She was exactly as she had been in the image Sixtus had showed him, back in his vine-cave of a study. Gross, obscene, but with a horrible fascination in that many-breasted body, her head covered in jewels, her piscine tail resting among the lions crouched at her feet. Her eyes stared out, wide and fixed and hideous beyond description; her hands, reaching out over the flames that flickered in her hollowed lap, glowed already.
As Marcus watched in horror something stirred on the floor among the priests, something huge and gross and glistening, like a mountain of wet leather polished with new blood. It heaved itself to its knees. The whips sang, crossing their weals over the rolled fat of that immense back, and where the welts joined, blood trickled to mingle with the man’s pouring sweat. The priests swayed closer, beating him not only with their whips but with their stringy hair, and the face he raised to the glowing idol was transformed by ecstasy almost beyond recognition. Firelight, catching in the jewels in his rings, scattered glittering over his arms. The fish of the goddess, tattooed in the flesh, seemed to swim beneath the surface of a sun-sparkling sea.
The man’s voice was the bellow of a dying bull. “Atargatis!”
Pounding, crashing, the beating hands and bodies of the congregation echoed back the cry, “Atargatis!”
“You are the Mother! You are all that was and is!”
“Atargatis!”
“You are the she-goat that suckles us all! You are the ocean in which we all swim!”
“Atargatis!”
“Grant us this prayer, give us this blessing that it is within your unending power to give!”
“Atargatis!” The roar of the voices was like the sea, like a drug or the hideous logic of a hallucination. An emaciated eunuch rose from the stairs where he had collapsed in exhaustion, his body pouring blood from a dozen gashes, even his hair sticky and pointed with the stuff. He stretched forth bony hands and took something from a basket that had been in the shadows at the idol’s feet, something that wriggled and began to wail in sleepy protest.
Tiridates extended his huge arms toward the idol, the priest, the glowing fire that heated the red-hot brazen hands of the statue; his voice sounded shrill and stiff, almost like something produced from metal and wind. “Atargatis, I must take this girl to wife! Find her where they have hidden her! Send her safe to us!”
The voices of the congregation rose in a storming echo over the wavelike crashing of their hands. The whips sang, tearing the fat flesh; the thin eunuch came forward and mopped a handful of blood and sweat from Tiridates’ gleaming bosom and smeared it over the baby he held so easily in one huge spreading hand. The child began to kick and cry in earnest: a half-Nubian baby, Marcus saw, a boy of less than two months, tiny hands and feet kicking in terror at the noise and the smell of hot blood. The priest held it up for the congregation to see; his grinning skull-face was nothing human. Tiridates’ shouting was all but drowned in the roaring of the mob. “Send her safe!”
“Atargatis!”
“Bless us, your children!”
“Atargatis!”
“Let not the plans of thy most loyal son be crushed by stupid Fate! All-powerful, all-Mother, let this girl be found...”
“Atargatis...”
The priest was a black shape before the immense gold monstrosity, a skeleton silhouetted in the fire and the blaze of the searing brass hands that stretched over it like a grill. Terrified by the heat, the baby had begun to scream, but the sound barely carried over the clapping, the stamping, the rising chant of the goddess name...
“Drop it!”
Marcus had not thought any human voice could carry over that infernal din, much less that he’d be able to recognize any man’s. But Arrius had had experience making himself heard over battle, riot, and storm—Marcus would have known that harsh bellow anywhere.
The priest swung around, startled; like Jupiter stepping from the roil of his thunderclouds, the centurion had materialized from the darkness by the altar. At his words there was a singing of steel throughout the shadows that hid the walls, and Marcus saw, suddenly, as they moved, the firelight on red helmet-crests.
