Raptor (38 page)

The Church had long frowned on gladiatorial contests, and most of the Christian emperors had forbidden them. Some such bouts may have been privily arranged and fought in distant provinces, but there had not been one publicly held in Rome itself for fifty years before my own birth. Today’s combat was not, of course, being waged with the gladius sword or any other of the traditional weapons—the trident, the mace, the cast net—only with the fustis staff. Nevertheless, it promised to be a real blood contest, and that was an event unprecedented enough to throng the amphitheater.

The crowd comprised not just fishers and artisans and countryfolk and the other sorts of commoners who generally frequented the arena’s games and sports. Even the city’s merchants and traders and shopkeepers—who otherwise would hardly have closed their markets and warehouses to mourn the death of a popular emperor—seemed today to have shuttered their establishments, or left them in the charge of minor clerks and slaves, so they could attend this spectacle. Also present were all the transient visitors in the city who had heard of this unique offering of entertainment.

Long before the time for the combat to begin, I think every seat in every cuneus and every maenianum of the amphitheater was filled. As usual, the commonfolk sat on the ledges of the upper tiers, but Wyrd paid a stiff price for tesserae that admitted him and myself to the numbered seats on the second tier, ordinarily accessible only to the noble or wealthy. In the arena-level tier, reserved for high officials and other dignitaries, the central podium was occupied by the dux Latobrigex, his lady Robeya and the priest Tiburnius, all of them sumptuously and almost festively dressed. The dux was as expressionless as he had been the night before, but his wife practically radiated white-hot fury, and the priest looked as bland as if he were about to watch a troupe of ritum players devoutly reenact the Passion.

I turned to Wyrd and said, “Of all the money you and I have earned and tucked safely away, fráuja, I will wager my whole share against yours that Gudinand is the victor here this morning.”

He uttered one of his snort-laughs. “By Laverna, the goddess of thieves, traitors and fugitives, you ask
me
to back that swine Jaeirus? Preposterous! But akh, at any arena I have never been able to resist making some kind of wager. I
will
put up my half of all our earnings against your half, and put
mine
on Gudinand.”

“What? That would be even more preposterous. I would be disloyally—”

But I was interrupted before I could remonstrate further, by a single trumpet’s blast from the arena below and the concerted eager murmur and stirring of the whole crowd. Jaeirus and Gudinand had emerged from gates on opposite sides of the perimeter wall.

Each of the young men carried a stout ash fustis, longer than he was tall and as thick as his wrist. Each wore only an athlete’s loincloth and over the rest of his body a coating of oil to help slip the cudgels’ blows. They approached one another in the center of the arena and then walked abreast to stand beneath the podium and raise their staffs in salute to the dux. To each of them impartially, Latobrigex raised his right fist, in which he held a white cloth. Then the trumpet blared again and the dux let drop the cloth. Jaeirus and Gudinand instantly wheeled to face one another and took the fighting stance, each gripping his fustis with one hand at its middle and the other hand halfway between middle and end. The two young men were well matched for the combat. Gudinand was the taller and had a longer arm’s reach, but Jaeirus was broader and more beefy of muscle. Their skills with the staffs seemed also to be about equal. I knew that Gudinand had never had a friend with whom to engage in mock cudgel-fighting, but he must have amused himself sometimes with solitary pretend-battles. Jaeirus probably
had
had many opportunities to compete against other young men in the sport, but, Jaeirus being who he was, those others had doubtless restrained their blows and let him win easily. Though neither of these combatants could long have stood against a real, professional, experienced fustis wielder, they were right now giving a far better than fair show of swinging, parrying, thrusting, dodging—and the spectators had no reason to grumble that they had wasted their money to watch a bumbling novice performance.

To Wyrd, I said with exasperation, “See here, you cannot appropriate my wager. It was I who sent Jaeirus into that arena to be beaten to a pulp. It would be insane for me even unwillingly to wager against the man I chose for my defensor and champion. I insist—”

“Balgs-daddja,” Wyrd said calmly. “I was right to back Gudinand, and I refuse to retract the wager. Just look yonder—how Jaeirus is beginning to cringe and flinch and retreat.”

