The Triumphant, page 3
I gaped at Caesar. “You knew this?”
Caesar nodded. “And could do nothing.”
“But you trusted Cai.”
“I did. I still do.” He turned and gazed up at the tapestry, at Jupiter lifting his father, Saturn, above his head, ready to cast him down. “The father is not the son.”
“No,” Cai said softly, staring up at the image. “He isn’t . . .”
“I will hold your father’s estate and assets in trust,” Caesar continued, “until such time as it is safe for you to reclaim your inheritance. In the meantime, all I can ask of you is to forgive me for that necessity.”
“No need for forgiveness, my lord,” Cai said, with a brief bow of his head. “Only thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Caesar stood. “Now go. Fight well. And, for the love of the gods, Caius . . . survive.”
Something about the tone of Caesar’s voice raised the hackles on the back my neck. Yes, Cai, I thought, for the love of the gods—yours and mine—survive.
* * *
—
As we made our way through the enclosed courtyard toward the main doors of the villa, we passed a man sitting on a bench at the edge of a cascading fountain. Cai nodded briefly without breaking his stride.
“The legions will be the poorer without you,” the man called after us.
Cai halted in his tracks, and together we turned to address the man, who sat carving a pear with a small, sharp knife.
“Damned shame,” he said, popping a slice of fruit into his mouth and licking the blade. “Really. Sorry to hear about it, Decurion Varro.”
“Citizen Varro, General Antony,” Cai said, and turned a tight grin on the man. “Or Gladiator Varro, if you please.”
Antony, I thought. That’s Marcus Antonius.
Of course, I’d heard of Caesar’s close friend and protégé—the brilliant general and notorious philanderer—everyone had. Most of what I knew of the man was through what Antonia, my sister gladiatrix, had told me. She was a distant relation of his, born out of wedlock to a third cousin of the sprawling Antonine clan and treated worse than a kitchen slave growing up. When she was old enough, Antonia had decided to take her chances begging on the streets of Rome before finding her way to the ludus. She’d never met her infamous cousin face-to-face, she said, but she’d been under the same roof enough times to have surmised that the actual character of the man bore out the rumors.
He was, by her account, a cad. He was also, by everyone else’s account, a genius soldier and cunning strategist. I took the few moments he stood speaking to Cai to study Antony’s features. He was handsome in a way that was almost pretty, except for his mouth, which was thin-lipped and looked apt to shift from an expression of warmth to one of mockery with little effort. He wore coral-studded wristbands of silver and a richly embroidered cloak that hung in deep russet folds gathered over his left arm. His hair was dark and thick and carefully curled. I tried to picture him in a soldier’s gear, but my mind wouldn’t bend to the image. Still, I suspected it would be a mistake to underestimate the man. When he shifted the drape of his cloak, I noticed he also had a plain—and, from the look of the grip, well-used—short sword strapped to his waist.
“Ah, yes,” Antony said with a grin. “Gladiator Varro. Well. You were an inspired fighter in the field. I’ll be sure to cheer you on at your first bout in the arena.”
“From the sounds of things, you may be the only one.” Cai shrugged. “The only time the mob appreciates a disgraced hero is when they can disgrace him all the more. I won’t be showered in laurel sheaves, I don’t think. But I thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” Antony laughed and tossed the core of the pear he’d eaten into the nearby shrubbery. “I’ll cheer for you because you’ll win. You’ll have to. And when you do, the mob will forget all about what you did. It’s that easy to turn them in the other direction, Varro. Trust me.”
Cai didn’t trust him. I could see that in his eyes, plainly.
In the back of my mind, I wondered why Caesar did.
Cai smiled and nodded politely, and it was only then that Antony seemed to notice me, standing there at Cai’s side. His gaze shifted and flicked over me, head to foot, with profound disinterest. At first. Until the moment he was about to turn away—and then something sparked behind his eyes, and he blinked. And smiled.
“Am I right in guessing that you are Caesar’s pet project?” he asked, turning his full attention on me. “The girl gladiator?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cai wince.
