The Gladiator

         Pìcaro was a broad man. Broad shoulders, broad arms, broad hands. His whole physique seemed to have been constructed. Very few people in the village where he lived could imagine him as a small babe, or even as a gangly teenager. He had been born huge, the village elders decided, probably a son of a god. It didn’t seem to bother him, so no one bothered him about it.
He seemed intelligent, too. He’d come from one of the other colonies further up the coast, and had suffered. It had been a game among the young women of the village to try and see Pìcaro naked until one of them saw his bare back, covered in thin, white scars. Suddenly, the game lost its appeal. Nobody mentioned it again.
         One day Pìcaro left. No one knew why, he just left the next day. The elders shook their heads and sighed. The harvests had been good these few years, and the extra manpower had been extremely useful. Nonetheless, they said, glancing at each other, it was perhaps a mercy he was gone. He had a lot of secrets, and it was better that they were away from here.

         Wood blazed, the crackling noise and choking smoke bringing the blacksmith back to reality. He coughed hard, trying to get rid of the ashes in his throat. Gasping for breath, he rushed into the square and plunged his head into the water trough. The water was warm, and had bits of ash floating in it, but he sucked it up as if his life depended on it.
         Sated for the moment, he leant back on his haunches, studying the leaping flames with the kind of detachment that is normally associated with death. His eyes panned unseeingly along the palisade, the flickering shapes in the flames reflecting in his eyes. His mind was free-floating, trying to reconnect itself, but he shut it out. He didn’t want to remember. He was perfectly content sitting here, looking at the fire, the flames, the people-
         His mind reconnected with an almost physical slap. The eyes staring down at him held him, squirming uncontrollably as he remembered-
-the shining form moving in the heat-
-the arrows hissing through the air-
-the woman and child folk screaming as nails pinned them to crosses-
-his own cowardly retreat into his smithy-
         Still the eyes held him, unblinkingly, unseeingly pinning him to the floor. Image after image rolled across his mind. His whole body shook as he relived the entire scene again. His mind saw the pictures while his eyes saw his family stare down at him, accusing him with their silence.
         He didn’t know how long the torture continued, but it must have stopped at some point, because he was awoken by the sense which is hereditary in all humans. It has been handed down from the beginnings of evolution, and goes something like this.

Predator before you. Don’t Move.

         It’s simplistic, but it works. Humanity tends not to change things that work.
         “Consurgas!” grated a voice. The words meant nothing to him, but the sword under his chin managed to convey the message succinctly.
He got up, slowly. A swordpoint to your throat tends to make you think far more carefully than normal.
         “Qui hic est?” grated the voice again, thrusting something blackened and circular in his face.
         “He wants to know what it is,” hissed a voice in his ear. “I’d advise you to tell me, or he’s likely to find an interesting place to put it.”
         “Interesting?” asked the blacksmith, his forehead beading with cold sweat.
         “Well…interesting for us, anyway.”
         The blacksmith grabbed the disc from the man with the frozen grin of someone who knows the rest of their life could be the next ten seconds. He rubbed frantically at it, willing it off. Something glinted under the black, reminding him of the glint that same morning from these men’s shields. He swallowed and kept rubbing.
         “Well?” asked the voice, quietly. The centurion tells me he is becoming impatient. He has told me to tell you to be quick, or else he will have you crucified.”
The blacksmith paused for a second.
         “You talk to them? But you are Spanish! Why are you betraying us?”
         “This is not betrayal. This is survival!” hissed the voice, so full of hate and venom the blacksmith shivered and stepped back. “Do you think I enjoy this? I was in your place not six months ago, except I was forced to watch my children and their mother be raped and nailed up. I do not enjoy this, but I don’t even have the courage to kill myself. So just shut up and tell me what the bangle is, alright?”
         “It’s a necklace of some sort,” said the blacksmith, looking hard at it. “A man came to me and asked me to get rid of it.”
         “What did he look like? Because if that’s what I think it is, and I have a pretty damn good idea what it is, the owner is in trouble.”
         “It’s not mine,” the blacksmith said quickly, “it was this man’s. He was big and my colour.”
         “No use. There are quite a lot of big men around these parts your colour. Would you be able to spot him in a crowd?”
         The blacksmith snorted, forgetting for a second the blade at his throat. “’Course I would! He’d stand out head and shoulders above any crowd, for a start!”
         “Good. Come over here.”
         There was a quick flurry of the foreign language, and then the blade navigated to his kidneys. A gentle prod was enough to propel him speedily across the square. A group of soldiers were standing around, looking threatening. Another had formed a jeering circle, prodding a large lump which was the focus of the circle. A snapped command lashed across them, and they came to attention with an impressively business-like stamp. The circle opened, and the object of their scorn became apparent.
         Wrapped in a large net, bleeding from a large wound on his head and a hundred tiny ones on his shoulders was a man who seemed to have been constructed.
         “That’s him,” whispered the blacksmith, hardly able to believe the huge Pìcaro had been captured. Behind him the centurion whispered to his translator.
         “Servus?”
         “Etiam”
         “Bonus”
         More snapped words in the foreign tongue. Then the circle moved in and grabbed the net. They hoisted it up and marched over to a waiting cage, into which Pìcaro, net and all, was unceremoniously thrown.
         “What will happen to him?” asked the blacksmith, unable to stop staring at the bound man.
         “He is a runaway slave. It is his master’s choice. He may be branded , he may be killed” The blacksmith could hear the resignation in the man’s voice.
         “And I?” he asked. He couldn’t help it. He knew he probably wouldn’t like the answer, but he had to ask anyway.
         “Nothing,” replied the man, his forced smile obvious in his voice. “You have aided the Roman people. You will not be punished.”
         “ Thank you, thank you,” murmured the blacksmith, attempting to crawl away.
         “You will instead be sold at one of the great slave markets in Rome, and spend the rest of your life serving your master.”
         The blacksmith leapt up, fists raised. “Not one man of my family has ever been a slave,” he shouted, his blood suddenly pumping in his ears. Death he could have dealt, and short-term humiliation was fine. But to spend the rest of your life being humiliated, and then be exiled from your family for eternity-it didn’t bear thinking about.
         He spat at the centurion’s feet. “I’d rather die than be a slave to any man,” he said. “I would rather die.”
         The centurion looked quizzically at the translator, who repeated what he had said, word for word. The blacksmith replayed it in his own head.
         “I’d rather die…oh, porras”
         The centurion looked him up and down, shrugged, and ran him through. The look on the blacksmith’s face was one of tragic realisation mixed with sad resignation. Then it dissolved as his muscles slackened, and he slid off the blade and pitched, head first, into the ground. The centurion wiped the blade on the man’s tunic and returned it to his sheath. Hefting the full pack on his back, he motioned to the legionnaires to get into line. A flurried moment of activity ensued, and then calm descended again. A couple of snapped orders, and the legion moved off, back along the path. All roads led to Rome, in the end.

         Pìcaro was awoken by one of the worst things in the world, and that is someone pressing a piece of white-hot metal into your forehead with sadistic precision and a lifetime’s worth of skill. He came round just long enough to smell his own flesh burning before passing out again.




To be continued...