Household Gods

From somewhere under the amphitheater, the lion let out a short, coughing roar. Nicole shut her mouth with a snap. God only knew how many millions of years of evolution were screaming at her, That noise means danger!

Calidius had fallen silent, too. His right hand snatched at something across his body, caught at air and stopped. “Mithras!” he said with a note of surprise. “I’ll be cursed if I wasn’t reaching for my sword.”

“There you hear him, folks – the king of beasts indeed,” the emcee – Faustinianus – said. His voice echoed up through sudden silence. “And with him today you’ll be seeing a creature you know well. Yes, ladies and gentlemen: with him we have one of our very own Pannonian bears! “

He didn’t get much in the way of applause this time: a scattering of handclaps from here and there around the arena. “Cheapskates,” Calidius Severus muttered, speaking for them all. “Probably be the only lion in the whole show, too.”

Nicole didn’t say anything. She had never seen a Pannonian bear, whatever that was.

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.”