Night of the Gladiator: The Fifth Well Book V by Michael Lee

Author:Michael Lee [Lee, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-05T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

As the weeks passed by, I began to wish I wasn’t right-handed. Of course, Caelius explained to me that left-handed people were considered evil in Rome, but that was beside the point. I felt that my wrist had healed enough to use it, but the doctor didn’t agree. I itched to practice with Patrick and Kate. They were getting better and tanner, while Caelius and I just got bored.

By the time Caelius and I were both declared well enough to enter training, Patrick, Kate, and I had completely lost track of time and how long we’d been here. I finally joined them in training one extremely hot day, but ended up more bored than before. We had all been trained by Merlin to fight in certain ways, which he had thought important to the success of our original mission.

That’s over, but we’re not home yet. Regardless, the gladiator training was nothing special: wooden swords, unsharpened arrows and spears, and hastily assembled straw dummies and targets.

While I didn’t learn all that much with the sword, Caelius was now sharing the floor of our cell with Patrick at night, and I learned much more useful things from him. Somewhere, he had learned that, as we had started as slaves during the first day of the Magistrate’s games, we would be starting as gladiators on the last. And now, he judged that the fifty days of games would soon be over.

It was the reason why we always trained in the open Palestra, under the burning sun: the arena was being used for the games. I hadn’t been back there since our first fight. The Palestra was where we were supposed to train anyway, but we couldn’t even get a feel for fighting in the arena with the games going on.

Caelius also told me that it was useless to try to escape, unless I wanted more broken bones. Patrick didn’t believe him and tried. He wasn’t even able to get out of the building complex our cell was in, but he did manage to come back without being seen. There were just too many locks to pick in the time between guards walking by. Gladiators were a prized commodity, Caelius admitted, somewhat proudly, I noticed.

A day or so later, the gladiators were back out beneath the sweltering sun. When the Lenista, our trainer, finally called a stop to the wooden practice-sword skirmishes, Caelius and I almost collapsed to the dusty earth, using each other to keep ourselves upright. He absentmindedly rubbed his hand over the fading bruises along his left ribs.

“Still bothering you?” I asked.

He looked at me, squinting against the sun. “Yeah, a bit.” We were both literally dripping wet and I pushed my soaked hair out of my eyes. I wondered if Merlin could give haircuts. I normally kept it short, but since the time we’d entered the first well, it had grown out to fall over my eyebrows.

We both returned our training swords and grabbed cloths to wipe ourselves down with as we waited for the trough of water to be free for us to rinse.

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