Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  At about the second hour of the night—for the hours of summer nights are very short—the cart traffic started up again, countrymen leading their donkeys or oxcarts through the deep twilight of the bridge, girls driving herds of swine or gaggles of geese, singing as they strolled through the warm liquid darkness. People crossed from the other direction as well, coming from Rome out to the Tiberside across the river: ladies of the evening in bright silks, Syrians chattering in their own tongue, rattling with astrological amulets, rich men in litters with their little troops of linkboys, clients, slaves carrying their slippers, bound for dinner with friends in the villas out in the Vatican Fields, or on the high wooded slopes of the Janiculum. One of these passed by and Sixtus said quietly, “There’s our man,” and was moving off in its wake almost before Marcus was aware that he’d spoken.

  “How do you know?” he whispered, catching up to the old man as he strolled, calm as any other country traveler in his plain tunic and short traveler’s cloak, after the plain chair with its close-drawn leather curtains. Even with his game leg and his staff, it was surprising how light-footed he was. “That isn’t his litter.”

  “No, but at one point in the proceedings at Quindarvis’ the other night I made it a point to slip out to the slaves’ court and make sure I could recognize his other bearers and link-boys.” The chair turned from the main way down a widish street leading northwest, the flickering torches of the two slaves trotting ahead of it winking on the gold curtain rings, throwing a confusion of shadows on the high tenement walls. Away from the main traffic artery into Rome there was little activity. The shop-fronts were heavily shuttered, and few lights showed in the windows of the tenements that rose like black cliffs on either side of the narrow way. A breeze blew down from the Janiculum, bearing on it the country smell of greenery and life.

  “Why?” whispered Marcus, turning a corner and starting up the slope that led, eventually, to the hill itself. “You didn’t know then that he was a Christian.”

  Sixtus hesitated a moment before replying. “We don’t know that he is now, not for certain,” he said at last. “Other faiths than the Christians use the fish as their symbol.”

  “Yes, but the amulet we picked up when Tullia was kidnapped was inscribed with the initials of the Christos. And besides,” added Marcus, with an uneasy glance at the totally deserted darkness of the streets behind them, “he can’t have evaded Arrius and his men by accident.”

  “No,” the old man agreed. “No, from the beginning it was clear that Tiridates was involved in something—the only question was, what and how? And it always pays to know as much about a potential enemy as you can. It’s clear that he posted bearers and a litter somewhere in anticipation of leaving his house secretly tonight. The other men, the bearers whom you recognized and who recognized you, will have told him that you followed them back to Rome. He’s a man who knows himself to be watched. He’s taking no chances, the night of the Midsummer sacrifice.”

  Some note in his voice caught Marcus’ attention, and suddenly disquieted, he turned to look at the scarred and time-battered face, all but hidden in the darkness of the stone-walled lane. They had left the crowded mazes of the Oriental town behind. They were among the small private houses—half farms, half hovels—that scattered along its outskirts, each with its vegetable patch and poultry yard, its pigsty and tethered goat. To the north, on their right, stretched the dark flat formlessness of the Vatican Fields. Directly ahead of them the Janiculum Hill rose, an undulant line of trees marked with the occasional lights of isolated villas. The litter was now far ahead of them, an occasional jitter of flame seen through the tree trunks, but Sixtus seemed in no great hurry to keep it in sight.

  “You sound as if you know where he’s going.”

  “I know that if he crossed the river, there’s only one place he could be going.” He took Marcus’ arm quickly and drew him into the dense shadows of a little alley between a wall and a shed. After a moment a small group of men and women appeared at the end of the lane from which they had just come, the women veiled in Oriental fashion, the men dark-faced and Semitic, clothed in the rough brown tunics of laborers or slaves. Marcus flattened against the wall as they passed and watched them out of sight up the lane, hurrying, furtive forms lost to sight in the shadows like a random tumbling of blown brown leaves.

