Gladiatrix Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Ric, my love.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Main Characters

  Part One: Present Time

  1: On the Coast, Just South of Sydney

  2: Des Arrives

  3: The News

  4: Proof?

  5: Lithgow Police Station

  6: San Francisco

  7: The NTA

  8: The Dupree Kidnapping

  9: Intimate Details

  10: The Portal

  11: Victoria’s Office

  12: More Questions Than Answers

  Part Two: Rome in the Time of Augustus, 8AD

  13: Falling

  14: Rome

  15: Victoria’s Apartment

  16: Valerius Musa

  17: The Crassus House

  18: Domitia Crassus

  19: Alexander

  20: The Rehearsal

  21: The Circus Maximus

  22: Dinner with Lurco

  23: The Fight

  24: Dealing with Alexander

  25: Rehearsal Part Two

  26: In Disguise

  27: The Iseum

  28: A Bird in the Hand

  29: Back at the Crassus House

  30: The Network

  31: Looking for Lucius

  32: Psyche and Cupid

  33: The Feast

  34: Drawing Down the Soul Eaters

  35: The Initiation

  36: Darkest Livia

  37: Dead and Dying

  38: Truth, the Daughter of Time

  Part Three: Present Time

  39: The NTA–San Francisco

  40: A Message From Isis

  41: Journey’s End

  42: Two Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  The Present

  Kannon Jarratt — a young woman with a mysterious past.

  Yuki Jarratt — Kannon’s half-Japanese, adoptive mother.

  Des Carmichael — the Australian police detective who originally investigated Kannon’s case.

  White Gregson — leader of the Moral Legion.

  The NTA — the National Time Administration, which runs the time portal.

  Victoria Dupree — Senior Time Marshal at NTA–San Francisco.

  Celeste Dupree — Victoria’s missing daughter.

  Doug Mertling — the head of NTA–San Francisco.

  Constan Valdestiou — office manager at NTA–San Francisco.

  Brandon Rous — an NTA marshal.

  Emmaline Scolette — an NTA marshal.

  Karl Armstrong — an NTA marshal.

  Rome, 8AD

  Bellona — the name that Victoria used while posing as a gladiatrix in Rome. Kannon borrows it.

  The Hierophant — the high priest of the Isis worshippers in Rome.

  Valerius Musa — a Roman businessman hired by Victoria.

  Domitia Crassus — the wealthiest woman in Rome.

  Augustus — the ruler of the Roman Empire in 8AD.

  Horace — the butler at the Crassus mansion.

  Gaius Aquilla — a Roman knight assisting Domitia with her plans.

  Alexander — a slave gladiator given to Kannon by Domitia.

  Philemon — a Greek playwright hired by Domitia.

  Livia — Augustus’s wife.

  Julia the Elder — the daughter of Augustus and stepdaughter of Livia.

  Julia the Younger — the daughter of Julia the Elder.

  Tiberius — the son of Livia and stepson of Augustus.

  Lurco Rabirius — a wealthy slave dealer.

  Andromache — Domitia’s clairvoyant slave.

  Cerebus — the head trainer at the Ludi.

  Felix — a free gladiator working at the Ludi.

  Lucius — a free gladiator with criminal habits.

  Plautius Sulla — the man in charge of Augustus’ public entertainments.

  PART ONE

  PRESENT TIME

  1

  ON THE COAST, JUST SOUTH OF SYDNEY

  ‘It’s time,’ Ledbetter rolled the next word off his tongue, savouring it like a lolly, ‘Freak.’ He was a hulk, even bigger than I remembered, sticking out at the back of the class like a bouncer at a children’s birthday party.

  Ledbetter had the beefy kind of body that came from having played full-contact sport every week since he was a kid. That, and a fondness for steroids. Thick arms. Thick neck. Thick head. The police college made him take my self-defence course as part of his basic training, and he hated it. Because he hated me.

  Freak? No-one had used that nickname since high school.

  ‘You heard me,’ he shouted, then pushed his way through the students to shove his face straight into mine. He was eager to hurt me. Something disabling. Permanent. ‘It’s time, Jarratt. We do it now. Fight me. Finish it!’ He was so close his last words covered my lips with a sour-smelling spittle.

  I slowly wiped my mouth with my sleeve. Why now? Why here? But I already knew the answers.

  The rest of the police cadets stood around us, faces carefully blank. This was their first class with me. The time when I had to get their respect and keep it. They all wore their navy blue, police-issue tracksuits, and their feet were bare on the tatami floor covering. The self-defence portion of their course always started here, in the Japanese training room at Yuki’s martial arts centre. The first thing they had to learn was how to fall and the thick woven matting softened their landing. Their faces said nothing, but you could still tell they were waiting for me to react. With a gleeful interest.

  I wasn’t interested. At all. ‘Step back, Ledbetter.’

  He smiled with yellowing teeth, ‘Make me.’

  The anger started to boil up from somewhere too deep inside. Old stuff, mean and crazy stuff, creating fissures in my hard-won professional manner. The last year had been bad. Very bad.

