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"Fifteen" he called in triumph. His sword clove it into two. He
bent over to flick the pieces away down slope. He put another notch in his
spear.
"You're winning," said Vargas. "I've got ten. No make that
eleven." He smashed down on a big brown rat using his spear as a club. The
rat twitched its back broken, stunned but still alive. Then Vargas stood up and
using the spear as a bat, whacked it far down the slope.
"You don't get extra points for distance..." said Klepto
suspiciously.
"We should probably throw them further," said Spartak. "Tomorrow,
they'll stink."
"Ah, the sweet smell of dead rat" sighed Barrak. "That
reminds me of home. When I was a boy we always had a rat dying somewhere in the
roof space, which had got away from the cats. No matter how hard you looked, you
never found them. They crawled into some tiny dark hole. But the smell would
last for weeks. I'd usually find a mummified body mixed up with a pile of corn
in the summer when we fed the chickens."
"What about the smell of that lot?" asked Klepto waving his arms
towards the the men and the flies.
"That reminds me of work" said Spartak grimly. "Although
they used to clean out the bodies from the arena, they didn't always have time
to burn them until the games were over. My quarters were by the main arena gate,
and that's where they used to pile the rotting bodies, sometimes for upto a week
depending on the festival."
"Aren't you glad now, that we left all that kind of thing behind us?"
quipped Vargas.
"Huh." grunted Spartak. "I expected the retirement benefits
to be better."
"Dead rat breath has an exquisite taste of its own" enthused
Barrak. "Now if only we could find some chickens, the image of my happy
childhood would be complete."
"I thought you ran away from home" said Vargas.
"Yes, that was in the interests of family harmony. Either I stayed at
home, and killed my stepfather, which would have made my mother very upset, or I
left home when noone was looking and joined the army."
"That kind of happy childhood eh?" said Klepto with a
knowing look. "When I was a kid I dreamed that one day my father would come
back home from a long voyage, toss out the scum living with my mother, and take
me with him into a rich house with servants and a bed of my own. He never came
back, so that's why I joined the navy, to find him."
"So what went wrong with your plan?"
"Officers mainly. They tried to treat me as if I was still that young
fatherless kid. I tried changing ships a few times. Even changing my name. But
some smart ass officer always got in the way. The navy is too small. They catch
up with you in the end. I stole a ship once. I sold it to some traders. They
sold it back to the navy without changing all the fittings. That was silly. The
navy does have a lot of ships but they couldn't ignore that. They put my case
into the hands of a very ambitious officer, a captain to begin with, but they
made him an admiral later on. I'd been clumsy about burying some of the
evidence, because I didn't think the traders would be that stupid and I was too
hasty tidying things up. By a lucky coincidence I discovered that I was to be
part of the navy team sent to track myself down. That delayed things a bit. It
took the captain about three months to realise why his target was always one
step ahead but then when he did, he was clever enough to extract from me how
much trouble I'd caused with my previous aliases. It was too late for me to
change by then, but he knew I could be an important part of his promotion plan,
which also involved removing some other officers who were ahead of him up the
greasy pole."
"Look Klepto," he says to me. "You've caused us a great deal
of trouble, stolen navy property, killed lots of our expensively trained
officers, all under different names. By rights we should execute you many times
over, but this is the navy. We do things by the book. A court martial would be
embarrassing for us, and end rather nastily for you. So instead, I'm going to
offer you a way out. If you can help me remove a few of my obstacles to solving
this case we can pin the blame on someone else. I will move upto the next
deserved stage in my career as the youngest admiral in the Scythian fleet. You,
in return will be dishonourably discharged for a much less serious offence and
can start your new career in the entertainment business."
"He had my balls about to go into a heated vice at the time, and he
knew what he was doing as he'd been demonstrating to me for most of the previous
week on some other suspects. So I needed to get out of the navy quickly, and
stay out of his way."
"That sounds familiar" said Barrak. "I think admirals and
generals must go to the same kind of schools."
"Yeah, that's why they're all full of the same shit."
"How about you Vargas? How'd you get into this?"
Asking a gladiator about his past was considered to be the height of bad
manners, and only the sort of thing which was discussed when things looked
hopeless. Vargas shrugged. His eyes twinkled in acknowldegement that maybe the
time had come for this kind of soul baring.
"I was in the wrong place at the wrong time." he said.
"More specifically?" signed Klepto with his eyebrows.
"More specifically, I was in the arms of a beautiful woman. Well in her
bed actually. She was married to my second cousin. I was much younger than her.
He was very rich. My side of the family was poor."
His eyes moistened, as he went on.
"He had me beaten up and locked away. Then he killed her. He said it
was in rage, but it must have been several hours after they took me away. I
didn't know at the time, but I found out later that he had been seeing another
young girl. He married her soon after Elena's funeral. So getting rid of Elena
was just a convenient excuse to avoid divorce and a settlement with her family.
She had brought him a rich dowry. Because I was young and family, they sentenced
me to three years in the mines. I escaped, and went back to stay in the woods
near home. One night his house caught fire. Unfortunately the fire was
discovered too quickly, and they found that he had been tied to his bed. I
thought the leather would burn more quickly. Anyway, the authorities realised
that it wasn't an accident. There was a hue and cry. I surrendered myself to
Elena's family. They made the necessary arrangments to get back their dowry, and
instead of being executed for a double murder, I was given the chance to redeem
myself in the arena."
"Families aren't all as good as they're made out to be" said
Barrak agreeing with the unvoiced sentiments.
All three of them turned to Spartak. Although they didn't say anything. He
knew what they were asking. Many stories had been told about his past. Since
becoming a gladiator, he had never bothered to confirm or deny any of the
popular myths. He had avoided this subject for so many years. Once it had been
important. But that was another life, another time. Even his adopted fighting
name Spartak was a kind of self made myth. He wondered if the truth made any
difference now.
"Let's just say, I too was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hello,
what's going on down there?"
His companions turned around to look down the hill. Tents were coming down.
Cooking fires were being quenched.
"It looks like they're packing up," said Vargas.
"Maybe they can't stand the smell," suggested Klepto.
"Or maybe they're running from something."
"Well they're not running from us" said Spartak. "But when
they've gone we'll go down there and have a poke around and look for some
supplies. And I'll tell you the rest of my story another time."
"Damn army" said Klepto. "Always messing things up, just when
they get interesting."
"Should we be worried?" asked Vargas.
"Only if we can't find anything better than smoked salami" said
Spartak. "It's not a healthy diet. And I don't want to get started on baked
rat at my age."
"Sixteen" cried Klepto. Another rat squealed.
"I think we've finished that game" said Spartak.
"I won!" said Klepto and claimed the prize, which was a helmet
full of blood encrusted silver coins.
"I wonder what game they think they're playing with us now?"
asked Spartak grimly. |
