Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  “Let me talk to him,” he said.

  Arrius shrugged. “You’re welcome to try. I couldn’t make him open his mouth.” He stood up and stretched, to unkink his back. “I’m going over to that eating-house down on Tuscan Street. Let our Son of Asclepius know that I plan to have some answers, one way or the other, by the time I come back.”

  And he strode from the room, deadly and impersonally cruel as a tiger.

  Marcus descended the ladder from the guardroom to the smothering darkness of the corridor below in an almost unbearable torment of mind. Justice cried out to him to tell Arrius to wait. Why dislocate every joint in an innocent man’s body—or a guilty one’s, for that matter—if the night would bring them the proof they sought? Why put anyone through the hideous torment of the rack on the say-so of a prating, cowardly person who had clearly been making accusations at random, especially if they were going to follow Tiridates that night to the rendezvous and the Christian sacrifice, and recover Tullia anyway?

  But if they did not, after tonight it might be too late. If they failed—if Tiridates proved too clever for them, as the Christians had twice now slipped through the fingers of the guards—if Tiridates was, in fact, Papa—they would have no further clue. When Varus returned in four days from Sicily, it would be to find his daughter still gone, either dead or a forced participant in Christian rites. Then all of them—Nicanor, and the girl Dorcas, Judah Symmachus and his innocent father—would be consumed by his revenge.

  Did he have the right to endanger them all, for a man who might just possibly be guilty anyway?

  The guard on the cell that had once held the Christians gave Marcus a half-comical salute, and said, “‘Mornin’, Professor. Callin’ on our friend here?” Under the greasy yellow of the torchlight his face looked stupid and cruel, for all its amiable expression.

  Marcus straightened the inexpert folds of his soiled toga. “Yes. Please.”

  The guard unlocked the door. “Popular fella. Hear he’s got afternoon callers lined up, too.” He held up his torch to illuminate the cramped little hole.

  The stink of the place was like mud in the nostrils. Nicanor lay in the dense shadows at the far corner of the cell, his face turned to the wall. He neither moved nor looked up when Marcus entered.

  “Nicanor?” said Marcus doubtfully. He received no response. “Nicanor, it’s me, Marcus. I have to talk to you.” He crossed the room to that unmoving figure in the darkness. “I’m sorry I—” He stopped. From the door the general stink of the room had overwhelmed it, but this close it was unmistakable. The hour or so he’d spent in the pits of the amphitheater, if nothing else, had taught him the stench of fresh blood. “Holy gods...” He dropped to his knees, turning that hunched and drawn-up body over. His hand came away blazing red, as if he had set it down in paint.

  “How’d he do it?” Arrius pushed the plate of bread and stew across the little table at him; Marcus shook his head weakly. Behind them on Tuscan Street, the male whores for whom this district was famous were beginning to parade in their long-sleeved tunics and eye paint, primping their perfumed curls.

  “He had a cloakpin. He ripped the veins in his wrists.” Marcus shivered at the memory. “The physician from the gladiatorial school was the closest we could reach—the one down by the Flavian. He was working on him when I left.”

  Arrius finished off his wine and stood up, shaking straight the folds in his red cloak. “So he’s not dead?”

  “Not when I left.”

  He paid his reckoning and a little over for the girl who’d served him, who favored him with a big smile from which half the teeth were gone. “You’d be surprised how tough men can be,” he mused, as they jostled through the crowds on that narrow street. “I’ve seen men crawl twenty miles with a broken spear-head in them, then have the camp doctor cut it out at the end of it, and have them wake up and ask for food just as we were rolling them up in their shrouds. Doctors at the gladiatorial schools will tell you stranger things than that.” They detoured around a little knot of brightly clothed Syrians, grouped in the doorway of a fortune-teller’s shop, their rings flashing with the waving of their arms. “We’ll see what we can find out tonight, but if—”

  He broke off, as the clamor from a side street interrupted him, a medley of jeers and curses and men’s voices yelling, “Murderer! Corpse-eater!”

