Search the Seven Hills (36 page)

There’s no reason they would hurt her,
he told himself desperately.

But there’s no reason they would have kidnapped her at all! The whole thing’s senseless, a vicious, filthy, meaningless act of terrorism that only fanatics could perpetrate!

He pushed open a door near the end of the hall and saw that it bore not only a lock, but metal bolts on the outside. For a moment he thought it was another punishment room, but he saw it was only a kind of cell, the window boarded over, the darkness almost absolute. It smelled and felt of use, of recent habitation, but its smell was of neither sex nor blood. His groping hands encountered a sleeping-couch, a stand with a basin for water on top and a chamber pot beneath, and a kind of little stool. Nothing further—no evidence of who had been here, or why.

Then a stray sliver of light caught on something bright, like a coin in the shadows under the couch. He bent and picked it up, and saw that it was a silver cross, still fastened to its broken chain.

He thought,
Dorcas.

And then:
Where did the light come from?

He hit the door in a desperate rush barely in time to prevent its being slammed to. Weight greater than his own shoved against it, skidding him back; he braced his feet and fought, worming to get an elbow or knee into the crack. Lantern light bounded crazily through the gap, and he glimpsed a brown bearded face and the glint of a gold earring.

The man yelled, “Crescens! Pugnax! We got him!” He was drawing in his breath for another bellow when Marcus slammed his weight on the door, off-balancing him. He thrust hard and slithered through the crack. The kidnapper Lucius swung at him, a blow that would have felled a donkey, and he ducked and was satisfied to hear the man’s fist crack against the doorframe. Then he was running for all he was worth down the hall, the shorter man pounding at his heels.

Two shapes, one massive and the other more massive, loomed against the light from the stairs. Torchlight flickered on edged steel. He dropped to his hands and knees, felt his pursuer’s shins collide briefly with his side as the man’s momentum somersaulted him into the arms of his friends. They were still tangling when Marcus ploughed his way past the whole melee, hearing his cloak snag and tear. As he plunged down the narrow stairs he heard men yelling, “Thief! Thief!” and footsteps pounding at his heels.

Doors were opening all along the darker hallway of the floor below, white frowsty faces peeking out. He clattered down the stairs and was halfway toward the main staircase to the baths when he saw the shadows of men racing up from below with torches. Other people were running into the hall now, men clutching bedsheets and dignity inadequately about themselves, women wearing nothing but paint and jewels, all of them giving tongue like the hounds of Hades. Marcus flung open a door at random, dived through, shut it behind, and gasped, “Beg pardon...” as he fled for the window, hoping for a shed roof or, at worst, a nice soft midden below.

The window was barred. Men were yelling in the hall, women screaming, fists pounding on doors. The woman in the bed sat up with a gasp of indignation, clutching the sheets around a magnificent bosom with somewhat inappropriate modesty. The man with her blinked at him, startled, in the dim light of a gold glass lamp, and said plaintively, “B’Castor, they’re right! Y’are a thief. That’s my best dinner suit you’re wearin’.”

“Felix!” gasped Marcus.

His brother sat up, his shorn hair making him look crumpled and rather pathetic. His eyes were red and puffy with weeping. “Here,” he complained, “what’re you doing here, Silenus?”

Outside in the hall doors were slamming, voices yelling. Among them Lucius’ was recognizable, cursing like a gladiator. Marcus gasped, “Felix, you’ve got to switch clothes with me.”

“What? Are you drunk?” Marcus was already stripping. “This’s a fine way to comport yourself on the night of your father’s funeral!”

“As the pot said to the kettle. Put these on, get out there, and run like blazes, and when they catch you, tell them I’ve already left—tell them anything. I’ll get out a window...”

“There’s a back stairs two doors down from this room,” said the girl, vastly interested, leaning back against the pillows and forgetting about the sheet. “My name’s Xaviera, if you’re ever back this way.”

“Uh—pleased to meet you.” He finished slinging Felix’s elegant Persian silk cloak around his shoulders, fastening it with long ornamental pins. Felix was shaking his head as he struggled into the dark-blue tunic. Fists hammered the door across the hall, a man yelled, “He’s got to be in here somewhere...”

“Y’know, Marcus, Caius might have been right when he said all that philosophy addled the brain.”

“Just get going!” He thrust him squeaking toward the door.

