Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  He heard the centurion grunt. “You been down to the Flavian Amphitheater lately, praetor? I’ve seen ten-year-old girls fed alive to bears there, and a hundred thousand people cheered.”

  “That’s a little different,” pointed out Quindarvis. “They were the children of criminals, or criminals themselves—cut-purses, whores, bait to lure drunks to their death in alleys.”

  “Maybe,” agreed the soldier. “But I don’t think all those people were cheering because they were seeing Roman justice in action. My point is that a lot of people will spend their festival days watching children die, for whatever reason.”

  “But that’s the whole point!” cried Marcus, raising his head again. “The city is filled with vulgar, vicious, uneducated mobs. Only most people know the difference between what happens in the games and what is lawful for them to do or not to do.”

  “Do they?” murmured the centurion, regarding him with thoughtful eyes. “It’s interesting that you brought up that incident three years ago, though,” he continued after a moment. “Do you remember it at all?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I heard about it. I suppose everyone did.” If Timoleon hadn’t mentioned it peripherally in a discussion on moderation and excess, he doubted he would have been aware that there were Christians in Rome at all.

  “I was in the law courts at the time,” said Quindarvis. “I was pleading a case at the other end of the Basilica, but I remember the din was such that we could scarcely hear one another speak.”

  “Well, I was there,” said Arrius dryly. “They called in the Praetorian Guard to keep order, and by Mithras we were needed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a madhouse in my life. Christians screaming curses against the emperor at the top of their lungs, people coming in from the Forum and throwing things, the Christian women shrilling and keening like a pack of harpies. We had to clear the court... ”

  “Then you’ve actually seen Christians?” said Marcus, and the soldier chuckled grimly.

  “Oh, I’ve seen them, all right, and a bunch of dirtier, smellier, more vicious ruffians you aren’t likely to meet this side of hell. Their priest was like a mad sibyl, with a great mane of dirty gray hair streaming around his face like fire. When they were sentenced to death he broke from his guards and jumped up on the table before the judges and shook his fists in their faces. And I remember he cried to the head of the tribunal”—and here the centurion’s voice grated suddenly harsh—“‘The Lord Jesus Christ will avenge upon you what you have done to us today. He will smite thee and all thy children, and bring you down in sorrow to your grave.’ And then, as now,” continued Arrius quietly, “the head of the tribunal was the city prefect, J. Tullius Varus.”

  “...thee and all thy children,” repeated Quindarvis softly.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And were they executed?”

  The centurion nodded. “They were smeared with pitch and torched. That was at the games of Ceres in April of that year. Varus was up for reappointment to the prefect’s office. He was out to win friends. Maybe he took advantage of the situation and condemned them to death for the sake of the show—but he’s still city prefect.”

  “Now, that I do remember,” smiled Quindarvis reminiscently. “He must have laid out three hundred talents in gold, enough to support his entire household and all his slaves for three years, on three days’ worth of games. An enormous investment,” he added, with a wry grin, “as I have call to know—but worth every sesterce of it.” His brow darkened suddenly. “But I see your meaning.”

  Marcus straightened up, though the effort made him sick and giddy. “But we’ve got to do something,” he groaned. “Close the roads out of the city... ”

  “We’ve had men watching them since last night,” said Arrius, “for all the good it’s likely to do us. There’s too many places for them to be keeping her in Rome itself. We’ve alerted all the watches of all the city wards, but they’re untrained men.”

  “But what can be done?” cried Marcus. “They’re fanatics—lunatics! We don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “No,” agreed Arrius equably. “But we can make some guesses. They didn’t kill her on the spot. If revenge is their game, it’s unlikely they’ll do anything before Varus returns to town. Did you send for him?”

  “Last night,” said Quindarvis. “He’s in Sicily, on his estates. He should be back within ten days.”

  Arrius nodded. “Good. As city prefect, he’ll have the authority to undertake a major search; but with luck we’ll have her back before then. If we can get just one Christian... ” He mimed the turning of a screw.

