Forbidden To The Gladiator

Chapter Three

He choked and coughed as the cold water poured over his head and dribbled down his limbs. Already there was a pool of it expanding at his feet. The woman had apparently discovered the dipping pot and he watched in horror as she slung it over the lip of the urn for another filling.

‘What…? Why…?’ he sputtered.

‘Your wound. It has not been properly cleaned.’

He peered down at the long diagonal gash across his chest and felt another assault of cold water. ‘Cease!’ he hissed and watched in horror as she returned to the urn for yet another potful.

She approached the bars. Mercifully, she did not give him a third dousing. Instead, she set down the pot and studied the wound. She reached out and touched the skin of his stomach.

A shiver rippled through him, followed by an uncomfortable heat. He grabbed her wrist. ‘What in the name of Erebus do you think you are doing?’

‘Be still,’ she commanded. ‘I am merely assessing the depth of the wound.’ Ignoring his grip, she gently traced the skin around the gash with her other hand. Her audacity was stunning, but her fingers were like soft wax. Their touch sent an unexpected pang of sadness through him.

Fifteen years. That’s how long it had been. Fifteen years since the last time a woman had touched him without the expectation of bedding him. That woman had been his yellow-haired wife.

‘There is sand within the wound that will bring infection,’ she explained. ‘Take this in your mouth.’ She pushed the thick, tasselled end of her tunic belt into his grip. ‘Now bite down. This may hurt a bit.’

There was no time for protest. There was only exquisite, burning pain as he bit down and felt her fingernail razor into his soft flesh. ‘Ugh,’ he groaned.

‘Just a little bit of sand…’ she crooned.

He bit down harder, envisioning certain forms of torture.

‘I fear there is some dirt lodged very deep,’ she said, absently picking a tiny metal hairpin from her braid. She held the pin to her lips and bent it taut with her teeth.

It might have been her proximity. Or it might have been the unusual shapeliness of her lips. Or it might have been the fact that he had just survived an excruciating amount of pain and was savouring its absence. But watching her bend that hair clip was the most deliciously sensual thing he had ever seen a woman do.

Then she plunged the terrible instrument deep into his wound. ‘Ah!’ he shouted.

Across the hall, Felix was laughing. ‘What? Is the Empire’s greatest gladiator crying?’

‘Piss off, Goat-Man!’ shouted Cal.

‘Not much longer now,’ she assured him, probing deeper.

He twisted his body in agony. ‘I did not ask for this.’

‘No, but you must have it if you wish to survive.’

Survival was not exactly the plan.

‘Hold this,’ she said, handing him the hairpin. She lifted the pot and gave him a final dousing.

He gasped for air and for something to say: something scathing and clever, something that would burrow beneath her skin as painfully as she had just burrowed beneath his. But the words did not come and all he could do was stare as she began to dab the wound with her handkerchief.

Her face was lovely in the torchlight. Haunting brown eyes and ruddy red cheeks. Eyebrows so high up her forehead they looked painted. For all her vitriol, her appearance was bright. Cheerful, even. The colour of her skin reminded him of well-fermented beer.

‘I wish I had some dried yarrow,’ she said. She was dabbing his wound with a strange reverence. ‘My mother used to keep some on her night shelf to help mend my father’s wounds.’ Her eyes searched his cell. ‘Ah! I know what we can use.’ She pointed over his shoulder to the distant corner of his cell. ‘Do you see it?’

Cal studied the dark corner, wondering if the woman had lost her wits. ‘Just there,’ she said. She was nodding her head, full of certainty. ‘The spider’s web.’

‘A spider’s web?’

‘You must fetch it for me.’

‘Are you mad?’

‘I am trying to help you.’

‘I did not ask for your help,’ he said.

‘And I did not ask to be…’ She bit her lip, stared at the floor.

Enslaved. That is what she wanted to say, but she could not find the courage to voice it. How could he deny her anything, knowing that she had been condemned to such a life?

He sighed and found himself crossing to the corner of his cell and gazing down at a fine silken temple shining beneath the torchlight. At the temple’s edge, a large black weaver posed regally. ‘How should I…collect it?’ he asked.

