FAMIA DID NOT bother finding a rope. Like most chronic drinkers, his intake hardly affected him. He was alert enough to know this was not the same as catching horses. Apprehending a leopard would involve rather more than approaching in a sly manner holding out a carrot, while hiding a bridle behind your back. We were both running fast to the Saepta, but I knew without asking that Famia had come simply for the show. That did leave me wondering who in Rome might be thought appropriate to deal with this situation. Not me, I knew that. I was going for the show too.
When we got there, and saw the size and menace of the beast-a leopardess, in fact-I was damned sure I didn't want to be involved. She was lying on the roof with her fat tail dangling like a Greek epsilon, occasionally snarling when the crowd below annoyed her. In the true manner of a Roman street crowd, that was what they were trying very hard to do Forgetting that they had seen leopards in the arena biting human necks then casually tearing human flesh, the locals were waving, growling, allowing their children to prance nearby grimacing, and even offering up broom handles to see if they were long enough to poke the cat.
Someone was going to get killed. One glance at the leopardess's narrow eyes told me she had decided it would not be her.
She was a beautiful animal. Sometimes the long sea voyage across the Internal Sea, not to mention the stress of captivity, leaves arena cats looking the worse for wear.
This one was as healthy as she was finely marked. Her spotted fur was thick and her muscle tone at its peak. She was lithe, bonny, and powerful. When Famia and I arrived outside the Saepta she was lying motionless. Her head came up, watching the crowd like potential prey on the savannah. Not a scratched ear or sniff escaped her.
It was safest to leave her alone in full view. The Saepta Julia enclosure was only two stories high. However she got up there, she could as easily get down again and be away. Everyone should have stood well back, keeping quiet, while some wild beast expert with equipment was fetched.
Instead, the vigiles had taken charge. They ought to have cleared the streets and contained the situation. Instead they were like boys who had found a snake curled up under a portico and were wondering what they could make it do. To my horror, they dragged up their syphon engine and prepared to squirt a cold douche at the leopardess to frighten her down. They were the Seventh Cohort. Idiots. They patrolled the Transtiberina, which was crammed with foreigners and itinerants. They were only adept at beating up frightened immigrants, many of whom did not even know Latin and took to their heels rather than discuss life and fate with the vigiles. The Seventh had never learned to think.
The centurion in charge was a ridiculous oaf who could not see that if the leopardess was forced down to ground level they were in big trouble. She could run amock. Worse, they could lose her for days among the massive temples, theatres, and art-filled porticos in the Field of Mars. The area was too crowded to hunt her safely, and yet too exposed to stand much hope of cornering her. There were people milling everywhere; some had not even noticed they had wandered into an incident.
Before I could offer these helpful thoughts, the rumpled troops of the Seventh started playing with their toy.
“Stupid bastards,” commented Famia.
The fire engine was a gigantic tank of water pulled on a waggon. It had two cylinder pistons which were operated by a large rocker arm. As the vigiles worked the arm up and down-something they did with gusto when a crowd was watching-the pistons forced a jet of water up and out through a central nozzle. It had a flexible joint that could be turned through three hundred and sixty degrees.
With more skill than they ever applied to house fires or burning granaries, the Seventh projected their water spray straight at the leopardess. She was knocked sideways, more by surprise than by the initial impact. Now angry and unpredictable, she started to slide, but recovered and scrambled to get a grip on the roof tiles with her extended claws. The Seventh followed her with the fine arc of the waterjet.
“I'm getting out of here!” Famia muttered. Many of the crowd lost their nerve too and surged off in different directions. Above us the troubled leopardess tried to walk along the roof-tree. The vigiles swung their nozzle to intercept her. She decided to escape downwards and moved tentatively lower on the pantiles a couple of steps, coming down on the street side rather than the internal Saepta enclosure. She was nervous of the roofs slope. It took the Seventh a fraction longer to adjust to the new direction; once they caught her in the spray again she made up her mind to leap.
People scattered. I should have done the same. Instead I reached for a stool, abandoned on the street by a flowerseller. I freed my knife from my boot and moved towards where the cat was intending to land. She was aiming for the narrow street half-way along Agrippa's Pantheon.
“Shift your arse out!” shouted the centurion, spotting a hero who might show him up.
“Shut up and do something useful!” I snarled back. “Get your lads sorted. Make a line. When she jumps we can try to guide her inside the Saepta. If we lock all the doors at least she'll be confined, then we can get specialist help-”
She leapt. I was ten strides away. Nearer folk scrambled for safety, screaming. Street-sellers ran with their trays. Parents grabbed infants. Youths jumped behind statues. The leopardess looked around, sizing up the situation.