  Marcus lowered his head to his hands again, feeling as though his skull would split open if not held tightly together. He fought to retain a philosophic calm—Remember that anything that can happen, he told himself, can happen to you. He groped feebly for Timoleon’s precepts. It is not the event that is evil, but only my opinion of the event... I’m not the first person in the world to suffer grief and loss. It must be a thousand times worse for her mother than for myself. I should be comforting her...

  But the thought of speaking to anyone, much less offering comfort out of the crying blackness of his soul, was physically nauseating to him. Around him, the blurred voices went on.

  “What about the mother?”

  “Nicanor’s given her poppy. I have business down at the treasury, not to mention all the arrangements that must be made for the games tomorrow. But I shall return this evening. I can’t simply leave her with the slaves.”

  Marcus opened his eyes to see the centurion raise his head. Through the parti-colored green of me arbor leaves a maidservant was visible, flirting in the shadows of the columned breezeway with a handsome Spanish boy whose chief duty it was to carve game birds at Varus’ feasts. “Don’t,” said the soldier quietly. “Don’t leave her alone, and make sure there’s someone you can trust with her. What about you, boy?”

  Marcus looked up, blinking and startled, to find the centurion’s remote lynx eyes resting thoughtfully upon him.

  “You’re looking pretty seedy. Where do you live?”

  “In the Subura, near the Neptune shrine. But I’ll be fine, I—”

  “I’m going back that way myself,” said Arrius brusquely. “I’ll see you home.”

  Marcus felt too ill to protest. He somehow got to his feet and stumbled after them to the atrium. The Syrian underbutler brought the centurion his crimson cloak and deftly draped Marcus in his rather soiled toga. After the cool of the arbor, the atrium already felt rather stuffy. Half a dozen of the city prefect’s clients were still hanging around in the blue shadows among the Ionic columns by the pool there: pettifogging lawyers or men whose sole occupation was to form a court around any wealthy man, applaud his lightest utterance, and hope for an invitation to dinner. They cast covert glances at Quindarvis as the butler arranged the purple-bordered folds of his toga, hoping to have it remembered in their favor, when Varus returned, that they had not deserted his household in its hour of need.

  Quindarvis was saying, “Remind me, centurion, and I’ll get you seats at the games tomorrow. They’re in celebration of the emperor’s victories in the East”—he chuckled suddenly—“and, fortuitously, just in time for the elections next month. If I do say so myself, they’re going to be quite fine. We’ve got sixty pairs of gladiators lined up, the cream of the best schools, and we’ve arranged for a hunt of wild boars and a beast-fight, tigers against crocodiles. And”—he lowered his voice impressively—“there’s going to be a special beast-hunt. About thirty captives from the Persian front are going to be hamstrung, each given a short knife, and have a pack of hyenas turned loose on them. Pretty good, eh?” He smiled cynically. “The crowds will love it.”

  “It should make an impression,” said the centurion in a colorless voice.

  “I’ll get you a ticket, too, Marcus,” promised the praetor. “Since I’m footing most of the bill, the least they can do is give my special friends privil
eged seating.”

  “Thank you,” said Marcus queasily, privately vowing to pass the ticket (if Quindarvis remembered to produce it) along to his brother.

  A doorman appeared—also Syrian, his dark-green tunic sprigged with leaves of embroidered gold—and bowed them into the vestibule. Blinding sunlight smote Marcus’ eyes as he stepped out into the street.

  “When I was serving in Germany I broke my leg on patrol and had to lie out all night fending off wolves till the rest of the patrol could track me in the snow,” remarked Arrius, as the door shut behind them. “After that I never cared much for those man-against-beast shows. Some people can’t get their fill of them, though.” They turned along the narrow street, the high walls of the big houses of the rich already trapping the morning heat. As they passed the mouth of the alley down which the Christians had dragged their struggling victim, Marcus shuddered.

  “Can’t anything be done?” he demanded. “Is all anybody going to do is just talk about the Christians? Can’t a search be made? A—a general arrest?”

