It was enough.
‘Prepare yourselves.’
Valerius’s left hand rose to touch the golden boar amulet at his neck.
Aulus Vitellius Germanicus Augustus frowned as the guards brought them out in batches of ten. Caecina hadn’t even thought to create a better spectacle by arming them properly. They looked like a bunch of bearded peasant farmers with spears and swords. At first they stood around, frightened and bewildered, but the lanistae ran between them pushing them into match-ups and pointing out the hundreds of archers who ringed the packed dirt and had orders to kill any man who refused to fight. Soon the arena rang to the roars of the spectators, the clash of swords and the screams of the dying.
He pinned the young man sitting next to him, the architect of this farce, with a smile, muttered some unintelligible words of praise and turned away. By the gods he was bored.
After the victory at Bedriacum he had been feted from Moguntiacum to Mediolanum and Lugdunum to Rome. He had eaten and drunk until he had been surprised to discover that even his gargantuan appetites had limits. Not four days earlier, Valens had held his own little spectacle, and in truth it was infinitely more cultured than anything this upstart youth had provided thus far.
His mind returned to the day when he had finally visited the battlefield between Cremona and Bedriacum, forty days after the fighting had ended. A charnel house. A slaughterer’s yard two miles long and a mile and a half wide. Tens of thousands of putrefying corpses piled as high as temple walls and hanging from the trees. Legs, arms and severed heads littering each yard of blood-soaked earth, every inch blanketed by the flies that swarmed insatiable to the feast. His court had gagged at the stink of rotting flesh, the yards of blackened, festering intestines torn from gas-filled bodies by the feral dogs which still roamed that awful field of death, and the black clouds of crows who fought for the softest parts – the best of it, the eyes, the lips, had long gone, but there were still opportunities for the determined – but to Aulus Vitellius Germanicus Augustus the stink of a rotting corpse was the sweet smell of victory.
A cry of appreciation from the crowd brought him back to the ‘entertainment’. A pair of gladiators had been clever enough to fight together for a time, but the taller of the men, a well-muscled bruiser, had taken the opportunity to stab his comrade in the back the instant that particular contest had been won. It appeared the victim had some special skill his murderer had feared. Perhaps the spectacle was not going to be as dull as he’d believed.
A second pair had also decided to fight as a team and he admired their skills until his attention was drawn to two equally matched men armed with terrible, curved knives. The blades darted and threatened, sang in great scything arcs that would have removed a head if they’d been successful, until the sublime moment when, with a scream that rent the air, they simultaneously ripped each other’s guts out and fell, spilling viscera on to ground already pooled with blood and gore. The numbers were down to twenty or thirty now, with the rest dead … or, like one of the gutted men who was entertainingly trying to crawl somewhere with his insides trailing behind him, certainly dying.
His gaze drifted back to the double team. By the gods, they weren’t bad. A tall spare bullwhip of a fighter with a long sword that seemed to have a life of its own, and a stockier man – no, not stocky, just not as tall as the other – who fought with a short sword and shield. So quick and coordinated that at times it seemed they fought as one man, entertaining the crowd with spectacular executions and imaginative ends, quite literally carving their way through their opponents. Vitellius thought he recognized something in the taller man. He had seen him fight before, he was certain.
Amusing. What would happen when …?
Valerius seemed to see the world through a red veil and a mist of scarlet droplets coated every inch of his skin and clothing. How many men had he killed? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was to kill the next one, and the next. Make it look good, but make it quick. They deserved that at least. He was glad Serpentius had insisted they stay away from the other prisoners and that he had never learned their names, otherwise … well, otherwise didn’t mean anything now. He fought on, always conscious of Serpentius’s immense presence at his side, not immense in mass, but in speed and style and efficiency. With a thrill of fear he realized the red mist had cleared and only one man faced them. The big man who had fought beside his friend, right until the moment he’d stabbed him in the back.
‘Come on, Lucius, let’s get it over,’ Serpentius coaxed. Valerius saw a moment of recognition in the other man’s face, and then he ran. The crowd shrieked their disgust and within five paces a dozen arrows from the archers on the walls had pierced his body.