‘Is this the last one?’ N’Jalabenadou asked.
Sphaerus nodded.
‘The last one on this side. Let’s see what my brother says when he returns.’
More owl hoots echoed through the night, and Sphaerus cupped his hands to reply. All of the gladiators then waited in suspenseful silence as Sethos padded across the corridor towards them.
‘Have they all been eliminated?’ Spartacus asked anxiously as the young Syrian approached.
‘All taken care of,’ Sethos replied calmly, ‘swiftly and silently. No alarm was raised.’
The gladiators breathed out a collective sigh of relief.
‘Good,’ N’Jalabenadou said. ‘My brothers, we have arrived! Down there at the end of that courtyard is the armoury. The most risky part of doing this will be battering the doors down, as they are secured with locks. We have to do it this way, I’m afraid, as—’
‘No we don’t,’ a voice piped up, interrupting the General.
‘Why is that?’ he asked, peering through the sea of heads to see who had spoken.
‘I’m a former thief, and one of the best lock-picks you’ll find anywhere in the world,’ announced one of the gladiators, a grizzled Spaniard who, like Sethos and Sphaerus, was a comparatively recent addition to the ludus.
The General smiled, his teeth bright in the moonlight against his ebony skin.
‘Excellent.,’ he remarked. ‘We do indeed have a diverse group of talents here! Come then, my lock-picking friend, gain us access to the armoury, and freedom will be but one final step away.’
***
Viridovix sat in the dank cell below the dining hall, chewing listlessly on a piece of gristle from a plate of scraps that had been scraped from the plates of Batiatus’s guests. Down here he could hear the undulating waves of noise crashing, ebbing and flowing from the huge hall above, somewhat muted because of the distance, but still quite distinctly audible.
He reached down and touched the cut on his calf, received in his earlier fight against Lucius. He pressed a fingertip to the pared skin and winced as pain shot up his leg – the cut had been deep, and blood had run all the way down his leg over his ankle to pool and congeal in his sandals, between his toes. With listless fingers he took another scrap from the plate and popped it into his mouth, chewing mechanically as he picked at the flakes of dried blood with his free hand. In this particular cell, unlike the underground gladiators’ cells in which he slept each night, there was a large window. It was heavily barred, but it was nonetheless a welcome portal to the outside world. He stared out at the night sky above, losing himself in memories as he focused his gaze on the great round face of the moon.
‘Moon Goddess,’ he whispered to himself. ‘I remember a night many years ago, when you were just as beautiful as you are tonight.’
His mind wandered back to a different time, well over half a lifetime ago. The night had been like this one – an eve in the dying days of late summer, the air ripe with the scents of flowers in bloom mingled with the damp, earthy perfume of the forest with all her greens and browns, alive with a smorgasbord of textures rough, smooth, soft, prickly and mossy. Viridovix had been young then, a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood, as yet unmarked by the tattooist’s bone-needle and untainted by the violence and gore of warfare. Through the forest he had wandered, drinking in the scents like too much mead, losing his senses in the multifaceted symphony of the night. Down through the caltrop tops of the pines the Moon Goddess had drizzled her blue-silver radiance, and amongst the tree-pillars it had blended with the drifting wisps of mist. Fireflies had whirled their phosphorescent paths through the dark; tiny will-o’-the-wisp ghosts igniting microscopic comet trails through that fecund galaxy, little balls of drifting fire that had led this lost youth through the labyrinth of rough-barked pillars, through the liquid shadows and drifting moonlight … to her.
The rustle of a zephyr coursing through the night forest with a pack of distant wolves on its heels had carried her scent, misting its disintegration over the young Viridovix as he had wandered, and wondered.
The tricklings scattered by the warm breeze had sent chills of delight and sylph-wisps of anticipation rippling along his skin; she had come, and she was waiting. There, in the midst of the moon-rain, in the eye of a swirling tornado of fireflies she had stood, waiting for him in an ancient oaken grove; sacred ground, and a holy place for his people and their ancestors. Her hair unbound, burnished liquid gold, as if she had been baptised upon a blacksmith’s forge, her skin milk-white and aglow with the Moon Goddess’s blessing, her lips a welcoming furrow in the mystery of the forest.
Eager young hands, trembling with the sweet violence of first love, feeling that crackling lightning blasting through the night air, ripping stars from the sky and weaving those celestial jewels into the fury of fumbling fingers and dancing tongues, carrying the heady saturation of scent and taste to the point of glorious oblivion, to—
‘Oy! Strap your armour back on, dog! You’re up to fight again! Hurry it up!’
Reality came rushing to the fore, crushing the memory and sending those dried up butterfly-wing recollections into crumbling ruin and annihilation.
‘I cannot think of these things,’ Viridovix muttered to himself as he began to strap on his armour, steeling his will against the deep sadness that threatened to crush every last atom of his spirit. ‘The past is gone. It is lost, forever. This is my fate. This … is my fate.’
When he strode back into the hall, he saw that a makeshift cage had been readied right in the centre of the hall. It was a very large structure, big enough to hold an elephant or two at the very least, and
