02-20-2020, 03:08 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-23-2020, 08:59 AM by TakeNoPrizners.)
The Third Kill
by TakeNoPrizners
The head came off cleanly with a swift and straight slice. It flew many paces away, spinning in the air before thudding onto the ground. The dead man’s helmet prevented his face from being scratched by the sand, but it had not prevented his death. Great red globs trailed through the air from the severed stub of neck at the base of his skull and plopped down like heavy rain, its crimson gleam magnified by the bright afternoon sun.
After several minutes of clanking swords and deep grunts of manly exertion, the defeated gladiator had been brought to his knees, where his iron grip weakened, and his weapon fell from his hand. The penetration of his muscled gut, followed not long after by an insertion from behind through one of his kidneys, made the deep gashes on his shoulder and thigh seem like mere scratches by comparison. The headless gladiator’s heart blood gushed upward from his neck, yet he remained in an upright position on his knees, as if stubbornly refusing to fulfill his destiny as dead meat on the arena floor. The blood coursed down his chest, coating his perfectly chiseled pectoral and abdominal muscles. It soaked the white cloth of the subligaculum that concealed his loins and manhood, turning his only garment a sickly pink. A stout kick from the victor’s heel to the loser’s blood-covered chest ended the defiance and sent him lurching onto his back. Brief death twitches caused the decapitated stud to scrabble his heels in the sand with comical effect.
The victorious Gaul knew that a quick, easy insertion of the sword beside the neck of the kneeling man, the customary death thrust down into his heart, would have been a wiser kill. The new spatha being issued to arena fighters was longer than the gladius it replaced. Little effort is required to force a longsword down through the heart and even into the guts of a gladiator on his knees. The match he had just won was only his first fight of the day. The double-grip exertion required to behead such a thick-necked bull could have been spared for his next opponent, or if he was lucky, for his third. His sword would have lost less of its edge if he had meted out the more traditional death of the defeated, rather than a showy decapitation. But the crowd loved his final flourish, and he basked in their applause. As he regarded the muscled carcass of his first kill of the day, the cheers emboldened him to anticipate easy fulfillment of his daily quota of three. Two more men sent to charnel slabs by his spatha would make the trio complete.
It was the first recognition he had received that day. Several times during the match he had thought the crowd was expressing approval for one of his moves, such as the handy gut jab, or the thrust into the lower back as he circled behind the stumbling man to finally bring him to his knees. Each of the cheers, though, had proven to be for one of the other five warriors at work in the arena. With three duels raging simultaneously at all times, there was plenty to watch. Ordinarily, the decisive thrust into his opponent’s belly would have brought the mob to its feet in raucous praise, but in the continuous triadic circus of dawn-to-dusk combat, such gladiatorial successes had become too common to merit particular attention. A showy beheading was needed if he meant to compete with the big Celt fighting not far away on the same arena floor. The fair-skinned stud had been cheered for defeating his tall Nubian opponent after hacking off half of the man’s sword arm. The Celt had exchanged his sword for that of the wounded Nubian, and then used his opponent’s own weapon to gore him. Similarly, in another of the three simultaneous duels, a retiarius had been applauded for sticking his adversary in the belly as he lay on his back in defeat. Avoiding entanglement of his barbed trident in the man’s rib cage, the retiarius gave his opponent a gruesome end with multiple double-fisted thrusts to the exposed gut, as the man flailed at the mercy of the lethal fork. His intestines, coiled around the tines of the trident, were soon pulled from his once-mighty body and held over his face as the last thing he saw before expiring. Gutting a man with a trident was a proven crowd-pleaser.
In the brief interim between fights, the Gaul regained his breath and surveyed the cuts he had sustained on his right thigh and left shoulder, neither of which was serious. The wounds from yesterday’s three fights also hardly pained him at all. He was off to a good start. As the overworked charons trudged out onto the sand to clear away the carcass of his first kill of the day, he proudly stroked the battle scars on his beautiful broad chest and quietly hoped the triumphant retiarius would not be his next opponent. Swords were much easier for him to counter than the insidious hempen web and the wicked fork of a skilled net man. He noticed that the two charons pointlessly carried the customary implements of their work: the hot iron, which was kept constantly aglow in a brazier, and a stone bludgeon for smashing the head of the fallen fighter. He banished from his mind the thought that the ghouls could well use these tools on his own body before the day was through.
