by Judith Tarr
“There you hear him, folks — the king of beasts indeed,” the emcee — Faustinianus — said. His voice echoed up through sudden silence. “And with him today you’ll be seeing a creature you know well. Yes, ladies and gentlemen: with him we have one of our very own Pannonian bears! “
He didn’t get much in the way of applause this time: a scattering of handclaps from here and there around the arena. “Cheapskates,” Calidius Severus muttered, speaking for them all. “Probably be the only lion in the whole show, too.”
Nicole didn’t say anything. She had never seen a Pannonian bear, whatever that was.
Faustinianus, it seemed, had finished his spiel.
The wall around the floor of the amphitheater was perhaps ten feet high. Faustinianus scurried toward it, not taking much time for dignity. Someone on the rim let down a ladder. He swarmed up it with speed commendable for one of his bulk.
No sooner had the ladder gone back up behind him than a rattle of chains drew Nicole’s eyes to the rear wall of the pit, stage, whatever one wanted to call it. Two gates rose at once, one on either side. The crowd hushed, expectant.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the lion roared again. Its first roar had been in the order of inquiry. This was raw fury.
A tawny shape bounded out of the darkness of the right-hand gate, sudden as if someone had stabbed it in the backside with the point of a spear. Cheers went up, whooping and whistling, like a football crowd when the star of the team comes loping onto the field.
A football player in full armor looked a whole lot more imposing than the beast that halted in the center of the arena and crouched with lashing tail. The lions Nicole had seen in zoos were fat, lazy, contented-looking things. They had nothing much to do but eat, sleep, and stroll around their enclosures.
This lion was anything but fat. She could count its every rib. Old scars, and others not so old, seamed its hide. Nor was contentment anything it knew the meaning of. It was more than furious. It was in a red rage. Maybe someone had goaded it out of its cage. Its mane stood on end. Its yellow eyes blazed. It snarled hatred at the people who watched it so avidly. The sound was like ripping canvas.
Nicole half rose from the bench. Her body shook. Her voice was no steadier. “They’ve been tormenting that poor animal!”
Calidius Severus shrugged, unimpressed at her outrage. “Can’t be helped. They’ve got to get the beasts ready to fight.”
“Fight?” Nicole said. So it was going to be that kind of beast show, was it? She gulped. She’d feared as much, though she hadn’t wanted to believe it. “Oh, Christ.”
But the fuller and dyer, fortunately, didn’t hear her. His attention was fixed on the other gate, the gate to the left. The bear was shambling out of it, less precipitous than the lion, but no happier with its lot. It was skin and bone; its fur was eaten away with mange. Pus seeped from a sore on its muzzle, dripping to the sand. When it opened its mouth to snarl, a broad swath of teeth was gone. But those that were left looked long and sharp, though not so formidable as the lion’s.
Still, the bear was larger, and even in this condition it had to be heavier. Which meant -
Nicole gasped and cut off that train of thought. She was — good God, she was figuring the odds.
Nor was she the only one. A man in the row behind her leaned forward and tapped Calidius on the shoulder. “Five sesterces on the bear,” he said.
“I’ll take you up on that,” Calidius answered promptly. “If the lion’s even close to healthy, he’ll rip old bruin there to shreds.”
Nicole might have caught herself reckoning the beasts’ relative chances, but she still had trouble believing what she was hearing. “I wish they weren’t fighting,” she said mournfully. “I wish we could just… admire them.”
Titus Calidius Severus looked at her as if she’d started speaking in tongues — or, more to the point, in English. “You can look at beasts for a little while, I suppose,” he said with the air of a man making a sizable concession. “But then you fall asleep. If the beasts are fighting, it keeps you awake. It’s interesting.”
Nicole sucked in a breath. She was damned close to blowing her cover, if she hadn’t blown it already. But she couldn’t make herself care. It was the wine in her, she knew that. And the shock, and yes, the disappointment. Calidius Severus, whom she’d been thinking of as a kind man, could think this horror was interesting.
“Interesting!” she said. “It’s not interesting. It’s cruel.”
