by Judith Tarr
Wolves were everywhere now, swarming over the aurochs. They launched themselves at its side and shoulders. They clung, teeth sunk in flesh, eating the aurochs alive. Blood streamed and spattered. Who would have thought there could be so much blood in the world?
The aurochs bellowed in torment. It scraped off one of the wolves against the wall, as it might have used a tree trunk in the forest. Nicole gave up on trying to control herself. She cheered. The aurochs stamped with an enormous hind hoof, full on the wolf’s panting middle. She heard bones crunch even through the roar of the crowd.
Titus Calidius Severus nudged her in the ribs with his elbow. She started and suppressed a shriek. “You’re for the bull, are you?” he said. “Me, I always cheer for the wolves. They fight as a team, like legionaries.”
It was, Nicole realized, a perfectly rational way of looking at the fight, if you wanted to look at it at all. Regardless of his taste in amusement — a taste plenty of people in Carnuntum obviously shared — the fuller and dyer was a long way from a fool. Could she blame him for having the same tastes as his neighbors? How far did cultural relativism stretch? Not to slavery. She’d be damned if it stretched that far. To actively enjoying animals in torment?
That she could come up with the idea in the first place didn’t worry her. That she didn’t dismiss it out of hand did worry her, a lot.
Calidius couldn’t have imagined what she was thinking, or even known such a way of thinking could exist. It wasn’t in his worldview.
“Mithras slew the great bull, you know,” he said. She nodded, though she didn’t know what he was talking about except that it must have something to do with his religion. She’d have to learn more about that one day. One day…
The aurochs gored another wolf in the side, not quite so terrible a wound as the first, and trampled another to death under its hooves. But while it slaughtered its enemies, the rest of the pack was literally eating it alive. It kicked and stamped and gored and swept its great horns in wild arcs, but its strength was failing. Its bellows grew weaker. At last, it sank to its knees. It struggled to lift itself, got one foot under its body, heaved. But its life had poured out of it with its blood. With a deep, shuddering moan, it rolled onto its side.
Like the bear, it didn’t die completely, not then, and not for a long while afterwards. It was still kicking feebly when the wolves were shoulder-deep in its carcass.
Calidius Severus folded his arms and nodded, pleased. “They got it down and lost only four,” he said. “That’s good work from the wolves’ side. I’ve seen an aurochs clean out a whole pack of them — not often, but I’ve seen it.”
How many beast shows had he seen, to speak with such casual expertise? How many had Umma seen? How many had been staged in Carnuntum that they hadn’t seen? How many other towns were there in the Roman Empire, and how often did they stage beast shows? How many animals died bloody deaths for no better reason than to amuse a theaterful of Romans with time on their hands?
Her thoughts must have run away with her: she spoke that last question aloud. Titus Calidius Severus frowned for a moment. Then he asked, “What sort of deaths do you think they’d die if we left them where they were?”
Nicole started to answer, but stopped herself abruptly. She didn’t think about death if she could possibly help it, no matter what form it came in. Death was bad. Death was unmentionable. It was — indecent.
Here, they took it as much for granted as they did any number of other indecencies. Head lice. Halitosis. Pissing in jars on a public street.
If she absolutely had to think about how a wild animal died, she supposed it went off somewhere quiet and died with dignity. But if wolves would eat an aurochs in an amphitheater before it was properly dead, what was to keep them from doing the same thing in the forest? They were starved, granted. But if they were hungry enough to take on something that big, they’d eat it alive wherever they were, in a desperate and completely instinctive bid for survival. That was the law of the jungle.
The year Nicole turned thirteen, the family dog had gotten sick. It was cancer, the vet said. Squamous-cell sarcoma: she’d looked it up, because something in her wanted to know exactly what it was that was killing fat old Gaylord. He stopped being able to eat his kibble. He left spots of blood on the carpet, which amazed her because her mother hadn’t seemed to mind. Then one day Nicole came home from school to find the carpets all freshly cleaned and Gaylord gone. Her mother had had him put to sleep. It was for the best, she’d said. He was in pain. It was only going to get worse. There wasn’t anything anyone could do to make it better.
