Arrius went on, “You study with the philosophers in the Basilica Ulpias? What’s your teacher’s name?”
“Timoleon of Athens. He’s usually there around noon. But if he’s busy...”
“If he’s too busy to see one of his students who’s been slugged by the Christians, he has no business setting himself up as an arbiter of the good life,” retorted Arrius equably. “I’ll send one of my men to tell him you’re ill.”
Marcus opened his eyes a slit, dazzled by the reflection of the sun on the bright rings of the hauberk. “But...” he protested, knowing he shouldn’t be lying here doing nothing, but feeling too sick to do anything else.
“But nothing. Take care of yourself, boy. You’ll be hearing from me.”
A few moments later he could hear the man’s hobnailed boots on the rickety wood flooring of the hall and feel the jar of his body weight as he descended all those flights of stairs. Then abruptly he fell asleep and, contrary to his expectations, slept like a dead man, dreaming nothing.
III
If you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love; for when it has been broken you will not be disturbed. When you are kissing your child or your wife, say it is a human being whom you are kissing; for when the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed.
Epictetus
GRILLING AND OPPRESSIVE, the heat of afternoon seemed to strangle him out of unconsciousness instead of into it. He lay for what seemed like hours, staring at the stained, cracked boards of the ceiling over his head, wondering if all last night and that morning had been some kind of insane delirium. Though he was sure he had lain down fully clothed, he was now naked, and the bedding of his narrow sleeping-couch was damp with his sweat. From across the room he heard voices, the philosopher Timoleon’s, slow and dry and deliberate, laboring over the commonplaces of the Forum and the market, against the high nattering counterpoint that Marcus recognized with surprise as belonging to his brother Felix.
“Of course, one hears all manner of gossip,” the teacher was saying, “and one sees these orgiastic processions wending their way through the very heart of Rome; these mincing priests of Cybele and Attis, with their dampened locks and affected gait. As Juvenal says, the mire of the Orontes has spewed itself into the Tiber...”
“Oh, quite, quite,” agreed Felix’s voice. “Fact is, though, can’t expect all them easterners just to drop their ways when they come to Rome, now, can we? I mean, we conquered ’em, and all.”
“No,” sighed Timoleon. Opening his eyes, Marcus could see the deliberate shake of that leonine head. “For the gods made all states and degrees of mankind, as they created different varieties of animals, each for their different task. And as horses, and asses, dogs, and wolves were each separately made, so the minds of the different races were each cast to their own mold...”
“That’s just it, ain’t it?” said Felix. “Can’t blame a dog for sniffin’—though, mind you, all that philosophy gaff is a sight beyond me. Always was.”
Marcus closed his eyes again, blotting out the afternoon sunlight and wishing he could silence those disparate voices as well. He wondered how he could possibly have slept, when the gods only knew what was happening to the girl he loved—except, of course, that he had the suspicion that the centurion Arrius would not have permitted him to do otherwise.
He sat up, stifling a groan as his cracked ribs pinched him, and Felix said, “Hullo! It’s Silenus himself!” Felix, as was to have been expected, had brought wine (and cups—he’d called on his brother’s lodgings before). He and Timoleon faced each other across the makeshift table, and Felix had clearly been doing his unsuccessful best to keep the dignified rhetorician entertained until Marcus could awaken and explain himself. With great presence of mind, he reached into the satchel that lay on the floor at his feet, produced another cup, and slopped it full from the wine mixer on the table without spilling a drop. “Thought I’d bring my own dishes,” he added brightly, carrying it over to the couch where Marcus sat gingerly probing the bruise on his side. “Save us grubbin’ around for yours and havin’ to haul the water up to wash ’em.”
Marcus let this perfectly justified slur on his housekeeping pass and sipped at the watered vintage. “So that meddling centurion told you after all,” he sighed. “I asked him not to.”
“Nor did he that I’ve heard.” He looked down at his senior, his head on one side, rather like some ungainly bird of exotic plumage. “Some slut who lives downstairs sent me word you’d been brought in by the watch at all hours of the morning with a cracked head and the looks of a prize brawl printed all over your noble frame, so I thought I’d push along and see what a philosopher looks like after a night on the tiles.”
