The Champion Read Online Free PDF

walls. Bears,horses, boars with huge twisted tusks and even elephants awaited the ring in iron-barred stalls.
    Sickened by the sharp stench of fetid hay and human degradation, Tibi watched the maelstrom of activity in awe. Life beneath the amphitheater spun like a well-oiled mechanism. Guards shouted orders to various troupes. Pulleys groaned as multiple lifts filled with dead warriors and animals were lowered from the arena’s sandy floor above them. Tibi cringed when the bodies were kicked aside. Just as Darius had said, trainers from the various gladiator schools unshackled their men. The fresh combatants lined up and traded their wooden practice weapons for polished shields, swords and tridents made of iron before being loaded onto the platforms that were raised back to the field.
    “We’ll wait in here.” Darius waved her into a side room divided from the staging area by a low wall. Flanked by stone benches, the converted game pen held a large, chipped ceramic pot filled with water at the far end. The bulk of Alexius’s gladiators filed in behind her, while the rest remained beyond the wall to practice their battle stances.
    Tibi tugged her cloak around her and buried her nose in a clean patch of itchy wool. The frenzied cheers of the mob blended with the tempest of activity clashing all around her. Doing her best to fade into a darkened corner, she studied the scarred, fierce-looking men. Some of them laughed and joked as though they were boys awaiting a romp while they played dice on the hay-strewn floor. Others were solemn, melancholy even. She wondered at the difference. Unlike most gladiators who were sold or sentenced into the profession, the men of the
Ludus Maximus
were volunteers who’d sworn their loyalty to Alexius, a tradition Caros begana few years earlier when, she suspected, he became a Christian and no longer wished to keep slaves.
    The crowd’s muffled chant of
“iugula, iugula,”
demanding a fallen man’s death, chilled her. The gladiator games were a pillar of the Empire, but she’d never been allowed this close to the carnage before. Nausea swirled in the pit of her stomach. “How many men do you expect to lose today?” she asked Darius when he sat down beside her.
    The edges of his mouth turned downward as he mentally took a head count. “Ten. Maybe twenty,” he answered prosaically. “The sponsor arranged battle re-enactments instead of a single man-against-man. The group fights are more expensive in lives and coin, but priceless in terms of buying the mob’s goodwill.”
    Cringing, Tibi nodded. Everyone knew authority in the capital depended on keeping the public amused and satisfied. The emperor and other rich men who wished to influence or keep power did so by providing food and sponsoring an endless array of entertainments. The chariot races and gladiator games—the bloodier the better—were by far Rome’s favorite sports.
    “What drew you to this life, Darius? Why did you volunteer?”
    His dark eyes questioned her sanity. “The money’s good. So is the acclaim. Where else can slaves, foreigners, the condemned or poverty-stricken men like me go to earn freedom or fortune if not in the arena? We gladiators embody Romans’ worst fears. Because of that fear, most people look on us with a mix of repugnance and awe. But train a man with weapons, teach him how to entertain the crowd and in return the mob will give him a godlike reverence few men can ever hope to attain.”
    “I know, but—” Another loud cheer signaled that the fallen gladiator was dead. She swallowed and wiped the sheen of perspiration from her upper lip with a shaky hand. “Some of you have wives and children. What good is fame and fortune if you’re dead? Why not be farmers or blacksmiths or—”
    “It takes coin to set up a farm or a shop, mistress. Except for a few men like the master who fight their own rage in the arena, a volunteer does so because his plans require funds to prosper.”
    Tibi