Looking down into those grave dark eyes, clear and simple-seeming as a woodland spring, he reminded himself that by her own admission this girl was versed in the foxlike art of laying down false trails, of seeming to be what she was not.
The longer he spoke with her, the more difficult it was to believe.
“If you Christians don’t even agree on whether your god was a god or not, how can you agree on what he taught or didn’t teach?” he asked her. “There might be a branch of you who believe in returning vengeance for wrongdoing, against the enemies of the Lord.”
“Papa would know,” she insisted quietly.
“How would he know?” Marcus cried.
She took a step back from him, holding her veil about her, her puckish face troubled by the vehemence and misery in his voice. Then her dark brows lifted. “It’s you,” she said. “You’re the girl’s lover—the girl who was kidnapped. Papa told me...”
And when she broke off into silence, he demanded, “Papa told you what?”
“Papa told me that the lover of the girl who was kidnapped was seeking her. That’s how you came to follow me, isn’t it?”
“What does Papa know about it?” cried Marcus furiously. He strode toward her to seize her wrist, but she backed from him, dodging among the pillars. “Who is Papa?”
In the shadows her eyes flooded with compassion. She whispered, “I’m so sorry.” He lunged at her and she was gone, her footsteps light and swift on the marble of the pavement. He plunged after the sound, but the forests of columns baffled him. Despairingly he cried, “Come back here!” and his only answer was a disapproving glare from a couple of aged senators, walking in the porches in the quiet of the afternoon, who plainly thought little of young men who played catch-me with pretty girls in the colonnades of the imperial basilicas.
Angry, disgusted, and perplexed, he turned away, making his way down Silversmith’s Rise to that small ugly building on the flank of the Capitoline Hill.
He found Arrius there, still in the same faded red tunic and chain-mail shirt he’d worn last night, writing up a report on wax at the warden’s desk. There were big blue smudges under his eyes, and his unshaven face was lined with fatigue. Standing in the doorway watching him, Marcus was uncomfortably aware that if he’d got any sleep at all in the last twenty-four hours, it had probably been on the bench at the back of this room. He glanced up as Marcus came in, his greenish eyes hard and cold as a hunting cat’s.
He said, “We’ve got them.”
Marcus blinked at him stupidly. “Got who?”
“The Christians who had Tullia Varia.”
The room, the world, did one slow, deliberate spin. Then he cried despairingly, “Had?”
The centurion tossed something across the desk to him, something that tinkled softly on the wood. “We found this in their meeting place.”
It was a bronze earring, shaped like a lily, snagged with a single strand of brown curling hair.
XIV
marcion: Recognize us! [as members of the Church] saint polycarp: I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan!
Saint Polycarp of Smyrna
“THE USUAL THING,” reported the centurion in his dry, uninflected voice. Marcus followed him into the dingy twilight of the guardroom, his head buzzing and the ache that he had felt before returning to his whole body but mostly to the wound in his arm. “An informer told us about a meeting this morning, down near the circus. We surprised half-a-dozen Christians in a cellar they’ve been using regularly for a meeting place. We found this on a blanket in a corner.”
“Papa would know,” Dorcas had said.
Well, maybe Papa had known. And maybe Dorcas had, too.
Marcus felt like a child who has been robbed by a kindly stranger.
“It lets your friend Nicanor and his lady off the hook, anyway,” continued Arrius, climbing down the ladder ahead of him. “But it’ll be hell if these characters turn stubborn.”
Even outside the cell, they could hear the voices raised in acrimonious conflict.
“I don’t care what kind of self-deceitful arguments you spout! The fact remains that it’s God’s grace and the holiness of Christ that make a sacrament efficacious, not how pious the priest is! It says in the Book of the Twelve Teachers...”
“You heretical drunkard, you wouldn’t know God’s Law if it came up and bit you!” screamed the familiar voice of Ignatius. “By that argument the city hangman could preside over the Supper of the Body and Blood! You’d have the priests of the Church no better than a bunch of thieving rascals, like the priests of Cybele—no better than yourself, I daresay...”
“I suppose we should all be as perfect as you are!”
“Neither the fornicators, nor the lustful...”
Arrius threw open the door with a crash just as a big muscular woman in the short tunic of a farmwife shoved the two would-be combatants apart. Typically, not a Christian in the room turned his head.
Around the massive peacemaker’s muscular arm, Ignatius continued to jeer. “A man who is as bound as you are to the sins of the flesh has no business meddling in the affairs of heaven! You should put aside your wife...”
“I’ll give you the priests of Cybele, you little...”
Another woman chimed in. “Anyone who would believe in the coequality of the human nature of Christ with the Divine—”
Arrius roared, “Silence, all of you!”
Neither of the two combatants over the purity of the priesthood so much as paused for breath; their peacemaker, moreover, plunged into a long misquotation from some neoplatonist philosopher on the subject of essence and accidents.
Marcus yelled into the rising din, “Shut up! I’ve heard enough! Does it matter how many natures your god had?”
Ignatius broke off mid-curse and whirled on him. “Of course it matters, you stupid idolater! How can anyone be saved by faith, if their faith be false and crooked? Only pure faith, and purity of the body...”
