It did not seem to be the same place as it had been that afternoon. The silence, the emptiness, changed it, the starlight on its thousands of concentric marble circles making each faint crack and shadow eerily clear. Below him the white sand lay in a round, oceanless beach, still smelling faintly of the raw feral stink of animals and blood. Round it the marble wall gleamed in a flawless ring of white, its gold rail gleaming softly under the uncertain light. From here the noises of the city seemed distant, attenuated, the rattling of the wheels of produce wagons on the cobbled streets softened to a rumble like the sea worrying the rocks on the shore. Beneath the ground a lion roared, a fauve and African sound in the milky Italian night. Somewhere iron creaked, and a man’s voice rose in rich Greek and undying musical love.
A shadow appeared, small and black and wavering, upon the sand.
“Oh precious boy, your cheeks are like the roses,/Those eyes the pools in which my love doth drown...”
Marcus walked down to the gilded rail. “Hullo!”
The man paused with his sand rake and shaded his eyes against the uncertain starlit distance. “Hark ho!” he called theatrically, “Walks Endymion by starlight?” The accent was a combination of Ionian Greek and Vatican wine.
“Does that door you came through lead down to the prisons?”
“Sweet nightingale in darkness, it does.”
Marcus judged the drop for a moment, then slithered under the railing, lowered himself over the marble edge to the full length of his arms, prayed briefly for the best, and dropped. It was farther than it had looked in starlight, but the sand was soft. Like a man crossing a desert he trudged toward the black maw of the beast door and its tall loose-jointed keeper, who had begun to moondance with his rake.
As he had feared, the man ceased his dancing at his approach and pirouetted up to him. He stank of wine, but, Marcus supposed, if your job was to go rake up snippets of human bodies out of the sand at the end of a long day, perhaps it paid to be drunk to do it.
“Ah! And why sojourns sweet Endymion, lover of the faithless lady of the moon, to these insalubrious shores?” In the starlight the man’s face was brown, claw-scarred, and foolishly smiling; he leaned on his rake directly in Marcus’ path. “The fruits of the seas these shoreless sands do yield...” He held up something from the bucket that hung at his waist, two human fingers stuck together by a rag of skin. “Here’s shrimp that’ll never crawl into a gold-lined purse again.”
“Very nice,” said Marcus queasily, and tried to edge his way past.
“You don’t tike shrimp?” The man interposed himself before the door, leering good-naturedly. “They aren’t to the taste of all, I fear. What toll shall you give me then, fair boy, to let you pass?”
“I’m afraid there’s been some mistake,” Marcus said politely. “My name is Orpheus, not Endymion. I’m looking for the road to hell, and I fear”—he took the rake from the janitor’s hand, stood it upright like a sundial, and consulted the resulting shadow on the sand—“I fear I’m desperately late.”
“Yonder lies hell all right,” said the drunkard, his smile momentarily fading. “You’ve but a short little trek, Orpheus, and no goddess at its end, either.” He leaned closer, surrounding Marcus in an affectionate arm and a vast reeking gust of stale wine. “But there! Now what’s our toll?”
“You have your toll,” said Marcus quietly, stepping back and holding up his hand to make a sign in the air as he had seen the priests of Isis do in processions. “I have set my music in your mind and heart, and my dancing in your feet. What more can sorrowful man ask of the children of gods?”
The drunkard bent his long supple body in an exaggerated bow. “Nothing, my lord.”
Copiously leaking sand from every fold of his toga, Orpheus passed him by and plodded on into the maw of hell.
The passage stank of animals, the musky stench of big cats mingling with the sharper odor of jackals. He could hear their roaring somewhere quite close and remembered Felix’s prattling voice from earlier in the evening, describing how the lions of the amphitheater were often trained to hunt men. The passage was pitch dark, and he wondered for a horrified instant if his drunken psychopomp had deliberately directed him into the cages themselves. But no—it was from this door that he’d seen the man emerge.
Other sounds reached his ears, shrill and confused. As he felt his way along the wall he remembered that on the last day of the games there was supposed to be a colossal beast-hunt, a mass slaughter of the most exotic creatures obtainable. Their voices dinned upon him from the darkness, a cacophony of screeches, growls, bays; the liquid slurp of water and the sudden booming belling of crocodiles, the wild frightened braying of wild asses. As he groped his way through the windings of those stinking tunnels, green or amber eyes flashed out of the darkness at him, the floor fouled and mucky under his feet. He blundered through the room where the Flavian band kept its instruments. Hunched like beasts themselves in the darkness were the gleaming rims of tubas, octopuslike groping shapes that turned out to be bagpipes, grinning monster teeth that were in actuality the pipes of the famous water organ. He turned a corner in the darkness and stumbled against the bars of a cage; there was a chorus of growls and swift sudden movement in the murk. A hand seized his arm, and he almost died of fright.
