Blood of a Gladiator - Ashley Gardner Page 0,13

vigiles lurked on the street, looking on in case the crowd turned into a mob. Vigiles worked mostly at night, watching out for fires, but part of their job was to keep order at any time. A man I recognized as an urban cohort, who performed the same function during the daylight hours, hovered on the opposite side of the gathering, eyeing the vigiles in mistrust.

Neither the vigiles or the urban cohort would even look at the Praetorian Guard who’d stopped to watch. The Praetorian must have been passing on another errand, because those elite fighting men kept themselves to the Palatine or their training field in the Campus Martius.

Lucia hurried out to meet me, parting the onlookers to tug me inside. Marcianus slipped in behind me.

“Has she died?” Marcianus asked in clipped tones.

“No, but she’s powerful sick.” Anguish rang in Lucia’s voice. The other ladies hovered, fearful. Floriana wasn’t always a kind mistress, but if she died, the women would be out on the streets.

Marcianus made his way to the small room at the end of the hall. I heard a whispered groan as Floriana struggled to live.

I pulled Lucia to my side. “Leave him to it.”

Marcianus could make healing concoctions I’d never heard of and knew how to stitch wounds with fine thread so that they closed and mended. Some believed he used magic to assist him, but Marcianus believed in little but what his own experience told him. I had faith in his skill.

He knelt by Floriana’s pallet, never minding the filth pooled there. I do not know what he assessed, but he reached quickly into his bag and instructed that someone bring him a mortar and pestle.

The youngest lady in the house, Marcia, peeled from the group to obey. Marcianus never snapped, never commanded. He simply asked in his reasonable voice, and others hurried to do as he wished.

“Leonidas,” he said in the same quiet tone.

I knew what he meant. “Out,” I said sternly to the hovering women. He needed room to work.

Marcia hurried back with the mortar and pestle. Marcianus dropped something white and hard into the pot and told Marcia to begin grinding. The other women lingered, either from concern or curiosity, but I mercilessly herded them down the hall and out of the house.

Lucia hung on to me as we emerged into the sunshine. Her brown eyes were filled with fear under her henna-dyed hair.

“If she dies …” Her words held agitation.

“I’ll look after you.”

Annoyance drifted over Lucia’s worry. “How? I am fond of you, Leonidas, but you are a moneyless freedman.”

“I have a benefactor now,” I reminded her.

“One who has given you no means to sustain yourself. What sort of benefactor is that?”

I couldn’t answer. I did not understand my situation, but for now it was enough that I did not have to sleep in the streets.

“You will have a place to stay, in any case,” I promised.

“You had better ask your slave if she is willing to wait on a woman like me. She sounds hoity-toity.”

I thought about how cleverly Cassia had made certain there was plenty of food, drink, and warm blankets for sleeping when I hadn’t enough money to cover the costs. For a woman who’d lived a sheltered life, Cassia had coerced the hard-bitten shopkeepers of Rome to do what she wished.

I wasn’t certain what she’d make of Lucia. But Cassia belonged to me, and should obey my wishes … shouldn’t she?

I had no idea what to do with a slave. I wasn’t the commanding sort, and Cassia so far had not waited for instructions from me.

The hordes outside the brothel hadn’t thinned. It was the third hour on this winter day, the sun well up, and the streets were full. Onlookers created a jam on the road, which led from the Esquiline Hill to the heart of the city. Those who needed to pass shouted and cursed. Others stopped to ask what had happened and lingered in curiosity. Romans ever sought entertainment.

The vigiles and the cohort tried to get people to move on, but with little success against the thick-bodied costermongers and determined matrons who watched from behind folds of embroidered pallas.

The Praetorian Guard looked on with disdain at the vigiles’ efforts and made no move to help. He caught my eye, frowned a moment, as though wondering what a gladiator was doing here, then his gaze slid past me.

I spied another figure in the crowd. A small woman, nearly hidden in her plain cloak, peered around