“Marcus Crassus!” Lucretia gasped, her eyes sparkling with greed.
“So near, yet beyond our reach,” Batiatus said sourly.
“And yet perhaps not. Solonius has slithered next to the man but he also presents opportunity for us to mend injury and brush him aside.” Lucretia allowed her hand to snake down her husband’s thigh and beneath his tunic. She grasped his cock, making him gasp, and began to squeeze and pull the flaccid organ until she felt it stiffening in her palm.
“He invites us merely to flaunt new-found status,” Batiatus said, and gasped again, raising his hips to further aid the accelerating rhythm of his wife’s hand.
“And while boasts tumble from his mouth,” Lucretia said, “my lips will form smiles as you find advantage in proximity to Crassus.”
“To draw attentions away from Solonius?”
Her hand pumped harder.
“Crassus is eager advocate of games is he not? Witnessing contest with Solonius’s meager stock would be but thin gruel against more desirable feast. With the mighty slayer of Theokoles the tantalizing main dish.”
Batiatus tilted his head back and bit his lip.
“My wife stashes away distrust for Spartacus to broach sly plan. The thought brushes aside dark clouds hovering above husband, parting skies.”
This last word was accompanied by a grunt and a final spasmodic thrust of the hips. Batiatus’s seed spurted from his cock, hitting the tiled floor in a thin white streak.
As he slumped back into his chair, his eyelids drooping heavily, a slave appeared in the doorway, a tiny Egyptian girl of fifteen or sixteen, her budding breasts exposed.
Lucretia rearranged her husband’s tunic and kissed him on the lips, a wickedly crooked smile on her face as she addressed the slave. “Your presence well timed to see floor cleaned.” She turned eyes back to Batiatus. “I trust I set mind?”
“You fucking did,” he murmured.
Ashur suspected that Naevia was to blame. In fact, he was almost certain of it. It was the only method by which news of his humiliation at the hands of Batiatus could have reached the ludus with such speed. The instant he arrived in the baths, after descending the stone steps from the villa and passing through the metal gates which separated the two worlds, the jibes began.
Varro was the first to speak. The flaxen-haired Roman, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear, raised his eyebrows and remarked, “Ashur comes to scrape away failure and wash taste of shit dumped from dominus’s ass.”
Ashur frowned. The matching grins on the faces of the other gladiators easing their aching muscles in the steam of the bath house informed him that he was the butt of some as yet unspoken joke. Even so, he could not prevent himself rising to the bait, albeit with a barb of his own.
“I merely come for whiff of company no longer kept. To remind Ashur of rank odor now replaced by sweet scents of villa above.”
There was a ripple of hoots and sniggers, albeit of contempt rather than admiration. Varro glanced around at his fellows, still grinning.
“His barbs stand as limp as crippled leg. And foul cock.”
Laughter echoed around the stone-walled chamber. Even Spartacus, who had had little to laugh about in recent days, and who had never indulged in the childish, often cruel victimization of the newer recruits like that pig Crixus, had a smile on his face. Ashur gritted his teeth in a grin to indicate that he was happy to play along with the humor of the men.
Then Duro, one of the German brothers, pointed at the ink stains on his tunic.
“The man appears to wield pen for bookkeeping as poorly as he did sword. Fortunate for him, he spills only ink instead of his own blood, as before.”
The walls rang with laughter this time-and Ashur’s ears rang too. The lame ex-gladiator felt his cheeks flushing red, felt the anger bubbling up his throat and into his head.
He clenched his fists, but was unable to contain his temper. Raising his voice above the sneers and hoots of derision, he shouted, “Ashur shall release similar sounds of mirth when he sees shit from Duro’s gut spill upon sand in the arena.”
Some of the men even laughed at that, though Agron, the brother of Duro, scowled.
“You will be released from this world before the opportunity presents itself,” he retorted.
Ashur shook his head.
“I have witnessed brother’s training, his shortcomings quite obvious. He will be nothing but meat for superior beasts.”
Agron jumped to his feet, the sweat pouring down his naked body. “I would see your crippled limb freed from body!”
“Ashur’s words see you jump to foot. Jolted by the truth of them no doubt,” Ashur taunted.
Agron lunged across the stone floor of the bath house, but was restrained by Varro, who leaped up and grabbed his arm as he ran past.
“Leave the shit alone,” Varro murmured calmly into the German’s ear. “No honor lies in his blood.”
Agron glared at Varro, but he backed down with a curt nod and sauntered back to his place on the stone bench.
“Tell us,” Varro said, nodding at the black stains on Ashur’s tunic, “what discovery prompts dominus’s displeasure?”
Ashur shrugged and recounted that afternoon’s events in the city.
“All that spying and whispering for no reward,” Varro said. “Silver tongue falls tarnished, Ashur. Take care lest dominus find no further use for you.”
Ashur bridled. “The fault lies elsewhere. I was hampered in efforts by … forces beyond control.”
For the first time Spartacus spoke. In a low voice he asked, “What forces were those?”
Ashur looked slowly left and right, as if fearful of interlopers. Then he leaned forward and hissed, “Batiatus’s marked man, Hieronymus, has dark attendant holding name of Mantilus and thick cloud of mystery.”
“I have heard of him,” Oenomaus rumbled, a dark presence in the corner of the room.
“A fearsome creature you would attest,” Ashur said with a nod.
“In what respect?” Spartacus asked.
Ashur paused for effect, and then said quietly, “It is said that he is not true man but one of the lemures — malign spirit raised from underworld. From the very pits of Tartarus itself.”
Oenomaus snorted. “A tale to frighten children and simple minds.”
“Perhaps,” Ashur said with an elaborate shrug. Then his eyes glanced about the room. “But my own eyes laid witness and heart felt dread he imparts.”
Some of the men looked prepared to hear more, but Spartacus was quietly skeptical. “Did dominus’s wine cloud mind when this vision appeared before you?”
Ashur smiled thinly as a couple of the men chuckled.
“Senses were as sharp as your killing blade.”
He told his story-about how he had followed Albanus down to the banks of the Volturnus River, and about the small merchant vessel which had appeared from the darkness with its consignment of slaves. If nothing else, Ashur had a silver tongue, as Varro had declared, and he told his story well. He embellished it too, for maximum dramatic effect-in his account the merchant vessel cut through the black waters of the Volturnus without a sound, the lights burning on its deck suffused with an eerie green glow. When Mantilus himself appeared, he did so, according to Ashur, capering like some simian spirit, his sightless eyes flashing white like beacons, and the scars on his body writhing as if a nest of vipers moved beneath his skin.
“He sensed my presence in the instant he emerged from darkness, appearing as creature rising from underworld,” Ashur said, his voice hushed. “Though wrapped in blackest of night, he felt my eyes on him.”
“Or got whiff of rancid breath,” Varro said, eliciting another laugh from the men.
Ashur inclined his head. “Perhaps he did, with sharpened sense. His head moved like hawk hunting prey, possessed of faculties acute beyond those of man. And then …” His voice dropped lower. Instinctively the men leaned forward. In a blood-curdling whisper, Ashur said “…his eyes bore straight at me. I was cloaked and concealed such that no mortal could have detected. Yet this creature of clouded eyes turned them directly upon me.”