Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  Into the utter silence of that dim stone room he said, “It was thrown down to me from a window the afternoon I was arrested.” He looked up with a last flash of defiance. “The window of a whorehouse.”

  “Plotina’s,” said Marcus.

  Sixtus’ gaze flickered to him. “You know the one?”

  “I was in the crowd,” he replied in a stifled voice, sick with the thought that she might have been trying to throw it to him. How many days ago had that been?

  “That’s just fine,” snapped Telesphorus scornfully, “I can just hear the news in the Forum now: ‘Christians Arrested Raiding Whorehouse...’”

  Sixtus ignored him. “Would Arrius take his men in?”

  Marcus hesitated. “Maybe. But Plotina’s well-connected. I’ve seen her dining with some of the most influential men in Rome. If we’re wrong...”

  “Yes, it would make for some awkward explanations. Especially since, thanks to various members of my household, I seem to be in a rather ambiguous position myself.” He glanced across at Churaldin. “You haven’t converted Octavia yet, have you?”

  The Briton looked sheepishly at the floor. Sixtus sighed.

  “I could go in and have a look at the place,” said Dorcas quietly, “and see if she’s there.”

  Sixtus met her eyes. “That isn’t necessary,” he said softly.

  “It’s all right,” she replied. “I’ll go in the morning, before the place is open for business, when most of the girls are sleeping or having their baths. The sister-in-law of a neighbor of mine works as a cleaning woman in one of those places. She says cleaning people go in and out all the time. I won’t be noticed.”

  He went to her, laid gentle hands on her shoulders, his voice barely audible to the others in that still, underground twilight. She was a tall girl, her wide brown eyes on level with his blue ones. “I don’t want to see you hurt, child.”

  Just as softly, she replied, “I’ll certainly be hurt, if there’s a persecution. And so will you. If Churaldin was right, we haven’t more than a day or two before Varus returns to Rome, and after that it won’t be a simple investigation.” She put her hands over his wrists, where they lay on her shoulders; it occurred to Marcus that, like Churaldin, Dorcas was already a friend of the old man’s, possibly a former slave who had taken his offer of freedom. The look that passed between them as they stood together in the shadows was not the look of strangers, but, as with the Briton, the look of a father and an adopted child.

  “God guard you, then,” he whispered and, leaning forward, ceremoniously kissed her forehead. Then he looked around at the others: at Churaldin in his red military tunic, at Alexandras, whom one of the other Christians was trying surreptitiously to help out of his armor, at Marcus, watching him with uncertainty and anxiety, suspicion and confusion mingling in his soul. “As for you others,” he continued in his usual mild voice, “you are welcome to remain under my roof—for this is my roof—provided you behave yourselves. I presume your deacon here”—he shot an accusing glance at Churaldin—“has made provision for feeding you, and I don’t wish to be told where you will go and what you will do after you leave. One thing only I ask.” He limped to the center of the group, that serene blue gaze suddenly hard, like a knife stripping bone and soul. “I remember hearing somewhere that the founder of your faith enjoined that where two or three of you are gathered together, there would he be also; so I beg you, do not disgust him by quarreling in his presence. Come along, Marcus, I’ll show you out the front door... it’s only a step or two down the secret passage here, through a short neck of the municipal sewers and past my wine cellars. Churaldin, I want to see you when you’re finished.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the slave stiffly. Sixtus turned on his heel and led the way to the jumble of broken boxes and disused furniture on the dais, which half-hid the entrance to an ancient tunnel. Not a Christian moved or spoke, any more than the old man’s legionnaires would have; Marcus half-expected them to salute.

  “I have had my suspicions about Churaldin’s activities for some time,” continued the old man quietly, as they ducked their heads under the low entrance. “But as I believe I said once before, there are things that it is more convenient not to know.” They turned a corner, and the dim light from the cellar behind them faded. They groped through what seemed to be a bricked-up section of another cellar and down a short ladder through an old dry drain in the floor. The sewer was disused but clammy; Marcus shuddered, wiping his hands on the hem of his toga, and almost ran into the foot of another ladder that led up to a low-roofed cavern of blue twilight and dust, which turned out to be Sixtus’ wine cellar. The old man limped to a corner, where his staff leaned against the wall among the stone wine jars. “I’m afraid I’m going to have problems enough trying to think of a convincing story to tell our friend the centurion that won’t too badly violate my philosophic commitment to truth,” he added, brushing cobwebs from his shoulders. And, in a gentler voice, “I shall send you word as soon as Dorcas returns.”