  “What the—”

  Halfway down the lane a mob had gathered, flinging stones and garbage at the bent, spiderlike figure of a man crouched against the pink-washed wall of a tall building that ran the length of the block. They were idlers, men out of work for the most part. Men who yesterday had occupied their time at Quindarvis’ celebrated games, thought Marcus, and hadn’t quite had their fill. But a couple of the local shopkeepers had joined them, a slippermaker in his little leather apron and a man with an ironworker’s soot-blackened face. Children crowded the lane, picking up dung from the road to hurl. Cries of “Christian! Jew! Christian!” tangled in the thick hot air.

  Arrius snarled a startled curse and left Marcus to stride toward the mob.

  The Christian straightened up a little, and a familiar voice screeched over the din of the crowd. “You stone the prophets of the Lord! God made himself manifest as Christ Jesus to smite the abodes of sin, to delve out the taproots of abomination! Oh ye wicked and adulterous generation...”

  “Abomination yourself, you dirty ghoul!” someone yelled, and a piece of dog shit splattered stickily against the Christian Ignatius’ dirty robe.

  The shrill voice rose. “Repent of your evils! Cast aside your wickedness and your fornications! God shall smite this city with his fire, and shall shatter it into atoms...”

  “That stupid little...” The centurion began to force his way through the crowd with businesslike brutality. In the crowd behind him Marcus heard one idler mutter to another.

  “Serves the little bastard right. Anyone who’d believe the Lord made himself manifest as Christ, rather than merely imbuing the human substance with divine nature, deserves to be stoned.”

  “‘Specially after it clearly states in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that there was one God and one Lord Jesus Christ.”

  “You’d know that little bugger’d get it all wrong.”

  Marcus swung around, but people were pressing up so closely behind him he could not see who’d spoken. All around him mouths were open, men and women howling, “Murderer! Kidnapper! Kill him!”

  A bigger stone tore a jagged bruise of red in Ignatius’ cheek. He fell back against the wall behind him, shaking his bony fists at them all and screaming, “Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortionate shall inherit the Kingdom of God...” Juice from a burst plum trickled down the side of his bald head into the blood in his beard. In the doorway of the house behind him women had appeared, clutching their thin robes about them, some of them shrieking in excitement, others giggling. A bigger rock smashed him in the shoulder, whirling him around, and he fell to his knees in the muck of the lane. Baying, the mob closed in.

  “Here!” roared Arrius, in a voice trained to carry over urban bread riots. “What is all this? Get back, curse you...”

  At the sight of his armor the mob milled a little, losing their momentum. Some of them dropped the rocks they bore. One man who’d been kicking the hunched little form on the ground gave it a final boot and turned sulkily away, like a child called to order by an unloved older brother. In the crowded doorway of the tall house a woman pushed her way to the fore, her gilt hair dressed in careful curls around a heavily made-up face, her thin tunic and toga of flame-colored silk leaving neither her profession nor her charms in any question. In a face like Venus’ her eyes were cold as a moneylender’s.

  “Take that little pig out of here and keep him from slandering decent people!” she cried, in a voice rich and sweet as Samian wine. “I run an orderly house, and I
can’t have filthy little troublemakers like him...”

  The crumpled form in the mud stirred itself; a bloody, angry face was raised, fire sparking from those dark brilliant eyes. “Whore that sitteth on the waters! Scarlet mother of adulteries, drunken on the blood of the martyrs of Christ!”

  The red rosebud mouth popped open in shocked distaste. “Well, I never!”

  Arrius seized Ignatius by the arm and hauled him to his feet.

  “Pig! Devil! Scum!” shrieked the Christian, spitting on the man’s scarred brown arm. “Bloody beast of Caesar! You persecute the servants of the Lord!”

  Around them the mob was already losing interest, drifting away down the narrow street or returning to abandoned pursuits. Behind the blonde woman the gaggle of girls still peeked, or else pulled the thin gauze of their dresses tight, so that the rouged tips of their breasts showed through the cloth, and blew kisses to the men who still lingered, as though to say that it was not too early in the day for other matters than killing Christians.

