5
The Professor
I knew pretty much everything there was to know about the Colosseum, but in all the photographs it’s two thousand years old and broken down, a heap of old stone that looks like it was sliced diagonally with a giant rusty gladius. Seeing it whole was mind-blowing. Curved walls a hundred fifty feet high lined with arches all around and all grand and golden and shiny and busy-looking.
And hell, Quentin and the guys recognized that thing straight off. I could feel their terror rise. My boys might not be all that well read, but every single one of them had heard of gladiators.
If the legionaries had tried to march us straight into that giant arena of stone and gold, the Warriors would have broken. I know it. All the discipline in the world couldn’t have stopped some of them from bolting, and then the rest would’ve tried to follow. And God alone knows what would have happened next.
But they didn’t. The centurion looked at me, and damn him, he winked, and then we turned and instead walked into the building next door, a low square functional-looking block with porticos across the front.
I heard Quentin murmuring calming things, and I could feel everyone relax. Bobby Gamin, our left fielder, even cracked a funny about feasting and couches and such. I wasn’t surprised, Bobby loved to go to the movies and I’m sure he’d seen Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur and plenty of Caesar and Cleopatra movies. The Claudette Colbert version of Cleo was a hoot, and the Vivien Leigh wasn’t bad. Not accurate, I’d always thought, but not bad. It occurred to me that I was about to get a chance to see just how accurate all those movies and novels and history books had been.
Which wouldn’t help me much if we all were dead. Unlike Bobby, I was far from relaxed.
No, we weren’t going into the Colosseum. At least, not yet. Instead, Rome’s soldier-boys were escorting us into the Ludus Magnus. Otherwise known as?
The Great Gladiatorial Training School.
And as we walked in the door, two legionaries grabbed my arms and half-lifted, half-dragged me away from my team.
Instant pandemonium. I heard Walter, our shortstop, shouting “Hey!”, heard the other guys start to move, heard a fight breaking out behind me, and then the soldiers had me around the corner and bumping up the stairs before I could even call out and tell them to be calm, not to get themselves hurt.