His brows climbed up, then dropped down in a scowl. “Life’s cruel,” he said with callousness that had to be deliberate. “The faster people figure that out, the better they understand it, the easier they can bear it when the world flies up and hits them in the face.”
That was as cold-blooded a way of looking at things as she’d ever heard. She opened her mouth to protest, but even if she’d managed a word, the lion’s roar would have drowned it out. It echoed in that deep hollow space, set deep in her bones and shook them into stillness.
The bear too seemed caught off guard by the power of that sound. The lion sprang. Its body was a tawny blur. She’d never imagined anything so big could move so fast.
The bear reared up to meet the challenge, and it roared, too, a deep, grunting sound. As the lion fell upon the bear, the crowd went wild. Nicole, reeling, deafened by the noise, had a dizzy memory of a college football game, when the home team sacked the visiting quarterback. He’d even looked a bit like the bear.
For an instant, she was there, in that crisp autumn afternoon, with the cheerleaders flaunting their assets and the band sending a razzberry across the field. Then the heat and the human stink of Carnuntum fell around her again. Someone was pounding on the bench close by her, shrieking, “Eat him! Eat him for lunch!” Whether the woman meant the bear or the lion, Nicole couldn’t tell. But that she meant it literally, Nicole hadn’t the slightest doubt.
That was the point, wasn’t it? Starve the poor things till they were mad with hunger, then offer them fresh meat — if they fought for it. It was an endgame. Winner take all, and devil take the hindmost.
The lion and the bear tumbled together to the ground, rolling and kicking. Sand flew from their flailing feet. The bear’s jaws clamped on the lion’s shoulder, just below the neck. The bear’s paws raked the lion’s tawny flanks; its claws ripped blood-red gashes.
But the lion’s hind claws ripped at the bear’s belly, as if the great cat were a kitten playfully disemboweling a ball of yarn. Yet this was no game, no kitten-silliness. It was as real as death. The lion’s teeth were sunk in the bear’s throat.
If the lion growled, even if the sound had not been muffled in thick fur, Nicole couldn’t possibly have heard it. The crowd was roaring louder than the lion ever had. Titus Calidius Severus, beside her, was yelling his head off. That calm, contained man with his easy affability and his air of quiet competence was as lost to the world as the most rabid twentieth-century football fan. And not just because he had money on the line, either. This was sports. You could sit him down on a couch in front of a TV in Los Angeles, shove a Miller Lite into his hand, and leave him there, rooting for the Lions against the Bears. Some things never changed.
She wanted to clap hands over her ears, and over her eyes, too, and why not her mouth while she was at it? It was all or nothing; so nothing it was.
Calidius Severus bounced right up off the bench. Her eye leaped to the arena, to see what had got him going.
The bear’s paws had stopped flailing at the lion. Its jaws had slackened and fallen away from the tawny throat. And yet it wasn’t, quite, still. It wasn’t dead.
The lion drew away a little and began to lick its wounds. The bear lay stirring feebly, but made no move to attack the lion. When its wounds were as clean as they could be, the lion lifted itself, stretched stiffly, yawned. Then it bent its ragged-maned head and began to feed.
The amphitheater was a perfect bedlam of noise. Nicole’s head was pounding. There was a sour taste
in her mouth, a burn of acid in her throat. She was going to be sick, she knew it. Right there. Right in front of everybody. And especially Calidius Severus.
He beamed at her, as oblivious to her state of mind as any man whose team ever won a game. “That was a good fight, wasn’t it, Umma? That lion could serve in my legion any day.” He turned to the man behind him and held out his hand. “All right. Pay up.”
The man shrugged and reached into his purse. Brass clinked as sesterces changed hands. “My turn next time,” he said. Calidius Severus grinned as he stowed his winnings away. He wasn’t gloating — much.
Down on the floor of the amphitheater, a group of men advanced warily on the lion. They carried spears and wore armor that looked amazingly like movie-Roman armor. Except that movie armor was always clean and shiny and impressive. This was battered and dented and dull. It wasn’t a prop. It was real; everyday gear that had seen hard use.
The lion’s rail twitched. In the silence that had fallen, as if the crowd had sated itself for a moment, Nicole heard it growl as it ate, a rumble of warning. Even in armor, even with a spear in her hand, Nicole wouldn’t have wanted to go near it.