‘Just wave your palm through the web gently and gather it on your hand. Do not take it all, lest you incur Arachne’s wrath.’

Cal did as instructed, giving a nod of reverence to the tiny creature whose sanctuary he had just harvested. Reverence for all creatures big and small. It was what the white-robed Druids had taught him in his youth.

He returned to her with the silken prize and was no less fascinated watching her ball up the strands and stuff them into his wound. Why was she helping him? He did not understand it at all. Nor did he have the heart to tell her that her effort was pointless.

‘My mother used spider webs on my father’s wounds, as well,’ she explained. ‘It is an old Greek remedy. My mother is Greek, you see.’

Pride lurked beneath her words. Cal knew that the Romans despised the Greeks in the manner of a jealous younger sibling.

‘Is your father Greek?’

‘No, I am afraid he is as Roman as they come. Born in Pompeii and left before Vesuvius blew. Lucky him. Though he could not escape the wounds of war…and now, I suppose, of peace.’

‘Was your father often wounded?’

She nodded. ‘After he returned from military service he became a lictor for a new aedile here in Ephesus. The young mayor had as many enemies as he had gold auris and my father was paid to protect him. I was always so worried for my father back then. Pah! I had no idea what worry was.’

She pursed her lips, and Cal sensed her trying to stifle her emotion. If there had been any doubt in his mind that she had been sold into servitude, it was washed away by the small tear he watched leak from her eye and trace a path down her cheek.

Without thinking, he pressed his finger to her skin and caught it.

She blinked, stared up at him.

His stomach tightened. He realised that he wanted to kiss her.

‘There,’ she said with finality and her deep blush told him that she had felt it, too—whatever it had been that had just passed between them.

Lust, he told himself. Simple, physical lust, born of the fact that he had not enjoyed a woman’s company in months. But that would be remedied—and very soon, thank the god Gwydion.

The woman stepped away from him and he was glad of it. If she had not, he might have taken one of those small, coiling curls of hair and wrapped it around his finger. He might have made the mistake of reaching through the bars, catching her by the waist and pulling her close enough to drink the tiny bead of water that had lodged itself in the small crevasse of her shapely upper lip.

He might have violated one of his most important rules: never to kiss a woman.

‘It will heal quickly,’ the woman was saying, nodding confusedly at his wound. In truth, the gash already felt much better.

‘I am in debt to you,’ he said. Not that the debt would ever be repaid. Not that any of this mattered at all. A dressed wound was of no benefit to a man whose days were numbered.

‘I suppose you are in my debt,’ she said. It was just the sort of thing a Roman woman loved to say and he knew what came next. ‘So tell me, how will you pay it?’

Reflexively, his eyes slid down the length of her. Curses. What was the matter with him? ‘I do not know,’ he said.

‘Why not tell me the truth as payment?’ she asked. The woman was like a dog with a bone. ‘Why did you agree to take the fall tonight? Tell me, I beg you.’

‘Because of a woman.’ There, he had said it. Surely it would be enough to put her off.

But she only frowned. ‘I do not understand.’

He could tell that she wanted him to confess totally. But if there was one thing he held sacred in this wretched world it was the memory of his wife and he was not about to cheapen it by admitting how much he missed her, or what he planned to do to honour her memory. ‘I took the fall for a woman and that is all I am going to say. I do not expect you to understand.’

‘Come now, you must do better than that, Briton.’

Briton. She might as well have called him a butter eater or a beer guzzler.

‘I am not a Briton,’ he said through his teeth.

‘Not a Briton? But you are called the Beast of Britannia, are you not?’ There was the Roman arrogance again. It rankled him.

‘That is what you Romans like to call me, because you know nothing about the lands you call Britannia.’

‘Are you a Briton then?’ she asked. His stomach twisted into a knot.

‘I hail from the island that the Romans call Britannia, yes. But I am not “a Briton” as you say.’

‘So what are you?’

I am a Caledonii warrior, proud and true, and I cannot trust you to ever respect that.

‘Do you wish to escape this ludus or not?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Because if you are here arguing with me when the guards arrive, I promise that they will have you for breakfast. You are a slave now and your body is no longer your own.’