If a wolf got squamous-cell sarcoma, there was nothing and no one to put it out of its misery. It would suffer till it died, which might take a long time.
There’d been little enough dignity for Gaylord, near the end. His muzzle had swollen with the tumors. Blood and saliva had dripped from his mouth, and mucus from his nose. He’d whimpered when he slept, from the pain. If he’d died quietly, it had been because he’d been given a lethal dose of whatever it was vets gave dogs to put them to sleep.
Out of all that, the only reply Nicole could find for Calidius Severus’ question was a second, much lamer question: “We ought to be better than nature, don’t you think, instead of as bad or worse?”
“Hmm.” Calidius Severus gave her another look, an appraising one this time. “While you were teaching yourself to read and write, you made yourself into a philosopher, too, didn’t you?”
Nicole laughed shortly. “Why, of course not,” she said with bitterness that surprised even herself. “I’m a woman. I can’t possibly be anything as elevated as a philosopher.”
“Socrates’ teacher was a woman,” Calidius Severus said, and that startled her, too. Then he shook his head. His expression was odd, half a smile, half a scowl. “You’re sticking pins in me to make me jump. I don’t much feel like jumping today, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Not even a little?” she asked with a touch of archness — God, she was flirting. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. It had to be the atmosphere in this place. It warped her out of her usual, enlightened self.
He didn’t mind it a bit. His scowl faded; his smile grew just a little. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the arena.
The aurochs’ death and the arrival of the beast-handlers hadn’t put an end to the show. The lion had been an easy capture: there was only one of him, and he was weak with starvation and loss of blood. There were still half a dozen wolves, which weren’t in any mood to be herded back to their cages. They had the taste of fresh blood, and a glimpse of freedom.
The first one or two were taken by surprise, netted and hauled away. The rest had time to fight back. They circled the handlers as they had the aurochs, snarling fit to curdle the blood.
The handlers seemed impervious. Their shields were long and tall, and looked heavy. They were as much weapons as defense. The handlers crouched behind them, and the wolves leaped futilely, snapping at the portable walls. One that moved quicker, or was luckier than the rest, almost got around a shield. Its edge caught him and sent him flying, to fall limp, with a split skull.
The wolf the aurochs had disemboweled was still alive, still feeding on the carcass. It hadn’t joined the pack against the handlers. Maybe it was confused, or maybe just intent on finishing its last meal.
It looked up as one of the handlers advanced on it, and lifted its lip in a snarl. Coldly, calmly, the handler smashed its skull with a club.
Nicole swallowed bile. It was hideous, disgusting. It was also merciful. The man had put the wolf out of its misery. No lethal injections here. No peaceful slipping into sleep.
She wasn’t any happier for knowing that. Whose fault was it, after all, that the beast had been in pain?
When the last of the wolves had been caught or killed, and taken away dead or alive into the bowels of the amphitheater, a team of mules hauled off the aurochs’ carcass. They made a great deal of noise and some little fus
s, braying and kicking against the drover’s whip.
Titus Calidius Severus was not amused. “Takes too long between fights,” he muttered in Nicole’s ear. Other people had taken advantage of the intermission to call for wine or sausages, or to slip away to — the privies? There must be public privies somewhere in this man-made hill.
Nicole thought about it, but she wasn’t inclined to fight the crowds. There’d probably be a line for the ladies’ here as there always was in the twentieth century. Potty parity wasn’t any more likely here than it would be in eighteen centuries.
The man beside her wasn’t showing signs of going anywhere, either. He yawned and stretched and cracked his neck, and grimaced as Nicole winced. “Not getting any younger,” he said, “and the day isn’t getting any shorter, either.” He shrugged. “Ah, well, the gods will have fat-wrapped thighbones for their altars, and the butchers will have fresh meat for their stalls.” He paused. His eyes sharpened. “Are you all right, Umma? You look a little green.”
