Arena (20 page)

A boar raced by, scented him, stopped. The boar snuffled and grunted. Ptolemy seized a large rock to defend himself. The boar’s tusks lowered, flashing in the sunlight. At the same time Ptolemy hurled the rock, and missed.

The boar charged.

It was a long, risky throw. I had no choice but to try. My arm whipped back, then forward. The iron spear head flashed through the air.

The boar leaped up, kicking. The head was imbedded in its neck.

The animal fell a few paces from where Ptolemy lay. A moment later he managed to extricate himself. The boar tumbled over on its back, dead.

Page 69

From the rim of the watercourse the Numidians were pelting down stones, driving off the stampeding animals. The big black smiled at me across the gully, and dipped his head in a kind of salute. Then he threw off the last clinging strands of hemp and raced up the slope to join his fellows.

Presently the beasts were all gone. We clambered down to reclaim the net and the dead. One black, one white. Quintus would have increased the score, as he told me at the night’s campfire.

“You should have let the big one die, Cassius. We’d be better off.”

Over his shoulder I saw Ptolemy watching. And listening too? I said, “The others seem to look up to him, and respect him. We might not be able to operate so well without him.”

“He’s a troublemaker,” Quintus muttered. “Doesn’t take easily to the Roman yoke and never has. Oh, he’s one of the leaders, all right. One day he’ll cause us real harm.”

“Since you fear him so much,” I replied, “why don’t you kill him yourself?”

Quintus merely glared.

Next morning he insisted we return to the fort. I took the opposite position. We had a loud argument. At the end of it, I invoked threats of the Emperor’s wrath and persuaded him to continue the hunt. And our next attempt to gather the boars fared better.

At the end of three exhausting days we trekked back to the fort with ten savage specimens, plus a dozen monkeys we trapped by putting out bowls of wine at night. The monkeys crept into the darkened camp, drank the wine, fell down in a daze and were thrust into cages.

Upon our return we put the animals in the cage carts outside the walls. I was not happy to be back. Locusta and Quintus whispered together at dinner like long-separated lovers. Once I noted them studying me with contemptuous expressions. For no reason, seeing them with their heads together frightened me.

One night after moonrise I lay dozing in my stifling room. A noise awakened me. I sat up instantly and reached for the dagger I kept beside me at all times. A heavy hand slapped across my lips, cutting off my air. I brought the dagger around to strike at my attacker’s backbone.

Another hand knocked the blade aside. Then I glimpsed white teeth in the moon, and ebony skin.

“Ptolemy!”

“I am your friend, master. Don’t strike at me.” He spoke in rumbling Greek.

I gasped for air. “You gave me quite a start.”

He hunkered down beside me. “On the hunt, I would have spoken to you except that I don’t want to feel the centurion’s whip until the proper time. The time when I can turn it back upon him.” He paused. “I came to thank you for my life, master.”

I wandered to the window, pointing. “How did you get in here? There are soldiers walking the parapets.”

“Cattle. Asleep on their feet. I came over the roof.” He hesitated again, as if embarrassed. “They talk about your wish to discover a marvelous beast, master. The unicorn.”

“Yes. The Emperor Nero wants a cup made from its horn.” Briefly I explained the futile mission upon which I had been sent, including the legend of how poison foamed in such a cup. “That’s why I’ll probably become another Quintus in a few years, Ptolemy. I can’t return to Rome unless I have the horns.”

Ptolemy pondered. Legionnaires cried the hour on the wall. The black said at last, “I will help, master. I owe you my life.”

“A kind thought. But there are no unicorns anywhere on earth.”

He smiled slyly. “Not unless a man makes one himself.”

“What? You’re talking nonsense.”

“No, master. I will show you. I will come here again tomorrow, after moonset. We will go. Half a night’s march.”

“Go where? What’s this all about? Ptolemy, come back —”

But he was gone, slipped out the window and disappearing upward, a black wraith. I shook my
Page 70

head and returned to my pallet. He was as addled as the rest.

