Time to stop being squeamish. The madam snarled, showing rotten teeth and a wine-stained gullet. I've looked down prettier throats on blood-dripping boarhounds. I jumped on her, got my arm around her neck, and pulled her head back while I let her feel that I was now wielding my knife. She let go of Albia. Albia's screams only increased.

An elbow jammed me in the privates with the force of a demolition ram. Heels kicked backwards at me with agonizing power as the other elbow took my breath away in a vicious waistline battery. Both hands came back and tried to pull my ears off. Then she gripped me with both legs and fell forward, her great weight toppling me over too.

I tried to roll sideways. She had all the initiative. I was flummoxed by this huge bundle of stinking fat. My legs were pinioned together by her treetrunk thighs. The knife was somewhere under us, not achieving much. I wanted Albia to fetch Petro, but when in the company of racketeers I still had to pretend he and I were strangers. If the girl had only made a run for it I could have gone limp and wriggled free, but I knew she was still nearby, capering in distress. I could hear her strangled little cries.

Deadlocked, the woman and I struggled breathlessly. I had overcome my diffidence about her age and sex. It was like fighting a rank slug that had heaved up from some black lake at the gates of the Underworld. As we flailed, her rags loosened so odd ends hung off like long branches of a Stygian weed. She bucked and jerked. I was flung around, but clung to her, digging in my nails. I stabbed one boot into a calf, hard enough to break bone, but I met only flesh and she just growled angrily. Filthy hair strands were whipping in my eyes. I nutted her skull. I don't know what it did to her, but it hurt me.

Suddenly my right arm slipped free. I had lost my knife, but I grappled the woman harder. I pulled her up by her shoulders, then banged her face down on the ground, once, twice, and three times. We were lying in the gutter so I was bashing her against the curb. I could hear my own grunts of effort.

Without warning the situation changed. Other people had arrived. Abruptly I was pulled away, receiving a barrage of pummeling to subdue me. I saw the old woman being dragged backwards up the road, held by her splayed legs. It was her turn to scream; this was rough handling. After being hauled off her, I had been thrown headlong, though I had recaptured my knife. No use: a booted foot trod briskly on my wrist and pinned it down. There was another foot on my neck, applying just enough pressure to threaten breaking it. I lay still.

"Get up!" I can recognize female authority. I scrambled to my feet.

"What's happening?"

"Don't talk!" That old cliche.

I still had my knife; no attempt was made to remove it from me. No attempt was made by me to use the thing, either-not with a pair of swords pricking right through my torn tunic into my back and a third weapon glittering directly in front, aimed upward at my heart.

I already knew what to expect; I had heard the voices. A glance around confirmed the worst. Albia had vanished. The old woman was lying out cold, dumped near the brothel. And I was being captured by an efficient gang of well-dressed, dangerously armed young girls.

As they marched me away with them, I saw Petronius Longus on the bathhouse porch. He was watching my removal with a faint sardonic grin.

XXIV

The house to which I had been taken by the women gladiators seemed small, but I sensed there were quite a few occupants. The room where they dumped me was almost dark. By now it was evening. Faint domestic sounds and smells suggested people were occupied with dinner. No food was brought to me. For informers, starvation was the curse of the job.

They had not bound me, but the door was either bolted or jammed. I stayed calm. Well, so far. No violence had been done to me after the capture. These women were fighters, but they killed professionally-for the winner's purse. If they had brought me here for a reason, it did not seem to be a reason that required me to be dead.

All the same I was wary. They were fighters, and there were a lot of them.

When they had reached the entertainment stage of their evening, where some diners might have called up tumblers, witty dwarves, or flautists, they had me fetched. The house was stylish. It must contain a dining room; I thought longingly of leftovers. But they were waiting to amuse themselves with me in a small colonnaded garden. I walked there through quiet corridors on level tesserae. From somewhere came the evocative scent of smoking pine cones, used in arena ritual. From somewhere else a maddening hint of saut?ed onion, used merely to torture hungry men.

My captors leaned gracefully on the pillars, while I stood centrally like a disgraced child. If they noticed my stomach rumbling, these girls ignored it, proving that gladiators are immured in cruelty. I must have made a sorry spectacle: grimy and bruised, depressed, puzzled, smelly, and exhausted. Such qualities are normal in my trade, but a group of female fighters might not see it as colorful. They belonged to a class that was legally infamous, debarred from all rights in society. Informers may be reviled, a subject of satire whose bills never get paid, yet all the same, I was a free man. I was entitled to vote, to cheat on my taxes, and to bugger my slaves. I hoped these women on the edge of society would not envy that too much.

I was uneasy for another reason. All men know from puberty that females in the arena are balls-grabbing sexual predators.

To look at, they hid this aspect courteously. Although the two I had first spotted at the baths had had the air of loose women waiting for customers, when relaxed at home the entire group-five or six here currently-seemed like woodland nymphs with nothing on their minds beyond perfecting scurrilous echoes. Laundered white gowns; endlessly combed long hair; manicured toes showing in beaded indoor slippers. You might discuss poems with these beauties-until you noticed their arrogance, their muscles, and their healed scars. They were oddly mixed. Tall or tiny, blonde or ebony: good box-office variety. One stood out: a girl who thought she was a boy, or a boy who thought he was a girl.

I wondered at first why they were not slung up in chains in a gladiators' barracks. How could they afford to run a pleasant and sizable house? Then I worked it out. Yes, untried colleagues would be in thrall to seedy lanistae in the training schools, but these had achieved independence. They were the successful fighters. The unsuccessful were dead.

"Are you planning to let me go?" I asked them meekly.

"Amazonia's coming." It was an extremely tall, lean Negress who addressed me first.

"Who's that?"

"You'll find out."

"Sounds ominous."

"So be afraid! And who are you?"

"Didius Falco is the name."

"And what do you do, Falco?" Heavy innuendo made me blink. Or was the innuendo all in my mind? Setting aside the urge to joke that I was just a time-waster who played around with girls, I told them straight: that I worked for the governor and was investigating the Verovolcus death. It seemed best to be honest. They might already know who I was.

They exchanged glances. I could not tell whether it meant they were impressed by my social standing or whether the name Verovolcus was significant.

"How does it feel to be rescued?" sneered a sturdy brunette. "It stinks."

"Because we are women?"

"I didn't need help. I was holding my own."

"Not from where I was standing," she exclaimed, laughing. They all chortled. I grinned. "Well, fair enough, ladies. Let me thank you, then."

"Turn off the charm!" exclaimed the boy who thought he was a girl (or the girl who thought she was a boy).