Household Gods

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?