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Arrius’ voice cut through his weariness like a blunt sword through flesh. “So tell me about your friend Nicanor.”

Marcus looked up with a start. “Hunh?”

“Prefect Varus’ physician. The one our girl friend put the kiss on this morning.”

He felt as though the wine had turned to poison in his belly. “But he’s not a Christian.”

Arrius drained his winecup. “You sure about that, boy?”

Marcus was silent.

“I’m going to spend tomorrow,” he went on slowly, “with the city hangman and that pack of lunatics. I’m not looking forward to it. Of the two that woman said were connected with Nikolas and company, Telesphorus may be too tough to break and his pal Ignatius too crazy. And I don’t know how much anybody else will know.

“Now that bitch could have been lying. But I’m not willing to risk Tertullia Varia’s life on that. If I draw a blank tomorrow, I may have to start calling in my other debts. When did Nicanor enter Varus’ household?”

Marcus said unwillingly, “About two and a half years ago.”

“Who’d they buy him from?”

“Porcius Craessius, I think. A private sale. I don’t know why.”

“Can you find out for me, without rousing anyone’s suspicions?”

A police informer,
thought Marcus, feeling suddenly stained within. He nodded miserably, unable to meet the centurion’s eyes.

After a moment Arrius said, “Why’d you become a philosopher, boy?”

He stared unhappily down at the dark surface of his wine. “To seek the truth,” he quoted. “To find the good, and the beautiful.”

“Of those three,” continued the soldier, “what’s the most important?”

Marcus looked up. “They’re all the same thing. They’re what is—that is, True, and Good, and Beautiful.”

“What if you found out the truth was ugly?”

From across the square somebody yelled, “Baby-eaters! Corpse-fuckers!” There was a clamor of catcalls, the deep baying of the mob. Against the darkness of the New Way, torches swarmed, their light wavering over the dark teeming bodies, the hard brazen flicker of mail. A voice cried, “Have that one, you poxy whore!” and a woman’s voice began shrieking curses. A double file of soldiers entered the square, their burnished helmets gleaming in the ruddy light, and like a dog pack around a garbage cart the mob boiled on all sides, jeering and laughing, bending down to pick up rocks and dung from the road. Between the soldiers Marcus could clearly pick out the Christians: Telesphorus with his high bald head flashing with an oily sheen of sweat, Arete stumbling, sobbing, her dark heavy hair like a cloak over bowed shoulders, Ignatius shaking his fists and screaming back at the mob. The other Christians followed in sullen, frightened silence. He saw a rotten fruit explode against Telesphorus’ back, heard the shrill chorus of profanity that accompanied it, both of which the priest received in stony silence. He found himself thinking that this man—kidnapper, pervert, and cannibal that he might be—was above his revilers.

He turned to his companion and saw the centurion’s mouth drawn together in a single hard line of distaste. “Do you think Papa will save them?” he asked him softly.

“It isn’t my affair to speculate,” replied Arrius in a dry voice. “My affair is to find out who he is.”

“Who?” A staff was leaned against the wall beside Marcus, a second jug of wine set in the midst of the table. Looking up in surprise Marcus found himself confronting bright fierce blue eyes under white brows like a hawk’s.

“Sixtus!” he said in surprise. “What are you doing—I mean, I thought you never...”

“The locks and bolts on my gates deceived you into thinking that I never emerged into the light of day,” replied the old aristocrat easily. “Hello, Arrius. Did you learn anything from your miserable Christian?”

“How’d you know about him, you old devil?” grinned the centurion, reaching up to clasp the blunt scarred hand in greeting.

“Don’t tell me there’s another reason you’d pay calls in that lion-reeking den.” The scholar took his place on the bench beside him and regarded him with mild challenge in his lifted brows. “So you did join the Praetorian after all.”

“I did, and how you knew me after all these years is more than I’ll ever figure out. And it’s just conceivable,” he added haughtily, “that you’re wrong about there being a Christian at the Flavian whom I went to see. I could be having an affair with the head cage-keeper.”

Sixtus studied him gravely for a moment, as if giving the matter careful thought. “Unless his taste has sadly declined, I hardly think he’d find you any rival for a handsome young lion. And as for how I knew you, you look a good deal like your father, you know. And a boy of your enterprising nature would be bound to end up in the Praetorian Guard.”

