‘I said they should have put ’em all in separate cages. They’ll say we didn’t feed ’em enough.’
‘Better cut the corpses up and give the meat to the tigers. Dogs is one thing, but if we lose one of them cubs, we’ll be dog meat ourselves.’
After that there was no shortage of food and the cubs spent most of the time when they weren’t eating, sleeping off their huge meals. But their sleep was not peaceful.
The cubs had no desire to fight or kill each other. They didn’t know they were brothers, but each knew that the other was all he had. One was the first-born and the larger. He was the leader. In the jungle, he had been fed first and most, and had led their games and pretend hunts. He was also the more intelligent of the two. He came to understand that it was no use howling and scratching at the ground and rubbing backwards and forwards with cheek and sides against the cold, close-together barriers, or trying to chew them to pieces. When his brother did these things, he would knock him down with his paw and lie on him to stop him.
The younger one would submit. It was better, he found. His paws, throat and teeth stopped being sore. He learnt to save his energies. But the misery was still there. It only stopped while he ate, and when he curled up with his brother and they licked each other’s faces, and slept.
*
At last it ended.
The sky-hole opened and stayed open and a new smell came through. They smelt earth and vegetation – not what they’d been used to, but bearing some comforting relation to it.
They stood together side by side, alert and waiting for what would happen next. The two-legged animals were running about over their heads and making loud noises with their mouths. The sky-hole grew bigger, and at last they could see the blue of the real sky over their heads. Something came down from above, grasped their prison and swung it upwards! It rocked and swayed and the cubs fell on their sides and couldn’t get up without falling down again. After a short journey, there was a hard jolt. Then two-legged ones gathered around them, peering at them, their loud mouth-noises coming from all directions.
One of them put its long-toed hairless paw in between the thin trees. The bigger cub snarled and snapped at it furiously. It was snatched away and there was an outcry.
‘It tried to bite me!’
‘Stupid! What do you expect? It’s wild, it’s not used to being petted.’
‘But they look so sweet, like big kittens—’
‘Do you need to lose half your hand to find out that they’re not? They’re for the arena, they have to be fierce.’
The cubs watched warily as the other captives were lowered to the ground near them, and soon the crowd had moved away to inspect the bears, the peacocks, the monkeys. When the she-elephant was carefully lowered from above, there were gasps and shouts.
‘Great gods! What a size! Keep clear of it!’
‘Will the Emperor show it at the Colosseum? Will they bait it, like the bears, with dogs?’
‘Perhaps. I hope so! What a fabulous show that would be!’
‘How many dogs will it take to kill a thing that size?’
‘No, Caesar won’t have it baited or killed. They never kill the elephants. Perhaps he’ll ride on it. Think of that! Our great Emperor on the tallest beast in the world, riding along the Appian Way! What a triumph!’
Thick vines were joined to the cubs’ prison and by them it was dragged on to the back of some unalive thing that nonetheless moved. It was pulled by animals whose feet made a hard, clattering sound against the ground. The cubs looked about them. There was sunlight, but not filtered through greenery. It flooded unhindered over green and yellow stretches of ground. The tigers had never left the jungle, never seen fields and crops, and these puzzled them, but at least it was natural earth and growing things – they could smell them and they longed to be free to bound away and seek safety and a hiding place. Freedom was something they had not forgotten.
Behind them came the other captives, dragged along like them. The bears, on their hind legs, held the prison-trees and roared at the crowd. The jackals pawed and whined. The monkeys leapt about, twisting their heads and gazing here and there with their little bright eyes. The two surviving dogs lay licking their wounds. The elephant stood swaying on her huge feet.
The motion went on for a long time. After a while, the cubs grew tired and lay down and slept.
When they woke up, they saw that the natural scenes had gone. Now they could understand nothing of what they saw. They were moving among many two-legs and behind these were big cliffs of stone that had caves in them where two-legs were passing in and out, or standing in the higher ones, looking out. Their interesting but nose-wrinkling smell and the noise of their mouths were everywhere.
The cubs dangled their tongues and let the scent of warm edible flesh enter their noses.
The Lady Aurelia was reclining on a couch on the balcony of her bedroom. She was twelve years old but already so beautiful and womanly that her father, the Emperor, had issued a protective edict that no man might be alone in her presence without his express permission. The balcony overlooked the palace gardens, and beyond them, three of Rome’s fabled ‘seven hills’ could be seen, covered with a mixture of sun-bleached stone buildings and cypress trees, their stately dark fingers wagging at the sky as if admonishing the gods for not giving Aurelia enough to do.
Her mother had hinted again, only that morning, that Aurelia was indulging in too much idleness and daydreaming. As a Roman emperor’s daughter she already had some duties, but they were not of a kind to alleviate the boredom she felt in doing them or in looking ahead to doing them again tomorrow. She had her regular lessons, of course, but only the musical ones actually engaged her, and that was as much because of the charms of her music teacher, a young Assyrian with coal-black curly hair and nervous but excited eyes, as for any fascination with the lute. Her other tutors were old and deadly dull, and didn’t seem to realise that she was quicker-witted than they were, and usually grasped what they were mumbling at her long before they’d got to the end of their meandering sentences.
Aurelia had all the intelligence that her clever parents could bequeath her. But it seemed it wasn’t going to do her much good.
Of course, her looks would do her good, if being helped to a rich husband was considered good. The son of a senator, perhaps, or an officer in the Praetorian Guard. She was aware that her mother was already on the lookout for a suitable match, though she would not be expected to marry until she was thirteen, or even fourteen if she were lucky.
She sighed from her very depths. Other young girls – the few her parents considered suitable for her to associate with – seemed to talk and think of little but beautiful young men and marriage, but the idea of following in her mother’s footsteps – marriage at thirteen, motherhood a year later, a life of matronly duties and domesticity – appealed to Aurelia about as strongly as being tied up in the arena and fed to the wild beasts, like those strange, death-inviting Christians.
No, no. Of course not, not that. Aurelia stopped sighing and shuddered. She turned her mind away, accompanying the mental trick with a swift quarter-turn of her head. She had learnt early how to swamp ugly imaginings with pleasant ones.
‘I am so lucky, not to be a Christian,’ she said aloud. This was part of the ritual of drowning fearful or unpleasant thoughts.
She was lucky. She had grown up knowing that she was. This was part of her cleverness, because others in