Paralyzed, I stared at the wooden sword, offered hilt first.
The rudis, in the shape of a gladiator’s short sword. A reward for a life spent in the games. I recognized the letters of my own name carved into the blade, the only word I could read. The rudis meant release.
Freedom.
I couldn’t move. The man with the sword glared at me impatiently, his distaste evident. He didn’t like gladiators, his stance proclaimed, and he didn’t want to touch one.
Many believed the blood of a gladiator cured illness. People had crowded today to the place where the dead fighters had been carried, jamming forward to dip cloths or even bare fingers into the gladiators’ still-flowing blood. They’d take it home and store it for when it was needed.
This man didn’t want anything to do with my blood, or me. But at last he had to shake my bronze sword from my hand, and shove the wooden one into my grip.
Regulus wrenched himself from me, not gently. The sting of his rage was a distant pain, receding behind the buzzing in my head.
I lifted my arm, the wooden sword strangely light after the heavy weapons I’d wielded this day. I heard my name pouring from the crowd, shouts of joy.
I should share the joy, but at the moment my arm ached and my fingers were lifeless. I turned in a circle, holding aloft the symbol of my freedom, without any sense that the freedom was real.
Nothing was real but the hot sand and my friend’s hatred. The noise rolled on, but the heat and blinding light from the arena floor blotted out all but the bite of wood against my palm.
I didn’t regain awareness until I tried to retire to my cell in the ludus that night. I’d been tended to and bandaged by Nonus Marcianus, the talented medicus who kept the gladiators alive to fight another day. After that came wine in great quantities, bestowed upon us by our lanista to celebrate the survivors and my new-won freedom.
I drank and drank until I brought up the wine again, disgusting sweet grapes gone to death in the corner of the training grounds. My hand stayed around the sword as I vomited, I clenching the thing as though my freedom would evaporate if I let it go.
Once I was finished being sick, I decided I’d sleep first and then visit Lucia, on whose narrow pallet in the Subura I forgot about death, life, and pretty much everything else. I’d rest until I could better navigate the streets of Rome.
Regulus was in my cell, lying on my bed. He didn’t bother to get up.
“Mine now, my friend,” he said to the ceiling, eyeing Xerxes’s drawings.
“Then where do I sleep?” My tongue was heavy, drink dulling my wits.
“No one cares.” Regulus slung his arm over his eyes. “You don’t belong here anymore. Go away, Leonidas.”
I felt a presence behind me and turned to the hard bulk of Aemilianus, our lanista.
“Stay if you want.” Aemil’s scarred face, as usual, held little emotion. “I can use you to train the others.”
“No.” My answer was instant. “No more death.”
Aemil simply looked at me. As lanista, he had to herd forty gladiators through training every day and keep them confined and out of trouble. If anyone wanted to hire us as fighters in the games, or for exhibitions, or as bodyguards, they went to Aemilianus. A former gladiator himself, he knew exactly how to tame us, and one of those ways was to rein in his own emotions.
“You’ll be back,” he predicted.
“No.” I set my body stubbornly, at least as much as my drunken swaying allowed.
Regulus, on the pallet, lifted his arm. “He means, idiot, you either stay and work for him or get out. I’m primus palus now. I don’t want you here, so go.”
“I’m sorry.” My tongue, not gifted at the best of times, could not explain why I’d spared him. But Regulus was alive. He had a chance. I didn’t regret the decision.
“Hercules strike you down.” Regulus slumped back to the bed, arm shielding his face again. “I hope he does.”
Aemil continued to watch me from his mismatched Gallic eyes, one blue, one green-brown. “Are you staying?”
I shook my head. Regretted the shake, as the world spun.
“The gate is open for you.” Aemil gave me a nod, a dismissal. “Godspeed, Leonidas.”
I’d lived in this ludus for seven years, well beyond the sentence given to me for a crime everyone believed I’d committed. A life in the games