Marcus swallowed, suddenly repelled. Beauty, Truth, and the Good, he thought to himself: their very natures seemed to slither like reptiles through his cringing fingers. Where did I go wrong in my search? How did I come into this hole of ugliness and death, lies and blasphemies, to sit like a greedy little clerk in the hole where they crouch to take down confessions wrung in agony? But he looked up and saw that uncompromising cynicism in the centurion’s eyes, mocking his courage without mocking his search.
“All right,” he managed to whisper, and Arrius smiled, a brief, bitter grin that never touched his eyes.
“Good boy.” He rested a brown scarred hand on his shoulder. “We’ll make a soldier of you yet.”
Through the knothole he saw the woman enter the room a few minutes later, escorted by the sentry. She was pale, and under her brown veil her thick black curling hair was dank with sweat, but between the leering soldier and the crouching shadow of the rack she maintained her calm. She was young, eighteen or nineteen. Her dress bore the stripe of a woman with children. The lamplight glinted on a silver amulet of a fish that lay on her large, upstanding breasts.
Hobnailed boots clacked in the passage. Marcus saw her flinch and realized how much courage it must have taken to come here at all. The door opened, and the sentry’s voice growled, “Make it fast, grandpa.” Telesphorus stepped from the shadows and met the girl’s big dark eyes.
The door closed behind him, the wind of it making the grubby lamp flame startle. Marcus shifted within his sweltering cubicle, the sweat-dampened wool of his toga unbearably itchy against his neck and the walls too narrow for him to risk making a sound by scratching.
Telesphorus’ face was shiny with moisture in the dim brown darkness of the room. The fear of the place was growing on him, but his voice was still calm. “You shouldn’t have come, Dorcas.”
She gestured to the small basket she’d brought. “I have food for you.”
“It’s a costly meal at the price of your life. You think they’ll let you out of here?”
She swallowed hard, hiding her fear. “I told them I was a member of your family. They let me in.”
“You don’t think they’ll be after our families as well?” he demanded harshly. And then, as those full, sensitive lips tightened, he added, “They’re asking names.”
Marcus saw her eyes flicker down to his hands, then his feet. She asked him, “Are you all right?”
“So far. They want to know about Nikolas’ group, and their families.”
Dorcas frowned, her dark strongly drawn brows swooping down over her nose. “But they’re all dead. Dead or left the city. You and Ignatius are the only survivors of that group. I don’t understand.”
“It may be the only lead they have.”
“But why?”
He gestured impatiently. “Do they need a reason? That heathen spectacle of blood they call their ‘games’ is going on. It may be we’re cheaper entertainment than the gladiators. But if it comes to the rack, somebody’s going to break, and God alone knows where it will stop.” He folded his long arms. His eyes were only a brooding glitter in the deep shadows of his overhung brows. “The Church has picked up a lot of dross in the last twenty years,” he said finally. “I don’t know what kind of person would join a proscribed cult simply because it’s proscribed, but there are those whose strength I doubt. And some of them know more than they ought.”
“Who’s with you?” asked Dorcas, and he shot her a glance from under those heavy brows.
“Ignatius and Agnes. Doriskos. Martin from John’s group. That silly bitch Arete from Dioscordes’ bunch.”
Dorcas said, “You’ll have to be broken out.”
Telesphorus raised his head, like a brooding eagle at the turning of the wind.
“I’ll tell Papa.”
“If we can get you out of here yourself,” rasped the priest. “If not, pray God to grant us strength. At worst he may be able to save some of the others.”
“How long do you think you have?” she asked softly, and he shook his head. The heavy tread of hobnailed boots passed in the corridor. They both looked up quickly, the small muscles in the priest’s jaw standing out in a sudden relief of oily gold and blackness in the lamplight.
“Not long,” he said in a strained voice. “Let him know how we stand. His doctrines may be pernicious, but...”
In the grimy shadows Dorcas’ cheeks colored. “Papa isn’t a heretic.”
Telesphorus’ eyes flashed. “No. But he rides a close line to it. Beware of him...”
