"Quintus will show you the kitchen and help you settle in," I told Victor.

He shrugged. "It appears your trickster has other plans."

I followed the direction of his gaze.

In the quarter of the training yard where I had my marble rubble obstacle course, Quintus was dragging a stone arm away from the pile of marble parts. Sand stained his arm from shoulder to elbow in a gray streak; I suspected a decent scrape underneath, probably raw. Yet, the stubborn idiot was rebuilding the course solo.

He was doing it despite my leniency, for I didn't confirm his punishment at the day's end. It wasn't that I had forgotten my threats. The guys threw a lot at him, and I didn't need a trickster fighting like a cooked snail tomorrow.

"Mithras' bull!" I scowled to cover a what-I-am-going-to-do-with-you smile and angled for Quintus, but Victor remained standing, alone, in the empty yard.

"Just follow your nose to the kitchens. Allia, our cook, loves garlic as much as her name implies." I turned my back on him resolutely. Victor was the bigger boy of my two troublemakers; hence, he was more likely to eat tonight if he chose to. I was his lanista, not a wet nurse.

Once I made my way to the obstacle course, I sat on a chunk of stone that didn't fulfill its destiny as a column, and watched Quintus labor.

His body basically rounded into C-shape, with legs set into the sand, skinny butt up in the air, and arms strained to pull the heavy stone against the sand's traction. His fingers were entwined underneath that of the statue's and the grapes the stone hand was clutching. Local grapes, I thought. When the sculptors wanted to represent the Earth's bounty, they chiseled out long, plump berries, rather than the tight clusters that grew in this world.

Anyway, from where I was sitting, it looked like Quintus was trying to wrestle those stupid grapes from the marble arm. Or to plow with the broken-off marble end. He wasn't getting those grapes anytime soon, but the furrow he was making was already half-a-foot deep.

Five backwards, torturous steps later, Quintus was still pulling. Veins popped on his temples. His nostrils flared... Mithras' bull!

I jumped to my feet.

His lips curled back, even though he was not looking at me.

I caught up to him in two strides, grabbed the free end of the marble arm and hefted it. The heavy weight straightened my elbows for me with an unpleasant click. I cursed Bacchus and his gift to humanity under my breath, but held it aloft.

"Where do you want this?" I asked Quintus, as if nothing stupid was going on here.

"By the wall," he panted. "Wanted to build a ramp."

It was a reasonable idea. "We'll get it started, then you go eat. I'll put everyone to finish the job first thing tomorrow." The wheezing barely spoiled my confident tone.

Thankfully, Quintus wasn't up for a debate either. With some grunting, we got the thing into position and stood there, admiring the result. More precisely, I stood. Quintus bent over, with hands on his knees. Sweat rolled to both sides of his protruding spine, like it was a mountain range.

His sorry state wasn't my fault. I didn't order him to work to exhaustion. I didn't pick an artwork for him to move. And yet my chest clenched. "I forbid you from missing a single meal. Understood?"

He drew in his next breath with a whistle rather than a rasp. "Why do you always want people to think the worst of you?"

Was I supposed to answer that being mean was in my job description? Bah! I patted his shoulder. "Get moving. It's getting late."

He went no further than the marble pile. Once there, he sat down and glared at me from under his indigo curls.

My nail broke while moving the marble chunk. I chewed on it, came over and lowered myself next to him. Too cozy for my liking. I moved away a little. "I never asked how you ended up in the clutches of that pox-ridden slave trader."

He drew a spiral in the sand with his big toe. "No big secret. The Fidelis transferred my father to another outpost, so the barbarian lords didn't find me as entertaining as before. They sold me to the trader."

"So, it was your father who was a Fidelis?" My gut turned. Men could fall really low when stationed at the far-flung outposts.

"Uh-huh." He bobbed his head. "A commander at the fort. Mom was a whore there. If I took after Fidelis' blood, maybe he'd have kept me..."

More likely, he would have had him drowned. What happened on the borders... yeah. "Maybe."

"And if I turned out to look more like the barbarian's blood, the brothel would have kept me. Whores are like livestock that way, you know."

"I don't," I replied—and regretted it, when he flinched. "Look, I'm a whore myself—"

"It's different!" Quintus bristled. "See, you're doing it again! Making yourself sound worse than you are."

I didn't, but let the time disillusion him. Some parts of my past weren't for sharing. "Fine, you're right. It's different."

"Until I met you, all I dreamt about was to be born looking like my mother," Quintus said earnestly. "It sounded so much better than my life where nobody wanted me. Or ever would."

His eyes turned on me, shining with hope. He wanted me to argue and prove him wrong in one very specific way. A blind mole would see that from thirty yards off, so I squinted at the far corner of the arena like I was blinder than even the blindest of all the moles.

