‘Macro, look out!’
As Macro glanced up, Cursor locked his arm round the soldier’s neck, wrenching him off Hermes. Gasping for breath, Macro kicked out at the gladiator trainer, slamming his foot back into the man’s groin. Cursor doubled up in agony, releasing Macro. The optio spun round and unleashed an uppercut that caught Cursor clean on the jaw. The gladiator trainer grunted. There was a dull crack as his jawbone shattered. His mouth went slack and his eyes rolled back. Without pausing for breath, Macro lowered his head and charged at his stricken opponent, burying him under a mad flurry of blows. In the meantime, Hermes had picked himself up. He spat out blood and set his piercing gaze on Pavo.
‘Got you now, traitor,’ he growled.
A sudden cry went up from somewhere in the crowd, distracting the two gladiators. Fighting back the burning pain on top of his skull, Pavo glanced past Hermes and saw a handful of men from the urban cohort barging through the crowd. They used their heavy wooden staves to clear a path and surrounded the gladiators and their trainers. A moment later the officer in charge of the cohort emerged from the heaving throng.
‘That’s enough!’ he fumed as his men hauled Macro off a bewildered Cursor whilst two more seized Hermes and dragged him away from Pavo. When the officer saw Hermes, he was speechless for a moment, staring in obvious admiration at the gladiator.
‘Why, I’ve seen you fight before … You’re Hermes!’ he exclaimed.
The gladiator nodded. ‘That’s me.’
‘I was in the crowd when you defeated that Illyrian scum Demetrius. Best swordsmanship I ever saw, that.’ Remembering his duties, the officer quickly composed his face and snapped his fingers at the two soldiers holding Hermes. ‘Release this man at once. That’s no way to treat a legend of the arena.’
His men did as ordered. Turning away from the gladiator, the officer searched for someone else to blame for the fracas and his eyes settled on Macro. ‘You. Take your gladiator and clear off to the imperial ludus. We don’t want your kind making trouble here.’
‘Get your hands off me!’ Macro boomed, pulling himself free of the men holding him. His nostrils flared with rage as he glowered at the officer. ‘These bastards waded in with their fists.’ He gestured at Hermes and Cursor. ‘The lad and I gave them what they deserved.’
‘Liar!’ a voice cried from the crowd. ‘The stout bastard started it.’
Other fans of Hermes shouted their agreement. The officer glanced at them before turning back to Macro and screwing up his face.
‘From where I’m standing, it appears that you’re the one who attacked first. As for the merchant, I’ll see to it that a bill for damages is drawn up. It’ll be docked from your pay.’
‘Hermes started it!’
‘I don’t give a shit,’ the officer retorted. ‘Now get out of here or I’ll have the pair of you thrown in the Mamertine and you can spend the night in that festering hole with the rats.’
Macro shuddered at the thought. Muttering curses to the gods under his breath, he brushed past Cursor and waved for his young charge to follow as the guards set about dispersing the crowd. Some spectators flocked to the nearby taverns built into the ground floor of the arcade to refill the jars of wine they had brought with them for the day. Others sought out bookmakers to place bets on rival teams ahead of the scheduled chariot races. Pavo tenderly placed a hand on his seeping head wound and winced with pain. As he made to follow Macro, Hermes stepped forward and blocked his path, contorting his snarl into a grotesque grin.
‘Do you remember what happened to your old man after I butchered him?’
Pavo gritted his teeth and made no reply. A sharp memory flashed before him as Hermes leaned in and dropped his voice to a scratched whisper.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten, boy?’ Hermes smirked. ‘Allow me to remind you. His head was piked on a stake and put on display in the Senate House, to serve as a warning to others of the perils of conspiring against Rome.’
There was a flash of anger in Pavo’s eyes. He clamped them shut and clenched his jaws. He had tried to forget the bitter memory of the day he had learned of the final indignity suffered by his father. Now a flood of rage ran through the young gladiator and every muscle in his body immediately tensed.
‘They left his head on display for days,’ Hermes went on. ‘Birds picked at it. Eventually the smell got so bad they had to take it away. I hear one of the imperial servants dumped it in the River Tiber.’
‘I will kill you,’ Pavo hissed, ‘for what you’ve done to my family, I swear to the gods.’
Hermes sneered at him. ‘I don’t think so, traitor. The gods always favour me. In two months’ time, the next head on a stake will be yours.’
CHAPTER FORTY
‘Slow down, lad!’ Macro bellowed at training the following morning in the grounds of the imperial ludus. ‘You’re supposed to attack the palus. Not chop the fucking thing in half.’
Pavo appeared not to hear his mentor. He thrust his training sword manically at the wooden post, gripped by an uncontrollable rage as he mentally imposed the face of Hermes on top of it. There was a dull thwack as the tip of his sword struck the palus at the point of an imaginary neck. Beads of sweat flowed freely down his back. He had been hacking and stabbing aggressively at the palus since Macro arrived at the ludus at dawn to commence the day’s training. He’d worked up a fierce sweat despite the bleak winter chill. His muscles were still sore from participating in the group fight and the flesh wound on his chest had formed a lumpy scab. But the dull throb of his injuries was nothing compared to the leaden feeling in his guts. Pavo had not been able to sleep the previous evening, tossing and turning in his cell as he pictured his father’s severed head on a stake, mocked by his enemies. His desire for revenge had twisted into something darker, an unspeakable urge to maim Hermes. He did not merely want to kill the champion of Rome. He wanted to make him suffer, as he himself had suffered these past months. Snarling through his gritted teeth, he slammed the blade of his sword against the heavily scored palus, as if hacking through Hermes’s neck, his muscles tensed with rage. The sword splintered down the blade as it clattered into the training post. Macro immediately snatched it from Pavo’s grasp.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at, lad?’ he bellowed impatiently.
Pavo glared back, chest heaving. ‘Training, sir. As per your instructions,’ he replied bitterly. ‘You did order me to take out my anger on the training ground.’
Macro snorted and shook his head. ‘I told you to use your rage as a motivation, lad. All you’re doing is blindly hacking at the palus. Good gods, you’re not even practising the moves I taught you. If you try hacking at Hermes like this in the arena, he’ll cut you down before you’ve broken into a sweat.’
Grief and frustration overwhelmed Pavo. He lowered his head and his shoulders slumped heavily. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he panted. ‘But Hermes is a step too far. He’s unstoppable.’
Macro seized Pavo by the shoulders and looked him hard in the eye. ‘Hermes isn’t a god, he’s a scum gladiator. He’ll have a weakness. We’ve just got to work out what it is.’
‘You saw the fight against Criton,’ Pavo protested. ‘He didn’t seem to have any weaknesses that I saw.’
‘Criton hardly launched an attack worthy of the name,’ Macro countered sternly. ‘We’ll make a better fist of it. And look at it this way: if you lose, at least you’ll go down fighting. Do your old man proud, eh?’
Pavo nodded without conviction. In moments like these he cursed his upbringing. For all his knowledge of the Greek tragedies and the history of Rome and his fancy fencing lessons, he lacked the ruthlessness and determination to survive of a true warrior. One could not learn how to be tenacious and brave from lessons in school. Macro had both these qualities in abundance, a result of the many years he’d spent as a soldier fighting on the bloodied frontiers of empire. The optio possessed the kind of education one could only hope to acquire through hard graft, Pavo reflected.