“I’m fine,” Nicole lied. Here was a beast killed by wolves, and they were going to sell the meat? If that wasn’t the most unsanitary thing she’d ever heard of… She caught herself again. If that wasn’t, then any of several other unfortunate practices was. The Romans’ notions of hygiene, however proud of them they were, left damn near everything to be desired.
The day dragged on. There was no discernible end to the slaughter, and precious little variety, either. Bears and wolves and another aurochs — smaller than the first, but more agile, and almost fast enough to kill all of its attackers before the survivors pulled it down. And once, to frantic applause, a leopard. “Don’t see that every day,” Calidius Severus declared, clapping and stamping his feet along with everybody else.
Nicole would sooner not have seen any of it. Whenever a vendor came by with wine or food, she bought a cupful or a handful. By the time the leopard sprang snarling into the arena, she was full to the gills and halfway down the road from tiddly to snockered. Knowing she was abusing alcohol to keep from watching animals being abused didn’t make her feel any better.
The leopard’s adversary was a black bear. It was, Nicole gathered from the commentary around her, quite a large specimen of its kind. It made short work of the leopard. People hissed and whistled in anger — not, she thought, out of sympathy for the cat. Because it hadn’t fought well enough to amuse them.
A pair of handlers dragged the beautiful spotted body toward one of the gates. Nicole’s eyes fixed on the bloody trail that it left behind. She swallowed hard against tears.
Somewhere down in Africa, the leopard had been living its own life, minding its own business. The Romans had expended heaven only knew how much effort (and courage, she admitted to herself with no small reluctance) to capture it and bring it up here alongside the Danube. And for what? To have it torn to bloody rags between one eyeblink and the next. Where was the justice in that? What was fair about it at all?
Life isn’t fair. Titus Calidius Severus had said to her earlier. All of this was as graphic an illustration of that fact as she could have imagined.
Yet again, Faustinianus puffed and strutted his way down to the arena and raised his grand trumpet of a voice. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, something you’ve been waiting for for longer than most of us like to remember: the criminal Padusius, who murdered Gaius Domitius Zmaragdus the spice merchant and Optatus the physician even as he robbed them, having been duly and properly convicted of his crimes, now faces the maximum penalty.” He paused as if waiting for a round of applause. The silence was thick enough to cut with a sword. Somewhat feebly, if not more faintly than before, he called out, “Enjoy the show!”
He left the arena, still in that thick-bodied silence. Nicole could hear clearly the puffing of his breath and the creaking of the ladder as he climbed back to his seat. When he had settled in it and the ladder been pulled up, scraping and rattling against the stones of the wall, a low growl ran through the crowd. There was nothing human in it. They sounded like wolves themselves, closing in for the kill.
Beside Nicole, Calidius Severus struck his fist on his thigh. “About time that bastard got what’s coming to him. I thought they’d crucify him, but this will do as well.”
“Cru — “ Nicole began. He couldn’t have meant it literally. Could he?
She’d never thought of crucifixion in connection with anyone but Jesus, even though she knew the Romans had crucified two thieves with him. Yet again, the phrase cruel and unusual punishment ran through her head. Crucifixion was cruel, no doubt about that. What if it wasn’t unusual?
Two thieves and a revolutionary had died on that hill in Jerusalem. What were they going to do to the murderer Padusius, if they weren’t going to crucify him?
Calidius assumed she knew. It was something everyone knew, just as everyone in twentieth-century Los Angeles knew the death penalty was hardly ever used in California. She didn’t think Carnuntum was any more like California in this than in anything else. Whatever was going to happen to Padusius, she was sure it would be both bloody and painful.
She’d come to the conclusion some time since that the underdog in any fight came out of the left-hand gate. It opened now. There was a pause, a long holding of breath in the amphitheater. Then a shape wavered in it. A filthy man in a filthiest tunic stumbled, or was pushed, into the arena.
