The Triumphant, page 14
What I hadn’t expected was that Heron, our ludus physician, would be going along with the staff—and not with us. Again. The last time we’d fled the ludus, he’s stayed behind because of Lydia, to treat her injuries. Three months ago, she’d succumbed to them—or rather, to the damages wrought on her mind—drowning herself in Lake Sabatinus one night after Heron had gone to bed. I wasn’t certain the physician didn’t blame himself for it. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me he wouldn’t come with us. His refusal to prompted an argument from me when I found him in the herb garden we’d planted where Tartarus had once stood.
He forestalled my ire with a raised hand. “Fallon,” he said, “I’m not a warrior. I’m not young. And I’m not needed.”
“But—”
“You have more than enough to worry about without dragging along a fussy old man who cannot fight his own battles.” He shook his head and went back to gathering the last of the medicinal plants the garden would ever yield, perfuming the air around us with a bittersweet tang. “Neferet is one of you,” he continued. “She can take care of the girls and herself at the same time. Miss me if you will—I will miss all of you with all of my heart—but go with my blessings.”
It felt like losing another part of myself. Everything was falling away, and I couldn’t stop it. But I also couldn’t blame him for his choice. So instead, I hugged him hard and let him go. When I got back to the stables, Elka and Vorya were splashing lamp oil from large storage skins on the floors of the empty stalls. Gratia and Ajani followed close behind with torches.
“It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?” Vorya said, coming up to stand beside me as the first flames caught and began to lick greedily at the piles of straw and fodder. “To come together and build something—something real and right—and then have it all taken from you in an instant. By people you’ve never even met and have nothing to do with.”
“We’ll still be together,” I said, but I heard the hitch in my voice as the stable post I’d used for practice ever since arriving at the ludus—carving marks into it with my blades like notches on a druid seer stone—began to smolder. “We’ll still be sisters. We’ll still have . . .”
“Purpose?” Vorya said.
“I was going to say ‘each other.’” I turned so the others could hear me when I said, “But you’re right, Vorya. Our purpose is each other.”
How I hope that’s not just a hollow platitude, I thought bitterly.
But when Ajani threw her torch into the flames, she turned her back on the fire and walked toward me, wordlessly holding out her hands for me to take. I reached out, and she gave my fingers a tight squeeze, her expression serene. That gesture, and the simple fact that my friends hadn’t all just packed up and left on the barge along with the ludus staff . . . maybe it wasn’t all falling apart. Maybe the platitudes—like that one, and the ones I’d given Kallista and Selene—carried a kind of truth in them. Maybe home really was who you were with, not where.
“It’s just a stable post, after all,” I muttered.
Ajani glanced at me sideways but didn’t ask me what I meant by that.
Elka came to stand with us for a moment as Gratia whirled her torch above her head and lobbed it high into the rafters of the barn. The smoke began to rise into the stillness of the sky. Elka put an arm over Vorya’s shoulder; the expressions on both their faces remained stony. Varini mettle at work, I thought. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Elka when we’d first met and become fugitives on the run from Charon and his slavers. About how her tribe, if they decided to move somewhere else—because of war or famine or the whim of a Varini chief—would burn their houses before they left. I’d thought at the time that it was a ridiculous idea. Wasteful. I’d only ever done a similar thing out of sheer emotion. In a fit of despair, I’d thrown my most prized possessions into the fire on the night my father had denied me my place in his war band.
When I’d asked Elka what the Varini reasoning was, she’d answered, “There is only forward. Only tomorrow. No yesterday, no going back. And nothing of value is left behind, so nothing is truly lost.”
She’d also said, rather more pragmatically, “You don’t leave a freshly made bed behind for your enemy to sleep in.”
That conversation still echoed in my head as, together, we turned and strode to the barracks building where the others waited for us. So we could perform our one last act of rebellion. Of fierce independence. Rome could not have us. Rome—whatever it was to become in the dawning days—would not have us.
* * *
—
It didn’t take any of us long.
Outside my cell, I could hear the others starting to gather in the corridor, but I still stood at the foot of my cot with my trunk open and the few things I would take with me laid out on top of a scant pile of clothing—tunics and breeches, nothing fancy. No stolas or pallas—I likely wouldn’t need such things where I was going, and I wouldn’t miss wearing the finery of a Roman lady. It had never suited me anyway. I was already wearing my armor, and my sword belt hung from my hips. My best warm cloak was fastened at my neck, and I’d laced up my best pair of boots tight around my ankles.
The rest was . . . sentimental. Small, but meaningful. A pair of silver brooches Sorcha had presented me with after I’d won a hard bout. A fine iron dagger that was a gift from Heron, the Sekhemet pendant Cleopatra had given me, my new oath lamp . . . the key to my cell in Tartarus.
Beside a stack of letters and drawings Cai had sent when he’d been on campaign, there was a neat pile of wax-sealed courier tubes containing the letters I’d sent to him at the Ludus Flaminius. Letters he’d never read and sent back to me unopened. I frowned down at them, wondering, and then gathered them all up and dumped them back into the trunk. With everything that had happened, I’d forgotten to ask Cai why he’d returned them. But it no longer mattered. That time apart had been hard on us both, and it seemed silly—petty, even—to bring it up now. I had Cai himself back—the letters could burn.
