The next time the door opens, the Roman is there.
She walks into the room a step behind the young red-haired Gaul, who carries a tray of something that smells like food. Again, the Roman wears men's sandals and a short men's toga, her hair tied into a tight knot at the back of her head, a gladius slung low on her hip. The Gaul crosses the room quickly, setting the tray on the floor near you; the Roman follows in long, easy strides, and crouches near your face.
"The sleeper awakes," she says, green eyes sparkling at you like candles on the road to Hades.
Her smile, crooked and dimpled, sneers at you. You can see yourself diving at her, digging your nails into the flesh of that aristocratic face and rending the skin from the bone. You wouldn't kill her, though. You would send her out to walk the streets of Rome as a warning for what happens when you cross Helena Wells, warrior of Brittany turned slave of the Roman Empire.
But you can do none of this now. You can barely move, now. You shift your gaze to the Roman's unwieldy, oversized gladius.
Fingers, on your cheek, push your hair behind your ear and you imagine grabbing those fingers and snapping each one for the insolence of being so familiar with your body. Your eyes flash up to meet hers with what is, you hope, the most terrifying glare she's ever seen. Her brow does flinch, a little, and the smile falls from her face. An answering grin grows inside you, but you suppress it, firming your lips into a line.
"What is your name, slave?" the Roman asks.
You stare at her.
"Perhaps she doesn't speak Latin?" she ponders, still looking at you but her question offered to the slave-girl beside her.
"She does, Domina," the Gaul says. "She spoke it in her fever."
In the corner of your eye, you see the young girl's gaze move from you to the Roman and back again.
"Leena told me her name is Helena," she says, eventually.
"Helena," the Roman repeats, high-bred diction curving over the syllables. She smiles again. "Well, Helena, my name is Myka, and my father owns this ludus. This is my hand-maiden, Claudia."
Your eyes shift to Claudia. It's a lovely name for a lovely-seeming girl.
The Roman reaches for the bowl of broth and slides it across the floor so that it rests between you. Carefully, she ladles up a small spoonful, blows lightly on it to cool it, and offers it to your lips. You meet her eyes again, and keep your mouth closed.
"All right," she says, as she returns the spoon to the bowl, "no broth, then. Some bread, perhaps?" She picks up a roll from the tray, tears off a small piece, and offers that to your lips, but you only tighten them. You will not be fed from the hand of a Roman.
The Roman smirks a little, lip quirking up to the side. "Well, Claudia, it seems to me that Helena here doesn't care much for me."
She drops the bread back onto the tray, and runs the back of her hand over your cheek.
"Very well, Helena," she says, "I will leave you in Claudia's hands for now, but I'll be back to check on you tomorrow." She squeezes the handmaiden's shoulder before leaving your cell.
Claudia watches her leave, then shifts to kneel closer to your face. Without preamble, she lowers a spoonful of broth to your lips, which part easily for her. It's rich, warming, flavorful. She offers you another spoonful, and you accept that, too.
"You know," the girl says, eventually, "I get what's going through your head, but she's one of the good ones."
You let your raised eyebrows stand in for a response.
"The Lady Myka," the girl clarifies. "She can be a bit of a stick in the mud-I mean, she's still a Roman—but… she cares for people. Even if they're her slaves."
"Hmm," you reply.
She finishes feeding you in silence, but you thank her, as honestly as you can, as she picks up the tray to leave.
\\
The subsequent days are like this. The ludus healer—a tall, Gaulish woman whose voice is faintly familiar—visits you, stripping your poultice to inspect your back, and applying fresh leaves to your skin, held in place by bandages wrapped around your torso.
"Last round," she says. "In two days we'll take this off to let the wounds dry so the scars can form."
Claudia and Leena bring you twice-daily meals. At first it's broth and bread, but as your condition improves they bring you cheese for the bread, and soups with meat and vegetables.
Your strength begins to return. You can raise to a sitting position, first for short periods, and then for longer ones. You can feed yourself, but Claudia and Leena sit with you when they can, to keep you company. They give you information about where you are, and how you came to be here.
Where you are, it turns out, is in a cell of a highly-respected ludus belonging to Warren Bering, who keeps a stable of his own gladiators and rents out training and housing for fighters belonging to other nobles. You were brought here by servants from elsewhere (you know where). Nobody knew who they were, or where they came from (you know who, and where), but they brought you and no-one else. No other new slaves arrived that day. Claudia and Leena still don't know what your purpose in the ludus is to be.
