I looked at Cassia. Cassia looked at me.
Around us, Rome surged. Men and women, slave and free, strode the streets to the markets for vegetables and fish, and to the bakeries to take their grain to be made into bread.
The stream of humanity was too busy to push us aside and so flowed around us as though we were two boulders on the pavement. Water trickled along edges of the street, Rome’s fountains overflowing to drain to the sewers and the river.
I’d never had a slave before. The ludus used slaves to clean up after us and fetch and carry, but they belonged to Aemil, not the gladiators. Rumor had it that we practiced killing on unfortunate slaves, but that rumor was false. We were trained to fight other killers, to put on a show to please the multitude. The slaves were there to change our bedding and bring us food.
Cassia wasn’t at all the sort of slave I was used to. The man at the ludus who’d cleaned my cell ducked his head as he dragged out my slop pail and did his best to remain invisible. The women at Floriana’s were trained to please men bodily and made an art of enticement.
Cassia simply stared at me with the imperious gaze of a patrician’s wife and made no move to do anything.
One of us should make a start, or we’d stand there all day. It was the end of the year, Saturnalia finishing yesterday, and the wind was sharp.
“Where are the lodgings?” I asked her abruptly.
Cassia parted her lips, revealing even teeth. “It is above a wine shop, at the base of the Quirinal.” Her voice was young and soft, but with a cool patience, as though she was used to explaining the obvious to her inferiors.
The base of the Quirinal sounded promising, though not palatial. I’d visited villas and massive houses at the tops of Rome’s hills, expected to perform for my supper—which could mean fighting another gladiator, or displaying my scars, or simply telling tales of my past bouts.
I wondered what sort of rooms my new benefactor could provide. If he’d obtained my freedom, he must have paid a handsome sum to take me from my contract with Aemil. That meant a wealthy man or, as I’d speculated, woman.
Cassia remained unmoving so I made a brief gesture with the sword in my sore hand. “Lead me.”
Cassia studied me for another moment before she started off along the narrow street.
She wasn’t used to walking, I could see. She stepped carefully in her sandals, moving warily from stone to stone, shying from the rivulets of water on the road’s edges.
What sort of slave was uncomfortable with the pavement of Rome? Slaves hurried all around us to get breakfasts or run errands for their masters who lived in the houses, from the grand stand-alone domii to the meager rooms in the insulae. I strode along without hesitation in my thick-soled sandals.
I guessed, as we went along, that Cassia was used to riding in a litter. She might have been a highborn woman’s slave—dressmaker or hairdresser or some such. I’d seen litters carried about by strapping men, the personal maids of the ladies crouched in a corner inside with their mistresses.
Or else Cassia was unused to Rome itself. Possibly both were true.
“Where do you come from?” I asked.
She glanced over her shoulder then resumed walking with her uncertain pace. “Campania.”
Not the answer I expected. Campania was south of Rome, containing the seaside towns of Herculaneum and Baiae. Wealthy patricians built vast villas there, growing olives and grapes for expensive wines. Cassia, as I’d observed, had the complexion of a woman from Antioch or Cyprus. Her Roman Latin was perfect and unaccented—better than mine. I reasoned that she must have been born and raised in Campania, but her parents or grandparents had hailed from the eastern end of the sea.
We left the Subura, skirting the Forum of Augustus and the great wall he’d constructed to shield his grand space from the rest of Rome, and turned up the Vicus Longinus.
From here Cassia took a smaller street, this one filled with shops whose awnings were propped open. The vendors sold anything from oranges and lemons to fresh-pressed oil to the baskets to carry the comestibles in. We passed a popina doling out bread and pottage, and my stomach growled, accustomed to being filled soon after I woke.
I halted. “Is there food at our lodgings?”
Cassia realized after a few steps I wasn’t following and turned back. “No, nothing to eat there.”
“Then we should buy it.” I waved vaguely at the vegetable seller whose counter was piled with fresh greens from the farms open to winter sunshine. “You can prepare me breakfast. And have some yourself,” I added. It was not my way to starve a servant.
“Oh.” Cassia paused in confusion. “I don’t cook.”
I blinked at her. “No?”
“No.”
We regarded each other a few moments. I noted that her nose wasn’t perfectly straight.
“Maybe you didn’t cook for your mistress,” I ventured. “But you belong to me now. I need meals, not my hair dressed.” I touched my head, close-shaved to keep me from bothering with vermin or having my hair grabbed in a bout.
I had thought to make her laugh, but she studied me in all seriousness. “I mean I don’t know how to cook. Or dress hair.”
My puzzlement grew. “Never mind. We can eat what the popina sells.”
Cassia glanced, mystified, at the eating shop, with its customers leaning on the stone counter, the man behind it ladling out grainy soup from copper bowls sunk into that counter, kept hot by pots of burning wood beneath them.
“Do you have coin?” I prompted. “To buy us something?”
Her brow furrowed. “Any coin is in our lodgings. And there is not much of it.”
I was growing impatient with this single-minded personage. I’d taken my meals outside the ludus plenty of times when I’d done guarding jobs. I’d preferred to eat at the ludus, because our food was much better, but I sometimes had no choice.
“Then we will go to our rooms, and decide what to do. You can sweep up and set the table, or whatever it is a person does in a house.”
“I don’t know much about cleaning either.”
I foresaw a future where I took out the slop buckets and fetched water while this swathed creature reclined on a dining couch, munching grapes while she observed my labors.
“I thought you were my servant,” I said. “What sort of slave are you, if you can’t cook, clean, or fetch and carry?”
A courtesan, was the answer. One to keep the gladiator tamed while his benefactor decided what to do with my obligation to him.
Cassia lifted her chin. “I am a scribe.”
Her answer surprised me to silence. A scribe? The gods must be laughing at me. Leonidas, the champion of the empire, left alone on the streets with no money and no food, and the only one sent to assist him was an unworldly scribe.
My hand throbbed where it clutched the sword. Cassia had turned away and continued along the quiet street as I stared in disbelief.
“A scribe?” The words scraped out of me as I strode after her. “Why do I need a scribe?”
Cassia halted at a plain door next to a shop whose customers lined up to take away amphoras of wine. She opened the door to reveal a stone staircase that rose into shadows.
She began to ascend, but I put my hand on her shoulder and drew her back, not wanting her to walk alone into who knew what kind of rooms with who knew what kind of person waiting. Rome was not a safe place.