Marcus sighed and lowered his tangled head to one hand. “Gods, if only it were that,” he whispered.
“The centurion Arrius was good enough to send one of his warriors to the Basilica Ulpias, where I had repaired, as is my custom, to teach,” Timoleon informed him kindly. “Hearing that you had been somehow injured, I was greatly distressed and, dismissing my other students, came here with all speed, to find your brother already in possession of the field, if not of the facts. I enlightened him insofar as I was able, from what I had myself learned at third hand from the soldier who first brought me the news.”
Felix’s gentle vacuous eyes filled with admiration. “I say, Professor, will you talk like that when you become a philosopher?”
Timoleon looked down his long elegant nose at him and made no comment.
Not being a citizen, Timoleon was not entitled to wear a toga and garbed himself instead after the fashion of the Athenian philosophers in a simple Greek chiton, which left his right arm bare. He was a tall, graceful man, Jove-like in his grave dignity, his tawny hair fading in streaks from russet to straw to white. He reminded Marcus at times of a statue of the god, wrought in old ivory and worn gold, an oracle of times past, imbued with the wisdom and dignity of former ages.
Beside him Felix looked hot and overdressed, the white toga his father insisted it was his duty as a citizen to wear contrasting absurdly with the blue and scarlet birds and grapes embroidered on his cream-colored tunic. Felix himself was a ridiculous caricature of his older brother, having the same long, narrow face, in which all the features were exaggerated: the nose beakier, the chin weak instead of square, the wide, gentle brown eyes blinking, lamblike, and heavily painted with malachite and kohl. On his head Marcus’ unruly brown curls were a carefully wrought confection of perfumed ringlets. The scent of balsam and depilatories breathed from the folds of his elaborately wrought toga as he fished among them for a handkerchief and carefully blotted his brow.
“Say, I was badly rocked to hear about this, you know?” he said after a time. “Tullia bein’ snatched, and all. No word?”
“Not yet,” said Marcus, in a voice cracked with exhaustion and anxiety.
“Lady A. takin’ it all right?” For all his ludicrous appearance, there was genuine concern in his tone. “Awful for her, of course. She was always kind to me.”
“Not well,” said Marcus quietly. “She’s been given a sleeping draft, but she’ll have to wake up sometime.”
“May the gods endow her with the strength to endure this misfortune with philosophic mind,” said Timoleon gently. Shrill and distant as birds, the cries of children rose from the court below, along with a man’s voice, free and lazy and clear, singing in Aramaic. Marcus thought of the sound of Aurelia Pollia’s tortured animal weeping, and said nothing. Tullia was somewhere in Rome, in the hands of vengeful terrorists; mere was no way to find her, nothing that he could do. Yet he felt that if he remained in this airless room all day he would go mad.
“I should see her,” he said finally, half to himself. “Even if she’s asleep, or drugged, she’ll need someone. I can’t do anything...”
“At all events, you can offer her the inestimable consolation of philosophy.”
“Dunno about the consolation of philoso
phy,” put in Felix, “but havin’ your hand held for a bit never goes amiss.”
The philosopher’s rebuttal to this was a frigidly polite silence. Felix, unaware of having committed the gross philosophical solecism of comparing the lowest usages of the emotions with the highest ones of the mind, was busily picking through the heap of clothes in the corner in quest of a clean tunic for his brother.
“Tell you what, though,” he continued after a moment, “if you’re going to visit Lady A. this afternoon, you really ought to wander by the baths first, elder brother.”
“What?” blinked Marcus, jerked abruptly from his misery by the mundane. He looked down at himself and rubbed at his stubbly jaw. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I’ll even lend you the tin, if you’re short the price of a shave,” added Felix handsomely. “Where’d you get this tunic, brother? It’s miles too big for you.”
“I don’t know,” said Marcus impatiently. “It’s Varus’—they lent it to me...”
“Should have known. Dashed sight better than anything you’d wear. Clean, too.”
