Fireball by John Christopher Page B

fine. Simon awoke to the trumpet call with a strange feeling of excitement mixed with fear and a dragging sense of doom. The meal the night before had been a special one, with an extra ration of meat, and even jugs of wine passed from hand to hand along the trestle tables. There had been a lot of jollity and laughter and much bellowing of songs. Simon had put up a show of joining in, but had been acutely aware of the macabre nature of a situation in which men now singing and laughing together would tomorrow be intent on killing one another.
    The day of reckoning had come, and he felt a sick conviction that all the effort had been inadequate and to no purpose. There was a different atmosphere in the dormitory—a quietness and tenseness and preoccupation in place of the usual jesting and horseplay. And the others were all older than he was, most of them a lot older, and most of them experienced. Bos put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a grin and a word or two of encouragement, but even he was grim-looking and taciturn. It was a weird and awful thing to look out into the morning light, with the sun rising over the east wing of the barracks, and knowthat the odds were one wouldn’t live to see it set.
    They marched in procession from the barracks to the circus, with armed guards marching alongside. That put paid to any notion of escape on the way. Although it was early, the streets were lined with people, some cheering, others jeering. Simon wondered if Brad might be among them, but thought it highly unlikely. He doubted if Brad had even survived, but if he had, it could be only as a slave, not as one of the city mob enjoying the festival. Though that would be preferable to what he faced.
    The circus presented itself as a high blank curving wall, with an open gate at the base through which they marched into a dark tunnel, lit by torches fixed against the sides. The tunnel sloped down and then, after a time, up again. They came out, blinking sunlight from their eyes, into the arena, and to a great roar from the spectators massed in tiers all round. As far as Simon could tell, not a seat was empty. The procession wheeled towards a place at the centre of one of the long sides of the amphitheatre, where a platform jutted out with a purple awning and purple-draped front. The figure sitting in the middle, in apurple toga, would be the governor. They marched beneath him, arms raised in salute, and bellowed the ritual greeting: “Morituri te salutamus!” We who are about to die salute thee.
    Simon opened his mouth obediently, but nothing came out. Sand crunched underfoot, golden in the sunlight. There would be a lot of red staining it, before the day was over.
    Having completed a circuit, they were marched back into the shadows; as they entered the tunnel, Simon heard the growling and snarling of the wild beasts penned on one side, and caught their rank feral smell. Hours of waiting still lay ahead. The morning was devoted to the beasts, either fighting between themselves or slaughtering their helpless human victims. Light entertainment—clowns and jugglers and such—came next. Then, in the afternoon, the important show. Their show.
    Simon had been separated from Bos during the procession, but the big man came and found him after they had been dispersed into one of the long, low cavernous rooms that lay on either side of the central tunnel. He said: “Good news!”
    Simon looked at him. The only good news he could imagine, apart from a miraculous reappearance of the fireball with late-twentieth-century England on the far side, would be that the Goths and Vandals were pounding at the city gates. Bos said: “You’re going to be fighting another tiro, not a veteranus.”
    He supposed that was better than nothing. “Who?”
    Bos shrugged his broad shoulders. “Not a veteranus, that’s what matters. I told Burro”—that was the instructor—“that you were too