Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  “But I let her get away! She might be our last hope!”

  “Not with half-a-dozen Christians in the prison, she wasn’t.” The centurion leaned his shoulders against the tiled curve of the niche and looked out across the vast expanse of steaming water and pink, heat-puffed, naked bodies. His arms, resting along the rim of the hot pool, were brown as leather up to the line where his tunic sleeve usually fell; after that they were startlingly white. Through the steam his greenish gaze seemed softened, as though, like asphalt, his soul become more malleable with heat. “She did exactly what I would have done, if I were being followed. And if her father’s a powerful member of the cult, she’ll have learned caution from the cradle. Did you stay for the rest of the games?”

  “No,” said Marcus in distaste, and Arrius grinned.

  The Baths of Aphrodite were far less fashionable than the more elegant premises Marcus usually frequented. The arcaded roof was lower, and the big room with its warm swimming pool and series of hot tubs was far noisier. The clientele seemed to be mostly soldiers, laborers, shopkeepers and their wives, with some of the higher-class prostitutes of the neighborhood. Unlike the more stylish baths, these didn’t have separate facilities for men and women. During their soak in the hot tub his conversation with the centurion had suffered several momentary gaps.

  “You said yourself there’s nothing more to be got out of the Christians in the jail,” fretted Marcus. “They’ve had her since the night before last!”

  “And we haven’t heard—or found—a thing,” replied Arrius stolidly. “They’re holding her, you can depend on that. As for this morning, while you were out chasing skirts around the Flavian I got in touch with another one of my informers, greasy little ghoul that he is. He says he has another Christian for me.”

  Marcus had ducked his head beneath the surface of the heated water to rinse the sweat from his cheeks, but the words brought him up like a dolphin. “Where?” he gasped, shaking his lank curls from his eyes.

  “At the Flavian. He’d have gone to the lions this afternoon if he hadn’t been sick. The lion-keeper refused to send him into the ring, though why the silly bastard thinks lions will get sick from eating a sick man’s meat is beyond me. They live half the time on carrion in the wild. He wasn’t arrested for Christianity, in fact nobody knew he was a Christian at all, till he started raving.”

  “What was he arrested for?”

  Arrius shrugged. “He wasn’t—not technically, anyway. He was supposedly philandering with his master’s wife; his master’s a pal of your friend Quindarvis.”

  Marcus started to reply and saw that his companion’s attention had been momentarily diverted by a bountiful young redhead, passing by with a towel thrown casually over one shoulder.

  After a moment’s reflection the centurion continued, “In any case, this poor ass can’t have had anything to do with the kidnapping. But he might give us some names. Care to come?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I—I have something else I have to do tonight.” In his heart he was not sure which brought him more dread—the thought of another visit to the amphitheater, or the scrawled message that he had found upon returning to his lodgings, summarily bidding him to his father’s house for dinner. “Did you learn any more from the Christians you have?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “Nothing of value. And if what your girl Dorcas said to the priest was true—and there’s no reason to think it isn’t, since they didn’t know they were being watched—it’s no surprise. It’s possible the kidnapping was planned by another group of Christians entirely, or that word simply hasn’t got around about it yet.” He sat up and splashed warm water over his face. In the main pool beyond, a rowdy fight had broken out, men yelling good-naturedly, women shrieking and laughing, the noise bounding off the mosaic arches of the low roof.

  “So what are you going to do with them?” Marcus hauled himself up, dripping, onto the edge of the sunken tub, and deliberately ignored a wink directed at him by a fat black Libyan girl across the room.

  “They’re being transferred to the holding jail across from the amphitheater tonight. They’ll stand trial tomorrow and be sentenced in time for the last day of Quindarvis’ games.”

  Marcus stared. “That’s awfully quick.”

  “I didn’t give the orders. The games only last three days; it’d be a shame to waste ’em.”

  “But what if they’re not guilty?”