From the missives he’d sent me, I chose only one: the almost lifelike picture he had sketched of his hand. I rolled it carefully into a bronze tube and tucked it into the bottom of a canvas traveling pack. Then I shoved everything else I was taking in after it and yanked the straps tight. I took down the skin of lamp oil that hung on a peg by my washstand and splashed it on the floor and on my neatly made bed. Before I left, I remembered one last thing I needed to take: a small, sealed ebony wood box that sat on my windowsill and contained only a handful of earth.
I tucked that into my traveling pack too, and stepped out into the hall to join my ludus sisters. We exchanged silent glances. And then, as if it was some kind of ritual we’d rehearsed and enacted time and again, we each took a torch down from the iron brackets that hung on the corridor walls beside the doors to our rooms.
Like silent, cloaked statues of the warriors we’d become in this place, we stood. As one, we threw the torches into the cells, turned our backs, and strode in a line out of the ludus barracks and into the chill predawn air, leaving nothing but growing red light and the sounds of crackling flames behind us.
Not one of us looked back.
I thought, for a moment, that Gratia might have been on the verge of tears. But when I turned to her, I realized the glint in her eye was something else entirely. I tracked her gaze and saw that she was staring intently at where Acheron was lifting Cleopatra’s cumbersome trunks into a wagon—all bulging muscles and heaving chest, his copper braids tossing like the mane of a stallion. When Gratia noticed me looking at her, she shrugged and said, “What?”
“Nothing . . .” I shrugged. “I just thought you might be . . . upset?”
“About leaving here?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “I’ll be all right. A place is just a place. I’ve got you lot for company, and I’m sure I can find something new and interesting to occupy myself with until we get settled somewhere else . . .” And then, grinning in a somewhat predatory fashion, she loped across the yard to go lift heavy things and make Acheron nervous.
I was about to follow with the others when I saw Charon standing at the head of the path leading to the smallest of the ludus’s carefully manicured garden courtyards, all of which would soon be nothing more than ash and blackened stumps. As we approached, he nodded his head.
I turned to Elka. “Go on,” I said. “We’ll follow in a moment.”
“Don’t take too long,” she said. “Fire’s catching. If the wind shifts, this place will serve you for a funeral pyre just as well as it did for a training ground.”
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” I said.
She snorted and punched me in the shoulder, then hurried to catch up with the others. I turned back to Charon, and he led me a little way down the path into the garden, to where there was a stone bench set beneath a fig tree. The tree’s graceful, spreading branches were just beginning to unfurl pale green buds overhead, not even close to blooming.
It was only March.
“I wanted to speak to you for a moment, without the others around,” Charon said. His eyes narrowed, and he frowned as he looked at me. “Fallon . . . are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, staring up hopelessly at the tree and telling myself the stinging in my eyes was from the smoke. “I don’t really know what that is anymore. We’re leaving—again—and this time it’s for good. Because there won’t be anything to come back to, even if we wanted to. And at the same time, I don’t know why that wounds me so, because I feel like all I’ve managed to do with my time here in this place has been . . . meaningless.”
Charon shook his head. “You’re wrong about that.”
“Am I?” I looked at him, wondering if that was what he really thought. “Everyone still calls me Victrix. They tell me I’m some kind of hero or leader or something. And yet it feels to me like all I’ve done is somehow master the art of triumphantly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
“This isn’t over yet, Fallon,” he said. “For any of you.”
I laughed a little. “Not over? Isn’t the world ending?”
“For Rome, for a while . . . maybe.” He ran a hand over his beard, seriously considering the question. “Not for long. Never that. The wheel turns. And for you and your sisters? I think it’s just beginning. I can’t say whether that’s a thing to be hoped for or feared. But I know you. And you don’t let a little thing like ended worlds stop you.” He turned and walked away from me, over toward the stone bench. “Because of that, I wanted to give you something,” Charon said, reaching for a box that lay on the ground beside the bench. “Before we leave this place.”
It was the same garden where he’d gifted me my first real set of armor. The one I’d worn on the circuit, when I’d first started out on my journey to become Caesar’s Victrix. And now Caesar was dead. And what was I? I wasn’t being dramatic with the former slave master. I really didn’t know. But Charon seemed to think he might. And so, just like on the day that he’d presented me with my gladiatrix armor, he had a gift for me. This time, the box was made of wood, not wicker, and it was long and slender.
Just the right size to hold a sword.
I found myself frowning in wonder as he lifted the lid . . . and then everything went a bit blurry. I blinked, wiping at my eyes. I couldn’t even lie anymore and tell myself it was just the smoke as two fat tears spilled down my cheeks. Charon gestured to the sword belt I wore and the single blade hanging from my left hip.
“It was starting to look a little lonely without its fellow,” he said.
