Vibia Perpetua Faces the Arena with Faith

The sand stuck to my palms where I gripped the stone ledge. Below, the iron gate groaned upward on its chains, and the first of them stepped into the light. Perpetua walked at the front, her tunic already torn at the shoulder from the guards’ hands. Felicity followed close, her belly still bound from the birth two days before. The crowd’s roar hit them like a wall of heat.

I had watched the same gate open for bears and leopards the hour before. Now the noise changed. People leaned forward. Some shouted names they had learned in the streets. Others called for the beasts to be loosed at once. I stayed low on the bench, the way my brother had taught me when we came to these games as children.

Word had reached us days earlier that the deacons had paid the soldiers again. The prisoners had been moved to a better cell. Perpetua’s baby was brought to her there. She nursed him through the night while the others prayed. By morning she told her brother she had seen a ladder reaching to the sky, weapons fixed to its sides, a dragon coiled at the bottom. Saturus had climbed first. She followed. When she reached the top she turned and saw her father still standing on the ground, unable to follow.

Her father had come to the prison gate twice more after that. The second time the guards let him through. He carried the child on his hip and begged her to offer the pinch of incense. She would not take the baby from him. The guards had to pull him away when he tried to drag her by the arm.

In the arena the wild cow was driven out first. The handlers had been told to use a single animal for the two women. It charged low, horns catching Felicity under the ribs and flinging her against the barrier. Perpetua was caught on the second pass. The impact knocked the breath from her. She rolled once, then stood again, pulling the torn cloth across her thigh so the crowd would not see the blood. Felicity called out that she could not rise. Perpetua went to her, took her hand, and helped her to her feet. They stood together until the handlers drove the cow back through the gate.

The gladiator who came next was young. His helmet covered his face. He approached Perpetua first. She took his wrist and guided the point of the sword to the hollow at the base of her throat. For a moment he hesitated. She spoke to him, too quietly for anyone above the sand to hear. He finished the stroke. Felicity was next. The same blade. The same quick motion.

Afterward the bodies were left where they fell while the next pair of condemned men were brought out. The sand darkened around them. A boy ran down the steps selling watered wine. I bought none. My hands would not stop shaking against the stone.

By evening the editor’s men had collected what remained. They carried the corpses through the western gate and left them for the families outside the city. Perpetua’s mother and the catechumen brother waited there. The father did not come. Someone said he had taken the child and gone to his villa on the coast road.

I walked back through the city as the lamps were lit. The street that led past the prison was quiet. The door where the deacons had stood to bribe the guards was shut. A single torch burned in the niche above it. The light did not reach the ground.