Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  Sitting upright at the foot of her husband’s couch, his mother leaned across to him, seeing him about to speak. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen you, dear,” she said to him quietly. “Your sister’s getting married, you know.”

  “So I gather,” replied Marcus dryly.

  “Of course, your father says that times are hard,” she continued, as though his father were not always complaining about their nonexistent poverty and the decline of the House of Silanus. “But I think we’ll be able to dower her creditably. We do have the credit of the family to think of. And of course, Garovinus is quite a wealthy man himself.”

  “Well, he won’t be, if he keeps on as he is,” declared Felix, aside. “He runs with a dashed fast crowd, the whole pearls-in-vinegar set. He’s been said to have spent upward of fifty thousand sesterces on a single banquet, not counting the wine. My guess is he needs the dowry to bring himself about.”

  Their father looked up sharply. “That’s precisely the sort of gossip you would pick up in the baths and perfume shops. Lectus Garovinus is one of the most fashionable men in Rome, and a scion of one of the oldest families. His political influence is such that he may end up praetor, or even consul, one day. If you cannot restrain your cattiness, exercise it on one of your own set.”

  “Well, dash it, the man...”

  His father’s thin black nostrils flared to angry slashes. Felix glanced across the table, to where his sister sat in silence. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but she was making a valiant attempt to obey her father and eat. Marcus guessed she would very likely throw it up the minute she was out of his sight.

  Lamely, Felix finished, “The man’s not the sort of man I’d like to see married to m’sister, is all.” He returned his attention to his plate abruptly, picking restlessly at his spiced shrimp, his painted eyelids lowered and his face taut under the rouge.

  His father added viciously, “With as little experience as you have with manliness, Felix, I would venture to say that you’re hardly qualified to judge.”

  Felix said nothing.

  Silanus slammed his cup down on the marble. “Answer when your father speaks to you, boy! What this house is coming to I don’t know!” His wrinkled little face stained a sudden red; in it his eyes were like two burning coals. “In the days of the republic the House of Silanus was one of the most powerful in Rome, that even the House of Caesar sought to ally itself with. We ruled Rome! If the republic still stood, my voice would be heard in the highest councils, and my sons would have retained the manners and respect that I’ve tried to teach them.

  “But what have I got instead?” He looked spitefully around him, daring any of them to speak. “A painted whore who does nothing but spend my money chasing boys. A worthless chattering Sophist who’s worse than the Greeks he wastes his time with, since they were born what they are, and he deliberately made himself to be like them. An arrogant and disobedient trull of a wife...”

  Marcus started to speak, and his father cut him off with, “That’s what comes of marrying somebody’s dowerless poor relation. There was bad blood in all your mother’s family, and the rot at the core of Rome has made it worse.” He turned suddenly, black malicious eyes glittering, to his wife. “You haven’t said much for yourself, Patricia Pollia Cato.” The tone was a command. Lady Patricia raised her bowed head and in gracious, rounded sentences agreed with his evaluation of Roman society and the degeneration of the House of Silanus. In her face Marcus could see what he had seen for a long time—her awareness that anything was better than to continue the quarrel.

  He found he had lost what little appetite he’d had.

  When the dessert dishes were cleared, Silanus dismissed his slaves and his women with a few curt words. A good-looking, rather shy boy of fifteen or so came around with a crater of wine. Silanus lay propped on his elbow, restlessly turning his winecup in nervous, prying fingers, and watched his middle son with hard penetrating eyes.

  “What’s this I hear about you getting mixed up in some disgraceful business with the Christians?” he demanded, when the boy had gone.

  “It is a disgraceful business,” replied Marcus in a low voice. “They’ve kidnapped Tertullia Varia.”

  “So I heard,” snapped his father. “I’m not surprised. Aurelia Pollia is little better than a Christian herself.”

  “She is not!” said Marcus, stung.

