Forbidden to the Gladiator Read online

  ‘I was supposed to die in the arena just days after you cursed me,’ he continued. ‘I have been trying to die ever since. I believe your curse has been keeping me alive.’

  She regarded him searchingly, then blanketed herself in a Stoic’s calm. ‘It does not sound like a very effective curse. It sounds more like the favour of the gods.’

  He shook his head. This was not going well at all. ‘It is not something I would expect you to understand. You do not know real suffering.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes flashed. ‘You think I do not know suffering? I labour in a textile workshop with twelve other women and two windows the size of my hands. We must weave our carpets continuously, from sunrise to sundown, lest we be beaten.’ She placed her hands upon her hips and peered up at him accusingly. ‘I do not know suffering? Well, I certainly know that earthworms are difficult to kill. They wriggle even after being severed.’

  He felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. Was her situation already so dire that she had been reduced to scratching for worms? ‘I will not pity you,’ he managed to say. ‘Pity will not help you to survive your years of servitude.’

  Besides, it was not pity he felt, it was anger. Burning, thought-splitting anger. He wanted to find the man who had done this to her and beat him senseless.

  ‘Arria,’ she said, swallowing the last morsel of cake with a sigh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said your name is Cal. I am Arria.’

  ‘Arria,’ he repeated. Such a musical name for such a troublesome woman. But at least she had introduced herself. He cleared his voice and spoke as politely as he could. ‘Arria, please, I beg you to lift the curse you have placed on me.’

  She shook her head, then stepped forward and held out her untouched wine cup. ‘Take this. You need it more than I do.’

  He dumbly accepted the cup as her eyes slid down the length of his bare chest. It felt as if she were stripping him of clothing that he was not even wearing. An unwelcome lust coiled inside his gut.

  ‘It looks good,’ she said. ‘The wound, I mean.’

  She stepped closer, and the scent of her hair wafted into his nostrils—a maddening blend of wool and woman. Bull’s blood, why did she have to smell like that?

  ‘The swelling has diminished,’ she observed, still studying his chest. She reached up and touched just below the ball of his shoulder, where the tender scar began its long, diagonal path. Her finger was so soft that it stung.

  ‘Do you not understand?’ he said, willing the words to come. ‘I wish for you to lift the curse.’ Though what he wished in this moment was to draw those soft fingers to his lips and kiss them one by one. ‘I wish to die.’

  He thought he saw her eye twitch again, but she continued to trace the scar, leaving a forest fire of heat where her finger had touched. ‘Do not do that,’ he said. He felt his desire rising beneath his loincloth. By the Hound of Hades, what was she doing to him?

  ‘Do not do what?’

  He drank down the cup of wine and tossed it to the floor. ‘Touch me like that. Unless you plan to keep touching me.’

  She paused, then peered up at him. And there, rushing between them, an invisible river, its dam breached, its waters flowing. ‘I do not understand,’ she said, though it was clear by the speed of her breaths that she did understand.

  He stepped forward and stared into her eyes.

  They stood there a long while: two opponents facing off in their small arena. It is just lust, he tried to tell himself. He had felt it a thousand times. His body wanted hers and nothing more. This just happened to be particularly powerful lust. Lust that pulled his body towards hers by some elemental force. Lust that made him feel as if he might burst into flame.

  ‘I think you do understand, Arria.’

  She pulled her finger from his skin and stepped backwards. ‘Pink,’ she blurted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your scar. It has grown pink. Pink is the colour of healing.’

  ‘Is it?’

  His scar was not the only growing pink thing. Nor did the place where she had touched him feel like it was healing any more. It felt like scorched earth. No, this was not going well at all.

  Her eyes flitted about the cell, as if searching for something more to say. They seized on an empty corner. ‘Look there!’ She rushed to the corner of the cell and squatted low. ‘Do you see? The spider has rebuilt the web.’

  The heat of her nearness dissipated and he felt his wits return. ‘I do see it, yes.’

  ‘Is it not a wonder?’ She flashed him a dazzling grin. ‘I confess that I have never healed anyone in all my life.’

  He grinned. ‘But you have certainly cursed many.’

  She shook her head. ‘Only you. But I have healed you, as well.’

  ‘I never asked to be healed or to be cursed,’ said Cal, though he admitted that he would have paid a thousand denarii in that moment to feel her fingers upon his skin once again.

  ‘You did not ask for it, but you needed it. My treatment worked well.’

  ‘I believe it was the curse that has kept me alive and not any treatment.’

  ‘No, I believe it was the web. And the salt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was salt in the handkerchief I used to dry the wound.’

  ‘Salt?’

  ‘From my tears.’

  ‘By the gods, you are a sorceress.’

  She shook her head, then paused. ‘Perhaps I am.’ There was authority in her eyes now and no small amount of mischief. ‘In any case, I cannot lift the curse.’

  ‘Of course you can lift the curse. All you have to do is say, “I lift the curse.” That is all I am asking you to do.’

  She stood and folded her arms over her chest. ‘How long did you labour in the quarry?’

