child?”
“Gaius is looking after Julia at my house,” snapped Maia. Helena condescended to explain swiftly, “Your mother told us about that note Anacrites received. We're using our initiative. Now, please don't interfere.”
“You're visiting a damned gladiator? You're doing it openly? You have come without a chaperone or a bodyguard-and without telling me?”
“We are just intending to talk to the man,” Helena cooed.
“Necessitating four bangles apiece and your Saturnalia necklaces? He may have killed a lion.”
“Ooh lovely!” minced Maia. “Well he won't kill us. We're just two admirers who want to swoon over him and feel the length of his sword.”
“You're disgusting.”
“That,” Helena assured me quite calmly, “is the general effect we were aiming for.”
I could see they were both really enjoying themselves. They must have spent hours getting ready. They had raided their jewellery boxes for an eye-catching selection then piled on everything. Dressed up as cheap bits with too much money, they were throwing themselves into it. I started to panic. Apart from any danger in this ludicrous situation, I had the awful feeling that my sensible sister and my scrupulous girlfriend might happily turn into flirting harridans, given the money and the chance. Helena, come to think of it, already possessed her own money. Maia, married to a determined soak who never bothered what she got up to, might well decide to seize the chance.
Rumex was minded by four world-weary slaves. As a slave himself he could not actually own them, but Saturninus had ensured that his prize fighter was pampered with a generous back-up team. Perhaps female admirers paid for it.
“He's resting. No one can see him.” Resting after what the spokesman did not say. I imagined the unsavoury possibilities.
“We just wanted to tell him how much we adore him.” Maia flashed the slaves a brilliant smile. The spokesman surveyed her. Maia had always been a looker. Despite four children she had kept her figure. She combed her dark, tight curls in a neat frame to her round face. Her eyes were intelligent, merry and adventurous.
She was not pressing the slaves. She knew how to get what she wanted, and what Maia wanted tended to be a tad different. My youngest sister sometimes failed to follow the rules. She still had hopes. She disliked compromise. I worried over Maia.
“Leave whatever you've brought. I'll see that he gets it.” The response was offhand.
Helena adjusted the gold collar at her throat; she was playing the nervous one, the one who was afraid they would be named in the scandal column of the Daily Gazette. “He won't know who sent it!” He W1n't care, I reckoned.
“Oh I'll tell him.” The minder had given the brush-off to plenty before them.
Helena Justina smiled at him. It was a smile that said these two were not the same as all the others. If he chose to believe it, the message could be perilous-not least for Helena and Maia. I was in despair. “It's all right,” Helena assured the man, with all the confidence of a senator's daughter who was up to no good. Her refined accent announced that Rumex had acquired himself a delicate devotee. “We didn't expect special treatment. He must have lots of people who are desperate to meet him. He's so famous. It would be such a privilege.” I could see the men thinking this one was really innocent. I was wondering how I had ever hitched myself to a girlfriend who was actually so much less innocent than the rude tightrope walking acrobats I had hankered for first. “It must be hard work for you,” she commiserated. “Dealing with people who have no idea of allowing him any privacy. Do they get hysterical?”
“We've had our moments!” the spokesman had allowed himself to be lured into a chat.
“People throw themselves at him,” Maia sneered knowingly. “I hate that. It's disgusting, isn't it?”
“All right if you can get it,” laughed one of the slaves.
“But you have to keep a sense of proportion. Now my friend and me-” She and Helena exchanged the cloying glances of dedicated followers talking about their hero. “We follow all his fights. We know all his history.” She listed it off: “seventeen wins: three draws: twice down but the crowd spared his jugular and sent him back. The bout with the Thracian last spring had our hearts in our mouths. He was robbed there-”
“The referee!” Helena leant forwards, stabbing her finger angrily. This was some old controversy, apparently.
“Rumex was tripped.” I was impressed by their research. “He was winning, no question, then his boot let him down. He'd had three hits, including that tricky one when he did the cartwheel and cut up under the other man's arm. He ought to have been given the fight.”
“Yes, but accidents don't count,” put in one of the slaves. “That bastard the old Emperor Claudius used to have their throats cut if they fell by accident,” someone else said.
“That was in case they were fixing it,” said Helena.
“No way. The crowd would spot that.”
“The crowd only sees what it wants to see,” suggested Maia. Her interest seemed genuinely passionate. It looked as if the finer points of the Rumex loss against the Thracian would be haggled over for the next three hours. This was worse than overhearing a row between two half-drunk bargees on pay night.
My sister stopped. She beamed at the minders, as if pleased to have shared with them her knowledge and expertise. “Can't you let us in just for a few moments?”
“Normally,” explained the spokesman carefully. “Normally there wouldn't be a problem, girls.” So what was abnormal today?
“We have money,” Helena proposed bluntly. “We want to give him a present-but we thought it would be nicer if we could just see him, to ask him what he really wants.” The man shook his head.
Helena clutched her hand to her mouth. “He's not ill?” Over-indulgence, I thought to myself. In what, it seemed best not to speculate.
“Has he been hurt in practice?” gasped Maia, with real distress.
“He's resting,” said the spokesman for the second time.
I let myself speculate after all. Everyone knows what top gladiators are like. I could imagine the scene indoors. An uneducated thug, provided with indecent luxury. Gorging on sweated suckling pig, dousing it in lashings of cheap fish-pickle sauce. Reeking of impossibly scented pomades. Swilling undiluted Falernian like water, then leaving half empty amphorae unstoppered for the wineflies. Playing endless repetitive games of Latrunculi with his sycophantic hangers-on. Pausing for three-in-a-bed orgies with teenage acolytes even dafter than the two rash women who were debasing themselves outside his quarters now…
“He's resting,” said Maia to Helena.
“Just resting,” Helena answered her. Then she turned to the group of minders and exclaimed, with innocent lack of tact, “That's such a relief. We were afraid of what might have happened to him-after what people are saying about that lion.”
There was a small pause.
“What lion?” asked the spokesman in a patronising voice.
He stood up. He and the others adopted a well-practised shepherding technique. “We don't know anything about no lion, ladies. Now, excuse me, but I'll have to ask you to be moving on. Rumex is very particular about his training regime. He has to have absolute quiet all around him. I'm sorry, but I can't allow any members of the public to hang about when there's a risk of disturbing him-”
“You don't know about it, then?” Helena persisted. “It's just that there is a terrible rumour running round the Forum that Rumex has killed a lion that belonged to Calliopus. His name was Leonidas. It's all over Rome-”
“And I'm a gryphon with three legs,” asserted the chief minder, evicting Helena and my sister from the barracks area ruthlessly.
Outside in the street again, Maia swore.
I said nothing. I know when to carry a basket with my head down. I walked quietly behind them as they stalked away from the gate, making sure I looked like a particularly meek boudoir slave.
“You can stop playing the know-all,” scoffed Maia to me grumpily. “It was a good try.”
I straightened up. “I'm just agog at your encyclopedic knowledge of the Games. You both sounded true arena bores. Who fed you the gladiatorial lore?”
“Petronius Longus. We wasted time on it for nothing, though.”
