city of the Caesars. The last time he'd been here they had first put him in the arena, and then 'Mad Nero' had sentenced him to life as an oar slave on the galleys of Rome. No, the Imperial City still had a bad taste for him and he stayed close to the ship, not venturing much further than the nearest tavern for a drink now and then. Finally they had reloaded their cargo holds and made sail. They sailed first to the west, then north, this time to Messilia in Gaul, where he had first enlisted as a boy in the legions.
He felt an increasing desire to be gone from the hot humid lands of the Mediterranean and also away from the Pax Romana. There was only one place he could go where the long arm of Roman law didn't reach-across the Rhine into Germania. He also wanted to see if what the mercenaries he had served from the northlands had said about the women was true. It was a poor reason, but who said you had to have a good one?
Casca felt a sense of relief when they finally left Ostia behind them and headed out again to the open sea and into the clean sea air. Here the stench of a decaying and corrupt empire would fade with the distance. Rome still left a bad taste in his mouth. At nights, when the sea was quiet and the bireme rocked to and fro with the swells, he would often awake with a jerk, his body soaked in cold sweat as memories rushed on him in his sleep. In his nostrils would be the sweet, sick smell of blood.
It was blood from the sands of the arena-the circus where he'd fought for the amusement of the Roman public, where women in a frenzy would sell themselves into slavery, making wagers on who would die. He could hear the voice of Corvu, the Lanista, barking out commands at the tyros, the same as a sergeant in the army would, constantly repeating commands to recruits until the response to orders became automatic.
'Don't go for the throat or the leg-get the gut first. It's the biggest target. Cut the bastard after he's down. Remember, a leg wound might eventually slow a man up, but if you get careless he can still kill you. Play it safe. Only get fancy when you know he's through; then make it look tougher than it is. Keep in mind that you're out there to entertain the people, not get yourselves killed. Let the bastards from the other schools do the dying.'
But even Corvu was not above rigging a fight against one of his own students if the man was a troublemaker. It was simple enough to arrange. A little draught of a sleeping drug in the cup of posca, the watered vinegar that each gladiator would rinse his mouth with before entering the arena, would insure that in a few minutes the man's reaction time would slow down. And before the audience caught on that he was drugged, his opponent would surely take advantage of the situation and put a quick end to the unfortunate one.
But of all the faces of the arena, the one that haunted him most was Jubala, the monstrous black prince from Africa. He was a giant of a man, with the strength and courage of a desert leopard, and with a hatred in his heart that made him not just a hunter, but a killer who fed his hate on pain and death…
So that even now, when the hortator of the bireme struck the skin hide of the drum to set the measure for the oarsmen, Casca could feel a twinge seem to ripple over his back, for a slave master's lash, on the galley he had slaved on, had made its mark there. All this, he owed to Rome. But still, he was a Roman.
When they reached Messilia, Casca transferred over to a grain ship heading up the Rhone to Lugdunum, again trading the muscles in his back and arms for passage. Leaving the barge at Lugdunum, he took a large portion of his remaining sesterces and bought a young gray ass to carry what wealth he had on its small back, and struck out, trying to avoid contact with any of the Roman garrison along the way. After all, he was still a deserter and the arm of Rome is as long as her roads, reaching from Asia to Britannia. He didn't really understand why he wanted to cross the Rhine into Germania, but his feet took him to the same spot where he had killed his first man. Was that it?
Had he come back here because this was where he'd become a soldier, where his sword for the first time had cut the life out of another human? The number he had taken since that day, he couldn't recall. Only rarely did a face stand out in his mind for a moment, then fade back into the mists of the past where they belonged…
Perhaps forgetting helped him to keep his sanity. If all the slaughter and pain he had inflicted and suffered himself were to come to him at one time, it would be too much for his mind to stand. Perhaps forgetting was the way the mind cured itself of the sickness that could linger with bad memories.
It was with a sense of something yet to come that he reached the banks of the Rhine just before nightfall. It was too late to make a crossing now; he would have to wait until the morning. He cast a regretful look at his ass and sighed. There was no way he would be able to get the animal across the rushing waters… So, waste not, want not. And it was time for chow.
Chapter One
Casca watched the broad back of Glam Tyrsbjorn as the ox of a man moved with amazing silence through the brush and tall forest. His double-handed sword hung from a sling on his back and a single-bladed axe dangled from a thong on his side. In his hand, he carried a spear made for the killing of wild pigs, but it served as well for men.
Glam was the first man he'd met when he came out of the waters of the Rhine and then, the red-nosed, oversized hunk of sausage had wanted to rob him and leave him all but naked. What was it I called him that pissed him off so much..? Turnip dick, that's it!
He had conned Glam into putting down his weapons and letting the Roman come out of the water to fight him with bare hands. Glam was big, even for a barbarian, but the Roman had learned something about fighting with empty hands that the barbarians of the dark woods had no concept of. They only knew to hit and smash or, if you were strong enough, to grab your opponent and squeeze his ribs until they caved in. Glam's brute strength was no match for the few techniques taught Casca by the yellow philosopher from beyond the far Indus river, where the priests learned to defend themselves without the aid of anything more than their own hands and feet. True, Shiu Lao Tze had not taught Casca a great deal, but what he had was more than enough to make him a match for anyone he had met so far on this side of the world.
But Casca also knew that if he screwed up and missed one of his movements, a good blow could knock him down. And no matter who it was, if you were landed a really good shot, the odds were you would get your brains kicked out, tricks or no tricks. Since then, he and Glam had become sword companions and Glam had been his guide and teacher. The gruff bear of a man was basically good-natured and, once he had gotten over being peeved at Casca for whipping his butt, he became a fast and good friend. They'd had no more disputes since that day when, after tossing Glam into the Rhine, he had threatened to braid the big German's legs if he didn't behave himself. When Glam had considered the effect that this act would have had on his sex life, he'd rapidly agreed to a truce.
But now there was something else happening ahead of them that demanded their attention. The sun was up only an hour and low mist swirled around the roots of the giant pine and fir trees twisting up into the morning sky. They were like ghostly tendrils, which some of the legends spoke of as being the spirits of fallen warriors eternally searching to find their way to the great Halls of Valhalla.
A touch of smoke mixed with the vapors. Barely audible were the distant sounds of dying. Shrill screams from women and children mingled with the deeper grunts of men killing each other. Casca raised his face to smell the mist, to search out the direction of the cries. In these dark primordial forests, sounds were hard to pinpoint.
He loosened his sword in its scabbard and took his small, round, hide-covered buckler with a brass boss in the center from the pack on his back.
The gray-blue eyes sparked with anticipation. His companion, that monstrous bear of a man who, from a distance could have been easily mistaken for one wrapped as he was in the hides of those beasts, swung his single-bladed axe from his shoulder and ran a calloused finger over the edge. Glam, son of Half Gan the Ganger, wiped his other hand on his bristled beard to get rid of any sweat so he could get a better grip on his broad-bladed boar spear. 'Do we go?'
Casca nodded his head in the affirmative. They knew that the sounds of battle in the distance were probably instigated by the members of the Quadii, who had been raiding far from their tribal lands.
More than once since the snows had gone they had come across the mountain passes to leave gutted and burned villages behind them, taking with them only the women and children. The rest were put to the sword. The women and children brought high prices in the slave markets. The survivors would find themselves being offered for sale, time and again, many going as far as the slave pens of Rome or even Alexandria in Egypt. Fair hair and blue eyes brought high prices and Germans were known to make good slaves if you could catch them young
