Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  He remembered that his father kept the slaves locked in their rooms at night. One night he’d caught the boys’ pedagogue stealing out to meet a woman and had sold him next day to a broker bound for Gaul.

  Marcus was coming to understand how a talented manservant like Alexandras would prefer to dig this man’s gardens, rather than leave his house.

  The villa of Priscus Quindarvis stood two or three miles from the outskirts of Rome, close to the Ardeatine Way. A walled parkland of many acres surrounded it, scattered with dark groves of cypress and plane trees, green rolling land rich in the lucid sunlight of the late afternoon. As the hired litter approached the wide steps of salt-and-pepper marble that led up to the tessellated pavements of the terrace, Marcus caught a glimpse of burnished peacocks spreading their gaudy tails in the shade of fountained arbors. Not far off through a belt of trees, zebras drank at a marble tank at the feet of an image of Pan.

  An Ethiopian doorman in livery of red silk met his master’s guests on the steps. As Sixtus stepped from the litter Marcus had a quick look at the front of the villa, the high walls white and brilliant as meringue in the slanting sunlight, the pillars of the two-story porch pink marble, their garlanded capitals basalt and gilded malachite. Statues of gods and heroes—Hercules, Venus, Mars, Helen, Alexander—stood among the shrubs that flanked the terrace, half again life size and carved out of black marble, with draperies of red porphyry so fluidly carved as to appear to be agitated by violent winds. Even the immortals, grinned Marcus to himself, wore the uniform of the household. In the dim shade of the pillared porch two guards, ex-gladiators by the look of them, in silver armor and crimson plumes, stood to attention as Sixtus passed between them and out of sight into the shadows of the house, with Alexandras padding humbly at his heels carrying his slippers. For all the notice the kingly old aristocrat paid them they might have been bootscrapers.

  The bronze doors shut. Marcus was on his own.

  There was a big courtyard at the back of the house where the litters were taken. Two or three were there already, including an equipage of gold and ebony that would have done for the pharaoh of Egypt and must have required at least a dozen bearers. Only one guest seemed to have come from town in a cisium, and the brightly painted two-wheeled sporting carriage was drawn up at one side of the gate, its shafts resting on an abandoned bench. Marcus, whose ribs still smarted from the kick he’d collected from the Christian kidnappers, tried to picture riding in the unsprung vehicle even under the best of circumstances, and felt slightly ill. Dead drunk, its passenger would be likely to die of seasickness before they ever reached the gates of Rome.

  Marcus had a story ready that would account for his inexperience, but no one in the slaves’ court paid him much attention. There were already upward of thirty assorted bearers, linkboys, and footmen lounging on the benches; many of them evidently knew one another well. (As they must, he reflected—as well as their masters and mistresses knew one another. Everyone in Rome went to the same parties.) Someone had already got up a dice game in the shade of the porch. A couple of men started flirtations with the maids who emerged from time to time from the steamy confines of the kitchens; one of the Nubian bearers, stripping off his gold loincloth and jewels, challenged all comers to wrestling, and soon the courtyard was a fog of aureate dust.

  Someone called out a greeting. Another litter was coming through the arched gateway, its gilded lotus-blossom shafts borne on the shoulders of eight men. Tiridates had evidently turned out his whole fleet of chair-men to carry him in comfort to and from the party. Marcus recognized one of the men at once—the right-front corner man, with his bruised face and his white teeth flashing in a grin as he returned the greetings of his friends. The other man he wasn’t so sure of—he thought he knew him, but like most Romans, Marcus was bad at recognizing slaves.

  He started to move toward them, not to speak but simply to establish himself as part of the scenery, when a small, light-boned hand touched his arm, and a woman’s voice purred, “Haven’t seen you before, have I, pearblossom?”

  Marcus turned, startled, gasping, “Uh—there must be some mistake...” and found himself looking, not at another kitchen wench, but at a woman who was clearly one of the guests at the feast.

  She pursed painted lips at him, and murmured, “Oh, I don’t think so.” Insinuating fingers wound in the fabric of his tunic; gentle, insistent pressure drew him into the shadows of the porch. “My, but you’re a good-looking one.”

