When Hurek had first met Cicero, he’d thought the man was a priest. For what other reason would an educated, nobly-dressed Latin man be speaking to a fist-fighting slave? Hurek assumed Lady Atia had finally called on the help of one of her gods to aid him out of his misery. Ever since Juno’s monkey-fueled insanity, Hurek had been feeling strange and lost. He’d also gotten into scuffles with collegiate scribes who’d tried to steal Juno’s tome.

Hurek had been trying to read it, but eventually found it more useful as a shield to bludgeon the thieves. Ever since then, he held the chain-bound tome close to his chest, both outside and inside the arena. He barely understood Palmyra as it was, then when his friend turned into a monkey, it made even less sense. But Hurek always rolled with the punches.

“Nuces?” Cicero said in his curt yet snappy tone. “vis aliqua nuces?”

Hurek frowned at the Latin; he didn’t know it that well, and it took a while for him to formulate a response, such that Cicero’s impatience got the better of him as the old man would often throw his hands and cry oh mitte!

But this time, Hurek picked up on the clue, specifically the cornet of freshly roasted nuts that the biographer was offering him. “Nuces!” Hurek replied. “gratias.”

As soon as they’d escaped the amphitheater, Cicero had approached the closest snack vendor and begun arguing. The man loved to haggle and argue and it was too funny. As little as Hurek understood, he’d still noticed a general method to the madness. Cicero always tried to be formal and curt in the beginning, but the longer a conversation continued, the more the mask fell away and an irritable, cranky old man surfaced with colorful insults and criticisms. He would then mutter mercy under his breath and give dirty looks to everything around him for the next hour.

Cicero nodded at Hurek’s thanks and said something to the gist of, “we will not speak of what we just saw in the theater”. Hurek threw a handful of the hot peanuts into his mouth. He hadn’t had breakfast yet, and his stomach growled furiously. The noise actually turned some heads as they navigated their way towards the colonnade.

The city was slowly awakening from its slumber. It must, Hurek thought. How else would it feed itself? Once the people had seen the nobles hide in their households and the looters taken care of, they had slowly come out of their hiding—first the laborers and women rushing to the markets and demanding the vegetables be brought out, then the children escaped their homes and continued the last game they had been playing before they’d been rushed inside so rudely. Last came the rich men, the bureaucrats and senators, resuming their strolls and dinner parties. But while everyone seemed to return to themselves, Hurek noticed that Cicero had changed a little.

Sure, he still carried himself like an entitled Roman, looking down his nose on those that didn’t meet his standard or etiquette. He still shook his head at things not done properly. But more and more, he’d begun speaking with Palmyrans. And not just in the way a man of his stature would. As grumpy as he could be, he gave a poor slave the same respect he would give to a nobleman, albeit a bit more casual with the former. He looked you in the eye and listened to what you were saying. While a rich man would avoid eye contact and act like anyone beneath his station didn’t exist, Cicero treated you equally—even if he did end up calling you an idiot.

In many ways, he reminded Hurek of Baku, when the old boxer still had his wits about him. Baku had been a very strict teacher, with a soft spot for the Nokchi boys, and especially Jiri. He’d let Jiri off training early to go see Ollia or turn a blind eye to Septimus’ shady night time activities.

Hurek paused in the middle of a crowded bazaar. A wave of grief threatened to push him down to the ground, and he closed his eyes tight, fighting down tears that pained his face. Oh, brothers… Hurek muttered a prayer for his family. He would never see them again, and the world was much darker for it.

“Hurek?” A familiar hand touched his arm. Hurek wiped his blurry vision to find a concerned Cicero looking up at him. “esne bene?”

Hurek nodded. They had entered the thick afternoon crowd of the colonnade, filled with locals and travelers alike. Wagons and stalls encroached upon the marbled road as militiamen fought with vendors to create more space, who in turn were too busy answering the rabid calls of servants and free men alike. In between it all, ran children and chickens, and runaway goats with their drovers chasing after them. Hurek towered over everyone, and could watch the sea of heads turn in his direction, parting for him as he walked, feeling like a ship breaking through waves.

Hurek distracted his thought by focusing on Cicero. The biographer was being a lot more social than he’d ever been. He paused by any vendor that had a moment to talk, exchanged a few words, simple small talk in Latin. Then he’d move on, maybe stop a farmer in his path and ask the same questions. From what Hurek could tell, Cicero was trying to understand everyone’s opinion on recent events and how their life had been impacted, if at all. It was done in a very casual, non-demanding way.

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He eventually turned into an alley that led to the Persian quarter. There was a line of pottery stalls, where Cicero paused in front of a merchant who smoked a long pipe. The bearded man judged the biographer up and down, and almost seemed on the verge to ignore him, but Hurek’s presence alerted him. He put on a curt smile, and greeted Cicero in Persian.