In advance of his second duel, he pulled his helmet off and cast it aside, complying with the requirement in the triadic tournament, that a gladiator relinquish one piece of equipment after each victory. In the emperor’s generous planning of entertainment for the masses, including a decree that three simultaneous contests should be in progress as long as the sun was up, the imperial obsession with the number three had resulted in each fighter being granted three implements or pieces of armor. To ensure the most entertaining quantities of spilled blood, a fighter was required to heighten his vulnerability by choosing one part of his gear to relinquish each time he won a match. To streamline this unending festival of death, the customary armament of the secutor had been reduced to helmet, the new longsword, and a third implement that varied from man to man. To his pleasant surprise, his third allotment of gear had been a spiked arm greave, and he would keep it for now. He was well rid of the helmet anyway, which restricted his vision and would do nothing to save him from a strike to the chest or throat. In the current torrent of combat, the earlier custom of determining the fate of each fallen gladiator had been abandoned. Though it was once the case that a defeated man might be spared the kill and allowed to fight again, the new entertainment allowed only death for the loser. The winner was rewarded with survival and the chance to fight three times each day, until he too contributed his life to the manly glory of the arena. With merciless death the potential outcome of any unwise decision, the men chose their forfeitures and their strategies with great care.
He stared at the ignorant charons with disdain and mockery as the two slaves approached in order to apply the hot iron and possibly bludgeon the skull, should there be any indications that the fallen man was not dead. He pointed to the severed head and to the patch of thick blood muck that had formed at the man’s opened neck. The weary slaves shrugged and relinquished their unneeded tools, tossing the stone club and the hot iron onto the bare chest of the kill. The iron sizzled deeply into the flesh but could cause no pain. One of the slaves retrieved the stray head, only for the value of the helmet it still filled, and likewise placed it on the gladiator’s motionless chest. As they pulled the kill by the ankles toward the Gate of the Dead, and from there to a dissection slab in the spoliarium, the carcass draggers met the victor’s next opponent. It was the Celt, who strode forward with undiminished determination after killing the Nubian. His sword, until recently the Nubian’s weapon, was coated with the blood of its former owner. The gladiator’s muscles were pumped large from the exertion of his first contest, and veins swelled prominently on his thick arms, shoulders and pectorals. He too had removed his helmet in acknowledgment of initial victory. That choice left the Celt clutching the sword in his right hand, but he also wore a lethal adornment on his left. Rather than a greave on his arm, this gladiator had been outfitted with a weaponized glove, a caestus with three curved hooks, which had been tightly mounted and affixed to his hand. The razor-sharp claws would bear close watching. Even so, this deathfighter was not a retiarius, rather a fellow bladesman. Despite the lethal enmity between the two men, the common ground was satisfying.
The Celt slowed his stride when he was five paces away. The impressive height of his broad-shouldered stature cast a long shadow in the sand and made the two a well-balanced match. He was tall enough to fix his fierce gaze on his opponent’s eyes without looking up or down. Bright blue eyes flashed from his pale, angry, strangely handsome face as his strong square-cut jaw began to flap with the customary verbal taunting that preceded each death match. The spew of verbiage was expressed in his unintelligible tongue, but it doubtless referred to the mother of his opponent and some mention of prostitution, pigs, or both. The Nubian, now on his way through the Gate of the Dead, had likely heard the same rant. As Celts are wont to do, he elevated his verbal venom to an ear-splitting pitch and transitioned to a hideous war cry that was no doubt the pre-battle custom of his barbarian tribe. As he screamed, the Celt clutched his weapon in his right hand. Though his sword shook and pointed menacingly, the twitching of his claw-bearing left arm was a better indicator of his tactic. An observant opponent could reasonably suspect that the Celt was not right-handed at all, and that he would attack instead with the caestus bound to the other hand. The manner in which the fierce Celt had defeated the Nubian and stolen his blade had shown him to be devious. But the Gaul now standing before him, equally eager for his second kill, was determined not to be taken in so easily.
He began his response by flashing a smile, which he allowed to evolve into a mocking laugh. When this rebuke did not raise the current level of agitation, he commenced a physical assault. Stepping suddenly forward, he slashed the Celt’s left cheek and jaw. The strike cut the jawbone to the teeth, gashed into the man’s cheekbone, and left a grisly flap of jowl hanging from the once handsome face. The unexpected mauling ended the noisy tirade. The blue eyes flashed in rage, and the red beard grew even redder with the first blood of the contest. As anticipated, the response came from his opponent’s left hand. The Gaul saw the caestus fly up with lightning speed, and though his intention was both to dodge it and to immediately follow up by attacking the Celt’s sword arm with a backhanded swing, even his Gallic quickness was not sufficient to take him from harm’s way. As he slashed hard into the Celt’s right forearm and tried to withdraw, he felt the caestus rip into his chest. Pulling away only made matters worse and caused the three curved metal claws to tear deeply across his massive left pectoral muscle. He disentangled from the infernal claw with his chest now mauled as badly as the Celt’s face. If he survived the match, along with his third fight of the day, he would take hot irons to his muscle to stanch the bleeding. He assured himself that he would live to fight again, and that he would flaunt even more impressive battle scars. His determination grew stronger, even as blood coursed downward over his ribbed abdomen and soaked the cloth of his subligaculum. The throaty approval of the observing mob further salved his wound. Much to the delight of the spectators, simultaneous hits by the two men had produced an entertaining quantity of blood.