  Marcus knew that this was patently untrue. But he returned the compliment, stammering, “Uh—you’re very—very beautiful—er—too,” although, as he was drawn closer to her, he knew that this was untrue, too. The makeup gave the impression of beauty, rouge blossoming delicately on a background of white lead, lapis and malachite painted around the rather protuberant blue eyes, the whole surrounded by a stunning coiffure of snailshell curls built up six or seven inches above that fair white brow. But closer inspection revealed the haglike lines buried under the cheeks, the disguised puffiness beneath the eyes, and all the pastilles in the world couldn’t cover the wine reek on her breath.

  “Do you think so?” she crooned.

  Marcus hastily disengaged his hands from where she was guiding them. “I—er—yes, yes of course. But they’ll be missing you at the banquet...”

  “Oh, that!” She shrugged half-uncovered shoulders, and staggered slightly, falling against him. “You know, I’ve always preferred to take the first course in private... if you know what I mean.”

  Marcus backed hastily and bumped into the wall of the alcove into which she’d led him. She giggled thickly, her hands sliding down his body, “You be good to me,” she purred, “and I’ll be good to you...”

  He gasped, pushing her away. Aside from philosophic principles and the fact that he wouldn’t have mounted a hag like her if he’d been the worst rake in town, they were virtually within full view of the rest of the slaves’ court. She lunged at him, and he ducked aside, escaping into the porch that ran along three sides of the court. She staggered after him, her voice blurry with drunken anger. “I’ll tell your master! I’ll tell old Priscus...”

  Wonderful, thought Marcus. He dove through the first refuge that presented itself, through a doorway into the steamy darkness of the kitchen. The place reeked of spices, oil, and sweat. Down at one end the head cook was sculpting a gigantic boar from goose-liver pate, at the other, a downtrodden-looking girl of about ten was resignedly stuffing dormice with a paste of honey, saffron, minced mushrooms and chopped cherries, and arranging them in concentric rings on a golden dish. There seemed to be about a hundred people crammed into the tiny space, stripped to their stained loincloths and yelling at one another in Sicilian: plucking swans, peppering flamingo tongues, and swatting roaches for all they were worth. Marcus ducked through the confusion, and out the far door as his ladylove’s voice grated down the porch, “I’ll tell them to have you cut, if you’re not already, you...”

  He slipped through the far door and out onto the terrace. The terrace on this side ran the length of the villa, paved in lapis tiles into which the zodiac had been worked, in mosaic of red and gold. He hurried cautiously down its great length, listening for sounds of pursuit. Though none came, he decided that perhaps it would be better to let some time elapse before returning to the slaves’ court. A confrontation, for whatever reason, with a drunken Phaedra and an indignant Priscus Quindarvis did not bear thinking of. He reached the end of the terrace, swung over the low carved railing, and dropped to the ground below.

  From his family’s villas—one near Naples and two in Gaul—he knew the layout of country palaces in general. But those had been the centers of working farms, the source of the family income. They had as little to do with this green silent paradise as a plow horse has to do with a thoroughbred. After the unceasing din of Rome, the crowded, reeking, grilling days and the endless clattering insomnia of the nights, this place was like the heaven of the gods. The clear darkening air was fr
agrant of citrus, of water and shrubs; the very solitude was like a cool drink after long delirium. In the silence he could feel his grief lessen. His fears for Tullia, his misery over his helpless guilty hatred of his father eased like the loosening of a constricting bandage. From an oak-crowned hilltop some distance from the house, he could see the lights of Rome, but it was as though he looked on another world. For the first time in many days, peace descended on his soul.

  Confident as children in the safety of their protected glades, dark-eyed Arabian gazelles stared at him in the twilight. On a turning of a woodland path a deer emerged from the ferns almost under his feet and stared at him affronted, like a king who has encountered a charwoman in his anteroom, then faded back into the invisibility of the myrtle. Through the trees the lights of the villa glowed amber in peacock-blue dusk. He could not have been more than a few miles from Rome, but surely, he thought, the Greece of the ancient legends had been like this. It would have caused him no surprise to come upon Diana, the moon tangled in her dusky hair and her white hounds about her feet, hunting supernatural prey in the evanescent woods.