  “All those eastern cults are the same. Mewing mystagogues fawning over a bunch of dirty eunuch priests—bah! I said when she went over to whatever worship she’s favoring this year nothing would come of it but trouble, and so it has.”

  “It was still no reason to forbid Mother to see her.”

  “You leave your mother to me, boy, and don’t take that tone. I’m still the owner of this house and, I might remind you, I pay you an allowance you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself without. If all your philosophy has taught you is disrespect for your elders, I can’t say I have much regard for it.”

  Marcus took a deep breath and, as Augustus Caesar had once advised, began to tell over the letters of the alphabet to himself. At L he said quietly, “Yes, sir.”

  “How did you come to be mixed up in it?”

  “Purely by chance, sir. I was talking to Tullia in me street when she was on her way home the evening before last. When her litter was ambushed I tried to keep the men from carrying her away, that’s all.”

  “Hmph. If that was all, for what reason did you go with some soldier down to the prison? I’ll thank you to remember that you were born a gentleman’s son, even if you don’t choose to act like one. Your actions reflect upon the house as well as yourself. I can’t have it bandied about Rome that you’ve taken to hanging about the barracks like some catamite whore. Wasting your time and my money among your worthless philosophers is bad enough.”

  “They’re not worthless,” began Marcus, and his father cut him off with an impatient gesture.

  “Not to themselves, surely, if they can persuade young ninnies like you to pay to speak with them. But beyond that they produce nothing. They can philosophize from one year’s end to the next, and have not enough of anything at the end of that time to fill a thimble. But it’s an occupation I’ve seen pursued by other sons of gentlemen, though they have the decency to remain under their fathers’ roofs while they do it, and not live like paupers in the lowest slums of the town. But to hang around the barracks—”

  “But they need me to help identify the Christians who kidnapped Tullia!”

  “Fine things your philosophers have done for your manners, boy, if they teach you to interrupt a man who has just fed you, before the covers are even off the table! Those repulsive lapdogs your mother used to keep had better manners.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Marcus quietly. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  The old man nodded grimly. “The Praetorian Guard is paid to keep order in the city. It’s their business to do the dirty work that the watch can’t handle; it’s their business to round up criminals and perverts. There’s no need for you to dirty your hands with it.”

  “But they need me to find the men who did it,” argued Marcus, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “They’re all the same, aren’t they? Christians, Jews—it’s the same thing. And if they round up the lot of them and throw them to the lions, Rome will be the better for it.”

  “But we may not find Tullia.”

  “Stop prating about that stupid chit! They’ll find her.” And his eyes narrowed unpleasantly as he saw the unguarded look that flared into his son’s face. “So,” he said, his voice honeyed with scorn. “It’s more than your civic duty after all, is it, that leads you slumming on a Jew-hunt? That’s quite a bit of work, isn’t it, to find her only to restore her safe to some Phrygian’s bed—if he’ll have her, after.”

  Marcus was aware of a hand gripping his arm and knew that he’d made an involuntary move to rise. Glancing sideways he met a wide, frightened, warning look in Felix’s eyes. He had almost forgotten the presen
ce of his two brothers. His world, it seemed, had compressed to the small cubicle of fading daylight, his father lying lean and withered on the crimson cushions with the dark wine sparkling in the cup in his hands.

  “You little ass,” said Silanus softly. “You really think even if you do rescue the little bitch her stiff-necked demagogue of a father is going to turn her over to you? Or that I’d let any get of that pandering politician Varus into this family, even if she hadn’t been rutted by half the criminals in town? What’ll you call your son—Christos?”

  With a violence of which he had not thought himself capable Marcus wrenched his arm free of Felix’s grasp. In a single quick move he rolled from the couch and blundered out of the room. Somehow he found his way to the darkened atrium, snatched the folded toga off the one-legged table by the wall. The lamps had not yet been lit; in the semi-darkness he heard his father’s harsh voice echoing in the dining room, demanding that he return. The toga unraveled itself in weighty folds all around him. He fought and cursed at the unwieldy thing, sobbing with rage and frustration, and ended by flinging it off, determined to carry it through the dark streets in a bundle under his arm.