  The centurion held his rescued martyr at arm’s length and looked up at the madam. “What’s our boy here been up to, Plotina?”

  “You saw him! Cursing at customers, blocking the doors, ranting that garbage...” She shrugged, her big hard breasts shifting like melons under the thin silk. “I’ve always run an orderly house and I pay taxes to keep it that way. I can’t have this kind of thing. My customers come here to relax, have a little decent fun...”

  A little decent fun like you were having at Quindarvis’ supper-party, thought Marcus suddenly, recognizing that round pink face in its frame of too-bright hair. It occurred to him to wonder if she’d helped provide the entertainment, and he felt a kind of sick distaste, as though he’d bitten into something rotten.

  Meanwhile Ignatius was striking ineffectually at his rescuer’s arm. “Beast of seven heads! Pimp of Antichrist! In the days to come you will be thrown into the fiery pit, and the saints of God shall laugh to hear you scream!”

  “Hey!” One of the few remaining onlookers, a big burly fellow in a blacksmith’s leather kilt, cuffed him angrily. “He didn’t have to save you from stoning, you little Jew.”

  “What is stoning to me?” screamed Ignatius, “What are the beasts of the arena to me? In rending my body they shall offer me a pure and perfect sacrifice to the Lord...”

  “Not if you go around preaching that heretical drivel they won’t,” grumbled a retreating voice somewhere behind Marcus.

  “Mother of harlots! You are filled with the abominations of the earth! You shall be made desolate and naked, and the beasts shall eat your flesh while your soul burns in hell!”

  “I’m afraid you got that backward, preacher,” said Arrius quietly. “You’re the one most likely to be cooked or eaten, and what happens to your soul after that is no business of mine. But I have a few questions to ask you, first.”

  XII

  Though I am worshiped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated with ail manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me. The primeval Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, Mother of the Gods; the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropian Artemis; for the islanders of Cyprus I am Paphian Aphrodite; for the archers of Crete I am Dictynna; for the trilingual Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; for the Eleusinians their ancient Mother of the Corn....

  Invocation of Isis (from Apuleius)

  “AND DID YOU GET any sense out of him?” Sixtus selected a date from the bowl on the table before them, turned it over in his fingers as though searching for a maker’s mark, and consumed it with slow enjoyment, his eyes never leaving Marcus’ face.

  Marcus shook his head. In the garden beyond the open archways of the summer dining room, late sunlight shimmered among the embroidered veils of the pepper trees, making a mingled harlequin of shadows on the worn marble floor. “Well, when we got back he was taken up with Nicanor, and then the hangman had left to take his siesta. Arrius questioned him himself—pretty roughly, I thought—but all he got was ranting.”

  “Hardly surprising,” commented the scholar. “He sounds like a man not easily turned aside from his purposes—certainly not by anything so paltry as life or limb. How’s Nicanor?”

  Marcus looked unhappily down at the tabletop, a smooth-worn marquetry of fruitwoods and mother-of-pearl. “He’s alive,” he said quietly. “That’s about all that can be said for the present. It’s too early to tell. He cut longways down the veins, instead of across.”

  Sixtus nodded. “He’s a physician, he’d know about things like that.”

  Churaldin came in, carrying a bronze wine mixer. At his heels trotted the little dancer from Quindarvis’ feast, well-brushed and well-scrubbed in her plain linen dress, and shy to the point of muteness.

  “But why would he do it?” asked Marcus miserably, as the child handed him a cup.

  “Possibly he did not wish to be racked. I shouldn’t, myself.” He accepted the offered cup from the little girl as though she’d been a table. She was looking at him with worship in her eyes; if he’d spoken to her she’d probably have fled the room.

  “But if he was innocent...”

  “What makes you think he was?” asked Sixtus. “If he was a Christian—or if he had anything else to hide—suicide would be the logical course. And even if he was innocent, you cannot prove innocence by torture—only guilt, or stamina. Will you see him tomorrow?”

  Marcus nodded wretchedly. “I think a lot depends on what we find tonight.”

