The First Champion
Chapter 1:
Marius
The first champion comes at me with a net, which is an insult.
I let it fly. It settles over my shoulders like a fisherman’s catch, and twenty thousand Romans suck in one breath, because they think it’s over.
Then I take the net in both fists and pull. The man holding the other end comes with it, straight into my elbow.
He drops. The sand takes him.
“One,” I say.
The crowd doesn’t cheer. They don’t know how yet. They paid to watch a mountain savage get carved into pieces by Pompeii’s finest, and the savage just folded their finest in half without breaking a sweat.
Three more circle me. A murmillo with a fish-crested helmet and a shield as tall as a door.
A Thracian with a curved blade and quick feet. A secutor, smooth-helmed and patient, the kind who waits for you to get tired.
I don’t get tired.
“They told us mountain lords,” the murmillo calls through his helmet. “Nobody said mountain goats.”
“Come closer and say it.”
He doesn’t. Smart man. The Thracian circles left, the secutor right, and the murmillo holds the middle with his shield up, herding me like I’m cattle.
Under my skin, my wolf paces.
It has been pacing since we rode through Pompeii’s gates three days ago. It hates this city.
The stink of fish sauce and incense, the press of bodies, the stone that never ends.
Now it’s pacing harder, because there’s blood in the air and three men want to hurt me, and every instinct I was born with says: open their throats and be done.
Not here, I tell it. Not in front of twenty thousand witnesses.
Rome tells its children that a she-wolf nursed the city’s founders and laughs at the rest of the story. If I shift on this sand, Rome stops laughing. Then Rome sends legions up the mountain to find out what else in that old story is true.
So I fight as a man. A big man. A fast man. But a man.
The Thracian comes first, low and quick, curved blade aimed at my knee. I step inside the swing and drive my shoulder into his chest. He staggers back, and I let him, because the murmillo is already moving behind his shield like a wall on legs.
“Left.”
The word cuts under the roar of the crowd. Quiet. Calm. My brother’s voice.
I don’t look toward the gate where Aldric stands with his arms folded. I don’t need to. I turn left, and the secutor’s blade hisses through the space where my ribs just were.
Thirty-one years since we shared a womb, and he still sees the fight better from the shadows than I do in the middle of it.
I catch the secutor’s wrist. Squeeze. His sword falls into the sand, and his smooth helmet turns toward me, and I imagine the eyes inside going wide.
“Two,” I tell him, and slam my forehead into the bronze.
It rings like a temple bell. He goes down. My skull rings too, but the crowd finally finds its voice, a rolling wave of noise that shakes dust from the seats.
Now they’re cheering.
Now they’re cheering me.
I hate it more than I hated the silence.
Three weeks ago, a Roman envoy rode up our mountain in a white toga that was brown by the time he reached the gate. He carried a letter sealed with the governor’s ring and stood in our hall, sweating through his fine clothes, while two hundred wolves pretended to be ordinary men around him.
Marcus Valerius, Governor of Campania, invited the lords of the Apennines to fight in his arena.
“An honor,” the envoy had said, in the voice of a man who did not think it was one. “A demonstration of friendship between Rome and the mountain peoples.”
“And if we refuse?” I’d asked.
He’d smiled the way Romans smile when they’ve been told the answer in advance.
“The governor would be saddened. Rome would be saddened.”
Saddened Romans come with legions.
I would have burned the letter anyway. I was holding it over the fire when Aldric took it from my hand and read the last line out loud.
To the victor, a prize beyond price: the she-wolf of Judea.
The hall went still.
Two hundred wolves, and not one of them breathing.
That night, our elder Vesta came to my chambers.
She’s older than the stone the stronghold is carved from, and she has never once explained herself to me.
She didn’t start then.
“Go,” she said. “Win. And bring her home.”
“Bring who home? It’s a phrase, Vesta. Romans call everything from the provinces a wolf. It could be a dancer.
A slave. A dog.”
Vesta looked at me with those ancient eyes and said nothing. Then she left.
So here I am, fighting for a woman I’ve never seen, because an old woman told me to.
I’ve done stupider things. Not many.
The murmillo charges.
Give him credit: he’s brave.
He’s watched me put down two of his brothers-in-arms, and he still lowers that door of a shield and comes at me like he means to drive me through the arena wall.
