Author's note: The following story is part Rurouni Kenshin, part Gladiator, and part my own twisted imagination. Swooping liberties have been taken with time order, as I highly doubt Japan had any trade or connection with Rome during the 2nd century AD, but it all works somehow. For all you samurai fans, know that Kenshin shows up in Chapter 3. The final chapter or two is not yet completed and still being fleshed out, so any comments/suggestions/criticisms are much welcome!

My name is Gladiator.

I sat in the filthy cell, watching as rotting straw poked my clothing and rubbed itself uncomfortably against my legs. Around me were the smells of sweat, urine, dung, and the acrid scent of terror. The tiny cell I shared with about twenty others was overcrowded: a motley collection of old men, young men, women of various ages, and a scattering of children were in various poses around the small area. Most sat on the ground, heads bowed in prayer. One young man paced back and forth angrily, fists clenched. A few children cried and clung to their mothers, and the one baby kept up an almighty bellow that his stunned-looking mother could not silence. Clinging to the bars of the cell was a scrawny man of interminableness age; fear was sending his entire body shaking, and he yelled at every person who walked by, "I'm not a Christian! I'm a good Roman citizen, loyal to the Emperor! I'm not guilty!" He had done this ever since we had been arrested the other night, and I was extremely close to slapping him and telling him to shut up. Protesting his innocence would do nothing; we were all going to die.

Sighing, I tried to relax on the ground, ignoring the sticky skin of the woman next to me who was uncomfortably pressed up against my right side. There were so many of us in the small cell that we were practically stacked on top of each other, and the air was hot and humid. Dread hung in the air as heavy as moisture: tomorrow morning, we would face the Colosseum and whatever horrors the Emperor had in store for us.

From the elegant white-marbled halls of my father to a disgusting prison cell awaiting execution was a long way for the daughter of a Roman tribunus to fall. My father, Kashim Mercelus, had been a man whose ambitions and talents were boundless. Born into a wealthy Roman family, he had advanced quickly through the Roman military, gaining recognition and additional wealth for his skills as a commander and prowess on the battlefield. His soldiers practically worshiped him, and Rome had flung accolades and rank on him liberally.

He had married my mother, celebrated as one of the most beautiful women in Rome, and bought her a gorgeous house, hoping to soon fill it with children. Yet, for some reason, this hope was dashed time and time again as my mother miscarried or bore children who did not live long. I was the result of my mother's fourth attempted pregnancy, and I came out of the womb blue in the face from the cord wrapped around my neck. The midwife did not think I would live and, being Roman, she suggested that I be cast out, the usual fate for less-than-perfect Roman children or unwanted girls. My father nearly strangled the woman; instead, he tore me from her arms and blew into my feeble lungs until I gasped and begin to breathe on my own. Whenever my father told the story of my birth (as he often did), he would end it by teasing me that I was too stubborn to die, a proclamation that proved ominously true.

I was the only living child of my parents. After me were two more miscarriages and one more stillbirth. My father could have cast my mother out and found himself another wife, one able to bear children, but he would not entertain the thought – he was too much in love with her. When I was 10, my mother died giving birth to what would have been her eighth child, a little boy that did not live much longer than his mother. Heavens knows what agony my father had undergone through his love of this woman, enduring multiple dead children and finally a dead wife, but he bore his pain with the stoicism of a Roman soldier.

As a girl, I could have been ignored by my father: women were accounted of little worth in Roman culture. However, his love for me was no less than the love he bore for my mother, and he lavished all attention and care on me that he would a prized son. It was from my father that I acquired an education that few Roman girls were privy to: politics, math, science, history, and philosophy were my early childhood companions. In addition to his teaching, my father hired tutors for me, dour men that no doubt considered teaching a mere girl greatly below them, but my father had the knack of finding particularly impoverished tutors and paying them excellent wages, so they did not grumble too loudly. One in particular developed a grudging affection for me, and I for him. I was nearly inconsolable when a fever took him from me.

But one thing I did not learn from my tutors was the way of the sword. It started when I was very young. I used to sneak into the courtyard and watch my father practice his sword skills, and, in the manner of children, I begin imitating him with the aid of a small stick I found. My father thought my antics were amusing and made me a child-sized wooden practice sword so I could mock-spar with him. It was purely play at first, but my father quickly discovered that I had a natural aptitude for the sword, and he soon began teaching me in earnest. My mother was appalled that my father was doing such a thing, protesting that I would never find a husband, particularly if I could beat him at sword play, but my father simply laughed, proclaiming that he would find me a warrior husband worthy of so great a prize. In fact, he would tease me, he would only allow me to marry if my intended husband could beat me in combat. Only then would he know a man was deserving of my hand in marriage.

Alas, it was not to be. In the grief of so many children dead and a wife torn from his side, my father gradually turned to Christianity, a strange new religion that had swept through Rome like water from a broken aqueduct. The man responsible for this new faith, Jesus of Nazareth, had been tried by Roman court as a rebel and executed at Golgotha, the place where the particularly notorious criminals met their gruesome death. As a young man, my father had been in command of the soldiers responsible for Jesus' execution, and the event had profoundly moved him. He did not often speak about it, but I knew it ate at his heart. When Mother died, my father began secretly meeting with a group of Christians that surreptitiously met in houses to study their forbidden text and listen to their leaders speak about Jesus.

