Search the Seven Hills (2 page)

“Wait for what?” she sobbed. “I’m sixteen already! All the girls I went to school with are married and some of them are divorced! Marcus, it’s no good,” she went on, her voice cracking and raw. “Tiridates wants the wedding to go through as soon as Father gets back from Sicily I’ve spent the day with his horrid sister buying my bride things and it’s no good, Marcus.”

She was crying again. His heart torn with compassion, he reached to embrace her, calling her by her childhood nickname, “Tullia, no, there has to be some way... Tell them to put down this wretched chair, by the gods!”

“No,” she gulped, drawing back, “No. You know he won’t listen. What good would it do us if he married me to Tiridates by force? And he’d do it, Marcus. With the elections and the new appointments coming up, and he’s already planning to give games next year... I think he’d do anything.” Her voice had turned suddenly thin and forlorn, her tears shining like quicksilver in the deep shadows of the white curtains. She whispered, “Marcus, do you love me?”

Thwarted of an embrace, he kissed her fingers passionately. The slaves continued to stare bleakly off into space. In the blue darkness of the summer evening they were alone, but for the bearers and another slave, whistling his way along on the other side of the street, bound on some errand of his master’s. If he noticed the scene at all, he had the good manners to pretend he didn’t.

“Marcus, listen.” Tullia’s light, soft fingers touched his uncombed hair. The silk of the litter curtains stirred in the breeze and touched his cheek like the kiss of wind-spirits. “We can’t do anything now. But I can send for you—after the wedding.” Her voice was low, excluding the chair-bearers (who might not have understood much Latin anyway). “Will you come?”

“What?!” At her furious signal he dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. “What? You mean you’re cold-bloodedly planning to deceive your husband... ”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby!” she hissed furiously, thrusting shame and sorrow aside by the more convenient emotions of anger and scorn.

“Baby?” he whispered back. “You say ‘baby’ when you sit there, practically on the eve of your marriage, plotting an affair before the knot’s even tied!”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know that it’s done! Everyone does it!”

“That’s no reason for you to swell the ranks of adulteresses!”

Her hand lashed out at him in an inexpert slap that all but overset the litter. Marcus caught her as she swayed; the bearers compensated for the sudden swerve without a flicker of expression. Tullia pulled violently away from his steadying grasp. “Take your hands off me, you—you philosopher!” she raged. “You’d put your own stupid priggish morals before our happiness...
Our
happiness! Your happiness, I should say!”

Marcus could only gape at her in inarticulate outrage, his hand to his cheek, which was not stinging nearly so badly as was his self-esteem.

“You’d cause trouble with my father about my marrying a foreigner, which is something that can’t be helped, but just because of some silly vows... ”

“No vow is silly if you’re going to have a workable human society!”

“Human society!” cried Tullia, weeping afresh, though not, if either of them had been old enough to know it, with anger at him. “My own father is selling me as a slave, practically, to some fat Syrian who’d sooner cuddle you on his wedding night than me, and all you can do is prate at me about human society! I hate you, Marcus Silanus!”

“Tullia... ”

“Move on!” she sobbed wrathfully to the chair-bearers.

“Tullia!”

The bearers had begun to move off with their loping, professional stride. Tullia slued around in her chair and screamed at him, “Go away! Go back to your dirty old books! I never want to see you again!” And with a jerk she pulled the curtains shut.

“Tullia, listen!” Marcus broke into a run to catch up and tripped over the flapping ends of the toga that marked him as a Roman citizen come of age. He landed in a patch of mud and fruit peelings, and by the time he’d scrambled drippily to his feet, the litter was turning the corner with practiced neatness, into the street that led up the hill to Consul Varus’ town house.

Marcus was gangly for all his height, and a bookish boyhood had given him no great turn of speed. By the time he’d reached the corner, the Arabs were far up the street with their burden, and where the street turned, at the crest of the hill, he could see the walls of the house, creamy white against the gloom, the dark trees of the gardens spangled with light from the courts below, like firelit smoke. Even at this distance he could make out two forms in the gold rectangle of the open door: the slim dainty shape of Tullia’s mother, Lady Aurelia Pollia, and, dark and blocky behind her, a big man in the purple-bordered senatorial toga whom he knew for the praetor Priscus Quindarvis, Consul Varus’ adopted cousin and political running dog.

