Fire in the East by Harry Sidebottom Read Free Book Online Page A

ahead over the azure sea. What a nice irony: here was he, a slave, enjoying the sun and spray in the best seat on the ship, while behind and below him 180 freemen, technically soldiers of Rome, many of them volunteers, sat on hard benches in the airless semi-dark rowing this great ship. Let the poor bastards get splinters in their arses, he thought.
    Slavery sat lightly on Maximus. Others took it hard - young Demetrius for one. The Greek boy had looked down in the mouth ever since it had been announced that they would stop at Delos. Maybe it had to do with how you came to be a slave. Some were born slaves. Some were abandoned on dunghills as babies and taken in by slave dealers. Some were so poor they sold themselves into slavery. Some were enslaved for crimes; others captured by pirates or bandits. Outside the imperium, many had been enslaved by the mighty armies of Rome - fewer now that Roman armies seemed to have acquired the habit of losing. And then there were those who had come into the condition like Maximus himself.
    Back when he had been a freeman, he had been known by the name Muirtagh. His last memory of freedom was of laughing with some other warriors. They had tied a peasant to a tree, on the off chance that he had perhaps a hidden pot of gold, and were passing a skin of beer from hand to hand. His first memory of servitude was of lying in the back of a cart. His hands were tightly bound behind his back and, with each jolt of the unsprung wagon, the pain in his head grew worse. He had no memory of anything between the two. It was as if someone had taken his papyrus roll of The Satyricon, ripped out several sheets and then glued the torn ends together again, or maybe better had torn several pages from one of those new bound books. The story just jumped from one scene to another.
    Another warrior whose life had been spared for slavery, Cormac, had been in the cart too. Apparently, they had raided a neighbouring tribe of some cattle and some of its warriors had caught up with them. There was a running battle and Muirtagh had been hit in the head by a slingshot and dropped like a stone. Now they were being taken down to the coast to be sold to Roman slave traders.
    Cormac had not been sold. A minor wound to his leg had turned bad, and he had died. Muirtagh had. His first owner thought Maximus was a suitable name for a potential recruit to the arena, so he was called Muirtagh no longer. Maximus was shipped to Gaul and sold to a lanista, the trainer of a travelling group of gladiators. At first he had fought with the cruel caestus, the metal-spiked glove of a boxer. But there had been an incident: Maximus and a retiarius, a net and trident fighter, in the troupe had fallen out over money. To recoup the loss incurred by the crippling of the retiarius, Maximus had been sold to another troupe, where he had fought with the oblong shield and short sword of a murmillo.
    Maximus had been fighting in the great stone amphitheatre of Arelate when Ballista first saw him. The Angle had paid well over the odds for him, and for good reason. Back then, on his way to the far west, Ballista would need two things: someone to watch his back and someone to teach him Celtic.
    Maximus was not obsessed with winning his freedom as other slaves were. The Romans were uncommon generous with manumission - but only because freeing lots of slaves was the carrot that worked with the stick of crucifixion to keep them from acts of desperation, from mass flight or revolt. At an individual level, it was a way for the Roman elite to show their largesse. Freeing large numbers of slaves fuelled the demand for new ones. Freedom, for Maximus, was all bound up with expectations and obligations. Maximus was not too fussed about a roof over his head, and certainly not bothered whether the roof was his own. He wanted his belly full, of booze as well as food; he wanted a string of willing girls, although, at times, reluctance had its attractions; and he enjoyed a