A Matter of Matter (Stories from the Golden Age) Page 7

I swiveled around and found the other one within ten feet of me. Startled by the fate of his friend, he drew and then pitched his trident at me. Its middle prong hit my helmet with a clang, and the weapon went zooming off in a new direction.

  He spread and cast the net before I could catch him in my sights. The thing settled over me like a thousand spider webs.

  He rushed to retrieve his trident and had picked it up when—

  He rushed to retrieve his trident and had picked it up when—

  BOWIE!

  He went to join his companion on the banks of the Styx.

  “Boo!” yelled the crowd. “Boo! Magic! Fake!”

  Nevertheless, I approached the President’s box again. I stood beneath it. If this was Nero, then I had not looked to find the handsome young fellow that he was. A dissolute mouth was all that marred his face. I took the woman on his right to be his mother and sweetheart, Agrippina.

  “Boo! Fake!” screamed the crowd.

  Nero looked over the edge of his box at me. Ceremoniously he raised his right hand. And then, with a savage gesture, struck his thumb down.

  This appeared very silly to me since there was no other combatant in the arena, and I certainly was not flat on my back awaiting a coup.

  The crowd echoed the sentiment and the master of ceremonies must have been looking, for within the space of a minute, three doors opened and at least seventy-five Numidians dashed with a war cry into the arena.

  Each one of them looked about fifteen feet tall, shiny black, wearing ostrich plumes and carrying assegais. They danced, and bounded, and waved their weapons and leather shields. They drew up into a formation approaching a phalanx and, after pausing long enough to be acclaimed, started for me.

  I turned sideways and yelled at Nero, “Hey, you, this isn’t fair!” Nero grinned ghoulishly at me. I turned back and looked at the Numidians.

  I was scared. My blood clogged my veins. Maybe it was the war cry, maybe it was the shiny black bodies, maybe it was the savage teeth. But the one place where I wanted to be at that minute was back in Teague County, Texas, eating some of my mother’s corn bread.

  I had reloaded the riot gun in front of the President’s box, but I knew better than to try to spray that mob.

  Something was banging against my hip. I recalled the tear gas grenades. I unhooked one and pulled its pin. I counted to three and chucked it. It burst immediately before the phalanx and sprayed dots of white smoke in all directions. The Numidians vanished in a cloud of it.

  All of a sudden I felt like laughing. Maybe it was hysteria, but those black boys had looked so gay and so brave dancing in, that the contrast was very funny. They came out of that cloud in the formation of scattered rabbits. They were doubling up, and wailing, and clawing at their eyes. They were calling out the names of their various gods and rolling on the ground.

  Their shields and spears were thrown in all directions. However, the crowd was not amused.

  “Boo! Fake!” they jeered.

  But the Numidians didn’t jeer. They went over to the edge and found places to sit down, or they bumped into each other, or they tried to climb up the palisades. It came to me that they were more scared than hurt.

  “Charge me, will you?” I yelled at ’em. Then I went out to pick me up a cluster of ostrich plumes, hoping that this act would mollify the crowd.

  During this operation it seemed to me suddenly that I was acting very foolishly. Here I had all the weapons that they didn’t have, obsolete as I considered them, and all I needed to do was to blast the lock on one of those doors and walk out of the place.

  There was little enjoyment in the arena for me. Sooner or later somebody was going to get hurt.

  I threw down the ostrich plumes and rushed toward one of the doors. But there the Roman guards threw the dice for me and got “crap.”

  That door came open with a bang! And there I was, looking down the trunk of the biggest Indian elephant that was ever born. If P. T. Barnum had seen that elephant, he would have gone crazy and billed him all over the world. That elephant was so huge he could have used the Empire State Building for a toothpick. What made him look all the more horrible, they had thrust burning sticks and barbs under his skin until he looked like a porcupine.

  Somebody—probably my old friend—was jabbing him with a red hot poker from behind. And the elephant came out of there!

