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In any case their actions had not found much favor with Tullius Varus.

Sentence being passed, Nikolas, called priest among the criminals, did break from the guards and spring upon the table in the face of his judges, and cry out that this same Christus would take his vengeance upon them, and upon all of their families. These same criminals were then sentenced to the amphitheater, where the men were tarred over with pitch and bound to stakes, and there lit, to illuminate the arena while the women were first raped by the beast-catchers and then devoured by lions. This was at the games of Ceres, Tullius Varus, prefect of Rome, presiding.

Marcus let the scroll roll itself shut, feeling just slightly ill. Had the priest known what was going to happen to them when he had shrieked his curse upon his judges?

He himself had avoided the games for years. Even as a youth they had shocked him. But worse than the shock, he unwillingly knew, was the fascination, the shivering horror of watching the helpless desperately struggling against inexorable and hideous fate. When he was fourteen and fifteen he had gone again and again, and only his later priggishness, he supposed, had prevented him from acquiring the habit of it.

Maybe, he thought, tying the tapes of the scroll together, if he had been more accustomed to the games the image conjured by that dry account would be less vividly horrible to him. Maybe such things were common usage to Arrius. He remembered what Sixtus had said about the temple in Antioch and cast a swift, unwilling glance across at the centurion, who was calmly paring his fingernails with his dagger.

He glanced up at him and stuck the dagger point-down into the scarred tabletop. “So there we are,” he grunted. “Nine people who might or might not be related to those lunatics downstairs, or whose families might or might not have decided to have a fling at revenge. That’s two possibilities. There’s a third.”

“A third?”

Arrius nodded. “Yesterday I took a little walk up to the Aventine, where Chambares Tiridates has a villa. You know anything about Tiridates?”

Marcus shook his head, mystified. “Only that he’s Phrygian or Syrian or something, and that he was betrothed to—is betrothed to—Tertullia. He’s supposed to be stinking rich and powerful.”

“He is,” growled the centurion. “I’ve had more civil treatment from members of the Senate than I got from his assistant doorkeeper. After one hell of a long wait in a vestibule that smelled like a high-class whorehouse, I finally saw him and asked him if I could talk to those two chair-bearers who brought Tertullia home that night. The ones the Christians slugged. I’d put the wheels in motion to round up our friends downstairs and I thought I’d give the bearers a look at them, too. Which reminds me—”

“I already spoke to the other man, Churaldin,” said Marcus. “He knew nothing—I don’t think he even saw them clearly.”

A slow grin spread across that harsh bony face. The lynx-green eyes glinted with approval. “For a philosopher, you have a nice grasp of essentials, boy.”

Marcus flushed with an odd pleasure at that backhanded compliment, but he only asked, “Did you ask if the bearers would come down to have a look at your Christians?”

“No,” said Arrius. “Chambares said he’d sold them.”

“Sold them!”

“He said he was angry for their carelessness at letting someone make off with his betrothed. He said he sold them the same day to a galley shipping out for Egypt.”

“Dear gods,” whispered Marcus, appalled by the callousness of the act, its cruelty, and its utter injustice. The bitterness in Nicanor’s voice came back to him, his own shocked disgust that a cultured, talented physician should have to plead with a family friend nearly half his age to intercede for his life.

“Oh, come on!” said the centurion roughly, reading the horror on his face. “At two hundred fifty sesterces for an untrained bearer do you think he’d really let good men go like that? He just didn’t want me talking to his slaves.”

“But why not?” protested Marcus. “What does he have to hide?”

Arrius worked the knife point free of the wood and turned its blade to catch the thin sunlight from the window. “That question,” he said dryly, “did cross my mind.”

Marcus was silent for a moment. “Maybe he just didn’t want his slaves put in that kind of danger? If their testimony was required in court...”