“‘Ere, wot yer doin’, scarin’ my babies?” snarled a voice from behind him. By the greasy ocher gleam of the single corridor lamp, Marcus could see a horrible old hunchback, his head bald and laced with scars, one eye socket gaping red and empty, with a reek to him that would have done credit to any lion in the place.
“I—er—I’m looking for the holding area for the condemned prisoners. The—the centurion’s a friend of mine.”
The hunchback sniffed and pointed down a corridor. “That way. Still no call to go a-puttin’ my lambs in a fret.” Growling, he shambled to the bars of the lion cage; as Marcus hastened down the new gullet of blackness, he could see the little man reaching through the bars to scratch the lions’ proffered ears. Presumably, he thought, they weren’t going to put their good man-killing lions into the beast-hunt. A cheaper grade of lion, perhaps, or those who were sick or injured.
The big holding cell had, up until today, contained several dozen people, “dishonest persons,” as the law called them, condemned for infamous or disgraceful crimes. Though slaves had raked out the filthy straw, the place stank of ordure, the smell overlain now by the sharper reek of sickness, vomit, and putrefying flesh. Only a tiny seed of light hovered above a hand-lamp, the gleam of it picking out the brazen edge of an armored body from darkness, the angle of a broken nose, the smooth line of a muscle rucked and broken where it was crossed by a scar. In the blackness beyond he sensed restless movement and the whimpering of a man in agony.
Arrius glanced up at the grating creak of the door. “So you decided to sit with the sick after all.”
Marcus nodded wearily. “Have you learned anything?” He gathered his toga about him and seated himself on the damp clay floor at the centurion’s side.
“Not much,” said Arrius. “He was wounded when he was taken; gangrene’s got to it, and fever. I doubt the lions would have touched him.” He rubbed at his eyes wearily. The stink of the wound turned Marcus queasy and sick. He was glad the centurion had not asked where he had been that evening, or why he had returned here.
Arrius went on, “He’s been pleading on and off with his father to forgive him for leaving the faith. He’s a Syrian Jew: I guess there’s enough of a difference between Jews and Christians for him to think he’s betrayed his father by going over.”
“Anything that causes you to leave your faith is evil to the Jews,” said Marcus. “Your faith is your family, it’s your nation; you’re a traitor to everything if you leave.”
Arrius raised his brows curiously. “Really?”
“Of course.” He kept his voice low, though he was certain that the dying man was too far-gone to hear. “One of the other students with me at Timoleon’s w
as the son of a strict Jewish family, and they raised a terrible dust when he turned philosopher. I remember his father used to come down to the Ulpias and have bitter quarrels with Judah, calling him traitor, Greek, apostate, accusing him of helping the men who razed the Temple of Jerusalem... It was terrible.” He looked out unseeing into the cramped stinking darkness of the cell. “At least my father never did that. I remember afterward Judah would sometimes be sick for days. It’s—it’s more to them than it is to us. Maybe that’s why he and I were friends.”
He leaned around the centurion and looked down at that wasted brown Semitic face. The young man was white under his tan, his skin dry and his eyes sunk in black pits. On his heaving chest gleamed the silver emblem of the fish, its chain shining like a ring of sweat around the tight-corded muscles of the straining neck.
Amid a salting of black stubble his white lips moved, mumbling cracked words in Aramaic, “Abba—abba—” and a string of broken phrases.
“What’s he saying?” whispered Marcus, when he had again fallen silent.
“Calling on his father. Says he was called—he had to follow. Something about the son of David, whoever David is.”
“David was their great king,” whispered Marcus in reply. “Judah—my friend—used to tell me there was a prophecy that David’s son or descendant would reunite the Jewish nation, and they’d go on to conquer the world.”
Distantly a lion roared, and at the sound the dying man whimpered pitifully, fumbling with dry hands at the bandages over his stinking wound. He began to whisper again, desperate.
“He says he was cheated,” translated Arrius after a moment. “Cheated of the glory of God. He says the gates of heaven will be closed to him. His death was not in the Lord’s name.”
“Didn’t the Christians this morning say something about that?” whispered Marcus, and the centurion nodded.
The dying man clawed suddenly at Arrius’ hand, his eyes opening wide. “Papa,” he gasped. “Papa...” His voice trailed off again in broken Aramaic. He began to sob weakly, clutching at his bandages, rolling back and forth on the heap of urine-saturated straw where he lay. Disturbed by his convulsions, a huge roach scurried indignantly across the grimy floor. Arrius carelessly crushed it with one hobnailed boot. Then, with no more ceremony, he pulled his dagger from his belt, reached across to take the Christian by the hair, and slit his throat.
Marcus turned his face hastily away, unwisely closing his teeth on the rising vomit and getting it, burning, in his nose instead. Darkness and the harsh coppery reek of fresh burning blood closed around him.
Arrius slapped him roughly on the shoulder. “Come on, boy, let’s go.”
He helped him get to his feet, and led him through black stinking corridors and out of the abyss.
They did not speak until they were in the wineshop across the street.
