are you, but from the looks of you, you got only a
couple of stabs. Nice work."

"Prayer, my boy. Prayer is the stuff. I prayed to 'em in order, and hit
the jackpot with Shamash. My guts curled up again, like they belong, and
I knew that the portents were all in my favor. Besides, when you were
walking out to meet Fermius, did you notice that red-headed Greek
posturer making passes at you?"

"Huh? Don't be a fool. I had other things to think of."

"So I figured. So did she, probably, because after a while she came
around behind with a lanista and made eyes at me. I must have the next
best shape to you here, I guess. What a wench! Anyway, I felt better and
better, and before she left I knew that no damn retiarius that ever
waved a trident could put a net past my guard. And they couldn't either.
A couple more like that and I'll be a Grand Champion myself. But they're
digging holes for the crosses and there's the horn that the feast is
ready. This show is going to be really good."

They ate, hugely and with unmarred appetite, of the heaped food which
Nero had provided. They returned to their assigned places to see
crosses, standing as close together as they could be placed and each
bearing a suffering Christian, filling the whole vast expanse of the
arena.

And, if the truth must be told, those two men enjoyed thoroughly every
moment of that long and sickeningly horrible afternoon. They were the
hardest products of the hardest school the world has ever known: trained
rigorously to deal out death mercilessly at command; to accept death
unflinchingly at need. They should not and can not be judged by the
higher, finer standards of a softer, gentler day.

The afternoon passed; evening approached. All the gladiators then in
Rome assembled in the Claudian Grove, around tables creaking under their
loads of food and wine. Women, too, were there in profusion; women for
the taking and yearning to be taken; and the tide of revelry ran open,
wide, and high. Although all ate and apparently drank with abandon, most
of the wine was in fact wasted. And as the sky darkened, most of the
gladiators, one by one, began to get rid of their female companions upon
one pretext or another and to drift toward the road which separated the
festivities from the cloaked and curious throng of lookers-on.

At full dark, a red glare flared into the sky from Caesar's garden and
the gladiators, deployed now along the highway, dashed across it and
see