“I am Fallon ferch Virico, General Antony,” I replied. “They call me Victrix in the arena. And, yes, I suppose I am Caesar’s pet project.” I tilted my head and smiled sweetly. “One of them, at least. I hear he has others.”
Cai’s wince turned to a grin that he swiftly hid behind his hand.
Marc Antony’s eyes flashed hotly for an instant. But then his smile widened, baring a row of straight white teeth. “I’m afraid, Victrix, that I’ve missed your performances to date on the sands,” he said, and stood, reaching to take my hand and bending low over it. “That is, I can plainly see, a deficiency on my part. One I hope to have the opportunity to remedy.”
“I hope so too, my lord,” I said. “There are many fine fighters at the Ludus Achillea—even if we are, as you say, ‘girl’ gladiators. I think we might surprise you.”
“I think you might at that,” he said.
He lapsed into silence, and Cai stepped forward to excuse us. Antony waved a languid hand in a kind of dismissal, and we continued on toward where a carriage waited to take me back to the ludus and Cai back into the city. I could feel Marc Antony’s gaze between my shoulder blades as we walked away.
Once we were inside the covered carriage and on the road, with the sound of wheels and hooves loud in our ears as we clattered over the stone bridge, I shed whatever composure I’d managed to keep up to that point and vented my full fury over the sheer injustice of Cai’s fate. He let me rage for far longer than I probably deserved. When he finally spoke, the look on his face brought me instantly to a stuttering halt.
“Fallon.” His voice was quiet. But it was as hard as I’d ever heard from him. “I understand that you are grieved for me because you think what Caesar has decreed as my fate is a harsh one.”
I swallowed my fiery indignation and clenched my hands into knots. “Isn’t it?” I asked.
He laughed. A bitter bark of derision. “Without Caesar’s intervention,” he said, “I would have faced the full penalty of a very particular Roman law. It’s called poena cuellei, and it’s reserved for those citizens who are found guilty of the murder of a parent. Personally, I’ll take my chances against even the most brutal gladiator in the arena.”
“Rather than . . . ?”
He raised an eyebrow at me and said dryly, “Rather than submitting myself to getting sewn up in a leather sack full of venomous snakes and thrown into the Tiber.”
I blinked at him, dumbstruck.
The carriage rumbled on, and we sat there silently.
I knew that Romans worshipped their ancestry. That their fathers and mothers were almost as gods to them. And I knew that Cai had adored his father. That is, right up until the moment when he’d put a sword through the elder Varro’s guts. To save my life. I could remember with shocking clarity the moment when Cai had thrust the blade between his father’s ribs. Right to the hilt, without hesitation. I remembered Varro’s face, how he had reached for his son . . . and I remembered what Cai had said: “You have no son,” he told his father. “I renounce you, and your name, and your blood. I will not perform the rites for you, old man. I will not put coins for the Ferryman on your eyes. You go to Hades with no issue, no legacy, and no hope to ever walk the fields of Elysium beside my mother’s shade.”
We hadn’t really had an opportunity—or maybe it was that we had avoided the opportunity—to talk about what had happened. But that moment in the carriage I suddenly realized the full import of what Cai had done. What he’d said. He had, in essence, laid a curse upon his father. The man who’d raised him, loved him, taught him how to be a soldier and a man. And then betrayed everything Cai had grown to believe in.
And that had forced Cai to betray everything his people believed in.
“If it weren’t for me,” I said, “none of this ever would have happened—”
“No.” He stopped me again with the sharpness of his tone. “Don’t.”
After a long silence, he sighed and reached for my hand.
“What do you think would have happened if I’d never found out who—what—my father really was, Fallon?” Cai asked me. “If I’d never uncovered the gorgon lurking beneath the mask? What do you think might have happened to me? To my soul? He wanted nothing more than for me to follow in his footsteps.”
I shook my head. “But you wouldn’t have.”
“I don’t know that. I can’t say that with any certainty at all.”
“I can. You are the most honorable man I’ve ever known. And you were my enemy on the day I first met you.”