“How do you do, toga man?” he said, knowing full well that Cicero couldn’t understand him. The biographer looked towards Hurek to translate.

Hurek didn’t translate that for him, and instead turned to the merchant. “You will address him with respect, brother. It would be the wisest thing to do, I promise you.”

Cicero moved on, though, quickly deciding they would get nothing from this exchange. The merchant chewed on his pipe as he mulled over Hurek’s words. Or threat, more like. Hurek didn’t like threatening unless he meant it. But with Cicero around, he’d found himself doing things more and more that he didn’t truly mean. He didn’t blame the old man, though. Much of it came from Atia and her cursed tournament. And after Juno’s strange fate… Hurek wasn’t entirely sure what was going on in his mind. Ahura’s three-fold path was becoming difficult to follow.

Many believed, Cicero included, that Hurek was a pacifist or someone who shied away from a fight. That wasn’t true at all, and it made Hurek chuckle every time it came up. His Nokchi cousins could attest to Hurek’s brutal nature, as could the hundreds of pit fighters who’d been knocked unconscious over the years with his signature hook. Even hearing of Shams’ death later on hadn’t bothered Hurek.

No, it wasn’t the act of violence that bothered Hurek, but the thoughts that came before it. The three-fold path demanded pure thoughts, even when trying to hurt others. With wrestling, Hurek and his brethren had kept their culture alive, a piece of their home and strong character. With boxing, Hurek pursued his passion of perfecting every muscle and instinct in his body, the back and forth of two wills, two dancers in a ring struggling not against each other, but against fate itself. Letting his muscle memory and rhythm dominate had been the only thing in Hurek’s mind, even if Gaius Julius had used him as a fist-fighter for his own gambling needs.

Atia’s tournament however—a battle to the death in many cases—Hurek struggled to form his thoughts on the matter. The High Priestess had promised him freedom, as had Cicero, and despite Hurek’s best efforts to enter the fray with good thoughts on his mind, he had failed every time. The battle with Shams seemed like a dream, and he remembered he’d lost control, and drifted into an intoxicated state where he felt something else had been in control; a presence that had its own unclean thoughts and desires.

“Per luppiter, aperi ianuam!” Cicero's voice cut through Hurek’s brooding. The biographer banged on a rickety door, and Hurek tried to understand what was going on. They’d stopped by a group of children who had been loitering outside of a school, and Cicero was interrogating them for a bit before he’d turned and demanded the doors be thrown open for them.

Hurek tried to intervene but the biographer’s explanation didn’t make sense to him, so he turned to one of the older children, a lanky boy carrying his siblings’ satchels along with his own from the looks of it. The boy shrugged, “Master won’t let us in. We have to pay.”

“Pay what?” Hurek asked.

“The fees.”

Finally, a man answered the door by opening the top half of the wooden frame. He spoke to Cicero in an apologetic tone, and waved his arms expressively like an actor, and it began to ease Cicero’s frustration. He’d either convinced the biographer of something or made him appreciate his own situation. Hurek couldn’t imagine why a teacher would refuse his students entry over some coin. Coins and contracts and almost anything else on paper had never made much sense to Hurek. It seemed like a secret language of free men and women. Slaves communicated only in favors, duty and force.

Hurek looked for signs or queues for him to jump in, maybe intimidate the teacher in some way if Cicero needed, but the biographer only sighed. “Oh mitte,” he said, and looked back at the children pitifully.

“Veni, veni mecum,” Cicero said, as he gestured for the children to follow him. Hurek wanted to question him, but his expression must have given it away, for the biographer explained using the word home.

Hurek nodded, and began asking the children where they lived. For the next few hours, they navigated their way through the crowded colonnade, up the Temple Road, past the Forum where the decapitated heads had thankfully been taken down, and dropped the children off in the northern neighborhoods of Palmyra, right next to the slums. They came from labor class families who wanted their children to become literate, and the Persian school had apparently offered tutorship in large groups at a discount.

Hurek still frowned at the concept as Cicero tried to explain it to him. Teaching children was a duty of the elders. Why should there be an exchange of coin? If Hurek ever gained his freedom, he’d open up a wrestling school and teach all of the children for free. It was a good way to keep them off the streets.

That is, if he didn’t pursue the soap business that him and Jiri had dreamed of. Come to think of it, Hurek hadn’t made a single bar of soap ever since his cousin had been killed. But with Shams now dead and justice served, maybe it was time to get back into it.

As Hurek escorted the tired biographer back to the palace, his mind flooded with ideas long buried. A soap wrapped in fox fur, a nostalgic scent with a spicy twist. A dish soap that was edible, so you could eat it and it might even clean the plate as you ate it. Something like that... it had to be possible one way or another. Hurek wondered if Jiri’s workshop was still in working condition.