There was a moment of dead, utter silence, in which Marcus could hear the crackle of the fire, and the hot metal’s hiss. Then the thin priest whirled, far too fast for one broken suddenly from the grip of the god, and hurled the screaming infant straight into the centurion’s arms. Arrius dropped his sword and fumbled a catch, cursing; the priest bolted like a scalded tomcat around the other side of the altar into darkness. The sanctuary dissolved into a shrieking chaos as men and women tried to flee, or threw themselves howling upon the armed soldiers, clawing at the armored bodies of the men who swatted them aside like flies. The priests were not among the Maenads—they dropped their bloodstained whips and bolted like rabbits. Many of the congregation followed—it is the chief strength of Maenads to outnumber their prey. Sixtus pulled Marcus clear of the doorway as the scrambling, trampling men and women clawed past them, pushing for the door.
Soldiers had already converged on Tiridates. The fat man was blinking, dazed, as though wakened from a dream, holding a woman’s scarf in front of his privates and streaming with blood, a horrible and ludicrous sight. Two guards came back around the main altar, dragging the biting, clawing chief priest. Sixtus grabbed Marcus by the wrist and hustled him down the mobbed steps, through a dark confusion of struggling forms, cursing men, screaming women, and soldiers, toward the bronze form that stood by the altar, as still as an idol himself in the rose-amber glare of the sacrificial fires. He still held the infant, who was wriggling and sobbing helplessly at the bite of the mail into his soft flesh.
The centurion’s greenish eyes were bitter and cynical. “Quite a party,” he said.
“We were only pleased you could come,” replied Sixtus graciously.
Arrius looked up, his gaze moving slowly around the dark room, to the gaggle of terrified priests under one guard and the bleeding, indignant Tiridates under another. Soldiers from the anteroom brought in a dark, small, pretty woman in her late twenties, clutching her shawl about her shoulders; Tiridates’ sister Roxanne, thought Marcus, watching the look that passed between the two. Suddenly he felt sick, and very tired.
“Well, credit me with a few wits,” the centurion said at last. “I had two men on the bridge. Neither of them recognized Tiridates’ plain litter but one of them, may Mithras bless his beady little eyes, recognized the Professor here from our little night at the catacombs. When he saw you hotfoot in pursuit of a perfectly strange litter, he had the sense to send his partner to fetch us and kept you in sight. Though mind you, we expected to find Christians, rather than”—he gestured around him in disgust—“this.” He looked down at the sobbing child. “We’ll send word to the watch in the various city precincts to see if we can find this poor little bastard’s parents. Somebody’s been feeding him good.” He poked the child absentmindedly in the stomach. He looked around him. The hot darkness of the sanctuary still stank of incense and spilled blood, but the evil and terror it had held had been broken by the confusion. Looking up at the golden idol, the polished blackness of the huge phalluses, Marcus was struck by how much the whole thing resembled a gigantic stage set, or the scene for one of Quindarvis’ banquets.
“At least you’ve broken the cult of Atargatis in Rome,” said Sixtus, by way of comfort.
“Not even that,” grumbled the centurion. “They’ll just go underground again, as they did before. No, all we’ve done is lost another day. We could have left Tiridates and his poor silly fish worshipers in peace, for all the good it did us. Because it was the Christians who took her—the amulet we found with the anagram of the Christos proves that much. Tiridates and his bearers and the whole stupid boiling of ’em probably don’t know any more about the kidnapping than this brat here.”
He sighed, his eyes narrowing with annoyance as he watched the fat Syrian and his sister being escorted from the sanctuary on the heels of the rest of the prisoners.
; “I’m sorry,” murmured Marcus, aware that it was he who had identified the fish tattoo on the merchant’s arm.
Arrius shrugged. “Not your fault. I’m only dreading what the praetorian prefect is going to say when I tell him I’ve hauled in the chief of the whole Syrian merchant community on a charge of worshiping with abominations.” He sighed and tucked the baby under his arm like a fowl. The child had fallen asleep. “Well, let’s go. Party’s over for the night.”
XIII
“They are slaves,” people declare. Nay, rather, they are men....
