Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  “Maybe because it’s possible to love and hate the same person at the same time,” said Marcus softly. “You hated him at closer range than I did. You knew him.”

  “An’ to know him is to love him,” he choked, with drunken sarcasm. “Kind of a messy theory for a ph’los’phr, frater mine.”

  “Life’s messy.” He drank off the wine and handed the cup back to the boy. “Will you stay with him?”

  Giton nodded. “He’ll be better after the funeral,” he predicted quietly. “He didn’t learn about it until the morning after it happened; that’s what hurts him, I think.” He walked with Marcus out into the breezeway, slender and effeminate-looking and diminutive, but with those bright, unsurprisable violet eyes. “In a way it’s too bad,” he continued, glancing toward the doors that led into the atrium, through which the sound of wailing had died away as the mourners packed up to go home, their day’s work done.

  “What is?” asked Marcus. “That any man would make himself so hated that his own sons were avoiding his house at the time of his death?”

  The boy glanced up at him, those long painted lashes throwing soft curved shadows on the alabaster cheeks. “That he was that unhappy. It’s very difficult to change the way you are.” The boy looked as though he would have said something else, but changed his mind. A moment later he slipped back into the stifling darkness, and as he walked away, Marcus could hear the murmur of his voice and Felix’s sobbing, drunken replies.

  The mourners had left the atrium by the time he returned there. The only light now came from the four lamps on their tall bronze stands, set at the corners of the bier, making his father’s face look like something wrought clumsily of wax. Despite the heavy wreaths, roses and asphodel mingled with ripe fruit and colored ribbons, Caius was right about the necessity for a quick funeral. As he came from the quiet alcove into the main room, the woman at the foot of the high couch looked up and smiled lopsidedly. “Hello, Professor.”

  “I thought you’d be asleep still.” He leaned down to kiss her unbruised cheek. “Caius and I went by to see you.”

  “Did you, dear? That was kind.” In the uneasy saffron light her face looked worse than it had earlier, drawn and exhausted. Her hair, loosened for mourning, was visibly graying.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” she smiled. “All the notables of the Senate have been in and out of the house all today and yesterday, including that horrid Garovinus man who’s still under the impression that he’s going to marry your sister. I couldn’t very well come to look at him then, not looking like a gladiator’s moll—not that any of them would have been so ill-bred as to ask, of course,” she added, with a faded smile. “But I feel that I owe it to him, to mourn beside him tonight.”

  Marcus rested his hands on her shoulders. “You don’t owe him a thing, Mother.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “I owe him the outward form of grief, since I feel none within. And even that isn’t strictly true.” Beyond the indigo curtains in the drawing room they could hear Caius moving about, giving orders to Straton in a low voice about the funeral banquet and wreaths for the pallbearers. At the foot of the bier, incense hissed in the burners, the clouds of it soft and blue and sweet-smelling over the oily smoke of the lamps. “I’ve been his wife for twenty-seven years, Marc—quite a record, these days. And I can’t remember ever being happy, or feeling anything but trapped by it, and helpless to get out. But still—it is twenty-seven years. One can’t just put it behind one without a backward glance.”

  She turned from him and rested her big soft hands on the curved foot of the bier, the four torches touching her face with their multiple shadows. “I don’t know why I should feel there was something I could have done differently, some way I could have kept him from finding out...”

  Marcus shook his head and put his arm around her waist. They stood almost shoulder to shoulder; standing as he had used to, the top of the dead man’s head would have come to his son’s chin, and to his wife’s lips. “If Caius was right, and it was a kind of sickness in him,” he said softly, “you could have done nothing to prevent it. One or the other of us would have provoked his wrath; if it had not been this, it would have been something else, quite soon.”

  Her glance slid sideways, asking, then she smiled wanly and turned her head to kiss his cheek. Between Patricia Pollia Cato Silania and her sons there had never been much need of words.

  With an odd sort of peace in his soul, he returned to his room and slept, for the first time in years, in the walled-in and expensive quiet that only the rich in Rome could afford.

