Household Gods

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