Search the Seven Hills (26 page)

“Hey!” One of the few remaining onlookers, a big burly fellow in a blacksmith’s leather kilt, cuffed him angrily. “He didn’t have to save you from stoning, you little Jew.”

“What is stoning to me?” screamed Ignatius, “What are the beasts of the arena to me? In rending my body they shall offer me a pure and perfect sacrifice to the Lord...”

“Not if you go around preaching
that
heretical drivel they won’t,” grumbled a retreating voice somewhere behind Marcus.

“Mother of harlots! You are filled with the abominations of the earth! You shall be made desolate and naked, and the beasts shall eat your flesh while your soul burns in hell!”

“I’m afraid you got that backward, preacher,” said Arrius quietly. “You’re the one most likely to be cooked or eaten, and what happens to your soul after that is no business of mine. But I have a few questions to ask you, first.”

Though I am worshiped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated with ail manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me. The primeval Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, Mother of the Gods; the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropian Artemis; for the islanders of Cyprus I am Paphian Aphrodite; for the archers of Crete I am Dictynna; for the trilingual Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; for the Eleusinians their ancient Mother of the Corn....

Invocation of Isis (from Apuleius)

“A
ND DID YOU GET
any sense out of him?” Sixtus selected a date from the bowl on the table before them, turned it over in his fingers as though searching for a maker’s mark, and consumed it with slow enjoyment, his eyes never leaving Marcus’ face.

Marcus shook his head. In the garden beyond the open archways of the summer dining room, late sunlight shimmered among the embroidered veils of the pepper trees, making a mingled harlequin of shadows on the worn marble floor. “Well, when we got back he was taken up with Nicanor, and then the hangman had left to take his siesta. Arrius questioned him himself—pretty roughly, I thought—but all he got was ranting.”

“Hardly surprising,” commented the scholar. “He sounds like a man not easily turned aside from his purposes—certainly not by anything so paltry as life or limb. How’s Nicanor?”

Marcus looked unhappily down at the tabletop, a smooth-worn marquetry of fruitwoods and mother-of-pearl. “He’s alive,” he said quietly. “That’s about all that can be said for the present. It’s too early to tell. He cut longways down the veins, instead of across.”

Sixtus nodded. “He’s a physician, he’d know about things like that.”

Churaldin came in, carrying a bronze wine mixer. At his heels trotted the little dancer from Quindarvis’ feast, well-brushed and well-scrubbed in her plain linen dress, and shy to the point of muteness.

“But why would he do it?” asked Marcus miserably, as the child handed him a cup.

“Possibly he did not wish to be racked. I shouldn’t, myself.” He accepted the offered cup from the little girl as though she’d been a table. She was looking at him with worship in her eyes; if he’d spoken to her she’d probably have fled the room.

“But if he was innocent...”

“What makes you think he was?” asked Sixtus. “If he was a Christian—or if he had anything else to hide—suicide would be the logical course. And even if he was innocent, you cannot prove innocence by torture—only guilt, or stamina. Will you see him tomorrow?”

Marcus nodded wretchedly. “I think a lot depends on what we find tonight.”

In the garden outside the light was fading; the evening promised warm and still. Through the tangling vines he could see the gray cat beginning to prowl, green eyes wide with the madness of summer. Churaldin asked, “Will there be anything else?” and Sixtus shook his head. “Let’s go, Octavia.” Collecting her dippers and water jar, the little girl hurried out at his heels. As the shadows swallowed them up, Marcus could see the tall Briton rumple the child’s dark hair.

“You bought her from Quindarvis?”

Sixtus shook his head. “No, I simply left with her. Since I contrived to look unspeakably bored during the rest of the orgy, they now suspect me of vices they can only guess at—even our friend Porcius Craessius was tremendously impressed.”

Marcus cried, “How disgusting!”

The blue eyes twinkled. “I would far prefer what others will say about me to what I would think of myself if I left her there. I don’t suppose you saw more than half of what went on—you left rather early.”

“I saw enough,” muttered Marcus.

“I daresay you did. Where were you when you were attacked that night? You said close to the circus?”

