A decade earlier. Back in my home village, before the failed uprising, before I’d left my sick faith. Dozens of men around me, jostling, shouting. A stone gripped in my hand. A hole in the center of the crowd, twenty yards across, empty but for a single weeping man. We churned around him like a boiling sea, hurling abuse, hurling hatred. Stones lay about him.
Ehud. I had slept with him years ago. I had loved him for a while. I should have known he would be found out. A stone flew from the crowd and tore his ear open. It bled black.
He looked up, snot running down his face, eyes swollen. I knew he couldn’t see me through his tears, but his gaze seemed to catch mine. My chest constricted. It was too hot, too tight. Rabbi Tzuriel caught the look. He looked at me, then back at Ehud. Glanced at the rock held unthrown in my hand. Something troubled his eyes.
I stepped forward and flung my stone at Ehud. It caught him in the mouth, split his lip. Dark syrup poured from the gash, and now Ehud’s tears came clouded and oily. The sweet smell of decomposing bodies filled the air, his cries broke into crow-like squawks. I bent down, grabbed more stones, hurled them one after another, blindly.
And I was sitting up, in my quarters in Gracus’s estate, gasping for air. The sky outside was still dark. I threw aside my soaked sheets, leaned over, and vomited on the floor.
Somehow the dream was even worse, twisted like this — Ehud’s execution melding into the monster’s slaying. The sweet stink clung in my nostrils. I squeezed my eyes tight and let the sickness flow through me.
“The Emperor demands another monster,” I told the wizard that afternoon. It had taken me all day to find another barbarian slave who could speak his language. She worked as a scribe and had been educated by Roman teachers, yet she sat by his cot in reverence. His hip had been shattered in the fall.
Even with his face taut with pain, his lips still curled in contempt.
“He says you don’t have the stomach to gather the components he needs for the summoning,” the girl translated.
“Try me.”
A wry grin broke over her face. “The Reverend Elder is new to slavery,” she said. “He doesn’t realize how quickly the Romans warp us into mirrors of themselves.”
I did not appreciate being included in her sentiment.
I visited Aurelius that evening, at the Temple of Somnus. As Gracus’s Dispensator I received a small personal stipend, and if I was frugal I could visit Aurelius twice a month. Therefore I was very frugal.
It seemed the whole damn city was in the temple, everyone there pale and harried. By the time Aurelius was ready for me, I’d seen enough people pass through to fill half the Colosseum.
“Is it a holy day?” I asked him. Aurelius shook his head, his blonde curls bouncing lightly.
“Just a lot of supplicants today. Nightmares flooded the city last night.” He smiled at me and took my hand. “Don’t worry about it. How are you?”
I drew him close, ran my other hand through his hair.
“Better now.”
It didn’t last, though. The evening was marred by the lingering, cloying stench of the monster. After I finally spent myself inside Aurelius, I left sick with disgust. The entire city stank of that pitch blood.
I tossed in bed all night, my skin crawling with every breath. When the sky lightened, it came as a relief — I could give up on sleep and distract myself with work. I left for the apothecaria to buy the wizard’s components.
The air outside was thick; I had to push my way through it. The sun filtered down heavily, dulled to diffuse amber. Those on the streets shambled along, exhausted. The eyes I met were tired, half-lidded pools. Everyone labored to breathe the sticky atmosphere.
I pulled myself from one alchemist to the next, listing the vile components without apology. Everyone turned me away with revulsion. One man cursed me as he chased me out. As the shadows bled toward the horizon, I finally received a calculating look from a dark man with wet coals for eyes. He named a ridiculous sum, his lips barely moving. I accepted.
I had barely left the apothecary when a strained voice yelled my name.
“Marad!”
I turned, saw a slave of the Ludus barreling down the street. He waved for me desperately.
“Marad! Wait!” He almost collapsed at my feet, panting, but forced his words out regardless. “The animals. They’re loose. All. All of them.”
I left him in the dirt, running as fast as I could back to the Ludus, bowling past shouting pedestrians. Gasping minutes later, I rounded a final corner, and saw the crushed masonry where elephants had careened into a building. Carts lay strewn about in splinters. The screams of the injured choked the streets, and in the mouth of a nearby alley a tiger gnawed on a bloody arm. Oh God. This meant my death.
Could I risk going back for the coins I’d accumulated? It was a stupid thought. Of course not. I should have planned ahead, should have hidden something outside the city. Now I’d have to flee with only what I had on me. But if I could evade capture, then survive until I made my way to another city, I could have a life again. I’d heard there were places in the Empire where a literate, numerate slave would be accepted without questions.
I would never see Aurelius again. That hurt like a dagger. But it beat torture and execution. I turned to flee.
A hand clapped down on my shoulder. Titus’s rough, sneering voice. “Leaving so soon, Marad?” My heart stopped.
I sat up in my bed, gulping the air, heart pounding in my chest. Wet sheets tumbled to the floor. The sun had cleared the horizon, and filtered through a dull sky into diffuse amber. The air was thick, sluicing reluctantly down my throat. I groaned as I flopped back onto my cot. None of it had happened. I still had my life. I waited until my trembling subsided before getting to my feet.
The wizard began his ritual that night, chanting hateful, buzzing words that filled the Ludus into the early hours. His translator assisted him, burning incense, slathering him with wine and blood. My heart beat unnaturally fast in their presence, my skull itched behind my eyeballs. I didn’t ask what the stillborn was for.
They paused to rest several times, and on the third such occasion I broke my silent vigil. “How much longer?” I demanded, spurring a guttural exchange between the two slaves.
“Four days, maybe five,” the girl translated. “He’ll have to be taken to the Colosseum for the final casting, on the last day.”
Days? I had expected hours. That incessant chanting still echoed in my mind.
“Why so long?” I asked.
“God’s mind encompasses all things.” She answered me directly, without referring my question to the wizard. “We must work hard to get His attention.”
“This is your religion?”
She regarded me silently for a long time before answering.
“These are the broken shards of my religion. This is what remained after the Romans ground it against reality.”
Rumor from Jerusalem claimed that my former faith was splintering as well, but I wouldn’t miss it. I left them to their work.
The days kept growing heavier, the sky more oppressive. Its blue dome sank down onto the Earth, squeezing us beneath its weight. A faint scent of rancid honey coated every breath. In the Colosseum the cheers were forced; plaintive cries of defiance against a wilting world.