  A voice from the hall door said, “Let me.” Caius, with lumbering firmness, removed it from his grasp. “I may not possess Felix’s elegancies of education, but I hope I may know how a Roman gentleman drapes his garments. And be sure to change your shoes. I won’t have my brother padding about the streets of Rome in his house slippers...”

  “Gods curse it, am I never to do anything without the approval of the entire house and all my filthy ancestors?”

  His older brother paused in his work and laid a ponderous hand upon his shoulder. “I confess I consider our father’s remarks uncalled-for,” he said gravely, “but he remains our father. I am sorry to see you return his scorn with disrespect.”

  “What would you have me do?” demanded Marcus furiously. “Bow and kiss his feet like you do? Turn myself into a faded dishrag like Mother? Let him drink me like a vampire until I have no will of my own?”

  Caius turned him around to face him and looked gravely into his eyes. “Lower your voice when you speak so of him in his own house.”

  Marcus was silent, his breath coming in thick fast sobs, the rage in him already burning down into slow smoldering coals of shame. Timoleon would never so forget himself, he reflected bitterly. In Epictetus’ Enchiridion he exhorts us to understand that an event will be what it will be—I knew this would happen. It always happens, with Father. But these reflections did nothing to ease the slow familiar cold and sickness growing within him, the wretchedness of defeat by the little tyrant in the supper room.

  In silence, Caius draped his toga, found his street shoes, and handed them to him. As he put them on Caius asked him, “Tell me. Would you say that Felix is his own man?”

  “Felix,” said Marcus shakily, “I would scarcely count as a man at all.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed his brother. “But nevertheless he is enough his own person to wear a gown like that to dinner, and slide from under our father’s wrath simply by not replying. Aemilia will not marry until she is fifteen, despite all my assurances to Father that negotiations are proceeding, and she will certainly not marry a man with Garovinus’ shocking reputation for dissolute living. But I will never tell Father so.”

  Marcus wrapped up his house slippers without replying.

  “Marcus, listen,” urged his brother. “It does you no injury to say, ‘Yes, sir.’ And after, you may truly do as you please, for you are of age, and he surely would not parade the affairs of our house through the law courts trying to establish his legal rights over you. The most he can do is disown you and cut you from his will, which he has not done yet. But any politician may tell you that lies are the price of peace.”

  “But my vocation is truth! I’m a philosopher!”

  Caius regarded him soberly for a moment. “What is truth?” he asked. “There is truth and truth. Whom does it harm?”

  “I don’t know.” Marcus turned away, feeling suddenly exhausted and sick. “Maybe Truth itself. Maybe I’m only using it as a weapon with which to strike at him, because I can’t fight him on his own ground. But I—I respect him too much to simply tell him one thing and do another. He’s going to have to face truth—real truth—about something someday, and I’d rather he faced it about me now. And I have my own truth to find.”

  His older brother’s face seemed to grow longer in the shadows, as their father’s occasionally did when he saw his children joking and laughing, or speaking their own secret languages among themselves. “I cannot say that I understand this stubborn quest whose only end is words,” he sighed. “But I wish you luck upon it nevertheless. And on your other endeavors as well.”

  Marcus turned away bitterly. Like a ghost from the shadows the Macedonian doorman had materialized to let him out—he realized the man, whose sleeping cubicle let into the vestibule, must have heard every word of the conversation. No wonder people said slaves knew everything.

  A heavy hand stayed him. “Search for her, younger brother,” said Caius kindly. “After she is found, we shall see what can be done.”

  From the supper room a harsh querulous voice rose again, telling Felix not to be a worse fool than he was and shouting for Caius and Marcus to return at once. Caius clasped his brother’s hands and nodded to the doorman to let him out. As he passed under the smoky lamp in the vestibule, Marcus saw that while he’d been at supper, Straton had had his toga cleaned.

