Search the Seven Hills (11 page)

Arrius said impassively, “Lying bitch.”

She made no reply, only lay there sobbing, her inky hair spread round about her, gulping and sniveling incoherently not to be hurt.

“Aurelia Pollia really have a Greek slave girl?” he asked softly after a moment.

Marcus shook his head. “I think she used to have a Greek girl named Ledo, but right now her dresser’s an Armenian—Maali—and both her maids are Africans, sisters, Priscilla and Prudentia.”

The centurion nodded. “But I’d say three quarters of the wealthy houses in the city have some Greek girl in them named Chloris or Chloe or Charis or Corrinna or Core. And damn near every one of them has a physician.”

Marcus looked up quickly. “You think she was lying?”

He shrugged. “If she was, she was pretty safe. You know the physician?”

Marcus nodded wretchedly.

“You think he’s a Christian?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, miserable with the truth that it was impossible to know. Before them on the floor, the woman groveled, sobbing, oblivious to their soft conversation. “I don’t think so, but...”

“We’ll hold him in reserve, and I’ll cross-check with the others,” said Arrius. “No sense crushing the poor bastard’s finger joints on her word alone. Telesphorus and Ignatius, eh?” He stepped over to the door, pushed it open, and called, “Guard!”

The woman Arete got slowly to her feet. With her struggles her gown had come unpinned and gaped open over her bosom; her damp black hair hung down like a river, framing her blotched, tear-streaked face. She said slowly, “I want to recant my faith.”

Arrius shrugged, the dim lamplight glittering harshly over his mail shirt. His eyes might have been something dug from a mine. “Sorry. We’re not out for recantations. This is a civil case, and I don’t give an old date pit who you worship.”

“But you promised,” she said desperately. “You said...”

He glanced over at Marcus. “You hear me promise anything, boy?” Marcus shook his head.

“You promised me,” said the woman frantically, as the guard entered and took her by the arm. Her voice rose to a shriek. “You stinking beast! You filthy pimp! The Lord God will smite you as he smote Ananias, as he smote Judas the traitor, as he...” The door shut behind them.

“Whew.” Arrius removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow with his arm. “She may be right,” he said after a moment. “If I was planning revenge or anything else, she’s the last person I’d tell of it. Odds are she knows nothing of the kidnapping at all. There’s ways of finding out.”

Sullen silence reigned in the Christians’ cell. Arrius called out “Ignatius!” and was answered by that shrill rasping voice.

“Oh Lord!” it prayed, “sustain me to the glories of martyrdom in thy Holy Name!”

“Shut up, you stinking heretic Sodomite,” growled the young boy in the corner.

The little bald man scrambled nimbly to his feet and threw himself at Arrius. “Do your worst to me, imperial thug!” he cried, ripping open his tunic to bare an unwashed and rather concave breast. “The teeth of the beasts in the arena will be but the grindstones to mill my body, to make the pure bread of the Lord!”

The older of the two men remaining in the cell sighed. “Gag him when you throw him to the lions,” he advised.

“That’s it!” screamed Ignatius furiously. “Gag the truth! I should have known it of you, Doriskos! Any man who would champion me desecration of the holy Easter Sunday by making it a cheap Jewish movable feast...”

“The Passover has always been...” began the younger boy, and the room showed every sign of degenerating into new squabbles. But at that moment Marcus heard the creak of the ladder in the corridor, and one of the guards from the room above emerged from me murky darkness.

“Sir?” he said. “There’s a woman here to see the prisoners.”

Arrius glanced from the rising uproar in the cell to the sentry, and back again. He signaled to Marcus, and they retired into the hall, unnoticed by any of the combatants in the room. In the next cell Arete and Telesphorus could be faintly heard, screaming abuse at each other.

Arrius took Marcus by the arm and steered him back into the examination room. “Will you let her see them?” Marcus asked.

“Oh, yes.” He shut the door and went to the rear of the chamber, stepping around the black crouching shape of the rack to the shadowed wall behind. “Here.” There was a faint scraping sound. Marcus saw the shadows of the wall shift and a darker oblong appear among them, where there had been only dirty and bloodstained plaster. Coming gingerly at Arrius’ signal, he saw a very small chamber, like a closet, concealed behind the hidden door.

