“But lord and god,” pressed Lacerta, “this creature, this sauropithecus, is amazingly fast and can leap—truly, I saw it—at least thirty feet. I fear it may be dangerous for even you to watch it in the open like this.”
“You’d put me in a cage, Lacerta?” the Emperor asked, turning to the Guard officer with a look of chilling speculation on his face. “Or do you think I should hide in my palace while a unique animal kills a tiger in front of—” he gestured toward the packed stands, the fifty thousand men, women and children who had managed to acquire tickets for this most special of occasions “—half of Rome?”
“My master and god,” Lacerta lied, straightening with a taut face and freshly-beaded sweat on his forehead, “you know that I did not mean such a thing.”
The Italian officer remained braced to attention, his eyes turned toward the arena and his mind focused on images of his own death. He did not relax, even minusculely, until he heard Domitian say, “Jump thirty feet? I wonder if it will leap onto the tiger as soon as the arena door—”
Another door in the high arena wall swung down, and the crowd thundered over anything further the Emperor would have said—even as the event embarrassed his hopes.
The sauropithecus did not leap into the arena. Indeed, it could be seen clutching at the movable grating until a slave with a torch thrust it out onto the sand in stumbling despair.
“It doesn’t look like a lizard at all,” said Domitian loudly, and in obvious displeasure. “Or an ape, so far as that goes.”
“I thought you said it was blue, Lacerta?” Crispinus called, shark enough to be a part of any offered kill. “That thing’s really a purple in good light.”
“Head like a fish, not a lizard,” put in another courtier.
The guard tribune was shaking. He had parlayed his brief glimpse of the sauropithecus in action into sole credit for the beast’s capture, aided by the seeming unconcern of Vonones and Lycon to tell Domitian himself a story that meant riches and power for its heroes—or hero: the Egyptian mangled unrecognizably, another of the capture party torn to collops, and—in the tribune’s version—Lacerta himself pinioning the beast while its claws cut deep grooves (artistically rendered by a tinker with mallet and chisel the next day) in his armor.
“It’s exceptionally cunning,” Lacerta said, repeating what he had been told, “and I have no doubt that it’s luring the cat closer.” He had a great deal of doubt—the creature looked very much as if it were running around the iron palings in a blind panic—but surely the gods would recognize a prayer, whatever its form? To the hope expressed as a certainty, the tribune added the lie, “That’s what it did when it killed the first tiger.”
This tiger was certainly fooled. It did not like the crowd noise or the direct blaze of sun on sand, but unlike some of its kin it did not react by cowering against the bars until barbs and torches drove it back toward the center. It hunched, midsection first rising, then falling, as the paws wriggled for purchase in the sand and the tail twitched. The orange of its fur overwhelmed the black of the stripes overlaying it in the dazzling sunlight. The great head shifted to follow the scrambling so-called lizard-ape. The whole body shifted; and the tiger sprang for its prey.
Almost a hundred feet separated the cat from the bipedal monster with which it shared the arena. The tiger covered the distance in three magnificent bounds which drew gasps of delight from even the jaded familiarity of the onlookers.
The prey leaped up onto the grating. The creature had been RyRelee, emissary from a Class 5 planet of the Federation—and more recently, before it lost its false skin and the battery of biomechanical devices which permitted it to kill and stun and process information in hundreds of human languages, had been N’Sumu the Egyptian wizard. Now, in the last moments of its life, it was the lizard-ape. It caught a cross-bar scarcely eight feet above the ground, and the tiger smashed it back to the sand with both hind paws firmly planted.