They would be waiting for her, having evidently expected her back earlier than this. In fact Quindarvis had said something of the kind when Marcus had spoken to him earlier in the afternoon, when he’d first come inquiring for Tullia. He had had some notion of running after the litter, of calling to her to stop, not to become one of those sleek worldly women whose loveless marriages were sweetened by cheap and changeable loves. But he couldn’t do it, not with her mother listening—not to mention a problematical uncle and an unknown slave and the chair-bearers (if they knew Latin). So he could only stand, panting, at the corner of the street, as she receded from him. He thought,
I have lost her,
and despair closed over his heart.

When the gang of men emerged from an alleyway halfway up the street, blocking the litter’s progress, Marcus’ first thought was only a kind of mild surprise that so many would be abroad so late. The litter-bearers stopped, expostulating; then in the lamplight that filtered from the distant open door Marcus saw that the men carried clubs.

One of the bearers dropped his end of the poles and ran; men emerged from an alley on the opposite side of the road, surrounded him, and clubbed him unconscious. The chair had heeled drunkenly, then fell as the other chair-bearer went down. In the thrashing mill of the white curtains, he could see Tullia being dragged out by the ambushers, struggling desperately, her dark hair tumbling down around her shoulders.

Then at the top of the street he heard her mother scream, and with an incoherent yell he grabbed up the flapping ends of his toga and plunged into the fray.

He tripped over the body of a fallen bearer, scrambled up, and went sailing into the man nearest him, swinging his fists and shouting. He had no idea how to go about attacking a man, having never struck anyone in anger in his life; he got a brief glimpse of the man’s face, swarthy and grinning, white teeth gleaming in a coarse black beard, a gold ring flashing in one ear.

The battle was humiliatingly short. Somehow he was abruptly on the ground, Tullia’s screams ringing in his ears. Beyond the litter and the milling bodies he could see her white limbs flashing in the tangle of her gown, brown greedy hands holding her, lifting her off her feet. He sought to rise and a boot thudded brutally into his ribs. His sight blurred, and he tasted mud and wetness and the welling sourness of vomit in his throat. As the world reeled into darkness, he heard the screams muffled, and the clattering welter of fleeing feet.

By sheer force of will he heaved himself half-upright, in time to collide with another young man—the slave who had passed them earlier and had come leaping out of nowhere to run to the rescue. They tangled and fell, the slave cursing him in British. There were other voices, shouts ringing off the high walls, a flicker of white and struggling movement in the mouth of an alley. The slave writhed free of Marcus’ entangling toga and was off after them again, to catch them before they were lost in the maze of lanes downhill. Marcus tried to follow, tripping again, fighting a dizzy blackness that clutched at the edges of his mind. He reached the black canyon of the narrow lane at a staggering run, hearing something falling and, in the impenetrable shadows before him, the clatter of footsteps and a horrible smothered squealing. Without pausing for thought, he plunged after the sound. Something white and blurred danced elusively among the twisting alleyways.

Then his feet were hooked from beneath him, and he hit the pavement again, the stones of the wall beside him ripping at his flailing hands. A body lying half under his feet twisted to a sitting position, and he had a brief vision of the dark angular face of the slave as powerful hands caught his shoulders and slammed him unconscious against the wall.

The goddess Persephone had been raped by Pluto, lord of the underworld.

It had all happened in the ancient days of the gods, he knew; and Timoleon, the Greek philosopher at whose feet he had studied these last three years, had explained to him once that the myth was, in fact, an allegory of the union of the elements in a single godhead.

But through the gold fog that seemed to surround him, he thought for a time that he lay in the grasses of an ancient Greek meadow, the scent of flowers thick in his throat. He saw the coming of the death-god, the girl taken by surprise; saw the white struggling body in the reeds beside the stream, and the brown hands of that inexorable assailant gripping at the girl’s clenched, protesting thighs. He struggled toward them, trying to call out, but his body felt heavy, as though he were half-asleep or very, very drunk. He saw the girl’s mouth part in a scream, stretching wider and wider; and turning, looked into the horror-stricken eyes of Demeter, Persephone’s goddess mother.