  It was as well that he did, for the morning was hellish. Marcus’ attempt to slip quietly away after a bite of breakfast was thwarted by his older brother, and he found himself involved in a bitter, sordid quarrel about funerary arrangements, the order of the procession, Felix’s drunkenness, and his own random and irresponsible lifestyle. As he so often had with his father, Marcus cried, “How can I make you understand?” and Caius retorted, pinch-lipped, “I hope I shall never be so lost to propriety as to understand how any man, no matter what his feelings toward his parents, can put a mere woman before his duty toward them. I hated our father as much as you did, but I respected him, something I fear neither you nor our drunken sot of a brother ever did. Since I am now the head of this family—”

  “You may be the head of this family, but you do not have a father’s power over me!” Marcus shouted at him, losing his temper in his anxiety to be away. “My father is dead and I owe him nothing.”

  “You may owe him nothing,” yelled Caius back, “but by Capitoline Jupiter you owe it to our house to remain here and to our mother not to desert her at such a time! If you will not do your duties to the House of Silanus, then depart from it and never look to us for another scrap of bread or another sesterce of silver as long as you live!”

  “You can keep your filthy money if that’s all that matters to you!” cried Marcus, by now in a towering rage. “I don’t care...”

  He was saved from further escalation of the quarrel by the entrance of Straton into the drawing room, crop-haired and wearing the ash-streaked white of mourning. “A visitor to see Lady Patricia,” he announced quietly, and with a withering glare at Marcus, Caius got to his feet and strode stiffly into the atrium. In the shadow of the vestibule Aurelia Pollia stood, her veil drawn over her head, looking timid and very small in the presence of the man who in life had so detested her husband and herself. Like a grave guardian, Priscus Quindarvis stood at her side, wearing, like her, plain white clothing, and Marcus took the opportunity to slip quietly away. Since the night of the banquet he had had badly mixed feelings about the praetor. As he let himself out a side door like a thief, he heard the voice of the time-slave calling out, “It is now the beginning of the third hour! It is now the beginning...”

  There was not much time, he thought, to effect a rescue and get back in time for his father’s funeral.

  He broke into a trot.

  “I tell you anything could have delayed her!” Sixtus limped to the corner of his shadowy cell and turned like an old white fox, driven to bay among his watching baals. From the green tunnel of the overgrown walkway Marcus could hear his voice, even before he stepped into the room.

  “Anything!” spat Telesphorus harshly. “You send a chaste young woman into a brothel and you say ‘anything.’”

  “Don’t be an ass, cleaning women go in and out of those places all the time!”

  “You’d know best about that,” snapped the priest. “I say she should never have gone.”

  “Who else would you have sent? Arete? That Quartilla woman, who’d start preaching about fornication and adultery the first time she glimpsed a naked bum? Dorcas is clever, and she has the courage of a soldier, she’d—”

  “What’s happened?” asked Marcus quietly from the door.

  Priest and philosopher both turned. They seemed equally at home, Telesphorus with the green cavelike room with its litte
r of scrolls, inscriptions, and unknown gods, and Sixtus with the presence of the Christian. Marcus had the impression they’d been arguing doctrine and elenchus since breakfast.

  It was Telesphorus who spoke. He folded his big callused hands on his bony knee. “Dorcas hasn’t returned from Plotina’s brothel.”

  “When did she go?”

  “Shortly after the first hour of the morning,” replied Sixtus.

  At this time of the year, the daylight hours were very long. “Is the place open now?” asked Marcus after a moment, and Sixtus nodded.

  “But you’d be about as inconspicuous as a black cat in a roomful of laundry. I’m having the place watched.”

  “By whom?” asked Marcus, and the old man looked embarrassed, as if he’d been caught in a social solecism.

