Forbidden To The Gladiator. Greta Gilbert

       Chapter One

      City of Ephesus—west coast of modern Turkey—Roman Empire—AD 99

      There were two kinds of Roman men: the ones who lived in search of Gloria and the ones who lived in search of bona fortuna. Arria’s father was the second kind. No matter what family crisis or holy ritual, what call of duty or act of the gods, nothing could keep him from the fighting pits and that was where she found him the night he sold her freedom.

      ‘No women allowed,’ growled the guard, standing at the entrance to the pit-viewing area. ‘Unless you want to do me a favour?’ He gave himself a rude scratch, then flashed Arria a wine-stained grin.

      ‘Go to Hades,’ she told him, and in the split second of his astonishment she slipped past him into the rollicking crowd. There must have been two hundred men gathered on the slope before her—portly merchants and seafaring traders, oily-haired plebeians and watchful freedmen, even a smattering of patricians—all vying for position around the large gladiator training pit known as the Chasm of Death.

      Arria scanned the men’s torchlit faces, searching for her father. She told herself that it was possible he was not here at all. There was a chance that he had been on his way to the fighting pit that evening and been struck by a bolt of reason.

      I am an honourable pater familias, Arria imagined him realising. I should not continue risking my family’s survival on the uncertainties of bets.

      Arria almost laughed. As if her father were capable of such Aristotelian logic! No, he was here, as was every other corrupt gambler in the province. The fighting pits of Ephesus were as popular as they were bloody and the Chasm of Death was the largest and bloodiest of them all. The only hope now was for Arria to find her father and seize his purse before the damage was done.

      A shell horn moaned. A ringmaster’s voice resounded from below. He was introducing the next set of gladiators—a Dacian and a Berber, whose heights and weights he announced first in Latin, then in Greek. Nearby, a Jewish man echoed the information in Aramaic and Arria thought she heard someone say it again in the Armenian tongue. Second only to Alexandria in influence, Ephesus was the most important commercial centre outside of Rome—a place where people from every corner of the world gathered to live and trade. They spoke different languages and worshipped different gods, though Arria doubted any kind of god was present in this bloody place.

      Keeping out of the torchlight, she stalked along the edge of the crowd in search of her father’s stooped form.

      The fight below commenced. Arria could hear the metallic clang of weapons and the grunts of effort as the gladiators began their bloody brawl. The Chasm of Death was the training ground of Ephesus’s largest gladiator school and several times a year its owner, Brutus, would invite spectators to place their bets on fights between old or unpromising gladiators in an effort to clean out his stock.

      It was a twisted, bloody business and one which the idle and desperate men of Ephesus looked forward to with perverse joy. Arria calculated that her father had lost enough denarii at the pits over the years to equal the cost of a herd of goats, or a fine fishing vessel.

      But tonight he had reached a new low. He had seized a purse full of denarii that did not belong to him: Arria’s purse, the purse that contained the denarii that would see their family through the winter.

      Arria pushed deeper into the crowd and nearer to the pit’s perimeter. ‘First blood to the Dacian!’ someone shouted. Men cheered and grumbled. Coins changed hands. Someone smashed a wine flagon against a slab of stone.

      ‘Where are you, Father?’ Arria mumbled, feeling a little dizzy.

      She felt a large hand push against her back. ‘Move yourself, boy.’ A man in a purple-trimmed toga brushed past Arria, his eyes sliding to the small bump of her bosom. He paused. ‘What is this?’ He yanked her braid out from beneath her tunic. ‘A woman? At a fighting pit?’

      Arria stared into his kohl-rimmed eyes, too stunned to speak. She knew the man’s face: the bent nose, the high cheeks, the oil-soaked hair, combed into perfect rows. She had seen it carved on statues and sketched on walls from the cities of Miletus to Pergamon. ‘Proconsul Governor Secundus?’

      ‘You are under arrest, woman. Your presence here is an affront to Mars and a disgrace to feminine honour. Lictor!’ He motioned to a bodyguard somewhere behind her.

      The governor of the province? At a fighting pit? How was it possible? More importantly, what was she to do? She needed to find her father. It was September already. Fortuna alone would not keep Arria’s family warm and alive through the cold, bleak months to come.

      She lurched her braid free from the governor’s grasp and