‘Ah, back in the world of the living, are you?’ a vaguely familiar voice asked, speaking the hated tongue of Rome.
Viridovix peered up and saw a blurry face leering down at him. As the confusion lifted, dissipating as quick as morning fog retreating from the sun, the man’s features came into crisp focus, and it all started to come back to him.
‘Liar! Oath-breaker! I kill you, I kill you!’ Viridovix snarled through gritted teeth, struggling against the bonds that now restrained him.
‘No, you won’t kill me. You’ll kill your opponents in the arena, like a good slave.’
‘Let me go! Take chains off! I kill you, you dog!’
Lucius smiled; a serene curving of his lips, as if he had not a worry in the world.
‘“Wolf”, if you please, not “dog”,’ he responded calmly. ‘Now, if you can show me that you’ll behave, I’ll loosen your leg irons enough for you to hop along behind me. If you try anything though, and I mean anything at all, I will lock you up here and return with a horse, behind which I will drag you to Batiatus’s ludus. Your choice, Viridovix.’
Viridovix growled and wriggled and writhed against the chains, but try as he might, he could not loosen the bonds.
‘I save you life! You say free me!’ he roared.
Lucius grinned, and his eyes sparkled with a devious gleam.
‘Yes, yes you did save me!’ he exclaimed, his words dripping with mockery. ‘Should you have, though? Despite your current circumstances, I’d say yes, for you saved your own life in the process. After they dispatched me, those Huntsmen would have slaughtered you too, or at best sold you as a galley slave or a quarry slave. Any of the aforementioned fates would have been far worse than the glory of the arena that now awaits you.’
‘I want freedom! You say! Liar! You lie!’
Lucius’s lips curled into a mocking smile, ripe with sardonic glee.
‘Ah, freedom!’ he said, walking around the chained slave in a slow circle, his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of a teacher gripped by the fervour of passionately delivering a stimulating lecture. ‘The dream of every lowly slave! But what would you do with your freedom, Viridovix? Go back to your land, which is now in Roman hands? Your people are all gone; dead and buried, or sold into slavery. It’s sad, perhaps, but it’s a fact, a truth that you can do nothing about, and you would do better to accept it than to fight it. Listen, try to be positive about your current circumstances, why don’t you? You’re about to be given the greatest and most glorious position any slave could aspire to: a gladiator! If you do really well, why, in two or three years you could be out of the insignificant fighting pits in Capua, and swinging your blade in the Colosseum of Rome! Thousands of voices cheering your name in the greatest arena in the world. Think of it, Viridovix, think of it! Women would bare their breasts and get slick between the thighs at the mere sight of you. Men would kill to be you. Boys would take your name as they battle with wooden swords, dreaming that they are claiming the victories that you win on the sands of the arena.’
Viridovix grimaced and spat a mouthful of blood-slicked saliva onto the soil.
‘No! I don’t want! Freedom I want!’
Lucius stopped walking in his circle, shook his head, sighed, and folded his arms across his chest.
‘You certainly are of a stubborn sort, aren’t you? I suppose that that’s good though, and it is promising in a way. Why, it means that you’ll have spirit as a gladiator – you’ll not go quietly to your death like some broken, empty shell of a man. It will, however, make things difficult for everyone else, unfortunately. Batiatus is not known for his kindness towards new recruits … especially those with a rebellious spirit.’
‘Let me go!’
Lucius knelt down beside Viridovix and slapped him hard across his face.
‘That was a mere love-tap compared to the sort of floggings Batiatus will dish out if you show this sort of stubborn insolence in his ludus!’ he hissed. ‘Now stop this foolishness and do as I say!’
Viridovix growled, and his eyes were aflame with a blistering wrath, but this time he did not attempt to argue.
‘I walk,’ he muttered under his breath, defeat and impotent anger clouding his speech to the point of inaudibility.
Lucius smiled cheerfully, his dark threats metamorphosing abruptly into a light, playful sprightliness. He clapped a friendly hand onto Viridovix’s shoulder.
‘Excellent choice! Now, on to the ludus,’ he said. Maintaining his toothy smile, he loosened Viridovix’s leg irons by a few degrees and then started on his way, stepping over the bloodied corpses of the Huntsmen soldiers as if they were mere rocks in the road.
‘Come on, move quickly,’ he called out. ‘If we hurry, we may just get there in time for them to get some porridge into you. Wouldn’t that be nice, then?’
‘Not as nice as I’ll feel when your severed head rolls at my feet, Roman scum,’ Viridovix whispered to himself in his native tongue. ‘I will have my vengeance. I swear it … I swear it on all the gods of rock, tree, sky and stream.’
It was well past nightfall when Lucius and Viridovix reached Batiatus’s villa, a lavish, expansive estate built on top of a slight rise; the terrain here was mostly flat, although Mount Vesuvius loomed on the distant horizon. The ludus, where the gladiators lived and trained, was a fort-like structure situated behind the great villa. Attached to the ludus was a small amphitheatre.
‘It’s built like that not to keep enemies out, but to keep the likes of you in,’ Lucius said with a smirk.
Viridovix said nothing, but beneath his outer veneer of calm he was subtly observing everything with keen determination, taking mental notes and performing calculations; if there was a way into this prison,
