‘Thank you.’ Marcus smiled.
He sat and watched as Piso approached his master, bowed his head and mumbled a few words that Marcus did not catch. Porcino looked past Piso towards Marcus and nodded. Then he stood up, stretched his back and strolled over to the chained prisoners.
‘You, boy. On your feet,’ Porcino said evenly. ‘Piso tells me you want a word.’
‘That’s right.’ Marcus nodded, his hopes rising at the chance to explain his predicament finally. ‘You see, I was kidnapped and -’
Porcino’s hand whipped out and slapped Marcus hard on the side of the head. His vision exploded into a brilliant white cloud of sparks. He staggered back, reeling from the blow. Porcino hit him again and Marcus collapsed on to his backside with a grunt. A fist clenched in his hair and shook him painfully.
‘When you speak to me,’ Porcino growled in his ear, ‘you call me “master”. If you fail to do that next time, then I’ll knock your teeth out. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ Marcus replied, still dazed by the blows.
The hand twisted his hair violently. ‘Say that again!’
‘Yes, master.’
‘Louder, boy!’
‘YES, MASTER!’
At once he was released and Marcus fell on to his back, gasping at the pain in his head. Porcino loomed over him, hands bunched into fists as he glared at Marcus.
‘That’ll be the last time I show you any mercy. Whatever you were before, now you are my slave. My property, to do with as I want. You will call me master and you will do whatever I say at once, without question. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, master.’
Porcino narrowed his eyes for a moment, then straightened up, relaxing his hands. ‘Then I’ll have no more of your nonsense. If I, or Piso, hear one more word of any ridiculous story about being kidnapped again, I’ll beat you so badly your mother would never recognize you.’
He turned away and strolled back to make his fire. Marcus stared after him, terrified. He felt a hand pluck his sleeve.
‘Here.’ Pelleneus spoke in a kindly tone as he handed Marcus his food. ‘Eat up. You’ll need all your strength. We’ve a long journey ahead of us.’
13
They continued marching up the coast in the following days. Each night they stopped, Porcino took turns with Piso keeping watch over the prisoners. When he got the chance, Marcus carefully examined his neck collar and the link through which the chain fastened him to the others. The iron was strong and the pin that fastened the collar had been firmly seated so that he could not make it budge at all. At length Marcus realized that he would not be able to get out of the collar while he was chained to the others. He would have to bide his time and wait until they reached their destination. When the collar came off, he could turn his mind to thinking about escape again.
The one consolation of the situation that kept him from sinking into complete despair was the knowledge that each step took him closer to Rome and General Pompeius. From what he could glean from Piso, the lanista’s gladiator school was just outside a town called Capua, in the region of Campania, just over a hundred miles south of Rome. If the chance to escape came, then Marcus felt confident that he could at least reach the great city by himself.
On the fifth day after leaving the port, they reached the small town of Ventulus, where Porcino left the coast road and took them on to a route heading inland. The gently rolling farmland soon gave way to hills and then mountains as they marched west. Summer was coming to an end and the evenings had turned cool, so that Marcus found it hard to sleep, curled up on the ground, his teeth chattering. It took some time before the effects of exhaustion and an increasingly numbing despair allowed him to finally drift off for a few hours.
All the time he harboured a simmering rage against Porcino and vowed to all the Gods that there would be a reckoning one day. Meanwhile he avoided the lanista’s gaze and never dared to address him directly again. On the coldest nights, when the road crossed the highest points of the mountains that ran down the spine of Italy, Piso lit them a fire.
As the prisoners sat in the warming glow of the flames, Marcus thought for the first time about how the rest of his companions had come to be here. Maybe they all had stories as unjust as his own. He turned to Pelleneus.
‘How did you end up one of Porcino’s slaves?’ he asked.
Pelleneus gave a bitter laugh. ‘You want to know more about the life of a slave, boy?… Unlike you, a Roman citizen, I was born into slavery, in a brothel in the slums of Athens. I was raised with a handful of other children whose mothers worked there. As soon as we were old enough, the slave who ran the establishment on behalf of the owner had us out on the streets stealing for him. Jewellery and other valuables from market stalls. We also picked the purses of the wealthier citizens of the city as they strolled through the crowded streets.’ The Athenian smiled at the memory, then his expression hardened as he continued. ‘Then one day my mother rejected the advances of the head slave. As a result, the slave took his revenge and bullied me relentlessly.
‘In the end, I snapped. I was fourteen when I finally turned on the slave and used my fists. It was a short struggle, in the brothel kitchen, with the women screaming in panic all around us as customers ran for cover. I won the fight, beating the man to a bloody pulp. Beating him so badly that he died from his injuries a few days later.’
‘You killed him with your bare hands?’ asked Marcus in astonishment.
Pelleneus nodded. ‘Not the smartest thing I ever did. Once the owner heard, he wanted to make an example of me. He demanded that I be put to death. However, it turned out that one of the customers who had witnessed the fight owned a team of boxers and decided that I had potential. So, he bought me and trained me until I had grown to manhood, and since then I’ve been fighting in bouts across southern Graecia, losing only a handful of fights in ten years. It was in a fight staged at the party of a wealthy merchant that Porcino saw me and decided my talents might be more profitably used in the arena. He paid a high price,’ Pelleneus said with evident pride in himself. ‘Now I’m looking forward to fighting before the crowds in Rome.’
Marcus looked at him curiously. ‘You mean you actually want to become a gladiator?’
‘Why not?’
Marcus could not help a surprised smile. ‘Because you’ll be putting your life at risk every time you fight.’
‘I’ve been in fights before.’
‘And, as you say, you haven’t won them all.’
‘True,’ Pelleneus conceded.
‘If you lose a fight in the arena, it could well be your last,’ Marcus suggested. ‘Seems to me that it’s more dangerous than boxing.’
‘Then the trick of it is not to lose,’ Pelleneus replied. ‘If I train hard and learn all I can, then I will have every chance of winning in the arena.’
‘Unless you meet a better gladiator.’
Pelleneus pursed his lips. ‘Then it will be a case of putting up a good fight. If a man does that, then the crowd will want him spared. If I live long enough, and win enough fights, there will be rewards.’ He stared into the fire and smiled longingly. ‘I might even win my freedom one day, and have enough money put aside to buy a farm, or a small business, and live out the rest of my life in comfort.’
Marcus did not know much about the life of a gladiator but what Pelleneus had just told him had sparked a thought. If he could not escape his current position and was condemned to live as a gladiator, what if he survived long enough to make his fortune? He could return to Graecia and buy his mother’s freedom, and take her back to the farm and return to the way things had been before Decimus’s thugs had destroyed their lives. If the chance came, then he would be a good enough fighter to take on and defeat those who had killed his father. Best of all, he would find – and kill – Decimus. He dwelled on the prospect for a while, until he became aware that the iron collar was chafing his collarbone, and he shifted the neckline of his tunic to cushion his skin.