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its ears torn like a battle standard after the fight.
    The crowd began to chant, “One Ear, One Ear,” and I saw it run at a barrier between the crowd and the arena, causing the people sitting there to scramble back. Then the beast lay down in the sand, motionless except for the tip of its tail, which twitched lazily from side to side, yellow eyes surveying the stands with a kind of indolent contempt. The lion instantly sharpened to alertness when a gate creaked open and a rhinoceros trotted out, its gray hide plated like armor, its nostrils blowing as it picked up the scent, a cruel tusk set between tiny black eyes.
    I glanced at Alypius, who was sitting forward in his seat shaking the bone betting tokens in his hand, his body taut, his eyes feverish as if another inhabited the house of his body. Even Augustine’s eyes were fixed on the arena and his hand had tightened around mine.
    The lion was stalking the rhinoceros now, moving slowly, shoulders hunched, belly close to the ground, its huge paws taking almost delicate steps. Its prey snorted uneasily and lowered its head. Then the lion sprang, clawing at its prey’s soft underbelly, a great gash opening in its flanks. The crowd roared. Giving a great bellow, the rhinoceros lashed its head from side to side, its horn scything wickedly through the air. But the lion leapt easily out of its reach and continued to circle the rhinoceros, waiting patiently for a chance to inflict another terrible wound.
    I could watch no more and buried my face in Augustine’s shoulder while the sounds of the death-struggle below beat at my ears and the copper smell of blood grew stronger. At last it was over, and when I looked again, the rhinoceros was a gray hump in a welter of gore, the lion tearing great gobbets of flesh from the carcass. At last its handlers appeared and, prodding it with long spears, forced it away and into its cage. Attaching hooks to the corpse, they harnessed it to mules, rearing as they caught the scent of the blood, and dragged it away, a great smear of red trailing behind.
    I glanced at Alypius, who had the look of a man sated by sex, eyes now dulling, forehead beaded with sweat, mouth slackening. I looked away, sickened.
    The trumpets sounded and the gladiators strutted into the arena. Every man, woman, and child in the Roman world knows what they look like even if they have never seen them fight: the retiarius, armed with trident and net, his left shoulder covered with armor; the murmillo, a fish-like crest upon his helmet; the thraex, carrying a scimitar and small square shield. Small boys squat in the street and, within a circle drawn in the dirt, enact fights with figures made of sticks, the net a scrap of muslin. Alypius stirred from his torpor and leapt to his feet, and when the clank of weapons echoed around the stadium he screamed out encouragement to the fighter he had put gold on that day.
    I rose and pushed along the seats, out of the box and up the steps to the back of the stadium, the highest tier, fighting my way through, pushing at the crush of bodies, deafened by the screams. Behind me I heard Augustine call my name, but his next words were drowned out by the roar of the crowd.
    The fight to the death horrified me, but the bloodlust of the crowd who moments before had been ordinary citizens horrified me even more. I saw the girl with the cat’s eyes from the stall at the harbor, the one who had lent us the water jar. Leaning out across the barrier she was screaming, “ Iugula! Iugula! Kill him! Kill him!” lips peeled back, teeth glistening, her painted eyes crazed with a kind of murderous joy. I bumped into her as I tried to force my way past, and she greeted me gaily although she did not recognize me, all trace of her monstrous passion slunk back below the depths. I shuddered to think of what hidden horror crouched in other people’s breasts waiting to be let out, like the trapdoors in the arena of the Colosseum in