Arrius sighed. “Don’t you ever find it a little disappointing never to be surprised by anything?”

“Not really.” The old man poured out a cup of wine for himself. “The last time I was truly surprised it was by a cobra under a rock in the desert, and since that time I have endeavored to avoid all occasion for it.” He looked out across the dark square. The guards had formed a semicircle around the door of a brick building at the corner of the gladiators’ compound, and among the crowding backs of the mob, the Christians could be seen entering the building under the escort of more soldiers from within. Most of the crowd from the wineshop had gone to join the fun; only the sand-raker remained, moodily pouring raw wine down his throat, oblivious to all else.

“So those are your Christians?”

“Prime bunch,” agreed Arrius.

“If one isn’t particular about one’s entertainment, I suppose so. Is there really a tunnel from the holding jail to the pits beneath the amphitheater?”

The centurion nodded. “It runs under the square. There’s another one to the gladiatorial barracks. The whole compound there is barracks—the stables of the Red chariot-racing faction lie just beyond. The whole quarter between here and the circus is like that, lodgings and stables and armories.”

“It must be a joy to police. Have you learned anything from your poor Christian?”

“Not much. He was far-gone.” Arrius poured himself another cup of wine; his fourth or fifth, Marcus thought. Perhaps there was more to that curious, complicated man than the brutality he had shown in the prison. “Only—who is it that the Christians call Papa?”

Sixtus frowned. “What do you mean, ‘who is it’?”

“Arrius thinks they could be referring to a kind of archpriest.”

“Possibly,” agreed the old man doubtfully. “But that would imply some kind of overall organization, wouldn’t it?”

Arrius laughed unexpectedly. “Have you ever seen a roomful of Christians? I thought we’d be taking up the bodies in the morning.”

“Oh, yes,” smiled Sixtus. “As I said to Marcus earlier, Antioch was crawling with them, all of them preaching brotherly love and ready to scratch one another’s eyes out over whether the Christ had one nature in two bodies, or one body with two natures, or one and a half natures or whether he existed corporeally at all. I suppose that is the remarkable thing about Christianity: that it is attempting to apply logic to mysticism, to make rational sense of what is essentially irrational.”

“The remarkable thing about Christianity,” growled Arrius, “is the damn Christians. Do you know what that scrawny little monkey Ignatius has been doing all afternoon? He’s been trying to bait the guards into killing him, so he can the for his faith and go straight to heaven. The poker-backed old priest finally told him not to tempt the judgment of the Lord, and that set the rest of them off again. Lunatics, all of ‘em. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Oh, it’s quite the thing to die for one’s beliefs.” The old man leaned his back against the wall behind him, his scarred hands resting at ease on the scrawled carvings of the filthy table. He looked as at home in that grubby tavern, with its crude paintings of gladiatorial murder and ill-assorted ruffians at the bar, as if he had spent the last five years here instead of in study and meditation in that leafy cave on the Quirinal Hill. “It’s easier than living for them. And in any case where their Savior led, they are eager enough to follow.”

Arrius grunted and poured himself another cup of wine. “You’d think their god would have picked a better way to go than a punishment reserved for traitors and brigands. If he did die that way, that is.”

“Oh, he certainly did,” said Sixtus. “Back in the days when I was an arrogant junior staff officer of the Tunis garrison I talked to the centurion who had been in charge of the punishment squad at Joshua Bar-Joseph’s execution. In view of the fuss that was made over the execution itself, and the rumors that went around immediately after, he remembered it quite well.”

“So he actually saw Bar-Joseph die?” said Arrius.

“Oh, yes.”

“What was he like?” asked Marcus curiously. “Bar-Joseph, I mean.”

Sixtus was silent for a time, his chin resting upon his knuckles, his eyes seeming to lose their focus as they turned inward, remembering another night, in perhaps another tavern. “He said he chiefly remembered Bar-Joseph as being very tall, and quite strong,” he said at last. “He was supposed to be able to break a cornel-wood spear-shaft in his hands, but had that gentleness you often find in big men, who have seldom had to fight. Longinus said it surprised him that he died so quickly. A crucified man will sometimes die in as little as twelve hours, depending on how it’s done, but others can hang on for days.”