  Arrius had emerged from the water and stood dripping, like a scarred Neptune, drying his hair with a towel. He looked quietly down at Marcus. “Boy, they’re guilty,” he told him. “They’ve broken the law that forbids the worship of their crazy Jewish god, they’ve been formally denounced before a magistrate, and that’s enough, whether they practice abominations as part of their rites or not.”

  “They’re not the only ones who do,” Marcus pointed out.

  “No,” agreed the centurion. “We’re surrounded by abominations. I personally think any cult that requires its priests to geld themselves in a religious frenzy—with, I suspect, the help of drugs—should be looked into, but there are temples of Cybele all over Rome.

  “But it isn’t the abominations. It’s the politics. When times get bad people get scared, and they want to know that at least in their own lifetime everything’s going to be fine. They want to kill what’s troubling them. And since you can’t blame the system or blame hard times, you blame the stars—which you can’t fight—or blame a bunch of people who are messing things up, personally, for you. That’s the Jews and the Syrians and the Christians. But the Jews are too powerful in the government—I don’t think there’s a department in the treasury that doesn’t have its little Jewish clerk looking after things—and the Syrians have too much money. The Christians are a cheap target, and they’ve made themselves a target. They could sacrifice their babies in the Forum, so long as they handed a slice of the meat to the priests of the genius of the emperor.

  “But they won’t.” He slung the towel over his shoulder and offered Marcus a hand up. A great splash of water was thrown out of the pool, dousing a vendor of honeyed figs; the vendor added his voice to the general noise in terms that, while undoubtedly Latin, Marcus had never heard before. “They won’t,” continued Arrius, unperturbed, “and that’s where they leave themselves open. They aren’t persecuted because they’re maniacs, boy. It’s because they’re traitors. There’s a lot of them, maybe more than we know. They work in secret, and we have no idea where their loyalties lie. That’s what makes them dangerous.”

  The town house of the Silanus family stood on the Esquiline Hill, not too far from the great baths. It was a new neighborhood, and fashionable. Many of the big houses contained shops and apartments as well, but his father’s was not one of these. It might be more expensive, but at least the place didn’t smell of cooking in every room.

  Straton greeted him in the atrium, a roly-poly, gray-haired Greek who had looked after the details of the Roman house since Marcus was a baby. “How goes the philosophy?” he asked—a question that a number of people asked Marcus, but not all of them truly wanted an answer longer than “Fine.”

  Straton’s question, however, fell into the other category, and Marcus gave the matter some thought before replying. “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “Yesterday I would have said it was going badly because I haven’t had time to be with Timoleon in the Basilica in days, but... I’m not sure whether I’m turning into a better philosopher or a worse one.”

  The Greek gave him a curious look and said, “If you can ask that question at all, you’re probably turning into a better one.” He lifted the hem of Marcus’ toga, blotched with stains of hare’s blood acquired during his pursuit of Dorcas with the shopping basket in his hand. Marcus felt his face turn scalding red, like a little boy who has dirtied his tunic. “Not a cleaner one, though,” sighed the slave regretfully and helped him out of it, folding the massive weight of the garment over his arm with a deftness that Marcus had never been
able to acquire. Though he ran a critical eye over Marcus’ plain tunic, he said nothing. It was clean, at any rate, though the dark-blue linen was badly worn and faded.

  “Oh, come on, old toad,” called a voice cheerily from the drawing-room door, “don’t you know philosophers are supposed to look like that? Positively bad appearance not to have a few frays in the hem, and all.” Felix let the embroidered indigo curtains fall shut behind him and came striding across the room, holding out his hands. “Good to see you on your feet, Professor.”

  Marcus caught him by the shoulders, holding him off at arm’s length. “Do I clasp your hand or kiss you?” he demanded, laughing.

  “I beg your pardon, this is not a dress I’m wearing, it’s a Persian robe! It’s all the thing!” Felix bridled like an aspersed cat, clutching at the folds of the offending garment as if he feared it would be snatched off. “B’Castor, it cost me close to five hundred sesterces! Y’see ‘em all over the town!”