  Marcus looked at him curiously, a white ghostly shape in the gloom. “She was your slave, wasn’t she?” he asked. “She said something to me once about having had a master who would cure anyone of hatred of mankind. I should have known she meant you.”

  “A hard cure, in her case,” sighed the old man. “At fourteen she was as tough and nasty a little urchin as ever stole from her master’s guests. But she’s as fearless as a gladiator, and clever as a thief. If Tullia is in Plotina’s brothel, Dorcas will find her there.”

  They climbed the steps to the pantry, a ramshackle closet built off the tiny kitchen. Through one arched doorway could be seen the dirty flagstones and matted wall of vine and thorn that had overgrown the pillars of the arcade around the garden. Through another, the drift of spices and vinegar blew, and with them Harpalos’ voice telling Octavia a hideous tale of vampires that rose from their graves in the night to bite the noses off their victims, to the little girl’s breathless delight. Marcus followed him, exhausted, into the shadowy corridor of jungle, his mind groping to assimilate the repeated shocks of the afternoon.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said at last. “Why would they have stolen her in the first place? If they were going to turn her into a whore, it would be too dangerous to keep her in Rome. Somebody would be bound to recognize her.”

  Sixtus shook his head. “They didn’t kidnap her for anything of the kind,” he said quietly. “There are far too many girls in Rome who are pretty, and helpless, and cheaply come by, to run that kind of risk to take an unwilling one. No, the choice of victim, of method, and of witnesses were all deliberate—they have to have been. And very clever by the way: who’d look for a missing girl in a brothel?”

  “You’re probably right,” whispered Marcus.

  “Marcus.” Sixtus laid a hand gently on his arm, halting him before the half-ruinous cave of a splendid summer dining room, whose archways were so choked with vines as to make the room inaccessible from the gardens at all. Green dappled light mottled his toga, checkering his lined, enigmatic face with wan brightness. “If they’re holding her in Plotina’s, which is after all a semi-public place, they’re not about to run the risk of any kind of violent disturbance. In a place like that it would be too easy for word to get about.”

  “You mean rape makes a lot of noise,” concluded Marcus for him bitterly, daring him to deny that it had been in his mind.

  Sixtus returned his defiant stare with one of quelling calm. “Yes,” he replied. “Even in a brothel.”

  “Thanks for the comfort.” He turned away.

  The old man followed him, not at all put out. “And she had her wits about her enough to pitch one of her earrings down, on the off-chance that someone would see it and recognize it. So she was able to get about. And more important, her spirit wasn’t broken, if that means anything to you at all.”

  Marcus swung around, an angry retort flooding to his lips. But it died unspoken. He wondered why he fought so to keep the ho
pe from his heart. He whispered, “It’s so close.”

  “It’s hard to trust,” said the old man gently.

  In the atrium the sunlight had narrowed and focused itself to a two-inch slit of molten gold, cutting the shadowy faded frescoes of the east wall like a burning wound. They paused beside the dark flickering waters of the pool; from their depths Isis regarded them, veiled in her long green hair.

  “Thank you,” said Marcus quietly. “For everything.”

  Sixtus smiled and dismissed the thanks with a shake of his head. “I’ll send you word—if that pack of fanatics I’ve been feeding for the last several years ever returns to bear it—tomorrow morning at your family’s home.”

  “What?” Marcus halted, startled, in the act of turning toward the door. “How did you know I’d got a message from my family?”

  Sixtus frowned. “But it’s all over the city,” he said. “I heard the criers myself in the Forum.”

  “What?” He stared at him, uncomprehending. “What are you talking about?”