“Got a minute?” inquired Xaviera, with an inviting wriggle.

“Another time...” He watched through a crack in the door as Felix went tearing down the hall. As he’d expected, every tough ex-pug in Plotina’s employ pelted at his heels, yelling for him to stop. Felix must have had more brains than any of them had given him credit for
(Well,
reflected Marcus,
he could hardly have less),
for he ran waving his arms, yelling, “Stop thief! Stop thief!” like a gawky rabbit at the head of a pack of slavering mastiffs who were also bellowing, “Stop thief!”

The whole melee went pouring down the stairs in a noisy cataract. Marcus straightened his twice-borrowed silks, cast a quick look up and down the milling crowds in the hall, blew a kiss at Xaviera, and walked down the back stairs.

As he passed through the baths he saw the group gathered at the foot of the main staircase. Bristling with indignation, Felix was being held against the wall by three armed bodyguards. In front of him were ranged Plotina, like a jewel-encrusted idol under at least ten pounds of gold ornaments, and Lucius, who sported a black eye. Lucius was snarling, “That isn’t him, you unprintable jackasses!” and Felix protesting in his highfalutin voice, “Flamin’ balls of Jupiter that’s what I’m tellin’ you! It’s m’cousin! Looks just like me! Stole my clothes, beat me up—gone berserk, I tell you! If this’s the sort of place you run, madam...”

Marcus tipped the bathman handsomely as he walked through the lobby. Felix’s purse was far better lined than his own.

He waited for him in a discreet wineshop on the corner. Felix emerged from the baths a short time later, trailed by the faithful Giton and fulminating over the rip in his cloak. “B’Castor, you’ve torn it,” he accused, aggrievedly, as Marcus got to his feet and fell into step with him.

Marcus looked at the slash. “I was lucky that wasn’t through my belly,” he said grimly. “That’s too clean for a tear. It’s a sword slash.”

“Is it?” Felix examined it again, with renewed interest. Then, “Dash it, Professor, what were you doing messing about with swords? And why were they after you, anyway? Really, Caius has no call at all to say
I
get myself into stupid scrapes.”

“This isn’t a stupid scrape.” They turned the corner of Tuscan Street, and along the New Way, the shadows of the torch sprawling drunkenly along the walls on both sides and the narrow archways overhead. “And where on earth did you get this outfit in the first place? I feel like somebody’s bedboy.”

“Well, whoever it is has dashed bad taste,” sulked Felix. He skirted a particularly noisome pool of garbage. “Not that Caius’ll ever speak to either one of us again, after tonight,” he added as an afterthought. “Leaving him there with all those wretched mourners, and all.”

“We’ll have to go back there,” said Marcus quietly, gathering the thick silk of his robe in one hand to keep it out of the mud. “We’ll have to talk to Priscus Quindarvis.”

“Quindarvis? What d’you need that sleek brute for? And listen, Professor...” He pulled something from the purse at his belt. “I respect your philosophy, an’ all, but if you’ve turned Christian, Caius really
will
kill you.” He held up the silver cross on its broken chain and regarded his brother with earnest, worried, sheeplike brown eyes.

“No,” Marcus assured him gently. “No, I haven’t turned Christian. Listen, Felix. Tullia was up in that place, held prisoner in the attics. I think she’s been there all the time. But this morning a girl—a Christian—went snooping around and discovered her there, and I think the kidnappers took fright and took her someplace.”

“A Christian?” said Felix querulously. “But I thought she was snatched by the Christians? Only this evenin’ Consul Varus—You know Consul Varus is back? He said...”

“The Christians didn’t take her,” insisted Marcus.

“How d’you know? Stands to reason they would.”

“They just didn’t. Shut up and let me talk. That’s why I need to talk to Quindarvis. I know he’s—he’s a friend of Plotina’s. He might be able to learn something, to give us some kind of clue—something he’s heard...”

“Friend!” hooted Felix. “Holy tits of Venus, brother, what rock d’you philosophers hide under? Quindarvis
owns
the wretched place.”

Marcus stopped dead. “What?”

