Household Gods

Whether it did or it didn’t, this man had been tried, convicted, and sentenced – to death, she could assume, though the law made a pretense of giving him a fighting chance. It didn’t stop him from standing in the middle of the arena with his flimsy shield and his ridiculous little club, and shrieking up at them all, “I’m innocent! By all the gods, I didn’t do it! “

Jeers and catcalls answered him, and a rain of more solid insults: eggs and rotten fruit that people must have brought for the purpose, half-eaten sausages, even stones and bits of brick. Padusius lifted his shield against the barrage. He was still shouting: Nicole saw his lips move. But the crowd drowned him out.

Nicole had no idea of the rights and wrongs of the case. She wondered if anyone else did, either. Nobody around her looked to give two whoops in hell for rights, wrongs, or anything in between. They wanted blood.

And they got it. A pair of lionesses bounded from the right-hand gate. Nicole didn’t know what she’d expected. A man, probably, or men. An execution squad, or another criminal pitted against this one, with the winner to be granted his life. She’d seen something like that in one of Frank’s old movies.

As she looked at the lionesses, and as the truth dawned on her, she wished she hadn’t eaten and drunk so much. She was going to lose it, right here between her grubby sandaled feet.

She’d heard in catechism class of Christians thrown to the lions. It was a cliche. She’d assumed – Sister Agatha had made her assume – that that was the punishment reserved for Christians. What if that wasn’t it at all? What if they were sent to the lions simply because they were criminals, or because they were reckoned criminals?

She should have been used by now to the shock of her preconceptions crumbling. It wasn’t going to let up – but it never seemed to get easier.

She closed her eyes and breathed as deep as she dared, which wasn’t very; the people around her, and for that matter she herself, were getting fairly ripe in the heat of the sun. She counted carefully to a hundred. She scraped together all the calm she had, and made herself open her eyes.

At sight of the lionesses, the crowd had gone crazy. Padusius’ scream of terror pierced even that pandemonium like a hot needle piercing butter.

If he’d wanted to live a little longer, a cold small part of Nicole observed, he should have kept his mouth shut. The lionesses had come out more baffled than furious; in fact, they seemed a little better fed than the animals that had fought earlier. They stood together just outside their gate, sniffing the air, crouching down under the force of the crowd’s roar. One looked ready to bolt back into her den, if the gate hadn’t slammed shut behind her.

Padusius’ shriek brought both of them to abrupt and complete attention. There was their dinner bell, loud and clear. They shook off the daze of sudden sunlight and the crowd’s roar, and loped toward the condemned man. They weren’t even bothering with stealth. Something in their manner told Nicole they’d hunted criminals before, and killed, too. They had no fear at all of his humanity, and took not the slightest notice of his flimsy excuse for a weapon.

Nor, for that matter, did he. He dropped the useless shield and club and bolted for the wall. Nicole had never seen a human being move so fast or jump so high. His fingers actually caught the topmost edge; a good ten feet up, and hooked over it. His feet scrabbled at the wall below, inching the rest of his body upward.

There were people sitting in the first row above the wall, men and women better dressed than most, some with parasols to protect them from the sun. One such, a creature so epicene Nicole took it for a woman till it turned slightly and she saw the curled beard, stamped down hard on the straining fingers. The crowd cheered. The dandy turned grandly about, bowing and throwing kisses.

Padusius dropped wailing to the sand. The lionesses sprang.

He was unarmed, his toy weapons flung aside and far out of reach, not much more useless there than they would have been in his hands. His fists beat against one great cat’s side. He kicked at the other. The lionesses took no more notice of his struggles than of the death-throes of a gazelle. He was nothing more to them than meat.

Nicole watched Padusius’ writhing ebb. She couldn’t shut her eyes, or turn her face away. She was caught in a sick, and sickened, fascination.

She’d never watched a man die before. Not for real, not right in front of her. People in California, in that world so far away in space and time, had spoken in favor of televising executions. Let the public see what capital punishment was really like, they had said. They’d abolish it then, in a fit of righteous horror.