Colosseum (28 page)

Valeria smiles, her face bathed in sweat; she is stunning.

“With pleasure, my lord.”

She adjusts her
subligaculum
, the standard loincloth, straps a band to her right knee and picks up a shield and a curved dagger, walking into the arena naked and ferocious. Priscus is curious to know what sort of adversary fate has in store for her. Fighting a man would be unfair, so there must be another gladiatrix around. The Gaul has heard of them because one of the most widespread fantasies at the work site was that of watching a match between female warriors. But he had never
really
believed it: he thought they were just tall tales, nonsense dreamt up to dupe the gullible.

And yet…

Priscus wonders whether the beautiful Valeria is a slave, whether she also lives in the
ludus
, and if so how she defends herself from the gods of the arena who crowd the barracks night and day. Then he remembers the girl has just given a lion a thrashing, and imagines she can probably take care of herself.

Or at least run the risk.

Daimon seems to read his mind: he is familiar with how everyone becomes curious when they see Valeria. Never mind the lions and panthers. The fact is
she
is the real tiger in the Ludus Tridens: small, firm breasts, prominent nipples, an ass firm and pert enough to put a statue of Apollo to shame, like the rumps of certain freedmen who have won the hearts and loins of Emperors. Tiny feet and ivory smile. Not to mention that cascade of rippling locks the color of a wheat field, enough to give even someone of Priscus's inclinations second thoughts about who they want to take with them to the nuptial bed.

“Valeria is a free woman,” the lanistaexplains. “Daughter of a wealthy shipwright. Her mother died when she was still a babe in arms and her father raised her as a boy—he did not know what else to do. When she turned sixteen he left her here in Capua in the family villa, with more money than she knew what to do with. Valeria started going to the games, but she is not a gambler, she is more interested in action. Once she understood this and felt it was time, she came here and asked me to lend her a hand. I did all I could to dissuade her, but she was deaf to reason. She trains in her own home with one of my men, the eunuch Badinus from Aleppus—he actually lost his balls in a fight five years ago the poor bastard. She learns fast, and has quite a knack for it. A ton of repressed anger to let out. She will fight at the games in Rome, the Emperor will love it!”

“Excuse me, my lord, but who does she fight? No matter how strong she is, having her face a man would be absurd.”

Daimon smiles. “Every peg has its hole, my boy…” he says, whistling loudly enough to split the Gaul's poor eardrums and shouting at the top of his lungs: “Milus!”

And Milus makes his entrance.

Thracian equipment: helmet,
manica, s
quare shield,
sica
, greaves and even a bronze breastplate. But all of it absurdly scaled down to size.

Milus looks like a toddler kitted out for war.

But his round face is another story.

Milus is a dwarf.

A very, very pissed one.

He emerges from the passage that leads into the arena like Alexander the Great's stallion, throwing himself at the blonde with murderous rage. Valeria dodges to one side and cuts her blade across the front of her opponent's shield.

Sparks fly
.

Little Milus is ready again, launching an attack at the female warrior's legs and scraping them with his
sica.
Valeria shouts and lands him a kick that send his helmet flying into the sand.

The two are really going at it, up and close and personal. It is a game of shields more than blades, smash and riposte follow one another in a fractured, visceral ballet. Attracted and repelled by a magnetic force, the dwarf and the girl dance the dance of death, of salt, of sweat.

He tries to lunge but she keeps her distance. Sweating and grinding her neat, white teeth, she takes a few bruises to the thighs from her opponent.

“I'm dying to stick you,” he tells her, waving his curved blade.

“Hmmm…” purrs Valeria, “you'll get me wet talking like that.”

The midget's eyes pop open wide and he hesitates for a second.

Big mistake
.

The gladiatrix performs a complete twirl and lands her blade on her adversary's right hand.

The dwarf's finger arcs through the Capua sky and lands with a phut in the coarse sand.

“You filthy bitch!” screams the stunted warrior as he crumples to his knees, cradling his wounded hand and leaving his neck undefended.

In a trice Valeria has her sword against her opponent's jugular, and turn to face Daimon.

The lanista is already on his feet, clapping enthusiastically.

“All hail Valeria the Great, Queen of the Dwarves!”

The entire
ludus
salutes her victory with applause and laughter. Valeria takes a bow before helping Milus back onto his feet. He is furious but concedes, and the two of them head back into the corridor the little man came out of, deep in conversation.

