"Oh." Then, "Well, I hope my goddamned ill-gotten gains helped." He turned on the hard bed and groaned as aching muscles sharply called attention to themselves from his shoulders to his thighs and from his biceps down to his wrists.
A stirring of the darkness gave him scant warning. Then, when hands touched his naked shoulder in the darkness, panic hit. "Marcus, what are you doing?" The other man was kneading his sore shoulders as though they were bread dough.
"I am doing what I was trained to do from boyhood. To give my master soothing back- or shoulder- or foot and-leg rubs when he requested them. Just lie still, Skeeter. I'll work through your tunic cloth, since you do not have the mindset-that is the right word? of a Roman. Your privacy is a dark shroud you pull about yourself. That is your choice; every man needs his privacy intact."
A certain darkness in Marcus' voice connected quite abruptly with other things he'd said on occasion, leaving the truth about Marcus' boyhood lit by a scathing spotlight. He knew; but he found he had to confirm it to believe it. "Marcus?"
"Yes, Skeeter? What is wrong? I have hurt your shoulder?"
"No. No, that's fine. Feels like maybe I'll be able to move it tomorrow after all."
"It would be better with liniment, but we have no coin to buy it."
"Marcus, would you please shut up? I have something really important to ask. You don't have to answer; but I have to ask it. Your old master, the one before that bastard Farley dragged you through the Porta Romae ... when you gave him rubdowns like this, did he request--order--other things as well?"
The sudden stillness of the hands on his shoulder and the utter silence, broken only by rattling breaths, gave Skeeter all the answer he needed.
Surprisingly enough, Marcus answered anyway, in a whisper torn from a proud man's soul, leaving it filled with nothing but pain and fear. "Yes. Yes, he did, Skeeter. He was ... not the first."
Skeeter blurted out, "He wasn't? Then who the hell did rape you first?"
Marcus' stilled hands on his shoulder flinched badly. "A man. I never knew his name. It was on the slave ship. He was the first."
It hit Skeeter harder than most, for he'd seen prisoners of the Mongols buggered before being split open from throat to genitals and left to bleed out. "My God, Marcus! How can you even bear to touch another person? To father children, to give my aching muscles the rubbing they need. I mean, the rubbing they want?"
He said simply, "Because for whatever foolish reason, I have come to trust you again, Skeeter. My life is literally in your hands. If we are caught, they will take you back to the gladiatorial school. You have become famous in the Circus, so you are valuable. I am only a scribe. I've grown too old for the other, thank all gods and goddesses, but even as a scribe, I am worth little compared to you. If we are caught, our faces will be branded with the F of a fugitive. That's all that will happen to me, if I'm lucky. My so-called master could well cripple me to keep me from running again, or turn me over to the state for execution, or sell me to the bestiary masters, to be torn apart by ravening wild animals." He drew a deep breath. "So, I stay with you, Skeeter, as my only hope of survival until the gate opens. And ... I wish to ease your pain because you are my friend, and you acquired that pain saving me from the arena master's ownership. I knew that was wrong, but not another man in Rome would have questioned it, never mind defended me."
"Hey, I wasn't just helping you. As I recall, I had some pretty selfish reasons to get the hell out of that arena, too, you know."
"Yes, but..." He gave up with a sigh, and said instead, "What I said at the Neo Edo, Skeeter ... I had no right to say it. Any of it. The truth of what happened between you and Lupus Mortiferus I will never know, for I was not present, and I know now the kind of professional killer he is. So ... who am I to judge?"
"Huh." Skeeter remained silent a moment. "Well, just to set the record straight," he couldn't keep a bitter hoarseness from creeping into his voice as, for once, he told the gods' own truth about what he had done, "I swindled and pickpocketed every bit of the money I brought back from that profitable little trip. Right down to the little copper asses and their fractions."
Marcus was silent a long time, kneading muscles along Skeeter's back until they felt like pudding.
"There are many ways of growing up, Skeeter, and I have no right to judge when I, of all people, know your truth-the way you were brought up. Your childhood, Skeeter, was far worse than mine."
"Huh? How the hell do you figure that-?"
Marcus wasn't listening. He gave out a little, wan laugh just this side of anguish. "Believe me, Skeeter, when I say mine was hell. But yours was far worse. I was every kind of fool for judging you so cruelly."
"The hell you were." Silence fell between them, both of them stilled to the point that the sound of an unknown voice outside their hideaway would have drawn indrawn, ragged screams from them both. Skeeter finally broke the silence with a sigh. "No judging, huh? Is that how your Found Ones operate their business?"
"First," Marcus dug into a muscle under Skeeter's shoulder blade with enough force to wring a yelp of pain from him, "we are not a `business.' We are a survival necessity for those of us ripped from time and left stranded at TT-86. We serve as what Buddy would call a `support group.' And we have to accommodate the religious and political beliefs of many, many differing times and nations and kinds of men and women. It is not easy to be a leader of that group."
"And you are?"
"Mere" Honest shock filled his voice. "Great Gods, no! I am neither talented nor patient enough for such demands." A brief pause. "I did say that the right way, did I not? It is `either/or' and `neither/nor' is it not.
Skeeter knew far better than to chuckle. Marcus was a man with little but battered pride left and Skeeter didn't want to make more mistakes than he felt he already had. "Yes," he said quietly, "you got it right, Marcus. But if you're not a leader, who is? You've adapted better than almost anyone else, you're smart and driven to improve yourself-"
"Skeeter! Please ... it is some other man you must be speaking of, not I" He drew a deep breath and let it out. "It is Ianira who leads us, with a few others who take responsibility for certain tasks. Things like making sure no downtimer goes hungry." He chuckled, then, clearly over his embarrassment. "Do you have any idea how long it took to convince Kynan Rhys Gower that we were not devil-worshippers damned for all time? Yet now he comes to our meetings and speaks up with ideas that are good."
"Humph. I didn't know you were that organized, or even if you were organized, but I figured you needed help. I gamble away most of my money, anyway, you know, a habit I picked up in Yesukai's yurt, so I just take some out first and send it to you, so I can tell myself I'd done something decent as judged by this world."
His voice caught slightly on the word. Surprising himself immensely, he found himself saying, "Do you have any idea how my two worlds tug at me? Some days ... some days they come near to ripping me apart. In my most secret heart, I still yearn for the honor of riding on raids as a Yakka warrior. But I lived in the squalor and deadly dangers under which they live, Marcus-lived in it for five years. It is a perilous life, usually brutally short; yet I still want it. And another part of me is pulled the other way, into the now in which I was born. The now where I hated my father so much for not caring, that I became an accomplished thief and swindler by the age of eight. In that same heart, I know Yesukai would have been proud of me, these past years. But here I am tolerated only because I don't steal from 'eighty-sixers. They don't seem ever to understand they're the only family I have left." It was Skeeter's turn to suffer hot, stinging eyes. "What you said, about my lying to myself? Maybe you were right. I just don't know, any more."