Chapter 7

It's mid summer of 189 AD, and I now have a daughter. I wanted to name her Fiona, but Fiona insisted that was bad luck. I couldn't see how naming a baby after her mother could possibly be bad luck when it was OK to name a boy after his father, but Fiona wouldn't budge. We compromised on naming her Iola, which was the name of Fiona's mother. Oh, well, what's in a name?

Commodus kept getting crazier and crazier. I was thinking that I only had one more year before I could retire as a gladiator. Commodus had already lost four of his best men to retirement, and he was steaming over it. It was a union rule that a gladiator could retire after three years if he wanted to. Of course, he could stay longer if he wished, but he could not be forced to remain a gladiator after three years of service.

Commodus was beside himself with rage over that, but there was nothing that he could do. If he had refused to live up to the contract, the union could go on strike. Commodus, and nobody else, could imagine Rome without the circus, and there would be no circus without gladiators. It was simply a situation that Commodus couldn't break. He couldn't even find a way around that rule, so he just fumed and fussed, but he never took it any farther.

You can bet that I planned to retire as soon as my three years were up, but I never let on that I thought that way. Two gladiators who had announced their intention of retiring a few months before they were eligible for it, found themselves in fights that they could not possibly win. Commodus showed his thumb when they asked for mercy, and they were killed on the spot. The rest of us got the message real fast.

I still wound up with some weird partnering, but I managed to live through it, and I rarely had to kill somebody at the end of a match. Everybody conceded that I was very likely the best gladiator in Rome at the time, but I had no trouble getting matches. Either there was hope of gaining a fantastic boost in one's reputation by beating me, or there was the expectation that I would not kill my opponent unnecessarily. Either way, men were not afraid to fight me.

On the opposite side of the coin, there was no longer any point in betting on my matches. The odds were biased so far in my favor that a bet on me paid so little that it was not worth the effort, and a bet against me was tantamount to throwing your money in the Tiber. Even I quit betting, the odds were so poor.

Commodus kept setting me up with more and more difficult matches. It was as if he was trying to kill me off. Nevertheless, I still managed to win, and I think that he began to get more than a little frustrated. He even once tried to set me up against a Sagittarius, but the union squelched that one. Their contention was that there was no way I could hope to beat a man on horseback who used a bow. I agreed with them, and Commodus again had to back down.

I would have been willing to fight a man on horseback who used a spear or lance, because I had some hope of killing the horse and forcing his rider to the ground. By now, I was probably overconfident, but I was sure that I could beat any man who was standing on the ground and used a knife, a sword, or a spear. I had seemed to get stronger and faster as I practiced my trade, and I was pretty sure that I was at the top of my game.

The reason for thinking that was that I had recently fought a Hoplomacus who had used a lance as his primary weapon. This was the feature match of the day, and we had to wait until all the other matches were finished and the arena had been swept clean of the droppings of shit from the animals and blood from the humans. It was nearly dark, and the place was brightly lit by torches. We couldn't complain about insufficient light, though the multitude of shadows could be confusing for the spectators at the upper reaches of the Colosseum.

After the usual preliminaries, we faced off and the referee told us to commence fighting. The lance was one that could be thrown as well as used as a hand-held spear. The lance was tied to the Hoplomacus' wrist so that he could easily retrieve it if he missed his cast. His other weapons were a gladius, and a dagger. His main defense was a large shield like mine. By the way, I was using my normal-weight shield for this match.

The match started with the Hoplomacus trying to stab me with his lance, but I was easily batting it aside either with my shield or my sword. Since that didn't work, he shifted to throwing it at me. After the fifth cast, I got a break. The cast missed me completely and went flying over my shoulder, but the lanyard was conveniently close, and I cut it. Now my opponent was forced to use his sword or to chase after the lance he could no longer recover by pulling the lanyard. He chose the sword, which was what I hoped that he would do.

The Hoplomacus was thought by the crowd to be the battle tank of the arena, since he had the most armor. In a lot of ways that was correct, and he was limited in speed and reaction rate as a result of all of that armor. He had so much armor that it was a waste of time to batter at him with a short sword. Your best bet was to try to get close enough to stab him in his chest or gut, but that was very difficult to do.

Here was where I hoped to use my heavy shield and, especially, the boss as my primary weapon. I ran toward my opponent with my shield top just below my eyes so that I could barely see over it. This was a common defensive position as it provided the maximum amount of protection to my torso. Of course, my opponent saw me coming and prepared to dodge. However, dodging while wearing all that armor was difficult to do. I managed to crash into him all right, but he got his shield pulled around to line up with mine.

What he was not expecting was that the shape of the boss on my shield put an unusual amount of stress on his shield when we banged together. The result was that his shield split vertically in half. That was what I had been hoping for, and I was ready to follow up immediately. I pulled back, and half of his shield fell to the ground, useless. He was now forced to fight with half a shield.