Ptolemy returned the next night as he had promised. He would say nothing more about what he had in mind, but because I was curious, I went with him. We slipped down through the tower and left the fort with no trouble. Often I spent whole days lounging in my rooms when the sun was too hot for comfort, so I was fairly certain my absence would not arouse suspicion. I followed Ptolemy across the sandy waste, convinced we were both on some kind of idiot’s errand.

After a smoldering dawn we reached a stretch of hilly, thinly forested ground that stretched westward for several stadia. Ptolemy led me to the crest of a low hill. On our stomachs we crawled to the edge. There below I saw strange beasts grazing.

They resembled young horses, grayish, and marked all over with black. The bucks sported pairs of long, nearly straight horns of an iridescent grayness. Ptolemy’s grin grew wide as he watched me.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Oryx is the Greek name. A kind of antelope. Have they never been seen in Rome?”

“Not to my knowledge. But they have two horns, not one in the center of the head, like a unicorn must have.”

“Two horns,” he said slowly, “can be made one.”

“Explain yourself.”

“The horns, master, are soft when the bucks are young. Once, before the Legions took me in chains from my village far from here, I saw a buck whose horns had been twisted somehow, twined and grown together into a single long spike. Perhaps he tangled them in a tree, I do not know. I only thought —”

When I was silent, his face grew sad. “A poor thought, it seems. I am sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m thinking.”

At first it seemed utter foolishness. But I had known so little hope in such a long time, I was willing to risk anything. I said at last, “We have come this far. What’s to prevent us from trying, anyway?”

His face lighted. “Nothing, master.”

As the morning advanced we used ropes we had brought from the fort to snare a quartet of the young bucks before the rest of the fleet herd raced away in fright. After tethering the bucks to some scrub branches, we cut strands of rope and bound the soft, porous pairs of horns together tightly. The oryx were gentle when caught. They submitted to the binding with only a few stamps of their hooves and a sad roll of their dull, big eyes.

We cut branches, working until the daylight faded. A bond of silent friendship strengthened between us as we labored side by side. Next morning we scouted the nearby hillsides until we found a steeply walled little valley where a pool of tepid water bubbled from the parched earth.

Using the branches we had cut, we built a crude pen around the water, enclosing the four bucks.

We stood back to admire our handwork.

“The growing will take many months,” Ptolemy informed me. “But if no one comes to disturb them —”

“This place is a wilderness. And we should be able to divert Quintus elsewhere on our forays.

He’s not very eager as it is. Time — well, that’s a commodity of which I have an ample supply.

I’ll be in Africa the rest of my days if the horns grow separately.”

To allay suspicion, we spent the rest of the day locating the wandering oryx herd, cutting from it two handsome, fully grown bucks and a pair of does. We roped the animals on lines and set out for the fort.

At long last my step had a spring to it. I began to see a rough, arid beauty in the sandhills, rather than sheer desolation. Ptolemy chanted under his breath as we moved along, some ancient, crooning melody of the victorious hunter. For all his natural cleverness he was an ingenuous as a child at times, and pleased with my pleasure.

Page 71

Titus Quintus accepted my account of an impromptu trapping expedition readily enough, though he issued a surly warning that I’d best select another black for a guide. Ptolemy would probably cut my throat one day when I wasn’t watching. Inwardly I laughed at Quintus’

statement.

Then a thought struck me. How was Quintus different from the man I had been back in Rome?

Was I that man still? I found no ready answers in the days ahead.

Those days became months. The months turned into a year filled with marching and searching and trapping. We ranged out far after lions. These we trapped by digging a pit with a high wood fence around it. We roped a lion calf in the pit. Hearing the calf bellow in fear, the lioness would slink out of the dark, jump the fence and tumble into the trap.

We were too far north for elephants or leopards, but the number of cages outside the fort multiplied during the months, until the desert station rang with monkey squeals and boar bellows and lion growls day and night. Quintus professed loudly and repeatedly that he was going out of his mind smelling animal dung.

Now and again he received a letter from the first centurion. Upon learning that matters were going well at his post, the officer had elected to prolong his holiday on the coast indefinitely.

When the decurion Publius decided to inspect the fort again, the centurion would return, but not before. Being of lesser rank, Quintus had no choice but to submit to the orders.