The bolts rattled at the door. Dorcas got to her feet, startled; their eyes met. Then she said, questioningly, “Wicked uncle?” and Telesphorus nodded.
For a moment the question, if question it had been, made no sense to Marcus. But as the sentry returned he saw the subtle shift in the expression of the priest and the girl, each becoming, not different, but only what seemed to be a different aspect of the same. The tension in Dorcas’ face changed to a kind of innocent horror, as though none of this had or could have anything to do with herself. Telesphorus seemed to grow stiffer and more withdrawn, but the wariness in his leathery face turned to a kind of sly self-righteousness and he picked up the basket she’d placed on the table and began to examine its contents. With condescending concern he said, “I thank you for your helpful thoughts, niece, but what you did was foolish. Let us take care of our own. We have put aside our families for a greater family, the Family of Christ. Meddling in it will only bring you trouble.”
What Marcus could have sworn were tears glinted in Dorcas’ eyes. “You may have forsaken your family,” she replied shakily, “but that doesn’t mean your family is going to forsake you. I don’t understand your doctrines, but I’m not going to leave you to starve.” She started for the door, drawing her veil once again over her hair. The sentry made a move to block her way, but in the same instant she turned back and said, with trembling chin, “I’ll see you again, uncle.”
Telesphorus glanced up from the food basket, like an interrupted hyena. “If you plan to, you’d better get your ticket early,” he commented, with deliberate brutality.
Dorcas stared at him for one moment in stricken horror, then burst into tears and pushed past the outraged sentry, her running footsteps retreating along the hall. A moment later the ladder creaked; the sentry gasped, “You self-righteous old sod!” and cuffed Telesphorus hard enough to knock him back against the wall. The priest clutched his food and snarled at him. He seemed a wholly different man from the one who had met Arrius’ questioning with such quelling dignity. Had he told them that the girl was no messenger of his he would have been disbelieved at once; as it was, he had left her free to take a message to the other Christians...
To the other Christians? Marcus thought suddenly, as Telesphorus was shoved brutally into the hall. Great gods!
He pushed against the door of the hidden closet, frantic to stop her before she got away. Arrius had closed it from the outside; there seemed to be no latch on the inside at all. Furious, he sprang to his feet, knocking his head on the low pitch of the roof, cursing in a most unphilosophic fashion as he rattled at the recalcitrant catch. You’ll have to be broken out, she had said, and then, with simple unshakable confidence, I’ll tell Papa, as though the one would follow upon the other. But she’d have to act fast. With any luck it was her father she would now seek.
In despair he threw his whole weight against the door, tripping over the stool in the process and precipitating both it and himself violently onto the floor of the examining room. He scrambled to his feet (stepping heavily on the hem of his toga) and stumbled for the door. In the back of his mind, as he blundered down the passageway, was a kind of amazement at the fakement. Having seen the Christians fighting among themselves in the cell, he would never have credited even members of the same group with such capacity for quick, concerted action.
He threw himself up the ladder. The guardroom was now broiling hot, the sunlight glaring in through the open door
. A clump of guards were grouped around a slimy little man in an embroidered blue tunic, who was marking down bets on a wax diptych. “Where’s Centurion Arrius?” he gasped, and one of the men looked up.
“Gone off with some informer. He’ll be back.”
“It can’t wait—Did that girl leave?”
The man nodded and jerked his grimy thumb toward the outside door, adding, “Poor little kitten.”
Kitten indeed! thought Marcus, pausing only long enough to snatch up his shopping basket, men dashing outside. From the higher ground of the footslopes of the Capitoline, he could see the brown veil, making its way quickly among the scattered groups in the Forum below. He spotted her position and direction from his vantage point—crossing through the line of the monuments to the Caesars and heading for the corner of the Julian Basilica—and plunged down after her, trying to keep his toga out from under his feet and at the same time to look as inconspicuous as possible.
