Household Gods

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.