Gladiator Tiger, page 7
part #5 of Gladiator Shifters Series
Of course, she already had proof, in the form of that sculpture, but no one would believe that. Nor would she want them to, really. She just wanted to see and build the links herself, as a matter of personal satisfaction. She thought Joash would understand that.
She bet Joash was extremely good at matters of personal satisfaction.
A flush of heat ran through her, and even though she was alone in the apartment, she gave a hoarse laugh and said, "Jesus, Elissa," to herself. Then she got her phone, texted, I met a guy, to Olivia, and got breakfast while opening an old file on gladiatrices, searching for a Livia Amazonia who fought around the first century. She had been famous, Elissa knew it as if she remembered it, but there were so few details about individual gladiators, never mind gladiatrices. Women were all too often erased from the fighting records.
Well. Women were all too often erased from history in general. Warrior women, those who went against the grain of history’s perception of what women were supposed to be, were frequently deliberately erased as an entire category, but sometimes records survived of the very famous ones.
There. 87 C.E., just a handful of years after the Colosseum was completed. A slave girl with shoulders like a man fought a good battle against a fellow slave. Two years later, a ‘large girl’ regularly defeated her opponents, to the cheers of gladiators themselves. And in 92, her name was recorded, Livia Amazonia, present at the battle of the tiger, slayer of dozens, and—
Elissa sat back sharply, shaking herself as if she’d received a shock as profound as Joash’s tale of the tiger’s death.
Livia Amazonia had died in 93, a beloved gladiatrix mourned by the masses and then, as quickly, forgotten. If there were monuments, memorials, shrines to her, they had disappeared, lost to time and buried beneath other, new, popular gladiators and gladatrices.
Joash and Livia had had less than a year together.
"What happened?" Elissa had gotten through the day in a stunned haze, waiting—hoping—that Joash would visit. He’d come at the end of the work day, looking unsure of himself, which Elissa found charming, if unexpected. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her at work, but had realized they hadn’t exchanged numbers. Elissa had realized that oversight herself in the wake of learning about Livia’s death, and had been more than glad to leave the museum with him so she could ask her desperate question. "I found a record of Livia, Joash. She died so young. What happened?"
Surprise, then regret, momentarily creased lines into his face. "She was murdered."
"What?" Elissa stared up at him, aghast. "By whom?"
"A man called—well, he became Lupus Aurelius. His name at the time doesn’t matter."
"Lupu—that means golden wolf, Joash. Isn't that a little on the nose?"
A faint smile crossed Joash's face. "Yes. He chose it after her death. He…" His eyes were tiger yellow and intense, in the setting sun. She couldn’t imagine they were any other color, not the amber-brown she’d assumed the night before, not some accidental shade of green or hazel. Yellow. An animal color.
They had been brown, when Livia first fought him. Elissa remembered that with a clarity like she’d seen it herself. Brown, when Livia and he had fought, and gold, after he and the tiger had bonded. Gold again now, looking at her with such familiarity. Not just on his part, but as if she knew that gaze, knew the intensity of it from the inside, as if she remembered meeting that brilliance with her own forthright and open examination.
"There’s a cafe," Joash finally said, softly. "A shifter space, close to the arena. Could we go there, or somewhere else quiet, so I can tell you this? Here is…not the place."
Elissa forced herself to look away from him, becoming more aware that they’d barely left the museum. That they were, in fact, still in front of it, with people passing close by as they made their way home or to dinner after work. "Of course. Joash…I’m sorry."
He said, "It was a long time ago," but with a darkness in his voice, an edge of anger that she hadn’t imagined could be there.
Although, of course it could. Anger was a familiar emotion to almost everyone, and the greatest injustices could still spark it even after it lay fallow a long, long time. "Do you want to walk?"
He gave her a startlingly grateful glance. "Please. I know you want answers, and that a walk will delay them, but…"
"Arguably I’ve waited two thousand years," Elissa said gently. "Another half hour won’t hurt."
