Et tú, Clarissa?

Chapter nine

60 BC (Rome, Italia)

"Move, savages!" the guard shouts just next to me and I slightly moved my head not to be deaf because of the loud sound.

They push us over the long road in our big chains. The ones that fall down because of the lack of strength got whipped till they continued moving forward. As one of the younger ones fell, my gaze snapped at him.

No, no. Get up, I thought and went to help him up, but one of the guards saw it.

As he was about to bring up the whip, I head-butted him so that he would lose focus on the boy and focus on me. The other guards overpowered me quickly as I had won his attention and given up the struggle against them.

I looked up at the head guards on the big horses before I continued looking forward. No surprise they would punish me, any one could have figured that out, but the same exact second my jaw tensed when they were about to tear my shirt off, four of the horses reared like possessed. They threw off their riders and I saw instantly that guards did not know what to do. All of them but the two guarding us, ran to the rescue of the riders and to calm their horses, but they were doing it wrong.

I turned to the guards and extended my chained arms to them. At first, they just looked at me with eyes filled with question, until I nodded at the horses. First then, the token fell into place for one of them. The thinner one bumped his arm into the side of the bigger one with the keys.

"The general mentioned that his former owner bragged about him being a Celt, a survivor of the horsemen tribes. Let him help."

The one with the keys stared at me for a long time before he realised, he did not have much of a choice. He groaned as he reached for the key to my shackles.

"But if you think you see a chance to run, you better think again."

I pulled my free hands back to me and envied them for some seconds before walking towards the horses. Before I reached up to them, I lower my gaze and put out my hand in front of me. The guards left us slowly as the horses started to calm down and walked up to me. Sniffed on my hand and allowed me to look up at them again.

"Easy boys." I said in such a low tone the guards and other slaves would not hear. "It is okay. I am fine. You are fine."

I felt how the people around us were watching us intensely. The horses talked over each other making it almost impossible to hear what they were saying. I calmed them and as I had caressed them one last time over their mule, I backed away from them while I felt someone grabbing my hands, putting them back into the shackles. I gave them a death stare as they pushed me to continue forward. After a couple of seconds, I felt how someone came up to me.

"Thank you." I heard a light voice say behind me. "Thank you, Celt."

I looked over my shoulder at the lad for some seconds before I nodded a 'You are welcome' with a smile so small it went by nearly unnoticed, but warmed me down to the core to have the privilege to make such a gesture.

After hours of walking, the guards started slowing down. Everyone looked up at them and waited for them to say something.

"There you have it." the guard with the keys said and gazed out over the gigantic city inside the big walls in front of us. "Rome, the capital of the world."

They led us through the streets of Rome with people staring at us like those animals we have been told we are. I kept my head high, but did not seek eye contact of anyone. The less I saw of them, the easier would the feelings be. The feelings in a mixture of disgust, admiration and some odd fusion of caution and excitement with the constant sound of the guards shouting their guts out about the new gladiators for the games. I hated all those eyes on me. With the nearly white colour my hair ended in made it a common reaction and therefore I knew that they were staring more at me than the other. I was like an exotic animal.