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dung!”
    I gathered spit in my mouth and sprayed it on his legs. Tigellinus howled with anger, seized the whip and finished the job, lashing me until the lights in my skull went out.
    But I never screamed.
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Chapter II
    CARTS RUMBLED, and thunder from an impending storm, somewhere south in Campania.
    Night must have fallen. The vegetable wagons were never allowed through the city gates by daylight.
    I groaned and opened my eyes. Beneath my belly I felt the tangled wool of the blanket on my cell’s stone bed. A golden flame, tallow in a pottery bowl, wavered and leaped. All along my backbone pain roamed.
    Dismal shadows flittered on the cubicle’s rock walls. The darkness was thickest in the empty niche above my head. I tried to rise, fell back and floated off in hazy dreams of the past.
    Through drifting mists shone the face of my father, a scarred and bearded fighter. He said he found me as a bundle in a hollow alongside the great Via Cassia leading down to Rome from the country of the legendary Etruscans. He was convinced I was a child of more than base blood.
    Wealthy fathers often decided they did not wish to burden their pocketbooks with additional offspring. They exercised the right of paterfamilias and left the unwanted young at roadsides on stormy nights. The poor seemed to love their boys and girls too much for such cruel separations, he told me once.
    My father Cassius Flamma was a widower long past his prime when he picked me up that night, a year before the current Emperor was born. Cassius Flamma was a lonely man. He cared for me as well as he could, considering that his sole income was derived from running a fly-by-night animal show in the Field of Mars. The performance featured a couple of Mossolian hounds and two toothless mothy lions. He would wrestle the old lions, parade the dogs around on their hind legs and collect a few coppers from the crowd before the watch came along to send him and his rickety cage carts packing.
    He died when I was twelve, but he had taught me how to write and read the native tongue by then, as well as the universal language of commerce, Greek. And he’d left me a share of memories.
    Tales of how he’d won the wooden sword in the Circus before Tiberius himself. How he’d Page 8

    become a freedman before that, and was therefore able to confer Roman citizenship on his son.
    He showed me the trick with the hand, maintaining he’d learned it from a Numidian gladiator and put it to use on animals. And he initiated me into the hidden lore of the arches under the Circus, those dark, secret mazes where men diced and planned robberies and pimped for Cappodocian girls who performed lewd dances between acts of games.
    Lying with my back torn half open, I remembered him saying that the path to fame, though dangerous, lay straight and sure in the Circus. I’d waited a long time to follow that path.
    From my twelfth year to my nineteenth I had worked at various jobs, selling sausages on a tripod in the streets or unloading wheat from Africa at the Tiber wharves or sweating at the kilns of the Afer brick works. Then, only then, had it struck me that I was no longer a boy but a grown man who must make his way. To enter the arena it was not necessary to be a slave or a criminal. I could promise myself for three years to any of the training schools. I chose the Bestiarii School because of my father.
    The time was ripe for success. Never before had public spectacles been of such importance to a ruler.
    True, the Emperor favored gladiatorial contests, but some said he might be persuaded to enjoy animal exhibitions provided they were sufficiently base and bloody. Once I saw Nero Caesar Augustus at a great distance, when he was passing through the Forum, but the facts of his nature I knew only by hearsay, for I was busy in small outlying circuses where Fabius sent me to practice baiting bears with a veil and sword or to chase deer with a spear from ponyback.
    Gossip