She looked at him as if he had just slapped her face. ‘Yes, I know that you have been sold into slavery,’ he continued, ‘and by your own wretched father no less. Now listen to me. You have no more legal protection now and your security depends on the whims of men who regard you little better than a vase of flowers.’ There were tears at the edges of her eyes and he knew that he had put them there.

‘Do you not see that I am trying to help you? Get tough, woman. Toughness is the only thing that will serve you now.’ Along with a dose of humility. ‘You have one chance to escape this ludus and that chance will come very soon, when a group of guards will open the door to the barracks to bring us our rewards.’

‘Rewards?’

‘You must hide yourself behind the door as it opens and, as soon as the group passes through it completely, you must slip out the door and run, do you hear? As fast as you can. Then you must find your way back to your new master and beg his forgiveness. You must do this all in haste, lest you be caught by a slave catcher on your way.’

She shook her head and he could sense the mix of anger and panic at war inside her mind. It was illegal for a pater familias to sell his children into slavery, but few paid attention to such rules outside Rome. She was as doomed as he was now, though she had no idea what that meant. Yet.

She was studying the floor again. ‘And do not even think about trying to escape into the wilds,’ he continued. ‘You cannot live for ever off wild berries and grass. Believe me, for I have tried. You will be caught eventually and your new master will be forced to pay for your return. Ask yourself if a few days of starving in the wilderness is worth your master’s name tattooed across your forehead.’

That was the punishment for most escaped slaves, after all, though he could tell that she had not appreciated the reminder. ‘I curse you,’ she whispered.

‘That again? It is the Empire of Rome you should be cursing, my dear, for it consumes us all.’

And he was done with it.

No more selling his soul for some elusive hope of escape. No more doing the bidding of his cursed lanista, Brutus, who valued gold and silver over flesh and bone. It was true that Brutus could control where Cal ate and lay and pissed, could decide when Cal was beaten and when he was bedded, could even control how often Cal was allowed to lift his face to the sun. But there was one thing Brutus could not control—the moment in five days’ time when Cal would choose to die.

There was the sound of creaking hinges as the barracks door began to open The woman froze in terror. ‘Get tough,’ he told her. ‘Now go!’

Chapter Four

Arria lunged behind the door just as the guard opened it, pressing herself into the corner as an entourage of women swept into the barracks on a perfumed breeze. They were followed by a cluster of guards, the ringmaster among them, along with Master Brutus himself, whom Arria recognised by his gaudy, gold-trimmed toga.

‘Gladiators,’ Brutus said, ‘Governor Secundus sends his gratitude for your performance tonight.’ He gestured to the women with a bejewelled hand. ‘You have already received your allotted wine and here are your promised women. You will be rewarded similarly for a performance of equal merit at the Festival of Artemis this spring.’

One of the guards began to unlock the Beast’s cell, and Brutus gestured to a blue-eyed woman with a nest of yellow hair atop her head. ‘Here she is, Beast. Long blonde hair, blue eyes. Just as you requested.’

‘Whence does she hail?’ asked the Beast.

Brutus nudged the woman. ‘You heard him. Where do you come from?’

‘Germania.’

The Beast gave a nod and the guard let her into his cell.

‘And the second woman?’ Brutus asked the Beast.

‘Do not want a second.’

‘You do not want a second woman?’ Brutus laughed. ‘Then you are a fool.’

Arria watched the chosen woman float into the Beast’s cell. She wore a flowing white-linen tunic and matching long shawl which she let fall to the floor just as the gate clanked shut. She must have been from far in the north, thought Arria, for her eyes were a startling blue and her hair was as yellow as wheat. She was beautiful.

But the Beast did not even look at her. He reached for a flagon of wine and guzzled it, then offered it to the woman without meeting her gaze.

She accepted it eagerly, taking a long draught herself.

If Arria was going to run, it had to be now, while the entourage of guards and women made its way deeper into the barracks. Unfortunately, she could not bring her legs to move.

She could only watch in quiet awe as the yellow-haired woman removed her tunic, revealing a landscape of dips and curves. She was the kind of woman Arria would never be—fleshy and abundant. Lovely as a bowl of fruit.

