Arena Read Online Free Page B

swords.” He seized my arm, his narrow foreign eyes glowing with the scheme. “Hear me out, Cassius. The Emperor may not have much taste for beast shows yet, but I’ll wager that within a year or more, the animal business will double. Triple, even.”
    “You’re hasty, Syrax. You’ve only been here a few months. The term is a full three years.”
    He waved the quibble aside. “The mob or the Emperor or both can grant the wooden sword any time they want. You know that. It could happen the first time we hunt in the Circus Maximus. I’m not promising it will, mind you, but it’s possible. So are many things. A large villa.
    Riches. Rank. Fine food. The caresses of fine ladies instead of the gigglers they ship in once a week. I know a great deal about you, Cassius, though you’ve never bothered to do more than nod to me. I know you seldom have a woman in this cell, for instance. And not because you favor the Grecian style, either. Because you stand alone, needing no one. I admire you, my friend.”
    “I do stand alone, Syrax. That means I don’t need you.”
    I said it seriously, though I was amused by his nerve. His bold, bright speech wiped out awareness of the pain in my back. I studied him critically, both fascinated and repelled by the naked, laughing greed on his thin Southern face. Some inner sense whispered that for all his clever talk and quick grins, I would be safer to stay clear of him. He was a man driven by an ambition as furious as mine. But I was curious too.
    “Since I admit I travel my own way, asking no favors, what convinces you I need your assistance?”
    He raised both palms in the manner of a Levantine trader. “Our school.”
    “Oh? How do you propose we build it? Even granting we manage to stay alive, win freedom with the wooden sword and find ourselves at liberty? Will the Emperor donate the land? Will he furnish us the money to build dormitories, import beasts and hire whores for the students?”
    “That’s my part,” he grinned back. “I may look like nothing to you since I’m a foreigner. But I know Rome. I was shipped here with my parents when I was small. They died in an insulae fire, the miserable creatures. Since then I’ve managed to ingratiate myself with quite a few equites and senators. I am also a man of wide business experience.”
    He ticked off on his fingers an astonishing collection of occupations including notice writer, oracle, fortuneteller, physician and professional actor at important Senatorial funerals, where he impersonated, as was the custom, the dead man in the burial parade. He concluded in a tone that reminded me of the upstart Tigellinus, “My last position was one of considerable authority. I Page 10

    served a wealthy landowner as his chief steward.”
    I laughed. “Then why are you here?”
    Unsubtle anger blazed in his eyes. “A little matter of using the master’s signet ring on some documents. The damned magistrate called it forgery. He offered me a choice. Leave Rome or bind myself to one of the schools.”
    “Naturally you couldn’t leave Rome when there are so many fortunes awaiting a clever man.”
    His fingers were hard on my arm. “Don’t joke, Cassius. That is, unless you enjoyed the whipping you got today. I heard your promise to Tigellinus. That you’d wear the eques toga. Did you mean it? Or are you like the rest in this miserable place? A braggart, full of nothing except wind?”
    For that I would have struck him, except that I felt again the humiliating bite of the thongs on my back. A dark sense of fate swallowed me as I said, “What I told Tigellinus will come true. I swear it. I’ll let nothing stand in my way. Does that answer you?”
    “Not quite. When you say nothing can stop you, have you the will to back it up?”
    My resolve was suddenly hard and cold as marble. “Yes.”
    He threw back his head and laughed, the ringlets of his hair shining. From the faraway plain rolled the boom of the thunderstorm, like nameless