“And I was a different man until the day I met you.” His eyes searched my face, looking for something . . . I wasn’t sure what. But he smiled and said, “Fallon, I’m—I was—a soldier. I obeyed orders. I did what I was told. It took someone like you crashing headlong into my life to make me see that being a good soldier isn’t necessarily the same as being a good man. You made me want to be an individual. I never had the will to be that on my own without you. I was my father’s son and I was Caesar’s instrument and now I am neither. But I am . . . well, I am my own, I suppose. And I am yours.” He laughed a little. “If you still want me.”
“Oh, Cai . . .”
The carriage slowed to a stop, and he pushed aside the curtain. I looked past him to see we had arrived outside the gates of the Varro estate. The legacy Cai would have to wait to inherit, if he could survive long enough. I vowed silently then that, if I had to will him to live through the trials he would have to face at the Ludus Flaminius, I would sacrifice my soul to the Morrigan to do it. Because Cai had been given a chance for life. In spite of the decrees of his barbaric Roman laws, he would live in the wake of his father’s death. But he would bear the burden of guilt for that for the rest of his life.
That was Caesar’s punishment.
And that was Caesar’s mercy.
III
I SEEMED TO be collecting goddesses, I thought, as I nodded to the sentry on the wall and slipped out through the main gate of the Ludus Achillea, into the darkness of the night beyond. Or, perhaps, they were collecting me.
The sword that bumped against my hip as I walked was marked with the triple-raven knot, a symbol of my own goddess, the Morrigan, who had in her wisdom seen fit to send me so far from home to seek my destiny. In my hand I carried a lamp, a replacement for the delicate glass one I’d first received on the night I’d taken my gladiatorial oath beneath the light of a Huntress Moon. This one was rather less fragile, made of bronze and inscribed with the image of the Roman battle goddess Minerva. Around my neck, I wore a silver chain. Hanging from that chain was a pendant fashioned in the shape of yet another goddess: Sekhemet, who bore the head of a lioness and made war upon the enemies of Aegypt. Cleopatra, the queen of Aegypt herself, had given me the charm, and I treasured it. I treasured all of them.
But that night, the pendant lay cold on my breastbone. The new lamp felt heavy in my hand, and the sword on my left hip needed its twin hanging from my right to balance it as I walked. But that blade had been shattered. Broken in two in a fight against the girl whose grave I walked to visit that night.
The moon hung like a scythe in the sky, a slender, gleaming sickle, paler almost than the stars. But my new lamp cast enough light to keep me from stumbling over a tumbled grave marker that had succumbed to age and weather and lay on the ground just inside the low stone wall of the little necropolis. The moment I stepped through the archway into the enclosure, the night breeze died to stillness and the stars seemed to wink at me more brightly. I made my way through the cluster of tombs and statues devoted to departed Romans, most of them from families from the nearby estates that dotted the lush countryside around Lake Sabatinus.
At the far end of the graveyard, there was an enclosure set apart from the rest. There were no ostentatious marble crypts raised over the graves of those who slept in this place. No statues. Just simple stone markers set in the earth. I paused when I found the patch of earth that still bore ghost-faint traces of gray ash—from the funeral pyre that had blazed there months ago. I walked around until I stood between it and another grave: the one I’d first been brought out to stand witness at—along with all the other girls who would become my ludus sisters—for the interment of a gladiatrix I’d never known. It seemed an eternity since that night, the very first night I spent at the Ludus Achillea. Long before I discovered that the hooded woman who’d led the funeral rites was my sister. Before I’d known that I would one day have many more sisters. Before I’d killed the sister that lay in the dark earth now beneath my sandaled feet.
I sank down to sit on the damp, chilly ground and set my lamp beside the grave marker so I could read the name carved there. It was written in Greek, which I’d only just begun to learn, but of course I knew it was hers.
“Hello, Nyx,” I said.