Arria was studying the woman so closely that she did not notice the guards turning back towards the door. ‘They are yours for two hours,’ announced Brutus.

Arria cowered in the shadows as Brutus and the guards exited and the door to the barracks closed with a slam.

And that was that. She had missed her chance to escape. Now she would have to wait two hours and pray that she could keep herself concealed as the men and women…as they…

From somewhere further down the hall came a long, ecstatic moan.

Oh, gods.

The Beast’s cell was only steps away from where Arria squatted. Arria could see his muscular figure sitting at the end of his raised bed. His head was stooped. He was studying the floor, though the German woman stood only a breath away from him, her body exposed, her tunic in a pool at her feet. ‘You are handsome, Gladiator,’ she told him.

‘Do not call me Gladiator.’

‘Beast?’

He shook his head.

‘What shall I call you, then?’

The Beast paused, looked up. ‘Call me Husband.’

Call him Husband? What a strange request. Arria closed her eyes. She should not be watching this. Whatever this was. A ritual of some kind? A fantasy? Arria’s sense of propriety was duelling mightily with her curiosity and she sensed her curiosity quickly gaining ground.

Why should she not watch? It had been a night of firsts, after all: her first pit fight, her first discussion with a gladiator and now, it seemed, her first real lesson in the act of love. She might as well watch, for this first lesson was also likely to be her last. Propriety be damned. She opened her eyes.

‘It is well, ah, Husband,’ the woman said. She reached up to her golden bun and pulled out a comb. Her hair tumbled on to her shoulders in a curtain of yellow silk. She shook it hard and the strands danced in the torchlight like shiny ribbons.

The Beast stared up at her, his head cocked in contemplation. ‘I shall not kiss your lips, understood?’

The woman shrugged her assent.

‘May I have the comb?’ he asked.

She placed the comb in his palm. He reached beneath his bed to produce a small brazier pan full of coals. He moistened a single tine of the comb with the tip of his tongue, then dipped the small instrument into the black residue of the pan.

‘May I adorn your face?’ he asked.

The woman nodded. He stood and touched the blackened tine to her chin, gently dabbing the coal stain into a mark of Venus. He dipped the comb into the coals once more and thickened the mark, then leaned backwards to behold his work. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

He returned to sitting and reached again for the jug of wine. He took a long draught, never taking his eyes off the woman’s face. ‘Rhiannon,’ he whispered. He might have been a sculptor naming his bust—his lusty, lifelike bust that seemed to have been polished by the very hands of Venus.

‘Will you not make love to me, Husband?’ she asked in soft, melting Latin.

The Beast sighed, then bowed his bald head so that it came to rest against her smooth white belly. ‘Ah, Rhiannon,’ he said. ‘Wife.’ He reached to the woman’s hips and pulled her closer, burying his face in the creamy white flesh of her stomach.

He sat there for a long while, his head resting against her stomach, as if she were some familiar, domestic goddess and he had come to offer his daily prayers. And then he did begin to pray, or so it seemed, for a torrent of words sprang from his lips. They were strange, tangled words—words so full of breathy desire that they might as well have been kisses themselves.

Arria had no idea what language he spoke, but she could feel what he was saying in her very bones. He was speaking of love and lust, of sweetness and yearning, of things that Arria had never known. They were words so lovely, they might have been birds, or tiny fishes swimming beneath some invisible wave of emotion that Arria could sense was about to crash.

And then it did. He rose to his feet to face the naked woman, speared his fingers through her hair, and lavished her neck with the hungriest, most passionate kiss Arria had ever witnessed.

His mouth rioted down the long column, biting and tasting and sucking in a torrent of urgency and lust. He gripped the woman by the waist and pulled her against him, and Arria had to brace her shoulder against the low wall to keep her own legs from buckling beneath her.

And then, just when she thought the wave had dissipated, just when the bruising neck kisses had subsided into soft, tender caresses, he bent to take one of the woman’s breasts into his mouth.

Blessed, sweet Minerva.