"There was a philosopher in the Second Generation, if memory serves," I said, "who argued that after enough years had passed, the Populus Fidelis would undergo a full metamorphosis because of the differences in soil, water and seasons. Then, there will be no differences between anyone on Nanciscor."

"Wow," Quintus said. "Do many Fidelis believe that? Most of you act like they want nothing to do with the barbarians."

"They don't. The book was banned and burned."

My lecture didn't dull his admiration. If anything, it intensified judging by his rounded eyes and gaping mouth. "But you know of it, Maximus! How do you know about it?"

Youth is the strongest wine. It takes nothing at all for breath to hitch, for pulse to race, for the world to swim round and round us when we're young. How can one cool such enthusiasm?

"Someone kept an illegal copy in his library to preserve the knowledge. He was a truly brave man. I merely met someone who's found it. When you're as old as I am, you're bound to pick up a few things in the patrons' households."

The memory of being intoxicated with forbidden knowledge, wine and love washed over me. O that cultured, amused voice reading the lines in an archaic dialect! Green eyes glittering with mischief and conviction by turns! The way those carved lips preached dissent between the kisses of complete agreement, the moans of pleasure, and the splashing water of the artificial lake...

"You aren't old!" Quintus protested so loudly, it ripped my daydream to shreds. Good riddance to it, too. It was an old ache, but it hurt the way a mended bone aches in the middle of a winter night.

"I'm the oldest gladiator in Fidelium. Probably, old enough to be your father."

Quintus laughed till tears streamed from his eyes.

I didn't mind sitting there for a little longer, but a shadow moved on the gallery. My rookie. If I wasn't preoccupied with moving stones, I'd have noticed him looming in the doorway. I'd only just met Victor, yet it seemed completely in his character to refuse to fight his own people and not to be keen on rubbing shoulders with them.

"He's stubborn as a mule," I groaned.

Quintus startled out of his giggling fit, but his mouth stuck open in a huge smile, like a comedian's mask as he gawked at Victor.

Noticing our attention, Victor separated himself from the doorway.

Quintus snapped his mouth shut with an audible click.

"Get to the kitchen, both of you," I shouted. "Otherwise the rest of them would eat your share and move like heifers tomorrow."

I escorted Victor and Quintus inside, where Junius scorched us with his glare. "If you come late to the table tomorrow, I wouldn't put my life on the line to save a single bite for you."

The rest of the men fall about laughing, like this was the best joke they'd ever heard. Maybe it was. Anything sounded like fun in the warm, crowded kitchen imbued with the smell of turnips, pork fat and, of course, garlic. Sitting by a long wooden table with their bowls empty and their bellies full, the fighters' mood soared.

I nodded my approval. "Fight like you eat, boys, and we'll make Rufius Fulgentius rich!"

This earned me the drumbeat of bowls on the tabletop, cheers, and boasts.

In the meantime, I pushed my charges toward Allia and her giant pot.

"Feed them, please," I told her.

For once, someone took my order to heart. She scooped the content off the bottom, even scraped it, to fill two bowls to the brim. I motioned Quintus to grab the first one, then passed the second to Victor.

Before Allia reached for the third one, I waved her away. "No need. I'm going home tonight."

Quintus, who had already climbed over the bench to take his spot at the table, froze. He didn't dare say anything in front of the gang, but he didn't need to. When he slumped down, his indigo eyes were broken enough to convey his disappointment. He grasped the bowl's side with his hands to warm them up, then lowered his face, pretending to inhale the delicious steam.

True to form, Victor chose a spot with his back to me. After hanging around the gallery to eavesdrop on me! The Senators debating a minor point of taxation were less irritating than him.

Bothered beyond reason by the rookie's behavior, I left the school. Perhaps the biggest difference between the Colosseum and Rufius Fulgentius' establishment was its location. Also, the location. And, yes, the location.

We used to be on the outskirts of Fidelium when Rufius Fulgentius started the school, but the tenements grew and grew around it, only thinned out by occasional fire. Unlike the avenues by the Forum, the streets here were so narrow, two men had to suck their stomachs in to squeeze by one another.

Rarely I could glimpse a rectangle of gray sky, since the illegal balconies on the top floors covered the overhead space. What light reached the street level had to squeeze in between their wooden boards. Those balconies were terrible whenever a fire broke out, but otherwise the risk was worth it for less stench and more sunlight. I had a balcony like that in my apartment.

As sunshine strained with that last flush before twilight, I turned into one of many arched doorways along the street. A step on the other side of the threshold sunk below the street level, but my sandal found it without a fault.

Just as habitually, I navigated the smoky room I found myself in without bumping into four wobbly tables. The illumination in this hole consisted of two smoldering oil lamps and a kitchen fire, and it was for the best. Whoever wanted to see these walls and the floor in the bright light? Nobody, that's for sure.