A smile pulled the corner of his mouth, and he offered his arm. Elissa slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, feeling the firmness of muscle and the warmth of his body as they fell into step together. He moved easily, matching his stride to hers, but she thought he might run and leap on something with a destructive burst of action, if he had his way. "Tell me about Tove and nearly getting hanged."
Joash glanced at her again, clearly recognizing she was offering a distraction and just as clearly appreciating it. "First you have to understand how tiny she was, by modern standards. Less than five feet in height."
"I thought Vikings were tall!"
"They were, but a tall man then was five nine, and Tove was not a big woman by even their standards."
Elissa, slowly, said, "You’re over six feet tall."
"There’s a reason I was taken as a gladiator, my lo—ah, Elissa."
A glow of warmth spilled through Elissa and she ducked her head, trying without success to hide a smile at the endearment as Joash went on. "I was preposterously tall, for my time and place, and towered over most Romans. So did Livia, although not as dramatically. She was around five eight, though, about your own height, which was enormous for a woman then. Tove, however, did not share your advantages and felt she had to make up for it in both audacity and ferocity."
"Which she showed by cattle raiding?"
"As frequently as possible, and with a high success rate. The hanging incident was the peak of a long-running dispute between her father and another nearby warlord. They’d been stealing from one another for years, but Tove’s older brother was killed in Ireland. It had nothing to do with the dispute, but it gave the other chieftain an advantage. His own sons were alive and any hope of marrying one of his daughters into Tove’s family was gone with her brother’s death, so the local balance of power changed. She decided she could change it back by taking all his cattle."
"Could she have?"
"If it had worked. They anticipated her, though, and hanging her for raiding would have gutted her clan’s power structure. They would have lost their footing in the valley."
"Until a tiger came riding to the rescue?"
"A tiger and most of the gold from her older brother’s Irish raid. Roman coins, actually. It felt a little full-circle. Her father very carefully never asked about the giant orange cat who came from the hills to help rescue her. Both clans decided Tove had Freja’s favor—the cat was her animal—and made peace rather than anger the gods."
Elissa laughed. "And you lived happily ever after?"
"With several fat babies who grew up taller than their mother, much to her relief and resentment. It was long ago," Joash said softly, "but once in a while, if I visit that valley, I see a young man or woman with deep red hair and warm skin tones and know that they’re my grandchild, a thousand years removed. It doesn’t really happen elsewhere. A tribe of tigers, in the Nordic mountains. How unlikely."
"So they’re still shifters?"
"Even after so long, you mean? They are. As long as we meet our mates, we breed true. And look," he added with a smile. "You’ve distracted me all the way to the cafe. Thank you, Elissa."
"My pleasure," she said, and meant it, not just because she had gotten a little more information about who she used to be. About who one of her had used to be.
The cafe they'd reached had a sort of pleasantly long-neglected air to it, a comfortable kind of shabbiness that suggested people kept going to it out of habit rather than because it was the newest, freshest place around. As they were led to seats, though, Elissa noticed that the leather-covered chairs weren't really falling apart, but carefully distressed to look like they were three decades old and hadn't been comfortable to begin with. The lighting looked terrible, at a glance, but the individual tables were in comfortable pools of light. The rough-looking cafe bar was actually polished, even where it looked like it had been broken or damaged. Elissa admired the skill that had built the place to send casual visitors away at a glance, and as they sat, she cautiously offered her hand, palm up, to the man across the table. "Can you tell me now?" she asked quietly. "I think I need to know."
Joash inhaled deeply, then let it out again slowly. "You do. For more reasons than you think. Let me tell you first, Elissa, that in the wake of the tiger battle, Livia and I realized that we were…" He chuckled softly. "Destined. It took time for the phrase ‘fated mates’ to become ritualized. But we knew, from the moment our eyes met again in the arena, that something had changed."
