Varro darted to the left, but so did the man in front of him.
“Who do you seek?” Timarchides asked, throwing back his hood.
Varro glanced past the Greek’s shoulder, seeing the litter receding through the crowd. He made to shove Timarchides aside, but the burly Greek grabbed his hand.
“You miss my touch, Varro? Is that it?”
Varro bellowed with anger, and punched with his free hand, a blow that Timarchides easily dodged. The freedman twisted and turned so that he dragged Varro’s right arm with him, throwing the Roman over his shoulder and hard to the ground. But Varro grasped at his tormentor, tugging down on his tunic, and planting his foot in Timarchides’s stomach as he fell, propelling the freedman in a somersault over his head and hard into a stack of earthenware jars.
A crowd began to gather, calling and jeering at the fighting men.
Teeth gritted against the pain of a dozen jagged cuts, Timarchides threw himself at Varro. But the gladiator rolled deftly out of the way, and snatched up a meat cleaver from a butcher’s table. He advanced toward Timarchides, swishing the iron blade experimentally.
“Think on what you are doing, Varro,” Timarchides said, backing away as the crowd gave the men wide berth.
“I have thought on it long and hard,” Varro said, luxuriating in the weight of the cleaver. He grabbed Timarchides by the neck, raising the cleaver high above his head in victory.
“I am a free man,” Timarchides choked as Varro pulled his head back. “And you, a slave. Take my life, and you take your own as surely as if you had slit your own throat.”
Varro hesitated, only for an instant, before a wooden club descended upon his head. His vision exploded in a cloud of pinpricks of light, whirls of darkness encroaching from the edges of his sight, the sharp pain registering only briefly, as unconsciousness came over him, and he slumped to the ground.
“Gratitude,” Timarchides said to the butcher who had struck the blow.
“No slave shall strike a freeman,” the butcher said, holding out his arm, partly in a gesture of camaraderie, but also with the palm upturned, in hope of reward. But Timarchides had already turned, running for the next set of stone steps toward the harbor, leaving Varro at the feet of an inquisitive crowd.
Varro moaned, softly, stirring from his sudden slumber. He made to get up, but slumped once more, weary beyond words.
The bearers were sweating hard now, their feet stumbling as they tried to keep up the pace. The Sardinian boy at the back was dragging his feet. The old man at the front was flagging, causing the litter to lean dangerously along the axis.
Verres frowned with irritation, and prepared to rebuke them, only for something to come charging out of nowhere, speeding from a staircase between two houses, straight into the side of the litter.
The litter pitched to the side and then crashed to the ground, upending Verres and his cushions.
“Fools!” he shouted, clambering to his feet. But as his head poked through the curtains, he saw the agents of his demise, Spartacus and the Getae witch, chained together by manacles at their wrists, and already locked in combat with the bearers.
Verres gazed momentarily on the scene, and then caught sight of Timarchides dashing into the street a block further up at the next set of steps.
“To the harbor, Timarchides!” he shouted. “We sail with tide, with all who reach docks in time.” With that, Verres darted for the alleyway between two houses that concealed the next staircase toward the harbor, the masts of the ships already looming above the rooftops nearby, the cry of gulls already rising above the voices of the streets.
Spartacus and Medea faced four, all bearing knives. As one, he and Medea snatched up broken pieces of the carrying poles, now readied as makeshift clubs.
The first bearer lunged at Spartacus. The gladiator dodged instinctively, unwittingly dragging Medea into the blade’s path. She batted it away with her own club, smacking down on the man’s arm and causing him to drop the knife. Spartacus punched the surprised attacker in the face, but was forced to duck beneath an attack from a second assailant.
Medea snatched up the knife with her left hand, sweeping it up and into the chin of the man who had dropped it, driving its blade through his mouth and into his skull. He tried to scream, but the deluge of blood already choked his throat, causing him instead to cough bright red liquid over the chained fighters. Medea kicked him away, twisting his ruined face from the knife, and leaving him on the ground to die.
Three yet remained, the brands of the House of Pelorus visible on their arms.
“You are betrayed!” Spartacus cried. “Your masters desert you. Surrender and see them brought to justice.”
“Justice already awaits us,” the older man said, whom Varro had called Charon. “Execution is our fate.”
He lunged at Spartacus with the knife. Spartacus leapt backward, dragging an unwilling Medea with him.
“Run!” the old man shouted at the other two.
“But, doctore…” the boy said.
“Run!”
They hesitated long enough for Medea to stab at one, tearing a gaping wound through his ribs to a ruined heart. The man tumbled to the ground, grunting in final agony, leaving but the old man and the boy.
The old man threw himself at Spartacus and Medea, barging them to the ground amid the wreckage of the litter.
The boy saw his chance and fled, pelting down the steps as Spartacus and Medea flailed in the dust. The old man punched and kicked with fierce precision, seemingly knowing all the points where nerves stood close to skin, or muscle gave way to bone.
Medea howled in pain as one well-placed jab found her shin. She rolled away, but was halted by the chain that bound her to Spartacus.
The old man struggled to his feet, only to be tripped by the chain itself as Spartacus and Medea tugged it round his ankles. He landed badly, close to a fallen knife.
“Wait!” Spartacus said. “Do not!”
But the old man drove the dagger deep into his own throat, and crumpled before them, his blood pooling and swelling in puddles, reaching over the edge of the topmost step, and beginning a slow, viscous cascade toward the harbor.
“The boy yet remains!” Medea said.
Spartacus waited not a moment, deserting the still-twitching corpse of the man who once played Charon, and dragging Medea down the last set of steps that terminated in the harbor itself, amid a thrumming bustle of sailors and merchants, whores and slaves.
Spartacus and Medea charged with locked steps, their paces matched as if a single man of twice their weight pounded along the dockside jetty. Their arms pumped in unison, unencumbered by the chains that truly bound them, and steadily, achingly, they began to draw near to the fleeing Sardinian boy.
He leapt over boxes on the jetty. He darted past sailors at their tasks. But then, he tripped.
His flight was halted for mere moments, but it was long enough for his twinned pursuers to reach him.
Spartacus grabbed at the boy, bringing all three of them down hard onto the wood with the thump of bodies and the rattle of chains. The boy twisted and wriggled, straining against Spartacus’s firm hold, his free hand reaching for his fallen knife.
“Let me go,” the boy pleaded, “and I shall live free. Hold on to me, and I shall be broken in pursuit of futile truth.”
Spartacus looked into the boy’s eyes, and saw for the briefest instant what some slaver might have once seen in the eyes of a forgotten Thracian-a plea poised on the brink between chains and liberty, a moment when a man might yet be free, if only he could make one final sprint for sanctuary.
“I have my orders,” Spartacus said, with reluctance.