He bit down harder, envisioning certain forms of torture.
‘I fear there is some dirt lodged very deep,’ she said, absently picking a tiny metal hairpin from her braid. She held the pin to her lips and bent it taut with her teeth.
It might have been her proximity. Or it might have been the unusual shapeliness of her lips. Or it might have been the fact that he had just survived an excruciating amount of pain and was savouring its absence. But watching her bend that hair clip was the most deliciously sensual thing he had ever seen a woman do.
Then she plunged the terrible instrument deep into his wound. ‘Ah!’ he shouted.
Across the hall, Felix was laughing. ‘What? Is the Empire’s greatest gladiator crying?’
‘Piss off, Goat-Man!’ shouted Cal.
‘Not much longer now,’ she assured him, probing deeper.
He twisted his body in agony. ‘I did not ask for this.’
‘No, but you must have it if you wish to survive.’
Survival was not exactly the plan.
‘Hold this,’ she said, handing him the hairpin. She lifted the pot and gave him a final dousing.
He gasped for air and for something to say: something scathing and clever, something that would burrow beneath her skin as painfully as she had just burrowed beneath his. But the words did not come and all he could do was stare as she began to dab the wound with her handkerchief.
Her face was lovely in the torchlight. Haunting brown eyes and ruddy red cheeks. Eyebrows so high up her forehead they looked painted. For all her vitriol, her appearance was bright. Cheerful, even. The colour of her skin reminded him of well-fermented beer.
‘I wish I had some dried yarrow,’ she said. She was dabbing his wound with a strange reverence. ‘My mother used to keep some on her night shelf to help mend my father’s wounds.’ Her eyes searched his cell. ‘Ah! I know what we can use.’ She pointed over his shoulder to the distant corner of his cell. ‘Do you see it?’
Cal studied the dark corner, wondering if the woman had lost her wits. ‘Just there,’ she said. She was nodding her head, full of certainty. ‘The spider’s web.’
‘A spider’s web?’
‘You must fetch it for me.’
‘Are you mad?’
‘I am trying to help you.’
‘I did not ask for your help,’ he said.
‘And I did not ask to be…’ She bit her lip, stared at the floor.
Enslaved. That is what she wanted to say, but she could not find the courage to voice it. How could he deny her anything, knowing that she had been condemned to such a life?
He sighed and found himself crossing to the corner of his cell and gazing down at a fine silken temple shining beneath the torchlight. At the temple’s edge, a large black weaver posed regally. ‘How should I…collect it?’ he asked.
‘Just wave your palm through the web gently and gather it on your hand. Do not take it all, lest you incur Arachne’s wrath.’
Cal did as instructed, giving a nod of reverence to the tiny creature whose sanctuary he had just harvested. Reverence for all creatures big and small. It was what the white-robed Druids had taught him in his youth.
He returned to her with the silken prize and was no less fascinated watching her ball up the strands and stuff them into his wound. Why was she helping him? He did not understand it at all. Nor did he have the heart to tell her that her effort was pointless.
‘My mother used spider webs on my father’s wounds, as well,’ she explained. ‘It is an old Greek remedy. My mother is Greek, you see.’
Pride lurked beneath her words. Cal knew that the Romans despised the Greeks in the manner of a jealous younger sibling.
‘Is your father Greek?’
‘No, I am afraid he is as Roman as they come. Born in Pompeii and left before Vesuvius blew. Lucky him. Though he could not escape the wounds of war…and now, I suppose, of peace.’
‘Was your father often wounded?’
She nodded. ‘After he returned from military service he became a lictor for a new aedile here in Ephesus. The young mayor had as many enemies as he had gold auris and my father was paid to protect him. I was always so worried for my father back then. Pah! I had no idea what worry was.’
She pursed her lips, and Cal sensed her trying to stifle her emotion. If there had been any doubt in his mind that she had been sold into servitude, it was washed away by the small tear he watched leak from her eye and trace a path down her cheek.
Without thinking, he pressed his finger to her skin and caught it.
She blinked, stared up at him.
His stomach tightened. He realised that he wanted to kiss her.
‘There,’ she said with finality and her deep blush told him that she had felt it, too—whatever it had been that had just passed between them.
Lust, he told himself. Simple, physical lust, born of the fact that he had not enjoyed a woman’s company in months. But that would be remedied—and very soon, thank the god Gwydion.
The woman stepped away from him and he was glad of it. If she had not, he might have taken one of those small, coiling curls of hair and wrapped it around his finger. He might have made the mistake of reaching through the bars, catching her by the waist and pulling her close enough to drink the tiny bead of water that had lodged itself in the small crevasse of her shapely upper lip.
He might have violated one of his most important rules: never to kiss a woman.
‘It will heal quickly,’ the woman was saying, nodding confusedly at his wound. In truth, the gash already felt much better.
‘I am in debt to you,’ he said. Not that the debt would ever be repaid. Not that any of this mattered at all. A dressed wound was of no benefit to a man whose days were numbered.
‘I suppose you are in my debt,’ she said. It was just the sort of thing a Roman woman loved to say and he knew what came next. ‘So tell me, how will you pay it?’
Reflexively, his eyes slid down the length of her. Curses. What was the matter with him? ‘I do not know,’ he said.
‘Why not tell me the truth as payment?’ she asked. The woman was like a dog with a bone. ‘Why did you agree to take the fall tonight? Tell me, I beg you.’
‘Because of a woman.’ There, he had said it. Surely it would be enough to put her off.
But she only frowned. ‘I do not understand.’
He could tell that she wanted him to confess totally. But if there was one thing he held sacred in this wretched world it was the memory of his wife and he was not about to cheapen it by admitting how much he missed her, or what he planned to do to honour her memory. ‘I took the fall for a woman and that is all I am going to say. I do not expect you to understand.’
‘Come now, you must do better than that, Briton.’
Briton. She might as well have called him a butter eater or a beer guzzler.
‘I am not a Briton,’ he said through his teeth.
‘Not a Briton? But you are called the Beast of Britannia, are you not?’ There was the Roman arrogance again. It rankled him.
‘That is what you Romans like to call me, because you know nothing about the lands you call Britannia.’
‘Are you a Briton then?’ she asked.