Through the foggy blurring of his senses he thought he heard the philosopher Timoleon’s voice as he lectured. “What we have here is not the disgraceful behavior of God toward God—for how can there be violence of one element of the Godhead toward another?—but an allegorical figure of life and death as united emanations of the One. Earth, and the commonplaces of human affairs, are here represented by the goddess Demeter, whom we may take to understand... ” The voice seemed to fade, to change into other voices. Marcus thought groggily,
No, it isn’t that! No measure
—
no godhead.
Only the rape of innocence, blind and random injustice, the thrashing pale reeds whitening to a froth of torn white silk, the bronze lilies tangling in the helpless girl’s hair.
All the philosophy in the world will never reconcile me to that.

“My dear boy... ” Something shockingly cold against the side of his head made him flinch, and blinking, he saw Pluto’s face melt into the square, anxious countenance of Priscus Quindarvis as the big man bent over him, a dripping rag in his hand. “Are you all right?”

The bright haze of the dream blurred the features, and the lights stabbed at his eyes, so that he twisted his head aside to escape burning.

“It’s the lamp,” said another voice—Nicanor, he identified it, Varus’ Greek physician slave. The dazzling glare shifted.

Somewhere a woman was screaming, a moaning animal noise of grief. His eyes opened suddenly, he said, “Demeter... ” Then, as consciousness devoured the last fragments of the vision, “Lady Aurelia!” He tried to get up and sank back with a nauseated groan.

“Are you all right?” asked Quindarvis again, daubing worriedly at his face with a rag, and Nicanor demanded brusquely, “How in the name of Apollo would he know if he’s all right? Lie still, Professor.” It was an old nickname that dated back to his bookish schooldays; even Tullia’s father’s slaves used it. He supposed it was better than what the other philosophy students at the Basilica Ulpias sometimes called him—Silenus, after the Greek god of drunken poltroonery, a pun on his family name of Silanus. The physician’s light swift fingers turned back his eyelids, then felt at the cords of his neck. Gradually his senses cleared. The softness of the dream’s grasses turned to rocks beneath his smarting ribs, though rolling his head painfully to one side, he saw that he was actually lying on one of the dining-room couches in Varus’ house. Someone seemed to have filled the sockets of his eyes with sand; his mouth tasted as though it had been carefully stuffed with Egyptian cotton.

A night breeze wafted the scent of honeysuckle through the open archways from the central court. A single bronze standing-lamp threw titan shadows over the marble pilasters that lined the painted walls. In the courtyard a fountain murmured; there was a muted bustling, a distant blur of frightened voices, and from far off, the rattling din of cart traffic from the stew of sound that was Rome. Lady Aurelia’s sobs were a distant, broken jarring in the night.

“You’ll do,” grunted the physician, “though Asclepius only knows how.”

Quindarvis swung around, his dark cynical eyes brooding in the lamplight. “Wretched, dirty, filthy beasts... How’re the other ones?”

“I’ve already sent the bearers home—they were Tiridates’ men... ”

“Why in the name of the gods didn’t she have her own slaves to carry her chair?”

Nicanor shrugged impatiently. “The bearers who took her over there came back this afternoon—one of them had a fever or something... That damn Syrian has so many slaves he could easily spare a couple. No harm done, they were only stunned.”

“What about the man who was supposed to be with her?” continued the senator in an outraged voice. “The man should be put to death, and if he was mine he would be.”

“She sent him away,” protested Marcus feebly.

“He shouldn’t have left.” Quindarvis came pacing back to his couch, despite his square chunky build and puffy, unhealthy skin, giving the impression of latent power, like an overweight tiger. On one thick hand a massy gold signet flashed like a mirror. “Great gods, man, we’re not talking about a pilfered winecup! How’s the other man, the slave?” he added.

“I’ll live,” said a younger man’s voice. Limping steps halted up to the side of the couch, and Marcus found himself looking up into the dark face he had seen just before the wall came rushing up to smash him over the head. “Young master,” said the slave, who couldn’t have been much older than Marcus’ twenty-two years, “I beg you to forgive me for—for tripping you. I thought you were the last of those scum. Indeed I did.”