As he completed a second lap around the arena, David saw the trident and net on the ground in front of him. He rushed to scoop them up.
“Fight, coward!” somebody shouted from the crowd. “Fight for your honor, and the honor of Rome!”
The tiger kept advancing on David.
He kept walking backward. As an animal lover, he didn’t want to use the sharp edge of the trident. But he would do whatever he had to do to survive.
David started opening the net. It was bigger than he’d originally thought. Fully opened, it was about as large as a king-size bed.
The tiger opened its mouth and roared. It had two razor-sharp teeth, perfect for cutting into flesh. David held the net up, still keeping one hand on the trident.
The tiger wasn’t dumb. It knew it couldn’t catch David by running. The boy was too fast. Its best chance would be to gather up its remaining energy and attack with a bold leap at David’s throat.
So that’s what it did. One last roar, and then it was all teeth and flying claws. The crowd gasped.
David instinctively threw up the net so it was between him and the tiger. He stepped to the side like a bullfighter. Or, in his case, like a batter who gets out of the way of a fastball coming at his head.
The tiger hit the middle of the net with its face and tumbled to the ground, rolling over so the net fell on top of it. Thinking quickly, David ran over and grabbed the edges of the net to wrap it around the struggling animal.
“Hilarius! Hilarius! Hilarius!”
The tiger was tangled up inside the net. It struggled to get free for a minute, but only ensnared itself more tightly in rope. It realized its situation was hopeless. It stopped fighting.
The tiger was out of breath, panting. So was David.
“Stab it!” somebody yelled. And then the crowd started to chant.
“Stab it! Stab it! Stab it!”
David looked up at the crowd disgustedly.
“No!” he shouted.
“Boooooooo!”
Food and garbage rained down into the arena. The people came to see gladiators and animals killed, not captured.
“You people are worse than animals!” David shouted at them. “Tigers are an endangered species!”
He was about to walk toward the gate, but then he remembered that after Luke had won his fight, he’d ended it with a triumphant bat flip. So David flipped the trident up in the air and defiantly walked toward the gate.
The trident went about ten feet up in the air.
Then it came down.
And it landed in the one place David didn’t want it to land.
In the tiger.
The tiger let out a tortured roar. So did the crowd.
Hearing the noise, David turned around. He saw the trident sticking into the tiger’s belly. It was gasping for breath as its front and rear paws flailed around.
“Nooooo!” David shouted, falling to his knees in horror.
The tiger was dead.
CHAPTER 17WORKING GIRLS
WHEN WE LAST SAW ISABEL AND JULIA, THEY were chained to opposite walls of a dark, dank, dangerous dungeon, their situation hopeless. The girls were tired and hungry. Their ankles and wrists were sore from the chains that bound them. Both of them had been crying.
“What do you think the boys are doing right now?” Isabel asked.
The girls, of course, had no idea that David and Luke were in the amphitheater, fighting for their lives.
“Oh, they’re probably lounging around some Roman bathhouse with girls in bikinis feeding them grapes,” said Julia. “Isn’t that what men did all the time during the Roman Empire?”
“You’ve seen too many movies,” Isabel told her. “I don’t think the Romans even had bikinis.”
Isabel was right. The bikini wasn’t invented until 1946, by Frenchman Louis Réard. He named it after a group of islands in the Pacific, where the United States was conducting nuclear tests. But that’s another story for another day.
It was almost eleven o’clock. Mount Vesuvius was going to blow in an hour. But the girls didn’t know the time, because David had the timer. Julia and Isabel were dozing on and off when the dungeon door opened with a loud screech. Startled, they looked up. A woman had entered their cell.
“Slaves!” she shouted as she went to unlock Julia’s chains. “Come with me!”
“Well, it’s about time!” Julia said as her ankles were freed. “Those things are cutting into my skin.”
“You’ve got to listen to us!” Isabel told the woman. “Vesuvius is going to erupt. It’s going to destroy Pompeii and all the people in it!”
“Quiet, slave! Did someone instruct you to talk? You are not to speak unless you are spoken to.”
The woman hustled them out of the cell and into Via dell’Abbondanza. Two angry-looking guards armed with spears were waiting there, so escaping was out of the question.
“Where do you think they’re taking us?” Isabel whispered to Julia as they were escorted down the busy street.
“I don’t care,” Julia replied. “Nothing could be worse than being chained up in that dungeon. Maybe they’re going to take us to one of those bathhouses. The Romans were famous for their baths, you know.”
That was true. In fact, it’s been said that the Romans built aqueducts so the people would have fresh water to take baths. Cleanliness, as they say, is next to godliness. There were three bathhouses in Pompeii.
But the girls were not being taken to the baths.
They were marched down Via dell’Abbondanza and made a left at Via Stabiana, passing a bakery and a shop that sold leather goods. As they turned the corner, Isabel caught a glimpse of Mount Vesuvius in the distance. It still looked quiet and peaceful.
Julia noticed the large clay jugs on the ground in front of many of the shops. She remembered Miss Z had talked about them. Then she saw a man walk up to one of the