The men moved quickly enough. A bomb squad might move like that: fast, efficient, aware of the danger but not stopping to dwell on it. Stopping would get them killed.
Along with their spears, they carried a weighted net. One of them, the one nearest the lion, snapped a command: “Now!”
They would only have one chance. The lion tore at the bear’s soft underbelly, but with each rending stroke, his head came up higher and his tail lashed harder. If the net missed, or failed to fall cleanly over him, there would be hell to pay.
They flung the net. It seemed to hang forever in the air. Nicole held her breath. So, she thought, did everyone else in the amphitheater. The net dropped — fell clean, enveloping the lion.
He roared his fury, and tried to spring. The net tangled him all the tighter. The more he struggled, the more thoroughly he was caught.
The handlers dragged the snarling, slashing bundle across the bloody sand. They were as matter-of-fact about it as if they’d been hauling a sackful of rocks.
They were still dragging the lion toward one of the gates as another group of men, these in ordinary tunics, trotted out of that same gate toward the carcass of the bear. They worked altogether without ceremony, lashing ropes around its hind legs and hauling it away. To the victor, obviously, went what passed for spoils: a few mouthfuls of stringy meat, a weighted net, and a chance to fight another day. At least, thought Nicole, the bear was out of his misery. The lion wouldn’t win any such reprieve till something else killed him.
She looked down at the sand. It was empty now, if briefly. Only drag marks and bloodstains showed what had passed there.
Then, like groundskeepers manicuring an infield, two more men emerged from the lion’s gate. They carried rakes and sacks of fresh sand. In a few moments, the arena was smooth again, unmarked. Ready for the next battle.
Nicole didn’t even dare to hope that the first fight would be the only one. She got as far as tensing her body to stand, but she was hemmed in. There were people on all sides of her, and a vendor blocking the aisle. The smell of his sausages made her knees go weak with revulsion.
Inert and trapped, she watched the emcee make his pompous way back down the ladder. His feet left a ragged line of prints in the freshly raked sand. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaimed in his deep fruity voice, “a northern fight next! From the trackless forests of Germany, fierce wolves will challenge the brute strength of the terrible aurochs. Enjoy the show!”
Again he climbed back to his front-row seat, where he sat mopping his brow while the ladder went up once more. A person in a tunic rather better than Nicole’s best one — but a slave nevertheless, she was pretty sure — handed him a cup. He drank from it with evident pleasure. He wasn’t getting the rotgut the rest of them were, she’d have been willing to bet.
How long does this go on? She wondered miserably. She couldn’t ask; it was surely something Umma already knew. It was also something Umma surely enjoyed. Titus Calidius Severus, sitting there beside her, hadn’t asked her to come as if to something exotic. He’d taken it for granted that she knew what would happen — and taken it for granted that she liked it, too. There was no way, knowing that, that Nicole could get up and bolt. No matter how much she wanted to — if she did, there was no way she could explain and still keep up the pretense.
To let go, to fall off the tightrope she’d walked for — Christ, how long? She had to stop and think before she could even remember. To stop pretending. To burst out with the truth, the whole truth — to just give up. Nicole almost wept with wanting it. But she wasn’t as brave as that, or as crazy, either. Not yet. What did they do to the mentally ill here? Feed them to the lions? She wouldn’t have put it past them.
That first morning here, she’d wanted to call the SPCA because a man had beaten his donkey. The only SPCA the Romans would have recognized was a Society for the Promotion of Cruelty to Animals.
She sat where she’d been sitting since Calidius Severus brought her here, sunk in on herself. Her eyes fixed on the arena with a kind of fascinated horror.
One of the gates opened. The one, she recalled, that had disgorged the lion. It was wolves this time, ten or twelve of them. They trotted around the arena in rapid, businesslike fashion, too fast for Nicole to count them exactly. They looked something like huskies, but they were bigger and meaner and scrawnier than any dogs she’d ever seen. A phrase she’d read somewhere — a lean and hungry look — niggled in her mind. It hadn’t been written about wolves, she didn’t think, but it fit tighter than O. J. Simpson’s glove.
