While the two thieves were wrapped up in their own problems, Casca made use of the time to free himself from his bonds, nicking himself only slightly in the process of handling a sword behind his back.
When the two were able to motivate under their own power, he sped them on their way with a few well-placed slaps on the ass from the flat of his blade. The two men wasted no time in putting as much distance as possible between them and what was to have been their victim. Casca gave his first laugh in weeks at the sight of the bobbing heads heading for the high ground.
The action of the attack and its subsequent outcome served to break him out of the dangerous, mind-drugging lethargy that had been creeping over him. He was wide awake and ready for some living. Gathering his gear, he mounted his horse and with a kick to the flanks headed back into the wastelands, but this time his blood was racing and alive. There was a world to see, and, thanks to the Jew, he had what looked to be more than enough time to do it all. By the great brass balls of Jupiter, he would try.
Three more days and he reached the first signs of civilization. He came upon neat rows of cultivated fields and groves of olive trees. He spent a few scarce denarii for fresh meat and grain. After eating, he questioned the farmers and found that he had gone in a long half circle to the South and was now near the city of Aphrodisias.
He had heard of the city. It was well known throughout the empire as an artists colony, whose sculptures were to be seen in the finer domus of the empire. The city, as was obvious, was named for its patron goddess, Aphrodite, goddess of love and artists.
The farmers told him the city boasted of having the most liberal attitude toward sex of any in the empire, and also claimed to have more homosexuals to the square foot than any city in the world.
He spent four days in the city lying on his butt and taking it easy. He didn't have sufficient silver for the more plush boardinghouses, but after selling one of his horses he did have enough to raise a little hell and get laid a couple of times. He had some minor luck with dice, playing against Arab traders heading for Bithynia and won enough to cover the expense for part of the trip. He paid for the rest of it by renting out his sword as a guard for the caravan of Izmael Ben Torzah, a hawk-nosed old patriarch of the desert who looked like some great graying bird of prey, riding over the desert on his horse with his white robes flying loose about him in the wind.
The old man had taken a liking to the scar-faced Roman. When they were to leave the fleshpots of Aphrodisias, he went to the trouble of locating Casca and liberating him from the attentions of a widow, who was interested in having his knotted, muscled body carved into a likeness of marble. It would have been something new in the art field. It would have been called stark realism, since Casca was not one of the pretty boys of the Greek school but a real man with all his bad points-and, as she said when examining him in the nude, also his one good point.
Izmael paid the protesting woman no heed as he threw the half-naked and drunk carcass of his new guard over the back of one of his pack animals and rode off to join his caravan, already far outside the city and heading north.
When Casca finally sobered up, he wasn't sure whether to be grateful or not. He was sure he could have had a fairly decent existence as a male model. Hell, he had been getting into the thing. Learning to pose and twist his body into awkward positions while the matron supervised the sculpture. Too bad he had had to leave before it was finished. But what the hell, maybe another tune.
After a little time passed, he realized that the life of a male model wasn't really what he was cut out for and forgave Izmael for hauling him off-especially when Izmael, himself feeling somewhat contrite, let Casca grade and sample the eight slave girls he was taking to the markets in Bithynia. On a scale of one to ten, two of them were threes, and the best one he gave an eight. The others fit somewhere in the middle. But all in all, they served their purposes well enough.
Casca didn't make it all the way with the caravan. When they stopped at Halicamassus, on the coast, he got drunk with some sailors and woke up to find he had signed on as a crewman. The creaking of the timbers brought him staggering to the upper deck of the bireme, where he emptied the remains of the previous night's revelry into the Mediterranean. Being a fatalist, he reconciled himself to the change in his mode of travel. As long as they didn't try to chain him to an oar, he was as well pleased as could be expected.
The captain was fair and the food not too bad. They were carrying an amphora of grain and olive oil as well as hauling precut slabs of marble to be used as facings for public buildings in Rome. These they used as ballast to settle down the tendency of the galley to pitch and roll.
When they finally put into the port of Ostia, he chose to stay on board rather than take the time to visit the city of the Caesars. The last time he'd been here they had first put him in the arena, and then "Mad Nero" had sentenced him to life as an oar slave on the galleys of Rome. No, the Imperial City still had a bad taste for him and he stayed close to the ship, not venturing much further than the nearest tavern for a drink now and then. Finally they had reloaded their cargo holds and made sail. They sailed first to the west, then north, this time to Messilia in Gaul, where he had first enlisted as a boy in the legions.
He felt an increasing desire to be gone from the hot humid lands of the Mediterranean and also away from the Pax Romana. There was only one place he could go where the long arm of Roman law didn't reach-across the Rhine into Germania. He also wanted to see if what the mercenaries he had served from the northlands had said about the women was true. It was a poor reason, but who said you had to have a good one?
Casca felt a sense of relief when they finally left Ostia behind them and headed out again to the open sea and into the clean sea air. Here the stench of a decaying and corrupt empire would fade with the distance. Rome still left a bad taste in his mouth. At nights, when the sea was quiet and the bireme rocked to and fro with the swells, he would often awake with a jerk, his body soaked in cold sweat as memories rushed on him in his sleep. In his nostrils would be the sweet, sick smell of blood.
It was blood from the sands of the arena-the circus where he'd fought for the amusement of the Roman public, where women in a frenzy would sell themselves into slavery, making wagers on who would die. He could hear the voice of Corvu, the Lanista, barking out commands at the tyros, the same as a sergeant in the army would, constantly repeating commands to recruits until the response to orders became automatic.
"Don't go for the throat or the leg-get the gut first. It's the biggest target. Cut the bastard after he's down. Remember, a leg wound might eventually slow a man up, but if you get careless he can still kill you. Play it safe. Only get fancy when you know he's through; then make it look tougher than it is. Keep in mind that you're out there to entertain the people, not get yourselves killed. Let the bastards from the other schools do the dying."
But even Corvu was not above rigging a fight against one of his own students if the man was a troublemaker. It was simple enough to arrange. A little draught of a sleeping drug in the cup of posca, the watered vinegar that each gladiator would rinse his mouth with before entering the arena, would insure that in a few minutes the man's reaction time would slow down. And before the audience caught on that he was drugged, his opponent would surely take advantage of the situation and put a quick end to the unfortunate one.