Forbidden To The Gladiator. Greta Gilbert

relishing crumbs all her life, in truth. The first crumb had come when she was fourteen—the usual age of marriage for a Roman woman. One evening, her father had invited a fellow lictor to dine with them—a handsome, ambitious young man named Marcus. When Marcus pulled her into an alcove after the meal, her heart had begun to pound. He was so very handsome and he wore his earnest goodness like a fine mantle. She remembered thinking that he would make a splendid husband. ‘Arria, I want to ask you…’ he had begun saying, then hesitated. ‘I want to tell you that I wish to pursue marriage…’ Another hesitation.

      Remembering that moment still made her insides dance, then turn to stone. ‘I wish to pursue marriage…’ he repeated, ‘with your friend Octavia. Would you counsel me, Arria? You are so amenable. How is it that I may win her affection?’

      After that night, Arria had retreated into her weaving and the Greek and Latin lessons that her family had still been able to afford. ‘There is time,’ her mother assured her. ‘But you must go out more. Join your friends at the festivals. Come with me to the market. And hold your head high when you walk. A towering lion will never notice a cowering mouse.’

      But Arria did not want a towering lion; she wanted a soft, baying sheep: a man who was gentle and kind—someone who would respect her tender heart.

      The second crumb came a full year later. By then her youngest brother had returned from the army without a leg and her eldest brother not at all. Overcome with grief, Arria’s father had lost his job and begun to gamble away Arria’s dowry.

      One day in the marketplace, a greying man spotted Arria puzzling over a tower of onions. ‘They may appear wilted and old,’ he chirped, ‘but just beneath the skin they are young again.’ Arria had been charmed and when he invited her family to break bread in his home, they went eagerly.

      But the man’s wealth had been modest and when he learned of the diminished size of Arria’s dowry, his wrinkled grin became a wrinkled frown.

      A year later, after her father lost the remaining half of her dowry to a fellow gambler called Verrucosus, the man had offered to return his winnings for a single night with Arria.

      ‘She is a lovely woman, your daughter,’ Arria had overheard Verrucosus tell her father. ‘So young and unsullied.’

      It was her father’s endless begging that finally convinced Arria to accept the offer. ‘You can redeem me, Daughter, and thus save yourself.’

      She remembered the faint smell of urine when she arrived at Verrucosus’s room and the flies buzzing over the thin reed mat that was to serve as the bed where she would lose her maidenhood.

      Verrucosus emerged from a corner reeking of pomegranate wine, his face decorated with warts. When he moved to embrace her with his sticky hands, she whirled out of his grasp and out the door.

      As it happened, Verrucosus was the kind of man who embellished his anger with lies. ‘Oh, I had her,’ he bragged all around the city. ‘And I can tell you that she is as cold and hard as a slab of marble.’

      The gossip spread with the speed of arrows. ‘He does not speak truth,’ Arria assured her friends, but she could see that they did not wish to associate with a woman whose family had been brought so very low.

      ‘Your beauty alone will attract a husband,’ her mother continued to assure her. ‘And your skills and education are beyond what would be expected from…’

      ‘From a pauper?’ Arria asked.

      She was nineteen by that time. Most of her friends had already borne their first children. She tried to believe her mother’s words. She was beautiful and worthy and as long as she believed it, the world would, too.

      But she did not believe it. She was poor and without a dowry, and rumoured to be impure. How could she hold her head above so much shame and disgrace? How could she be desired by any man?

      Thus she fashioned a third crumb for herself. She told herself she was, in fact, fortunate that no man wanted her. Indeed, she was blessed to be free of a husband. Men were careless and inconstant, after all—prone to gambling and drink. Her father and brother were burden enough. She could not even imagine what she would do with a husband.

      She fed herself this crumb in moments of yearning—moments such as this one, as she observed the intertwined limbs of the Beast and the woman he had pretended to be his wife. No pleasure of the flesh could be worth the burden of matrimony, though to be fair this particular couple was not married at all. And they had shared something beautiful.

      In that instant, Arria realised that she was tired of crumbs. She wanted the whole pie and now it was too late. Somewhere in the course of her life, she had managed to miss one of its greatest pleasures. The opportunity for love and passion had passed her by.

      And now she would be invisible for the rest of her life.

       Chapter Five

      The guard placed a bowl of barley mash on the floor of Cal’s cell, then slammed the iron gate and pulled the lock into place with a clank. The ritual was wholly unnecessary, at least to Cal’s mind. Even if the gate were left open wide, he would not attempt to flee.

      There was no point in flight. He had learned that lesson well enough after his fourth attempt at escape—or was it fifth? They always caught you. They always won. He had the lash marks to prove it—twenty of them, or was it twenty-one?

      The Roman citizenry had been divided since time immemorial—the patricians versus the plebs, Romulus versus Remus, the red charioteers versus the whites. But Roman citizens were remarkably united when it came to the control and policing of slaves.

      They were especially vigilant here in Ephesus, one of the largest slave markets in the Empire, whose number of slaves made up a full one-third of the population and whose number of professional slave catchers grew with each passing day. The Romans feared an uprising and justifiably so. A proper slave revolt would bring revenge killing, looting and, gods forbid, the loss of slave labour.

      Cal himself had tried to start such a revolt once. He had the stab wounds to prove it. Five of them—or was it six?

      There was no escaping the Empire of Rome. That was the lesson he had finally learned. At least not in this miserable world. Thus, in four short days, he planned to depart. He would lay himself bare before his opponent and position himself for a clean death.

      And thus he would finally escape Rome for ever.

      He glanced at his possessions, which he kept neatly arranged in a small cubicle in the wall. The concavity was meant to be a shrine—a place for gladiators to place their religious idols and offerings. But Cal had long ago given up on his gods and so he used the cubicle as a storage space for the few objects he called his own: a clean loincloth and lavatory sponge, a toothpick, a bottle of olive oil for washing, a shell from the beaches of his homeland. A spoon.

      And now, it seemed, a hairpin. He picked up the tiny metal object. It was too small to be of use as a weapon, or as a pick for any kind of lock. It was so very delicate, in fact, that he wondered of what real use it could be in a typical woman’s hair.

      Though the woman whose hair it had graced had been anything but typical. And when she had bent it with her teeth before his eyes, it had seemed the most incredible object in the world. He could hardly remember the pain that had followed when she had plunged the pin into his open wound. All he could remember was the woman’s lips around the pin and the quiet, savage confidence she exuded in bending it.

      Strangely, it was the memory of the Roman woman that had lingered in his mind—not the German woman he had bedded. The German had been familiar; the Roman a living riddle. How perfectly appalled the Roman had been when she realised that the fights had been fixed. As if justice were a thing to be expected in this world. As if it were some kind of birthright.

      Yet her birth itself was obviously quite common. Only a plebeian woman would dare thrust herself into a crowd