“No, it isn’t faith alone that’ll save a man from sin!” cried another woman, leaping to her feet. “‘A tree shall be known by its fruits...’”
“That filthy heresy was disproved by—”
From a comer a young man’s voice yelled, “Shut up, Ignatius! Your logic is as shoddy as your manners!”
And Marcus recognized the voice.
“Judah!”
The young man who had spoken rose from his place with the lithe powerful movement that Marcus remembered, and came to the patch of light that fell, grimy and yellow, through the open doorway into the fraught darkness of the cell.
“Marcus,” he greeted him quietly.
Timoleon’s two erstwhile students faced each other in silence, groping for words and finding none. It was as if bars of mistrust, and the threat of death, had been lowered between them. It is said that the saved cannot speak with the damned.
It was Judah who broke the silence. “I see you’ve turned informer.”
It was the second time in as many hours that this charge had been leveled at him, and Marcus cried out perhaps more vehemently than he need have, “I’m not! Dammit, I’m only trying to find Tullia!”
Judah’s dark brows knotted. He studied him for a moment, sweat gleaming on his dark breast, the silver fish that hung there flashing like a chip of fire.
Marcus cried, “Where is she? What did you do with her?”
Something changed in Judah’s eyes. “You’re arguing ahead of your facts, Silenus.”
“They found her earring in your damn cellar is all the facts I know.”
He made an impatient gesture. “I should have expected something like that from you. What Roman citizen would ever admit he doesn’t know what’s happening?” He flicked Marcus’ toga with a scornful finger. “The whore that sits upon many waters—but it won’t be her adulteries that bring her down. It’ll be her damn certainty that there’s nothing beyond what she already knows.” He stared bitterly at Marcus. “I’m a lying Christian, remember? You believe wh
at you believe.”
Marcus was silent, carefully telling over the letters of the alphabet. At F he said, “I don’t know what to believe, Judah. I’m sorry I—I argued ahead of my facts.”
The Christian looked down his high-bridged nose at him, bleak scorn in his dark eyes. “I’m sorry, too,” he said coldly, “that your rotten little informers haven’t anything better to do than persecute the servants of the Son of man. But the Lord will look after his own. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord...”
“Where is she?!” shouted Marcus.
“Judah?” A hesitant voice spoke at Marcus’ elbow, and he turned, startled, as Isaac Symmachus hobbled diffidently into the grimy cell.
Judah swung around savagely. “And I suppose you’re going to ask me about the stupid little bitch as well?”
Symmachus hesitated, then said, “No, son.”
“Or beg me to recant? Join you as a nice civil slave in the treasury? Hold your pens for you while you audit the books, like I was taught? It’s a little late for that, O patriarch of my house.”
“It is a little late for many things, my son,” replied the Old Jew quietly.
“It’s a little late for the whole damned world,” said Judah, his voice quiet but its scorn and strength filling the cramped darkness of the cell. “The Lord will come in judgment; the vessels of his wrath have broken, and their fire will pour over this filthy empire that’s even now drowning like a man in a sewer in its own crap! And when it happens you’ll still be fetching and carrying for the Romans, auditing the books and wiping the arse of some fat jumped-up tradesman’s son of a Roman hog, who spends a million sesterces on his dinner and then doesn’t even bother to digest it! You’re worse than the German barbarians! They were raped, at least; you were only paid.”
“I may have been paid, my son,” said Symmachus, and his voice shook suddenly with suppressed fury, “but by the God of Hosts I was paid in a whole house, and live children instead of dead ones, and time to hand on the teachings of the Law and the prophets...”
“The Law and the prophets! That’s a book that’s been rolled up like a scroll—yea, a scroll in the hands of the angel of the Lord! You’ve sold your honor and your god for bad coin. A man shall forsake his father and mother...”
“You cannot forsake us!” cried the father in fury. “By the God of Hosts you will drag us with you by your heedless pride and destroy us all!”
Marcus turned away, unable to listen further. There was a strange humming in his ears as he climbed the ladder to the guardroom, a hot restless weakness in all his muscles. The voices followed him up from below.
“...kiss the feet of your filthy praetor!”
“...may not have honor but I and my family are alive!”
“...Book of the Acts of John clearly states that the Christ could appear in any form that he wanted to, from a youth to a bald-headed old man...”
“...lower and a higher element; his spirit is of divine origin, locked in an exile in a fleshly body until the coming of a divine messenger...”
“Driveling Gnostic!”
“Heretical jackass!”
He leaned his head on his hands, seeing the guardroom through a blur of weariness and fever. The baking heat of the day was beginning to pass off; outside, the street was deep in shadow. The guardroom torches were again lit. At a table in the corner the men of the day watch were sharing watered wine, laying bets, and joking. By the door the bored bursar was paying out silver to a short sturdy man in the brown tunic of a slave or a day laborer. Someone called out a joke—the man looked around and grinned, his teeth flashing whitely in the dark tangle of a beard, gleaming in the twilight like the gold ring he wore in his ear. A man jostled past him, his shadow blocking the dimming outdoor light, and Marcus recognized the massive form of the city hangman. They will argue about the nature of their god, he thought, while the hangman heats up his little tools.
