Back | Next
Contents


Chapter Twenty-two

It was probably mid-morning, but light in the cellars of the Flavian Amphitheater depended on lamps, not the sun.


They had talked a little after Lycon's family was brought in, dragged in, and locked two cells away so that eight feet and a double set of bars separated the beastcatcher from them. Zoe quieted the children almost immediately, however. She had long experience of her husband in his present state: the utter torpor that followed total immersion, mental as well as physical, in a project until he had nothing left to give. Every night after he had played for the blood-mad crowds in the arena, he had collapsed this way . . . and Zoe knew he had done the same more recently in the field after the days he survived but only just. She could forget about that, however, because she had not seen him as she saw him now . . .


Lycon rolled abruptly, bringing himself to full alertness though he still lay on the floor of the cell where he had been dropped. The concrete surface was slimy with various grades of filth, but the beastcatcher had been in worse places—and he had more important things on his mind, now, anyway.


A single-wick lamp sat beside Zoe, lighting the left half of her face which was suffused with enough concern for the whole. Lycon smiled mechanically, falsely—but the wish to reassure her was not false, and that counted for much at this juncture. "I—" he tried to say, but he croaked instead with the phlegm clogging his mouth.


"Daddy's awake!" Perses squealed. "He's awake, Alexandros!"


"We almost had that thing, my love," Lycon said in a normal voice and with a normal expression on his face—the face itself normal, because it was normal enough for it to be scratched and bruised in any of the lines of work Lycon had followed during his life. "We could have tracked it from there—and then that bastard N'Sumu screwed it up or . . . something."


Zoe heard the words, but she could not fathom her husband's meaning. There was no need for her to understand the story, of course: the real point of it was that something had gone wrong but that he was all right, lucid now and healthy enough to discuss events without screaming in pain. The way he lay, ostensibly relaxed now but at full length on the concrete, his torso lifted by his left elbow and flat palm, belied the impression he was trying to give of being in reasonable condition.


Aloud, Zoe said, "Alexandros has been reciting the Iliad to me, darling. It was so very clever of him to bring the volumes with him. Would—" the plump woman reached beside her without looking; her hand caught that of her older son and the two stepped together, side to side, as they both kept their eyes on Lycon "—would you like him to read to you, too? Because he does it so well."


"Are we going to leave now, Daddy?" Perses demanded.


"Not quite yet," the beastcatcher said with the touch of wry humor that made the truth speakable, "unless things are even worse than I think they are." He reached out with the hand that had braced him on the floor and caught one of the bars. "Up we go," he coaxed himself in an undertone, and it wasn't too bad. Herakles, he'd be fit for another try tonight just like the last one, if they could only find the lizard-ape again.


And if they let him out on his own feet instead of being dragged from the arena through the Gate of Death by his heels.


Lycon let his face shape itself into normal human lines from the mask into which it had drawn itself to hide the pain that might have accompanied movement. It hadn't been too bad, though it might be a while before he wanted to eat again, especially the sort of food he could expect to be offered here.


If Zoe and the kids were offered slops this time around, there were a lot of people who'd better pray Lycon did leave the Amphitheater by his heels.


"Right, ah," the beastcatcher repeated, remembering to smile at his family. The baby was still asleep, thank the gods, and Perses was clutching the side of his mother opposite his elder brother. Lycon did not reach toward them. Eight feet was too far for the gesture to be other than pathetic or absurd, and they didn't need either of those things. "I'd like to hear you recite, Alexandros. Good way to pass the time, and good for you too."


He licked his lips as he paused. They were dry and hot; he wondered if he'd picked up a fever, gods, Rome was worse than the fetid swamps of the Nile Delta, for things to send you to Hades in screaming delirium. "Look, I don't know how bad things are, the situation I mean," he went on, because it was better to speak the truth than have them afraid of bogies which were worse—and this was the truth, there was a fair chance of it working out. The door at the head of the corridor clanked, promise of a meal of sorts . . . or perhaps a visitor, Vonones with a diploma releasing at least Lycon himself. . . .


Speaking very quickly, the beastcatcher went on, "I'm here now because things went wrong last night, but the decision was at a pretty low level. I'm pretty sure Vonones can square things—he knows how bad they need me if any of this is going to work."


Zoe nodded understanding with her lips sucked tightly together in hope that this would, by sympathetic magic, prevent the tears from slipping from her eyes. By looking down she managed without that disaster to say, "Then you aren't condemned to the, to . . . above, I mean." She lifted her head in a gesture and the tears did burst out, not single droplets but runnels that wavered as Zoe twisted her face away again and wiped it on the shoulder of her shawl.


"Oh, Pollux, nothing like that," the beastcatcher said with a brusqueness and near-anger that cloaked his own reactions—all but the catch in his voice, just a brief catch. There was only one set of footsteps rasping down the corridor, so it was the slave with food after all. Who knows, maybe he could eat something now that he'd stood erect for a while, a chunk of bread at least to scrub the tastes of bile and exhaustion from his mouth. "Look, I don't say it won't happen, but I've been in worse places," Lycon said, making himself believe it.


The slave was not carrying a lamp. In fact, he did not appear to have a tray of food.


