9
Quentin
Well, it was a shame that the Professor was called away, because the Wandering Warriors found ourselves visited by royalty, or whatever they call it when it’s emperors and not kings.
We’d finished up our practice and were getting some chow, the usual gruel, more like breakfast porridge or grits than what a man would like for dinner; but tonight they brought us some salted ham and some olives and wine to go along with it. This cheered the boys up some, but not a lot, because they never liked it when we were separated from the Professor. We ate in the same long, low hall as the gladiators, but they mostly sat on their own benches to eat and didn’t mix with us, which was fine. Those brutes scared the tar out of us.
So the fellas were grousing, but not too loud, while stuffing their faces, and then a tall and aristocratic young man walked in with an even taller Praetorian Guard on either side of him, and all the gladiators jumped and fell right down onto the floor and pressed their foreheads into the floorboards, and that was how we met the Co-Emperor, Geta.
Of course, without the Professor, conversation was all but impossible. None of us spoke Geta’s languages—he tried several—and we tried what few we knew: a little Spanish, a little Italian, and some Yiddish. But he smiled and clasped every one of us by the arm and studied us and mimed throwing and catching a ball, and gave us to believe by signs that he would be coming back to see us in daytime and actually play a bit. Walter and Davey were all for getting a ball now and trying to get some catch going once they realized he was an Emperor and all—even they could understand we needed to impress the powers-that-be, whenever possible—but Geta obviously had somewhere else to be, and after smiling a bit more, he left.
Wow. An Emperor. That bucked up the boys and no mistake, and made those gladiators look at us with a bit more respect as well, given that he’d spent twenty minutes trying to talk to us and had ignored them completely. So after Geta left the guys all went back for more food, even though the ham was all gone and it was just gruel again now, and another cup of wine, and the mood in the room got about as downright cheerful and neighborly as it had gotten since we had arrived in this time and place.
And I sat back and thought, well now, maybe everything’s going to be all right after all.