“It wouldn’t be,” shrugged Arrius. “We have a freeborn witness. Now, I know there are men who would rather cut out their slaves’ tongues than have them talk to anyone without their leave—and I’m not speaking in hyperbole, by the way. But from what I gathered, Tiridates is eager for the match, in spite of the fact that he had his hand up his wine-server’s tunic before I was even out the door. For a poor boy from Syria, marriage with the daughter of the city prefect of Rome is a big step. So yes, I’m inclined to be suspicious. But Tiridates has seen me now, and he has enough political power to make me hesitate about bringing in one of my men—always provided I could find a man in the Praetorian with the wits not to haul off and break the jaw of the first man who addresses him as ‘boy’ while he’s passing himself off as a slave.”

He was silent for a moment, and Marcus had the uncomfortable sensation of being weighed and judged by that aloof, gray-green gaze. He felt suddenly very naked, like a raw recruit being inspected: revealed in all his thin-shanked inadequacy as being not much good for anything but the ideal pursuit of Beauty, Truth, and the Good.

But to his intense surprise Arrius asked, “You think you could pass for a slave?”

Marcus hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve been told I couldn’t pass for anything but a philosopher.”

The long, curled eyebrows dived suddenly down. “By whom?” There was an edge of excitement in the centurion’s voice.

Marcus grinned at the memory. “By a former governor of Antioch, believe it or not.”

“I’ll believe it,” said Arrius eagerly. “Not Xystes Julian?”

“It’s the Latin form of the name—Sixtus Julianus?”

The centurion gave a great shout of laughter. “The Falcon of the Desert himself! I thought the old madman was dead years ago! Where did you meet him?”

“Churaldin’s his slave.”

Arrius was still laughing. “And I’ll bet he told you where you lived and who your father was.” He leaned his elbows on the desk, the rings of his chain-mail shirt glinting in the thin sunshaft from the window.

“How does he do that?”

“Mithras knows—I certainly don’t. But when my father was serving him in Africa and I’d been up to any mischief in me camp, old Xystes could pin me with it just by looking at me. He was a strange old coot,” he added, “but his men worshiped him—more than they worshiped the current emperor, which is why he ended up being shipped off to Antioch. My dad said he could outthink a demon and outtalk the gods. Half the men were dead scared of him. The only things you could know—according to my dad, I was only seven at the time—was that he wouldn’t fail you, and he probably knew more about the situation than you did.” He stood up, looked around, and put on his burnished helmet, with its cross-roached centurion’s crest. “You think, since his slave was mixed up in it, the old lunatic might give us a hand?”

“I asked him to,” said Marcus, as he followed him out into the guardroom. “He’s retired from the world, practically turned hermit. But he said he’d advise me.”

At Arrius’ signal the guards were moving the cover from what had looked like a wellhead in the flagged floor. But a rickety ladder was revealed, leading down into a dismal pit below. “You couldn’t have made a better choice,” he said, with a sideways glance at Marcus. “If we can’t get any sense out of this lot below, we might need him even to find a starting place.” He put his feet on the ladder and started down.

“What do you mean, ‘get any sense out of them’?” Marcus looked around hastily, set his marketing basket on a bench, and gathered up his soiled toga around him in order to descend behind him. “Aren’t you going to question them”—he flinched from the memory of the slave Churaldin’s bitter jeer, from Nicanor’s anxious eyes—”in the usual way?” he finished.

Below him in the darkness Arrius laughed. “You ever try to question a Christian?”

Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it hath been declared unto me of you... that there are contentions among you.

Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians

O
N ONE SIDE THE WALL
of the corridor was brick, like its low-vaulted roof and its floor, old, uneven, cracked brick, slimy with moss and rank with the smell of evil. On the other side the living stone of the Capitoline Hill had been cut into four cells. All the doors were bolted, but only one boasted a guard. In the smoky glare of the single oil lamp the place looked clammy, dirty, loathsome—foul with the smells of excrement and fear. As he trailed in the centurion’s footsteps, Marcus found his own soul prey to an unreasoning terror and an illogical desire to flee from this place.

The guard slapped out his arm in salute as they halted before the door. Faintly, voices could be heard within, babbling and confused. Arrius cast a questioning glance at the soldier, who shrugged. At his signal the man undid the door bolts and opened the door to the Christians’ cell.

Out of the dimness, the voices grew suddenly louder.

