He stood and waited for a response, a slight smile on his face, and Marcus looked back at him for a moment before the realisation of who the newcomer was dawned upon him, a snatched memory of a face seen in the light of torches in the city weeks before, the hairs on the back of his neck rising.
‘Mortiferum?’
The other man grinned back at him, shaking his head.
‘No, I’m his brother, as it happens.’
‘You’re Velox?’
The gladiator nodded.
‘You’ll have to forgive the rather bombastic nature of my arena name, but it’s so much easier than trying to persuade anyone to use my real name that I’ve more or less stopped trying.’
Horatius stepped forward and offered his hand to the gladiator, who clasped it and then reached out to repeat the greeting with Marcus, who realised that he was giving a good impression of being awestruck by the man’s presence, even if his main emotion was in reality simple hatred. He took the hand, looking into the other man’s eyes as they clasped.
‘Forgive me, it’s not often that a man gets to meet an arena legend.’
Velox shook his head.
‘We’ll have none of that nonsense in here. Within the ludus we have no adulation, whether contrived or not …’ He paused, looking at them both with a sombre expression. ‘After all, any of us might meet the other on the sand at some point. In here, my friends, we are brothers, from the youngest tyro to the most experienced and deadly man in the place.’
Marcus inclined his head in recognition of the generous sentiment, turning to introduce Dubnus only to find the big man staring over his shoulder down the corridor. Looking round to see what had caught his attention, he realised that a group of three men had gathered around a single woman at the far end of the run of cells. She was wiry, and as tall as the shortest of them.
‘Ah yes.’ Velox’s voice took on a sardonic note. ‘Those of us not disposed towards enjoying each others’ bodies have the choice of either taking a handful of grease and closing their eyes or forcing themselves on the slave girls, which is, after all, what they’re here for. Apparently.’
As they watched, it became clear that the gladiators gathered around the woman were playing with her as a prelude to something much more direct, taking advantage of the fact that she was carrying a bucket of meat stew with both hands and unable to prevent their lewd groping. Dubnus shook his head, his anger evident to Marcus in his narrowed eyes and tight lips.
‘Is that woman assigned to this corridor?’
Velox nodded, speculatively eying the hulking Briton.
‘She is. But if you fancy taking her for a ride you may find there’s something of a queue. You should-’
The Briton brushed past him, striding purposefully down the run of cells with a set in his shoulders that Marcus had seen before.
‘Excuse me brothers, I suspect that this is about to get nasty.’
He slipped past the champion gladiator with a nod, padding quietly after his friend who had stopped a few feet from the scene of the servant girl’s molestation.
‘Get your dirty fucking hands off her!’
His booming command silenced the hubbub in an instant, and the three men who were now dragging the woman towards a cell swivelled to face him, one of them the gladiator who had been bested by the three friends that morning. In an instant they were lined up across the corridor with their fists clenched. Hermes stepped forwards, raising his right hand to display his scarred knuckles in an unambiguous threat.
‘And who the fuck do you think you are, tyro?’
Dubnus straightened his back, folding his massive arms.
‘I think I’m the man who’s going to put his fist through your face so hard you’ll have to reach back to blow your nose, unless you back down and leave the woman alone.’
Hermes walked forward until he was within a foot of the Briton, who allowed his hands to fall to his sides.
‘Beating me with a wooden sword doesn’t give you any rights in here, Briton. Until the day I can meet you with iron and put you in your place, you’d better keep your head down, unless you want to get a quick reminder of just how far down the ladder you are from me. That woman is ours. Mine. I’ve fucked her before, and I’ll fuck her again, any time I like. She’s a slave, so I’m free to do whatever I want to her. And when I’m done, these other men will take their turn with her. We’re happy, ’cause we get to empty our balls, and the master’s happy because a happy gladiator is a quiet gladiator.’
‘And the woman?’
Ignoring the dangerous note in the Briton’s question, Hermes threw his arms out wide, turning his head to grin at his audience.
‘The woman? Well she doesn’t get a choice, does she boys? She just gets a regular load of our-’
He didn’t see the punch coming until it was way too late, a fast left-handed hook that smacked him full in the face and bounced him off the wall to his left. The gladiator tottered, groaned once, the long, slow moan of a man who was already no better than semi-conscious, then slumped gracelessly to the corridor’s floor. In the instant before violence erupted, while the men around him were still goggling at the speed and ferocity with which the Briton had put their comrade away, a bellow of command froze them in place.
‘Hold!’
Marcus started at the snapped order, realising that Horatius had advanced down the corridor half a step behind him, but before he had time to register any gratitude for the other man’s support, the gladiators gathered about them stirred angrily at the sight of their friend sprawled across the stone floor.
‘Fuck you! You’re not in the bloody legion now, Centurion. We’re going to kick the fucking shit out of all three of you, and then-’
‘No …’ Velox’s voice cut through the rapidly escalating anger with ease, silencing the rumble of threats with his first word. ‘You won’t.’
The gladiator stalked down the corridor, easing past Marcus and Horatius and planting himself in front of Dubnus with self-assurance oozing from every pore.
‘You won’t raise a finger against these men. Not just because I reckon they’d give half a dozen of you a good hiding and come looking for more. And not even because if you do, and trust me on this, I will personally kill, slowly and with the greatest pleasure I can squeeze from the act, the man who makes the first move. And you know how much I like to live up to my arena billing.’ He looked around him, his face hard, and Marcus saw more than one of the men around them flinch at the overt threat. ‘They don’t call me “The Master of Carnage” without good reason, do they? Be the first one to step forward against these men and tomorrow morning it’ll be just you and me, with sharp iron and no question of mercy.’
He looked about him with an expression of disgust.
‘It’s not even because I’m tired of you dirty bastards degrading these poor helpless bitches just because you can. No, the reason that you’re not going to touch these men is because, as I was just about to tell them, is that they’re fighting in the morning. So right now you can consider this as an instruction from Sannitus himself, since he asked me to give them the good news. And knowing Sannitus as well as I do, and the expectations he has of these three, I can assure you all that the first man to raise a fist will have an easy enough exit from this life at my hands, compared with what’ll happen to the others when I tell him who else participated.’
A moment’s silence stretched until first one, and then another of the men who had squared up to Dubnus looked down at their feet, and the tension ebbed from the situation like water from a split skin.