He frowned suddenly, as something snagged at his memory.
Some memory, he thought—perhaps a dream. He couldn’t remember it clearly, or why it troubled him. He knew now that his wound had turned feverish; many things looked dreamlike in that blue-shadowed room.
From below, since the trap had been left open, Judah’s voice could be heard in a fury of shouting. “Son! You never in your life wanted a son! You only wanted a name, and if you could have found a dog who’d father acceptable grandchildren he’d have done as well!”
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” That’s what Judah had said, and, presumably, Christ or Paul or some other Christian notable before him, since these people seemed to talk largely in quotes. But in me forest cool of the columns of the New Forum, Dorcas had said, “Turn the other cheek...”
Was it possible to have two wholly opposite doctrines within the same faith?
“...but Jesus abandoned his earthly body when he said, ‘Woman, behold thy son,’ and a moment later his heavenly part ascended into the hands of his Heavenly Father...”
“And reunited, I suppose, for dinner on the road to Emmaus?”
Hadn’t some Christian said, “With faith, all things are possible?”
Did the possibilities of faith include a likable, grave-eyed girl like Dorcas hiding the knowledge of abominations behind her sunburst smile? The shadows of the guardroom seemed to deepen, the voices of the guards growing fainter. The old dream returned to his waking eyes, Persephone struggling in the tender green of the river reeds, white hands pushing helplessly against the brown strong chest, the laughter in the death-god’s dark grinning bearded face...
He opened his eyes, knowing suddenly whose face it was.
Not Pluto’s. Not the face of the god of money and the dead.
A brown face with a black beard and one gold earring, grinning at him as they struggled in the dark street.
He scrambled to his feet, almost falling over his long legs as he stumbled across the room. The bursar was putting away his little box of silver pieces and preparing to go home to the Praetorian camp outside the city.
“Who was that man you were paying off just now?” demanded Marcus breathlessly. The soldier looked up at him in blank surprise.
“Who, the informer?” He looked to a couple of the drinkers for confirmation. “Lucius? Lucian? Centurion’d know. He’s the man who put the kiss on our talkative friends downstairs.”
“You’re sure?” Arrius drew a careful, deliberate gridwork of lines on the corner of the wax tablet on the table before him, then just as carefully smoothed them out with the blunt end of the stylus, making the dark wax as blank and uninformative as his unshaven face.
“I’m positive!” insisted Marcus. “I saw the man, he was as close to me as you are now!”
“When was he that close?” inquired the centurion. “Just now, or in the street?” In the blurred brownish twilight of the warden’s office, his green eyes gleamed like a beast’s. Flattened and straggling from his helmet, his hair was like a beast’s pelt as well. From beneath long curling eyebrows he studied Marcus’ face with a hunting cat’s impersonal intentness.
“In the street, when Tullia was kidnapped! But I’m not mistaken, I’d know him anywhere. Don’t you believe me?”
“Oh, I believe you, Professor.” Arrius’ mouth drew together, thin and hard as the lines he made with his stylus on the wax. “I’m fast reaching the point where I’ll believe anything about Christians. The little turncoat scum,” he added. “You didn’t recognize any of the others down there?”
Marcus shook his head. “But I’m not sure that I would. He was the only one of them I saw clearly.”
Arrius cursed and rubbed at his eyes as though they ached. “He never said he was one of them,” he growled. “Damn the man, if he was going to get scared and sell out, the least he could have done was tell us where they were likely to take her. And like a fool I never thought to question him. He only said he knew where they were hiding; I didn’t ask him how he knew it.”
“He wouldn’t have said,” said Marc
us, disconsolately.
The centurion sighed and ran a knotted hand through his hair. “No. They’re slippery as eels, and from what you’ve told me at least a few of them—that Dorcas girl for one—are geniuses in the art of misdirection. She acted her way in and out of here and got word to this Papa of theirs. I should have had my suspicions about Lucius—if that’s really his name—when he gave a false address. But a lot of informers do that. It’s a stupid kind of pride, considering.”
“But why would he have sold them out?”
Arrius shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they didn’t like his opinions on the writings of Paul and kicked him out, and he did this to get even. I don’t know.”
A soldier entered, carrying a couple of lamps that emitted more smoke than light. Doubled shadows reeled across the cracked plaster of the walls as he hung them from an iron bracket. “Will you be back working tonight, sir?”
Arrius thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’ll finish up here and go back out to the camp. I haven’t slept in a bed since I don’t know when. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow.”
The man saluted. “Very good, sir.”
The centurion rubbed at his eyes again, the swaying lamps making his mail glitter like the scales of a bronze fish. “I’ve given them all a preliminary questioning, for all the good that did me. I couldn’t get any of them to stop quarreling long enough to make sense. The only connection with Nikolas and the group that were executed three years ago is that crazy little monkey Ignatius, and I haven’t figured out whether he’s completely insane or the most skilled actor of them all.”
He stood up, stretching his back like a digger after a long day shoveling. “That arm bothering you?”
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