to take advantage of the fact. He refused to sponsor any further games.
Rufus thought Fronto would be concerned about the fall-off in trade, but where others saw a crisis the trader perceived opportunity.
'Don't worry, boy, the games will be back. They say the youngster Tiberius has chosen as his heir can't get enough of the spectacle. Meanwhile, we are given the opportunity to improve our stock.'
Cupido, interested to learn more about the beasts being readied for the arena, became a regular visitor to Fronto's enclosures. Dressed in his white tunic, he might have been any other handsome young slave of average height and build, but there was a fierceness of spirit in him, a tension and an awareness, that made other men shy away.
He assessed the farm's stock with a professional eye, commenting on the hardiness of one antelope and the stamina or nimbleness of the next. They stopped at the stockade containing what Rufus now knew as the rhinoceros. Cupido laughed aloud when the young slave explained how Fronto had introduced him to the massive animal, which eyed them curiously as they stood by the fence.
'She must be much faster than she appears,' said the gladiator appreciatively. 'And that skin looks as tough as thrice-tanned leather. I wouldn't like to take her with only a sword: it would just bounce off. I think her horns are as much to frighten as to kill, but she'd crush a light infantryman, even a hoplomachus, without any trouble. Perhaps it would take a double team of a netsman and a heavily armoured murmillo like Sabatis to best her?'
Cupido commented on the many empty cages and stockades at the farm. Rufus explained that Fronto was on another trip to Africa to buy fresh stock and assured him they would be full again in a few weeks' time. A shadow clouded the gladiator's eyes.
'Do you think there are enough creatures in the world to keep the Romans amused? Look at them. They are as beautiful as they are wild. Each one has a purpose and a place, from the fiercest of the cats to the most docile of the antelopes. Do they not deserve life?'
'That is a curious point of view for someone who does what you do.'
'When I enter the arena, I leave my feelings in the arming room,' Cupido replied. 'Afterwards, when the blood-letting is finished, it is different. Every life I take, be it animal or man, weighs heavy on my mind. Each individual adds to the burden I carry. I know one day that burden will crush me. But do not be sad for me, Rufus. My fate was decided from the first moment I entered the arena. The rudis is not for me. Give me a clean death and a quick one and I will be satisfied.'
Rufus was surprised at his friend's fatalism. The rudis was the carved wooden sword presented to a gladiator on the day he won his freedom.
'But you are the most celebrated fighter in all Rome. The crowd loves you. Great men seek you out and reward you with gifts and money. The day will surely come when that gift is a wooden sword?'
Cupido shook his head and changed the subject.
'I remember the first day we met, when you cried for the leopard. Soon there will be no more leopards, or antelopes, or rhinoceros. They will all be gone, fed into the insatiable maw of the games. What will you do then?'
'Fronto knows what he is doing. He will find more animals for us,' Rufus said with more confidence than he felt.
'This time perhaps, and the next time. But there will come a day when he cannot. Think on that, Rufus. Think on a means of providing entertainment without blood. I have studied the mob. They don't come only for blood. If you can give them something different, something they have never seen before, perhaps they will be satisfied with a little less of it.'
It was a weary and disheartened Fronto who returned from his mission. The animal dealers at the trading camps on the coast all told the same story. They had few animals to sell and those they did possess were low in quality and high in price. He had hired guides and made the arduous trek into the mountains, but the news was the same. The game either was hunted out or had fled south, and the predators that lived off it had followed. He was venting his frustrations on Rufus by the menagerie gate when they were interrupted by a shout.
'Cornelius Aurius Fronto, you old lecher. You were in Mauretania, but you did not tell me you were going. I might have put some business your way.'
Fronto excused himself and went to meet his visitor, a tall, bald man in a threadbare tunic which hung loose on his thin frame. He spent thirty minutes in deep conversation with his guest, and when he returned to resume his discussion with Rufus the big man looked uncharacteristically thoughtful.
'Who was that?' Rufus asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. Fronto shrugged as if it was of no consequence, but Rufus persisted. 'One day it might be important for me to know this man. You are always telling me knowledge is profit.'
'His name is Narcissus,' the trader said reluctantly. 'He buys and sells commodities.'
'What kind of commodities?'
Fronto didn't answer directly. 'He is the freedman of one of our senators, a minor member of the imperial family. He is very clever, perhaps the cleverest man I know. He speaks seven languages and a dozen native dialects. Sometimes I use him as an interpreter. Sometimes I do him a favour.'
'A favour?'
'Yes. When it suits me I will carry a message to a certain person in a certain port. In return, I receive another message, which I pass to Narcissus.'
'So the commodity he buys and sells is information? Then he is a spy?'
Fronto turned to face Rufus with a dangerous look. 'No. Not a spy. A businessman. He buys and sells, just as I do. If the information eventually reaches the ears of Tiberius that is of no interest to me.'
'He must be an important man, this Narcissus,' Rufus said thoughtfully.
Fronto answered with a superior wave of his meaty hand. 'Oh, Narcissus would like to be important. And rich. But he will be neither. His senator is a crippled nobody and Narcissus's choice of horse is as poor as his choice of sponsor. It is well known at the Circus that if Narcissus backs Red, the gods will favour Green. Come — we have work to do.'
VI
It did not take the animal trader long to discover that all was not as he left it.
Rufus was standing beside the lion pens speaking to Cassius, the head keeper, when a snorting sound behind him made him wonder if one of the enclosures had been left unbarred. But it was Fronto, and he was furious.
'What in the name of the immortal gods have you done? I didn't give you permission to separate the young cats from the adults. You'll ruin them as you did the leopard.'
Rufus had known this moment would come, but he was not prepared for the cataclysmic power of Fronto's wrath. He had hoped to be able to explain his plan earlier, but somehow the moment had never seemed right. Now their faces were so close that the younger man could feel the rage radiating from Fronto like heat from an open fire.
'I left you in charge here, because I believed I could trust you,' Fronto roared. 'All you had to do was keep things running smoothly, but you couldn't help yourself, could you? Don't deny it — I know all about it. I've heard what you have been doing with the lions. Petting them, sitting in the cage with them, feeding them by hand. Jupiter!
You've even been wrestling with the bloody things. When they go into the ring they won't fight the gladiators, they'll try to hug them to death.'
Rufus opened his mouth to speak, but the modest sign of defiance only served to make Fronto angrier.
'You're too soft. I wanted you to have all this, but I didn't work my way from a farm in Etrusca to become a Roman citizen so that you could throw it all away. You will never be anything but a slave. You can move out of the house and back into the slave quarters tonight. Get out of my sight.'
Rufus refused to move as the bigger man tried to force his way past, and Fronto was as much surprised by the weight of the shoulder which halted him in his tracks as by the edge in the boy's voice. Boy? Perhaps no longer. This was a different Rufus from the one who had waved him off three months ago.
