Innocent until proven guilty, Nicole thought. Did Roman law even acknowledge the principle?
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.
Nicole had been rather inclined toward that view herself. Now she was sitting in a place where public executions were, from the looks of it, a common thing. The faces around her were avid, the eyes greedy, drinking in the sight of a human being dying hideously under the teeth and claws of lions. They’d made it a sport, like the slaughter of animals. It was a spectacle for their amusement.
Padusius’ struggles had all but stopped. The lionesses paused to lick red and dripping jaws, then bent their heads and began to feed. They wouldn’t wait for him to finish dying, any more than the male of their species had waited for the bear, or the wolves for the aurochs.
Calidius Severus spoke beside Nicole, startling her half out of her skin. The crowd’s roar had sunk to background noise. His voice was surprisingly distinct, and rather loud. “Well, that’s that. Pretty cursed quick, too — quicker than the son of a whore deserved.” He paused as if to ponder that, then sighed and shrugged. “Still and all, he won’t be breaking in the heads of honest people again, or doing worse, for that matter. I hear he outraged Domitius Zmaragdus’ wife after he’d murdered her husband in front of her.”
“Did he?” Nicole said faintly. It seemed her overloaded stomach would stay where it belonged. A few minutes before, she wouldn’t have bet on it. Calidius Severus had just given her the most powerful argument of all in favor of capital punishment: Now we know he won’t do it again.
Did hearing that Padusius was a rapist as well as a murderer make her feel easier about watching him die? Almost with his dying breath, he’d sworn he hadn’t committed the crime for which he’d been condemned. Was he telling the truth?
There was no way, now, to know. All the witnesses were dead. The suspect was dying, was maybe already gone. His foot jerked beneath a lioness’ paw, startling Nicole. The lioness snapped at it and began to gnaw, as a dog will gnaw on a favorite bone.
Whatever the truth was, whether the man was guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter now. One way or the other, he was just as dead.
They — the authorities, Faustinianus, whoever was in charge — let the lionesses eat their fill of Padusius’ body. People started getting up, stretching and belching, jostling one another as they headed for the exits.
Calidius Severus touched Nicole’s arm, a light brush of the fingers, quickly taken away. Nicole shivered. She wasn’t repulsed, not at all, but neither was she in a mood to be touched.
“Shall we go?” he asked. “No gladiators this afternoon; it’s too early on in the games. The last couple of days, I expect they’ll put on a healthy show.”
“Gladiators?” Nicole knew what the word meant: she could hardly help it. She hadn’t thought she would need the knowledge. Carnuntum kept surprising her, as usual in ways dismaying rather than delightful.
If you looked at them the right — no, the wrong — way, gladiatorial shows made a horrid kind of sense. Beasts killed beasts for the Romans’ amusement. Beasts killed men for the Romans’ amusement, too; the lionesses were still gnawing meat from the bones of the man who had insisted he wasn’t a murderer. If you took those two for granted, why not have men kill men for the Romans’ amusement?