  He saw me!

  He was delighted!

  He reared up until there was an eclipse of the sun. He aimed two feet twice as big as kettledrums right at my head.

  His tusks gleamed. His teeth gleamed. His eyes gleamed. And froth sprayed out of his mouth like a flame-thrower.

  He saw me!

  He was delighted!

  He reared up until there was an eclipse of the sun....

  His tusks gleamed. His teeth gleamed. His eyes gleamed.

  Hurrahs and hurrays bounded around that arena from a delighted crowd.

  I had brought up so short at the sight of this world-ender that I sat down, directly under him. The butt of the riot gun hit alongside of me. My finger threw it on full automatic and I let him have the entire chamber as fast as I could shoot.

  Pieces of elephant meat flew all over the arena, the palisades and me. When he hit earth again his trunk slammed me sideways about thirty feet. I picked myself up. But there was no more fight left in that elephant.

  These people were getting too rough to suit my fancy and once more I started to get out of there. A scream of surprise and delight from the crowd made me turn again.

  A second elephant, twice as big as the first one, had been let into the arena! He was bearing down on me like a combination of the Graf Zeppelin and a General Sherman tank. My error was that I was the only one in motion in that arena. He ran over about five Numidians getting to me.

  The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will probably never hear about this, but my riot gun was empty. There was nothing else I could do.

  I unhooked a second gas grenade from my belt and pulled the pin. When he was within thirty feet of me I heaved it into his open mouth.

  BOWIE!

  That elephant’s head like to have torn off. He couldn’t stop because he was going too fast. His front legs folded up and his hind end came on over them. I jumped sideways just in time to miss him. He did two complete somersaults and wound up with a crash against the boards right underneath Nero’s box.

  I was surprised, to say the least. I hadn’t expected a tear gas bomb to kill him. But from the look of the way he was heaving and shuddering, that elephant was halfway to his happy hunting ground already.

  The little torches jammed into his side began to flicker out. The smoke from them drifted around him like a shroud.

  The Numidians had drawn off to the farthest point of the arena. The crowd now took to jeering at them. Two of them advanced as though to prove their metal. The riot gun took care of that.

  “Let me out of here,” I yelled at Nero. “I’m Danny West of Teague County, Texas. And you’d better be careful next time where you get your gladiators. Let me out of here!”

  But Nero Germanicus and his party were not thinking about gladiators. The tear gas had fumed out through the twitching trunk of the elephant. It had wheezed from his scalded lungs to work its way upward and drift into the President’s box. His mother and the ladies of the court had scrambled awkwardly backwards to the walkway above. Nero now stood crying the first and last tears of his merciless life.

  I glanced around the arena. The crowd was plainly scared. And that, my friend, is an accomplishment, for the impressing of a Roman crowd was a thing for which men sold their lives. It began to come over me what I had done.

  I looked around me. That arena looked like a dance hall after the Longshoremen’s Ball. Dead lions and elephants were stacked up like the Chicago stockyards. Numidians, dead, wounded or terrified, were black or red spots on the white sand. Above them the crowd was beginning to surge away from the palisades.

 
I could see young Marius and his girl. From the expression on his face, he had ceased to be convinced of the authenticity of necromancy.

  I swelled out my chest and strutted a little bit. Such was my confidence that I missed a second vital fact—when a Roman crowd gets scared, it kills.

  And when a Caesar is offended . . .

  Up until this time I had not paid particular attention to the glittering helmets and shining spears of the household troops which surrounded the box of Nero Germanicus Caesar. They were fine, big Germans. And, though they might have been the ancestors of the Tedeschi we were supposed to fight in Italy, they were very far from bones. Six feet six, most of them, picked for their size and courage. They served Caesar with a fanaticism born of the fact that without Caesar alive they themselves were dead before the Roman mob. So little was Nero Germanicus loved at this time, that he was accustomed to placing large troops about the city.

