The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(16)

The games that day were held in the Theatrum Pompeii on the Campus Martius, on the northwest edge of the capital. It was a much smaller venue than the Circus Maximus, where I’d fought during Caesar’s Quadruple Triumphs, but it was still an impressive structure. Tiered stone seating rose in steps that curved like the sides of a bowl up around a raked-smooth, sandy half circle. The theater was the first of its kind in the city and mostly used for dramatic presentations. As I understood it, it had been commissioned by a man named Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—Pompey the Great—a great friend of Caesar’s, and a greater rival. Pompey had been assassinated two years before I’d arrived in Rome, at the behest of Cleopatra’s brother Ptolemy, the Aegyptian boy king with whom she’d been at war. Ptolemy, so the tale went, had thought to curry favor with Caesar by sending him Pompey’s severed head. The effect had been exactly the opposite, with Caesar enraged and disgusted by the gesture. Things had gone rather poorly for Ptolemy after that. Caesar had sided with Cleopatra, and so Cleopatra had, of course, won.

In recent weeks, the queen had been a live-in guest of the Ludus Achillea, visiting my sister while the great love of her life attended temple dedications and other public functions with his dour—but nonetheless proper aristocratic Roman—wife. Cleopatra wasn’t happy about the situation she found herself in, but she was also pragmatic about it. Before coming to the ludus, she’d sent her young son—hers and Caesar’s—back to Alexandria, telling Sorcha it was so he could begin a proper Aegyptian education, but I wondered if that was the whole truth. Public opinion of Cleopatra had never climbed up out of the roadside gutters, and public opinion on Caesar’s civil wars swung wildly from week to week. Depending, it seemed to me, on the weather and the wind and however much a wine jug sold for in the marketplace.

To say the mob was not fickle was to never have encountered the mob. It was the very essence of the gladiatorial games. The reason for their existence: public opinion. Which could be a very dangerous thing. And not just for upstart Aegyptian queens.

I already knew, walking into the theater beside Elka and Quint, that public opinion was heavily stacked against a certain ex-decurion-turned-gladiator. I could hear snatches of horridly gleeful speculation and saw the wagers being traded back and forth. The odds seemed to overwhelmingly favor Cai’s impending bloody demise. I wondered if anyone in the crowd would have kept that opinion to themselves if they’d known who I was. But I also couldn’t blame the plebs for not recognizing me—or even Elka, for that matter—dressed as we were, as Sorcha had mandated, in our stolas and pallas.

But we certainly weren’t the only ones who were unrecognizable that day.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was startling to see Cai out of uniform, dressed in the gear and attire of a gladiator. He stood over by the Flaminian dugout adjusting the fit of his leather wrist bracers and, once I realized it was him, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Cai had let his hair grow out from the military cut he’d always worn. It brushed the sides of his face, just above his jawline, which stood out sharply, accentuated by the stubble that shadowed his cheeks and chin. I’d never seen Cai unshaven before. He wore no breastplate, no tunic, just a short leather-strap battle kilt and a broad leather belt that protected his abdomen but left his chest and arms bare. A bronze helmet lay on the bench beside him, fashioned to look like it sported two curving ram’s horns, one on either side. He turned to pick up his sword belt, and I saw the scars on his shoulder—three jagged parallel lines made by the claws of the bear that had attacked him in Hispania, when he’d been on campaign with Caesar—gleaming pale against the sun-browned skin that slid over the contours of his lean, muscled frame.

He looked nothing like the decurion I knew.

There was something . . . primal about him. Something barely leashed inside his soul, straining to break the bonds of his training. His discipline. I shivered beneath my palla, remembering what Senator Varro had said to him in the moments before Cai had buried his sword in his father’s chest. “You even fight like one of them,” Varro had sneered at his only son. “Like a filthy gladiator. A real legion officer would be ashamed.”

I knew those words had burned into Cai’s heart like a brand. But looking at him in that moment, I suspected they’d also kindled to life a flame that burned deep within him. The fire of a warrior, not just a soldier. He lifted his helmet, settling it on his head, and drew his blades, and I imagined him painted with woad beneath a thundercloud sky, fighting shoulder to shoulder with me alongside the bravest and wildest of the Cantii warriors. A treasured member of the royal war band . . .

A moment of outlandish daydream, maybe, but a nice one.

I shook my head to clear away the reverie. There was no woad, no thunderclouds. No war band. Cai stood beneath the pale, bright Roman sun, his skin unmarked by paint, waiting to fight for the pleasure of the crowd. I watched as he rolled the tightness from his shoulders, noticing that he seemed to have regained some of the weight he’d lost recovering from his injuries. The too-lean look that had been there on our journey to and from Corsica had disappeared, and I was glad of it. At least he looked healthy enough to fight. And I had faith in Cai’s fighting abilities, having tested them myself on more than one occasion.

For his first contest that day, Cai was slated to fight against an opponent who was kitted out as a murmillo fighter, and I winced at the no doubt intended irony. In recreation spectacles, murmillo were typically cast in the role of the hero and uniformed in such a way as to mimic the glorious legions of the mighty Republic. Cai, on the other hand—and the sight of it instantly made my heart beat faster in my chest—wore dimachaerus gear. Like me. Only, where I wielded two short, straight-bladed swords, Cai had opted to use a pair of sica as his weapons of choice. Sica were longer, curved, and better to use to get around the edges of the scutum. A smart choice.