The opponents had begun the fight by trying every stroke and move that is possible in fustis combat, both offensive and defensive, to judge one another’s courage and dexterity and strong or weak aspects. The various defensive moves include, of course, quick and firm parrying with the staff itself, but there are also many adroit means of dodging or ducking or even—if one’s opponent makes a violent swing with the entire length of his fustis—of vaulting right over it as deftly as an acrobat. Basically, the cudgel-fighter’s only offensive moves are the swing and the thrust, but they too can be delivered in various ways: for example, a feint of swing that suddenly becomes a thrust.

After Jaeirus and Gudinand had for some time battered at one another with all those different sorts of strokes—the body blows heavy and loud enough to make several of the onlookers grunt in sympathy—and both had, successfully or not, tried the several means of defense, they evidently decided they knew one another’s weakest points and thereafter concentrated on those.

Jaeirus, lacking length of arm, less often thrust with the end of his staff, but relied on swinging it, and he swung most often at Gudinand’s head. I think Jaeirus must have remembered his mother’s reference to Gudinand as “brainsick,” and was hoping that even a glancing blow to the head would severely stun the young man.

Gudinand, for his part, soon realized that Jaeirus’s squat, square body could hardly be toppled or even much budged by sidewise swings of his cudgel. So Gudinand began to rely on his longer reach, on lunging thrusts. He aimed alternately at the pit of Jaeirus’s stomach, trying to ram the wind from his body, and at Jaeirus’s hands, trying to break or weaken his grip on his own fustis.

Gudinand, leaner and lithe, was able to dodge or parry Jaeirus’s swings toward his head, or most of them, anyway. But the heavyset Jaeirus was not agile enough to avoid Gudinand’s thrusts with the end of his staff. Several of those jabs to the stomach made Jaeirus utter an audible
whoosh!
and stagger backward long enough to snatch a new gulp of air. Several of Gudinand’s thrusts we heard crunch against his opponent’s fingers, and once Jaeirus’s right hand nearly dropped its hold on the fustis. From then on, Jaeirus did not so much wield his cudgel offensively; he fought to prevent its being wrested from his grasp. He appeared to have abandoned hope of victory and to be merely defying defeat. Gudinand pressed the advantage, forcing Jaeirus ever backward until the two of them were almost directly before the central podium.

“Look yonder,” Wyrd said again. “The tetzte wretch is sweating the oil right off his body.”

So he was. Where Jaeirus now stood, but shakily, shuffling his feet to keep his balance against Gudinand’s relentless pummeling, there was a stain spreading on the sand, and I do not think it consisted entirely of sweat and oil. Jaeirus was flicking his eyes frantically from side to side, as if seeking a refuge—or a rescue, for he flicked his gaze most often toward the podium where sat his father and mother. The dux’s face had not changed expression in the least, but Robeya’s… well, if she
had
been a dragon, I am certain she would have swooped down into the arena beside her boy, belching flames at Gudinand.

Wyrd remarked with satisfaction, “A brute swaggerer is always a coward, and this one is publicly proving it. Urchin, you ought not complain at paying me even such a heavy wager, since it has brought you the pleasure of seeing your friend victorious.”

But, all at once, Gudinand stopped his battering of Jaeirus and stepped away from him. The spectators may have thought he was simply according his defeated opponent the dementia: not killing him outright, not breaking his bones so that he would be forever a cripple, not even beating Jaeirus until he lay prostrate on the sand and had to make the humiliating gesture of the lifted finger, pleading that his life be spared. However, I knew it was not thought of clementia that so abruptly paralyzed Gudinand. He had ceased even to look at Jaeirus; his eyes slowly lifted above the arena, above the tiers of the amphitheater, on up to the morning sky above, as if perhaps he had seen a strange green bird fly over, or heard an owl unnaturally hoot in daylight.

All through the bruising battle, Gudinand had shown no least evidence of his affliction. But I had long ago noticed that it oftenest came upon him not in moments of stress or duress, but when he was feeling happiest and most healthy. And so it did now, when he was on the verge of what would have been the grandest moment of his life, the moment that would have changed him from Constantia’s lowliest outcast to its triumphant hero.

The fustis simply dropped from his hands, and I could see why: his thumbs had curled tightly into his palms and his hands were useless as hands. Jaeirus stood, staggering slightly, but in his astonishment almost as benumbed as his opponent. Every other person in the amphitheater was similarly stupefied, absolutely silent. Then Gudinand uttered the cry I had heard him cry once before, as if he had already been dealt his deathblow, and the ululation echoed eerily through the breathless hush that prevailed. One other voice spoke, but so quietly that no one except Jaeirus heard it. His mother leaned far over the balustrade of the podium and hissed something down to him.