The Celt staggered back, shreds of flesh and chest muscle now clotting his caestus. His less adept right arm still clutched his sword, but it no longer pointed menacingly. The Gaul was pleased to see that he had cut through his opponent’s arm muscles just below the elbow and at least halfway through the bone. The Celt was receiving the very medicine he had administered to his Nubian opponent.
Wasting not a moment, the wounded barbarian moved forward and desperately flailed the claw attached to the outer extremity of his heavily muscled left arm. A caestus was a deadly weapon, but once it was bound to a man’s hand, he was not able to remove it. Since he could not shift his sword to the uninjured arm, the Celt was no longer a bladesman. The earlier battle cries changed to a scream of rage and lament, as the Gaul’s blade managed to find precisely the same gash it had first inflicted on the Celt’s sword arm. Ducking beneath the deadly whirl of the caestus, he made sure the second hack took his blade clean through the bone of his opponent’s arm. Even as much of the Celt’s limb fell off, the detached but unrelenting hand continued to clutch the hilt of his now useless weapon. The Gaul withdrew and assessed the situation. Though the remainder of the Celt’s right arm spurted blood, the claw on the bastard’s left arm still sliced the air in quick swipes, seeking meat for its hooks.
Two fresh fighters entered through the Gate of the Living and started their first match of the day in the station once occupied by the Celt and the Nubian. However, the crowd largely ignored them. The Gaul and the Celt were now the best show in the arena, eclipsing even the antics of the retiarius, who, having abandoned his helmet after his first kill, was now flinging his net toward a new opponent with consummate but unappreciated skill.
In addition to wielding his caestus, the Celt swung his half arm in pointless aggression. The Gaul felt arterial spurts splat onto his already bloody chest, but he ignored the flailing of the wounded limb and kept his eye on the claw. He could not let it maul him a second time. At an opportune instant he swiftly advanced on his opponent. Before the Celt could escape his grip, he stepped swiftly behind him as he curled his left arm around the fighter’s throat. The Celt felt the spikes of his opponent’s greave prick the skin of his neck and immediately knew much worse damage was to ensue. He frantically clawed upward with his caestus, but the wicked claw only scraped and clattered over the spiked armor protecting the Gaul’s forearm. True to the ethos of his warrior tribe, the Celt never stopped fighting, even though it was clear he was about to die. His massively muscled back pressed against the Gaul’s hard chest as the victor drew his prey tightly toward him and clenched his neck in the crook of his arm. The salty sweat on the back of his opponent stung the open caestus wound that striped his pectoral muscle.
The Gaul had two options for accomplishing his second kill of the day. He could drive his sword through the Celt’s lower back and out his belly, or alternatively he could use his right hand to press against the side of the man’s head and immobilize it as he jerked his left arm and used the greave to tear open the bastard’s throat and neck. The crowd enjoyed the pregnant pause in the action as the Gaul briefly considered his next move. The Celt added further entertainment value by continuing to flail the stubbed arm and rake his caestus over the spikes on the greave that was holding him in a death grip. The Gaul would have to forfeit another piece of fighting gear after he killed this beast. Of course, the greave rather than the sword was the most obvious implement to sacrifice before his third fight. In the meantime, it would be a shame not to use his arm gear at least once.
The victorious Gaul pressed his sword grip against the right side of the Celt’s ragged red head to steady it for the death rip. He mouthed a caustic farewell into the gladiator’s left ear as he pulled his left elbow back and deployed his greave to tear the man’s neck and rip out his throat. He grimaced in dread of the prodigious blood spew he knew was about to erupt. The distaste he felt was not due to any weakness of constitution. Masses of flies were already teeming around the warm pools of blood and other male effluvia that blotched the arena floor. As he opened the arteries and veins in his opponent’s neck and ripped away muscle and ligament, he regretted making yet another contribution to the stinking fly-swarmed offal that offended the nose of every Roman within a stone’s throw of the arena.