  ‘The quarry? Apologies, but I do not know what—’

  ‘Twelve years. That is what you told me. Twelve years of eating grubs and losing toes and feeling the sting of the lash. If you can last in a quarry for twelve years and in the arena for three, then you can certainly stay alive for a little while longer.’

  ‘You mean to deny me my one wish?’

  ‘Summon me in a month and I will consider lifting the curse.’ She crossed to the gate and hailed the guard.

  Was this really happening? Was she really refusing him? Anger flared. ‘I helped you escape the ludus and this is how you repay me?’

  Who did she think she was to deny him his one desire? By whose authority did she trifle with his chosen fate? ‘It seems you have yet to know real suffering,’ he barked, ‘for if you did, you would release me from my own.’

  The guard grabbed her by the arm and yanked her into the hall. ‘I am sorry, Cal, but if you die then you have let them win and I cannot allow you to do that,’ she said. ‘Get tough.’

  Chapter Eight

  Her first beating took place on Saturnalia. Arria had completed her carpet by the start of the mid-December festival and released it to the head guard with pride. It was her finest creation yet, or so she had believed. But when Oppius stormed into the workshop that afternoon and smacked her across the face, she knew otherwise.

  ‘What is this?’ he demanded. He held up the carpet like evidence to a crime.

  ‘It is the carpet you commanded me to weave, Dominus.’

  Oppius smashed his hand against her other cheek. ‘That is not what I mean and you know it.’ He dragged her out the door and she stumbled into the courtyard in a storm of dust.

  ‘You defied me. You deliberately wove something I would not be able to sell. Get the lash,’ he shouted to one of the household slaves and then to Arria: ‘Remove your tunic.’

  * * *

  It was many days before she could lie on her back. Many more before she was able to speak. ‘Do my duty,’ she told h
erself one night, not realising she had spoken the words aloud.

  ‘Arria speaks!’ called a friendly voice from across the darkness. ‘She has returned to us.’ The voice belonged to the proud-faced barbarian woman they called Epona. ‘You will heal in time,’ she assured Arria.

  More soothing words filled the workshop and though Arria tried to hear them, memories of her beating crowded her mind. The joyous sneer Oppius wore as he delivered the blows. The mind-splitting pain. The snap of the lash as it tore up the flesh of her back.

  ‘Welcome back, Arria,’ crooned an ancient voice and all the women went silent. The woman they called Grandmother rarely spoke, but when she did, everybody listened. ‘You have been brave.’

  ‘Gratitude, Grandmother,’ Arria replied across the darkness, though she did not feel brave.

  She rolled over on to her stomach and tried not to think about tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. Cal had lasted twelve years in the quarries, yet she had been enslaved for less than four months and already she felt herself fading.

  ‘Grandmother, what are you thinking about right now?’ she asked.

  ‘I am thinking about the pigeons of Artashat.’

  ‘Pigeons?’

  ‘Years ago, before the Roman general Corbulo burnt the Armenian city of Artashat to the ground, my mother made frequent offerings at its great temple. I remember that thousands of pigeons roosted in its eaves. There were grey and white and brown pigeons. One day I even saw a black pigeon. Imagine that! I thought it was a crow, but it flapped its wings in that way, you know, like it was applauding the presence of the gods. It was so black that as it flew into the air I could trace the outline of its feathers against the white snow fields of Mount Ararat.’

  ‘The augurs say that black birds are bad omens.’

  ‘The augurs are silly fools,’ said Grandmother. ‘Whatever gives you hope, you must think of it now. It may be a god, or a memory, or some outlandish wish. Or perhaps it is just a vision of what your life could be. Hold on to whatever gives you hope, my dear, and a thousand lashes cannot harm you. The temple is gone, but my pigeons live on.’

  Arria gazed into the darkness, trying to find her pigeons. They were not in her memories, for even the good ones seemed tinged with the consequences of her family’s decline. Nor was her family itself a very hopeful thought. Her brother’s drunken stupors, her father’s desperation, her mother’s dangerously swelling belly.

  She could not even bring herself to feel hope for her new brother or sister. Even if the baby survived, how would her family feed it? It was as if they were struggling up some terrible mountain with boulders on their backs.

  An image came to mind of Cal. He had struggled up mountains for years—literally. The slaves who laboured in the Quarry of Luna were criminals and captives of Rome. They were not meant to survive. They were meant to carry those boulders until they were crushed by them.

  And yet, Cal had not been crushed. He had survived and had gone on to become one the Empire’s finest gladiators.

  If Cal was still alive, she decided, then there was hope. Plenty of it. Hope to spare. If Cal lived, then there were miracles, too. And no small helping of divine will.

  Because although Arria had cursed many things in her life—her father’s gambling, her brother’s drinking, her family’s terrible fortune—none of those curses had any effect. If her curse on Cal worked, then she was more powerful than she knew, and she could certainly endure ten years at the loom.

  The thought fuelled her spirit, which slipped right through the small, slitted window and flew out flapping into the night.

  * * *

  The next day, by some small miracle, Arria was summoned once again to Ludus Brutus.