On any other day at this hour he knew he would never have been able to follow her across the Forum. But today its cobbled expanse was nearly deserted, only a stroller or two idling in the shaded arcades of its closed law courts. The sidewalk vendors were gone; so were the acrobats, the beggars, the sword swallowers who performed for a gauping populace. Distantly Marcus heard the rising roar of applause, an animal bellow of approbation, like summer thunder over the deserted streets. Quindarvis’ games were evidently a wild success.
There was no crowd to hide her, but neither could he conceal himself amid the usual mob in the Forum. Keeping as much distance as he dared, he trailed her among the statues of the Caesars—that ill-assorted family-party of deities whose spirits still guarded the city that had murdered most of them—and through the shadows of Augustus’ great triumphal arch. They passed the tall portico and round altar that marked the spot where Julius Caesar’s body had been given to the fire, and crossed to the monumental shadows of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Here the crowds were thicker, coming and going from the New Way and the shops around the base of the Palatine Hill. Marcus found himself snared in a gaggle of men around a Vespasian memorial, his shopping basket catching on someone’s elbow. He tugged at it, cursing, casting a despairing glance after the girl as she vanished into the narrow New Way itself. By the time he’d got it free he had to run to catch up; moreover, the hare he’d bought for dinner was beginning to leak through its saturated wrappings, dripping down his toga and drawing after him curses and flies.
Ahead of him the girl was moving faster, heading straight along the New Way, the shadows of the overspanning arches barring her in a flickering series of patches of gold and black. Once she glanced over her shoulder, and his heart was in his throat lest she see him. But she turned neither left nor right. She followed a path beside a ruined wall, past the broken columns and tumbled masonry that had been Nero’s fabulous palace, turned along the main way under the shadow of that incredible gilded porch. They passed the towering marble Colossus, a 110-foot statue by the greatest dilettante of all time...
...And he realized where she was headed.
When anyone said they were going to the Colossus, they were seldom referring to that staggering piece of frivolity. Already people had begun referring to the Flavian Amphitheater by that name. As he came around the comer and into the mobbed square before those towering white walls, Marcus heard the baying of the crowd again, a deafening elemental howl like the sea. He made a run to close the distance as the brown head-veil and blue dress plunged ahead of him into the throngs that surrounded the amphitheater as thick as porridge, and found himself entangled in an almost inextricable morass of sidewalk fortune-tellers, blanket dancers, fig sellers and bookies, each with their attendant mob of idlers. Ahead of him the girl was edging and darting her way through the press like a fish through weeds, and turtlelike, Marcus swam after her. His shopping basket caught on some woman’s parcel; he tried to pull it free and found himself engaged in a desperate tug-of-war, the woman shrieking and striking him with her cane as Dorcas plunged into the roaring vaults of the arcade that surrounded the Flavian itself.
With a final determined wrench, Marcus saved his dinner and went shoving through the mobs into the shadows of that preposterous edifice. The shadows of the arcade seemed black after the sunlight of the square; the bellowing of the crowd was deafening. He glimpsed Dorcas as she turned in an arched doorway that led inside, and this time their eyes met. Then she plunged inside and out of sight.
Marcus darted after her into a vaulted stairway whose gilt-and-purple ceiling rang with the noise of the crowds. Someone caught him by the back of the toga with a grip that all but lifted him off his feet—“You got a ticket, boy?” growled a burly man with an ex-pug’s cauliflower ear.
“But I have to...” he gasped desperately.
“I know, I know,” sympathized the guard, “but youse still gotta have a ticket.”
Marcus fumbled in his shopping basket, dropping the leeks, trickling hare’s blood down his foot, while people crowding behind him cursed at him in languages he’d never heard before in his life. He slapped the grimy bit of clay into the man’s hand and ran up the wide marble stairs, pushing past the crowds that blocked his way. Sunlight streamed through the vast archway ahead of him, blindingly white on the dirt-smutched marble of the walls. It flashed blue-black on Dorcas’ dark hair as she reached the top of the stairs ahead of him, pulled off her veil, and vanished past the archway into the light. Cursing, Marcus struggled into the open air.
