Under bare feet the sand very hot with the sun, gritty but scarcely felt (what?). Lyla reached down giddily to touch her own sole and heel, expecting to contact sandy roughness and finding only a smear of the excrement which she had earlier wiped from her hand. Yet the roar of the hungry lions was (what?) unmistakable, the coughing noise like a slow explosion. And the watchers on the banked seats reaching up to the pure blue sky like an oppressive tent on which the gold coin of the sun hung with an expression of interest in these matters of Me and death.
For the last time she managed to force herself back into the normal frame of reference, and it stopped with the sight of the two gleaming metal shafts upraised to catch the light, the chair-made-shield and the curtain torn to make a tangling defense. The taste in the mouth of a last bad meal, a handful of sad olives, a wedge of stale unleavened bread and a few bites from a haunch of meat destined for the wolves but diverted by a lanista who had bet on today’s contest of man and man, that had seemed only rancid but might as things went have been poisoned, for the world swayed horribly at every step and there was a rushing of blood in the ears that drowned out the cries of the crowd.
Lyla realized perfectly well what was happening to her. She had ingested a subcritical dose of the drug in the sibyl-pill and it was just taking her over the border from reality into whatever world she inhabited during her ordinary trances. It was what was happening to everyone else that she couldn’t figure out. That tall blonde Germanic swordsman in the morion and cuirass and one vambrace and one greave and carrying a targe or buckler opposed to that retiarius with the stabbing trident and the cleverly wielded net.
Once more from the cages underneath the stands, the roar of angry lions.
Deft the net spread on the sand and a jab of the trito force the other back, sword-struck aside by serving the purpose of placing one careless heel on the net and heave and the man’s length measured on his own shadow by the overhead sun. From the side where wealthy spectators sat in the company of the Emperor, shaded by awnings whereas the plebs must sweat and screw their eyes up, applause mingled with cries of andue to losing bettors.
(Meanwhile: Slob in spite of his hurt hand grabbing the whip while Madison’s attention was distracted in tripping Putzi with the torn curtain.)
A shift and tilt of the universe, a sense of aeons grindby in the wrong direction and screaming at every painful second of their progress. In a linen kilt not as low as the knee and with a beard hanging in coarse rat’s-tails against his chest, a whip-wielder mouthing curses into an eternal desert silence. Dark and cold overlying the comprehended words: “Crocodiles and dogs shall share thy bones at dawn!”
Sensed on one’s own breath, the foul of bad onions and the sour of beer no better than urine. Across the shoulders the tidy parallel lines of that same whip, on the hands the calluses plated with adobe dust and the blisters from hauling ropes, one burst and raw as though the palm had cupped a fresh coal from the fire an hour ago. Hobbled to the ankles, other ropes not serving to shift great blocks of stone but only to hinder rebellious slaves while the overseer stood back at whip-length dis
Handy, a heavy sun-hardened brick, the size and shape of a loaf of that bread not given to quiet the grumbling of the stomach in more days than one knows how to count. Picked up, faster than whip can follow, and hurled.
Through a chaotic haze of sickness, weakness, hate hate and hate, eyes belonging to Lyla but blurred with years of untended infection and stark sunlight and wind-borne dust out of the heart of Africa saw a chunk of the concrete which had earlier been smashed out of the apt’s wall cut open’ the scalp of Slob more neatly than a knife. He folded to his knees and bowed over the whip to anoint it with the blood his head was shed