Priscus takes a minute to order his thoughts. Armed women, people chopped to pieces, ferocious beasts. He traveled all this way in chains, believing he could flee the absurd pains of the heart, but life has a way of being even crueler than love.

Daimon dismisses him and Priscus sets off for the dormitory. His new home awaits him. His soul is as empty as his poor stomach. He misses everything about his old life.

He misses Verus. Gone forever.

On the way, he passes in front of the baths where Valeria, naked as the day she was born, is beneath the icy jet of water with her thighs spread wide open. Milus stands before her, drenched in sweat, busy sucking at her clitoris. Blood oozes from his severed finger, mixing with the clear water, but he does not seem to mind. Valeria holds him by the hair, shouting over and over: “You're a bad boy! Dirty and bad!”

Priscus continues on his way, melancholy weighing on his shoulders like a heavy cloak. He sinks onto his bunk a moment before the jailor swings shut the bars and leaves him with his thoughts.

Outside the window, a bruised and battered sun slinks silently under the earth.

He is alone, now.

Lost and wounded behind enemy lines.

Alone.

Like he has never felt before.

To extinguish violence is more needed than to extinguish a fire.

H
ERACLITUS
,
On nature
, fragment
43

Rome,
AD
80, July

DREAMS HAVE THE feel of honey; when they are good, you know it. They caress the psyche in yellowish waves, soft and sticky, tickling throat and belly, awakening smells and thoughts, wiping away anger, pain, fear and everything else one can feel, everything except for pleasure.

But nightmares have the acrid stench of a hundred bitter disappointments. They cling to you like a mosquito bite, leaving their mark, a swollen boil of hate that itches and grows. Nightmares are promises of the future, offerings of fate, reminders of what is owed. Nightmares are sincere.

They never lie.

Verus is having a nightmare right now. It begins with the sea: a great, blue-green expanse in which to lose oneself to the sound of the surf, back relaxed and limbs spread like a Christ freed from his agonies.

Soon though, the water turns fetid, putrid surf flooding his nostrils. The gentle lapping swells to a roar of slapping, merciless foam. Verus feels the temperature rising and the story of the frog in the pot comes into his mind. To cook one of the amphibians you cannot throw him straight in boiling water because he will jump out again; instead, you put the frog in cold water and heat it up gradually, so that when the beastie realizes he is caught in a trap, it is already too late. Feeling himself in the same position, Verus begins kicking wildly. Towards freedom.

He has heard the story a million times: Priscus used to tell it often, as a metaphor for their miserable lives.

Priscus, damn it. Even inside the nightmare, his friend comes back to haunt him. Why did he have to leave?

The black dream follows its twisted logic, sometimes crystal clear, other times completely irrational. But the heat is real, that much he knows. Verus struggles, kicking out right, left and center: the liquid gradually transforms, changes its consistency, clots into dark mud. A solid slime of the wrong color.

“Like that other damned frog,” says Verus to himself, thinking of the Gaul.

That was one of Cormac's stories though, may he rest in peace and enjoy all the fucking beer in the Elysian Fields. If you can find beer there, that is.

Cormac always said that when you find yourself in a complicated situation, you have two choices: either accept it, or do everything you can to get out of it. A bit like those two frogs (why are there so many stories about frogs?) who fall into a pail of milk. The first frog, overwhelmed by his baleful fate, lets himself slip down into the white liquid to die. But the second decides to act and starts to swim with all his might. He swims and swims and swims until the milk, pounded like a fifteen-year-old bride on her wedding night, turns to butter beneath his feet. And the stubborn frog can finally escape, climbing up out of the bucket.

Verus feels
exactly
like the tenacious toad now that he is knee deep in the damned quagmire, now that he can walk on the congealed mud. But the fact is he can still feel a tremendous stench clinging to him, as well as a suffocating heat filling his damp clothing, his nose, his throat.

In other words, Verus is up to his neck in trouble.

So he runs, slips away, wriggles his way free. He squirms, flees, climbs the high ground looming before him like a flower suddenly spurting upwards, the magic bean plant that stretches to the sky.

He climbs and sweats, the young Briton, but the further he flees, the more he sweats and the more the scorching heat rasps at his throat. There is not enough air but the race goes on, the sky sliding into sunset. Blood red clouds leave no room for doubt: tongues of flame.