Elissa nodded. "Yes, I—" The impulse to say remember was ridiculously strong, and for a moment it seemed as if she could feel the heat off the sand, the waves of it carrying the scent of blood and fighting. As if she could hear the shocked breath Joash took as the tiger died beneath the screams of the crowd. She couldn't know they'd been angry, that they'd seen the tiger's death as a betrayal of its efforts on the field. That had to be her own dismay at the turn the story had taken. The vivid sensation of Livia meeting Joash's eyes in the aftermath of his dance with the tiger could only be a reflection of her own response to looking into his gaze. "I thought so," she said, trying to emphasize it to herself, if not to him. "Was…" It took her a moment to pull the name to mind again, but it rose like another memory. "Was Lupus Aurelius jealous?"
"In a manner of speaking," Joash said quietly. "He was the ringmaster, the man who set the arena's schedule, who chose the gladiators to fight, who…" The tiger shifter shook his head. "Ruled us all, and despised what he couldn't control. He gave the order to kill the tiger, that day. Even without understanding what had happened, he had it killed."
"And when he did understand?"
Joash lifted his eyes to meet hers. "He had you killed."
CHAPTER 10
LIVIA - 91 C.E.
Livia had known the ringmaster's father, when she was a child. Not well, of course; she'd been a child, but from a distance, as a judgmental but impartial man. He had not been kind, but neither had he been cruel. His duty was to the entertainment of the masses and the emperors, perhaps in that order. Livia's fathers, the gladiators, fought at his whim, and died because of it, but that was the job. There had been no pettiness, no preference, that she could see, from her vantage as a small girl.
His son was different.
He had a name, but would only respond to Ringmaster. That, by itself, was different enough, and earned him no fondness amongst the fighters. Some played up to him, of course, currying favor, but even they curled their lips and spat when they spoke of him. He had tried to buy Livia, when the chance had arisen. She was glad he'd been outbid, that a wealthy citizen had decided he could make money off her by keeping her in the ring. The ringmaster would not have let her fight.
It was he who'd had the tiger killed.
Joash—she knew the red-headed gladiator as Joash, now—had staggered, nearly fallen, as if the tiger's death had almost been his own. Livia had put herself between him and the chance of more arrows, had turned to see the ringmaster's hand lowering, as if he might have ordered a new flight loosed, but didn't want to risk—
—not Livia herself. He would have been glad to see her dead, after his inability to buy and control her. Nor would he have cared about Joash's death. No, the thing he risked losing was the crowd's adoration, their willingness to go where he led. They were already on their feet, enraged, stomping, thundering their fury across the sands and up toward the scalding blue sky. The tiger had won their hearts, and audiences hated it when their chosen champions were undone.
The ringmaster had the archer killed, as if it had been the archer’s own decision to loose the arrow that slew the tiger. But it satisfied the crowd, took the heart out of the forming mob. It turned a burgeoning riot into complaints over wine and sausages while the onlookers waited for the next match. Such were the diversions of the masses, one outrage easily forgotten while waiting for another.
As the crowd settled, Livia had helped Joash off the field, and in the first dark space, beyond the reach of prying gazes, had welcomed his kiss as if her own life depended on it.
The next days and weeks were as full of laughter as any gladiator's could be. They had to learn one another's languages; it went better for him, surrounded by Latin, but she learned enough of his own tongue to trade secrets even while others listened in. They found joy in one another, and in watching the effect of Joash's refusal to fight the tiger. It had become the stuff of legends overnight, and happened again and again, the goddess binding man and beast in the same way Joash was bound.
He had not, in any way, meant to transform into a tiger, the first time it had happened. Livia had startled him by hurrying into his cell, and the wary leap from bed that many warriors knew had taken a new twist. A man had started the leap, certainly, but a tiger finished it, crouched low on the floor with its eyes rolling wildly. Livia laughed hysterically, and Joash became a man again, flat on his belly on the floor.
"Where did your clothes go?" It was all she could think go ask as she sank to the floor herself, fighting back a wild giggle.