  The old man saw that he did not understand and laid a blunt scarred hand gently on his arm. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know you had not heard. Your father is dead.”

  XVI

  A life honorably lived reaps its rewards of authority to the end.

  Cicero

  MARCUS STOOD FOR A long time in the doorway of his mother’s summer bedroom, looking down at her unconscious form on the sleeping-couch. Someone had bound up the wound in her temple; the bruise on the jaw was livid, but small. In the diffuse twilight that filtered from the garden beyond the covered walk her eyes looked bruised and swollen with weeping.

  He asked, “How did it happen?” aware that his voice sounded very distant and offhand, aware that if he didn’t fight to keep it so, he would break down and weep. His father had always called it unmanly. One couldn’t, he supposed, offend the old boy now.

  Caius said, “Her maids said they quarreled. She had been gone all day and returned home late in the afternoon, after he had come back from the baths.” His voice sounded bitterly disapproving in the hushed heat of the afternoon. As well it might, thought Marcus, turning quietly away and letting the curtain fall back to cover the doorway, lest the light awaken the woman who slept within. He walked back along the breezeway, feeling hot and sticky in his heavy toga and oppressed by the silence of the house.

  “That was the day she went to see Aunt Aurelia at the Temple of Isis,” he said quietly.

  “That was the day before yesterday,” replied his brother. For a moment their father’s voice crept into his tones, as though the old man himself were reproaching his son for hearing of the event so tardily, and from strangers. They passed through a graceful triple arch of pillars into the drawing room, which had been curtained off from the atrium but where one could still hear the professional grief of the hired mourners. Caius sat down in a carved backless chair. “I do not know where she had been, for I have never made it a practice to question my parents’ affairs. Priscilla—one of her maids—said that she heard angry words coming from Father’s office across the court. She was frightened—naturally—for Father was in a terrible passion, the sort of blind rage in which he might do anything. She says that she heard a scream, and a blow, and the sound of furniture falling. She dared not go in until she heard him leave, and then she ran in, and saw Mother”—his thoroughly controlled voice wavered a little—“lying unconscious beside the desk. She was naturally shocked and turned to see Father storming across the garden in one of his black rages. She says that he stopped beside the fountain and half-turned, as if to come back, then he passed his hand across his eyes and suddenly doubled over, as though he had been struck, though there was no one nearby or, in fact, anywhere in the garden at all. He was dead when she reached him, his face bright crimson, almost purple.”

  Marcus ran his hand along the carved edge of the room’s ebony scroll case. “Sounds like a burst blood vessel.”

  “That is what our physician said.”

  “Had he ever struck her before?”

  Caius was silent a moment, looking down at his hands resting among the white folds of the toga in his lap. He had already had the family barber crop his hair, and looked austere and disapproving: his father’s expression in his mother’s wide brown eyes. But it was not his father’s bitter callousness that answered.

  “Since you left us, Marcus, to choose your own paths, Father was more and more given to this kind of rage. When we were children he might order a slave beaten, but he would never do it with his own hand. It was almost a sickness in him.”

  “A sickness,” repeated Marcus quietly. “Or maybe just a rage at Fate, that our kind are not what we were. He was right, of course—the old families and the Senate aren’t ruling the empire anymore. The ones with the real power are the emperor’s freedmen—former slaves from who knows what background—and people with money, like Tiridates. We’re only valuable because of the prestige of our names, so that people whose fathers made their fortunes in trade like Priscus Quindarvis can have themselves adopted into our class. The Silanus family is one of the oldest in Rome, but Father was never more than an aedile.”

  “That is still no reason,” said his brother thinly, “to strike our mother because she thwarted his will.”

  “Whom else could he strike?”

  Caius’ face seemed to grow longer with the lengthening of his upper lip. Marcus prowled over to the courtyard door, stared bleakly out into the carefully trimmed garden, with its white and pink lilies and its sweetness of mint. On her pedestal beside the fountain, a bronze Macedonian nymph glowed like gold in the last of the sunset. “In some ways I think anger was almost a luxury for him,” he said after a time. “He enjoyed being angry. Maybe people do ask for the deaths they get.”