  They turned into the lane that ran along the ridgy backbone of the Quirinal Hill; a litter passed them, the feet of the bearers throwing a choking cloud of dust over them. Arrius regarded him with amusement in those cool greenish eyes. “Oh, give us time,” he said tolerantly.

  “Time for what?” protested Marcus angrily. “Time for the Christians to—to—” He stammered to a halt, his mind shying from the possibilities.

  “Time to make a round of my informers,” returned the centurion, unruffled. “See what and who I can smoke out.”

  They turned down another street, plunging steeply down the side of the hill. The walls of the tenements loomed up around them, the noise and the dust far worse. The lane was crowded, the voices of the idlers in the street striving against the shrill cries of hawkers in the shops and the din of mallets from a sarcophagus-maker’s shop. Soldiers in their leather armor pushed past them, Syrian immigrants in bright robes and oiled lovelocks, Jews in somber gray. Slaves on their way back from the markets on the other side of the Forum jostled them.

  Marcus stumbled along in Arrius’ wake, down streets that grew narrower and narrower. The sky vanished behind a clutter of outthrust balconies, fluttering clotheslines, and plank bridges thrown across the street at the fourth or fifth story. Like canyon walls, the high tenements trapped and held the sound and threw it back in a million roaring echoes, voices shouting in Latin, Parthian, Celtic, Greek, Aramaic. It was like one of the beast-hunts held periodically at the circus—the roaring and screaming of bears, elephants, tigers, crocodiles, lions, ostriches, wild asses, all trapped in the narrow walls, and all condemned to die.

  Arrius yelled over the din of a clattering forge, “What about you, boy? How long have you known Tertullia Varia?”

  “About ten years,” Marcus yelled back. Across the street, a harried-looking teacher in a storefront school was screaming declensions at his students. “We used to play together as kids. Her mother and mine are—well, not exactly sisters. My mother was a sort of poor relation; her mother’s mother married my grandfather Pollius—my mother’s stepfather—after he divorced Grandmother. But my mother was really the daughter of C. Drusus Cato, who was proscribed; Pollius was her third or maybe her fourth husband. But in any case Aurelia Pollia and Mother grew up together in Grandfather Pollius’ household, and they remained friends for, oh, years.”

  “Are they still friends?”

  “No,” said Marcus. They edged their way around a group of men surrounding a Vespasian memorial—a public urinal, of which that emperor had built hundreds throughout Rome. “When my father was aedile in charge of city roads he had a falling-out with Varus, and after that he forbade Mother to speak to Lady Aurelia again.”

  “But you were talking with her daughter just before she was kidnapped.”

  Marcus said stiffly, “As I no longer live under my father’s roof, I don’t consider it any of his business.”

  Arrius cocked an eyebrow at him. But he only asked, “And in all the years you’ve known her, did Tullia Varia ever mention the Christians?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Only in passing.”

  “Did she know any Christians?”

  “Great gods, no!”

  The green eyes narrowed. “You sure about that?”

  Marcus hesitated, pulling together bits of the logical process out of his foundering horror and grief. “No,” he said at last. “No, I’m not sure—but I am sure that if she did, she did not know they were Christians.”

  The centurion nodded. “And that,” he said, “is the chief problem with Christians. You don’t know. A few of them don’t trouble to hide their faith—often those are the crazier ones, the fanatics, the kind we’re likeliest to round up. But they’re not the planners. For the most part they keep quiet and keep to themselves, and the emperor isn’t about to hunt them down as long as they don’t make trouble. But they’re a proscribed sect. Their membership is secret. You can’t know who’s a Christian.”

  They followed the windings of a particularly foul and narrow lane among a labyrinth of six-story tenements, buildings that leaned against one another like tired and shabby drunks. In the shops below them, half-naked men and women worked at their trades, calling out to one another in Syrian or Greek, while naked children played in the dust outside. They were in the Subura proper now, and though it was scarcely the fourth hour of the morning, all the wineshops were open, and bedizened whores had begun to parade in their cheap finery. One girl called out gaily, “How’re they hangin’, Professor?” evidently sheerly for the pleasure of seeing him blush. She was not disappointed.