  After that they proceeded more carefully. As they climbed the lower slopes of the Janiculum, Marcus was conscious of others upon the road: drifting shapes that flitted cautiously among the shadows of the trees, an occasional litter and once a cisium, the little hooves of its pony rattling furiously on the stones of the road, tearing past them at a great rate and taking the corner ahead with its outside wheel all but coming off the ground. Sixtus had fallen silent in the unbroken darkness of the summer night, but once when the trees cleared a little above some rich man’s house, Marcus could see by starlight how set and drawn his face looked, and how ageless.

  He stopped, tense and puzzled. “Is that music?”

  An owl hooted. Somewhere there was a rustling in the thin woodland of oak and birch, as coneys sought the faint gurgle of an unseen spring. As a dog will hear whistling above what a human can detect, so now Marcus thought that he sensed, or felt in his bones, the deep insistent throb of drums. Faint as the pipes of Pan, a drift of flute notes blew among the dark uneasy trees.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “Where’s it coming from? Is it—is it the Christians?”

  Sixtus’ eyes glinted in the darkness. The starlight put a flicker of white around the ends of his hair, like a fox-fire halo. “It’s coming from up ahead,” he breathed. “Go carefully—they’ll have posted a guard.”

  Anxiety seemed to have sharpened Marcus’ senses to agonizing brilliance. Past the next turn of the path he saw the white line of a marble roof over the brooding cloudbanks of Stygian trees and heard, like a murmuring response to the elusive music, the cooing of a thousand doves.

  “Of course,” he said softly. “Of course—it’s the biggest deserted building in Rome. It’s been shut up for—what did you say, Sixtus? Going on fifteen years?”

  “Going on that,” murmured the old man.

  “If the cult of Atargatis was proscribed in the first year or so of Trajan’s reign, and the temple was deserted...”

  “But it wasn’t deserted,” said Sixtus, “was it?”

  “No—no, of course not. Not if the Christians were using it for their major sacrifices. We can—”

  Surprisingly strong, the old man’s hand closed on his arm as he started forward. Beyond the trees the music had become insistent, driving, like thinned amber fire streaming through me blood veins; there was an urgency to it, like lust or fear. Sixtus whispered, “Listen to me, Marcus...”

  He tried to pull away. “They’ll have started...” It might have been his overwrought imagination, but he had thought for a moment that among the cool scents of vines and water and midsummer night, he had smelled smoke.

  “Listen to me anyway.” Though he spoke in a whisper, such was the authority of Sixtus’ voice that Marcus stopped, as though he were one of the old man’s soldiers. A lifetime in the field had given this deceptively frail old gentleman a habit of command that rivaled the emperor’s.

  Behind the throbbing rise of the music, his voice was low. “Do you remember the story of the Maenads? The worshipers of Dionysus who tore to pieces any who intruded upon their rites?”

  “Yes,” whispered Marcus uneasily, suddenly aware that as well as being the largest deserted building in Rome, the old Temple of Atargatis was also one of the most isolated. “That was in—in The Bacchae—Euripides...”

  “I’m glad you remember your schooldays,” said the old man grimly. “Remember then also that we are greatly outnumbered, and that we are dealing with people who may be in the grip of a religious frenzy. If we make our presence known to them in any way, it may very well be the last thing that either of us ever does.”

  In the darkness the flut
es twisted, the music seeming to gasp and keen, like the mounting urgency of passion. This time Marcus was sure of it; there was smoke on the air. “But Tullia...” he whispered desperately.

  “You’re a philosopher,” retorted Sixtus impatiently. “Do you know the difference between what is possible and what is impossible?”

  The sudden plunge into elenchus startled him. He blinked for a moment and said, “Uh—no.”

  “Well, I’m a military commander,” snapped the old man, “and I do. Now follow me, and we’ll try to get in round the back.”

