An androgynous pantomimist was dancing the courting of Venus by Vulcan with a hunchbacked, lame, and truly deformed dwarf. The men were shouting with laughter, roaring their approval as the golden-haired sylph slipped through those big hairy arms, danced away from the dragging steps. As Marcus watched, a candied date caught Vulcan squarely on his hump, and someone in the audience yelled, “Dead in the gold! Ten points for Plotina!” Marcus scanned the room quickly, glimpsed Tiridates soddenly stuffing himself on peppered thrushes’ legs dipped in wine, ignoring his graceful, sloe-eyed dinner companion who was being uncontrollably sick over the foot of the couch. Another man rolled heavily to his feet, staggered toward the tiled arch of a discreetly curtained door, stopping only to collect a peacock plume from a silver vase that stood on a table outside it.
The feast, thought Marcus, was obviously a success. He stepped cautiously back from the shadows of the pillars that concealed him, cast a quick glance up and down the terrace for signs of movement. Something stirred in the dense bar of blackness cast by a statue at the top of the steps, and Quindarvis’ voice floated to him, thick and annoyed in the mellow sweetness of the night air, with words he did not catch.
A male voice with all the quality of plum syrup replied, “My dear Priscus, anyone would take you for a tradesman’s son, to complain of costs! The life of a gentleman is to expand himself, to taste the sweetness of the world, to live as befits a man. To do otherwise is to diet oneself at the banquet of life. And speaking of banquets, dearest, didn’t you say there was a course entirely composed of little gamebirds coming up?”
He could see them, outlined against the moonlight. Quindarvis had changed his dinner suit for one that was mint green stitched all over with silver. A wreath of white roses was gummed by unguents into his dark hair. As a noise caught his attention he turned his head sharply, the flat planes of his face grotesque in the shimmering light of the summer moon. The smears of melting perfume made streaks in his rouge. “Who’s that?”
Three men materialized from the stairway below. Marcus could see that two of them were the ex-gladiators the praetor kept as bodyguards, big men with slab-sided, bovine faces and the bodies of athletes run slightly to fat. The man in between them—a menial slave by his dress—was wringing his hands and weeping in terror, shaking so badly that his captors had to support him between them. One of the gladiators said, “We found him out behind the litters in the court, sir. Drunk as a sow.”
“Oh,” drawled the fruity voice in fading accents. “How utterly gross.” The man caught his own balance unsteadily on the base of a statue. “If there’s anything I cannot stand, it’s a drunk slave. Take him away and drown him in the fishpond.”
The gladiator glanced for confirmation at his master; Quindarvis nodded. “Do it.” The slave collapsed, sobbing with terror and clutching at the praetor’s knees, choking that he hadn’t meant it, and begging for his life.
“What’d you mean, you didn’t mean it?” asked the other man languidly, and hiccuped. “You did it, didn’t you? Really, slaves have the most amazin’ view of the world.”
In the thickness of the concealing shadows, Marcus felt ill. The boys throw stones in jest, the poet Horace had once said. But the frogs they throw them at do not die in jest—they die in earnest. The sweet strains of heartbreakingly lovely music, flutes and cithara and the glittering tinkle of the sistrum, sounded from the supper room. The gladiators took their victim down the steps toward the green murky water and razor-sharp weeds of the fish pond, and Quindarvis and his dapper friend recrossed the terrace, passing within a few feet of Marcus without seeing him. “...I fear if there’s another one of your excellent courses in the offing, my dear boy, I shall really have to pay a little call on the vomitorium before I can go on...”
He slipped from his hiding place, moved lightly down the deserted terrace. There was no sign of the Arab, so he doubled back, puzzled, to the slaves’ court, wondering if the recognition he’d seen in the man’s eyes had been a mistake, and he’d merely left the court to relieve himself in the bushes outside. But he was not there either, among the group of men still talking idly of work and the games and women, or among those who were lying resignedly down in the dust or on the pavement of the porch to sleep. And in any case he knew the man had known him. He must be waiting for him somewhere.