  Arrius went on, apparently without noticing, “That’s one reason I wanted to speak to you outside that house. Slaves hear everything—not that I blame them. Sometimes it’s life or death to a slave to know which way to jump. But Christianity’s largely a slave’s religion. And I’m virtually certain there’s at least one Christian in Varus’ household.”

  Marcus felt himself blanch with shock.

  “Think about it,” urged the centurion. “Do you know the religions of all your father’s slaves? Or their names, even? The ambush had to be set up somehow. It was only their ill luck that you were there at all. But Quindarvis said there were half a dozen of them, waiting in alleys on both sides of the street. It was planned.”

  “But—That close to her father’s house! It would be too dangerous!”

  “It was the only place they could be sure of finding her,” replied Arrius. “This your place?”

  Marcus nodded. They started the long climb up four flights of pitch-black stairs that swarmed with roaches and stank of grease, stale urine, and cabbage. Arrius went on, “They knew her father was away; they also knew of her upcoming wedding. This might be the last chance they had to strike at her father through her. Now, I’m taking a risk telling you about all this, because I know nothing about you and you could be a Christian yourself, for all I know. But it’s unlikely. You’ll very seldom find a philosopher who has anything to do with that cult.”

  “I should hope not!” cried Marcus, with a vehemence that made the centurion grin. “Have you read their tracts? Vulgar grammar, rotten construction, not to mention holes in their logic you could drive a laden hay-cart through! And as for that—that emotionalistic nonsense—drivel... ” Words failed him.

  They made their way down the stinking, Stygian hall to Marcus’ single room. Its one window faced south onto the building’s central court; the whole place was hot as a baker’s oven. Marcus leaned in the doorway, exhausted by the climb and suddenly giddy; the room began to blur before his eyes.

  Arrius’ voice seemed to come from miles away. “Professor?”

  “Hunh?” he said faintly.

  “You see me all right?”

  Marcus blinked at him and nodded.

  The soldier dumped two scrolls and a couple of apple-cores off the wobbly-legged sleeping-couch, took Marcus’ arm, and steered him to it, kicking asid
e a pair of discarded sandals, a dish, and several more apple-cores.

  “You’ll have to excuse my housekeeping...” mumbled Marcus.

  “You have someone to look in on you?”

  He lay back gingerly on the couch, paused, and ejected an empty cup from among the tattered sheets. “Don’t waste your time sending for my family,” he said, with faint defiance. “They certainly won’t waste their time coming.”

  Arrius looked around him at the squalid little chamber. Though he made no comment, Marcus felt called upon to add, “I couldn’t live a lie. And my father couldn’t live with a philosopher for a son.”

  The centurion peered under the upended pot that kept Marcus’ bread safe from the local rats. “But he sends you money for your keep?” he surmised.

  Splitting pain lanced through Marcus’ head as he tried to sit up. “If he didn’t, I’d still live as I do,” he flared. “I’d find work of some kind—copying books, or teaching... ”

  He felt himself being scrutinized again and fell silent, feeling exhausted and a little absurd. But in the hot sunlight that fell through the window he saw the calculating expression on the centurion’s face, not mocking him, but gauging what sort of a man he was.

  “I expect you would,” he said after a moment. “And I daresay the old man only sends you money to keep his friends from tattling about how he cut off his only son without a quadrans.”

  Marcus lay back again and closed his eyes, wondering how he could have become so angry. His whole soul seemed to be a single raw wound, sick and dizzy, exhausted but dreading the dreams that he knew would come with sleep. He said, “And anyway, I’m not his only son. I have two brothers.”

  The soldier made a little growling noise of approval. “Well, that explains why he let you go instead of keeping you for stud.”

  It was a hideously accurate representation of his father’s opinions about young men who fribbled away their responsibilities to the House of Silanus rather than wedding and setting up their nurseries, and it surprised a chuckle out of him that caught him under his cracked ribs.