‘Oy! What the fuck is going on there?’ the closest guard shouted in a brassy tone of voice. ‘You scum aren’t allowed to talk to each other! You gladiators, you shovel that food down like good little dogs, and you, you slut, you get your tight little cunt back to the kitchens!’
‘I have to go,’ the serving girl murmured as she hastily gathered up the remaining fruit and the platter.
Spartacus’s eyes were locked on the large fruit knife all the while, his gaze both unwavering and terrifying in its intensity. A trickle of melon juice ran down his lip, spreading its sweet stickiness over his chin as he stared, and his focus remained pinned to the blade as the girl picked it up, set it down on the platter and hurried away. Spartacus’s stare did not escape the attention of N’Jalabenadou.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Spartacus. You must stop this. You cannot think such thoughts, you cannot,’ he hissed, his eyes blazing white and protruding slightly from their sockets.
As he replied to the General, however, Spartacus’s eyes remained locked on the body of the serving girl, who was now hurrying out of the room.
‘That knife,’ he murmured, ‘a top-tier gladiator could take any of these guards if he were armed with it, even if he was unarmoured and had no other weapon. Viridovix certainly could. As could you Oenomaus, and you, General.’
‘Stop! Do not speak of this!’ the General whispered harshly, his eyes crackling with sudden panic.
Spartacus remained defiant.
‘I’ll wager that the kitchen is full of knives like that one. See how the masters gorge themselves on beef and pork and chicken and all manner of fruit while they watch us train? There’ll be large, sharp butcher’s knives in there too. Plenty of them…’
Oenomaus smiled, and a dark light sparkled in his eyes.
‘If I had a butcher’s cleaver in each hand, them guards wouldn’t stand a chance against me.’
The General flashed a glance to the left and the right, terrified that someone was listening to this seditious conversation. Crixus seemed to be paying close attention, if he could even discern any of what they were saying from where he was sitting, but thankfully nobody else seemed to have heard anything.
‘No, no!’ the General hissed. ‘This is too dangerous to speak of, you must stop this! All of you! Stop speaking of these things! Stop! It is madness to even speculate about this!’
Spartacus stared straight into the General’s eyes and curved the corners of his lips up into a wicked devil’s grin.
‘You, General, you could defeat any of those fat guards with ease, just armed with that fruit knife we have just seen. I know it. I’ve seen you fight in training. Listen, you spoke to me of freedom just a few days ago. You once led an army! Why now do you cower like a frightened lamb? Why?!’
The General bit his lip and stared at Spartacus with his wide white eyes. His hands were trembling at his sides, and when he spoke his quavering voice began cracking with raw emotion.
‘I’m begging you, stop this. Don’t awaken these old dreams of freedom that I’ve fought so hard to quash. You cannot understand how difficult it has been to suppress these dreams, to force myself to accept this life, over the past seven years, to—’
‘You’ll die like a dog on the sands with that attitude, General,’ Spartacus retorted flatly. ‘You’ll die like a cur, whose entire life and existence is worth nothing but a cheer or boo from a crowd of bloodthirsty plebs. If you stand with us, however, you’ll have your freedom … or at the very least you’ll die like a hero, fighting for freedom until your last breath. Which would you have?’
The General clenched his fists and gritted his teeth, and stared at the ground for many long and drawn-out moments. Eventually he looked up, and his eyes were ablaze with a phosphoric fire that had not burned in them for many a year.
‘Freedom,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I would have freedom.’
PART TWELVE
40
MARGARET
5th October 2020. T’Kalanjathu
The light thrown from the room into the secret passage did not extend very far, and soon Margaret was creeping along in complete darkness. Fear burned with a nauseating sickness in her core, chilling the very marrow of her bones, but curiosity and a determination to escape this place drove her on.
The tunnel, for the most part, seemed smooth and straight. A thick layer of dust underfoot made it obvious that it hadn’t been used in a very long time, and Margaret wondered if the General knew of the existence of this place. A flare of wicked pride blazed like a naked light bulb for a brief instant in Margaret’s heart; here she was, in the heart of the General’s castle, privy to a secret that he did not know.
‘Looks like you don’t actually know everything, smart-ass,’ she mumbled to herself as she crept onward. ‘Even right here under your nose, there’s stuff that you don’t know. I’ll find a way out of this, before you can “enlighten” me, as you’ve been saying. I’ll enlighten you as to just how determined and resourceful Margaret Green can be!’
She noticed the floor starting to slope gently to the right and suspected that this indicated a curve coming up. Sure enough, when she gently bumped into a wall on her left, she realised that this was indeed the case. Keeping both hands on the wall, she edged through the curve until it straightened out again.
‘On we go,’ she whispered to the black tunnel. ‘I wonder how far I’ve gone. Feels like I’ve been walking for at least ten minutes. Gosh darn it, if only I had a flashlight! Then I could make much faster progress, instead of creeping through the darkness like a timid lil’ mouse.’
She pressed on, cautious and anxious but driven on by a crackling optimism that she had not felt
