describe what occurred. There was
close agreement with what I seemed to see as I watched.

Palus lunged just as Murmex made a brilliantly unpredictable shift of his
position. The shift and lunge came so simultaneously that neither had, in
his calculated, predetermined movement, time to alter his intention;
Murmex, you might say, threw his throat at the spot at which Palus had
aimed his lunge. The sword-point ripped his throat from beside the gullet
to against the spine, all one side of it. He collapsed, the blood
spouting.

Palus cast the dripping sword violently from him, the gleaming blade
flying up into the air and falling far off on the sand. The big shield
fell from his right arm. Both his hands caught his big helmet, lifted it
and threw it behind him. On one knee he sank by Murmex and, with his left
hand, strove to staunch the gushing blood.

Before Galen, before even the _lanistae_ could reach the two, Murmex died.

Palus staggered to his feet and put up his gory hand to his yellow curls,
with a convincingly agonized gesture of grief and horror.

He uttered some words, I heard his voice, but not the words. Folk say he
said:

"I have killed the only match I had on earth, the second-best fighter
earth ever saw."

The audience, I among them, stared, awe-struck and fascinated, at Commodus
laying a bloody hand on his own head; we shuddered: I saw many look back
and forth from Palus in the arena to the figure on the Imperial throne.

The guards ran, the surgeons' helpers ran, even Galen ran, but Aemilius
Laetus reached Palus first, and, between the dazed and stunned _lanistae_,
picked up the big golden helmet and replaced it on his head, hiding his
features. The distance from the _podium_ wall to the center of the arena
is so great, the distance from any other part of the audience so much
greater, that, while many of the spectators were astounded, suspicious or
curious, not one could be certain that Palus was, beyond peradventure, the
Prince of the Republic in person. Palus stood there, alternately staring
at his dead crony and talking to Laetus and Galen.

The heralds had run up with the guards. Laetus, without any pretense of
consultation with the dummy Emperor on the throne, spoke to the heralds
and each stalked off to one focus of the ellipse of the arena. Thence each
bellowed for silence, their deep-toned, resonant, loud, practiced voices
carrying to the upper colonnade everywhere. Silence, deep already