He pointed toward the city. “There is a horse trader two streets east. He owes me a favor from my fighting days. He will take you to the mountains. Go. Be the storm Batiatus feared.”
“No,” Pelorus said, tossing the purse to Sura’s killer—he did not yet know she was dead. “I am the one who opens the gates.”
He would lean in, his piggy eyes glittering. “Then came the forty-eighth. A brute from Germania, a butcher with a two-handed axe. Pelorus had him bleeding in three exchanges. The crowd was chanting his name. But the German, in his death throes, swung wild. Took two fingers. Pelorus fell. He didn’t die. Worse, he flinched after that. In the next bout, a simple Thracian rookie feinted, and Pelorus dropped his net. The mob laughed.” spartacus: blood and sand
His name was Pelorus. He was older, his back a lattice of scar tissue, his left hand missing the last two fingers. He had been a champion once, ten years ago, in the time of Titus Batiatus, the current lanista’s father. Now, he was the ostiarius —the gatekeeper. He did not fight. He did not train. He sat on a stool by the inner gate of the ludus, oiling straps, sharpening practice swords that would never see a real throat, and watching.
“You,” Batiatus spat. “You traitorous relic. You told the woman something. You poisoned her mind.” He pointed toward the city
Sura startled, clutching a rag to her chest. “I… I cannot find the well.”
Batiatus lunged. Pelorus, with the slow, economical grace of a man who had dodged death forty-seven times, sidestepped. He used his stump to hook Batiatus’s wrist and his good hand to drive the little whittling knife—the one he’d been sharpening for ten years—up under the lanista’s chin. He will take you to the mountains
Doctore, the slave-trainer, treated Pelorus with a strange, unspoken deference. He never raised a whip near him. Once, when the brutish gladiator Crixus stumbled and nearly knocked over Pelorus’s oil pot, Doctore snarled, “Watch your feet, Gaul. That man has spilled more blood in the sand than you have sweat on this floor.”
