewhere else a maddening hint of saut?ed onion, used merely to torture hungry men.

My captors leaned gracefully on the pillars, while I stood centrally like a disgraced child. If they noticed my stomach rumbling, these girls ignored it, proving that gladiators are immured in cruelty. I must have made a sorry spectacle: grimy and bruised, depressed, puzzled, smelly, and exhausted. Such qualities are normal in my trade, but a group of female fighters might not see it as colorful. They belonged to a class that was legally infamous, debarred from all rights in society. Informers may be reviled, a subject of satire whose bills never get paid, yet all the same, I was a free man. I was entitled to vote, to cheat on my taxes, and to bugger my slaves. I hoped these women on the edge of society would not envy that too much.

I was uneasy for another reason. All men know from puberty that females in the arena are balls-grabbing sexual predators.

To look at, they hid this aspect courteously. Although the two I had first spotted at the baths had had the air of loose women waiting for customers, when relaxed at home the entire group-five or six here currently-seemed like woodland nymphs with nothing on their minds beyond perfecting scurrilous echoes. Laundered white gowns; endlessly combed long hair; manicured toes showing in beaded indoor slippers. You might discuss poems with these beauties-until you noticed their arrogance, their muscles, and their healed scars. They were oddly mixed. Tall or tiny, blonde or ebony: good box-office variety. One stood out: a girl who thought she was a boy, or a boy who thought he was a girl.

I wondered at first why they were not slung up in chains in a gladiators' barracks. How could they afford to run a pleasant and sizable house? Then I worked it out. Yes, untried colleagues would be in thrall to seedy lanistae in the training schools, but these had achieved independence. They were the successful fighters. The unsuccessful were dead.

"Are you planning to let me go?" I asked them meekly.

"Amazonia's coming." It was an extremely tall, lean Negress who addressed me first.

"Who's that?"

"You'll find out."

"Sounds ominous."

"So be afraid! And who are you?"

"Didius Falco is the name."

"And what do you do, Falco?" Heavy innuendo made me blink. Or was the innuendo all in my mind? Setting aside the urge to joke that I was just a time-waster who played around with girls, I told them straight: that I worked for the governor and was investigating the Verovolcus death. It seemed best to be honest. They might already know who I was.

They exchanged glances. I could not tell whether it meant they were impressed by my social standing or whether the name Verovolcus was significant.

"How does it feel to be rescued?" sneered a sturdy brunette. "It stinks."

"Because we are women?"

"I didn't need help. I was holding my own."

"Not from where I was standing," she exclaimed, laughing. They all chortled. I grinned. "Well, fair enough, ladies. Let me thank you, then."

"Turn off the charm!" exclaimed the boy who thought he was a girl (or the girl who thought she was a boy).

I merely shrugged at him (or her). "Do you know what happened to the teenager who was being dragged off by that hag?"

"She's safe," a neat Greek-style blonde chipped in. She had a nose straight off an Athenian temple peristyle but sounded as common as a harbor whelk-picker.

"Don't frighten her; she's endured enough today. She was under my wife's protection-"

"Then you should have left her with your wife, you pervert!"

Now I was beginning to understand why they had grabbed me: this tough sisterhood had been defending Albia. That was fine-but it was unclear whether they saw me as a victimizer. "I never tried to make her a child prostitute. I wanted her to get out of it."

Maybe they realized that. (Maybe they didn't care.) The Greek put her foot up on a balustrade, revealing lengths of superb, well-pumiced leg through an unsewn skirt. The action, apparently unconscious, made me consciously gulp. "She's with us now." This would be tricky to explain to Helena.

"Well, think again, is my advice. Albia is not a slave. Turning a free citizen into a gladiator unlawfully is serious. You could all end up being butchered with the criminals." That was the morning event in an arena, where convicts were put to bloody punishment: slash and smash with no reprieve. Each winner goes straight into another fight and the last man is slaughtered by the ring-keeper on the sodden red sand. "Besides," I tried, "You've seen her-she's totally unsuitable. She has neither the build nor the body. I can tell you too, she has no speed, no fighting intelligence, no movement finesse-"

As I ladled on the flattery, from somewhere behind me came an ironic burst of clapping. A voice cried loudly, "Oh, why don't you just add that she had flat feet and bad eyesight and her boobs get in the way?"

Rome! The accent, the language, and the attitude plunged me straight back home. Familiarity socked me in the empty gullet. I even felt I knew the voice.

I turned. I had lasted long enough in the confrontations so far to be feeling quite relaxed. That was about to change.

"Amazonia," one of the girls to my left informed me. At least these tough maidens were polite. When they had finished battering thick wooden posts with practice swords, someone must sponge sweat off them and put them through an hour of gentle etiquette.

When my eyes found the newcomer, I was stunned. Wide-apart brown eyes gazed at me playfully. Amazonia wore white like the others, setting off dark and sultry skin. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head, then fastened in a two-foot-long snaky ponytail; flowerbuds decorated the fastening. I was expecting some haughty and humorless group leader, who had plans to humiliate me. I found a little treasure with a flexible body, a warm heart, and a deeply friendly nature. Was this instinctive male recognition of a good bedmate? No. I already knew this woman. Dear gods, at one time in my dubious past I knew her rather well.

She had changed her career since I last saw her, but not much else, I guessed. There were extra fine lines around the eyes and an air of hardened maturity, but everything else was just as I remembered, and as I remembered it was all in the right place. A flash of her eyes said that she remembered everything too. She was a Tripolitanian ropedancer. Believe me, she was the best ropedancer you have ever seen, a shining circus acrobat-and equally good at other things. There was no way I would ever be able to explain this chance meeting to Helena.

If the so-called Amazonia was surprised to see me, I doubted it. She must have been listening for a while. Maybe she had known exactly what pitiful captive she was coming to inspect. "Thank you for looking after him. Everyone-this is Marcus! He's not as gormless as he looks. Well, not quite. Marcus and I are old, old friends."

I fought back feebly. "Who thought up the nom de guerre? Amazonia? Hello, Chloris."

She did blush. Someone else tittered, though quietly. I could sense their respect. She was clearly their leader-well, I would expect that; there was a time she could have led me through the flowery meadows all the way to Elysium.

"It's been a long time, Marcus darling," the girl I knew as Chloris greeted me, with a rapacious smile.

Then I felt the deep-down fear of a man who has just met an old girlfriend who he thought was just a memory-and who finds that she's still after him.