  The temple grounds were surrounded by a wall, and as Sixtus had said, there was a man at the gate. But fifteen years of neglect had taken its toll. The wall was crumbling, its stones forced apart by steel-fingered vines, and in places the local farmers had made free with the fabric of it to wall their own gardens. There was neither light nor any sign of life in the woods surrounding the temple precinct, only the occasional hoot of an owl, or the soft continual rustling of the temple doves. Marcus found his eyes had grown used to the dim starlight, however, and his companion seemed to be able to see in the dark like a cat. They found a gap in the walls on the far side of the temple itself. Marcus scrambled through it and helped Sixtus up, then they both dropped to the ground on the other side.

  Beyond the dense shadows of the trees that surrounded it, the temple of the Syrian goddess sprawled like a vast white mausoleum, its weather-stained walls half-choked with vines and smeared from the eaves down with a streaky cascade of dove droppings. Darkly gleaming in the starlight the great ponds that had contained the goddess’ sacred fish lay like black pools of oil, clogged with weeds and mud. No light shone from the pillared porch that enclosed the front entrance, but in one of the high small windows on the bare dirty flank of the building, Marcus thought he glimpsed a red flicker of firelight. From here the music was clearly audible, a wild obscene wailing against the thrusting rhythm of the drum, and below it, the steady beating of hands marking time. Once he heard another sound that prickled the hair of his nape with horror: the protesting wail of a small and terrified baby.

  For one instant his eyes met Sixtus’ in the dark. Then the old man was moving off again, light-footed despite his staff, soundless in the deep carpet of matted leaves that strewed the entire precinct. Marcus smelled smoke again, and in the eaves of the temple the doves stirred, fluttering in the darkness.

  Marcus felt, rather than heard, the thin swooshing of steel through air. With speed he had never dreamed he possessed he ducked and threw himself sideways, shutting his teeth against a cry of pain as he felt the flesh of his arm open. He saw a man—black and bronze in the shadows of the trees—standing over him as he fell, caught the thin starlight as it flashed on the descending blade. Marcus kicked desperately at his legs, making him stumble and miss; the air burned in his cut arm and his blood felt astonishingly hot against his flesh. His attacker caught his balance, and he had a blurred glimpse, through terror and pain, of a brown Arabian face framed in close-curled black hair, teeth horribly white in a grimace. The sword sheared down and sideways, slicing at his throat.

  But the blow never landed. Sixtus had reached them in two swift strides and jabbed straight into the fray with the end of his staff, like a bargeman poling off a wharf. The end of the staff took Marcus’ assailant just where the ribs curled up around those rippling stomach muscles, meeting the man’s full-speed attack. The Arab’s mouth popped open, he made a horrible sound, between a groan and a wheeze, and his arms flipped awkwardly out, like the wings of a toy chicken when its string is pulled. Calmly and with lightning speed, Sixtus reversed his walking stick around the fulcrum of his hands, and its iron-shod foot took the man in the temple and dropped him like the dead across Marcus’ body.

  The sword fell to the rustling leaves. From the pillared porch of the temple someone called out softly, warily. Sixtus called back in another language and got a satisfied grunt in reply. Then he knelt beside Marcus and whispered, “Are you all right?”

  He managed to nod. Sixtus pulled the unconscious attacker off him and helped Marcus to sit up.

  “Are you bleeding much?”

  Marcus shook his head, feeling dizzy and very ill. Sixtus used the fallen sword to cut a long strip out of the hem of the attacker’s tunic. In the diffuse starlight Marcus could see it was the taller of the two Arab bearers, the one to whom Tiridates had spoken on the terrace of Quindarvis’ house. Working quickly and calmly, as though he did this every night of his life, Sixtus examined the wound, bound it up, and applied a tourniquet higher up on Marcus’ shoulder to staunch the bleeding. Then, while Marcus was still sitting dazedly trying to get his wits back, the old man pulled off the assailant’s belt and tunic, bound his hands with the belt, and cut strips from the tunic to bind his feet and gag him. Watching the frail old scholar engaged in this task, Marcus realized that the guard had chosen to attack him first, because he didn’t see a lame and white-haired old man as being any threat.

  The idea of it made him giggle. “I thought you said Christians were opposed to violence,” he said, and Sixtus shot him a startled glance. “What’s a Christian doing trying to lop off somebody’s head with a sword?”

