Household Gods

Titus Calidius Severus nudged her in the ribs with his elbow. She started and suppressed a shriek. “You’re for the bull, are you?” he said. “Me, I always cheer for the wolves. They fight as a team, like legionaries.”

It was, Nicole realized, a perfectly rational way of looking at the fight, if you wanted to look at it at all. Regardless of his taste in amusement – a taste plenty of people in Carnuntum obviously shared – the fuller and dyer was a long way from a fool. Could she blame him for having the same tastes as his neighbors? How far did cultural relativism stretch? Not to slavery. She’d be damned if it stretched that far. To actively enjoying animals in torment?

That she could come up with the idea in the first place didn’t worry her. That she didn’t dismiss it out of hand did worry her, a lot.

Calidius couldn’t have imagined what she was thinking, or even known such a way of thinking could exist. It wasn’t in his worldview.

“Mithras slew the great bull, you know,” he said. She nodded, though she didn’t know what he was talking about except that it must have something to do with his religion. She’d have to learn more about that one day. One day…

The aurochs gored another wolf in the side, not quite so terrible a wound as the first, and trampled another to death under its hooves. But while it slaughtered its enemies, the rest of the pack was literally eating it alive. It kicked and stamped and gored and swept its great horns in wild arcs, but its strength was failing. Its bellows grew weaker. At last, it sank to its knees. It struggled to lift itself, got one foot under its body, heaved. But its life had poured out of it with its blood. With a deep, shuddering moan, it rolled onto its side.

Like the bear, it didn’t die completely, not then, and not for a long while afterwards. It was still kicking feebly when the wolves were shoulder-deep in its carcass.

Calidius Severus folded his arms and nodded, pleased. “They got it down and lost only four,” he said. “That’s good work from the wolves’ side. I’ve seen an aurochs clean out a whole pack of them – not often, but I’ve seen it.”

How many beast shows had he seen, to speak with such casual expertise? How many had Umma seen? How many had been staged in Carnuntum that they hadn’t seen? How many other towns were there in the Roman Empire, and how often did they stage beast shows? How many animals died bloody deaths for no better reason than to amuse a theaterful of Romans with time on their hands?

Her thoughts must have run away with her: she spoke that last question aloud. Titus Calidius Severus frowned for a moment. Then he asked, “What sort of deaths do you think they’d die if we left them where they were?”

Nicole started to answer, but stopped herself abruptly. She didn’t think about death if she could possibly help it, no matter what form it came in. Death was bad. Death was unmentionable. It was – indecent.

Here, they took it as much for granted as they did any number of other indecencies. Head lice. Halitosis. Pissing in jars on a public street.

If she absolutely had to think about how a wild animal died, she supposed it went off somewhere quiet and died with dignity. But if wolves would eat an aurochs in an amphitheater before it was properly dead, what was to keep them from doing the same thing in the forest? They were starved, granted. But if they were hungry enough to take on something that big, they’d eat it alive wherever they were, in a desperate and completely instinctive bid for survival. That was the law of the jungle.

The year Nicole turned thirteen, the family dog had gotten sick. It was cancer, the vet said. Squamous-cell sarcoma: she’d looked it up, because something in her wanted to know exactly what it was that was killing fat old Gaylord. He stopped being able to eat his kibble. He left spots of blood on the carpet, which amazed her because her mother hadn’t seemed to mind. Then one day Nicole came home from school to find the carpets all freshly cleaned and Gaylord gone. Her mother had had him put to sleep. It was for the best, she’d said. He was in pain. It was only going to get worse. There wasn’t anything anyone could do to make it better.

If a wolf got squamous-cell sarcoma, there was nothing and no one to put it out of its misery. It would suffer till it died, which might take a long time.

There’d been little enough dignity for Gaylord, near the end. His muzzle had swollen with the tumors. Blood and saliva had dripped from his mouth, and mucus from his nose. He’d whimpered when he slept, from the pain. If he’d died quietly, it had been because he’d been given a lethal dose of whatever it was vets gave dogs to put them to sleep.

Out of all that, the only reply Nicole could find for Calidius Severus’ question was a second, much lamer question: “We ought to be better than nature, don’t you think, instead of as bad or worse?”