“Everyone stand still! Turn off that bloody water!” yelled the centurion, as if pumping it had never been his own idea.
The scene quietened. The leopardess yawned. But her eyes never ceased watching; her head never failed to turn towards any hint of movement.
“Everyone keep calm!” shouted the centurion, sweating badly. “Leave it to us. It's all under control-”
The leopardess decided he was annoying her and adopted a low crouch, fixing him with those dangerous dark eyes.
“Oh great gawds,” muttered one of the troopers in a low voice. “she's stalking Piperita!”
One of the others laughed a bit, then advised in an unhelpful tone, “Better stand still, sir!”
I felt myself grin involuntarily: still one of the ranks, still hoping any officer would come unstuck. The centurion now had his own worries, so I took charge myself “Avoid sudden movements, Piperita. She's probably more scared than we are-” That old lie. “Famia,” I called quietly. “Nip round the back and get into the Saepta. Tell everyone to lock the other doors and stay inside their booths. Some of you lads run around the Pantheon to the other side of her so we can make a phalanx and guide her indoors-”
The Seventh responded at once. They were so unused to leadership that they had never developed healthy rebellion against it.
The silent leopardess was still observing the centurion as if he was the most interesting prey she had seen for weeks. Rightly or wrongly Piperita tried to inch further away from her without appearing to react. This aroused her hunting instincts even more. We could see her tense.
A small group of vigiles appeared from behind the Baths of Agrippa, on the far side of her, now sensibly holding esparto mats in front of them. The grass mats hardly offered much protection, but gave the impression of a solid barrier across the street and might help them steer the beast. They would be steering her towards me and the others, but we had to put up with that. I told the men in my row to take off their cloaks to use for a similar barrier. Not many were wearing them; even in December such luxuries were never part of their uniform. All the vigiles were unarmed too. A couple of nervous ones Hill behind the syphon waggon. Holding my stool in front of me, I steered the others forwards slowly.
It was going well. It had been a good idea. The leopardess saw us advancing. She tried a feinting run towards our group, but we stamped our feet and made off putting gestures; she turned tail. Piperita scampered among us and lost himself from her view. Threatened, the leopardess was looking for somewhere to escape. We had two lines of men walking towards her, closing in to make a V-shape at the Pantheon side. It left her a wide space the other way, inviting her to retreat through one of the grand side entrances to the Saepta. I heard Famia call down from one of the upper storeys, confirming that the other doors were closed. This was going to work.
Then disaster intervened. Just as the leopardess was approaching the open archway, a familiar voice boomed from inside: “Marcus! What's going on out there, Marcus? What in Hades are you playing at?”
I could hardly believe this nightmare: the short, wide bodied shape of my father had popped out of the Saepta. Face to face with the cat, he stood plumb in the middle of the entrance: grey curls, startled brown eyes, delinquent scowl, no damned sense. Famia must have told him to stay under cover-so the fool had to come straight out here to see why.
He must have thought about running. Then, being Pa, he clapped his hands smartly as if he were shooing cattle. “Hep! Hep! Get out of it, puss!”
Brilliant.
The leopardess took one look, decided Geminus was too scary to tackle, and bounded for freedom at full stretch, straight towards the hapless row of men opposite me. They stood their ground in horror, then leapt aside. We saw the big cat pounding through the gap, muscles rippling all along its back, paws pounding, tail up, backside in the air in that distinctive leopardine style.
“She's away!”
She was-but not far enough. She made a beeline for what may have looked like a place to hide: the Agrippan Baths.
“Come on!” I set off after the cat, urging the vigiles to follow me. As I passed Pa, I shot him a disgusted look.
“You harbouring a death wish, boy?” he greeted me. I was too good a Roman to tell my own father to jump into a quaking bog, without a plank or ropes. Well, there was no time to phrase it rudely enough. “I'll get Petronius,” he called after me. “He likes cats!”
Petro wouldn't like this one. Anyway, it was marauding in the Seventh's jurisdiction: not his problem. I, though, had somehow involved myself So who was stupid?
We tried telling the attendants to close the doors behind us. No use. Too many frightened people were rushing out through the monumental entrance. The attendants simply decided to run away with them. Everyone was shrieking in panic. When we ran inside, the leopardess had disappeared. The noise died down after the first exodus of naked men. We started to search the place.
I ran through the apodyterium, snatching at clothes on the pegs to check that the cat was not hidden under togas and cloaks. The Baths of Agrippa had been planned to impress; together with the Pantheon they formed the most dramatic building complex in the large output of Augustus' organizing son-in-law, his visible monument after he realized that despite decades of service he would never himself get to be Emperor. These baths had been free to the public since Agrippa died, a gracious gesture in his will. They were elegant, lofty, marble-clad, and supremely functional. Every time we pushed open the door to the next chamber we were slapped back by a wall of ever hotter, steamier air. Every step forward became more slippery and dangerous.