Nicole was as perfectly horrified as the emcee would have wanted her to be. But it seemed she was alone in that. “What’s so much of a much about wolves?” Titus Calidius Severus said discontentedly. “Anybody wants to see wolves, all he has to do is go a couple of miles outside of town in the wintertime. He probably won’t be very happy about it afterwards, but that’s something else.”
The other gate yawned open. The aurochs loomed in it, stamping its feet and tossing horns that seemed as wide as the whole of Carnuntum.
Nicole gaped, even sickness forgotten. Wolves she knew about. Didn’t everybody? The aurochs — if she’d expected anything, she’d thought maybe it was a kind of deer, or another bear. She’d never imagined it would be a bull. A Texas longhorn bigger than the biggest buffalo she’d ever heard of.
Nothing like it walked the earth she’d come from. Of that she was almost sure. She would have heard about it, seen it in a documentary, found it in a zoo. It must have gone extinct sometime between this era, whenever exactly it was, and her own. For all she knew, it was an endangered species right now. And the Romans were killing it for their amusement. Didn’t they have any idea what they were doing?
Calidius Severus turned to her with a bemused lift of the brow. “This should be interesting,” he said over the rising roar of the crowd. “You never can tell what an aurochs will do. Remember the one that caught a wolf on its horns and pitched it up into the seats? Wasn’t that a wild day?”
“Yes,” Nicole lied. She cast about for ways to put some of what she was feeling into terms Umma might have used. “It seems a shame to see such a splendid beast fighting for its life.”
“Wouldn’t be very exciting, watching lapdogs and sheep,” the fuller and dyer answered. “Besides, you know the aurochs is as mean a bastard as the Germans he shares the forest with. One less of them is one less mankiller roaming the woods.” He leaned forward with sudden intensity. “Here we go-”
To the wolves, obviously, the aurochs was not a splendid beast. It was lunch on the hoof, and they looked to have missed a lot of lunches. They circled it in a slow and surprisingly graceful dance, tongues lolling, golden eyes intent. Those eyes surprised Nicole, a little. She hadn’t been thinking; she’d been expecting plain doggy brown, not yellow.
&n
bsp; The aurochs knew what they were after. It would have met wolves before, away in the forest. It pawed the earth and bellowed. The noise was more like the bottom register of a bassoon with a bad reed than any sound Nicole could have conceived of as coming from the mouth of a cow. And yet, if the aurochs was a cow, it was the biggest damned cow she’d ever seen or heard of.
It lowered its head and charged. Sand flew beneath its hooves. The wolf in its path flung itself aside. Two more sprang at the aurochs from behind. The aurochs spun, impossibly agile. The wolves braced forelegs and skidded, scrambling out of reach of those arena-wide horns.
One escaped. The other had stopped a fraction too late. The broad curving sweep of the left horn caught it broadside, hooked underneath, pierced and thrust and ripped. The aurochs shook its head as if in irritation. The wolf flew through the air and landed rolling. Its yelp of agony rang over the shouting and hooting and catcalls that filled the amphitheater.
Nicole pounded her fists on her thighs. “Yes! Give it to him!”
She clapped a hand over her mouth. God. She’d got into it. For a few seconds, she’d become one of these people. She’d understood why they came to these shows, what went through their heads as they watched poor innocent animals slaughter one other for humans’ sport.
The worst of it was, the wolf didn’t die right away. Blood poured from the terrible wound in its belly, soaking into the sand. A loop of glistening pink gut slipped out and trailed the ground. The wolf tripped over it, shook its hind foot as if in annoyance, and went on with the hunt, as if pain and mortal wound were, after all, nothing to it. It wanted its prey. It fully expected its share of the kill when the fight was over. It didn’t know it was dead.
Even as the great bull gored the one wolf, others snapped at its legs, at its belly, and at its privates. “A eunuch for Cybele!” someone shouted near Nicole in a screechy falsetto. That drew a laugh from the crowd.
Cruel, thought Nicole. But the edge of censure was gone for a while. She’d been inside these people’s heads. She’d seen the fight as they saw it. She didn’t want to go back there, but neither could she maintain her position of moral superiority.