Jaeirus had continued to stand bewildered, bleeding from his nose and from his almost crushed right hand, clearly unsure of what to do next—until Robeya told him. Now, suddenly, while Gudinand yet had his head far back and was still giving that unearthly howl, Jaeirus struck with all his strength. The cudgel caught Gudinand in the throat, and cut short his piteous wail, and he fell backward as stiffly as a downed tree.

The blow may not have critically injured him; he might have risen to fight again; but the fit was upon him. He lay supine and rigid, only his extremities quivering, and Jaeirus rained vicious blows all up and down his body. Gudinand could still have made the plea for clementia—the raising of one forefinger—and the dux Latobrigex would have been obliged to halt the combat while he solicited the verdict of the crowd: life or death? But poor Gudinand could not open one of his convulsion-clenched hands even to lift that single finger.

His quivering slowed and ceased; he lay flaccid while Jaeirus beat and beat upon his body until it was almost unrecognizable as human; the only thing about Gudinand that still moved was the saliva pouring from his mouth. He was surely dead by then, but Jaeirus went on flailing at the shapeless corpse, as if he were exultantly disposing of a sackful of kittens. The sight was so gruesome that, unsolicited, the crowd of spectators sprang to their feet, as one man, and roared,
“Clementia! Clementia!”

Jaeirus paused just long enough to glance toward the podium. But the dux did not have time to make the traditional gesture: thumb downward as a signal for the victor to drop his weapon—because Robeya too quickly made the other traditional gesture: jabbing her thumb toward her breast, which in gladiator days had meant “Stab him!” And of course Jaeirus obeyed his mother. While the crowd still bellowed,
“Clementia!”
he raised his cudgel vertically and brought it down in the manner of a tamping rod, three or four times, directly on his victim’s head. Gudinand’s skull shattered like an eggshell, and the tragically disordered brain that had made his blameless life so miserable would never now be repaired by Juhiza’s attentions or any other means, for it spilled in a gray-pink sludge onto the sand At that, the crowd, which had formerly seemed so bloodthirsty, began to bawl its sickened outrage, and in a cacophony of tongues: “Skanda! Atrocitas! Unhrains slauts! Saevitia!”—“Shame! Atrocity! Filthy slaughter! Savagery!” The people were now milling about and, I think, in a moment more they would have been pouring down from the seats and ledges and into the arena, to rend Jaeirus in pieces.

But the priest Tiburnius was also on his feet and holding his arms high for attention. As one spectator after another noticed him, the crowd gradually quietened so he could be heard. He shouted alternately in Latin and in the Old Language, to make sure everyone understood him:

“Cives mei! Thiuda! My people!
Cease your impious protest and accept God’s verdict. The Lord is just and wise and of righteous judgment; in him there is no iniquity. To put a stop to any doubt in this controversy, and to disclose the truth to all, God decreed that Gudinand should be overcome, and Jaeirus gain the victory. Do not dare dispute the Lord’s wisdom as he chose to reveal it to all of you this day. Nolumus! Interdicimus! Prohibemus! Gutha waírthai wilja theins, swe in himina jah ana aírthai! God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!”

No one in the crowd was prepared to defy that priestly command. Though still muttering, the mob began to disperse and leave the amphitheater. Tiburnius, Latobrigex, Robeya and Jaeirus must have had a special door for leaving the podium, because they were suddenly gone as well. Not a single person except Wyrd and myself even lingered to watch the arena slaves—ironically known as the Charons, the ferrymen of the dead—remove from the sand the meat that had been Gudinand.

“Hua ist so sunja?” growled Wyrd. “What is truth? I do not know which is the slimier serpent: Jaeirus or his dragon mother or that reptilian priest.”

I too could quote from the Bible. “Mis fraweit letaidáu; ik fragilda. Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”

“It is I who am paying,” Wyrd grumbled as we got up to leave. “It cannot console you for the loss of your friend, but you have won a tidy little fortune. I might make one remark, however. You never told me that Gudinand was an uslitha, liable to the falling sickness.”