“... nonsense,” a woman cried, her voice deep and husky and cracked like an old wine jar. “Our priest says that a god would never defile himself with a—a—a filthy earthly body, much less that any man could bind and slay a god! He says that in the Book of Peter it specifically states that what appeared to the on the cross was a substitute!”

“
Your
priest?” rasped a man’s voice, harsh and angry. “And what, pray, would
he
know about it, or you either, you ignorant bitch? The whole point of Christ’s descent to this world was that he take on the appearance and substance of humanity. ‘For the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us...’”

“Now, wait a minute,” chided another man. “You say, ‘appearance,’ but
our
priest has assured us that the entire meaning of the sacrifice of Calvary was that the Christ take on the true nature of a human being. That he was, in fact, a man, and not a god, at the time he died.”

“Your priest is a fool!” screamed a shriller voice. “Who consecrated him, anyway?”

“Apollodorus...”

“That heretic? Only an idiot would ever believe that the Christ was ever a mere man. He was the Christos, the God-Made-Man, ‘of a single substance with the Father.’”

“And therefore he couldn’t have suffered and couldn’t have died!” shouted the woman’s voice. As the forms became clearer through the murk, Marcus could distinguish the speakers: the dark forms like the damned awaiting judgment, the white stirring of dirty limbs, the glitter of moving eyes. The woman speaking was tall and fleshy, standing with her hands on her hips, her dark hair lying in unbound waves over heavy breasts. She wore a dark-green stola stitched in some kind of lighter pattern, and her face showed the remains of a dark husky beauty. “You’re no better than a bunch of Orphics,” she was yelling at the others. “You believe the suffering of the god somehow saves his worshipers! If you want suffering go down to the Flavian! It’s the Word, the message, the Logos embodied in the temporary spiritual illusion that saves us all from our lives of sin and filth and misery!”

A tall rigid shadow in the darkest corner of the room broke in. “Just because he shared in the divine nature of the creator by no means indicates that he was not also a participant in the human nature common to us all.”

“Blasphemer!” shrieked the woman.

“Heretic!” screamed the shrill-voiced man.

“What in the name of the gods?” Marcus murmured. The two soldiers, armed and armored, had been standing in the doorway of the cell for some five minutes, and not a Christian had so much as turned his head.

“It states in the Acts of John....”

“That Gnostic tripe!” stormed the tall man in the corner. “In his letter to the Hebrews the apostle Paul specifically states that Christ is Lord—not similar to God, not proceeding from God, not a mere result of the Divine Demiurge. Moreover, in the Gospel of Matthew and elsewhere in Luke, by providing his corporal nature to his disciples after his resurrection from the grave...”

In a bored voice the guard called out, “Telesphorus!”

“...which they doubted, suspecting, as you do, my sister, that he was a ghost or spirit...”

“I’m no sister to you, you heretical limb of Satan!”

“Telesphorus!” bellowed Arrius.

Silence fell. The guard lifted his lantern to shed a wan light into the drab and filthy chamber, and a gleam of it reflected from the high bald head of the tall man as he turned around, his gray eyes like a hawk’s under the jut of gray-shot black brows. He stood up, gawky and rawboned in a laborer’s coarse brown tunic. “I am Telesphorus.”

Arrius jerked his head in summons. Telesphorus picked his way from among his quibbling brethren and walked to the door with his head high.

From the same corner a wiry little man sprang to his feet, like Telesphorus bearded, like him balding, but only across the top of his head. He flung himself hysterically to his side. “Be brave, my brother,” he exhorted in that same shrill, grating voice Marcus had heard before. “The gore of martyrdom is nobler than the purple of the bastard emperor. The fire, the cross, the struggle with wild beasts, the cutting and tearing of the flesh, the racking of the bones, the mangling of the limbs—these are but the steps to the throne of Jesus Christ! God will give you strength to meet it.”

“Let’s hope God will give you forgiveness for your heresy,” snapped a young man’s voice. “And all of you, you scheming Oriental bitch and you bunch of cowardly prevaricators who won’t understand that unless you renounce all matters of the flesh, the eating of all meat, the sin of fornication—”

“Whining Jew!” shot back the woman.