  He topped the crest of a hill as the wind behind him died, and found himself staring into the huge amber eyes of a black-maned Numidian lion.

  The violence with which he started almost lost him his footing and tumbled him down the fifteen feet of separating cliff. He caught his balance against the bole of a beech tree, staring down in shocked horror at the huge carnivore. The lion stared upward unwinkingly, its eyes like firelit mirrors in the twilight, lashed its tail, and growled deep in its throat. A chorus of growls replied. From the brush that circled the bottom of what Marcus realized was a broad enclosed pit, two lionesses emerged, rippling and tawny in the near-darkness. Beyond them other shapes moved, prowling in the shadows of the round pavilion that stood in the midst of the enclosure. The change in the wind brought their rank sharp stink up to him, and he shuddered with the memory of the pit below the Flavian.

  The little pavilion was dark, though through its open pillars he could glimpse the liquid blue of the twilight beyond. Silhouetted against the light among the black shadows of the encircling pillars he made out what he thought were supper-couches and a table, lampstands and statues; under the eaves of the domed roof he could see the pediment festooned with elaborate garlands carved in stone. In spite of himself he had to admit to a kind of fascination with the place—what a setting for an intimate supper! The floor of the supper room was on level with the lip of the pit, joined to it by a single narrow footbridge. The lower story would contain kitchens, or perhaps, thought Marcus, looking at the bronze door that was the only break in the sheer wall of the ground floor, lodgings for the keeper of the beasts. To be served the finest of foods and wines while the lions prowled below—it was the sort of contrast Quindarvis and his friends reveled in.

  In spite of the sheerness of the wall around the pit, and his conviction that lions could not leap so high, Marcus found himself looking over his shoulder more than once as he hurried back toward the villa through the darkness of the scented woods.

  When he returned, the banquet was proceeding full-swing. A series of curtained arches looked out onto the long eastern terrace; half-a-dozen men could have concealed themselves in the shadows of any one of the huge supporting columns. He identified his erstwhile attacker at once, on a couch at the far end of the enormous dining room. Whether she’d had her private first course or not, she and the man she shared her supper-couch with looked to be starting in on a second course of the same. The slaves, no doubt well-trained, ignored them; the others at their table seemed too busy gossiping to notice.

  The din in the room was unbelievable. Flute players preceded the slaves who moved about among the tables, playing in the wine and accompanying the wiping-up of spilled delicacies with popular airs. At the head of the central table Quindarvis lay, different from that cynical, proper magistrate who was so welcome in the home of his cousin and political patron. The cynicism had turned to a kind of oily mockery, not only of the ills of society but of its virtues as well; the propriety, Marcus saw, was a kind of camouflage, a magnification of the keynote of whatever surroundings he happened to be in. In his dinner suit of midnight blue, its borders flashing with flames and stars of gold and amethyst and pearl, he was one with the prodigal richness of the room. The woman beside him might have been fashioned of gold and ivory, as was the couch they shared; her hard, rather round face was fair under its rouge, her massive frontage of curls bright as electrum, the thin tissue of her thread-drawn silk dress as white as the massive breasts jutting under it. She was feeding him the honey-dripping little dormice on a golden skewer and laughing at his surreptitiously groping hands.

  They weren’t the only couple already slightly gone in their cups. A tremendous guffaw drew Marcus’ attention; a big coarse-featured man whom Marcus recognized as Lectus Garovinus, his sister’s betrothed, had seized the pretty young boy who was going around with the wine, holding him around the waist and kissing him amorously, while the hyacinths fell from the boy’s dark curling hair and the wine spilled in his struggles. The comedian who was entertaining between courses with a cutting account of his latest amorous exploits paused in mid-story, turned his head like a lean black hound only deigning to notice the intrusion of a cat into its territory, and called out, “Let the kid go, Garovinus, some of these nice people ain’t been served yet.” This elicited a bellow of laughter from the room, and Garovinus obeyed with an owlish grin. The floor beneath his supper-couch was already heaped with eggshells, olive pits, and two spilled winecups. Marcus turned away in disgust and returned to the porters’ courtyard.