Seneca
DESPITE THE CENTURION’S rather optimistic assertion, the doings of the night dragged themselves out until almost dawn. The prisoners were sorted and questioned, one and all denying any knowledge of Tertullia Varia’s disappearance. Tiridates was indignant at the question; it was of vital interest for the Syrian community and his own business and political hopes that the girl be found, and that he take her to wife, which he was still willing to do in spite of her having been among the Christians. “Not wishing to be vulgar,” he said rather stuffily for a man whose only articles of dress were his shoes and his sister’s scarf, “but I should think her father will be glad to marry her off now to a man of my fortune.”
“Whatever fortune’s left to you after the emperor gets done reading your sentence,” grunted Arrius. “And I’m not sure what old Varus will take against more—his daughter being used as a pawn by the Christians or by the worshipers of the Syrian goddess. In any case I don’t think you better start buying flowers for the wedding wreaths just yet.”
“This is preposterous!”
“So’s murderin’ babies.”
Out in the main guardroom Marcus had his arm bound up by the company surgeon, an ugly little man to whom a slice this small was about as consequential as a summer cold. He ripped off the makeshift dressing casually, washed the wound with water and then wine, and applied a stinging salve; Marcus gritted his teeth to keep from crying out and prayed to whatever gods he thought would listen not to let him faint. The few men on the late-night watch at the prison were tough scarred customers, veterans of every sack from Jerusalem to Germany, dicing in the grimy semidark of the few smoky torches and talking of women and chariot races. He would have died sooner than have them mock him.
The guardroom was nearly empty at this time of night, for it was well past the eighth hour, and outside the city sprawled in deepest slumber. Far off, Marcus could hear the rattling of wheels, the clatter of hooves of construction teams, the distant yelling of roisterers coming home from the brothels, but nothing compared to the cacophony of day. In time the noises seemed to retreat, the guards’ voices sinking to a distant buzz, and the gloom of the guardroom seemed to thicken, so that its few torches appeared only as blurred orange spots in soiled brown darkness. He remembered that it was Midsummer Eve, the shortest night of the year; that Tullia’s father would return in three days. She seemed to be slipping further and further away from them with every day that passed, and he wondered why he still believed that she was alive at all...
His mind went back to the incense-wreathed porches of the Temple of Isis. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been that morning. He wondered what his father would say when he learned that his wife had flouted his commands and sought out his enemy’s wife in such a place. He flinched from the thought, remembering the little man’s blind and violent rages. He had enough experience with his father’s spies in the household not to deceive himself that he wouldn’t find out about it, and wondered if he should go there in the morning. But it would only make the old man’s rage worse: at him for defending his mother, at her for turning his sons against their father. He knew his mother had been long ago broken of the habit of fighting back. He shut his eyes again, his head throbbing, and wondered what the old man would say when he asked for Tullia’s hand.
“Here, kid.” A big gnarled hand caught him as he slid sideways. “Better have some of this.” His eyes cleared and he saw that one of the soldiers had come over to his bench and pressed a boiled-leather cup of dark neat wine into his hand. “Good for what ails you.”
“Thank you,” said Marcus shakily.
In the jumping orange light, the man grinned like a friendly satyr. “Doc says that’ll heal up clean, give you a nice scar,” he said encouragingly; he must have had a dozen of his own in view and the gods only knew how many more beneath his armor. “Give your dad somethin’ to tell his pals about.”
Marcus giggled, trying to picture his father clapping him on the shoulder with the words, “The manliest of all my sons.” He’d probably think it one step above getting cut in a pothouse brawl.
There was a murmur of voices from the door, and he caught a familiar name. A soldier said, “You got any idea what time it is, honey?” and one of the men dicing in the shadows cracked a lewd joke. Marcus looked up suddenly, to see a woman standing in the door.
Despite the heat of the night she was wrapped in a cloak, more for concealment, he thought, than warmth. She’d worn a scarf over her head, too, and was in the act of putting it back, revealing a face as proud and delicate-boned as an Egyptian temple cat’s. Her lips were Negroid but less full than some; her black hair had been braided flat to her shapely skull and ornamented with gold beadwork. Beneath her cloak her dress was amber, silk, but there was something in those wary almond eyes that marked her for a rich man’s slave.
He sat up and asked, “Why do you want to see Nicanor?”