“Through that knothole you can see everything that passes in the room,” said the centurion. “The wall’s thin, and the ceiling’s pitched so you can hear a whisper. Will you do it?”

Marcus swallowed, suddenly repelled.
Beauty, Truth, and the Good,
he thought to himself: their very natures seemed to slither like reptiles through his cringing fingers.
Where did I go wrong in my search? How did I come into this hole of ugliness and death, lies and blasphemies, to sit like a greedy little clerk in the hole where they crouch to take down confessions wrung in agony?
But he looked up and saw that uncompromising cynicism in the centurion’s eyes, mocking his courage without mocking his search.

“All right,” he managed to whisper, and Arrius smiled, a brief, bitter grin that never touched his eyes.

“Good boy.” He rested a brown scarred hand on his shoulder. “We’ll make a soldier of you yet.”

Through the knothole he saw the woman enter the room a few minutes later, escorted by the sentry. She was pale, and under her brown veil her thick black curling hair was dank with sweat, but between the leering soldier and the crouching shadow of the rack she maintained her calm. She was young, eighteen or nineteen. Her dress bore the stripe of a woman with children. The lamplight glinted on a silver amulet of a fish that lay on her large, upstanding breasts.

Hobnailed boots clacked in the passage. Marcus saw her flinch and realized how much courage it must have taken to come here at all. The door opened, and the sentry’s voice growled, “Make it fast, grandpa.” Telesphorus stepped from the shadows and met the girl’s big dark eyes.

The door closed behind him, the wind of it making the grubby lamp flame startle. Marcus shifted within his sweltering cubicle, the sweat-dampened wool of his toga unbearably itchy against his neck and the walls too narrow for him to risk making a sound by scratching.

Telesphorus’ face was shiny with moisture in the dim brown darkness of the room. The fear of the place was growing on him, but his voice was still calm. “You shouldn’t have come, Dorcas.”

She gestured to the small basket she’d brought. “I have food for you.”

“It’s a costly meal at the price of your life. You think they’ll let you out of here?”

She swallowed hard, hiding her fear. “I told them I was a member of your family. They let me in.”

“You don’t think they’ll be after our families as well?” he demanded harshly. And then, as those full, sensitive lips tightened, he added, “They’re asking names.”

Marcus saw her eyes flicker down to his hands, then his feet. She asked him, “Are you all right?”

“So far. They want to know about Nikolas’ group, and their families.”

Dorcas frowned, her dark strongly drawn brows swooping down over her nose. “But they’re all dead. Dead or left the city. You and Ignatius are the only survivors of that group. I don’t understand.”

“It may be the only lead they have.”

“But why?”

He gestured impatiently. “Do they need a reason? That heathen spectacle of blood they call their ‘games’ is going on. It may be we’re cheaper entertainment than the gladiators. But if it comes to the rack, somebody’s going to break, and God alone knows where it will stop.” He folded his long arms. His eyes were only a brooding glitter in the deep shadows of his overhung brows. “The Church has picked up a lot of dross in the last twenty years,” he said finally. “I don’t know what kind of person would join a proscribed cult simply because it’s proscribed, but there are those whose strength I doubt. And some of them know more than they ought.”

“Who’s with you?” asked Dorcas, and he shot her a glance from under those heavy brows.

“Ignatius and Agnes. Doriskos. Martin from John’s group. That silly bitch Arete from Dioscordes’ bunch.”

Dorcas said, “You’ll have to be broken out.”

Telesphorus raised his head, like a brooding eagle at the turning of the wind.

“I’ll tell Papa.”

“If we can get you out of here yourself,” rasped the priest. “If not, pray God to grant us strength. At worst he may be able to save some of the others.”

“How long do you think you have?” she asked softly, and he shook his head. The heavy tread of hobnailed boots passed in the corridor. They both looked up quickly, the small muscles in the priest’s jaw standing out in a sudden relief of oily gold and blackness in the lamplight.

“Not long,” he said in a strained voice. “Let him know how we stand. His doctrines may be pernicious, but...”

In the grimy shadows Dorcas’ cheeks colored. “Papa isn’t a heretic.”

Telesphorus’ eyes flashed. “No. But he rides a close line to it. Beware of him...”

