Body Surfing

ring, yet his eyes seemed to bore into the boy’s—glowing eyes, filled with a liquid, luminous intelligence that seemed not of this earth.
    The boy couldn’t move, couldn’t look away. When a lion sniffed at his foot he didn’t even flinch.
    One of the emperor’s hands rested on his scepter and the other rested on the head of whoever serviced him—boy or girl, it was impossible to tell. And then the emperor did the strangest thing. He smiled. Smiled, and nodded, and closed his eyes. White-knuckled fingers pressed on the head of the body kneeling before him.
    The boy closed his eyes too as the lion’s teeth sank into his ankle and, with a flick of its powerful neck, threw him a dozen feet across the ring. But even as it leapt after him the boy felt a strange sense of peace fill him, of strength and speed and power. It was as if molten iron were being poured into his veins and leaching through his skin, rendering him invulnerable yet still mobile. Pain vanished. So did fear. The boy rolled out of the cat’s way and found his fingers closing around the hilt of a sword, flipped it like a kitchen knife and hurled it directly into the lion’s throat. The beast vomited blood and bile and dropped in a convulsing heap to the ground.
    The crowd’s roar was so loud that even the animals stopped. They looked up to see if a storm were coming, an earthquake. But then they turned back to the ring. To the lone figure still standing. Not just standing, but taunting them. Goading the animals and goading the crowd too. Show me what you’ve got , he seemed to say. Give it to me. Give it all to me .
    The animals circled warily. Humans didn’t fight this way. Not when they were alone. They cowered or ran or hid in trees. But this one screamed at them, ran after them. Weapons littered the floor of the ring, swords, lances, maces, and the boy jumped from one to the next, handled each as if he’d been trained in the art of war by Alexander himself. His actions were deliberate and fearless—and completely inexplicable to the person doing them, who seemed a spectator to himself, as distant from his own flesh as the throngs in the stone benches all around him. One by one the beasts fell, the lions, the tigers, the buffalo and elands. The boy’s arms were gory to the shoulders with blood and bone and offal.
    It was pure chance that did him in: he stepped backwards onto a trampled cobra, which had just enough bite left to sink its fangs into his ankle. In an instant his leg went numb, although the poison’s flow seemed to stop in his thigh, not reaching the vital muscles of diaphragm and heart. He was still standing but was unable to run or dodge. His breath was labored, spots danced before his eyes. Still, he taunted the animals. Come on!
    The rhino answered the challenge. The charging ungulate slammed into the boy’s body and its great horn—longer and fatter than the boy’s arm—pierced his abdomen. The boy gouged out the animal’s eyes with his bare hands and continued to jab at the pulpy sockets until the beast shook its head so violently that the boy’s body was ripped in half, torso flying in one direction, legs in the other. Even then he didn’t lose consciousness. Even then he fought on, dragging himself with his fingers toward a dagger glinting in the bloody sand. The boy had the disjunctive experience of watching a pair of hyenas rip his legs one from the other even as his fingers closed over the dagger’s hilt, but before he could tighten his grip it bounced from his fingers. The boy rolled himself over, just in time to see the charging elephant rear up on its hind legs, and then a foot the size of one of the columns that held up the Temple of Jupiter came down on his head.
    For months afterward, audience members swore that he continued to fight right up to the last moment—that he crossed his arms over his head as if he could sustain the weight of an elephant with his bare hands. The emperor, asked to award the fearless barbarian posthumous freedom, remarked enigmatically, “We are both free now.” But the slain boy came to him in a dream that night, told him that death’s freedom was something no one, not even an emperor, could command with certainty. As it happened, Nero would die by his own hand less than a year after the boy did, and Rome itself fell three centuries later. Emperor and empire achieved immortality in the minds of future generations, however, acquiring dominion over an area a hundred