“Pretty close to the east corner of the circus,” he agreed. He was becoming more and more used to the old philosopher’s lightning changes of topic. “We passed the Temple of Ceres almost immediately, when those two Christians saw me home. I still don’t understand that—”

“Who understands Christians? Would you say the men you were following were headed for the river?”

Marcus nodded. “I thought so at the time. I remember wondering how I was going to track them across the bridges, or through the Tiberside district. If you think the Subara’s bad, the streets of the Tiberside are like some kind of Damascus bazaar. Most people over there don’t even speak Latin. Once over the bridge they could go anywhere...”

“Indeed.” Sixtus nodded, folding his thick knotted hands against his chin and staring out into space over the minor mountain range of his knuckles. Then his blue eyes seemed to flicker into focus once again. “And where is Arrius posting his men?”

“Various places on the Aventine, where they know about houses with tunnels or subcellars. A couple of places near the circus, in that warren of slums there.”

“Anyone on the bridge?”

“Not that I know of. Sixtus, why do we have to wait? Why can’t we just have Tiridates arrested, search his house...”

“Who would arrest him?” asked the old man reasonably. “Who would order the search? The city prefect’s away. The praetorian prefect might, if he wanted to risk a complaint to the emperor about the way he’s fulfilling his duties, but what if he’s wrong? What if he can’t prove Tiridates is anything more than an extremely wealthy and powerful member of the Syrian merchant community who happens to have a fish tattooed on his arm? The emperor is notoriously hard on secret informers and men who listen to them.”

“But it’s Midsummer Eve!” cried Marcus. “The sacrifice is tonight! We can’t just sit here...”

“We’re not going to,” said Sixtus mildly, standing up and limping to the corner to fetch his staff. “We’re going to take a little walk down to the Tiber bridges.”

It was just over a mile from the run-down mansion on the Quirinal Hill to the bend in the Tiber where the brown waters divided around the little island of Tiberina with its hospital and its shrine to Asclepius. At this hour—the beginning of the first hour of the night—the two bridges that spanned the stream such a short distance from each other were almost deserted, though later Marcus knew they’d be a madhouse of cart traffic as the small farmers from the slopes of the Janiculum Hill and the Vatican started bringing in their produce to the city markets. The last tints of color paled and changed in the western sky, and degree by degree the hot blue summer sky deepened, from the color of a robin’s egg to that of a peacock’s breast, through teal, through the ultramarine of the summer Adriatic, to the unearthly blue of fine dark velvet, sewn with stars and dusted with galaxies of light. Sixtus sat on the stone balustrade of the bridge, talking of philosophy or of desert warfare, occasionally dropping a leaf or a twig down into the brown stream, while Marcus watched the pinholes of fire sparkle into life all along the darkness of the thick crowding suburbs on the river’s western bank. In the calmness of that warm milky night—or perhaps merely due to the old man’s serene personality—he had no sense of wasting time, nor of impatience. He felt rather like a runner somewhere in the middle of a relay race, waiting for the torch to come to his hand, but not about to fret himself until it did.

At about the second hour of the night—for the hours of summer nights are very short—the cart traffic started up again, countrymen leading their donkeys or oxcarts through the deep twilight of the bridge, girls driving herds of swine or gaggles of geese, singing as they strolled through the warm liquid darkness. People crossed from the other direction as well, coming from Rome out to the Tiberside across the river: ladies of the evening in bright silks, Syrians chattering in their own tongue, rattling with astrological amulets, rich men in litters with their little troops of linkboys, clients, slaves carrying their slippers, bound for dinner with friends in the villas out in the Vatican Fields, or on the high wooded slopes of the Janiculum. One of these passed by and Sixtus said quietly, “There’s our man,” and was moving off in its wake almost before Marcus was aware that he’d spoken.

“How do you know?” he whispered, catching up to the old man as he strolled, calm as any other country traveler in his plain tunic and short traveler’s cloak, after the plain chair with its close-drawn leather curtains. Even with his game leg and his staff, it was surprising how light-footed he was. “That isn’t his litter.”