A strange heat invaded Arria’s bones—pleasurable, radiant, alarming. He released the woman’s nipple and followed a winding path down her belly, festooning it with small kisses, until he was sitting once again on the bed before her and his lips came to a halt at the soft curly mass atop her Venus mound.

Was he going to…? Arria covered her eyes, then peeked between her fingers. Yes, he was going to. Arria watched in fascination as his tongue slipped into the woman’s sacred opening.

‘Oh,’ the woman sighed and Arria felt another disconcerting wave of heat. The woman arched her back, gripping the Beast’s naked skull as he began to move his mouth around her folds, kissing and sucking and…licking. It was the most forbidden thing Arria had ever seen in all her life. The woman began to whimper and Arria noticed her own breaths growing short.

What could it feel like to be kissed in such a way? In such a place? She strained to imagine it and found herself growing warmer still. She watched his hands slide slowly from the woman’s hips to her backside, which he squeezed and caressed as he continued to pleasure her with his tongue.

Arria could not look away. She could not close her ears, even as the woman’s moans transformed from soft sighs into low, rhythmic groans of the sort that Arria occasionally heard outside the baths. The woman’s arms stiffened. Her body shuddered. Her moans crescendoed as her whole body convulsed and Arria felt a shiver ripple across her own skin.

Slowly, the woman’s breaths subsided. She was still whimpering when he pressed his head against her stomach once more and hugged her close. He was breathing her in—deep, gulping breaths whose exhales sounded like sighs.

If the woman had been a goddess, he might have been her truest acolyte. But Arria knew she was even more than that to him. She was his beloved wife.

The cruel, hardened gladiator had disappeared. The monster that had taken life with cold efficiency had retreated to some faraway arena and in his place was a man—a gentle, loving man who seemed to overflow with tenderness.

At last he raised his head and stared up at the woman. ‘Wife,’ he said. In a single motion, he stood and guided her on to the bed and Arria noticed an alarming protrusion inside his loincloth. He closed his eyes and began to speak again: husky, lilting words that made Arria’s heart beat faster still.

What was he saying to the woman? What lavish words of passion were trilling off his well-used tongue? He stretched out on to the bed beside her and placed a series of small kisses down her arm. Leaning closer, he continued to whisper—a never-ending stream of small words strung together like kites.

They were words of love—Arria was sure of it. The kinds of words she imagined passing between a husband and a wife. The kinds of words, Arria realised, that she was certain never to hear.

Slowly, he arched over the woman, leaning on his arms as he kicked off his kilt and deftly untied his own loincloth. His taut, muscled form made a kind of arch above the woman’s prone body, dwarfing her in size and strength. Arria tried to imagine what it would feel like to lie beneath such a titan and an unfamiliar muscle deep inside her flexed with yearning.

His loincloth dropped to the floor. Arria stared, then looked away. She looked again, blinked. She told herself to breathe. It was nothing that she had not seen before, after all. Practically every corner of Ephesus was etched with some depiction of male desire or another. The images were common as clay: they were painted on walls and chiselled above doors, not to mention their prominence in statues and mosaics. Such figures even functioned as signposts, helpfully pointing the way to bars and brothels.

Why was it, then, that she could not take her eyes off his? Perhaps it was because she had never seen one in the flesh. She had always gone early to the baths, long before the patrician matrons arrived with their male slaves. And she had never even dreamed of lingering into the ‘trysting hour,’ or so was called the middle of the day when the women’s and men’s hours overlapped.

Now she wished she had lingered at the baths, if only to observe the variety of male forms, for she was sure she had nothing by which to compare him. Were the images lying, then? Did they universally under-represent the immensity of a man’s desire in its fully engorged state?

A small quake rumbled through her. She should not be watching them. It was indecent. Surely she was incurring the wrath of one god or another. But how could she not watch as he slowly settled his desire between the woman’s thighs?

Arria’s throat felt dry.

He took the lobe of the woman’s ear in his lips and began to suck. Suddenly, the woman gasped and Arria saw her hips rock upwards. The Beast was pushing himself into her. They had joined.

Arria gulped, looked away. She felt herself flush with the shame of a spy. Or perhaps it was another kind of shame pumping so much heat into her cheeks.