Out here in the Field of Mars was a long way to come for most folk, but even so the baths were generally well patronized. The leopardess had almost cleared them. The pickpockets and snack-salesmen had been first out. The fat women who took money for guarding clothes and supplying equipment had knocked us sideways as they ran for cover. A solitary slave now cowered in the unguent room, too frightened even to flee. For once the Spartan dry heat room and steamy tepidarium lay eerily empty. I kept going, accompanied by a few of the vigiles, our studded boots scraping and sliding on the tiled floors. When we staggered through the heavy self-closing door to the hot room, our clothes instantly stuck to us. Unprepared by normal warming-up procedures, we found the wet heat utterly draining Our hair dripped. Our hearts pounded unnaturally. Through the stifling steam we could make out naked shapes, the shiny raspberry flesh of soporific bathers all apparently undismayed by the chaos outside-oblivious in fact. These men had not been recently inspected by a loose leopard.
“She can't have come this way!” The great door would have stopped her. It was cantilevered so it swung easily to the touch, but the cat would have seen it as a fixed obstacle.
We fell back with relief Curious bathers tried to follow us “stay inside. Keep the door shut!” One of the vigiles had sense, but he was wasting his breath with advice. He was sweating so much he had lost all authority. People wanted to know what was happening. We had to find the cat. Then we could organize proper security around the area where she was.
These baths were unfamiliar to me. There seemed to be corridors everywhere. They had private pools, latrines, cubby holes, attendants' quarters. A thought struck. “Oh Jove! We have to make sure she doesn't get into the hypocaust.”
A vigilis swore. Under the suspended floors of the baths lay the heating chambers, fuelled by huge furnaces. He realized as I had done that crawling through stacked brick piers in the baking hot cavity in search of the leopard would be ghastly. The space was hardly big enough to squeeze through and the heat would be unbearable. It would be dangerous to breathe the fumes. An attendant wandered through a doorway holding an armful of towels, thin things that were hardly fit to blow your nose on. Piperita grabbed him, threw the towels away, and shoved him down one of the access points, with a large trooper standing guard.
“Search round all the columns. Shout if you see anything moving-” The man on guard grinned at me as Piperita gave his orders; even he looked a bit rueful. “Well, it's a start!”
“He'll collapse.” I was curt. It was stupidity. A big cat looking for a refuge just might slink between the hot pillars below, but for a man it was no joke.
“I'll send someone else in to get him if he does.” Without further comment I ran back towards the cold room. I met another attendant whom I sent running to warn the furnace master. “Where can I find the manager?”
“He's still at lunch probably.” Typical.
Luckily the vigiles had hauled out an under-manager from some nook. He had been chewing a folded roll, but the cheese was rather ripe and he seemed glad to abandon it. We persuaded him to organize his staff in a methodical search. Every time we checked a room we left a man in it to warn us if the leopardess prowled in there later. Slaves started persuading the rest of the public to leave, grumbling but fairly orderly.
The heat and steam were exhausting us. Fully dressed, we were overheating, losing our will to continue. Wild rumours of sightings were being exchanged. As the building finally emptied, the echoes of running feet and the vigiles' shouts made the atmosphere even wilder. I dragged my arm across my forehead, desperate to clear the perspiration. An overweight vigilis was emerging from a hypocaust vent but had stuck. His joshing mates rubbed his red face with towels as he gasped and swore. “Someone said they saw her go down-I went to look around, but it's hopeless. The space is only about three feet high and there's a forest of columns. If you met her nose to nose you'd be dead.” With a last effort he wrenched his body out through the manhole. “Phew! It's hot as stink and the air's foul!”
Temporarily done for, he fell full length against the corridor wall, recovering from the effects of humidity and hot gases.
“Best to seal up the underfloor area,” I suggested. “If she is in there either she'll expire or she'll come out of her own accord later. When we're sure she's nowhere else we can deal with that.”
We left him, and the rest of us dragged ourselves back to the search. Soon we reckoned we had checked everywhere. Maybe the leopardess was outside the baths altogether by now, causing a panic somewhere else while we wasted our time. The vigiles were ready to give up.
I was finished myself but I did a final check through the building. Everyone else had gone out. Finding myself alone I glanced through a wedged open door to the hot steam room. Much of the heat had escaped now. I walked to the great marble bowl of standing water and leaned over to splash my face. It was tepid, and had no effect. As I straightened up, I heard something that made all the hairs on my neck stand up.
The huge establishment was virtually silent. But I had caught the scratch of claws on marble-very close.