But he could find no sign of him in the whispering groves of trees that surrounded the house itself. Nor did he find him in the most obvious meeting place, a half-ruined shrine covered with rambling roses that stood in the midst of the gardens a dozen yards from the house. Annoyed with himself for not having tried to make contact with the man earlier, he returned to the terrace, determined to return to the court and have a try at the other bearer who’d carried Tullia’s chair that night, provided he could recognize the man.
The noise from the supper room had risen to a crescendo of shrieks above the striving of the voices and the music. Through a fog of crimson lamplight, the room seemed to blaze with colors; even in the cool open air of the terrace, Marcus was sickened by the stench of wine, spilled food, and vomit. A troop of little girls was enacting a masque of nymphs surprised by satyrs in the forest, and either they had not expected to be truly molested by the goatskinned men who emerged from behind the screens of tubbed orange trees to attack them, or they were all consummate actresses. Those who could get away fled shrieking from their obscene pursuers among the supper-couches, while the guests roared with laughter and called out advice. He saw that his sister’s betrothed, Lectus Garovinus, had rolled from his couch to lie in a drunken stupor among the deep litter of crab claws, snailshells, gnawed artichoke leaves and upset dishes on the floor. The entire pavement of intricately colored marbles seemed to be awash in spilled wine. Elsewhere a bald-shaved Syrian woman was fellating a senator who appeared to be far more interested in the platter of shellfish in honey he was devouring. At the head table Quindarvis had returned to his place as king of the feast, having changed his dinner suit once again, this time for one the color of dark Falernian wine. He was watching the room with a kind of drunken self-satisfaction, mocking his guests’ excesses without disapproving of them, seemingly pleased at having set so perfect a stage. The woman beside him, thick and husky, was laughing, her blonde curls loosened to a damp aureole around her plump pink face. His hand was idly busy, working loose the diamond pins that held the shoulders of her dress; the sweat-damp tissue stuck momentarily to her rouged nipples, then folded downward over his thighs.
In the midst of the orgy Sixtus lay on his supper-couch, a half-finished winecup untouched in his hand, clearly sober, his white hair wreathed in violets. He was looking about him with an interested expression, but his blue eyes were hard under their heavy lids. At his feet sat one of the little nymphs, a child of seven or eight, holding the ripped remains of her veils about her body and huddling as close to him as she dared.
So paralyzed was he by disgust, and the horrible fascination that the obscene holds, that Marcus did not hear the blundering steps approaching from the terrace until someone all but fell into his back. He whirled, startled, wondering for a horrified moment what they did to slaves who spied upon the antics of their so-called betters...
...and found himself face-to-face with his younger brother.
Felix blinked at him, struggling manfully to focus his eyes. “I say—Marcus?”
Marcus shoved him aside and darted down the terrace. Waving his hand Felix tottered after him, calling out, “Here—you—hold on—” in a feeble voice, his feet, bare for the feast, slapping damply on the lapis tiles. From another archway leading into the supper room a man abruptly staggered, fell to his hands and knees almost under Felix’s feet, and began to vomit mightily. Felix skidded to a stop, barely avoiding falling over him, “ ’Scuse me—so sorry—thought I saw someone I knew...”
Taking advantage of the diversion, Marcus ducked through a narrow archway into a deserted serving-chamber used for dinners on the terrace itself, blundering into a ta
ble in the darkness and catching his balance with a deftness of which he had never before dreamed himself capable.
A moment later he saw Felix pass the entrance, looking vaguely about him at the empty, moon-washed spaces. He scratched his careful curls, dislodging the wreath of dark roses tangled in his hair. “Dash it,” Marcus heard him murmur. “Must be drunker’n I thought.” The sound of his unsteady feet retreated, wandering back toward the primordial chaos of the orgy.
Marcus had almost made up his mind that it was safe to come out when he heard other footsteps approaching: two men, talking softly, one barefoot and one wearing stout shoes. He shrank back into his dark covert as shapes loomed in the door. The stink of perfumed unguents, wine, and sweat assailed him. The shadow of a tree across the terrace hid their faces in an inky bar of blackness, but the bigger of the men was unmistakable. An enormous mountain clothed in sticky primrose silk, short oiled curls, a fat round hand leaning against the edge of the open archway with its knobbed, glittering cestus of jewels. By the moonlight Marcus could clearly see, tattooed small on the oily flesh of that corpulent forearm, a small and beautifully done fish.