  “I suppose you do,” murmured his older brother, considering the long drape of the sea-blue silk, the peacock embroidery of the long, full sleeves, “in certain circles. Turn around, sweetcheeks, I’m dying to admire it...”

  “Well, it certainly beats that short little rag you’re wearing,” retorted Felix defensively. “Anyone with knees like yours ought to cover ’em.”

  “Oh, I agree, I agree,” purred Marcus, “and believe me, you look utterly ravishing! Why, only today in the Forum I saw the cunningest little green slippers that would go with that...”

  Felix pulled back his fist, his face pink under the teasing; Marcus’ eyes were sparkling. A battle that, in all probability, would have finished in the atrium pool was averted by a third voice, absurdly identical to the other two. “Your politeness in admiring our brother’s finery is certainly to your credit,” it said, “but I am constrained by propriety to point out that seeing you together, I must judge Marcus’ raiment to be the more manly, though it be frayed.”

  And as Caius Silanus stepped through the door curtain Marcus stuck out his tongue at Felix like a schoolboy. The oldest of the three Silanus brothers was, like his voice, an imitation almost to the point of parody of the other two. He was fully Marcus’ height, and before he had begun to put on fat he had had that same loose-jointed gangliness. His brown eyes were grave, his hair, which like theirs was soft brown and curly, was cropped uncompromisingly short, which made his face look even longer than it was. His plain white linen dinner suit was discreetly embroidered with a single border of egg and dart around the hem of the tunic and the edge of the cloak, a quiet rebuke against everything the others wore and were.

  “And how goes the philosophy, Marcus?” he inquired politely.

  “Fine.”

  Caius was already turning to Felix. “Was your luck good at the amphitheater, Felix?”

  “Dashed rotten,” declared the dandy airily. “Silly brute simply lay down and let the other chap carve him to collops! Don’t know where they found him. Racking good beast-hunt to finish the show, though. Chap killed a leopard with just one of those little pitchforks—one of those trident things they use...”

  An underbutler brought up a folding backless chair for Marcus, set it down, and changed his shoes for the plain blue house slippers Marcus had brought in a bundle under his arm. He then carried away shoes and chair in a wordless aura of disapproval that his master’s son would have sunk so low as to not have a slave of his own to carry his slippers for him.

  “...had a side bet with Trimalcho—You remember Trimalcho, Marcus? Anatolian or Parthian or one of those sorts, made a pile of tin on silks or amber or something of the sort, and now he’s into everything... city rents, share in the Blues at the circus...”

  Caius had already turned to conduct them into the summer dining room, leaving Marcus to deal with the interminable answer to his question. He didn’t mind. As Felix would say, it beat the daylights out of trying to talk to Caius.

  Their parents and sister and Caius’ cowed-looking wife met them in the doorway of the small open room, and with one accord, each of the three sons bent his knee to the thin, small, bitter man who was their father: a man who hardly came up to any one of their shoulders. He favored Felix with a single, silent glance of absolute scorn and turned away from him without speaking. His hard black eyes flicked over Marcus. “I see you weren’t too sunk in your own amusements to bother to come to dinner.”

  Marcus raised his head and said in a constrained voice, “I got Straton’s note.”

  “I’m surprised that Greekling had the brains to leave a note. But I suppose he could hardly have gone to search for you among all the bathhouses about the circus.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to protest that he never frequented the lower-class baths in that neighborhood, but since it was exactly where he had been today, he held his peace. His father took his silence for an admission and turned away coldly, to greet his eldest son with a warm handclasp and carefully measured kindness in his words. Looking up, Marcus met his mother’s eyes, wide and brown like his own, and desperately unhappy.

  “Well, we have been kept waiting long enough,” declared Silanus. “Like as not, thanks to Marcus, we’ll get the first course cold and the second burnt.” He held out his hand for his wife’s, a peremptory gesture. She laid her soft, long-boned fingers in his hard little palm like a dead bird; he led her to the supper couch like an auctioneer escorting a slave to the block. Caius, with ponderous formality, took his wife’s hand on one arm and his sister’s on the other. Marcus wondered if he should offer to take Felix’s hand, considering how he was dressed, but decided that this piece of levity would only precipitate the scene he knew was brewing. Don’t start the battle until the women have been got to safety, he told himself bitterly. They may as well get a meal in peace.

