Priscus half-rose at the lad’s announcement, and Decimus gaped in shock.“How?”the younger man demanded.
“Don’t know,” the door slave said.“They were found laid out on the dock, every one of them with their throat cut.”
As though they’d been executed, I thought.
Decimus swallowed, color leaving his face.“A few were kind to me.”
Priscus sank to his seat, laying a hand on his son’s arm.“I counted more than a dozen, in the end.All murdered?”
The door lad nodded.“Seems so.”
Priscus turned to me, as though I could explain.“How could so many be killed, on a deserted dock?”
“With twice as many armed men than the sailors,” I said.“Well organized.Like soldiers.”
“Hmm.I reported the ship to the harbor authorities, but the crew would have been arrested, not simply executed in place.”Priscus seemed less perturbed than his son, but he lightly tapped the table, his focus in the distance.“I had thought to linger here for a time, but I believe we should return to Rome.Leonidas, would you be so good as to guard us on the way?”
The journey from Ostia,which we began the morning after the slave’s announcement of the sailors’ murders, took less time than the journey down.Priscus wanted to keep a faster pace, with fewer rest stops.
Decimus was clearly not recovered, but he sat his horse competently and never complained.A resilient young man.Priscus’s servants doted on him, which was plain as we went along.He barely had to mention he was thirsty before they fell over themselves offering him a wineskin.
We reached Rome and Priscus’s large house on the Esquiline a few hours before nightfall.Priscus’s scribe, Kephalos, duly handed Cassia a pouch of coins, which disappeared inside her robes.
Cassia’s step was lighter as we traversed the streets toward home.We stepped against a wall as a procession came through, the tinny sound of jingling bells brushing the air.A priestess of Isis, with a cobra on her arm walked sedately along, her eyes on the snake, while the crowd melted out of her way.
The first thing Cassia did when we reached the apartment, after removing her cloak and shaking the dust from her shoes, was to pour out the money we’d received and count it.
I rubbed my close-cropped hair, finding it coated with dust.In spite of the December chill, I smelled of sweat and the road.
“I’m for the baths,” I told Cassia as she whispered numbers.Her stylus flashed as did the beads of the abacus she seemed to have acquired.
Cassia nodded at me, not taking her attention from her figures.I think this was the happiest I’d seen her since she’d been thrust into my life.
I had to pay a quarter of anas, the smallest copper coin, which Cassia had pushed at me before I left, to enter a bathhouse on the Quirinal, not far from our apartment.These were not a huge complex like the baths built by Agrippa or the ones Nero was currently having constructed.This bathhouse had a modest tepidarium, a larger caldarium, and even bigger frigidarium.I had to pay anotherasto buy a strigil—the one I’d used in the past years was still at theludus, with the rest of my meager belongings I hadn’t bothered to collect.
The strigil was cheap and thin, but it would do.I stripped down, paid an attendant to look after my clothes, and went to the small yard to work up a sweat.
Men and women crowded to watch me, curious as to what sort of exercises a gladiator would do.I lifted various weighted stones, which had been carved to be easy to grip.I followed this with kicks and lunges, plus arm swings I’d done to warm my body before sword training.Younger men studied me carefully, and when I quit the yard, began to copy my movements.
I handed my strigil to another attendant, who used it to scrape sweat and sand from my body, then I plunged straight into the cold water without bothering with the hot or tepid.This bathhouse had a room even hotter than the caldarium, where people went for extra sweating to cleanse their bodies, but the heat of that made me too sleepy.
The cold bath, on the other hand reinvigorated me.The water in the large pools was constantly replenished by a fountain flowing out of the wall in the shape of a fish’s gaping mouth.The excess overflowed the sides, running down into the drains to the great system of sewers beneath the city.
When I emerged from the bath, I noticed I’d drawn a crowd there too.Pretending to ignore the spindly men who watched me, I dried myself, dressed, and departed.
I’d once used a niche for my clothes instead of paying an attendant to care for them, and an enterprising thief had stolen every stitch, knowing that the used garments of a gladiator would fetch a huge price.My friend Xerxes had rescued me, arriving with a tunic in response to my summons, so I wouldn’t have to trudge naked across the cold city.He’d laughed so hard he could barely walk as we’d made our way back to theludus.
I missed Xerxes with an acuteness that jabbed my gut.
As I emerged onto the street, a woman ran straight into me.She was wrapped in a cloak against the chilling wind, and she clutched at me, out of breath.A fold of cloak fell, revealing overly bright red hair.
“Lucia,” I said in surprise.
“Leonidas.I’ve been looking for you for days.You weren’t home.”
“Had to go to Ostia.Job.”Not unusual for me.
Lucia gulped a sob.“Floriana.She’s dead.”