Verus snaps awake with a jolt. It takes only seconds to figure out what is happening.

Fire.

Rome is in flames.

The Briton leaps to his feet, snatches up his clothes and sandals, and runs out of the dormitory. Everyone is already in the courtyard: Decius Ircius, Aton, the
untores
, the warriors. The blaze is all around them and will soon reach the Ludus Argentum.

The city is burning.

“Where's the fire, my lord?” asks Verus.

The lanista spreads his arms: “No idea where it broke out, but people are saying that it is spreading through the city like a swarm of ants. We have to create a firebreak before it reaches the barracks roof.”

They organize themselves into groups of five, all of them accustomed to working as a team. Strong arms at the pumps, buckets, sand piled up to placate the coming flames and sandbags to contain them. The gladiators work skillfully and without yielding to panic.

They throw open the gates of the
ludus
and, outside the school, convince people to leave their homes and belongings: the important thing is to stay alive.

Teams of
vigiles
are already charging through the quarter, wearing the wide-eyed expressions of people who know that things are not looking good. Verus cannot imagine it, but those who have lived in Rome for more than fifteen years
remember.
The Great Fire: thanks to that bloody event the memory of Emperor Nero, though damned, will live on forever.

It was a massacre, a frenzy, pure madness.

The flames began at the Circus Maximus and spread as they consumed the goods on show at the market. The wind pushed them east and the blaze grew, reaching the
insulae
: families burnt alive in their beds, the horrific screams heard only by the dead. The timber structures of Rome's apartment buildings offered the perfect fuel: the good, dry beech wood of the verandas and buttresses and the poplar of the front doors fed the pyre like pitch.

The narrow streets prevented help from arriving and the flames grew. The caulk depot, near to the river, literally turned into a fireball, and the temples were next. The temperatures inside grew hot enough to melt the bronze capitals, crushing the bones and charred flesh of the poor, devoted worshippers trapped within.

The catastrophe lasted nine interminable days and nights. Of the eighteen quarters of the city, only four escaped the flames. Thousands of Romans found themselves homeless, and were taken into the huts hurriedly thrown up on the Field of Mars. After the pain of the burns and lost loved ones followed the madness of having to spend months under the stars, waiting for the authorities to work an impossible miracle. Rome was at risk of disappearing during those July days, sixteen years ago. And the memory of the red doom still flickers in the startled eyes of the
vigiles
on duty tonight.

Ircius is deeply concerned, but tries to put on a brave face, given that once again his men have not let him down. Thanks to the teamwork and the hoses of the water lords—the leather tubes, or
siphones,
that can be attached to hand pumps placed in strategic locations around the Eternal City—the neighborhood around the
ludus
is safe. But in the distance, the night sky is aflame.

Verus and Ircius exchange glances for an instant, but that is enough to convince the lanista that there is no point trying to hold the young Briton back. He has too much to seek forgiveness for.

Verus grabs a couple of companions and runs breathlessly through the moonlit streets. The air is thick with smoke. The well-to-do quarters were the first to awaken, torn from their beds by the screams of their terrified slaves. This time the wind is blowing from the west, and instead of the
insulae
being downwind as in Nero's day, this time the rich bastards' houses are under threat. Verus has an urge to leave them to their fate, but he knows there is no honor in killing a condemned man. So he gets to work: he orders his men to gather all the sheets they can find and to wet them in the tubs and muddy puddles left by the fire hoses. When they are soaked they spread them over the weaker flames, instantly smothering them. For the larger fire,
centones
are needed, the damp, fire-resistant blankets the
vigiles
always carry with them, heaped up in great towers on carts pulled by blind and patient mules.

All is competence tempered with fear: those familiar with fire weigh up the risks and do not challenge the fire-god Vulcan.

The foolhardy get carried away by the urge to save everybody, and find nasty surprises in store for them. It happens to Senator Giorgione, one of the wealthiest men in the capital; it happens right in front of Verus.

Giorgione is safely outside his villa, but behind his children's bedroom door all hell is breaking loose: crackling bones and wood, fiery screams and groans. The senator breaks down the seemingly immovable door with a mallet and Vulcan attacks without mercy, the blaze licking at his clothes, fingers of red-hot embers tightening around him. The blast of heat sears his flesh and leaves his chest a mutilated mess. The deafening sound of the scarlet beast, as hungry for air as any living creature, breaks the son of the Empire in two. If he had not been so daring he would still be alive. In any case, there was nothing he could have done against the fury of the fire: his offspring were already long gone.