Disgusted with such trivialities, Marcus turned away. “Timoleon, could you—could you spare the time to walk along with me to the baths? I need to talk. I feel desperately in need of wisdom.”
“Ah,” cried his brother, “be toddling on my way, then—come to the wrong shop for that. Good to see you’re not dead, though, Professor. Bit of a blow to Mater, what with the cost of funeral masks, and all that.” He smiled, and Marcus realized the absurdity of being angry with him for any length of time.
“Does Mother know?”
“By Castor, no! She’d never keep it from the old paterfamilias, and then we’d have the whole triumphal procession again about your hanging about with freethinkers and lowlivers and associating with Christians—though why if you was associating with ‘em they’d half-brain you beats me. Fine mind, Father,” he explained aside to the philosopher, “no logic, though.” And with that he finished his wine, collected his winecups, and pattered on his way.
“But what can we do?”
“Do?” Timoleon’s fine brow deepened. He leaned his shoulders against the brisk rough friction of the bath-slave’s towel, and considered his student gravely. “In the face of tragedy, Marcus, the most that a man can do is school his heart to bear the worst, and face Fate with courage.”
Down at the other end of the long drying room, a fat gentleman was fussily directing half-a-dozen liveried slaves to blot him dry, rather than rub him. Through the open archways that led to the pool deck Marcus could hear the racket of men’s voices echoing in the vaulted mosaics of the ceiling. For a long time he could make no reply.
Timoleon continued, “As Epictetus has told us in his Enchiridion, a thing is what it is. Willing it to be otherwise not only hurts you, but makes you slave to the whims of Fate.”
“But they have her prisoner,” whispered Marcus helplessly. “They could be doing anything to her. Isn’t there anything that we can do?”
He looked pleadingly at the philosopher, who sat beside him on the black marble bench, his faded reddish hair lank and dripping from the warm water of the baths. All around them was the quiet bustle of men coming and going: wealthy men, surrounded by clients who all but fell over one another to be the first to laugh at their patron’s jokes, senators emerging pink as lobsters from the steam rooms, still dictating away to their pink and sweating secretarial slaves, wealthy sportsmen returning from the training room, bronze as statues under the oily dust of the track and trailed by a string of slaves carrying hardballs, towels, strigils, oil. Despite his present mode of life, Marcus was enough of a rich man’s son to place baths above food, and to patronize only the best.
Timoleon rose as a bathman appeared, carrying their two neat piles of clothes. He rested a white slender hand briefly on Marcus’ shoulder. “Torturing yourself will not lessen another’s pain,” he said quietly. “This young girl is in the hands of Fate. Comfort yourself with Plato’s assertion that no true evil can befall a truly just person, and cultivate the detachment necessary to see both good and evil as necessary parts of this earthly existence.”
Marcus was silent as he dressed, silent as the well-trained slaves draped his toga, and in silence he followed the Athenian through the vast hall of the indoor swimming pool, where slanted sunlight flickered on the sparkling water. They passed through an enormous vestibule, where fig-sellers and bookstalls displayed their wares between columns of rose-red Samian marble, and out into the dusty brilliance of the square outside.
“Marcus,” said Timoleon quietly. “Please believe that I am not insensible to the grief that you feel—with justification—at this shocking event. You are young in your philosophy, and this makes it difficult for you to understand that to a true philosopher all events, good and bad, are like ripples upon the sea. They are not the sea itself. This horror that has befallen your friend is less than the horrors that happen in war. You must prepare yourself to meet waiting and anxiety, and possibly greater horrors, with a calm and equable mind. As Plutarch has said, we are all the sport of the gods.”
In the square before them a few groups of people had stopped to watch a religious procession, winding its way to an imposing columned temple opposite the steps of the baths. The priests walked with heads covered in the folds of their togas, lest they should see an inauspicious omen; the obligatory flute players followed, piping to drown out any profane interruptions that would cause the entire ceremony to have to be repeated again from the beginning. A hot drift of breeze blew the words to Marcus—they were in archaic Etruscan, memorized by rote, an unfailing ritual to a god whose very name had been forgotten in the course of the centuries.
Gods like those? he wondered.