  I clenched down on it. ‘I have a class to teach, cadet. If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to wait till it’s finished.’ Ledbetter wanted me rattled. He knew I couldn’t afford this kind of trouble.

  My adoptive mother, Yuki Jarratt, had owned and run the dojo for nearly twenty years. In that time her reputation in armed and unarmed combat had spread, and brought her a cluster of eager students. Later, with bills to pay, she’d started her own company, Makepeace Security, servicing Sydney and south to the Illawarra. Yuki had still run her martial arts classes, but the company gave us financial security. It put me through school, and gave Yuki a solid reputation as a businesswoman. When the South Coast Police College opened in Wollongong they’d asked Yuki to teach their self-defence course, and felt lucky when she agreed.

  But when Yuki died last year, the College had considered dropping our contract. I’d helped run the dojo since I was a teenager, but at twenty-two they thought I was too young to do it by myself. I’d managed to talk them out of doing anything for another year. And Ledbetter knew it.

  ‘Fuck you and your shit-arse class.’ He stuck his hands on his hips. ‘Do you really think this shitty place,’ he waved his hand around at the traditional wood and tatami training room, ‘and your stupid skirt’s going to get you any respect?’

  He was mocking my hakama — long, black, pleated trousers, tied at the waist. I wore them over the top of the usual martial arts uniform, a white cotton coat and pants. The samurai trousers tended to swirl when I moved fast, hence the skirt insult. They were traditionally worn by sensei, respected teachers, but here, in the middle of February’s heatwave, I probably did look like a freak to them all. My uniform was too strange, too Japanese.

  Ledbetter scanned around for confirmation from the others. The two men who’d pu
shed through the crowd with him smirked, but the others kept silent. They were waiting to see how things turned out first.

  I ungritted my teeth. This wasn’t the first time I’d had trouble in class. I was a woman, and young for a martial arts teacher, the same age as most of the cadets. ‘Calm down, Ledbetter. I’m not interrupting the lesson because you feel like it. Come back in an hour and we’ll talk.’

  Before, Yuki used to take the police cadet classes. She resembled her Japanese mother but was tall like her British father. Unmistakably not one of them. But no-one took her on. No-one. After she’d died last year I’d taken over the police classes, now there was always some moron who wanted to prove they were better than me. And this time, I knew, it was going to be much worse. Because it was so personal.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Ledbetter appealed to the class. ‘She won’t fight me, because she can’t fight. She shouldn’t be teaching you anything.’ Then he spat on the tatami. His two friends sniggered.

  I stared down at the spittle. He’d spat on me, and now on Yuki’s dojo. I pushed down the anger again. I had to get him out of here, but if I touched him I knew I’d be charged with assault.

  ‘Get out, Ledbetter. If you don’t want to do the class, just get out.’

  He pushed into my space again, jerking a thumb towards his jaw. ‘Come on, Jarratt, just swing for me. Do it.’

  ‘You could get thrown out of the College for this, Ledbetter.’

  He laughed. ‘Sure.’

  We both knew no matter what happened this afternoon he wouldn’t be blamed. His father was the local police sergeant, and anyway I was the professional fighter, the teacher in charge of the class. Whatever went wrong would end up on my side of the slate. I couldn’t touch him, and he wouldn’t leave.

  ‘Come on, Jarratt,’ he crooned. ‘For old times’ sake. It’s time to settle it, stop stalling!’ There were more sniggers, from more students. Someone to my left was whispering.

  Ledbetter stripped off his navy T-shirt, leaving just his track pants.

  He’d packed on tight muscle, mainly on his arms and shoulders, giving him that crab-like upper body that amateur weightlifters get. He wiped off a trickle of sweat that’d run down his chest and tossed the bunched-up shirt over his shoulder. One of his friends, a sandy-haired guy with acne scars, caught it and stepped back. The rest of the students simultaneously moved back to the walls. Their movement looked choreographed.

  Then I realised. Everyone had known this was going to happen. It was a set-up.

  I really didn’t need this! ‘Come on, Ledbetter. This is pretty pointless, don’t you think? You’re training to be a policeman, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ he mocked. ‘I’ve been wanting to fix you for a very long time. And now just feels so right.’

  The word ‘fix’ came out like something you did to a dog.

  Ledbetter and his mates had made my life hell at school. They hated my mother because she was half-Japanese, and they hated me because I was different, a misfit. I even had a Japanese first name — Kannon. Everything about me offended them. All that and because, in the end, I was stronger and smarter than them.

  The cadets behind Ledbetter exchanged malicious glances, they wanted to yell, ‘Fight! Fight!’ It felt like the schoolyard all over again.

  ‘I’m not going to do this, Ledbetter. I’m not going to fight you.’

  ‘No?’ Making it sound more like a threat than a question. ‘Oh I think I know how to make you do just that.’ He moved his fists up, ready to begin. ‘Don’t you?’

  I didn’t reply. He was right. We’d fought once before. Really fought, and he wanted a rematch.