  “Maybe,” agreed his brother in a thin voice. “But it does not become you to speak ill of a man whose spirit has not yet departed this house.”

  Out in the atrium the mourners’ wailing droned steadily on, breaking rhythmically every now and then as one of them beat on her breast. Above it rose the wailing of the double flute. “Sorry,” murmured Marcus. “I’m sorry.” He looked around at the small formal room, with its marble bust of his mother as a young girl, its scroll cases and painted pillars on the wall. “Where’s Felix?”

  “In his room.” Caius’ tone could have chilled wine. “You will be staying the night, of course. The funeral will be tomorrow, at the sixth hour...”

  “Tomorrow?” All thought of his father vanished from his mind as though wiped with a sponge.

  “In this heat it would hardly do to delay,” stated his brother stiffly. But Marcus hardly heard him, his mind racing ahead to Dorcas, and when she would bring back word... “I trust you will take time from your affairs to attend?”

  He ignored the ponderous sarcasm and murmured, “Yes, of course.” He wondered desperately what he would do. If Dorcas returned with word that Tullia was in that place, he couldn’t absent himself from the rescue-party. He had to see her, to speak to her before she spoke to anyone else, to reassure her and to be reassured himself. But like the Furies that punish impiety, the voices of the other side of his soul rose up, crying that he could not forsake this last duty to his father. His philosophy had taught him that a man’s body, after death, is of no more consequence than an empty wine jar. But he had been raised in the family cult. Not to attend the funeral, for whatever reason, would bring a guilt that would haunt him as though he had struck down the old man himself.

  In a sore torment of mind he left the drawing room, crossed the evening shadows of the garden toward the bedroom that had been his as a boy. The house seemed hushed, the noises of mourning in the atrium very distant. As he passed the open door of Felix’ bedroom, he paused, hearing from within the soft sounds of drunken grief and catching the smell of the place, like the breath of a tavern. From within a boy’s voice whispered, “Who’s that?” And as Marcus turned, “Oh! Master Caius, sir, please
don’t be angry with him...”

  “I’m not Caius.” In the dim evening light, wearing a plain white tunic and toga, he realized how easy it would be to mistake them. “Is that Giton?” He stepped inside, peering through the darkness to identify the pretty young boy who’d poured out the wine at dinner.

  He was sitting at the foot of Felix’s sleeping-couch, wearing only a little loincloth in the heat of the stuffy room. A clay wine jar was cradled against his bare side. Four others lay empty, amid lakes of spilled dregs, on the parti-colored marble of the floor. Felix himself was stretched, sobbing bitterly, face down on the couch.

  At the sound of his brother’s voice he rolled over, his long perfumed curls plastered to his cheeks with runny, half-melted unguents. His eye paint had run too, streaking his face with black and purple. He forced a drunken smile. “Ah! Professor! Sorry ‘bout all this. Silly of me, an’ all. Maudlin in my cups, you know. Always was.” He held out his hands to his brother, tears shining on his blotched cheeks. “Fancy it, cryin’ for that old hardfisted roughneck.” His voice cracked grotesquely, and he sobbed, “Give m’brother wine, kid.”

  Giton looked questioningly up at Marcus, who nodded.

  “It’s all right,” said Marcus after a moment, as the boy fetched another cup from the sideboard. “Thank you,” he said softly, and the boy nodded, a little absently. He was watching Felix, sorrow and concern in his intelligent, hyacinth-dark eyes.

  Felix pawed at his eyes with his long fringed red sleeve, making the mess worse. “Pious, an’ all,” he said. “Caius’d approve. Oughter call him in.”

  “No,” said Marcus.

  Felix nodded owlishly. “Unmanly,” he agreed. “Still...” He flung his cup down, the dark wine spilling like blood across the floor that was already awash in it. “I hated the old bastard!” he cried, his voice breaking with sobs. “Never gave nothing but pain—Mother, Aemilia, and you. Don’t even know why I’m cryin’.” And he sank back on the cushions, gulping, his body shaking with renewed grief.