“Wait!” a voice said from the doorway. Charon, boatman of the River Styx, stood in the half-light, his hands lifting to his face to remove the skull mask, revealing the wizened head of an old man beneath it.
The slave waited, the meat cleaver poised to fall.
“The lion skins are worth good coin, boy,” the man said. “Do not cut them up. Skin them later.”
Wordlessly, the boy nodded and picked up the tongs once more. The man who had been Charon hung his long dark robes on a peg, next to the mask. He surveyed the chamber with his hands on his hips, observing the long task ahead.
“I want this room clear by tomorrow,” he said. “Lions skinned and separated-teeth, too, if you can. Best cuts from the horse. We feed the dogs tonight.”
There was a low groan from the floor. The boy peered at the battered, savaged form that had once been a man.
“This one lives,” he said, his voice still in the process of breaking, his accent redolent of the coasts of Sardinia.
“Always the way,” Charon sighed, snatching up a long knife from the wall.
“Please…” whispered a voice from the floor. “Help me.”
“What do we do?” the Sardinian boy asked.
Charon peered down at a ruin of a man, his features ravened by lion’s teeth, one eye seemingly gone, his arm dangling limp and bloody, his chest rent by long, deep claw marks to the bone. Even as he breathed, blood seeped from his wounds and dripped through the grate in viscous, dwindling cascades.
Charon handed the slave the knife.
“Do you yet nurse dreams of fighting in the primus?” he asked.
The boy nodded, hopefully.
“Then here marks the commencement of your training,” Charon said. “Kill your first man.”
“Wait,” pleaded the weak voice from the floor. “Show mercy… mercy…”
“Mercy this is,” Charon said flatly. “Well, boy, hurry up.”
The boy moved forward and leaned over the wounded man. He then drew his knife across the man’s throat, spraying them both with a jet of further blood, filling the chamber with an agonised choking noise that went on and on.
“You must press deeper,” Charon said calmly. “That is not a killing wound. Here. Give me the knife.”
Charon took the wet blade from his apprentice, and grabbing the curly hair of his victim firmly in his left fist, he drew the knife hard across the wounded throat in a vigorous sawing motion. A trembling, bloody hand clutched momentarily at the apprentice, but sank to the floor, limp and unmoving.
Charon dropped the head to the floor.
The Sardinian boy made as if to say something, but Charon silenced him with an upraised hand. He listened, intently, in the dripping darkness.
“Do you hear it?” he asked.
Through the drips, through the trickles, there was another noise: a labored, shivering breath.
“Another is alive,” the boy said.
“For but a few moments longer,” Charon said. “Bring the knife. I will show you how to hit the heart.”
The boy clambered over the dead horse to reach Charon, who had found his prey among the lions.
“This one might survive, doctore,” the boy suggested.
Charon looked at him glumly in the half-light.
“I cannot be medicus. With luck and prayer and the greatest of herbs. With careful cosmetics to hide the worst of the wounds. With help to walk on those broken limbs. He might survive. Will you pay for him?”
The boy stammered, unsure.
“I am but a slave, I merely meant- ”
“He is already dead,” Charon said. “We are here to remind him of it.”
He held out the blade once more, and gestured at a space on the chest as it rose and fell.
“Here,” he said. “And slowly. I want you to see the moment that your blade makes a difference.”
The boy carefully placed his blade at the allotted spot and began to push. The flesh puckered beneath the knife’s slow advance, then suddenly gave way with a loud pop. The injured man snarled in anguish, began to scream, until Charon silenced him with a hand on his mouth. The noise continued, muffled, while Charon carried on with his lesson.
“Now,” he said, “see how his chest still moves. You have barely pierced the flesh. There would be more blood, but he is near bled out. Push on… push on, and see now how he flinches. And here… there!”
There was a sudden upwelling of blood, and the struggling ceased.
“You have pierced the heart,” Charon explained. “Measure well the depth required with such a blade.”
Some were already leaving as the acclamation of the primus died down. Cicero had seen retreating backs ambling down the steps, even as Verres and Batiatus made their closing announcements. The rabble had already forgotten Marcus Pelorus, if they had ever remembered him. They had forgotten many of the gladiators, too, and the reason that ten fought against four. But there was talk of the remarkable turnabout in fortunes during the fight with the lions, and much gossip of the painted woman who had lived to see her sentence postponed. It was, he heard patrons saying to each other, a fine day of games put on by Gaius Verres, in memory of Someone-or-Other. Pilorux or Plorus or something like that, may he rest in peace.
As Cicero stumbled down the steps after Timarchides, he heard some children giggling about some business with rabbits, which Cicero was grateful to have missed.
“A woman without worth,” Timarchides said to him.
“A judgment made by me alone,” Cicero said.
“As you seem judge of all things,” Timarchides muttered.
“Your meaning?” Cicero said sharply.
“Coming to Neapolis in search of a… what was it? A foretelling of a foretelling? Picking over the spoils of plundered cultures.”
“It is necessary, for the continued well-being of Rome.”
“Is the past, present and future of Rome not already inscribed in Sibylline Book?”
“A matter of some sensitivity,” Cicero sighed.
“Why is that?”
“For the reason that we no longer have them in our possession.”
Timarchides turned to look quizzically at the quaestor.
“But they reside in the Temple of Jupiter, on the Capitoline Hill!” he said.
“Burned ten years hence, the books destroyed with it.”
Timarchides stood, speechless for a moment. Then he looked about him at the firm, unyielding stone of the arena.
“So Rome is ended? Your history is over?”
“Fortunately, it appears that there is a window in the wall of Fate.”
“I would hope so,” Timarchides laughed humorlessly.
“The books may be restored.”
“You jest!”
“The priests maintain a prophecy is neither created by words inscribed upon a scroll, nor destroyed by burning.”
“Really? That is not what I have been told.”
“Regardless of what you have been told, no doubt by uneducated Libyan nurses and ill-informed Bithynian house-slaves, the future of Rome may be preserved through solicitation of replacement oracles from around the world.”
“If only the late King Tarquin the Proud had been told such a thing, he might have saved himself much grief.”
“Do you mock me?” Cicero bristled.
“Of course not,” Timarchides smirked. “I mock the priesthood,” Timarchides declared, “conniving swindlers with interest only in lining their own coffers.”
“Enough! The Sibylline Books can be replaced. Prophecies have been sought from all edges of the known world. They are to be collated in Rome and examined by the assigned priests. History will go on.”
“Thank the gods for that.”
“And gratitude to you for preserving one.”
“Of what do you speak?”
“The woman Medea.”
“She is not preserved.”