Forbidden To The Gladiator. Greta Gilbert

      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 of drunken men. And by the look of her threadbare tunic she had been lowborn indeed. Not an exchange-and-trade kind of plebeian. A bread-and-circuses kind of plebeian.

      Not that Cal knew very much about plebeians at all. Winning gladiators mixed almost exclusively with patricians, who frequently paid lanistas like Brutus to place gladiators on display at banquets. In his tenure at Brutus’s ludus, Cal had had seen the inside of more luxurious villas than he could count. He had bedded an equal number of luxurious matrons—women willing to line Brutus’s pockets for a tryst with a killer.

      As a reward for his obedience, Cal was also sometimes granted the company of expensive harlots—women like last night’s German. Over the years, Cal had discovered little difference between the patrician matrons whom he serviced and the expensive harlots who serviced him. Both types of women spent their days looking in mirrors and in so doing seemed to lose a good measure of their souls. Painted, bejewelled and reeking of costly perfumes, they floated from one banquet to another in search of attention and diversion.

      Such women cared little about justice. What interested them most was the size of Cal’s member.

      The Roman woman he had met last night was altogether different. She had been totally unadorned and by the looks of her thin limbs had not seen a banquet