He felt exactly as if someone had thrown a great drench of icy water over his head; as if he had seen his father give a gold piece to a beggar. The breath went out of his lungs in a kind of stupid gasp, which he barely had the wits to keep silent. He heard Tiridates whisper “...do not care why and am not interested in why. Take him back to town with you. It’s obvious we’re being spied on.” A murmured query. “No. Don’t go back to the house at all. I’ll tell Roxanne where you are in the morning. The sacrifice is an important one, and doubly so now. We cannot risk stupid hitches now.”
A second voice whispered in assent. A shadow detached itself; moonlight touched hawklike Arab features, the blue smudge of a bruise, as the bearer left his master and hastened away down the moonlit terrace. Tiridates stood watching him go for a long time. In the shadows Marcus heard the retreating tap of heavy shoes and, above it, the terrified pounding of his heart.
IX
You are a thoughtless fool, unmindful of sudden disaster, if you don’t make your will before you go out to have dinner....
Juvenal
HE REACHED ROME, exhausted, a good quarter hour before Tiridates’ two bearers, at the cost of grilling agony that seemed to fire through every muscle in his body. He knew the chair-bearers were professionals; once on the road, they’d move with that steady, ground-eating jog that he could never have hoped to emulate. They’d have outpaced him long before they reached the suburbs, and moreover, the brightness of the moonlight would have made it impossible for him to follow closely enough to do any good.
All this went through his mind in the few moments before Tiridates had turned and lumbered back to join the riot in the supper room, and he knew that his only hope of tracking them was to reach Rome ahead of them and wait where the Ardeatine Way ran into the city among the sprawling commercial districts around the south slope of the Aventine Hill.
Resolutely thrusting from his mind the screaming protests of his common sense about the distance back to Rome and the speed he’d have to travel to beat them there, he set off at a jogging run from the villa. To pick up distance he went cross-country, through the woods, leaping like a frightened gazelle at every shadow. The lions were still unpleasantly fresh in his mind. He scrambled over the park wall among the roadside tombs that stretched for miles outside the city along every highway. In the eerie darkness under the trees, it was difficult to maintain a philosophic attitude and keep from breaking into a panicked run, but he managed it and heard up ahead the noises of the road—the creak of wheels, the clip of tiny hooves, the mutter of farmers’ voices.
Though it was not long past midnight, the local farmers were already bringing their produce to Rome. As he jogged toward the city they were all around him: tiny donkeys laden with bundles almost double their size, wood-wheeled carts that raised a clatter like a troop of cavalry on the stones of the road, men and women and some very small children with bundles on their backs and heads. Some of them carried torches, but most relied on the brightness of the moon. As he loped between and among and past them, the night seemed filled with the murmur of their back-country dialect and the smell of onions.
In time the tombs gave way to small houses, with plots of cabbages and coops of chickens, which in turn became warehouses, three-story apartment buildings, suburban baths, then bigger warehouses, taller apartments, and the dark stink of the city, which seemed to rise before him against the starry darkness like the black all-devouring monster that the Christians called it. The small square in front of the Naevian Gate was crowded with farmers and carts, and blazing with torchlight like the mouth of hell.
As Arrius had said, the gate-guards had been increased on account of the notables who would be coming back later in the night. At present the soldiers were dicing on the raised platform that in the daytime was the center of the ranks of rented cisiums, and barely gave Marcus a glance as he stumbled, gasping for breath, through the crowds to the gate itself. Philosophy may do wonders for the mind, he thought wearily, but it certainly doesn’t prepare you for times like these. Every muscle in his body ached, rather to his surprise—since like most nonathletes he’d assumed that running is done with the legs—and he vowed to himself that he’d begin a course of exercise at the baths tomorrow, provided he wasn’t murdered in the meantime.