  So it happened, on this luckless day, that the Tenth Legion with all its panoply and fine training from across the Rhine was home and at hand.

  I saw the courier go, and though I didn’t know his message, I decided not to stay. The stiffening legs of the elephant and his massive body made a sort of a ladder up to the box. Of this I took advantage.

  I know more about mounting horses than elephants, but this one was bottom side up. I scrambled to his belly and then up his leg to grab at the top of the palisade. I was very engrossed in my effort since my equipment was not light and I was carrying that riot gun handy, reloaded. It was only a cheer from the crowd which made me look up.

  I was staring at the points of twenty leveled spears, backed by the blond beards of the household guard.

  Behind them and above them Caesar was smiling. It was his trick. I heaved myself down off that leg and under the protection of the elephant while all twenty of those spears bit meat close behind me. But it was elephant meat, not Texan.

  I stuck my head up again through the small forest and I leveled the riot gun. Three of the bodyguards had already begun to come down the elephant’s leg. They came down all right.

  BOWIE! BOWIE! BOWIE!

  Tedeschi! Well, I’d come to Italy to fight Germans, but I didn’t know that I would find them in the accoutrements of Roman Legionnaires. The riot gun let out a long roar. And the palisade above me was cleared! I reloaded and again stormed the ramparts.

  I don’t know where they came from, but they sure came in a hurry. Plumes, spears and helmets jammed the runway which led outward from the President’s box. The Tenth Legion was on its way.

  The Roman mob was cheering itself into laryngitis. All of a sudden I got mad.

  They’d come to see blood. Well, they were going to get blood. That riot gun blew down the first ranks of the Tenth Legion like a lawnmower. Their armor corselets might as well have been made of papier-mâché. The Numidians had been whipped up till now, but they knew that they would die anyway unless they did something. So I received a rear attack.

  Other companies of the Tenth Legion were flooding down into the arena from the boxes on either side of the President’s box. It was getting hot. I realized that it was certainly no place for Danny West.

  I pulled the pin on the last tear gas bomb and pitched it up into the runway behind the President’s box where it jetted white.

  I dodged about twenty spears and got up on the elephant again. From there I gave ’em a full burst from the riot gun. I reached the palisade and climbed over into the chair that Nero had so recently occupied.

  If the simple act of grabbing a throne would have made me Caesar, then I was Caesar. But I was sure sorry for it. You’ve seen it rain in a hurricane down in Galveston? Well, those big, long slanting drops weren’t anything compared to the number of javelins that were in the air around me then.

  One clanged off my helmet and almost knocked me silly. Some archer got to work and began to stud the woodwork with arrows. Ahead of me I could see the open runway, cleared now.

  I shut my eyes to dash through the tear gas. Then came the main bulk of the Tenth Legion. They blocked that exit like pickets make a fence. I backed up. I turned to see that the crowd itself, with cushions and baskets for weapons, had begun to back up the remaining Legionnaires, household troops and Numidians. All it required now was a pack of wild dogs and another flock of lions to make this a real Roman holiday.

  I let the riot gun go back into that press and then grabbed for the bandolier to reload. There was just one chamberful left. People were behind me and above me, Legionnaires were in front of me and, in short, it was no place for a self-respecting Texan boy to be found.

  Right about then I figured I was just so much lion meat. But I started up the ramp intending to find another way out. Then the impossible happened.

  I fell flat on my face, slipping in the blood which spattered the runway. And before I could regain my feet a bolt of lightning hit the Colosseum.

  It missed Nero, who had probably fled to the Palatine Hill by then. But it sure made hash out of the rest of the crowd.

  I hid my face in my arms but it didn’t come near me. It was a funny kind of lightning. It rolled around the arena in big yellow flashes. The whole crowd either dived under seats or died where they stood.

  The Tenth Legion, versed in all the lore of ancient superstition, saw that lightning and left their spears behind them.

