“We should finish him,” Lycon said in a low voice. He had not felt queasy in the present way since the afternoon on a mud bar he had cleaned a crocodile which had grown to three tons weight by devouring villagers who fished and washed in that stretch of the Nile. “He’s . . . he’s as like the other, the lizard-ape, as he is to us.”
The animal dealer lifted his jaw in agreement. There was a particularly dense pattern of nodes ringing N’Sumu’s head and neck. If the blob on his palm had been the charm which permitted the “Egyptian” to stun and kill, then these might well have something to do with the skill with which a mouth so inhuman mimed human speech. The little knife clipped each nodule out of the pattern of tendrils, then lifted it separately to the pile of offal on the stone.
Aloud, Vonones said, “Do you want to live, my friend?”
“What?” Lycon asked. “I. . . . Yes, I do.”
“So do I,” Vonones said, flopping N’Sumu’s left arm aside to make the task of stripping it easier. “And Master N’Sumu here is going to make that possible. He’s going to capture the lizard-ape alive just as he told the Emperor he would.”
The Armenian smiled brightly, but it was not for some minutes that Lycon understood what his friend meant.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The veils were drawn back above the hollow of the Flavian Amphitheater so that the sun could flood in on the mid-afternoon main turn in the arena. The sand had been raked smooth over the area, as large as a freeman’s farm in the dim, grim days of myth and Romulus. Blood did not show, not even from the ivory chairs of the imperial entourage on the lowest of the viewing levels. Domitian, shaded himself by a panel of gold-shot scarlet silk held by a pair of slaves, leaned forward in anticipation. His tongue touched his thick, cruel lips, and his fingers twitched as if they had a throat between them to squeeze. Crispinus, unshaded and smelling a little of sweat through his heavy perfume, watched the Emperor sidelong with a false smile and the inner awareness that imperial whim could cause any of the fifty thousand spectators to be thrust down into the arena.
The section of German guards carried spears and shields whose blazoning cost more than a sharecropper’s annual profit. The plywood cores of the shields were perfectly functional, however, and would provide the necessary protection should a beast somehow get through the spiked iron grill within the arena proper and up the eighteen-foot wall above which the tiers of seats were ranged.
There was just a possibility that the shields would be needed this afternoon.
“Lord and god,” said the tribune Lacerta, who had seen—or seen flashes of—the lizard-ape on the loose, “I really think the danger of this creature’s speed is such that—”
There was a bellow from the expectant crowd, though there was nothing unfamiliar about the beast that snapped and snarled its way onto the sand through a short covered passage from the cells below. It was a tiger, young and powerful, with a sheen on its coat indicating the good condition of the muscles beneath. The tiger’s belly sucked in sharply behind the rib cage: the beast had been fed only lightly for the past day and a half, leaving it hungry without breaking its spirit the way a week of starvation would have done. The beast whirled, clawing at the goads of the men advancing behind the movable grate in the passage. Then it sprang fully out into the arena and roared at the surrounding spectators.
“That fellow Vonones did a splendid job with the cat, didn’t he?” observed the Emperor as he considered the tiger with the eye of a connoisseur of blood sports. “Philon!”
“Lord and god?” replied the secretary who sprang to attention with his stylus poised over a wax tablet.
“A diploma for the animal dealer, Claudius Vonones,” Domitian said, “freeing him for port duties throughout the Empire for a period of five years. That will let him bring us more entertainment as good . . . if he’s wise.”