Search the Seven Hills (31 page)

Judah swung around savagely. “And I suppose you’re going to ask me about the stupid little bitch as well?”

Symmachus hesitated, then said, “No, son.”

“Or beg me to recant? Join you as a nice civil slave in the treasury? Hold your pens for you while you audit the books, like I was taught? It’s a little late for that, O patriarch of my house.”

“It is a little late for many things, my son,” replied the Old Jew quietly.

“It’s a little late for the whole damned world,” said Judah, his voice quiet but its scorn and strength filling the cramped darkness of the cell. “The Lord will come in judgment; the vessels of his wrath have broken, and their fire will pour over this filthy empire that’s even now drowning like a man in a sewer in its own crap! And when it happens you’ll still be fetching and carrying for the Romans, auditing the books and wiping the arse of some fat jumped-up tradesman’s son of a Roman hog, who spends a million sesterces on his dinner and then doesn’t even bother to digest it! You’re worse than the German barbarians! They were raped, at least; you were only paid.”

“I may have been paid, my son,” said Symmachus, and his voice shook suddenly with suppressed fury, “but by the God of Hosts I was paid in a whole house, and live children instead of dead ones, and time to hand on the teachings of the Law and the prophets...”

“The Law and the prophets! That’s a book that’s been rolled up like a scroll—yea, a scroll in the hands of the angel of the Lord! You’ve sold your honor and your god for bad coin. A man shall forsake his father and mother...”

“You cannot forsake us!” cried the father in fury. “By the God of Hosts you will drag us with you by your heedless pride and destroy us all!”

Marcus turned away, unable to listen further. There was a strange humming in his ears as he climbed the ladder to the guardroom, a hot restless weakness in all his muscles. The voices followed him up from below.

“...kiss the feet of your filthy praetor!”

“...may not have honor but I and my family are alive!”

“...Book of the Acts of John clearly states that the Christ could appear in any form that he wanted to, from a youth to a bald-headed old man...”

“...lower and a higher element; his spirit is of divine origin, locked in an exile in a fleshly body until the coming of a divine messenger...”

“Driveling Gnostic!”

“Heretical jackass!”

He leaned his head on his hands, seeing the guardroom through a blur of weariness and fever. The baking heat of the day was beginning to pass off; outside, the street was deep in shadow. The guardroom torches were again lit. At a table in the corner the men of the day watch were sharing watered wine, laying bets, and joking. By the door the bored bursar was paying out silver to a short sturdy man in the brown tunic of a slave or a day laborer. Someone called out a joke—the man looked around and grinned, his teeth flashing whitely in the dark tangle of a beard, gleaming in the twilight like the gold ring he wore in his ear. A man jostled past him, his shadow blocking the dimming outdoor light, and Marcus recognized the massive form of the city hangman.
They will argue about the nature of their god,
he thought,
while the hangman heats up his little tools.

He frowned suddenly, as something snagged at his memory.

Some memory, he thought—perhaps a dream. He couldn’t remember it clearly, or why it troubled him. He knew now that his wound had turned feverish; many things looked dreamlike in that blue-shadowed room.

From below, since the trap had been left open, Judah’s voice could be heard in a fury of shouting. “Son! You never in your life wanted a son! You only wanted a name, and if you could have found a dog who’d father acceptable grandchildren he’d have done as well!”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” That’s what Judah had said, and, presumably, Christ or Paul or some other Christian notable before him, since these people seemed to talk largely in quotes. But in me forest cool of the columns of the New Forum, Dorcas had said, “Turn the other cheek...”

Was it possible to have two wholly opposite doctrines within the same faith?

“...but Jesus abandoned his earthly body when he said, ‘Woman, behold thy son,’ and a moment later his heavenly part ascended into the hands of his Heavenly Father...”

“And reunited, I suppose, for dinner on the road to Emmaus?”

Hadn’t some Christian said, “With faith, all things are possible?”

Did the possibilities of faith include a likable, grave-eyed girl like Dorcas hiding the knowledge of abominations behind her sunburst smile? The shadows of the guardroom seemed to deepen, the voices of the guards growing fainter. The old dream returned to his waking eyes, Persephone struggling in the tender green of the river reeds, white hands pushing helplessly against the brown strong chest, the laughter in the death-god’s dark grinning bearded face...