  Telesphorus’ eyes glittered maliciously. “Once a general, always a general,” he purred. “The habit of command dies hard.” He cocked one chill gray eye up at Marcus. “Christians, of course. You don’t think Rome isn’t meshed over with a net of Christian intelligence? The Children of Light may be in bondage to the Children of This World, but slaves, as has long been known, know all things before their masters. Some of them are silly, and heretical, and believe wrong and foolish doctrines, but at least they believe something. They may haggle over it like market women, but at least they aren’t busy numbing themselves with booze or the sight of other men’s spilled blood. And whatever their doctrinal differences, they—we—are all of us bound together by the baptism of water and fire, an invisible baptism as strong and binding as that dunking in animal blood that holds together the followers of the Persian god. God sees all, and what God does not”—and he flashed the first wry smile Marcus had ever seen out of that austere priest—“the Bishop of Rome certainly does.”

  Marcus was silent for a moment, looking down at that tall rawboned man, who leaned back against the wall like an angular spider. “Are you the Bishop of Rome?” he asked softly, and then remembered the scene in the jail. “No, of course, you couldn’t be.”

  “And if I were I certainly wouldn’t let a centurion’s clerk know it,” remarked the priest. “No, Papa’s a far cleverer man than I, despite his woolly-headed doctrinal errors. Far too clever,” he added spitefully, with a sharp accusing glance at Sixtus, “to have sent a girl on a dangerous mission, as our friend here has done.”

  “When would be the earliest I could go there?” asked Marcus, looking from Telesphorus to Sixtus. “Tonight? After dark?”

  “Second hour of the night. That’s when the crowd will be the biggest.”

  “You’ll fit right in,” sneered the priest, “with that funeral-crop of yours, smelling of sacrificial incense.”

  Marcus felt himself flushing to the hairline, not so much because he contemplated a trip to a brothel directly following his father’s funeral, but because he scarcely had remembered that it would be so.

  Sixtus’ deep voice cut into the burning silence. “Yes,” he said gently, “he will. It’s very common, I believe. After the awareness of death, one seeks the act of generation. So the illusion will pass, provided,” he continued, “you are willing to go through with it. If you aren’t, we’ll contrive something else.”

  “No,” said Marcus, “no, I’ll go. At this point I don’t know who Arrius suspects, but any one of your people might be recognized. And Plotina’s is expensive. If Alexandros or Churaldin is suspected, someone might wonder where slaves got the kind of money it takes to go there.”

  Sixtus limped back to his desk. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “It’s a point well taken. Arrius was here this morning, furious over me disappearance of the Christians from the prison, but whether he suspects Churaldin, or Alexandros, or the whole household including myself of carpenter-worship I don’t know, and I’m not certain that he does, either. What will your family say if you do this?”

  Marcus shook his head. “My family’s said all it’s going to,” he replied in a hard voice. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, but I’m not going to kill the living to honor the dead, and if they’ve captured Dorcas, they’ll know someone’s on their trail. We haven’t time to waste.” He turned to go. “The funeral’s at the sixth hour. I should be back before the sun’s well down. I expect my mother will save me a cake from the banquet afterward.”

  In the doorway he was stopped by Telesphorus’ voice. “Although it hardly does to say so to someone entrusted with a mission of this sort in such a place,” said the priest, in that same hard, half-mocking tone, “go with the grace of God, my son.” He raised a hand, to sketch a holy sign in the air between them. “Heaven knows that the Son of God himself saved people from worse places than that.”

  The House of Silanus was an ancient one; its tombs lay in a great private garden beside the Appian Way a mile or so beyond the gates of the city. As he bent his shoulder under the weight of his father’s bier, Marcus looked about him at the other members of the funeral cortege and knew that the old man had been right. There were few enough trueborn scions of the ancient houses in evidence, and the ones there were were men like Porcius Craessius: highborn, wealthy, and appallingly dissolute, who poured out an eternal stream of money in a vain attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives. More of them were like Garovinus—who’d had himself adopted into a minor branch of the Cornelius family—or Quindarvis, whose father had made his money in speculations in Egyptian wheat. They both wore the purple-bordered togas of their senatorial rank and walked with bowed heads in silence among the mourners. There were a great many of the Senate in the procession. The music of tubas, of cithara and bagpipes, the wailing of the flutes and the keening of the hired mourners reverberated from the walls of the basilicas and temples as they crossed the noon hush of the Forum, and rang among the tall buildings of the circus district, as they crossed toward the Appian Gate.