She turned, startled, and he could see beneath her hard-kept pride the fear in her. Her eyes widened a little at the sight of him—as well they should, he realized, with a rueful look at himself. Dirty, unshaven, bloody and unkempt, he must look like some slave arrested for brawling rather than a highly polished product of the best philosophical schools in the empire. He stood up, only to have his knees betrayed by the wine. He caught the edge of the table to steady himself and said, “I’m a friend of Nicanor’s. Maybe I can help you?” He added, seeing her look, “I don’t always look like this. My name is Marcus Silanus.”
At the name her eyes changed, less apprehensive but even more startled. She stammered, “I—I realize what it looks like, to come here so late...”
One of the dice-players hooted. Marcus took her hand and led her to the bench where he’d been sitting. “The centurion Arrius is in charge of the case,” he said gently. “I can ask him to let you see Nicanor in a few minutes. What’s your name?”
“Hypatia,” she replied. “Is—is Nicanor all right? I know they—they arrested him for questioning this morning. He isn’t a Christian, I swear he isn’t, I have to tell them—they have to believe me. You believe he isn’t a Christian, don’t you?” Her grave dark eyes were pleading. “He said you wouldn’t betray him.”
Marcus studied her for a long moment, the beauty of that highbred face, the cost of the gold rings she wore in her ears. The fact that she had come here, alone, at this hour of the night, to see some other man’s slave. He said slowly, “Did you know that he tried to kill himself this afternoon?”
From that creamy gold complexion all the blood drained, as though her throat had been cut. For a moment he thought she’d faint, but her eyes never moved from his. She said through lips suddenly stiff and gray, “No, I didn’t.” Then she swallowed, and said in a more normal tone, “You said ‘tried.’” He saw she’d begun to tremble.
“He’s alive, but...”
She said, “I see.” She was looking down, her breathing suddenly thick.
“Hypatia,” said Marcus gently. “Who’s your master?”
She hesitated a long time before answering. Then she said, “Porcius Craessius,” in a muffled voice.
The dapper gentleman, Marcus recalled, who had told Quindarvis so offhandedly to drown his drunk slave in the fishpond. That had been the night of the jailbreak—this woman’s master had been from home. If Quindarvis had pressed Craessius to stay at that opulent retreat another night—or even if the dandified little rak
e had been too spent by his excesses of the night before—she would have been free the night of the abortive raid on the catacombs.
Free to put her life in danger.
For some reason he found himself remembering Quindarvis’ private lion pit, with its elegantly appointed pavilion overlooking the view. He rested his hand on her shoulder, as he would to comfort his sister, and felt her muscles stiffen. He pulled it back, blushing. She must have been pawed by so many men that a touch was enough to sicken. It was understandable, with her looks.
“We have no rights in a court of law,” she said slowly, “but I’ll tell anyone it would do good to know.”
“You were with him last night, and the night before?”
She nodded. “My master was at...”
“I know where your master was,” said Marcus. “And I know what he’d be likely to do to you if it were to come out.”
She gave him a bitter sideways smile. “Let’s hope not. You’re young to know things like that. But I can’t let him take it for me.” She still did not meet his eyes but kept her gaze cast down, fixed on her long, slim hands drawing the edge of her russet cloak over and over through her fingers. The grubby torchlight spangled her beaded head with fire. Her womanhood was fragrant, like cinnamon and musk.
“Where’s Craessius tonight?” he asked softly.
“With Paris. That’s his boy. He’s starting to tire of me already. We hoped...” She shrugged. “But there’s not much hope for slaves, now, is there? Maybe Nicanor had the right idea, after all.”
“No,” said Marcus. “Look at me, Hypatia.”
She raised her eyes to meet his, gleaming with tears, though her mouth was smooth and still as cast bronze.
“I’ll tell the centurion what you’ve told me, and I’ll tell him why Nicanor would prefer death to questions about his whereabouts on the last two nights. Nothing’s come to official trial yet, and nothing will until the city prefect returns.”
She sighed, like a child cheated too often of promised treats. “And when he returns?” she asked dully.
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