The court on the other side of the gates was much smaller and, consequently, far more crowded. In addition to the produce haulers there were construction workers with loads of marble and brick for repairs on the aqueduct. The din of voices was tremendous, the smell of brick dust and bodies, the shine of torchlight on straining muscles and the black relief of shadows. Marcus slumped down beside a public fountain, doused a handful of water over his face (much to the indignation of the oxteam already drinking there), and settled down to wait.
At rest, his body was immediately assailed by cramp, and his mind by doubt.
What if the bearers weren’t returning by this gate? What if they’d anticipated him and circled to enter by the Appian Gate? What if they weren’t coming back to Rome at all?
No, Tiridates had said, “Take him back to town with you.”
But not to the house.
To Papa, whoever Papa was?
Tiridates a Christian. And his sister Roxanne, evidently—a woman Marcus had never seen but with whom he remembered Tullia had gone shopping that day. And been unaccountably delayed, as a matter of fact. The bearers had been switched, too. An accident? Or a touch of poison, and a kindly offer of replacement. Marcus broke into a sweat, his stomach hurting worse than even a three-mile jog could account for.
“Sacrifice,” he had said. Sweet gods, don’t let us be too late!
They know we’re on their trail. The girl Dorcas—Tiridates—word has been got to Papa. Were they holding her for sacrifice at a certain time, or would the approach of capture make them abort the whole project?
What were the holy seasons of the Christians, if they had any? Like the ides of April, when the cows were slaughtered for Vesta?
Sixtus would know, he told himself. Why hadn’t he tried to see Sixtus, tried at least to send him word, before leaving the villa? Not that the old man would have been much help to him, but at least...
The Arab bearers stepped through the gate. They were clearly recognizable as they passed under the torches and seemed to have barely broken a sweat. Marcus stood up as casually as possible and slipped between a farm cart and a team of oxen dragging a sledgeload of bricks, circled through the press of carts, and followed the stream of traffic along Ardeatine Street, keeping them in sight as best he could.
The street itself was wide enough to admit a broad streak of moonlight, and enough of the farmers and carters bore torches for him to see his quarry at a distance. He kept to the same side of the street, knowing he’d never be able to cross the crowd in time if they turned down one of the small pitch-black alle
yways. They walked quickly, talking softly under the noise of the crowd, but seemed to be in no particular haste. It was only after they crossed under the black towering arches of the aqueduct that they left the main way, turning left into the crowded slums that surrounded the circus.
One of the men had a lantern, which he now uncovered; the grimy light bobbed ahead of him as Marcus slipped along at their heels. He had to close distance a little; if they turned a corner, he would lose them in the maze. What he’d do if they came upon one of the gangs of toughs that haunted these sightless canyons by night he couldn’t imagine. It would be beyond bearing if he lost perhaps his last chance to save Tullia’s life because he was being robbed or rolled in the mud by a band of drunk blue bloods.
From the darkness above him he heard a shutter creak and flattened himself against the wall just in time. A stinking shower splattered into the squishy stream that already ran down the center of the alley. Up ahead, he heard one of the bearers curse in Arabic.
They turned one corner, then another. They seemed to be making for the river; above him and to his right he glimpsed the white wall of marble with its statues standing eternal guard. The circus, where some poor sand-raker—or a team of them, considering the size of the place—would be sieving broken shards of wood and bronze dyed with the blood of men and horses from the sands. Tomorrow the games would be back at the Flavian again. Bound to stakes and wrapped in the bleeding hides of slaughtered beasts, Telesphorus and his little crew would meet the lions.
He wondered if Quindarvis, as sponsor of the games, had anything special planned for the women.
The Arabs muttered among themselves, evidently debating the way. Distantly Marcus could catch the din of the markets along the Tiber, a less exotic cacophony than one heard under the Flavian, but no less loud. The meat market was somewhere ahead, with its cattle pens and hog wallows, its coops of chickens and geese. Even at this hour hunters would be coming in with game from the woods and fields—hares, partridges, pigeons, the bounty of all those half-forgotten goddesses of me countryside, Flora and Fauna and Pomona. And beyond the meat market lay the river itself, and the bridges to the dense Tiberside district around the feet of the Janiculum Hill, like a suburb of Damascus or Antioch transplanted to the outskirts of Rome.
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