  I scrambled to my feet, but I got up a split second too soon. There was somebody above me. And he was yelling. I couldn’t make out anything in the roar of that arena. This guy came over the side of the runway and lit beside me. But Danny West wasn’t waiting to be detained.

  I let him have a clip alongside of the neck and grabbed at his hands which I figured held a knife. Something came away and then I fell. About ten million volts of lightning went around the place once again.

  That’s all I know until I woke up being kicked in the side. It was raining. It was morning. It was Rome. And from the empty sardine can alongside of me I knew that the army of occupation was at hand.

  “Get out of that, you deserter!” said this stinking captain of ours.

  I looked up and I swear I could almost have kissed the guy, as much as I hated him.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded. “What have you been doing? What do you mean by dishonoring me and disgracing your company?” And then, without waiting for me to answer any of these questions, he launched into a tirade that would have done credit to a West Pointer.

  He told me that I was guilty, as near as I could gather, of at least twenty-nine of the first thirty articles of war. Not the least of which was pusillanimous conduct in the face of the enemy.

  It seems there had been a riot the night before and I hadn’t been there. Though I tried to convince that stinking captain that I had been in a riot that made his look mighty pale, there wasn’t any talking past that high-grade flow of official redundancy.

  He had two MPs onto me like setter pups after a quail. He took the riot gun away from me and booted me all the way down to the military prison. So here I am, and all I got to show for it is this here fountain pen I took out of that bird’s hand just before the lights went out.

  He held up a small gray object to his cellmate and relapsed, looking glum.

  His cellmate looked at him pensively.

  “Well?” demanded Danny West pugnaciously. “Go ahead and call me a liar.”

  His cellmate regarded the souvenir critically.

  “And where did you have it?” he said.

  Danny West gestured at his boot: “In here. Them damned MPs would take your gold teeth off of you.”

  The cellmate seemed a bit nervous.

  “Let me see it.”

  “Okay, but you’ve got to hand it right back.”

  Danny West extended it to him, nearly dropping it. His cellmate turned white and grabbed it just before it touched pavement. Caressingly he looked it over, wrapped it in his handkerchief and thrust it in his pocket. He stood up.

  “See here,” protested Dan
ny West, “where you going with that?”

  “It happens, regrettably, that it belongs to me,” said his cellmate.

  “You? Now look here, I took that off a guy . . .” A dawning expression came over Danny West. He jumped to his feet and pointed. “Then you—”

  “Yes,” said the cellmate, bowing slightly.

  “But how . . . ?”

  His cellmate deepened the bow and took from his pocket a small metal card not much bigger than a dog tag, but made of some glittering substance of which Danny West had no acquaintance. The Texan read it with growing awe.

  “We didn’t intend to land here,” said the cellmate, “but we were caught without water and, unfortunately, the navigator and the captain chose the middle of the Italian desert in which to find it. We have not been much acquainted with these things for some time so you will excuse our ignorance.

  “I used a certain device of ours to go back to a period when water had been there. But, unfortunately, I got somewhat scrambled in my dates. And your little show in the arena—which, by the way, I wouldn’t have missed for worlds—sidetracked me further into this place.”

  He was moving toward the door as though his mere gesture would open it.

  “But here,” he said, “I won’t be too hard on you. I’m sure if you tell the captain that your part in the riots was well played, proving it by your empty bandoliers, he will be very happy to let you off—particularly since you can make him a present of one of the jewels in these.”

  Saying which, he drew out of his knapsack the gold laurel wreaths which had been worn by Nero Germanicus and his consorts. He handed them to Danny West. And even in that gloom, the roundcut gems gleamed. The gold was so soft you could bend it with a finger.

  “You won them fairly,” said the cellmate. “Anybody but Nero would have considered the show quite good enough, without turning loose the Tenth Legion on you.”

  Danny West was agape. “But look here, how . . . ?”

  “It’s simply that I got to Rome when I should have gone to Carthage,” said his cellmate. “Now, if you’ll give me my identification.”