“Charon, I . . .” I didn’t know what to say as I reached for the leather-wrapped hilt. The thing was glorious. Perfectly balanced, expertly crafted and honed, polished to a gleaming sheen. And an identical match to my other dimachaerus blade. Well, almost identical. As my fingers tightened around the grip and I brought it close to my face, devouring the lines and shape of it with my eyes, I saw that the blade was marked with a symbol just like my old sword—no. Not just like my old sword . . . I lifted my other hand and traced the inscribed shape on the iron. Similar to the triple-raven marking of the Morrigan, but different. Not three ravens . . . but a single eagle. The symbol of Caesar’s legions—of Rome’s finest warriors—only it was rendered in the twisting, fantastical style of the Celtic tribes.
“I hope you don’t think that presumptuous,” Charon said as I ran my fingertip over the design. “Or distasteful. I simply wanted to pay homage to your . . . dual nature, shall we say.”
“No,” I murmured, feeling the shape of the thing beneath my fingertip. “No, it’s . . . it feels right. Somehow.”
It did. In the same way that it had felt right for me to keep the key to my Tartarus prison cell. Something hated and hurtful but endured. Overcome. Rome—and Caesar—had shaped me. Become part of me. I found it strange how Charon always seemed so eerily insightful where my character was concerned. I told him so, but he shook his head.
“It’s a by-product of the trade, Fallon,” he said ruefully. “That’s all. I’m not so much insightful as I am—I was—simply awash in a sea of human experience, generally in its rawest, most wretched expression. I have seen far too much of the inner workings of the soul laid bare to be able to ignore it now. Especially from someone with a pure one. Like you.”
I looked at him, tilting my head, as if that would help me make more sense of this man who was—at the very heart of it—the chief architect of so much of the last two years of my life. Perhaps one day, I thought, but not today. I handed Charon back the box and spun the eagle blade in my palm, sheathing it in the empty scabbard at my right hip. The eagle and the raven. Rome . . . and home.
I nodded and said, “Thank you.”
Then together we hurried to join the others, so we could leave the Ludus Achillea before the fires burned it to the ground around our ears. Back in the main courtyard, the gates stood wide open and there were only two sentries left up on the walls to watch for dust clouds. Once we were on the road to Cosa, they would go their own ways with fat, coin-filled purses.
Cai was helping harness and load the wagons with the few things we would take from the place. Mostly weapons. He came over to stand with me for a moment, taking my hands in his and squeezing them as if he sensed my uncertainty and could pour all of the strength and surety I needed into me through that touch.
“Are we dismantling our home for nothing?” I asked. “What happens if Aquila doesn’t come here?”
“Rome is at war with itself, Fallon,” he said. “And you are warriors. Do not think that this place will remain untouched by the strife of powerful men.”
I thought back to the mutilated practice dummies in the arena in Rome and knew he was right. To try to convince myself otherwise was nothing more than dangerous folly.
“Even if Aquila doesn’t?” Cai continued. “Someone else will. Maybe someone worse than Aquila.”
“There isn’t anyone worse than him.”
“My father was.”
I looked up into his face and realized that Cai had already resolved himself to leave behind everything he’d ever had too. His father’s vast fortune, the city he’d called home, and the legion he’d pledged life and loyalty to. We were about to head toward the port of Cosa and ships. But it felt as if, once on those ships, we’d be setting a course toward the edge of the world and out into the abyss. And at the end of it all, Cai might be the only thing I’d have left to hang on to. But as our eyes met, and I saw the shadow of his father haunting his gaze, I wondered if he’d rather not just let go himself and drown. I wasn’t about to let that happen. Not after everything we’d already been through.
“You heard what Caesar said.” I squeezed his hands back just as hard. “The son is not the father. And you are the best of men, Caius Varro. In spite of him.”
He tried to smile, but I knew, without him saying it, that he held the elder Varro responsible in large part for what was happening to us. To the ludus. And because he was his father’s son, he would have to bear the burden of that guilt too, until such time as he could atone for those dread wrongs. It was his Roman way.
As his gaze dropped away from mine, I saw a tiny frown tick between Cai’s brows. He let go of my hand to touch a fingertip to the pommel of my new sword. I reached down and drew it from its scabbard, handing it to him so he could take a closer look.
“From Charon. I think he still feels bad for stealing me away from home,” I said with a casual shrug. “And for threatening to kill me. And for almost getting me killed. More than once . . .”
Cai shook his head. “I think he believes in you.”
“Whatever it is I’ve become.”
“A wandering hero, of course.” He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. “Like in the old epic stories. Odysseus or Achilles.”
With one more kiss, and a last fleeting smile, Cai went to finish packing the wagon so we could leave on our adventure. Behind me, the flames continued to grow, casting their light on the faces of my friends as we gathered together beneath the main gate. I looked up at the carved image of Achilles and the Amazon warrior queen Penthesilea frozen in time on the lintel stone over the ludus gate that Senator Varro had given Sorcha as a gift. The figures, poised on the brink of deadly battle in the heat of the Trojan War, were already darkening with smoke.
I knew something of those stories Cai spoke of. They always started with leaving home. And finished with coming back to a place where peace and harmony were restored. But we weren’t leaving anything to come back to. How, then, could we have a happy ending?
