Household Gods

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.”