Fronto watched in stunned disbelief as the two centurions stepped forward, raising their swords.
“You two are a disgrace to the army of Rome” Furius growled as he stepped to the side, flexing his arm ready for the coming fight.
“Pompous fool” Hortius snapped and leapt at them, Menenius right behind him despite the broken jaw paining him.
Fronto watched the opening flurry of moves in tense silence. Menenius was slower and more deliberate than before, his cocky speed absent as his face sent waves of pain through him with every pulse of his blood. And yet, Fronto had to admit, he was still very much a match for any ordinary swordsman. Fabius and Furius were quickly driven back to the corner. Fronto glanced around and saw his sword lying unattended. Scrabbling over to it, he picked it up in his left hand, the fingers of his right still pointing off at unpleasant angles.
He would not be able to wield the damn weapon. He had long ago learned that wielding a sword with his off-hand was more of a danger to him than to the enemy, and there was no hope of him gripping it with his right. With deep regret, he dropped the blade again. This fight would have to be up to the two veteran centurions.
The four combatants were now out of sight, back around the corner towards the atrium. His skin prickled again as he realised there was every possibility the fight might range into the room where Faleria lay under her sheet. He could ill afford to let that happen, when even a stray footfall might be the end of her, weakened as she was.
Rounding the corner, he could see the two centurions being pushed back into the atrium through the hanging sheet, which was now shredded with sword cuts. His eyes fell on the door to the right hand side and he scurried across to it.
His sister was on her knees her head held in her hands.
“Faleria!”
She looked up sharply, her one good eye wide and blood-tinted.
“Marcus?”
His heart pounding in his chest, weak knee threatening to give way any moment, Fronto ran across the room and dropped to envelop his sister in an embrace.
“Are you alright?”
“I… headache!” she said quietly.
“Come on. It’s not safe here.”
Almost as if to confirm his words, the sounds of fighting increased in volume and he could see the shadows of fighting men on the corridor wall opposite the bedchamber’s door. As slowly as he dared, Fronto helped his sister to her wobbly feet and crossed the room.
“Maybe we should lock ourselves in” he mused, but decided against it. Better to find somewhere to hide her than trap themselves where the tribunes already knew to look.
“The baths. Come on.”
Almost carrying her, tears running down his face at the pain in his broken fingers and from biting his lip against it, he hurried her from the room, past the ongoing fight at the edge of the atrium and back towards the house’s small bath complex. A quick glance told him that things were not going so well for his would-be saviours. Furius was already moving at a lean, his free hand clutching his side as he fought, and Fabius was limping and leaning against the wall. Worse still, the fight seemed to have spun around in the atrium and the centurions were now backing towards them, retreating into the bed-chamber corridors again… and the bath complex.
Desperation beginning to hound him, Fronto grasped Faleria with his good hand, his bad one held away but the arm beneath her side for support, and guided her along the corridor to the bath house, horribly aware that there was no exit anywhere on this side of the house. If the tribunes killed their opponents, they would only have to search long enough and they’d find the siblings.
He would make them work for it, though, and pay for every inch of ground. He wouldn’t let them get to Faleria if he could possibly prevent it.
The door swung open under their weight and he hurried Faleria into the changing room. The complex was completely refurbished and smelled of fresh paint and tiling cement. Positioned at the edge of the house, the only light that shone into the room was from a window that opened onto the peristyle. For a moment, Fronto wondered whether he and Faleria might fit through it, but decided against an attempt. It would be touch-and-go at best, and with Faleria barely conscious and his hand ruined, their chances were small.
His eyes ran to the corner of the room at the house’s outer wall, where the doorway led deeper into the baths towards the hot bath and the steam room. Pausing for a heartbeat, he listened. The sounds of desperate fighting were clearly getting closer. Damn it, the centurions were being driven back towards the baths.
Urgently, he made it to the doorway and looked down the dark vestibule lit only by a small aperture high in the wall. He held Faleria up and looked her in the eye.
“Can you hear me? Do you understand me?”
“Yes. I…”
“Get in there. Go to the cold room at the far end and hide in the bath. The complex is not active, so there’s no water. Don’t come out until I shout you.”
“What if you don’t” she asked pointedly.
“I will. Go hide.”
Faleria held his gaze for a moment and then nodded painfully and scurried off down the passageway. Fronto looked around the room, taking in his options as the fight drew ever nearer. The room was virtually empty. A mosaic covering the floor and displaying Thetis and Peleus coddling the infant Achilles was a new addition, as were the multitude of fascinating fish painted on the walls. Other than that there were three niches for clothes and a single labrum bowl on a stand at waist height. Unlike the great marble dishes of the public baths or the sizeable granite one in the steam room, this one was perhaps eighteen inches across and of carrara marble. Large enough for a single person to wash their hands in.
It would offer little protection, and as yet no water flowed into it.
What was it with these baths? Last year he and Priscus had fought two gladiators in the damned complex. Now, refurbished and looking like a different place entirely, here he was waiting for swordsmen again.
There was a thump against the bath complex door and instinctively Fronto ducked behind the labrum and tried to disappear in the shadow.
The door opened with a crash and Furius almost fell into the room, staggering backwards all the way across the mosaic until his back hit the wall opposite. Hortius came limping in after him, dragging a leg down which a torrent of blood flowed. As the two met again at the wall, their blood-slicked blades clashed and rang, both fighting for their lives and both badly wounded. Fronto looked from the pair to the door and back, wondering whether he’d have time to get Faleria out, when Menenius backed into the room, lurching left and right, awash with blood. Fabius staggered in after him, slashing wildly and clutching his bloodied face with his free hand.
What to do?
Slowly, Fronto stood, his weak knee giving slightly and causing him to grasp the labrum and put his weight onto it. The bowl wobbled where the cement had not quite taken properly. He steadied himself and straightened in time to see a killing blow.
Furius, backed against the wall, plunged his gladius through the tribune Hortius, straight into the sternum, pushing until the blade emerged from his back in a gout of blood. The tribune staggered, spasming, the blade falling from his twitching fingers, but Furius was in no condition to stand on his own and, all his weight thrown into the strike, the two men collapsed to the floor together, where the centurion let go of his sword and rolled away onto his back, breathing in shuddering, heavy gasps as blood trickled from a dozen wounds.
Fabius, meanwhile, was having less luck. Menenius, even with his broken jaw, was easily better than him, and was driving him back across the room, inflicting cut after small cut, gradually bleeding the strength out of the centurion.
The centurion staggered back, cursing noisily, wiping the blood from his face where it ran in torrents from a vicious cut that had ruined his left eye. Fabius was almost done, and he clearly knew it. Furius would be of little help, lying on the floor and trying to hold on to his consciousness without expiring. And Fronto would hardly be able to hold a sword in his right hand or swing it convincingly with his left.
His fingers gripped the edge of the labrum with seven good fingers and his knuckles whitened with frustration.