  The town villa of the Silanus family had three dining rooms, of which the summer one was the smallest. It faced out into the central gardens, open all along one side into the pillared peristyle that surrounded the immaculate handkerchief of grass, with its thick borders of lilies and roses, its scattered statues and covered walks. The tabletop was pink marble from Samos, on a base of elaborately wrought Corinthian bronze. The slaves, who had no surety for the wizened old man’s changeable temper, moved in swift and slightly apprehensive silence. Typically, Silanus Senior had arranged things so that he and his eldest son were able to talk most easily back and forth, which they did, disregarding their ostensible dinner partners.

  Marcus had not eaten under his father’s roof in nearly six months. He remembered why, now, watching how his sister picked at her food in cowed silence, not daring to raise her voice to conflict with those of the men. Caius’ wife looked even more washed-out than usual—she was pregnant again, Marcus saw, and her strained face had an unhealthy color to it—and did not speak at all. His mother only looked across the table at him once, to ask him how his philosophy went, to which he replied, “Fine.” He was more than ever thankful to Felix, who, having firmly established himself as the family fribble, was not expected to make decent dinner conversation or understand it. Instead he kept his mother, sister, and sister-in-law entertained with a light inconsequential patter of news from the marketplace and the games (which all of the women had been forbidden to attend by the head of the house), while he tucked away every morsel in sight. Marcus picked at the mull of tuna fish and eggs among the sharp sauce and lettuce of his plate, listening with half an ear and wondering why his father had summoned him.

  “...Nubian chap, or African of some sort, anyway, absolutely ripping with a trident, y’know. Never saw the like. Leopards’re quick, quicker than lions by far—know a chap in the beast-catcher training school who says he’d sooner take on a pair of lions than a leopard. Says lions’re cowards. Unless they’re specially trained or into the way of it, they won’t attack a man at all. Unless he’s wounded, of course, and they get the smell of the blood...”

  And riding counterpoint over that light, flutelike spate of triv
ia, Silanus Senior’s harsh rasp “...man of substance, with lands and money behind him, and none of this town-bred, trade-bought money that can be wasted putting on stupid and expensive games to amuse a vulgar and idle populace. I think your sister’s dowry is sufficient, and as Garovinus has been married twice before he should have no objections to...”

  “...expensive, though, dashed if I know where he’s getting the money to pay for the things. Dippin’ into the senatorial till, most like, which’ll make it rough if they audit the books when they change praetors in July... They say at the Flavian he’s been all to pieces these two years and more. It’s not as if he were one of the big landowners—he’s not, y’know—though mind you his wife has gold comin’ out her ears. She’s the one y’want to watch out for. They say in the Forum she has her own seraglio of young men and boys, keeps ’em out in a villa in the country. One of ’em bust another’s nose in a fight, and spoilt his looks; she had the attacker whipped, but the poor chap with the broken nose, she had his throat cut, ‘cause his looks were gone...”

  “Nonsense! Your mother was married at fourteen! And in a time of the disgraceful decay of the Roman family it’s a necessity for a girl to marry young, so that she may breed healthy children... . Though with two miscarriages your Cornelia has been grossly slack in her duty. Stop picking at your food and either eat or leave the table, Aemilia! Though on the whole I don’t believe in divorce—it’s the rot at the center of the fabric of Rome—I have a good mind to have you and that worthless woman divorced when her pregnancy’s done no matter how it turns out. Child’ll like as not be so sickly it’ll have to be exposed in any case.”

  Marcus glanced across the table at Cornelia, as the slaves brought in the second course. The women of the Silanus household were forbidden to wear cosmetics, and it may have been only that which made her look pale and yellowish as old wax. It did not help, he thought bitterly, that Caius was nodding grave approval of every word his father spoke.