In the warm darkness beyond the wineshop lights a stallion whinnied. Faint, bitter arguments could be heard floating from the barred window of the jail.

“Of course, Longinus admitted that the garrison had used him very badly through the previous night.” The old man’s eyes seemed to flicker back into focus, looking sharply from Arrius to Marcus beneath their heavy lids. “It’s always the late-night watch that catches all the bad squad, you know. And evidently there were a couple of real toughs in the Jerusalem garrison who egged the others on. They were all rather drunk, because of the festival, and after a week of Messianic agitation, and rumors, and threats of riot, the guards were keyed-up and dangerous. Jerusalem was always a bad station, and Pilate was such an incompetent governor that the men were ready to lash out at anyone or anything. Longinus said by morning the Nazarene could scarcely walk, much less carry the beam of a cross through the city and up a steep hill—they’d flogged him with a leaded whip, and I suspect he had internal injuries from the beating as well. Longinus said he never spoke a word to them, from first to last.”

“And was he dead,” asked Arrius softly, “when they took him down from the cross?”

Sixtus nodded. “Quite dead.”

Most of the crowd had returned to the tavern by this time, joined by others, gladiators or soldiers of the watch. At the bar, amid whoops of encouragement, a black-haired whore was attempting to drain twelve winecups in succession; the smell of lamp oil and cheap perfume and spilled wine was everywhere. From somewhere close by, the beasts of the Flavian could be heard roaring and growling—you could probably hear them in the jail as well, thought Marcus, and remembered the dying man in the stinking cavern below the amphitheater again.

He asked, “Why a fish? Because Bar-Joseph was a fisherman?”

The scholar shook his head. “No, in point of fact he was supposed to have been a carpenter, though most of his followers were fishermen. The fish is from the anagram of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior—Iesus Christos Theou Yios Soter—ICTHYS—fish. And of course, the symbol of the fish itself is sacred to other faiths from that part of the world as well...”

“There,” said Arrius suddenly, pointing. “There he goes.”

Marcus looked up, startled. From the darkness of a street that led up the Caelian Hill a litter emerged, surrounded by its host of bodyguards, torchbearers, slaves, and hurrying clients: a splendid equipage liveried in the bright colors that marked an eastern taste. The litter itself seemed to be plated entirely in embossed gold, the lotus-buds on its handles glinting with jewels. The embroidered curtains had been thrown back to reveal an enormously obese Syrian, clothed in a bright primrose dinner suit whose hems were a handspan deep in sardonyx, bullion, mother-of-pearl. His black close-curled hair was cut short, like a Roman’s, and glistened with unguents. Blue silk ribbons fluttered from the knot of emeralds that tipped his cloakpin. His sausage fingers were thick with rings, as though he anticipated a fight and went prepared with a cestus made of gold and gems.

“Who is it?” Marcus asked in distaste. “I’ve never seen anything so vulgar in my life.”

“It’s your rival in love, boy,” grinned Arrius unkindly. “That’s Chambares Tiridates, the pride of Phrygia and potentate of the East.”

“East bank of the Tiber, anyway,” commented Sixtus, referring to the location of the import warehouses that were the source of the Syrian’s wealth.

The litter and its procession halted in the midst of the square; the man inside called out and waved. A charioteer in a gaudy blue silk tunic detached himself from the bar at the back of the tavern and went striding past the table where Marcus and his companions sat, and ran lightly to the litter’s side. Gold curly hair glinted in the light of the surrounding torches; Tiridates was evidently wishing the man luck in the races tomorrow. After a moment the huge merchant leaned down to kiss the charioteer full on the mouth, a salute that was received with practiced enthusiasm. The bearers, resignedly, shifted their grip to compensate for the sudden list of the chair.

“That’s them!” whispered Marcus. “That’s the bearers—look, you can see the bruise on the nearer man’s face.”

“Sturdy brutes,” murmured Sixtus appraisingly. “They’d have to be, of course.”

“So he didn’t sell them!”

“I never thought he had,” mused the centurion. He glanced sideways at Marcus. “You think they’d talk to you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They might recognize me as a friend of hers, but nobody in Tiridates’ household knows who I am. I mean, that I—that Tullia—” He broke off in confusion, and Arrius hid a grin.

“Think you could pass yourself off as a slave?”