He opened his eyes, knowing suddenly whose face it was.

Not Pluto’s. Not the face of the god of money and the dead.

A brown face with a black beard and one gold earring, grinning at him as they struggled in the dark street.

He scrambled to his feet, almost falling over his long legs as he stumbled across the room. The bursar was putting away his little box of silver pieces and preparing to go home to the Praetorian camp outside the city.

“Who was that man you were paying off just now?” demanded Marcus breathlessly. The soldier looked up at him in blank surprise.

“Who, the informer?” He looked to a couple of the drinkers for confirmation. “Lucius? Lucian? Centurion’d know. He’s the man who put the kiss on our talkative friends downstairs.”

“You’re sure?” Arrius drew a careful, deliberate gridwork of lines on the corner of the wax tablet on the table before him, then just as carefully smoothed them out with the blunt end of the stylus, making the dark wax as blank and uninformative as his unshaven face.

“I’m positive!” insisted Marcus. “I saw the man, he was as close to me as you are now!”

“When was he that close?” inquired the centurion. “Just now, or in the street?” In the blurred brownish twilight of the warden’s office, his green eyes gleamed like a beast’s. Flattened and straggling from his helmet, his hair was like a beast’s pelt as well. From beneath long curling eyebrows he studied Marcus’ face with a hunting cat’s impersonal intentness.

“In the street, when Tullia was kidnapped! But I’m not mistaken, I’d know him anywhere. Don’t you believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you, Professor.” Arrius’ mouth drew together, thin and hard as the lines he made with his stylus on the wax. “I’m fast reaching the point where I’ll believe anything about Christians. The little turncoat scum,” he added. “You didn’t recognize any of the others down there?”

Marcus shook his head. “But I’m not sure that I would. He was the only one of them I saw clearly.”

Arrius cursed and rubbed at his eyes as though they ached. “He never said he was one of them,” he growled. “Damn the man, if he was going to get scared and sell out, the least he could have done was tell us where they were likely to take her. And like a fool I never thought to question him. He only said he knew where they were hiding; I didn’t ask him how he knew it.”

“He wouldn’t have said,” said Marcus, disconsolately.

The centurion sighed and ran a knotted hand through his hair. “No. They’re slippery as eels, and from what you’ve told me at least a few of them—that Dorcas girl for one—are geniuses in the art of misdirection. She acted her way in and out of here and got word to this Papa of theirs. I should have had my suspicions about Lucius—if that’s really his name—when he gave a false address. But a lot of informers do that. It’s a stupid kind of pride, considering.”

“But why would he have sold them out?”

Arrius shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they didn’t like his opinions on the writings of Paul and kicked him out, and he did this to get even. I don’t know.”

A soldier entered, carrying a couple of lamps that emitted more smoke than light. Doubled shadows reeled across the cracked plaster of the walls as he hung them from an iron bracket. “Will you be back working tonight, sir?”

Arrius thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’ll finish up here and go back out to the camp. I haven’t slept in a bed since I don’t know when. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow.”

The man saluted. “Very good, sir.”

The centurion rubbed at his eyes again, the swaying lamps making his mail glitter like the scales of a bronze fish. “I’ve given them all a preliminary questioning, for all the good that did me. I couldn’t get any of them to stop quarreling long enough to make sense. The only connection with Nikolas and the group that were executed three years ago is that crazy little monkey Ignatius, and I haven’t figured out whether he’s completely insane or the most skilled actor of them all.”

He stood up, stretching his back like a digger after a long day shoveling. “That arm bothering you?”

“A little,” Marcus admitted. “I think it’s turned feverish.”

“Have the surgeon look at it before he goes. Then I’d advise you go by the baths, get a good rubdown, go home and have a good meal, and go to sleep. By tomorrow evening the hangman and I should have got something out of that gang downstairs besides metaphysics and abuse.”

