War Raven: Barbarian of Rome Chronicles Volume One by Nick Morris Page A

tickled his right hand and he looked down, noticing that it no longer shook.
    With a drop in temperature the trainers reappeared, Scar’s distinctive bark shattering the temporary calm of the palaestra . The tiros were spurred into action, mechanically repeating the morning’s drills.
    Eventually, the afternoon tipped towards evening and Guntram’s practice at the posts was called to a halt. His vision swam and his right arm was on fire. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that his fellow trainees staggered as if drunk. After surrendering his wooden blade to one of the beckoning guards, he saw that his hand, sticky with fresh blood, was shaking again.
    The guards wasted no time in providing him with a battered pail of cold water and a bundle of clean rags. Paired with the Spaniard – the newly named Ellios – Guntram doused his body down before briskly rubbing himself dry. He quickly redressed, his flesh quivering under the coarse woollen tunic. Joining the now familiar queue of gladiators, he headed once more in the direction of the refectory. It would be his last meal of the day.
    Afterwards, sitting in the shadowed gloom of the palaestra, he winced as he straightened his right arm. He cradled it against his chest. I feel so tired , he thought. Too tired to even think. He closed his eyes, it seemed only for a moment, and then Scar’s voice rang out, and he knew that it was time to return to his cell.
    *
    He watched the dim twilight fade, the narrow band of light from the door’s aperture retreating slowly across the stone floor. There was no skylight, nor any means of communication with the cells on either side or above, and Guntram was soon enveloped in darkness. To one such as he, who’d lived his life amongst the vast, open forests of Germania, it was the worst type of prison.
    His gut an aching hollow, he mulled over his fate. This place was training him to fight, but who? He’d noticed the strange armour worn by some of the warriors who trained with real weapons, and who wielded swords and spears that were both familiar and strange. He’d even seen one warrior practising a fighting style using a fishing net and harpoon. And, he knew that Rome had its own warriors, its iron legions, to fight their enemies. Whose blood was he then being trained to spill? The questions like lost sheep ran circles in his mind, until baffled, he forced himself to think of happier times, before the death of his family.
    He remembered the night last summer when he and Jenell had slipped out of the village at just gone midnight. Two dark silhouettes, they left the settlement perimeter to silently blend into the surrounding forest. Like two ghosts, whispering and holding hands, they hurried towards a secret place in the nearby wooded hills.
    A narrow hill valley led them steeply upward through a belt of trees, where they followed a stream flowing through a meadow. On either side of the valley, peaks tottered overhead as if yearning to touch across the sky. The land dropped off at the meadow’s edge, the stream water-falling off into a pool in a sheltered hollow. The summer air was warm, heavy with the scent of pine, and a half moon washed the pool with pale light. They descended to the pool’s side, and wasting no time discarded their clothes and entered the water. Jenell had never looked more beautiful.
    He remembered the shock of the cool water and the feel of goose-bumps on Jenell’s arms as he pulled her close. Her lustrous hair, unbraided, fanned across the pool’s surface and he covered her mouth with his own.
    He’d placed a bear rug on the grass, and this was where they moved to; warm in each other’s arms after the chill of the water. Their love-making was tender, unhurried, and afterwards Jenell cradled his head in her lap and crooned a song of a hawk who became a prince. Much later, when they dressed to leave, he watched her as she stood straight, wringing the water from her hair – the tilt of her head, the soft