The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(17)
The cornua sounded their mournful, strident notes.
The combatants stepped toward each other.
“What’s the theme of the day?” Elka asked.
I squinted at the painted board at the far end of the arena detailing the particulars of the dramatic representation we were about to watch, working out the meaning of the words one at a time. One letter at a time, really. I’d been neglecting my reading lessons of late.
“Something about Rome’s gallant—and, of course, triumphant—struggles,” I replied, “against the . . . the barbarous hordes from the four corners of the world.”
Elka’s subsequent eyeroll was almost an audible thing.
I grinned and kept reading. “The first round of contests will consist of four duels fought . . . uh . . .”
“Simultaneously,” Quint helped me out. “It means at the same time.”
“Right.” I nodded, tucking the unfamiliar word away into my growing store of Latin and peering at the board. “Simultaneously. The winners of those contests will go on to fight in two pairs. And those winners will then fight each other for the prize.”
At least, that was how it was supposed to go. And it was painfully obvious which combatant was expected to win in each matchup. Four legionnaire-like murmillo fighters—the “heroes”—all squaring off against a variety of the other classes—the “villains.”
The first round followed the prescribed format, as expected.
The fights were well-matched, the combatants mostly evenly skilled. One gladiator—a thraex—fell to a sword thrust to the upper thigh and would likely need a good deal of stitching to close him up again. Another, a retiarius, dropped to his knees after a showy, frenzied bout that ended with both his net and his trident torn from his hands. Clearly the crowd’s favorite whipping post, he left the sands with a wave of his hand and was showered in a flurry of cheerful catcalls. The third combatant fared rather worse and had to be helped back into the tunnel after being knocked senseless from a vicious blow to the head.
That left only Cai and his opponent engaged.
The two adversaries danced, bobbing and weaving in a circle around each other, probing for weaknesses, feinting, attacking, defending, and backing off to circle again. The murmillo fighter was competent, but more inclined to brutishness rather than finesse. He had a thick, bullish neck and bulging arms and thighs. He was shorter than Cai, but he must have outweighed him by fifteen or twenty libra. The heavy bronze plates studding the leather belt that girdled his waist protected his vitals from Cai’s longer reach and curved blades whenever he managed to snake round the edges of the scutum, but the sica had still hit the mark early on and more than once. The man’s shield-arm shoulder and biceps were running blood from several long, shallow cuts.
Cai had remained, to that point, unscathed as far as I could tell. Still, it was almost unbearable sitting up there in the stands watching him fight. I felt my hands clenching and unclenching every time he flexed his fingers on the hilts of his swords. My muscles tensing with his blocks and blows . . .
A solid strike from his opponent’s shield sent Cai staggering across the sands, drawing a roar of approval. The crowd was clearly on the side of the murmillo fighter. Decurion Caius Antonius Varro might have been widely known as the dashing young legion officer who’d so gallantly celebrated my triumph as Victrix with a passionate kiss before the whole of the Circus Maximus, but Cai the Gladiator was nothing but a patricide—a murderer and a pariah—and, oh, how loudly they howled for his spectacular death. Of course, the thing about the Roman mob was this: You could be guilty of a crime without a trial, without evidence, with vastly mitigating circumstances . . . but to be innocent? You only had to prove yourself worth something.
Entertainment, as Caesar had so shrewdly surmised, was worth a great deal. And the mob would reap a marvelous return on the coins they’d paid out to enter the theater that day. The tide of bloodlust was running high and hectic. The other three bouts had been perfunctory, serviceable, and over too soon. But Cai’s fight was getting interesting. Entertaining.
The murmillo was getting tired. The weight of hefting around not only his shield but his own considerable bulk had him running with sweat. The point of his gladius kept dipping carelessly, and the bottom of the murmillo’s shield angled too sharply in toward his center line—only a handsbreadth, maybe two . . .
I took a sharp breath in and leaned forward, rigid with anticipation.
“Ja!” Elka exclaimed fiercely when she saw the same opening.
Does Cai see? I wondered, my heart in my throat.
He answered suddenly—and with a definitive yes—ducking low and lunging in a diving arc with both sica darting out in front of him like flicking serpents’ tongues. As Cai scrambled past his adversary, the points of his curved blades tagged the murmillo again—this time on the back of his legs, below his armored kilt. Blood splashed from a wound behind the gladiator’s knee on his right leg, while the shin guard on his left dangled loose, flopping from the single strap left holding it on.
“That’s it!” Quint punched the air with his fist. “Take the bastard down!”
Cai spun and delivered a sharp kick to the outside of the murmillo’s now-unprotected left knee, and he crumpled and hit the ground in a cloud of dust, blood pooling on the sand beneath him. The injuries were precise and purposefully not career-ending, but any weight the gladiator tried to put on his injured right leg that day would just send him back down in a heap. The bout was over.