Household Gods

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.

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