At that moment, however, another guard lunged at Spartus, his gladius perfectly poised for a thrust directly into his chest, and the gladiator had nothing in his hands with which to defend himself, nor any space or time in which to dodge the imminent attack; despair came crashing in a powerful instant through Spartacus’s core. He had started this rebellion but would not live to see the outcome of it. All he could do was twist his body and drop his hands in a hasty, futile attempt to stave off the savage thrust, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth as he prepared for the stab of agony that would accompany the blade’s impalement of his torso … yet the pain never came.
Stunned and surprised, Spartacus opened his eyes and looked down, and saw the point of the blade hovering a mere inch from his chest. And as his eyes traced a passage down the length of steel, and moved onto the hand and arm gripping it, he saw a big, honey-coloured hand holding that arm in place.
The guard, who was just as surprised as Spartacus that his attack had been thwarted, looked up and saw Crixus standing over him, grasping his forearm in a powerful one-handed grip. The big Carthaginian’s face was an expressionless mask, but a dangerous fire blazed brightly in his dark eyes. In a swift, fluid manoeuvre Crixus struck the guard’s wrist with his free hand, breaking the man’s arm and causing him to howl out with pain and drop his gladius.
Spartacus sprang forward and snatched up the weapon, while Crixus slammed his huge right hand over the guard’s flabby throat. Crixus clamped his fingers down, the powerful digits snapping shut around the man’s throat like a bear trap slamming closed, and then he started to lift the guard up off the ground with one hand, staring with a pitiless gaze into the guard’s bulging eyes as the man’s face turned crimson and his swelling tongue jutted obscenely from his mouth.
‘Thanks,’ Spartacus grunted to Crixus as the big gladiator held the guard in his one-handed throttling grip, the man’s fat, pasty legs dangling and kicking helplessly in the air.
‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for years,’ Crixus rasped as he tightened his merciless grip on the hapless guard’s throat.
Spartacus stopped in his tracks, staring with utter surprise at his fellow gladiator, who had finally broken his five-year silence.
Behind him the dazed Titus, whose face was half-caved-in from the force of the amphora smashing against it, saw armed gladiators attacking panicking guards all over the hall. He knew that flight was the only chance he had of surviving this massacre, so he turned and bolted in the direction of the doors – which slammed shut in his face just as he reached them.
‘Let me out!’ he screamed, banging desperately on the rough wood, his voice hoarse with terror. ‘Fucking let me out!’
‘You’re a pig,’ a familiar female voice hissed through the narrow gap between the doors. ‘And you’ve just entered the slaughterhouse.’
On the other side of the door Arishat smiled even as tears streamed down her cheeks.
Titus turned around slowly, his knees hopelessly weak beneath him, panic gushing through his veins, his back pressed against the doors. Everywhere, gangs of gladiators, armed with kitchen knives and weapons they had taken from the dead, were killing off the last few remaining guards. As the General had predicted, once the battle had started all of the gladiators had joined, even those who had previously said they would not participate; blood was sprayed across the walls and was already running thick on the ground.
It did not take long for the gladiators to finish off the guards; after a minute or two every guard but Titus was dead, and not one gladiator was seriously wounded, despite all of them being unarmoured. The gladiators were able, at this point, to discard their butcher’s knives and arm themselves with weapons taken from the fallen guards.
Titus, with blood streaming down his swollen face from his broken nose, knocked-out teeth and split-open lips, watched as the pack of gladiators advanced with slow menace on him. Their eyes shone with an insatiable desire for vengeance, and the bloodied knives, spears and gladiuses they carried were stark beacons in the torchlight, illuminating a long and twisted passage that would take his lost soul from this world to the gates of Hades.
‘Please,’ he whimpered as tears started to roll down his chubby, stubble-rough cheeks. ‘Please, in the names of all the gods I’m begging you, I’m begging you, please, please spare me…’
‘Damn right it’s yourturn to beg,’ Oenomaus rumbled menacingly. ‘So get down on your knees and beg, you bastard. Beg for your miserable life.’
Titus fell to his knees, weeping loudly and plaintively. His hands and arms shook with a violent, palpable terror, and a gush of warm urine ran down his left thigh.
‘Oh please, please, great and glorious and merciful gladiators, oh please in the names of all the gods, oh please, I beg you, I beg you, please be merciful, I beg you!’ he cried, his voice tremulous with fear.
‘A filth like you deserves no mercy,’ the General growled flatly. ‘We will tear your limbs off, one by one. This is how you will meet your Roman gods: limbless, and in the end, headless.’
‘No, oh no! Oh by the gods, please, no! No! Don’t—’
Spartacus sprang suddenly forward, and with one vicious but precise swipe of his gladius he slit Titus’s throat. The cut was deep and wide, and Titus’s throat opened up like a grotesquely yawning mouth, spraying arterial blood all over the oaken doors behind him as he flopped
