Chapter 1
Februarius, AD 63
“Ineed your help, Leonidas.”
Aemilianus, once my trainer, held up a blunt-fingered hand as I paused inside the doorway to my rooms above a wine shop on the lower slope of the Quirinal Hill. I was just returning from the baths, my scoured skin smelling of oil, my damp tunic clinging to my back.
Aemil gazed at me from mismatched eyes within a sharp face, heavy scars on his half-missing ear. He sat on my stool, at my table. Cassia, the scribe who lived with me, had retreated to the doorway of the balcony and watched Aemil warily.
Aemil had trained me as a raw youth who had strength but no skill, and built me up to becomeprimus palusof his ludus. I’d been a champion, the most famous gladiator of my time.
Since the day I’d been given therudisat the Saturnalian games and left the Circus Gai as a free man, Aemil had made it clear that he would do all he could to recruit me to help him teach others.
As I drew a breath to sling him out, Aemil said quickly, “Not to persuade you to return. I need you to help me find someone. Three someones, in fact. Gladiators.”
This puzzled me enough to halt my invective. “Find them?” I wondered if he was asking me to help him round up new fighters. “What gladiators?”
“Ajax, Rufus, and Herakles.” Aemil faced me on the stool, palms landing on his large, parted knees. “Find them, as infindthem. They are missing.”
My surprise mounted. “You mean they ran away?” Aemil was tough, but his gladiators ate good food and were housed in moderately comfortable cells. He didn’t practice cruelty on his gladiators, because broken men couldn’t fight, though Aemil wasn’t soft on them either. Few ever tried to flee him.
“Not so much ran away as are staying away,” Aemil said with impatience. “They walked out of the ludus during daylight, off to do jobs, or in Rufus’s case, visit a wife. Then did not return.”
Not unusual for gladiators of high standing to be given leave to depart theludus, either to work as bodyguards or go home to a paramour or wife. My closest friend, Xerxes, a very popular gladiator, had taken a wife and lived with her on a farm not far from Rome. Marcella still lived there, now that Xerxes was no more.
“They left together?” I asked.
“No.” Aemil scowled. “Stop interrupting. They went, with my leave, not together, and haven’t returned. I give all my men some leeway for sleeping it off before they come stumbling home, as you know, but four days is too much. I suspect they’re in a stupor from drink or fornication, but it’s bad for business if they aren’t where I can put my hands on them.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cassia quietly move to the table, open a wax tablet, and make a note with her stylus.
“The urban cohorts can find them and bring them back to you,” I said without moving.
“I don’t want the cohorts.” Aemil made a noise of exasperation. “If they’ve found trouble, I don’t want them dragged off to a magistrate or the Tullianum. I need them.”
Aemilianus was a businessman through and through. A former gladiator, he taught his men how to entertain while fighting for their lives, and his gladiators won prizes and brought him money and prestige.
“When exactly did each of them leave?” I did not ask for myself, but so that Cassia could write it down. Her fingers twitched, anxious to record more information.
Aemil rubbed his close-shaved brown hair. He’d begun life as a Gaul, large and strong, with one blue eye and the other brown-green. A hard man, he didn’t like problems that were too complex.
“Ajax, four days ago, right after breakfast. Rufus, the same day, at the sixth hour. Herakles, that night. Rufus went to his wife, Ajax to enjoy himself in the Subura, and Herakles didn’t say. He’d earned a night of debauchery, so I assume a lupinarius, like Ajax, or maybe the home of some woman.”
Cassia’s stylus scratched in the silence when he finished.
“The vigiles should be able to find them then.” I brushed leftover droplets of water from my arm. I’d indulged in the newly opened Baths of Nero and its fine marble frigidarium. Unlike Cassia, I had no interest in the bath complex’s artwork or the library, but I swam in the wide pools and sweated in the broad exercise yard.
“Did you not hear what I said?” Aemil rose. Taller than most Romans, his head brushed the low ceiling. “I want you to find them, Leonidas. Haul them back to me, andI’lldecide how to punish them.”
He’d terrify them but keep them alive and well, he meant. Aemil had perfected the art of intimidation.
I had to wonder why the three hadn’t turned up again, but on the other hand, I knew they’d have their reasons. All three were strong, capable men, in the top ranks of the ludus, with an arrogance that accompanied it. No doubt they were luxuriating in fine beds while women fussed over them.
“Why ask me?” I said. They wouldn’t return because I told them to.
“Because you have a slave who is good at finding things out. If the men are caught by anyone but us, they’ll be executed, and you know it. Ajax and Herakles aren’t citizens. You want to see them crucified?”
Ajax and Herakles had been captured after a battle in a far-flung corner of the Roman empire. Aemil had bought them once they’d reached Rome, stripped them of their own names, and given them those of Greek warriors. The two men were not Greek at all, being from a tribe from somewhere in Pannonia, but the crowds at the games liked ancient heroes.