  In the garden outside the light was fading; the evening promised warm and still. Through the tangling vines he could see the gray cat beginning to prowl, green eyes wide with the madness of summer. Churaldin asked, “Will there be anything else?” and Sixtus shook his head. “Let’s go, Octavia.” Collecting her dippers and water jar, the little girl hurried out at his heels. As the shadows swallowed them up, Marcus could see the tall Briton rumple the child’s dark hair.

  “You bought her from Quindarvis?”

  Sixtus shook his head. “No, I simply left with her. Since I contrived to look unspeakably bored during the rest of the orgy, they now suspect me of vices they can only guess at—even our friend Porcius Craessius was tremendously impressed.”

  Marcus cried, “How disgusting!”

  The blue eyes twinkled. “I would far prefer what others will say about me to what I would think of myself if I left her there. I don’t suppose you saw more than half of what went on—you left rather early.”

  “I saw enough,” muttered Marcus.

  “I daresay you did. Where were you when you were attacked that night? You said close to the circus?”

  “Pretty close to the east corner of the circus,” he agreed. He was becoming more and more used to the old philosopher’s lightning changes of topic. “We passed the Temple of Ceres almost immediately, when those two Christians saw me home. I still don’t understand that—”

  “Who understands Christians? Would you say the men you were following were headed for the river?”

  Marcus nodded. “I thought so at the time. I remember wondering how I was going to track them across the bridges, or through the Tiberside district. If you think the Subara’s bad, the streets of the Tiberside are like some kind of Damascus bazaar. Most people over there don’t even speak Latin. Once over the bridge they could go anywhere...”

  “Indeed.” Sixtus nodded, folding his thick knotted hands against his chin and staring out into space over the minor mountain range of his knuckles. Then his blue eyes seemed to flicker into focus once again. “And where is Arrius posting his men?”

  “Various places on the Aventine, where they know about houses with tunnels or subcellars. A couple of places near the circus, in that warren of slums there.”

  “Anyone on the bridge?”

  “Not that I know of. Sixtus, why do we have to wait? Why can’t we just have Tiridates arrested, search his house...”

  “Who would arrest him?” asked the old man reasonably. “
Who would order the search? The city prefect’s away. The praetorian prefect might, if he wanted to risk a complaint to the emperor about the way he’s fulfilling his duties, but what if he’s wrong? What if he can’t prove Tiridates is anything more than an extremely wealthy and powerful member of the Syrian merchant community who happens to have a fish tattooed on his arm? The emperor is notoriously hard on secret informers and men who listen to them.”

  “But it’s Midsummer Eve!” cried Marcus. “The sacrifice is tonight! We can’t just sit here...”

  “We’re not going to,” said Sixtus mildly, standing up and limping to the corner to fetch his staff. “We’re going to take a little walk down to the Tiber bridges.”

  It was just over a mile from the run-down mansion on the Quirinal Hill to the bend in the Tiber where the brown waters divided around the little island of Tiberina with its hospital and its shrine to Asclepius. At this hour—the beginning of the first hour of the night—the two bridges that spanned the stream such a short distance from each other were almost deserted, though later Marcus knew they’d be a madhouse of cart traffic as the small farmers from the slopes of the Janiculum Hill and the Vatican started bringing in their produce to the city markets. The last tints of color paled and changed in the western sky, and degree by degree the hot blue summer sky deepened, from the color of a robin’s egg to that of a peacock’s breast, through teal, through the ultramarine of the summer Adriatic, to the unearthly blue of fine dark velvet, sewn with stars and dusted with galaxies of light. Sixtus sat on the stone balustrade of the bridge, talking of philosophy or of desert warfare, occasionally dropping a leaf or a twig down into the brown stream, while Marcus watched the pinholes of fire sparkle into life all along the darkness of the thick crowding suburbs on the river’s western bank. In the calmness of that warm milky night—or perhaps merely due to the old man’s serene personality—he had no sense of wasting time, nor of impatience. He felt rather like a runner somewhere in the middle of a relay race, waiting for the torch to come to his hand, but not about to fret himself until it did.