He stood swaying, blinking in the dazzle of sunlight. A shield hung on one arm, a flimsy thing Lucius would have scorned to play with. In his free hand he clutched a club no bigger and apparently not much heavier than a child’s baseball bat. It might have been adequate for killing mice. A rat would have laughed at it.
Nicole had deliberately stayed away from criminal law in her practice, but it wasn’t from lack of experience. She’d done an internship one term in the county prosecutor’s office, and had spent time and enough in the courthouse, watching plaintiffs and defendants come and go. Black, white, Asian, or Hispanic, the faces had all had a certain sameness, a common expression. She’d never quite taken the time to define it.
Now she knew. It was guilt. Even when they didn’t care, even when they defied the system, something deep down in them told the truth. If they hadn’t done what they were brought in for, they’d done other things perhaps even worse. Or else, if they were innocent, the sheet weight of their surroundings pulled them down till they looked as guilty as the rest.
Innocent until proven guilty, Nicole thought. Did Roman law even acknowledge the principle?
Whether it did or it didn’t, this man had been tried, convicted, and sentenced — to death, she could assume, though the law made a pretense of giving him a fighting chance. It didn’t stop him from standing in the middle of the arena with his flimsy shield and his ridiculous little club, and shrieking up at them all, “I’m innocent! By all the gods, I didn’t do it! “
Jeers and catcalls answered him, and a rain of more solid insults: eggs and rotten fruit that people must have brought for the purpose, half-eaten sausages, even stones and bits of brick. Padusius lifted his shield against the barrage. He was still shouting: Nicole saw his lips move. But the crowd drowned him out.
Nicole had no idea of the rights and wrongs of the case. She wondered if anyone else did, either. Nobody around her looked to give two whoops in hell for rights, wrongs, or anything in between. They wanted blood.
And they got it. A pair of lionesses bounded from the right-hand gate. Nicole didn’t know what she’d expected. A man, probably, or men. An execution squad, or another criminal pitted against this one, with the winner to be granted his life. She’d seen something like that in one of Frank’s old movies.
As she looked at the lionesses, and as the truth dawned on her, she wished she hadn’t eaten and drunk so much. She was going to lose it, right here between her grubby sandaled feet.
She’d heard in catechism class of Christians thrown to the lions. It was a cliche. She’d assumed — Sister Agatha had made her assume — that that was the punishment
reserved for Christians. What if that wasn’t it at all? What if they were sent to the lions simply because they were criminals, or because they were reckoned criminals?
She should have been used by now to the shock of her preconceptions crumbling. It wasn’t going to let up — but it never seemed to get easier.
She closed her eyes and breathed as deep as she dared, which wasn’t very; the people around her, and for that matter she herself, were getting fairly ripe in the heat of the sun. She counted carefully to a hundred. She scraped together all the calm she had, and made herself open her eyes.
At sight of the lionesses, the crowd had gone crazy. Padusius’ scream of terror pierced even that pandemonium like a hot needle piercing butter.
If he’d wanted to live a little longer, a cold small part of Nicole observed, he should have kept his mouth shut. The lionesses had come out more baffled than furious; in fact, they seemed a little better fed than the animals that had fought earlier. They stood together just outside their gate, sniffing the air, crouching down under the force of the crowd’s roar. One looked ready to bolt back into her den, if the gate hadn’t slammed shut behind her.
Padusius’ shriek brought both of them to abrupt and complete attention. There was their dinner bell, loud and clear. They shook off the daze of sudden sunlight and the crowd’s roar, and loped toward the condemned man. They weren’t even bothering with stealth. Something in their manner told Nicole they’d hunted criminals before, and killed, too. They had no fear at all of his humanity, and took not the slightest notice of his flimsy excuse for a weapon.
Nor, for that matter, did he. He dropped the useless shield and club and bolted for the wall. Nicole had never seen a human being move so fast or jump so high. His fingers actually caught the topmost edge; a good ten feet up, and hooked over it. His feet scrabbled at the wall below, inching the rest of his body upward.