In the final moments of his life, the big Celt flailed even more violently and just as futilely. He was determined to slash the Gaul with his claw again before greeting death, but even that simple pleasure was beyond his ability. Wheezing from his opened throat, the Celt’s violent bucking quickly transformed to involuntary death spasms, after which he ceased his death dance altogether. His killer’s spiked arm clenched him under the jaw, holding his mutilated face up for the crowd to inspect. Before allowing his latest kill to drop to the sand, it occurred to the Gaul that he could still use the sword on him. There was no clear reason to do so, since the man was unquestionably dead. The frantic arterial spurts from his neck and severed arm had diminished to mere post-mortem leakage. Why further dull a blade by skewering a corpse through the back? But he did. The blade emerged from the Celt’s gut bearing a colorful mix of crimson blood and green bile. After disengaging his spiked arm from the neck of the dead fighter, he demonstrated the considerable strength of his sword arm by extending it with the Celt impaled on his blade. His muscled arm hardly quivered from the exertion. After a dramatic moment of holding up the heavy body, he tilted his weapon slightly downward, allowing the carcass to slide off the deadly metal and collapse into a heap on the sands of death. He kicked the corpse onto its ass and placed his right foot on the stout, motionless chest of the slain bull. Lifting his dripping sword high in the air and flexing his gashed chest, the Gaul presented himself for the crowd’s approval. The public response to his showmanship was deafening.
The two charons arrived promptly to clear away the carnage. One of them applied the hot iron to the dead man’s side. The lack of response from the Celt saved the charon with the stone bludgeon from the effort of smashing the dead gladiator’s skull. The Gaul stripped off his handy greave as his next forfeiture and tossed it onto the chest of his defeated opponent. As the carrion slaves gripped and tugged the ankles of yet another hunk of dead meat, the Celt’s blood-soaked subligaculum came unwound from his loins. The cloth straggled on the ground behind him before coming loose entirely, adding yet another bit of detritus to the arena floor and rendering the gladiator naked. The Gaul noticed with curiosity the exotically pink coloration of the Celt’s enormous cock. The impressive sexmeat wagged with the motion of its owner as the body was dragged across the sand. Oozing a slight last bit of semen, it bounced heavy and thick over the gladiator’s tough belly and hefty thigh, never to fuck again.
The victor lifted his gaze from the cock of his second kill to the face of his third opponent. The muscled fighter strode forcefully toward him, gripping a bloody trident in his left hand. Indeed, as the Gaul might have anticipated, it was the retiarius, rather than another blade fighter, who had been pitted against him. The cocky stud had scored an easy second victory over a far less capable opponent. Unlike the bleeding secutor, the fork man had not sustained any cuts from his second encounter. The wounded Gaul felt some relief, however, upon seeing that he was the taller of the two by at least a head. He was also not sorry to see that the infernal net had been abandoned. In his third contest the retiarius would wield only his fork.
For the first time that day, the opening provocation that spewed from his opponent’s mouth was comprehensible. The retiarius was also a Gaul. However, the man brandishing the death-fork spoke with the lazy slur of the maritime south and chose a laughably rustic word for “whore,” which was doubtless some relic of his forlorn place of origin. The retiarius was not truly a fellow tribesman, and no compunction should be felt for slaughtering him. As the swordsman responded in kind with a similar, though he hoped more clever insult, it could have occurred to him, but didn’t, that his opponent was thinking the same thing about him.
With the bleeding from his wounded left pectoral showing no sign of diminishing, and his left arm beginning to stiffen, the secutor determined that a quick kill early in the match was his best course of action. The crowd seemed to agree. With their attention largely focused on the most experienced pair of fighters among those currently in the arena, they chanted “ad mortem!” in thunderous unison. With equal amounts of vanity, each of the two Gauls assumed that the injunction to kill and win was directed at him.
The secutor deflected a devious jab of the fork toward the open wound on his chest and countered with a decisive swipe of his blade toward the belly of the retiarius. Instead of a cascade of guts, though, he saw only a thin bloody stripe appear from a superficial wound as the retiarius stepped quickly back and avoided a major incision. Several more hard strikes from the trident were likewise rendered ineffective as the secutor’s blade clanged between two tines of the fork, sending sparks into the air as his weapon blocked the assault. The retiarius cursed at his lack of success but showed no sign of slowing.
