Attia actually smiled through the pain.
Her people were a peculiar tribe. Direct descendants of the Spartans of old, Maedi soldiers were hardened by physical labor, honed and bent and reshaped so that the resulting body and psyche reacted like coiled springs. Pain could be tolerated or even ignored. A sword or bow or staff or even a rock was simply an extension of the self. Fighting was instinctual, natural, effortless. Sparro carried—had carried—a sword that weighed almost as much as Attia did, and Crius could pin a man to the wall with his spear.
Attia wasn’t particularly strong. She certainly wasn’t big. But she was a Thracian—a warrior of the Maedi. And this poor, stupid vigil was not.
Attia continued to wrap the filthy rope around her hand as she turned to face the watchman. Timeus and his bodyguard—still immobile on the ground—could only stare as the vigil unsheathed his sword and swung pathetically at Attia, missing by more than a few inches. She dodged the weapon with ease before smashing her rope-hardened fist into the center of the watchman’s chest, putting all of her weight behind the concentrated blow. It knocked him back only a little, and pain exploded across Attia’s wounded arm and wrist. But a soft snapping sound told her she’d hit her mark. The vigil managed to take just two steps before he fell face-first to the ground, the triangular piece of bone at the apex of his ribs having punctured his heart.
There was no one around who could stop her now. Ennius writhed on the ground, trying and failing to stand on his shattered leg. Timeus barely managed to push himself up to his knees before falling down again with a groan. Still, it took Attia a moment to clear out the dense fog in her head.
Move, she told herself through the pain, the dizziness, the loss of blood and breath. Move.
With the rope still wrapped around her fist, she turned on her heel and ran.
The warm air whipped against her face, stinging the little cuts and welts she’d acquired on the journey to Rome. The walls of the city were a brown blur. Everything seemed coated in dust, even though the late afternoon sun lent a slight golden haze to the air. Attia moved so quickly that her feet barely seemed to touch the ground, and for a single brief moment, she relished her victory. I’ve escaped. I’ve made it. Two young vigiles turned into the alley just then, their eyes widening at the sight of her running with the rope still dangling from her hand. They reached for their weapons. Or not.
Attia cut to the left and into another alley so narrow that she could brush the walls on either side with her fingertips. Just as the vigiles appeared around the corner behind her, she leaped up and braced her right foot against the wall. There was enough momentum in the motion that she was able to bounce off and plant her left foot on the opposite wall. She did it over and over, back and forth, climbing like a mountain goat with her cracked and bleeding feet. She didn’t stop until she reached the fourth-floor window on the northeast corner of a crumbling insula—one of the multilevel apartments built to house the poor.
Attia hooked an arm through the small opening of the window and tumbled into a stark room. A woman screamed and shrank back against the door, trying to hide a little boy behind her. The shouts of vigiles echoed up from the street below. Attia briefly considered climbing back out the window when she saw light shifting near the base of the wall. The cheap clay insulas were already caving in on themselves. The wall separating this room from the next had begun to collapse and tilt away from the outer wall. The shift had created a narrow crawl space at its base, and Attia dove in.
The makeshift tunnel was so tight and jagged that she had to wriggle through on her belly, and for a moment, she wondered if she’d been too hasty. But she could still move—just barely—and it was better than capture. She could hear someone pounding on the door of the apartment she’d just left. She crawled forward, trying to keep her breath even as she made her way through the passage, not knowing what waited on the other side. Her hands left bloody prints in the dirt. She crawled for another thirty yards before she finally saw another shifting light ahead. At last, the little tunnel curved upward, and she emerged onto a rooftop. The setting sun had already cast the road below in shadow. This sunset marked nearly four days without proper sleep, two without food. But she couldn’t afford to stop.
Attia climbed down to the darkened road, turned north, and forced herself to start running again. For a few minutes, she began to think she might actually escape. But her luck ran out. Three vigiles rounded the corner with swords drawn.
“There she is!” one of them shouted.
Attia slowed her pace and considered her opponents. Perhaps, in years past, the old vigil leading the group had been a vigorous young soldier, fighting for the glory of Rome. But time had turned him gray and made him very, very slow.
Still holding the rope in her hand, Attia made two wide loops at each end of its dirty length. Darting forward, she threw one looped end around the neck of the closest vigil. The knot tightened and she dragged him to the ground, rolling out of the way as the other two tried to attack her. She caught the second one with the other loop of rope, then used her captives to knock over the old vigil. Within moments, all three were sprawled on the ground. Dazed, humiliated, and sore, but alive.
Footsteps. Marching. More vigiles.
Attia picked up one of the watchmen’s swords from the dust and, with a quick glance around her, ran and cut into an alley.
Left. Right. Left again. Backtrack to avoid two more vigiles who’d joined the chase. Then up a rough-hewn wall onto a flat rooftop.
To the east, she saw darkening clouds. A sharp rock formation on the side of a hill reached up like a fingertip to brush against the evening sky. Attia knew that beyond that hill was a valley, and beyond that valley was a mountain pass, and beyond that was the Adriatic. Then, across the salty sea—the border of Thrace. Home.
The streets below her began to fill with an unexpected audience. The spectacle of a female slave escaping with sword in hand was met with both heckling and cheers.
“Someone catch her! She’s getting away!”
“Keep running! Don’t stop!”