"I…don’t know?" Joash patted himself like he was checking to make sure he was still dressed, then stared at her as if she could explain what had happened.
And she could, as much as anyone could. The goddess—or whatever power Joash wanted to attribute it to, since he didn’t seem to believe in the gods Livia knew at all—had done this. Made him able to change from man to tiger, and back again. With, apparently, his clothes. And now that they knew it, they went to the others whose encounters in the arena had been similar to Joash’s. Together, as secretly as they could, they learned to control the magic, to transform at will, to tap into the strength and flexibility and power of their animal selves without actually transforming.
Not secretly enough, though. The ringmaster caught wind of first their gatherings, then their power. After that he pitted them in the ring against one another, all too clearly intending to kill off those who had come by their shifting ability, their animal selves, as part of an unforced bond. So many of them died, and so many more were chosen by the ringmaster’s hand to fight beasts in hopes of triggering the bonding magic again and again. It worked, and those new shifters swore fealty to the ringmaster, promising their power and strength to him in thanks for the gifts they’d received.
Try as he might, though, he couldn’t make Joash or any of the other shifters who came to their power on their own bend to his will, not through coercion or promise or fear. As weeks turned to months and more shifters were made, the ringmaster tried to become one himself. Never in the heat of an arena battle, but when the gates were closed and the stands empty, he fought beast after beast, and beast after beast died on his blade.
"He’ll never bond," Joash said softly one night, under the screams of a dying animal. "He has no respect for—"
"Anything," Livia said, and beside her on their bed of padded rushes, Joash exhaled a breath of agreement.
"Not your gods, not the power of the arena itself, and certainly not the beasts. How can he imagine he’ll bond, with none of that?"
"He’s the ringmaster," Livia said with a shrug. "Therefore he must be worthy."
"It’s that simple, is it?"
"It is to him. He’s a free man, a citizen, and master of entertainment for all of Rome. How could he not be worthy? His father would have been worthy in fact, I think, but this one was born with a cruel soul. Our bad luck that this magic has come in his time, and not his father’s."
Joash smiled, a beautiful spark of light in the dark cell. "It’s easy for you."
"I was born to this life. You were brought to it. Maybe that’s the difference."
"I would take you away, if I could."
Livia chuckled. "I’ve earned far more coin toward buying my freedom than you have. Perhaps I’ll take you away." She leaned over to kiss him, and forgot, for a little while, about the ringmaster.
He entered the arena with her less than a month later. Thick dark yellow hair, unusual and coveted in Rome. A strong, if narrow, jaw, and a sharp nose: altogether handsome enough in his way, but with a conniving air that she could never like. The crowd screamed its excitement, though: they knew his face, and knew a day that saw the ringmaster on the sands would be one worth talking about. Livia, gut clenched with caution, knew they were right, but didn’t like it at all. He belonged in the stands, directing them, not carrying a blade and shield like a gladiator. Still, she bowed to show respect, and said, "Ringmaster," in a voice loud enough to be heard.
"Livia Amazonia." That was more respect than she’d expected to be afforded, and the audience loved it. For that moment, beneath the beating sun, she was his equal, and for a moment, she indulged in the thought of defeating him before the roaring crowds.
She wouldn’t. She could, but unless she killed him, she would pay for his humiliation with her life. And if she did kill him, she’d probably pay for that with her life, too. Even in the arena, a slave killing a citizen would not be looked upon well by the upper classes, and Livia had Joash and the hope of a free future to live for.
Besides, it wasn’t her that the ringmaster wanted to face. She’d heard a pack of wolves being brought in, massive animals raging with hunger. The ringmaster wanted to bond with one; that was clear. Livia had protected Joash from other gladiators as he’d negotiated with the tiger. She assumed that would be her duty again: massacre unskilled men for the amusement of the masses while the ringmaster tried to tap into the power that the audience’s passion brought to the arena. Livia and Joash were both certain the onlookers had something to do with the awakening of shifter magic, and the ringmaster seemed to have realized that much, at least.