  The funeral moved slowly, the pace and the dirge weaving themselves together into a lugubrious whole that drove all other thought from his mind. Stiff-backed with outraged piety, Caius bore the other front corner of the bier. Just behind him, Marcus could hear Felix’s agonized whimpers at every crash of the cymbals. After two days of continual drinking, his brother looked in worse case than the corpse. Over the wailing of the mourners, he listened for the sounds of his mother’s or sister’s voice, but perhaps the music drowned them. In any case, by the laws of the old republic, such outcry would have been thought unseemly.

  Sweat rolled down his face beneath the muffling folds of his drawn-up toga. The few passersby, loitering before the siesta hour, stepped respectfully aside, but at this hour even the city seemed hushed. Marcus wondered if, wherever she was, Tullia could hear the faint strains of the music passing by.

  The garden in which this branch of the family had its tombs was unwalled, a quiet and well-kept place, redolent of citrus trees and myrtle. His father’s tomb lay some distance in, near the columbarium of the family freedmen and slaves. It had been built some years ago; the young plane trees planted earlier were already taller than its corniced roof. His father had always said that he would wall the garden—no traveler, he had declared, would use his tomb as a privy—but like so many other things, it had never been got to.

  They laid him in his sarcophagus, wrapped in his shroud and already starting to smell. They sealed the tomb, being sure to leave the little tubes down which offerings could be pushed or poured at the Feast of Families, killed the lamb they had brought and poured out blood and wine. It was late afternoon by the time it was over, the clear crystal light softening the faces of those who stood around the tomb. Seemly things were said; his mother put back her veils just enough to drink a little of the wine. The rest of it was poured through the tube that led into the sarcophagus itself, the final drink shared with her lord.

  Then they returned in silence to the city.

  It was close to sunset when they reached the house. The slaves were already stirring about, making preparations for the funeral banquet. His father’s associates and longtime
clients were hanging about the atrium, talking over the funeral, or the emperor’s campaigns in the East, or discussing the games. Marcus slipped away as quickly as he could and crossed the garden to his own room, moving swiftly to avoid Caius. Even without his own concerns that evening, he had no desire to be trapped into a funeral banquet.

  His room was almost dark, facing northeast into the court. He threw off his white toga and tunic and pulled from the chest the clothes he’d cached there earlier in the afternoon: a dark-blue dinner suit he’d stolen from Felix’s room, the hems of tunic and mantle embroidered alike with a delicate line of tiny bullion stars. Absolutely the latest thing, Felix had assured him. Marcus, regarding himself in the long mirror of polished brass, with his cropped hair and knobby knees, thought he looked like an ass in it.

  If Caius sees me, he thought as he slipped down the breezeway toward the atrium, he really will kill me.

  From the drawing room he heard his brother’s voice, welcoming a late-coming guest. “...such an arduous journey, to return to such grief. We are honored at your presence. For all your political differences, I know that our father always respected you as a man.” (Another politic lie, thought Marcus. Of the precious few men their father had respected, none had espoused politics that differed from his.) “We would be honored to have you at our board.”

  “No,” replied a rich, mellifluous orator’s voice that brought Marcus’ heart up into his throat. “Caius Silanus Senior and I were old enemies. I would not do injustice toward his feelings about me by eating at his table, even after his death.” Marcus glided to the curtains as silently as he could, nearly tripping over a footstool in his stealth. Through a fold in the curtains he could see Caius, tall and pompous in his white dinner suit and plain house slippers, standing in the ocher lamplight beside the vestibule doors. The man before him was shorter than he by half a head, dark, middle-aged, wearing the purple-bordered toga over a dark tunic smutched with the dust of travel. His handsome face was drawn with fatigue and grief, but he held himself like a man supremely used to command. He went on, “It has been, as you say, an arduous journey, to a most bitter homecoming. I am here only to fetch my wife, and to speak with my cousin Quindarvis, if you will be so good as to let them know that I have returned.”