‘If I do, you will still have fought so well that the people will all turn down their thumbs, and you will be spared. A tall fine fellow like you is just the gladiator whom the Roman ladies like to look at, and they won’t have you killed in your first fight. But as for me—a mere Phrygian slave!—Yes, Glanydon, to-morrow your short sword will perhaps be red with my blood.’
‘Never!’ said Glanydon. ‘I will fight because I must, and will do my best; and when my blood is up I might kill you or any other opponent in the blind heat of the combat; but as for slaughtering in cold blood I could not do it—least of all could I murder the friend I love.’
‘You won’t be able to help yourself, Glanydon. And we netsmen (worse luck!) have our faces uncovered. Many of the spectators, like the late “divine” Claudius, as they call him, like to see us killed, because our dying expression is not concealed by a helmet.’
‘But why should we not both escape?’ asked the Briton. ‘Perhaps before this time to-morrow we may each be the happy possessor of the ivory ticket with “Sp.”[76] upon it, or even of the palm and the foil. Who knows but what by our bravery we may be rude donati?’
‘Don’t you know, then, that to-morrow’s games will very likely be sine missione? We must either die or kill.’
The Briton had not been aware of it. He sank into gloomy silence. Onesimus gently laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and said, ‘Well, perhaps, like Priscus and Verrus, we may both be victors and both vanquished. Pugnavere pares, succubuere pares.’
Glanydon shook his head. He said, ‘Let us talk no more, or we shall both be unmanned. Life—death—to-morrow; the rudis or the stab? Which shall it be?’
‘It is in God’s hands,’ said Onesimus, ‘if what we have been taught is true.’
With that awful issue before them, overshadowed by misgivings and almost with despair, finding life horrible, yet shrinking from the death which neither of them dared to regard with full Christian hope, the two youths lay down on their pallets. Before they closed their eyes in sleep, each of them had breathed some sort of unuttered cry into the dim unknown.