I was unaware of this until one day when I was out in the marketplace with my father. A young man bumped into him, apologized profusely, then, almost too quick to catch, slipped a message into my father's palm. I saw him do so and later on caught a glimpse of my father reading it before casually dropping it into a small fire as he passed by a vendor selling roasted meat. By a strange twist of fate, a gust of wind caught the missive and sent it blowing in the wind. My hand seized upon it and stuffed it inside my chiton without my father noticing.

Back at home, I opened the secret message and was shocked at what I found.

Tonight, midnight at Paellala's.

Aurelus

But it was not the message so much as the symbol at the end that astonished me: it was a simple sketching of a fish. I knew that this symbol was used by Christians to communicate with each other. Here was irrefutable evidence that my father, the most upright and loyal of Rome's citizens, was consorting with rebels.

I was still staring blankly at the message when my father walked into my room. An ugly fight, the first we had ever had, ensued. He accused me of being a meddling, prying daughter with no respect for her father's privacy. I accused him of being disloyal to Rome and going back against our gods. When we had shouted ourselves hoarse, I demanded that he take me to this meeting to see what Christianity was all about. He adamantly refused at first, but eventually relented when I pointed out to him that should he be accused of fraternizing with Christians, my reputation and future would be destroyed regardless of whether or not I had any knowledge of him doing so. Whole families had been wiped out because one member had become a follower of Christianity. Roman rule decreed that if one family member was guilty, the entire family was guilty. Were my father discovered at this meeting, I was just as dead sitting at home innocent of knowledge as I would be at his side.

Eventually, through my practical argument, my father grudgingly relented, grumbling that he wished he had never taken it into his head to teach me rhetoric and logic. Instead, he and I left the house silently that night, dressed in commoners' clothing and slipping through the shadows like spies. I found the danger and subterfuge exhilarating and was wickedly excited to be part of something so risky.

The meeting itself was nothing like I had imagined: the people crowding into the tiny room seemed to shine with an inner light of happiness and strength. Their words and messages were unlike anything I had ever heard before, and I soon realized what had drawn my grieving father to them. That meeting was one of many I attended with my father, and our knowledge of the Christian God and his son Jesus grew.

All changed one fatal day. Somehow, our secret got out: my father was arrested and brought before the Roman Senate on charges of heresy and disloyalty to Rome. Denied the merciful death of beheading that a Roman citizen should have been granted, he was crucified instead. Being his daughter, I was also arrested and thrown in prison with other Christians to await our turn in the Colosseum. It wasn't a long wait; tomorrow we would face certain, painful death.

The night wore on. It was impossible to sleep with the heat and stench and noise of soldiers trampling in and out of the hallways. The fear-wracked man in our cell finally ceased his shouting and collapsed in a pile of misery, whimpering like a whipped cur. I sat with my left side pressed up against the bars of the cell, turning over all the events in my 17 years so far. At my age, I should have been married to a fine Roman man and with children. Instead, I was inside a stinking cell waiting to die.

Eventually a cramp in my leg caused me to stand up, and I turned around. Against the wall outside our cell was a wooden storage box that had been shoved up against the wall but not quite flush with it. A single torch was fastened on the wall above the box, and it cast enough light for me to see that something gleamed in the dark gap between the box and the wall. Curious, I bent down and gingerly poked my finger into the gap to see what it was. My fingers closed upon metal and as I pulled back, a sheathed glaidus emerged. Some soldier must have placed the sword on the box, and it must have fallen in the gap between the box and the wall.

Praying desperately that no guard would surprise me, I pulled the glaidus free and began working it through the bars of the cell. The torch outside our cell fitfully illuminated what I was doing, but the sounds of other prisons and the harsh yells of the guards covered up any sound, and I worked undetected; eventually I maneuvered it into the cell.

The others in the cell (the ones who were awake) noticed my actions, and there was a collective gasp when I pulled the glaidus into the cell. "Quiet," I said in an undertone. Placing the sword on the ground, I laid my leg on top of it, covering it from prying guards' eyes.

"What are you going to do with it?" said the young man who had paced constantly all evening.

"I am Karou Mercelus, daughter of the Tribunus Mercelus and I do not intent to die tomorrow nor to let any of you die," I responded coldly.

The pacing man stopped. "You are going to fight?" Others looked at me blankly, a few with the faintest glimmers of hope in their eyes.

"Yes," I said.

The young man frowned, then said, "That's not right that you should fight for us. Let me have the glaidus."

"No," I responded.

"Let me have it," he said with more heat and force. "You're a woman, what do you know about fighting?"

"Quiet, you fool, do you want to bring the guards?" I snapped, then looked at him pointedly. "I have trained with the sword since I was able to walk. What do you know about sword fighting?"

He stopped, bit his lip, and looked furious. Trying to mollify him, I said, "It is likely that we will face armed gladiators out there. The first one I kill, you take his sword. Help me fight."

The anger left his eyes and he nodded. That seemed to placate him, but I was not convinced he would be of any assistance. Truth be know, I had zero confidence that the glaidus would do me anything but prolong my inevitable death and the deaths of the people around me. But the daughter of Kamiya Mercelus did not give up easily. I would make the Romans pay and pay dearly for the death of my father.

Glossary

Chiton: Roman clothing (similar to a toga) primarily worn by women.

Glaidus: Roman short sword

Tribunus: High-ranking Roman military commander