About every second month Ptolemy and I made a quick and secret overnight journey to the secluded valley. There, upon the heads of the penned oryx, a miracle was taking place.

Ptolemy bound the thongs tighter at each visit. At the year’s end the grown bucks spouted long single spikes, the double horns wrapped round and round each other.

The horns were a mite suspiciously thick and forked at the base when one looked close. But from a distance they were the unicorns of legend come to life. I was gratified that the beasts didn’t appear to have suffered greatly. They had waxed fat and healthy.

Through all this Locusta was a virtual stranger. She barely nodded when we met over the night meal. It was no longer a secret in the fort that she was sharing her bed with Quintus. Since I exhibited no sign of jealousy, he probably thought it futile to bait me on the subject. As a result his manner became slightly more cordial.

One night Ptolemy and I were returning from our latest inspection of the false unicorns. The black — whom I had grown to regard as my only friend — paused in our march.

“The fort lies just beyond the next dune, Cassius.” He had ceased addressing me as master long ago. “I wish I could let the remainder of our trek pass peacefully. But I cannot.”

I sat down to rest in the purple twilight shade of a dune. “What’s troubling you? It seems to me Quintus has grown more tractable lately. The whip comes out less often. Locusta keeps him busy.”

Ptolemy traced an odd design, much like a skull, in the sundown-reddened sand. “That is true, Cassius.” Slowly his head came up, the great black eyes luminous and sad. “They are plotting against you.”

I laughed. “Locusta and the centurion? Plotting to do what?”

“I cannot say. I do not know. But my people, walking silently, hear many things in the fort. A word or a whisper. Be warned.”

I had an urge to laugh a second time. Ptolemy’s intent expression held me back. I shrugged.

“There’s little I can do except continue to keep my knife handy.”

The black threw down a handful of sand. “I have been told you have some influence with the great Roman in the port city who rules this country. Quintus is a bad man. Cruel. You have seen how he beats my people for nothing. Speak to the great Roman. Write him. Have Quintus taken away.”

“I can’t do that,” I explained. “The laws under which Quintus and the soldiers govern here allow them to whip slaves. I admit Quintus abuses the law, but —”

“Law!” Ptolemy raged. “Evil law, I say.”

Page 72

“Yes, I agree with you. Still, my hands are tied.”

Ptolemy stared balefully. “It will not be borne forever, Cassius. My people bow their heads and take the lash, but they know the laws are evil. The Empire too, for allowing such laws. I have some status among my own kind. I hear their evening talk. The bad devils live in them. They are growing rebellious. Since the first centurion left, things have grown worse because of Quintus.

One day — or one night — one lash too many may fall. The bad devils would break loose.

Then, I could not promise to control my people.”

The threat sent a shudder racing through me. “Perhaps I wouldn’t blame your people. But giving cruelty in return for cruelty is no answer.”

“People who are treated like beasts begin to think as beasts.”

“That is so. I only wish there were something I could do. But there isn’t.”

Then my prompt agreement with his ideas began to puzzle me. I wondered whether my nature had undergone some subtle change. Many months ago in Rome I would have regarded his words as an insult to the Emperor’s power.

“There is one thing you can do, Cassius,” Ptolemy told me. “I repeat it now. Be warned.” He glanced at the darkening sky. “Best that we go now.”

The uprising which he prophesied failed to materialize in the next few months. The number of cage carts ranged outside the fort increased every week. I had almost forgotten Ptolemy’s obscure warnings by the time a year and a half, reckoned since my departure from Ostia, passed.

I had decided that my menagerie was satisfactory enough for me to begin thinking seriously of a return to Rome. In connection with this, I went by myself one day to check upon the four false unicorns. To my surprise I discovered one missing.

The pens had not been smashed. The tether ropes had been neatly cut, not torn. The other three looked healthy as ever. But one was gone nonetheless.

At the fort I sought out Ptolemy. I found him in one of the huts clustered below the wall, hard by the squealing, growling animals in their pens. He had daubed his face with some ocher stuff, painting on streaks and spots suggesting a ritual design that was part of whatever religion it was that he followed. The hut was dim, stinking of raw meat and human urine.