Yet, pleasant warmth spread through my chest when a woman separated herself from a stool next to the bar's counter and waddled toward me.

"Ave, Rhea!"

She was family. A soon to be increasing family, judging by the size of her belly. I glanced from it to her face and frowned. There were dark circles under her glistening eyes and her cheeks sunk more than usual.

I snuggled Rhea and my yet unborn niece or nephew in a hug.

Juno willing all would be well, but dammit! With her small stature, she should have left it to the rest of our sisters to make up for my failure to fulfill my prime duty to the Empire. They were pretty zealous about it, populating Fidelium with their true-blooded Fidelis progeny.

Rhea murmured something into my shoulder. It might have been my name, a greeting, or both. Then she separated from me to retreat to the counter, as if her husband couldn't see me from there.

That was Rhea for you. Of my four sisters, she was the quiet one, which made her my favorite. I always wondered what she was thinking about in all the time she was saving by not gossiping with other women. Perhaps, one day, she'd tell me, and I would be amazed.

Tonight, I was content to sit down, scan the two patrons in the bar—the business was booming!—then scowl at Gerontius, Rhea's husband.

It was impossible to tell in the bar's dimness, but when he was forced to go outside, his thick cheeks, neck, arms and feet glowed pink. Basically, every part of him resembled the hams that I wished he was cooking tonight.

Instead, the aroma in the air advertised his fish stew and beer. I couldn't complain, because as a famous brother I could count on extras.

Today, Rhea brought me a plate with five finger-fishes, along with the stew, bread and a mug of beer. The small fries splashed in the river only this morning, before being stuffed, breaded and fried in oil. Plus, Gerontius thickened the stock with millet flour, which gave the stew a slightly sweet flavor. Ingeniously done and cheap. I approved of it more and more, with every spoonful I swallowed.

I couldn't complain about beer either. Let Rufius Fulgentius chase his sour grapes, simply because wine had to be brought from the Southernmost reaches of the Empire! Only there, the grapes ripened on the scraggly slopes. Give me barley, give me hops from the neighboring fence! Brew it dark and Viva! I'm a happy man.

All in all, I had to give a thumb up to Gerontius, who waved back his fat, pink hand at me. Fine, fine, he knew his way around the kitchen. His establishment deserved to thrive. If only he kept a certain fat, pink part to himself, instead of killing Rhea slowly one baby at a time, he'd make an ideal brother-in-law.

Naturally, such a suggestion was unthinkable in Fidelium. Why stop at four children, when you could produce five fat, pink infants? Then six. Then... yeah. The more the merrier, to ensure that the blue-skinned barbarians never gain the advantage of numbers.

I ate and brooded over how some babies came into our world unwanted, like Quintus, while the others were wanted way too much, and all because of the color of their drool-covered cheeks.

Gerontius' extreme pinkness meant he descended from a barbarian of the Lost Earth. Maybe his forefather was one of the auxiliary soldiers who'd betrayed the Romans and walked through the portal with them in the confusion of the legions' defeat. Or his hatred of Romans overcame his fear of magic and he chased the enemy to Nanciscor. The first generation of the Fidelis might have even despised Gerontius' pale ancestor.

Nowadays, the Fidelis no longer concerned themselves with the minute differences within their midst. They only obsessed over staying separate from the blue-skinned tribes native to Nanciscor.

Why? I obviously wasn't smart enough to understand, even if I wondered until my head hurt. If any philosopher wrote about it, I bet their book would have gone to the pyre so fast, my lover wouldn't have been able to save it. Or even willing to do it. What was that philosopher's name, the one we read together by the lake-side? It used to be on the tip of my tongue back when I was with—

I didn't want to think about my doomed love, only to remember the book about Fidelis' eventual metamorphosis for Quintus. So, what was the philosopher's name?

I shut my eyes, racking my brain for it, fruitlessly.

Instead, Victor loomed large before my mind's eye, like he had loomed on the gallery today. Victor's voice filled my ears in place of the sounds of the footfalls as the pedestrians hurried by on the street, instead of women yelling at their kids from the upper floors' windows and the dogs baying in the distance.

'Maximus, why did your parents sell you into slavery?'

'Beat me in a bout—and I'll tell you.'

Our bickering repeated in my head with every sip of Gerontius' excellent beer. It was a wonder I didn't see Victor's face in the dregs on the bottom of the mug. The night was too young for Cybele's mischief, but it felt like a spell. Not malicious, just... frustrating.

The worst thing? I needn't have bothered rehashing the argument on my own.

Victor and I repeated this conversation with only minor variations the next day. Then the day after, and the day after that. Then every day, endlessly, until he debuted as a jester.

What can I say? We were both born stubborn, and we would both die from it.