The bolts rattled at the door. Dorcas got to her feet, startled; their eyes met. Then she said, questioningly, “Wicked uncle?” and Telesphorus nodded.

For a moment the question, if question it had been, made no sense to Marcus. But as the sentry returned he saw the subtle shift in the expression of the priest and the girl, each becoming, not different, but only what seemed to be a different aspect of the same. The tension in Dorcas’ face changed to a kind of innocent horror, as though none of this had or could have anything to do with herself. Telesphorus seemed to grow stiffer and more withdrawn, but the wariness in his leathery face turned to a kind of sly self-righteousness and he picked up the basket she’d placed on the table and began to examine its contents. With condescending concern he said, “I thank you for your helpful thoughts, niece, but what you did was foolish. Let us take care of our own. We have put aside our families for a greater family, the Family of Christ. Meddling in it will only bring you trouble.”

What Marcus could have sworn were tears glinted in Dorcas’ eyes. “You may have forsaken your family,” she replied shakily, “but that doesn’t mean your family is going to forsake you. I don’t understand your doctrines, but I’m not going to leave you to starve.” She started for the door, drawing her veil once again over her hair. The sentry made a move to block her way, but in the same instant she turned back and said, with trembling chin, “I’ll see you again, uncle.”

Telesphorus glanced up from the food basket, like an interrupted hyena. “If you plan to, you’d better get your ticket early,” he commented, with deliberate brutality.

Dorcas stared at him for one moment in stricken horror, then burst into tears and pushed past the outraged sentry, her running footsteps retreating along the hall. A moment later the ladder creaked; the sentry gasped, “You self-righteous old sod!” and cuffed Telesphorus hard enough to knock him back against the wall. The priest clutched his food and snarled at him. He seemed a wholly different man from the one who had met Arrius’ questioning with such quelling dignity. Had he told them that the girl was no messenger of his he would have been disbelieved at once; as it was, he had left her free to take a message to the other Christians...

To the other Christians?
Marcus thought suddenly, as Telesphorus was shoved brutally into the hall.
Great gods!

He pushed against the door of the hidden closet, frantic to stop her before she got away. Arrius had closed it from the outside; there seemed to be no latch on the inside at all. Furious, he sprang to his feet, knocking his head on the low pitch of the roof, cursing in a most unphilosophic fashion as he rattled at the recalcitrant catch.
You’ll have to be broken out,
she had said, and then, with simple unshakable confidence,
I’ll tell Papa,
as though the one would follow upon the other. But she’d have to act fast. With any luck it was her father she would now seek.

In despair he threw his whole weight against the door, tripping over the stool in the process and precipitating both it and himself violently onto the floor of the examining room. He scrambled to his feet (stepping heavily on the hem of his toga) and stumbled for the door. In the back of his mind, as he blundered down the passageway, was a kind of amazement at the fakement. Having seen the Christians fighting among themselves in the cell, he would never have credited even members of the same group with such capacity for quick, concerted action.

He threw himself up the ladder. The guardroom was now broiling hot, the sunlight glaring in through the open door. A clump of guards were grouped around a slimy little man in an embroidered blue tunic, who was marking down bets on a wax diptych. “Where’s Centurion Arrius?” he gasped, and one of the men looked up.

“Gone off with some informer. He’ll be back.”

“It can’t wait—Did that girl leave?”

The man nodded and jerked his grimy thumb toward the outside door, adding, “Poor little kitten.”

Kitten indeed!
thought Marcus, pausing only long enough to snatch up his shopping basket, men dashing outside. From the higher ground of the footslopes of the Capitoline, he could see the brown veil, making its way quickly among the scattered groups in the Forum below. He spotted her position and direction from his vantage point—crossing through the line of the monuments to the Caesars and heading for the corner of the Julian Basilica—and plunged down after her, trying to keep his toga out from under his feet and at the same time to look as inconspicuous as possible.

On any other day at this hour he knew he would never have been able to follow her across the Forum. But today its cobbled expanse was nearly deserted, only a stroller or two idling in the shaded arcades of its closed law courts. The sidewalk vendors were gone; so were the acrobats, the beggars, the sword swallowers who performed for a gauping populace. Distantly Marcus heard the rising roar of applause, an animal bellow of approbation, like summer thunder over the deserted streets. Quindarvis’ games were evidently a wild success.