As Verus watches the scene a jolt runs down his spine. An electric shock, a wakeup call to his drowsy senses.

A tangle of images forces its way to the front of his mind, a medley of awful memories: the night of the massacre, the flames of Vesuvius, the fire burning inside him. Once again, the eternal curse has appeared before his very eyes. Verus changes a thousand times in an instant: first a block of stone, blind with terror, as though standing before Medusa. Then a statue, still unable to move, but bursting with emotions. Until finally he turns to dry sand and collapses under his own weight, unable to keep his feet before so much pain. When he snaps out of it, the time has come to run.

Stick some wings on your ass!
Cormac would say.

Verus hurtles downstairs as the senator's villa implodes in an orgy of sparks. He went in to try to save Giorgione, but after having gone through a hallway, a corridor and up a flight of stairs, he realized there was nothing he could do.

He flees.

He swallows up steps two at a time, three, rolling like a barrel kicked down a slope. He crosses the pompous atrium and his gaze falls on the water of the
impluvium
, boiling like a pan of cooking oil. Breathing is hard and the air is thick as hot tar. Fifteen more strides and he is outside.

Around him is nothing but ash and orange-red chaos.

Rome burns. And it hurts like hell.

Actually though, this fire is not as brutal as Nero's inferno.

Even though today the plebeians accuse the Mad Emperor of having been the real culprit of that massacre—a guilt based on his desire for a new home and to sing as the world went up in flames—the truth is that the cursed monarch learned from his own mistakes and passed on that knowledge to the generations that have followed.

Under the reign of Titus the Great, the streets are broader and the houses are built of stone quarried from Alba or Gabio, more resistant to the fire than simple bricks. So for once the
insulae
are safe, and the poor will not be the ones who take the brunt of the inferno.

But much is ruined by the catastrophe; many of the gods' statues burn inside their gleaming temples, as Vulcan's fire spreads chaos throughout the city.

Verus charges through the streets at breakneck speed, like a deer spooked by a lightning strike. Once fear's spindly fingers begin to close around his neck it is too late—common sense goes out the window. Panicked evacuees fill every alley, ragged and semi-naked, careening about in a search of shelter. The looters never sleep and waste no time getting to work. Elegant houses and sumptuous villas, miraculously spared by the whirling flames, are ravished like Greek freedmen. The thieves, intoxicated by Mercury's favor, smash through locks and bolts, plundering storerooms, ignoring the screams of the masters' servants, dealing out beatings and smashing gums with impunity. Rome's upper crust bleeds, waiting for a rescue that is a long time coming. The Imperial troops are too busy helping the
vigiles
put out the fires. They have abandoned their swords and shields for axes, hooks, ladders, saws, poles, hoes, and ropes.

No one holds back; tonight there is need of elbow grease to contain the red fury. But when the massacre is over, the damage caused by the widespread looting will prove to be worse than that from the fire itself.

Verus is powerless to help, and in truth he is too frightened to be worried about the fate of the rich.

He seeks solace elsewhere.

He flees
.

He has no idea how he ends up in front of the Pantheon, but the spectacle that greets him is worth a tale or two. Tonight the gods are melting, every one of them.

Silver tears drip from the colonnade of the Temple of Temples. The fire spirit has possessed it, splitting the travertine stone and baking the marble. The lead and bronze capitals have liquefied and fused together, the mixture gleaming in the light of Diana's rays.

The moon is splendid, tonight, but she takes no pity on human suffering either.

The Pantheon weeps, crumbling one piece at a time before the Briton's incredulous eyes. The celestial vault gives way, while the name of Agrippa, engraved on the stone as a way of satisfying his eagerness to tell the world of his friendship with the well-to-do, disintegrates. His statue in the portico has turned black, alongside that of Octavian, already mangled by the flames. Countless manikins of the divine are now nothing more than memories; all is recollection and destruction.

The red death consumes the Capitoline Hill as well, crowded with memories of Vespasian's recent fires after the war with Vitellius. In those days Titus's father was little more than an executioner, a partisan driven by honor. And he had won by melting the houses of the gods with the fire of the just.