The slopes of the arena stretched before him like a reversed mountainside, the white of citizens’ and senators’ togas forming a solid block to halfway up the slope, and from there, the blues and browns and dull greens that marked the ranks of the poor, of foreigners, or slaves. Overhead the vast awning rippled in the wind. In the center of the ring, where the sunlight struck directly, the white sand glared like salt, blotched with crimson dabblings of blood. From this distance the half-dozen pairs of men still struggling there looked very small. Their armor and weapons were edged in sun-fire as they moved—Thracians, like men of leather and bronze, faceless in their bizarre helmets, the lighter-armed hoplites dodging their blows with sun and sweat and blood gleaming on exposed flesh.
He swung around, scanning the crowds on the benches behind. In the teeming mob it was hard to tell, but he thought he saw one figure climbing the steps between the tiers more swiftly than the others. Without the head-veil for identification he could not be sure. He struggled to follow, tripping over feet, murmuring a spate of “Excuse me’s” over the snarled yells of “Hey! Down in front!” Then another roar smote his ears like a thunderclap. As one man, the entire crowd was on its feet, surging around him and trapping him where he stood, roaring, “Make him fight! Get the irons! Coward!” Below, Marcus could see what had happened: a burly man in Samnite armor had lost his sword to a trident-man’s net. He had no other weapon; he had dropped his shield and fled. From the gates in the fifteen-foot marble cliff that rose above the sand, men were coming out already, with whips and a smoking brazier. The Samnite wheeled, tried to change the direction of his hopeless flight; the trident-man, light on his feet as a terrier, was before him, driving him back against the barrier. Light flashed on metal, the blood leaping out to splatter them both; even the food vendors were jumping up and down yelling, “Kill him! Kill him!” The whole arena was one tornado of noise, over which the thundering oompah of the Flavian band boomed in incongruous counterpoint.
The man was down, doubled around his spilt belly. Amid the shuddering roar of the crowds, if he had cried out in pain, no one had heard. Slowly he raised himself on one arm, turned a helmeted head as gold and shapeless as an ant’s toward the stands where the praetors, the sponsors of the games in the emperor’s absence, sat. Impassive, the trident-man stood over him, his short dagger in his hand. Marcus recognized Quindarvis when he raised his arm, even at that distance saw the haughty dignity, the power in every well-timed gesture. It was at his signal that the victor helped h
is beaten opponent to kneel, placed the razor point of the dagger against the hollow of his throat. As all good gladiators should, the Samnite, in spite of his ruptured guts, leaned into the deathblow; the cheering of the crowd rose to a deafening crescendo, drowning out the thunderous fanfares of the band.
Men around him were already sitting down, murmuring approval and anticipation. Marcus remained standing, scanning the stands above him without much hope. He reflected that even if Dorcas had been trapped by the surge of the crowd, she had less far to struggle to reach one of the stairways that led from the topmost tier. And she need not even have done that. His vision blocked by the mobs all around him, he had lost track of the precise place in which he had last seen her. She could be any one of hundreds of tiny moving figures; for that matter, she could have seated herself on the nearest bench. Marcus felt a sudden surge of sympathy for whatever worthy young heroine of legend it had been who had been required to separate a mixed bushel of wheat, barley, and rye.
“You gonna stand there all day blocking the view, kid?” demanded a hairy-eared Illyrian with grease stains on his toga.
“Sorry,” mumbled Marcus. He tripped over a long succession of feet on his return journey to the stairway and pushed his way through the tide of ascending crowds. It was only when he reached street level again and stepped out of the shadows of the surrounding arcade that he realized that his much-abused shopping basket swung considerably lighter in his hand.
One of the local cutpurses was going to have hare and stew for his dinner.
Marcus uncharitably wished the food poisoned and went dejectedly on his way.
VI
Stick to the good old ways, my boy, and do as I tell you. I hate to see a good man corrupted by the filthy, perverted manners that pass for morality nowadays.
Plautus
“I WAS HAD FOR A CHUMP—a fool. A child could have done it better.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” advised Arrius easily.
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