Feeling his sword arm strained and weakened from the effort of defense, and regretting the energy he had expended in his earlier showy kills, the secutor gripped the hilt of his blade with both hands and combined the strength of two arms into his swings. The double grip also gave him more control over the blade, he reasoned to himself. Raising the long blade above his head and stretching his massive, bleeding chest, he lifted himself on the balls of his bare feet and prepared a devastating sweep downward. His target was the left shoulder of the retiarius. His objective was to sever the bastard’s weapon arm.
The secutor felt a blow to his belly and involuntarily exhaled all the breath that was in his chest. The punch to his midriff forced him a half step backward and caused his descending blade to swing askew. The sword made contact but was deflected by the narrow knob of bone atop his opponent’s outer shoulder. He continued to force his weapon downward in an attempt to sever the joint, but its edge had been dulled from lavish use, and his own strength was waning. His blade skinned off a strip of flesh down the length of the arm, but the retiarius was left with both his limb and his trident. Bewildered about what had struck him with such swift and unseen impact, the secutor glanced downward in time to see three barbed trident tips emerge from his belly. They were clotted with his blood and gut gore. His ears filled with the rapturous approval of the screaming mob, and from habit he attempted to raise his sword in acknowledgment of their adoration. A second trident strike, this time to his upper torso, brought him to his senses, even as it knocked another chest full of air from his lungs. The masses were applauding his defeat, not his victory.
He felt his stomach flutter from the sudden descent of his towering frame. He was unaccustomed to falling, and it was a strange sensation for him. The fork extracted itself from his pectorals and sternum as gravity pulled his doomed ass toward the ground. He turned his head anxiously to the right and spotted the sword he had released from his grip. The weapon was well beyond his reach, but he grappled for it nonetheless. The sand beneath him scratched his sweaty back, even as the sole of his countryman’s foot ground grit into his bleeding, sweat-slicked chest. The retiarius was pinning his opponent in place for the death stroke. The secutor clutched the man’s ankle and growled as his arm muscles flared from the effort of dislodging the foot from his chest. He pushed it to the side, sputtering his indignation at being tread upon by a swine. But the defiance in his last words trailed away as his throat filled with blood and he gasped for breath with the pathetic croaks of a doomed warrior.
A brief glimmer of hope entered the mind of the defeated fighter as the retiarius yielded his foothold on the secutor’s chest. His spirit indomitable, the secutor began to lift himself from the ground, determined to regain his sword and resume the fray. A third strike from the trident, however, put an end to his prospects. The middle tine impaled his Adam’s apple and tore open his throat as the fork drove him back down to the ground, where he clearly belonged. The outer two tines gashed the sides of his stout neck, opening blood vessels as the barbs crunched into the sand. With his throat pinned to the arena floor, he died gazing at a clear Roman sky that was bisected by the upright shaft of his opponent’s trident. This time he could not feel the heavy, sand-coated foot resume its place on his chest as the retiarius celebrated his third kill.
For some reason the right leg of the conquered Gaul kicked unexpectedly when the one of the charons tested his body by jabbing a hot iron into a trident wound in his belly. Accordingly, the other ghoul smashed his skull with the bludgeon. Trailing brains and blood behind him, the unlucky Gaul was dragged to a pile of backlogged carcasses just inside the Gate of the Dead. Only three stone slabs were in operation in the spoliarium, which, given the current volume of kills, was in dire need of expansion. The lime pits known as the carnea were likewise overflowing, and due to a shortage of lime, they were no longer useful anyway. Fishers in the Tiber had complained about the glut of large, muscular corpses entering the river after being introduced into the sewage tunnel beneath the arena, and as a result, the slaves working in the spoliarium were now obliged to strip and dismember the bodies of the dead gladiators before remanding them to the sewer. The chopping was laborious, and a cleaver was dulled after duty on only a couple of the beefy corpses.
When his turn came, the Gaul’s slashed and punctured body smacked hard when it was hoisted and tossed onto the wet surface of a vacant slab. The death stone on one side of the charnel chamber was occupied by a headless warrior bearing skillfully lethal insertion wounds in his belly and lower back. Displayed in the center was a naked fighter with a lacerated neck and a missing cheek. The fair-skinned gladiator had been run completely through and was without much of his right arm. As if matching the disfigurement by truncating an appendage on the man’s left side as well, a slave hacked off the dead Celt’s remaining hand, in order to pry it out of the valuable caestus it still wore.
Once the Gaul with the caved-in head, clawed pectoral, gored throat and ventilated torso was laid out on the remaining stone, he made the trio complete.
end
"Ready your breakfast and eat hearty, for tonight we dine in hell!" -- Leonidas at Thermopylae