I let him come.
At the last second I drop, grab the bottom edge of the shield, and heave.
The shield goes up.
The murmillo goes with it, legs kicking, and lands on his back with a crash that I feel in my teeth. I pull the shield free and toss it across the sand.
“Three.”
The crowd is on its feet. Someone in the upper tiers is chanting something about mountains.
Someone else is throwing flowers.
Flowers. For men bleeding on the sand.
I’ll never understand Romans.
That leaves the Thracian.
He’s back on his feet, curved blade low, circling. He’s younger than the others.
Maybe twenty.
There’s fear in his eyes now, but he’s not running. I respect that.
“You can yield,” I tell him.
“If I yield,” he says, breathing hard, “my master sells me to the mines.”
“Then don’t yield.” I spread my empty hands. “Come on.”
He comes.
And the ground moves.
It’s small. So small I almost miss it.
A shiver under the sand, like something enormous turning over in its sleep far below.
The loose grains around my feet hop and settle.
A cup of wine tips somewhere in the front row, and a senator’s wife shrieks at the stain on her dress.
My wolf stops pacing.
It goes rigid inside me, ears flat, staring down through the sand at something I can’t see.
The Thracian doesn’t notice.
Nobody notices.
The crowd is too loud, and the boy is too focused on not dying, and his blade is coming for my throat.
I catch his arm, twist the sword free, and sweep his legs. He hits the sand on his back, and I put my boot on his chest, gently.
“Four,” I say, and lean down so only he can hear. “Tell your master you lost to the best. He can’t sell a man for that.”
The boy stares up at me. Then, slowly, he nods.
I step back, and the arena explodes.
The noise is so huge I barely hear myself think.
Twenty thousand people screaming, stamping, throwing coins and flowers and the occasional sandal.
Somewhere a horn sounds. Somewhere a man is weeping because he bet against me.
I don’t look at any of them.
I look down at the sand under my boots.
Still now. Ordinary. Grains of yellow sand mixed with blood and sweat, like every arena floor in the empire.
But my wolf is still staring through it, and it hasn’t stopped growling.
“You felt that.”
Aldric has come out of the gate shadows. He walks across the sand like he owns it, which is how he walks everywhere, quiet and unhurried. Lighter hair than mine, the same jaw, the same height. His eyes are fixed on the ground.
“I felt it,” I say.
“Third one since we arrived.”
“You’re counting?”
He gives me a look. Of course he’s counting. Aldric counts everything.
“The earth moves in Campania,” I say. “It’s a restless country. You heard the innkeeper.”
“The innkeeper also said his wine was Falernian.”
I almost laugh. Then I see his face, and I don’t.
Before I can ask what he isn’t saying, a small man in an expensive tunic picks his way across the sand toward us.
He steps around the groaning murmillo like a cat avoiding a puddle and stops three paces away, close enough to be heard, far enough to feel safe.
He’s not safe. But I let him think so.
“My lords.” He bows low. “The Governor Marcus Valerius offers his congratulations, and invites you both to dine at his villa this evening.”
“Tell him we’ll come,” I say, “when we see the prize.”
The envoy smiles. He was told I’d say that.
“The governor anticipated your concern, my lord.
He asked me to assure you the prize is real.” He glances up, just once, toward the purple-draped box where Marcus Valerius sits surrounded by senators. “She watched every blow.”
I look up at the box.
Purple silk. Torchlight.
The governor, smiling like a man who has just won a bet. Senators in white, wine in their hands.
And behind them, in the shadow at the back of the box, nothing at all. Just darkness.
My wolf goes silent.
Not still. Not growling.
Silent. The way it goes when something matters more than blood.
Historical note:
Pompeii’s amphitheatre, built around 70 BC, is the oldest surviving stone amphitheatre in the Roman world. It held about 20,000 spectators, which was most of the town.
The Pompeians didn’t even call it an amphitheatre yet. An inscription from its builders names it simply the spectacula, “the shows.”
The fighters in Marius’s match were real gladiator types.
The net-man was a retiarius, the murmillo wore a fish-crested helmet, the Thracian carried a curved blade, and the smooth-helmed secutor was trained to hunt down net fighters.
Gladiators could be celebrities. Graffiti still on Pompeii’s walls praises a Thracian named Celadus as “the one the girls sigh for.”