“By Castor, yes. In fact it’s one of his chief sources of income—that and his office, I bet. I mean, there’s a difference between making money off a praetorship and havin’ your hand in the till, and I ain’t saying Quindarvis doesn’t know what it is, but... Well, if there’s ever an audit of his books he may find himself taking a quick trip to Gaul. Man’s been all to pieces for these two years gone. Don’t know how he coughed up the tin for the games.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean...” And Marcus’ voice trailed off. He felt as though his eyes had been smitten by an enormous light, and stood blinking, gazing into darkness of the narrow street. “Felix,” he asked quietly, “who audits the praetors when their term of office is over?”

His brother shrugged. “Dashed if I know. Some Jew or other on the treasury staff, I suppose—half the staffs Jews, y’know. They’re everywhere. That’s why there’s all this shifting from an eight-day week to a seven-day—blasted confusing, tryin’ to figure out whether you’re on a sabbath or not. I made up a little chart, once, for use with my moneylender, but dashed if I didn’t lose it...”

Marcus whispered, “That bastard.” Certainty and rage poured into his veins like fire. “That callous, calculating, vicious, coldhearted bastard.”

“No,” protested Felix, “quite a decent fellow, for a moneylender.”

Marcus swung around on him with startling fury. “Quindarvis knew it!” he raged. “He knew what would happen if there was a general persecution of Christians! That if Varus’ daughter was kidnapped it’d be the amphitheater for every Christian they could find
and their families...
”

“Well, of course,” argued Felix reasonably. “I mean, stands to reason. If you’re going about eating babies, you can’t hide something like that, y’know.”

“They do not eat babies!”

“‘Course they do,” protested his brother, laying a soothing hand on his arm. “Everyone says so. You look a bit fagged, brother. Tryin’ day, and all. Here’s a wineshop, by midnight the old farm’ll be cleared out enough that we can cut on home...”

“You go home,” said Marcus quietly, resisting his brother’s well-meaning tug on his mantle. His rage had turned suddenly to ice within him. “You go home, and if someone comes demanding to see Quindarvis, delay them. Do whatever you have to, but keep Quindarvis from leaving Rome for as long as you can.”

“Here, are you all right?” twittered Felix, feeling his hands for fever. “What’s Quindarvis got to do with it all, anyway?”

“Everything,” said Marcus softly. “Everything. Listen to me, Felix. You’re Priscus Quindarvis. Praetor of Rome. Friend of all the aristocrats, in with the richest, the most socially prominent. It’s an expensive crowd to run with—parties at a million sesterces a night, a villa that would make Nero’s Golden House look like a shed. Pet lions. Dancing girls. Your wife lives apart from you and you can’t touch her wealth, hut your father made a fortune from trade.

“But things haven’t gone so well for you. You’re living above your means. You can make money off your office, but if you lose that you’re in over your head. So you make a bid to win popularity by giving the most fantastic games Rome ever saw. They’re expensive, but the investment is worth it—and besides, it isn’t your money anyway. All right?”

“All right,” agreed Felix, puzzled, his soft eyes completely sober now, and grave.

“So you’ve got a clerk, who works with you, handling the treasury side of your affairs. A little Jew you despise, but he’s smart. He knows money, and he’s going to know when they run the general audit in July that the books don’t balance. You know it’s only a matter of time, but people have already begun to talk. Everyone in Rome knows you’ve been all to pieces for the last few years. If this little Jew should happen to choke to death on his Chanukah-fish or get beaten up by toughs in the street, maybe someone would think your ill will had something to do with it.”

“Well,” agreed Felix uneasily, “it doesn’t do to rub folks’ noses in things.”

“No,” said Marcus, “it doesn’t. Especially if people have already begun to talk. But you happen to know your little Jew has a son. And his son’s a Christian. And a lot of people aren’t very clear anyway on the distinction between Christians and Jews—I’m not, myself, except that Jews don’t scream at one another over their theology like Christians do. But the real distinction between Christians and Jews is that you can’t be killed simply for being a Jew. Your whole family doesn’t come under suspicion of treason simply because you’re a Jew. Are you still following me?”

“Marcus,” said Felix quietly, “I don’t like this.” In the jumping light and shadow from Giton’s torch he looked ill.

“So what do you do?” pursued Marcus softly. “You might just kidnap the daughter of a powerful man who’s once run spectacularly afoul of the Christians, which he could hardly help doing, being city prefect. Kidnap her in the presence of her mother and leave a Christian amulet on the scene. You don’t even have to leave it, you can just palm it and pretend to pick it up from the mud yourself. You start rumors... You wait for Varus to come back to town... and his first morning back in town—”