This night was the first time I’d come to visit since we’d burned her body and buried her ashes with her weapons and worldly goods. I brought a small jug and two cups, and I sat for a moment, listening to the mournful fall of a nightingale’s song, before I pulled the stopper and poured out two measures of good dark Briton beer. Not wine. I would never again drink wine with Nyx—not even with her dead and buried—not after the party where she’d given me mandrake-spiked wine to drink. But it would have been rude to come empty-handed. I poured half of Nyx’s measure out onto her grave and set the cup down, watching as the thirsty earth swallowed the libation. Then I took a sip from my own cup and sighed.
“I drink to my enemy,” I murmured, repeating words I’d heard many times in the great feast hall back in Durovernum. “I raise my cup in peace and the hope that when we meet again, we shall be as friends.”
It was an old ritual, one of the oldest of the Cantii, and I’d seen my father enact it many times. Never at a graveside, of course. He, I’m sure, had no idea where most of the bodies of the men he’d killed in battle were buried. But he would speak those words every year on the anniversaries of the battles he’d fought. He would speak them softly to the dark air. To the shades that haunted him.
I wondered, if I said the words right, would Nyx’s shade be inclined to be friendly toward me? The notion almost made me choke on my beer.
Not in this life, I thought, or the next.
Or any of the others after that.
“This is stupid,” I sighed. “We won’t be friends. We won’t ever meet in the Land of the Blessed Dead. I don’t even know where your shade wanders now . . .”
Nyx was Greek, born in the back alleys of a place called Athens and raised as a petty thief by a gang of cutpurses. Caught and sold as a slave, she’d been shipped to Rome and auctioned off in the Forum. And my sister, Sorcha, new-made as the “Lady Achillea” and given a ludus to run by Caesar when her own career in the arena had ended, had seen something in Nyx. A flicker of obstinate spirit, a bloody-minded resilience, some angry spark that refused to be extinguished . . . I don’t know what, exactly. But that was how Nyx had found her way to the ludus.
She’d never really known much love in her life. That I did know. And so when she’d finally found someone to adore, someone to idolize and make proud—someone like Sorcha—Nyx had devoted herself to that cause. And all she’d had to do was hone and shape and harden all of the rage that had been building inside for her whole life and turn herself into a weapon. And she’d done it so well that it had earned her a place of honor in the ludus. Her new home. Her world.
My unexpected intrusion into that world had not gone over well.
I took a sip of the dark, bitter beer and shook my head. “I fear for you, Nyx,” I said. “There was nothing but hate in your heart when you died. I saw it in your eyes. And I’m truly sorry I was the cause of so much of it.”
I would have petitioned Nyx’s gods to take away that hate from her in death if only I knew who her gods even were. I thought about it for a moment, swallowing another mouthful from my cup. What did I know of Greek gods?
All I knew was that the Romans worshipped virtually the same pantheon, only with different names. Were they really interchangeable, I wondered? The divine beings who, in spite of their own wars and ruins and tangled relationships, did their best to guide us mortals through our muddled and messy lives? I’d even heard Caesar call my own gods by Roman names. Was Lugh really Mercury in another guise? Were the Morrigan and Minerva sisters, or cousins, or one and the same? Maybe my Blessed Lands and Nyx’s Elysium, Elka’s Valhöll, and Neferet’s Aaru were all the same thing. Or maybe they were lands whose borders touched . . . blurred, like traveling through a mist from field to forest. Whatever the case, I didn’t think it would necessarily do to ask the Morrigan to watch over Nyx in the afterlife. But maybe I could find a deity a little closer to entreat.
To that end, I thought about the coming morning. Sorcha had invited me to attend a ceremony at Caesar’s temple of Venus Genetrix with her in the city, during which he would dedicate certain treasures to the goddess: spoils of war, including a breastplate—a magnificent piece of armor decorated with river pearls—seized in his Britannia campaign. Sorcha and I were the only ones who knew that it had once belonged to her. In her mind, I think she’d framed it as a kind of honor, but I wasn’t so sure. Apart from the dedication, I saw nothing interesting about a bunch of priestesses standing around chanting and fogging the air with incense, and I still hadn’t made up my mind whether or not I’d go.