"Father," Alexandros was saying, "I'm sorry about the way I, I ran away from you yesterday. And—before." The boy was looking at the floor of the intervening cell, but he had the courage to keep his face turned in the direction of Lycon as he spoke. "I won't make you ashamed of me again."


"You there!" Lycon called as he shifted his body and his full attention to the front grating of his cell. He was no longer conscious of his body, of the aches and nausea against which he had been struggling in the time since he had awakened. The slave who shuffled down the corridor past Lycon and toward the cell holding his family wore a Gallic cape with the hood pulled close over his face. "Come here, damn you, or I'll have you flayed this afternoon when they let me out of here!"


"Who is it?" Perses called as he ran to the corridor side of his own cell.


The man in the cape, maybe a woman, of course, the figure was so short, did not look aside despite the beastcatcher's shout. Lycon made a desperate snatch through the bars, but the figure was too far away as it passed.


"Father?" said Alexandros, his voice rising an octave in the course of the two syllables.


"Perses, come h—" cried Zoe, grabbing for the child as he started to repeat, "Who—?" to the figure in the corridor.


"No!" screamed Lycon, and the arm came out from beneath the cape, one arm only but quite sufficient for its purpose. It was quick, cat-quick or even more so, and its claws caught Perses not by his tunic but under the breastbone, punching their multiple paths through the boy's diaphragm and then curling back around the lowest ribs to penetrate the skin again. They held Perses like a fish hooked around the jawbone.


The arm snatched back into the corridor and the boy followed it to the narrow gap between the bars, jerked off his feet. Then the breastbone with associated muscles and cartilage ripped free and the remainder of Perses flopped back onto the floor of the cell. He was still alive, but he could not scream because his chest could no longer force air through his throat. One of the four-year-old's lungs, hooked by the tip of the claw, flopped outside his ruined chest.


"Zoe, Alexandros," Lycon ordered in a calm, clear voice, "get to the back of the cell. Leave Perses, we'll take care of that when it's safe. Move!"


Though they were safe where they stood, you could never tell. They might lunge forward to caress Perses or grapple with the thing in the corridor—equally suicidal, equally pointless. You couldn't change death, not even the gods could change that if there were gods; and there would be a time to kill the blue thing, the lizard-ape, and it would die hard, very hard.


The beastcatcher no longer felt his body, though he knew it would respond as he thought, perhaps even quickly enough to grip the thing's arm if it were extended into Lycon's own cell. He bunched his tunic with his left fist, balling it out from his chest so that the claws would not snatch away his heart and life until his own hands had a throat to grip.


The sounds and everything Lycon saw within the cellblock were preternaturally clear, but they were distanced by the fact that he could not change any of them. He had been afraid when the figure shuffled down the corridor, but there was no longer any fear, any emotion whatever, only the taste of blood in his mouth as Alexandros shouted and stepped toward the thrashing remnants of his brother.


Zoe caught the older boy by the wrist and jerked him back, as she had done when he was an infant crawling toward the scorpion which had ridden Lycon's clothing back from the docks. As she held her remaining son, Zoe turned her back to the corridor so that the thickness of her body was between the infant at her breast and the sauropithecus. She was silent, and she held Alexandros in safety against the wall, though he flailed and screamed to get at the thing which had murdered Perses.


The sauropithecus turned its hand, the only part of its body not still covered by the cape. The gobbet of the boy's flesh and bone dropped to the floor of the cell. One of Perses' feet kicked at it blindly as his back arched and lifted his gaping chest toward the ceiling.


The creature's long claws slid into their sheaths, clearing them of the clinging gore. The paw—hand—twisted back toward the cowl, and a slender tongue lapped at the congealing stickiness which smeared the delicate scales. The claws re-extended.


Lycon ran to the front of his own cell. He gripped the bars with both hands, all his icy planning forgotten. "Guards!" he shouted. The grating was solidly welded so that the bars did not rattle among themselves, but the whole clashed loudly against the locking bar. "Guards! Somebody!" 


The click of the sauropithecus' claws working the wards of the lock down the corridor were inaudible under the present conditions, but they rang as clearly in Lycon's mind as the drooling whisper of the blood filling Perses' chest cavity.


"Somebody dear gods! N'Sumu!"  


The creature dropped its cape as it swung open the door. The tiger's claws had left long scars of leprous white against the scales. It had been very badly hurt, and it could surely be killed, would be killed, but for now it stepped with the balance of a rope-dancer into the cell with Zoe and the children, two of them still alive. Had he thought it was an animal? The look in the eyes the lizard-ape turned on Lycon now was quite human, as human as the eyes of N'Sumu when he ordered the arrest of the beastcatcher's family . . .


"Guards! Gods!" Lycon screamed.


But no god came; and hammer the bars as he might, Lycon could neither tear them loose nor drown the noises in the adjoining cell. The noises went on for a very long time. He did not notice when they finally stopped.


The beastcatcher was open-eyed, his hands and arms as rigid as the iron which they clutched, when the figure left the cell: It donned the cape and shook the hood again over its features. Lycon did not see it leaving, nor did the creature appear to have any further interest in the man responsible for destroying its brood. As it moved off down the corridor, it could easily have been a shuffling beggar-woman, bent and wasted by age.


But there was nothing human about the footprints it left on the stone behind it, except for the blood of which they were made.


 


Back | Next
Contents
Framed