  VII

  Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God.

  Saint Ignatius of Antioch

  IT WAS A LONG AND BITTER walk down the Esquiline Hill. Like an ugly specter, Truth stalked beside him.

  His father had spoken the truth. What made him think that just because he rescued Tullia Varia from the Christians—if he rescued her—he’d be any closer to having her than he had been before? Whether or not that mysterious Syrian would have her—and he might perfectly well—why did he think that he himself had any chance at all? To return to his father’s household and tutelage might give him sufficient prospects of wealth, but the doubled hatred of her father’s politics and her mother’s religion were enough to make his own father forbid the match. And what made him think that if and when she was found, she wouldn’t accuse him of wanting to take her out of pity, even if his father would stand for it? In all their bitter quarrels through his boyhood and youth, he knew that tonight was the closest he had ever come to striking the old man.

  For speaking the truth.

  What kind of philosopher am I? he wondered desperately. To so lose myself in a mere human relationship, especially with an impudent little vixen like Tullia? Why beat my heart to death against the wall of my mind that knows that I’m seeking to rescue her to have her become some other man’s bride? And knowing this, why does the very thought of her turn my brains to mush and make my palms go damp? How can I call myself a philosopher if I react with fury when someone says something that I know to be true? Or even if they say something that I know is not true? Timoleon never would.

  I’m no more a philosopher than Felix is, with his racecourse gossip and his pointless bets. But Felix has enough of a grasp of his own truth to realize it, while I’m still clinging to what some other man has called true. Maybe that’s what gives Felix his kind of silly integrity. He may not be much of a man, but he isn’t all things to all men. He certainly doesn’t live a lie.

  A variety of shallow considerations drifted through his mind, from suicide to membership in a frontier legion. But he knew already that he would do no such thing. Almost without his conscious volition, his restive footsteps carried him down the dark streets, through the ruins and overgrown patches of parkland that had once been Nero’s house, toward the white bulk of the Flavian, glimmering like the moon itself on the dark brow of the hill.

  The show had been over for some hours, but the amphitheater itself teemed like an anthill. Though most of
the shops in its arcades had closed down, the pillared shadows were alive with sweepers, cleaning up trash and date pits, broken clay tickets and lost articles of clothing. All around the corners of the little streets and squares in the dark looming shadows of the hills, wineshops poured their dirty yellow light out into the cerulean softness of the evening. As he walked along the arcades, Marcus was accosted half-a-dozen times by whores of various sexes, and twice by touts hawking the odds on tomorrow’s races, which would be held over at the circus. The wineshop across the square was lit like a stage in the darkness. He could see gladiators lounging at its marble-topped brick counter, big scarred men with buffed muscles that caught the sliding lamplight. He recognized one of them, the gangly trident-man he’d seen earlier in the day massacring his Samnite opponent, and wondered if after surviving a bout like that the wine tasted any sweeter. There were a couple of bandy-legged little charioteers at the counter as well. The corners of the wineshop were wreathed in heavy festoons of fruits and grape leaves and flowers, all twined in blue silk ribbons, a clear announcement that the drivers and grooms and stableboys of the Green, Red, and White charioteering factions had better steer clear.

  From a huge dark archway to his right a man emerged, stinking of urine and sweat, like a dyer’s shop, and scarred all over his body like a dog-chewed piece of leather. Marcus caught him by the arm and asked if there was a centurion down below talking to a condemned man, and the beast-catcher, after subjecting him to a long scornful scrutiny, allowed, in language so foul as to be almost unintelligible, that there was.

  Marcus went on up the dark stairs.

  Though he had haunted the place as an adolescent, he had very little idea of how to get from the public portions of the Flavian to its underground mazes where beasts, prisoners, and props were kept. In the vaulted immensity of the passage, his footfalls echoed weirdly, and up ahead, through the arched and gilded opening, he saw the stars, white and cold and shining in the blue of the night sky.