Leena, the slave who keeps the gladiators' quarters in the ludus, was told to care for your wounds, nurse you back to working health. You had been scourged so severely, there was little left of the skin between your shoulderblades and the small of your back. The wound was already infected, the sickness overwhelming your body. Lady Myka sent the healer to you.
The ludus' healer is a Gallic slave named Vanessa, the wife of Artie, a Dacian, who oversees the gladiators' training. She treated your wounds with acetum, a potent, burning liquid. It took three people—Leena, Claudia, and the Domina—to hold you down through the pain of the application, but between that, the poultice, and the renewing teas prescribed by the doctor, you have overcome the sickness and your wounds are healing nicely.
The Roman, Myka, visits you every day. She crouches, sits, reclines on the floor opposite you. She doesn't always wear men's clothing, you learn. Sometimes she comes to you in the long, flowing dresses more typical of her sex and status. She asks you questions about yourself, your past, your recovery, your meals. You meet her gaze evenly, but offer her not a word.
\\
Leena and Claudia ask you why you were beaten. "Because the Romans are pigs who may beat us when they wish," you reply.
They ask you where you came from. "Brittany," you say. No, they reply, they mean, where did you come from before you came to the ludus.
You withhold your answer. You are a Celtic warrior, fearsome with the spear and the bow. You are your parents' daughter and your brother's sister. You will not degrade those truths by sharing where you have lived, what you have been forced to do, during the past six years of your enslaved life.
You will not share that you were made to give your body to every person with the desire and the coin to pay your Dominus. That you lived in a building full of women and men forced into the same labour.
No. You will take those memories and bury them deep, alongside other memories you desperately wish did not define the scraps of person you have become.
\\
You have never been so bored.
Your mind is healed, your back is healing, your strength is growing. You can sit upright for hours at a time but your legs, so long disused, fail to support you on their own. With Claudia and Leena's aid, you make it to the bath at the ludus where you clean yourself, fully, for the first time in an age. It makes you feel closer to human and without thinking, you stand in the water, without help. Almost immediately your head spins and you fall back with a splash.
Part of you wishes there had been no water there to catch you. Part of you wishes your head could have hit the stone edge of the pool.
In your cell, you begin to pass the time by playing strategy games with yourself, scratched into the dirt of the floor with your fingernail. You play both sides, challenging yourself to best yourself, but it's difficult in the dirt, without playing pieces.
You decide to try, again, to stand, in your cell this time. Your fingers creep up the wall, latching themselves into crevices and seams between the stones. But just as you reach your full height, your knees twitch and buckle and you and you fall toward the center of the room, torso bouncing off the ground. It's far from the worst pain you've endured, but as you lie, alone, in the middle of your cell, something about it overwhelms you.
You cry for the first time in weeks, and wonder which of the gods hates you so much that they refuse to release you into the afterlife.
Of course, it's the Roman who finds you there, hours later. She slips her hands under your shoulders and helps to move you back to your blanket. For the first time, she doesn't attempt to engage you in conversation. Your tears have long since dried.
\\
The Roman shows up the next day with a board under one arm and a small sack in the other. She sets them on the ground between you, where you sit cross-legged on your blanket. She's dressed in the men's sandals and short toga, again, today.
"I know you're bored," she says, trailing her fingers over the scratch marks your fingers have left in the dirt. She opens the sack and dumps a pile of black and white stones onto the ground. "I brought a game. I thought we could play."
You stare back at her, impassively, as is your custom.
"We call this Latrunculi," she says, as she lays the stones out on the board. "Perhaps you know it? It's a strategy game. The goal is to immobilize the opponent's pieces by entrapping them with your own."
She continues to explain the rules, hands moving pieces across the grid to illustrate different points. You feel something pull at the edges of your eyes as your mind wraps around strategies, imagines setups and takedowns. You notice, absently, that her right hand is callused from sword-work.
She pushes the pieces back to their starting positions as she winds up her instructions.
"So," she says, "the first move is yours."
You look at the board, then up at her, her green eyes sparkling in the dim light. Your mouth opens, closes, opens again, mind warring with itself.
"Why are you doing this?" you ask, in her language. Your first words to her.
The smile that breaks across her face is almost contagious. Almost. "You intrigue me," she replies.
You have long known that you have no will to live. You would take your own life were it not for the shame such a deed would inspire in your family. You want them—the Romans—to kill you. You wish it desperately. But you want to take as many of them with you as you can.
This Myka, with her sparkling moss-coloured eyes and easy smile, reeks of innocence.
She, then, will be your sacrifice. She is your avenue to the ultimate freedom.
You lay your finger on one of the white pieces on your side of the board and make your first move.