  When we were both teenagers Ledbetter had ambushed me on my way home from afternoon detention. In those days I was always on detention, always in trouble. Him and three of his mates had waited for me. I had to cross through deserted parkland and they came at me from out of the bushes. He’d shown me a knife and told me that he was going to make me do things. With all of them.

  It’d taken him three months in Woonona Private Hospital and another six of intensive physical therapy before he was able to come back to school. His mates had made it out of the park under their own steam. Just.

  Ledbetter’s father was basically a good man. He’d tried to get to the bottom of what’d gone on, but neither of us would talk. Ledbetter because … Well, what could he say? And me? Because I’d come very close to killing his son.

  ‘So how’s the claustrophobia, Jarratt?’ taunted Ledbetter, still searching for the final trigger. ‘Do you still go foetal in lifts?’

  Suddenly I didn’t care about the police college contract any more. You see, Ledbetter did know what to say, what’d get to me. He always had. And he knew because everyone here knew.

  The series of tiny villages that spread south along the coast road from Stanwell Park down to Sandon Point at Bulli sit on a very narrow margin of land. To the west, a lush green rainforest full of towering eucalypts covers the slopes that rise up to meet the sandstone cliffs of the Illawarra Escarpment. To the east is the rolling Pacific Ocean, held back by sandy beaches and punctured by rocky points. Here, unlike Sydney only an hour to the north, passers-by meet your gaze, say hello. And all the long-timers know who owns the best fish and chip shop, who’s likely to win the next surfing comp and, of course, all the details of the local scandals.

  I was a local scandal.

  The day I nearly beat Ledbetter to death he’d used local knowledge to get to me. He’d said he was going to give me new dreams. Bad ones.

  I don’t remember much from when I was very little. Except for the nightmares of confinement, without faces or details. Just the darkness and the terror of being unable to breathe, unable to move.

  After I was found they couldn’t take me in a car or on a train, I’d claw and tear to get out no matter how fast we were moving. As I grew, I started to forget, started to settle into my new home with Yuki, and the panic attacks began to fade.

  Given enough love and care, young animals can heal from terrible beginnings.

  But when I turned nine the past came back to me in a new, more adult version. That was the year I found the files and I finally understood who I was.

  Or rather, who I wasn’t.

  I’d always known that I was adopted but I didn’t know why. Then one day when Yuki was busy with a women’s self-defence course, I went rummaging around in her office, looking for sticky tape. I was doing a school project on the Port Kembla steelworks, and I needed to stick down photos Uncle Des had taken for me the week before. Cupboards that were normally locked had been left open, and the first thing I’d found had been the newspapers.

  Folded on a lower shelf was an old copy of a Sydney daily paper. As I opened it, a picture of Uncle Des came into view; the caption said he was Detective Sergeant Desmond Carmichael of the Lithgow Police. On the same page was a picture of my mother, Yuki, holding a little girl. She was standing outside Lithgow District Hospital. The thick black headline above said ‘Still no clue to the identity of the Kanangra Baby’.

  I was too young to make the initial connection, but old enough to want to read on.

  The text said that a Japanese hiker had found the little girl in a cave in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park, and that her arms and legs had been tied to a noose around her neck. The hiker had just managed to resuscitate the child in time. It said that despite a nation-wide hunt no-one had come forward to claim her, and the police had come to believe that the parents had left their child there to die.

  All I could think of, at the time, was why had Yuki kept this locked up?

  Then something clicked. I looked at the date of the newspaper, then down at the caption under Yuki’s photo. It named her as the Japanese hiker.

  Time seemed to blur.

  I studied the little girl with the terrified face. Her eyes were black, like deep holes in her grey face. Her hair the colour and texture of straw.

  Then I knew why this
had been locked away, and why I couldn’t remember anything of my early years. It was a picture of me. Taken when I was two. The nightmares were real. They were memories …

  Memories.

  Ledbetter stood there, watching my face, pleased he’d managed to bring it all back to me. And so publicly. Here. Now. In Yuki’s own dojo.

  He grunted. ‘Does the College know you were suicidal?’

  I stared at him.

  After I’d found the files, everything had crumbled. When Yuki came home later that same day, she’d found me sitting on the edge of the roof. There was a forty-foot drop to the cement driveway below. After she got me down, we did the rounds of therapists again. But, by now, it was clear to everyone, myself included, that I was damaged in ways that talking couldn’t reach. In the end Yuki returned to what she knew best, hoping that it would give me the skills and the strength to find my own way to the surface. She taught me martial arts. To take control of my life. To be a fighter.

  And in the end it worked. Anger burnt out fear. Anger drove out despair.

  By the time I was a teenager I’d become so angry I hummed with it. Limits just set me off.

  Detention led to skipping school. Which led to running away. Which led to living on the streets. Ledbetter’s own father was one of the local officers who’d brought me home in the back of the paddy wagon. No charges were ever laid, just another caution to Yuki.

  It was the incident in the park with Ledbetter that finally jerked me out of it. That was the turning point. I’d nearly killed him. Just a split-second pause between him living or dying. In that second I’d realised how close I was to losing everything, including my freedom. And I couldn’t lose that.