The Far Arena
Page 48
Words lasted with great ideas, but languages did not. And in that, Olava had known she had done the right thing, and she was at peace with her God. This was the journey He wanted for her. It was her way of going home to Him, and she hoped she could bring her friend Eugeni with her. She would teach him about a living God as friend. She would also teach him of his poets whom he ignored when they were fresh. She would teach him living languages.
And she would take copious notes, releasing them at a better time. She would protect him from the world as much as the world from him, for being that great showman of Rome, he could do more damage to historical study, once sensing a profit, than all the revisionist historians who ever rewrote an old fact to fit a new trend.
She shuddered to think what he would do with some village priest. Probably sell the poor old thing pieces of the True Cross. Olava could, without stretching the imagination much, see Eugeni setting up a very profitable factory manufacturing pieces of the True Cross or medals blessed by Saint Peter himself.
Or in Moscow, Eugeni would have personally told of little communes or sworn before audience after audience that while slavery was bad, freedmen working for wages was even worse, and in socialism he personally had discovered what all men yearned for.
She was made and trained for this match with her friend Eugeni, this journey. This knowledge was what had brought peace to her back in Rome.
'Olava!' Eugeni called from the arena floor. 'Olava!' He wanted her to pay attention.
This was a perfect gladiator's arena, he said again. Did she notice how everything could be seen ?
She did, she said, and it was so. She felt right on top of him, at the first row of seats ringing the arena floor that crunched with ashes left from the disaster that had preserved it.
She saw how the arena could be cut into four parts, and how one could dominate by controlling the centre, how a match could take a long time, and how it could be short. She could see the quarters now, as Eugeni explained how he had the centre and would not let the imaginary retiarius with net and tridens move out of the quarter, but would keep him in that wedge. It meant something now.
She understood now why a giant arena like the one at the Vatican was so bad for a single gladiator. Who could see the moves? Even the Flavian arena would not let you see how important each move was.
She wanted to yell out to him that she understood now, but there were so many Latin words for 'understand', each with a precise different meaning, from acceptance to comprehension in one manner or another.
He stumbled, but it was a practiced stumble. He showed how letting an arm dangle made him look wounded and explained that if he rubbed blood on it, she would swear he was damaged in that arm. She saw how blood could be used.
She now fully understood how, while he wanted to keep all this out of his private home, he could still take pride in his skill.
And she knew now, too, why he would not surrender the knife. It was not to kill anyone. It was the one thing he knew, had trained to know since he was eight. That was why he slept with it.
He would not kill randomly in the society with it any more than she would start a fire with a great manuscript. To use his blade against a person because he didn't like him would be murder. Yes, he would save his life. He would save the lives of others, But would not desecrate his sword.
His lanista was the first man to give Eugeni love and care, as brutal as it was. In return, Eugeni had given him the Eugeni, both dead and alive.
Dead because his audience was dead. Alive because he was alive.
He told her she was now a vestal, although the vestals did not come to Pompeii, if he remembered correctly. He finally trampled over the retiarius and waited for her.
But she would not signal for death, that thrust of the hand into the chest calling for dispatch.
And in that tongue that was now so natural to her, she said:
'I want him to live.'
'He lost. He dies.'
'Not if he's valiant.'
'He's wounded anyhow. It's kinder.'
'No.'
'Do it.'
'I am the virgin, not you, Eugeni. Not you.' He started to explain how she was supposed to follow the will of the crowd.
'Look out,' she screamed. And she had never seen anyone move so quickly. The knife snapped in a slash behind him, as his body turned simultaneously around it. He had turned around a blade! There he was explaining something, and then he was ready to right instantly. How many practised years had gone into that perfect move?
She dared not count.
But she smiled. She was now even for her fright.
His thrust, blade very straight, downward as though killing someone, was clear. It was like a very fast poke. The ideal stroke was the straightest. He probably didn't even remember when he had learned it.
And she realized from athletics in her own youth that this man had perfected delivering that simple stroke so that there was no grand preparation; rather the blade was just there where he wanted it in an instant. When he did do something grand, it was only deception for the crowds - the bigger the crowd, the bigger the deception. His real power was subtle beyond her amateur perception, she thought.
'Roman,' Olava screamed, orating to the little empty stone arena in this beautiful language, 'I want your liver, puny weakling. In my right hand, a whole tree ripped from a northern forest and seasoned rich in Roman blood. In my left, a shield seized from a legionnaire whose eyes 1 sucked like grapes. First you I devour, then these ugly little Romans now in the stands waiting like the slaves they really are.'
And with that she swung an imaginary club above her head and lowered herself into the arena.
'Only your body is giant,' yelled back Eugeni. "The spirit of Rome and the virtue of the sons and fathers and husbands of these good people of Pompeii shall give me the strength 1 need, though I am wounded and small. For their virtue is now coursing through my body.'
They have no virtue. They are cowards. Black-haired cowards.'
'I will show you their cowardice,' he yelled back, the conversation loud for the imaginary audience.
And so they did mock battle, Olava claiming that she had scored several victories with her club, knowing of course that if there were a real club she would not have touched him. Eugeni would not play that he had been struck fatally.
'I cannot do that, Olava, just as you could not playfully signal for another's death.'
She was panting heavily from the running, and Eugeni told her this was but a fraction of the tiredness she would feel if she were in a real arena, fear draining the body like a wound.
It was quiet, and from the arena floor they could see only the clouds and reddish evening sky above them without an intruding airplane in it.
They were in Pompeii on this fine spring evening, and the land was good, and the air and sky comforting, as it was in this part of the world at this time of the year - today as it was two thousand years before.
'I understand,' he said.
'What do you understand?' she asked.
"That I have been here, really here. So long ago. Once so long ago, now here, and now here.'
'Yes,' said Olava, and the term he had used for 'understand' was the one a person used to accept 'what was'.
She had completed her pact with Lewus and Semyonus. It was done.
They heard something in one of the stone tunnels coming into the arena from outside. A guard in a blue uniform, one of the many assigned by the tourist agency to this site, came to the edge of the retaining wall. He signalled they should follow.
They had to go, he said. The city was closing for the night, and everyone else had left.
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