He raised his head, his heart a sounding hollow of misery within him. Over the roofs that shut in the square he could see the towering walls of the Flavian Amphitheater, high even from the hilltop beside them, and glittering like sugar in the sun. Through a break in the buildings where a wide street ran down the hill, he could see the forest of columns that marked the various forums, the glint of the gilt roof of the Vesta temple, the smoke that rose from the multicolored pillars of red and green Egyptian porphyry on the porch of the temple of Avenging Mars. Far off he could discern the marble woods around the newest imperial forum, flanked by its libraries, its temples, its deep-cut curves graven into the bones of the shouldering mass of the Quirinal Hill itself, and above and behind it all, rising like a solemn finger, clean as a sword blade in the sun, the emperor’s column with its lacework of embroidered stone.
Timoleon’s hand rested lightly upon his arm. “I’m sorry,” said the philosopher gently. Then he, too, was gone, moving down the steps of the baths, erect and aloof from the troubles of a filthy world.
For a time Marcus only stood, staring sightlessly before him. Why not accept it? he asked himself. There’s nothing you can do. Even if you were to rescue her, she’d still he betrothed to someone far richer than you, someone who hasn’t been cast out by his own family.
Arrius said you’d hear from him. Shouldn’t that be enough?
School your heart to accept what must be.
But the consolation of philosophy was ashes in his mouth.
He moved slowly down the steps, exhausted and lightheaded, wondering what he would say to Lady Aurelia Pollia. Maybe Felix was right, and he could give her only his presence, to wait at her side until Arrius brought them news.
The centurion’s words returned to him, that it might be a slave within Varus’ own household. How could he ever tell her that?
Who? he wondered. The sleek Syrian doorkeepers? The boy who carved game birds at the feasts and, as far as Marcus knew, didn’t do much else? One of the secretaries? Varus’ personal barber? Nicanor? Which one of them had relayed the information, through such swift channels as only slaves can know, that Tullia Varia would be coming home at such and such a time?
Which of them was a Christian?
&nbs
p; And abruptly, bitterness over the evils of the world vanished in the sudden thought: Churaldin might know.
If he were a slave himself, he might have picked up information, rumors of other slaves.
If he’s a slave he might be a Christian himself.
Not if he ran to her rescue, he wouldn’t be.
Wild elation went through him, and desperate hope. A slave’s testimony was useless in a court of law, of course, but he might be able to give them some kind of lead...
There was neither despair nor the quietude of philosophy in his heart as he hastened across the square, dodged past the affronted priests at the tail end of the procession, stumbled over the flapping ends of his own toga in his haste, and hurried on down the hill.
Churaldin had said that his master’s name was C. Sixtus Julianus, and that his house lay somewhere close to that of Consul Tullius Varus. On his way through the crowded lanes north of the Forum, Marcus tried to remember such a person, or at least hearing mention of the name. Back in the days when he, Felix, and Tullia had run wild like a pack of ill-assorted wood-sprites through the aristocratic upper slopes of the Quirinal Hill, he had been familiar with the names of the owners of all the big houses there, and the name was unknown to him. But as he passed the sidewalk booth of an astrologer, gaudy with painted signs and bronze amulets, and heard the crier there advertising cut-rate horoscopes and conversations with the dead, he remembered Quindarvis’ words, “I thought he was dead.”
And it occurred to him that Sixtus Julianus was probably the owner of the haunted house.
As children they’d often scrambled up adjacent trees to get a look down into the overgrown jungles of its gardens. Once they’d seen a slave moving about, but that was all. Nevertheless the run-down walls had exerted a kind of fascination on them all. Tullia, who had followed the brothers in and out of scrapes with a stubborn courage remarkable in so young a girl, had surmised that the owner of the house was a sorcerer who kidnapped children and made magic with their bones: this despite the utter dearth of evidence of anything of the kind. In spite of his more adult awareness that the master was a retired general turned scholar, Marcus had still thought of the place, when he remembered it at all, as a kind of haunted house whose ghost had not yet died, and it was with an illogical feeling of trepidation that he knocked at those bronze-bound doors.
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