  He found the entertainment there hardly better. A fire had been lit; some of the kitchen girls had come out, wiping sweaty faces on the hems of their tunics; the talk drifted from sex to the amphitheater and back again. The day’s chariot races received exhaustive postmortems, lap by lap and crash by crash, and were compared unfavorably to those given at the Roman games last year. Speculations on the honesty of the races and universal cursing of the bookmaking trade were aired. Someone passed around a big wooden bowl filled with jumbled leftovers of the last course served—blood sausage of bear entrails, fat mullet with sharp sauce, flamingo tongues stewed in pepper, dates, mustard, and wine. There were hardly any tongues left; Marcus found two, forgotten behind a leaf of sodden lettuce. Someone remarked on the dancers who were going to entertain after the next course. Someone else said, “That’s nothing—you remember that party Porcius Craessius gave six months ago? That guy who’d trained a jackass to copulate with a whore? Never saw anything like that in my life.”

  “That’s nothing compared to that broad who has the three mastiffs, what’s her name? Lana? Alandra?”

  “How about that time at the Neroian when they had all these dancing-girls on this fake island, and after the naval battle they sank the island, and all the crocodiles crawled up...”

  “Yeah, I remember that, you never saw such a bunch of startled tarts in your life!”

  “Or how about the time...”

  “Hell, I’ll tell you one,” growled a grizzled little linkboy with a broken nose. “This was years ago, when Domitian was rounding up the Christians. I remember there was this one old woman—must have been sixty, seventy years old—practically throwing herself at the lions. You know how they do.” He laughed, revealing brown stumps of teeth. “But the damned thing was, they were new lions, they’d never been in the arena before, and they were all upset by the noise and the sun, and they ran away from her! So here’s this old broad out chasing the lions, the lions are running away from her, and finally one of the beast-catchers had to come out with a cleaver and hamstring her, so they could get the smell of blood and attack. I nearly wet myself, I was laughing so hard.”

  “Shit, I’d run away from a Christian too, if she was singing’ hymns,” grunted somebody else. “That caterwaulin’ deserves death, even if they didn’t eat babies.”

  “They really eat babi
es?”

  “‘Course they do. They hold ’em up by their little feet an’ slit their throats into a big cup kind of thing, then they pass it around... I got a cousin who married a Jew, which just goes to show, ‘cause she’d screw anything that didn’t have tits...”

  “Yeah, I hear them Jews and Christians kidnap older kids, too...”

  Marcus sipped at the thin sour wine, moodily watching the faces in the firelight. Between the slaves and their masters there didn’t seem to be a great deal to choose.

  He could see the two Arabs, sitting with the other slaves who wore Tiridates’ livery. They were all Arabs or Syrians, hawk-faced and swarthy, their dark hair cropped close and their muscles shining in the red glare. Their heights had been matched to an inch. He saw one of the men—the man with the bruised face—look across the crowded dusty court at him and frown, as if trying to call his face to mind.

  In time someone got up a game of knucklebones. The remains of another course were brought in great wooden bowls: the remains of peacocks and pigeons roasted with damsons and yellow with saffron, a scattering of oily, half-eaten artichokes, the butchered remnants of the pate boar. The voices from the supper room were rising louder, audible even in this court, and shrieks of laughter and the drifting strains of music could be heard distinctly. Marcus caught the Arab bearer’s eye. The man’s brows dived down, startled, as he recognized him; he quickly rose from his place and slipped out the courtyard door into the night.

  After a moment, Marcus followed him.

  It was by now almost the sixth hour of the night, and pitch black. Pausing to let his eyes adjust to the darkness outside the court’s bonfire-light, Marcus could see no sign of the bearer. He looked around doubtfully, then made his way back toward the terrace, hoping this was the way his man had taken. The noise grew as he approached the supper room, everyone trying to talk over the music, punctuated here and there by a shrill scream.