Household Gods (38 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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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.”
The other gate yawned open. The aurochs loomed in it, stamping its feet and tossing horns that seemed as wide as the whole of Carnuntum.
Nicole gaped, even sickness forgotten. Wolves she knew about. Didn't everybody? The aurochs—if she'd expected anything, she'd thought maybe it was a kind of deer, or another bear. She'd never imagined it would be a bull. A Texas longhorn bigger than the biggest buffalo she'd ever heard of.
Nothing like it walked the earth she'd come from. Of that she was almost sure. She would have heard about it, seen it in a documentary, found it in a zoo. It must have gone extinct
sometime between this era, whenever exactly it was, and her own. For all she knew, it was an endangered species right now. And the Romans were killing it for their amusement. Didn't they have any idea what they were doing?
Calidius Severus turned to her with a bemused lift of the brow. “This should be interesting,” he said over the rising roar of the crowd. “You never can tell what an aurochs will do. Remember the one that caught a wolf on its horns and pitched it up into the seats? Wasn't that a wild day?”
“Yes,” Nicole lied. She cast about for ways to put some of what she was feeling into terms Umma might have used. “It seems a shame to see such a splendid beast fighting for its life.”
“Wouldn't be very exciting, watching lapdogs and sheep,” the fuller and dyer answered. “Besides, you know the aurochs is as mean a bastard as the Germans he shares the forest with. One less of them is one less mankiller roaming the woods.” He leaned forward with sudden intensity. “Here we go.”
To the wolves, obviously, the aurochs was not a splendid beast. It was lunch on the hoof, and they looked to have missed a lot of lunches. They circled it in a slow and surprisingly graceful dance, tongues lolling, golden eyes intent. Those eyes surprised Nicole, a little. She hadn't been thinking; she'd been expecting plain doggy brown, not yellow.
The aurochs knew what they were after. It would have met wolves before, away in the forest. It pawed the earth and bellowed. The noise was more like the bottom register of a bassoon with a bad reed than any sound Nicole could have conceived of as coming from the mouth of a cow. And yet, if the aurochs was a cow, it was the biggest damned cow she'd ever seen or heard of.
It lowered its head and charged. Sand flew beneath its hooves. The wolf in its path flung itself aside. Two more sprang at the aurochs from behind. The aurochs spun, impossibly agile. The wolves braced forelegs and skidded, scrambling out of reach of those arena-wide horns.
One escaped. The other had stopped a fraction too late.
The broad curving sweep of the left horn caught it broadside, hooked underneath, pierced and thrust and ripped. The aurochs shook its head as if in irritation. The wolf flew through the air and landed rolling. Its yelp of agony rang over the shouting and hooting and catcalls that filled the amphitheater.
Nicole pounded her fists on her thighs. “
Yes!
Give it to him!”
She clapped a hand over her mouth. God. She'd got into it. For a few seconds, she'd
become
one of these people. She'd understood why they came to these shows, what went through their heads as they watched poor innocent animals slaughter one other for humans' sport.
The worst of it was, the wolf didn't die right away. Blood poured from the terrible wound in its belly, soaking into the sand. A loop of glistening pink gut slipped out and trailed the ground. The wolf tripped over it, shook its hind foot as if in annoyance, and went on with the hunt, as if pain and mortal wound were, after all, nothing to it. It wanted its prey. It fully expected its share of the kill when the fight was over. It didn't know it was dead.
Even as the great bull gored the one wolf, others snapped at its legs, at its belly, and at its privates. “A eunuch for Cybele!” someone shouted near Nicole in a screechy falsetto. That drew a laugh from the crowd.
Cruel
, thought Nicole. But the edge of censure was gone for a while. She'd been inside these people's heads. She'd seen the fight as they saw it. She didn't want to go back there, but neither could she maintain her position of moral superiority.
Wolves were everywhere now, swarming over the aurochs. They launched themselves at its side and shoulders. They clung, teeth sunk in flesh, eating the aurochs alive. Blood streamed and spattered. Who would have thought there could be so much blood in the world?
The aurochs bellowed in torment. It scraped off one of the wolves against the wall, as it might have used a treetrunk in the forest. Nicole gave up on trying to control herself. She cheered. The aurochs stamped with an enormous hind hoof,
full on the wolf's panting middle. She heard bones crunch even through the roar of the crowd.
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.

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