  * * *

  Arria loved her legs as they carried her down Kouretes Street. She loved the slap of her sandals against the paving blocks and the cool December air. She loved how the smoke of the eternal flame mixed with the steam from the baths: a braid of black and white against the brilliant blue sky.

  When she entered the ludus, the winter sun shone down through small slits in its stone walls, lending something resembling cheer to the shadowy space. As the guard ushered Arria through the cell door and closed it behind her, she was further heartened by the strong, broad-shouldered man sitting in the warmth of a sunbeam: her pigeon.

  ‘You live,’ she said, feeling instantly foolish. Of course he lived. Would she be here if he did not? She searched for something more to say, but her wits were in tatters—destroyed by her exploding happiness.

  ‘It appears I do live, yes,’ he muttered. She could not guess his mood. It seemed reasonable that he would be furious with her—her curse obviously continued to shield him from the death he craved. But his expression betrayed neither fury nor happiness. His rugged, angular face appeared etched in stone.

  ‘The curse is a potent one,’ she offered.

  He did not reply, but watched her closely. His gaze was too keen, his eyes too green. He reminded her of a hungry predator.

  ‘You have been rewarded for your victories, I see.’ She glanced at his tunic. The bright red garment was sleeveless and obviously new. It grazed the tops of his knees, which towered over the snaking leather straps of new sandals.

  ‘Brutus continues to profit from my victories,’ he said flatly. ‘He rewards me in small ways.’

  It was a shame he wore the tunic. She would have liked to have checked how his chest wound was mending. The last time they had been together, she had been unable to complete her inspection of it. She had barely been able to begin, in truth, for he had growled at her menacingly and warned that she should not touch him unless she planned to keep touching him.

  She had been confused, told him she did not understand. I think you do understand, Arria, he had said and the words had plunged like a flock of waterbirds into the pit of her stomach.

  Since then, she had thought about that moment a thousand times. She had relived it so often that it seemed very little time had passed between that moment and this one. ‘It has been over two months since we last spoke,’ she said. Two long, lonely months. He nodded, saying nothing. Perhaps he planned to berate her. That would explain his strange mood. Soon he would unleash a torrent of gladiatorial rage upon her and simply frighten her into lifting the curse.

  She took a deep breath, preparing to receive his fury, and caught him glance at her breasts, which she had left unbound since her beating.

  In retaliation, she stole her own peek at the tip of his scar, which jutted from beneath his very short sleeve.

  That was how she found herself considering his arm. His bulging, flexing, bone-crushing arm. And then its happy twin: the other bulging, flexing, bone-crushing arm. And then the two arms together and the memory of how they had so easily lifted the flaxen-haired woman by the waist...

  On second thought, perhaps it was fortunate that she could not inspect the scar.

  She noticed that the table on the other side of the cell had been laden with wine and edibles. She drifted towards it, feeling like a deer in a forest.

  She looked down at the table without seeing any of its bounty, aware that she was once again locked in a cell with one of the most deadly gladiators in the Roman Empire—a man with every reason to hate her.

  ‘Take one,’ he said at last. She nearly jumped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A honey cake. The last time you were here, you seemed quite enamoured of them.’ He nodded at the tower of cakes on the table beside her and she studied them suspiciously. Had he requested them just for her? If so, it was perhaps the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her.

  ‘What mischief are you about?’

  ‘Take one,’ he repeated, nodding encouragingly.

  She could not decide what to do. She wanted to take one—most desperately. Her stomach moaned with longing. But she reminded herself that the last
time she had seen him she had denied his request that she lift the curse.

  Thus he had good reason to be furious with her and no reason to offer her honey cakes. If he loathed her as much as she suspected he did, then he might have been luring her into a trap. A poisoned one, perhaps. She had refused to annul the curse, so it was possible that he meant to annul her.

  He rose suddenly and crossed to the table, causing her to jump backwards and shriek. He was shaking his head in bewilderment as he reached for a honey cake and stuffed it into his mouth.

  ‘Do you see?’ he said, his mouth full. ‘They are perfectly safe.’

  Arria watched him carefully—not because she did not believe him, but because at this angle, with the torchlight flooding the cell as it was, she understood for the first time how very handsome he was.

  Not handsome in any traditional way. His eyes were a little too wide, his nose a little too large. His lips were too sensual to be considered classically masculine and his perfectly bald head shone like the beryl ball of a soothsayer.

  But gods, he was handsome. Terrifyingly so. No wonder the matrons of Ephesus sought him out. It was as if some fiery furnace burned beneath his skin, illuminating his features and giving them quiet power over everything and everyone. Over her.

  He swallowed his honey cake, then crushed her with his grin.

  The birds. They were fluttering their wings atop the sea inside her stomach, threatening to launch. She had never been grinned at like that by a handsome man. Though handsome was not quite the right word. Perhaps it was more like grand and dashing, with a hint of ferocity. Though that, too, seemed inadequate. What was he then? She searched her mind, though it was hard to think when his body was so close.

  What was she supposed to be doing? She took a quick look at her surroundings. Ah, yes! The honey cakes. She reached for one and took a large bite. When she finally recovered her wits, he was smiling still.

  Curses, he was so...