Blood of a Gladiator - Ashley Gardner Page 0,5

way to your lodgings. Settle in and wait for instructions.”

“Instructions.” I jerked my head to him. “For what?”

Hesiodos gave me an indifferent shrug. “Time will tell. Good day. Cassia knows how to send word to me.”

Without a nod, gesture, or any other farewell, he turned on his well-fitted heel and walked away, quickly swallowed by the crowd of a Roman morning. My hand tightened around the rudis as I watched him go.

I looked at Cassia. Cassia looked at me.

Around us, Rome surged. Men and women, slave and free, strode the streets to the markets for vegetables and fish, and to the bakeries to take their grain to be made into bread.

The stream of humanity was too busy to push us aside and so flowed around us as though we were two boulders on the pavement. Water trickled along edges of the street, Rome’s fountains overflowing to drain to the sewers and the river.

I’d never had a slave before. The ludus used slaves to clean up after us and fetch and carry, but they belonged to Aemil, not the gladiators. Rumor had it that we practiced killing on unfortunate slaves, but that rumor was false. We were trained to fight other killers, to put on a show to please the multitude. The slaves were there to change our bedding and bring us food.

Cassia wasn’t at all the sort of slave I was used to. The man at the ludus who’d cleaned my cell ducked his head as he dragged out my slop pail and did his best to remain invisible. The women at Floriana’s were trained to please men bodily and made an art of enticement.

Cassia simply stared at me with the imperious gaze of a patrician’s wife and made no move to do anything.

One of us should make a start, or we’d stand there all day. It was the end of the year, Saturnalia finishing yesterday, and the wind was sharp.

“Where are the lodgings?” I asked her abruptly.

Cassia parted her lips, revealing even teeth. “It is above a wine shop, at the base of the Quirinal.” Her voice was young and soft, but with a cool patience, as though she was used to explaining the obvious to her inferiors.

The base of the Quirinal sounded promising, though not palatial. I’d visited villas and massive houses at the tops of Rome’s hills, expected to perform for my supper—which could mean fighting another gladiator, or displaying my scars, or simply telling tales of my past bouts.

I wondered what sort of rooms my new benefactor could provide. If he’d obtained my freedom, he must have paid a handsome sum to take me from my contract with Aemil. That meant a wealthy man or, as I’d speculated, woman.

Cassia remained unmoving so I made a brief gesture with the sword in my sore hand. “Lead me.”

Cassia studied me for another moment before she started off along the narrow street.

She wasn’t used to walking, I could see. She stepped carefully in her sandals, moving warily from stone to stone, shying from the rivulets of water on the road’s edges.

What sort of slave was uncomfortable with the pavement of Rome? Slaves hurried all around us to get breakfasts or run errands for their masters who lived in the houses, from the grand stand-alone domii to the meager rooms in the insulae. I strode along without hesitation in my thick-soled sandals.

I guessed, as we went along, that Cassia was used to riding in a litter. She might have been a highborn woman’s slave—dressmaker or hairdresser or some such. I’d seen litters carried about by strapping men, the personal maids of the ladies crouched in a corner inside with their mistresses.

Or else Cassia was unused to Rome itself. Possibly both were true.

“Where do you come from?” I asked.

She glanced over her shoulder then resumed walking with her uncertain pace. “Campania.”

Not the answer I expected. Campania was south of Rome, containing the seaside towns of Herculaneum and Baiae. Wealthy patricians built vast villas there, growing olives and grapes for expensive wines. Cassia, as I’d observed, had the complexion of a woman from Antioch or Cyprus. Her Roman Latin was perfect and unaccented—better than mine. I reasoned that she must have been born and raised in Campania, but her parents or grandparents had hailed from the eastern end of the sea.

We left the Subura, skirting the Forum of Augustus and the great wall he’d constructed to shield his grand space from the rest of Rome, and turned up the Vicus Longinus.

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