But though Marcus obeyed all of these instructions, when he returned to his dark and oven-hot rooms in the Subura, it was long before he could sleep. The incessant rattle and voices in the streets outside kept him awake far into the night, and when he finally slept, they followed him into his dreams. The clattering of the cartwheels transmuted itself into the banging of a hammer, as a tall Jewish carpenter put together a marriage-bed for the goddess Persephone.

“He ain’t in.”

“Isn’t in?” Marcus stared down at the tubby little kitchen slave who’d answered Sixtus’ door, startled and aggrieved. “Is Churaldin in, then?”

The slave shook his head. “Which isn’t to say they won’t be back later, Professor. That is—I think the old man’s gone out to the baths, and maybe the gods know where that tomcat Churaldin is, but I sure don’t. Will you come in and wait a spell? We can find you some wine, I’m sure.”

Marcus shook his head. “No, thank you. I’ll be back later.”

Disappointed and vaguely troubled, he took his leave, wandering slowly back through the sunlit afternoon dust of the street.

It was about the middle of the seventh hour, the time when the shops reopen after the noon siesta, and men wake up from their naps and start thinking about exercise and baths. Marcus had slept off his fever, waking still rather tired but clearheaded, and had gone out to the baths early. On his way down the stairs one of the girls who lived on the first floor of the tenement building had told him that his family had sent word to him sometime yesterday evening, but Marcus had decided that if his father wanted to dress him down for encouraging his mother in her disobedience, he could wait until dinnertime to do so. The athletic trainer at the baths had changed the dressing on his wound and kidded him good-naturedly about staying out of tavern brawls. He had thought about going back down to the prison, but had decided to fill Sixtus in on events first. At heart, he did not want to be there for the questioning.

He had just decided to return to the prison after all when he caught a glimpse of Churaldin, crossing the street in front of him. In spite of the intense heat of the afternoon, he wore a dark cloak pulled close around his shoulders; he seemed to be carrying some kind of a bundle under one arm. Curious, Marcus followed him as he ducked into an alley between two shops. He turned left around somebody’s garden wall, right through a deserted pottery-yard, moving swiftly, as though to avoid pursuit. Marcus lost sight of him for a moment, then walked a few steps farther and saw him in a narrow alley, hurrying down a flight of steps to the sunken door of the cellar of a deserted building. As he watched, the slave turned the key, pushed open the door, and slipped inside.

Intrigued, Marcus followed him. He found the door locked and knocked at it, only wondering after he had done so if the place weren’t some kind of rendezvous-point between the Briton and some neighborhood girl.

The door was pulled open. “Churaldin,” said Marcus quickly, “I won’t keep you, but—” He stopped. The slave was wearing the scarlet tunic of a member of the Praetorian Guard, the outline of the breastplate he’d just removed clearly visible where the garment was plastered to his body with sweat. “What the... ?”

The slave reached out quickly, dragged him into the cellar, and shut the door.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in a low voice.

“Why were you in armor?” countered Marcus. The rest of the armor was there, helmet and swordbelt in a bundle, thrown down on top of the dark cloak and the red cloak of a soldier as well.

The cellar was dimly lit by a window looking out onto the stairwell and another one, high up in the wall at the far end. It smelled of clay and a faint sewery stink; cobwebs wreathed the brick pillars of the foundation of the house above. “A little masquerade,” said Churaldin briefly. “It isn’t important. Were you looking for Sixtus? He’ll be home later, he’s at the baths now. Come back this evening, at about the second hour—”

“Churaldin, I’ve seen one of the men who kidnapped Tullia!”

The slave was already hustling him back toward the door; his hand was on Marcus’ arm, and through the hard fingers he could feel him startle. But he only said, “Tell us about it this evening.”

Marcus struggled to free himself. “Wait a minute, what’s going on here? You’re not supposed to be armed. Sixtus wouldn’t have gone out alone.”

“Harpalos went with him.”

“Harpalos just talked to me at the door! If there’s anything wrong, if either one of you is in trouble...”

Sharp knocking sounded on the cellar door. Churaldin hesitated, his dark eyes flickering in the gloom. “There’s a stairway over in that corner that’ll take you up through the building,” he said tersely. “Why don’t you go out that way?”

The knocking thundered, urgent.

“I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s going on. Are you in trouble? Is Sixtus—”