“No, but at one point in the proceedings at Quindarvis’ the other night I made it a point to slip out to the slaves’ court and make sure I could recognize his other bearers and link-boys.” The chair turned from the main way down a widish street leading northwest, the flickering torches of the two slaves trotting ahead of it winking on the gold curtain rings, throwing a confusion of shadows on the high tenement walls. Away from the main traffic artery into Rome there was little activity. The shop-fronts were heavily shuttered, and few lights showed in the windows of the tenements that rose like black cliffs on either side of the narrow way. A breeze blew down from the Janiculum, bearing on it the country smell of greenery and life.

“Why?” whispered Marcus, turning a corner and starting up the slope that led, eventually, to the hill itself. “You didn’t know then that he was a Christian.”

Sixtus hesitated a moment before replying. “We don’t know that he is now, not for certain,” he said at last. “Other faiths than the Christians use the fish as their symbol.”

“Yes, but the amulet we picked up when Tullia was kidnapped was inscribed with the initials of the Christos. And besides,” added Marcus, with an uneasy glance at the totally deserted darkness of the streets behind them, “he can’t have evaded Arrius and his men by accident.”

“No,” the old man agreed. “No, from the beginning it was clear that Tiridates was involved in something—the only question was, what and how? And it always pays to know as much about a potential enemy as you can. It’s clear that he posted bearers and a litter somewhere in anticipation of leaving his house secretly tonight. The other men, the bearers whom you recognized and who recognized you, will have told him that you followed them back to Rome. He’s a man who knows himself to be watched. He’s taking no chances, the night of the Midsummer sacrifice.”

Some note in his voice caught Marcus’ attention, and suddenly disquieted, he turned to look at the scarred and time-battered face, all but hidden in the darkness of the stone-walled lane. They had left the crowded mazes of the Oriental town behind. They were among the small private houses—half farms, half hovels—that scattered along its outskirts, each with its vegetable patch and poultry yard, its pigsty and tethered goat. To the north, on their right, stretched the dark flat formlessness of the Vatican Fields. Directly ahead of them the Janiculum Hill rose, an undulant line of trees marked with the occasional lights of isolated villas. The litter was now far ahead of them, an occasional jitter of flame seen through the tree trunks, but Sixtus seemed in no great hurry to keep it in sight.

“You sound as if you know where he’s going.”

“I know that if he crossed the river, there’s only one place he could be going.” He took Marcus’ arm quickly and drew him into the dense shadows of a little alley between a wall and a shed. After a moment a small group of men and women appeared at the end of the lane from which they had just come, the women veiled in Oriental fashion, the men dark-faced and Semitic, clothed in the rough brown tunics of laborers or slaves. Marcus flattened against the wall as they passed and watched them out of sight up the lane, hurrying, furtive forms lost to sight in the shadows like a random tumbling of blown brown leaves.

After that they proceeded more carefully. As they climbed the lower slopes of the Janiculum, Marcus was conscious of others upon the road: drifting shapes that flitted cautiously among the shadows of the trees, an occasional litter and once a cisium, the little hooves of its pony rattling furiously on the stones of the road, tearing past them at a great rate and taking the corner ahead with its outside wheel all but coming off the ground. Sixtus had fallen silent in the unbroken darkness of the summer night, but once when the trees cleared a little above some rich man’s house, Marcus could see by starlight how set and drawn his face looked, and how ageless.

He stopped, tense and puzzled. “Is that music?”

An owl hooted. Somewhere there was a rustling in the thin woodland of oak and birch, as coneys sought the faint gurgle of an unseen spring. As a dog will hear whistling above what a human can detect, so now Marcus thought that he sensed, or felt in his bones, the deep insistent throb of drums. Faint as the pipes of Pan, a drift of flute notes blew among the dark uneasy trees.

“What is it?” he whispered. “Where’s it coming from? Is it—is it the Christians?”

Sixtus’ eyes glinted in the darkness. The starlight put a flicker of white around the ends of his hair, like a fox-fire halo. “It’s coming from up ahead,” he breathed. “Go carefully—they’ll have posted a guard.”

Anxiety seemed to have sharpened Marcus’ senses to agonizing brilliance. Past the next turn of the path he saw the white line of a marble roof over the brooding cloudbanks of Stygian trees and heard, like a murmuring response to the elusive music, the cooing of a thousand doves.