  There was a long pause, while the old man finished up his work, and slung the sword and scabbard at his own belt. He handled the weapon as unthinkingly as Marcus would eat an apple. Then he said, “What makes you think these are Christians?” He sat back on his heels, called out into the darkness in another language—Syrian, Marcus thought, or possibly Arabic. The voice from the temple porch replied. Sixtus went into a rapid-fire string of instructions and was rewarded, a moment later, when two dark forms emerged from the shadows of the pillars and went hurrying away through the starlight into the darkness of the woods. He turned back to Marcus. “Are you well enough to go on?”

  He nodded weakly and managed to get to his feet mostly unassisted. “What did you tell them?” he asked, nodding toward the temple porch. “And what do you mean, these aren’t Christians?”

  Sixtus was already moving out into the open starlight, “I told them I thought I’d heard intruders on the north side of the grounds,” he whispered back over his shoulder. “It should keep them busy until we can get in and get out.” He moved with a swift scuttling hobble, from shadow to shadow, toward the darkness of the porch, and Marcus, with a quick glance to the right and left, followed. The music was like a drug in his blood, a fever that drew him to its crescendo; it was as though he could feel the heartbeat of the worshipers within the dark sanctuary through the surging beat of their hands.

  The doors of the temple were shut, barred with wan starlight and the black shadows of the pillars. Crouching to either side were huge things of marble and bronze, things with eyes and wings, beaks and claws. There was an evil in them that made Marcus shiver as he passed the point where those horrible gazes locked, and he wondered if Sixtus felt it, too. The heartbeat of the drum was louder here, and as the old man pushed open the dark door, he became conscious of another sound, the whining snarl of a whip. The music grew stronger, insistent, like a streak of red in darkness; he heard a man groan and shrill voices chanting. He wondered how they would find Tullia in this place, and how they would get out when they did.

  Soundless as cats, they slipped into the pitch darkness of the temple.

  After the faint starlight the temple anteroom was chokingly dark, the blackness like a muffling blanket. The room seemed alive, the walls vibrating with the deep groaning of the drum, the air seeming to shiver and flutter with the beat of hands, the drugged sway of the dance. The place stank of blood and incense, of smoke that could not mask the pungent salt muskiness of sex. There was a sickness, an ugliness, to the feel of the place, the insinuation of forbidden things, that turned Marcus’ stomach and made his skin crawl with an unspeakable feeling of horror. As his eyes grew used to the deeper darkness, he made out tenebrous shapes of couches, of dragged blankets and scattered pillows among the heavy Oriental columns, of old stains on
the floor. A single slit of firelight from the sanctuary doors towered at least twenty feet in the darkness before them, red as blood; the black beating air was rank and living as a rapist’s breath in his face.

  But he dared ask nothing, only followed Sixtus as though hypnotized. The dark shape limped softly before him, to the cyclopean doors.

  As he approached them the smell of smoke grew stronger, and with it the stench of new blood, copper-sharp in the hot air, and the stink of superheated metal. Firelight widened over his face as he touched the door. It moved soundlessly on oiled hinges, to show what lay beyond.

  He had a blurred impression of darkness, of pillars, of a double line of black marble phalluses six feet high, gleaming with the red glare of the fire. Beyond them like a mingling of fire and shadows men and women swayed, bodies half-naked and glistening with sweat, heads lolling, dark hair falling over faces drenched as though by rain, over eyes whose white showed in a rim all around dilated black pupils. Gimcrack jewelry and solid gold caught flashes of the light. The eyes were empty of feeling, of knowledge; they were wide with the demon emptiness of madness.

  Boneless as the creation of a fever-dream, dancers leaped and swayed in the glare of the braziers. Thin androgynous bodies swayed and whirled, streaked all over with streaming blood. They had sharpened shells and little knives in their hands, ripping at their own flesh and one another’s with staring, uncaring, unconscious eyes, and the blood splattered up over the feet of the image, the One for Whom they danced.