“Interesting.” Arrius poured wine from the jug a black-eyed Dacian slattern set on the table before them. “You hungry?”
“Quite the contrary,” murmured Marcus weakly. “What was interesting? Besides the accommodations, I mean.”
“‘Papa’ was the only Latin word he used.”
Marcus frowned. “But he was asking his father’s forgiveness for leaving the Jewish faith.”
“But he was speaking in Aramaic,” the centurion pointed out. “He called his father ‘Abba’; probably as he had done in childhood. The only word in Latin was ‘Papa.’ Who’s Papa?”
“Dorcas’ Papa?”
“That was my thought.”
Marcus set down his cup. To his great surprise the wine stayed down, and moreover made him feel better. It took the taste of straw, and human filth, out of his mouth and, with them, the taste of his father’s bread. “Then he might not really be Dorcas’ father at all.”
“He probably isn’t,” agreed Arrius, removing his helmet and laying it on the bench at his side. “The Christians aren’t the only ones to use a family terminology. The priests of Mithras are called ‘father.’” He leaned his chin on his hand and stared thoughtfully out across the dark square, where lights were still visible in the gladiators’ compound opposite the moonlit bulk of the amphitheater itself.
Others were filtering into the tavern now, as their duties freed them: janitors, cage-keepers, doctors. In the smutty orange glare, Marcus made out the shape of the drunken sand-raker, leaning on me shoulders of a doll-faced boy of ten or so. At the next table a couple of bovine gladiators were discussing technique, using their three-inch cloak pins for swords; across the room a trio of prostitutes, gaily tricked out in togas of blue and scarlet, were leaning on the marble-fronted bar, shrieking with laughter over the labored witticisms of a well-dressed young blood with gold dust powdering his hair and cosmetics that looked as though they’d been laid on with a plasterer’s trowel. The voices grated on Marcus’ nerves, brazen in the tawdry light; the place smelled like the changing room of a third-rate bath. He leaned his head on his hands, feeling suddenly drained and sick. His father, Felix pirouetting in his new robe, Dorcas in her brown head-veil, and the sand-raker moon-dancing with bloody hands—all blurred together in his exhausted mind. Soaking in the baths with Arrius seemed years in the past; wandering the streets in the predawn gloom to do his marketing, his cane basket slapping at his side, might have been an event that had taken place in distant childhood.
Arrius’ voice cut through his weariness like a blunt sword through flesh. “So tell me about your friend Nicanor.”
Marcus looked up with a start. “Hunh?”
“Prefect Varus’ physician. The one our girl friend put the kiss on this morning.”
He felt as though the wine had turned to poison in his belly. “But he’s not a Christian.”
Arrius drained his winecup. “You sure about that, boy?”
Marcus was silent.
“I’m going to spend tomorrow,” he went on slowly, “with the city hangman and that pack of lunatics. I’m not looking forward to it. Of the two that woman said were connected with Nikolas and company, Telesphorus may be too tough to break and his pal Ignatius too crazy. And I don’t know how much anybody else will know.
“Now that bitch could have been lying. But I’m not willing to risk Tertullia Varia’s life on that. If I draw a blank tomorrow, I may have to start calling in my other debts. When did Nicanor enter Varus’ household?”
Marcus said unwillingly, “About two and a half years ago.”
“Who’d they buy him from?”
“Porcius Craessius, I think. A private sale. I don’t know why.”
“Can you find out for me, without rousing anyone’s suspicions?”
A police informer, thought Marcus, feeling suddenly stained within. He nodded miserably, unable to meet the centurion’s eyes.
After a moment Arrius said, “Why’d you become a philosopher, boy?”
He stared unhappily down at the dark surface of his wine. “To seek the truth,” he quoted. “To find the good, and the beautiful.”
“Of those three,” continued the soldier, “what’s the most important?”
Marcus looked up. “They’re all the same thing. They’re what is—that is, True, and Good, and Beautiful.”
“What if you found out the truth was ugly?”
From across the square somebody yelled, “Baby-eaters! Corpse-fuckers!” There was a clamor of catcalls, the deep baying of the mob. Against the darkness of the New Way, torches swarmed, their light wavering over the dark teeming bodies, the hard brazen flicker of mail. A voice cried, “Have that one, you poxy whore!” and a woman’s voice began shrieking curses. A double file of soldiers entered the square, their burnished helmets gleaming in the ruddy light, and like a dog pack around a garbage cart the mob boiled on all sides, jeering and laughing, bending down to pick up rocks and dung from the road. Between the soldiers Marcus could clearly pick out the Christians: Telesphorus with his high bald head flashing with an oily sheen of sweat, Arete stumbling, sobbing, her dark heavy hair like a clo
ak over bowed shoulders, Ignatius shaking his fists and screaming back at the mob. The other Christians followed in sullen, frightened silence. He saw a rotten fruit explode against Telesphorus’ back, heard the shrill chorus of profanity that accompanied it, both of which the priest received in stony silence. He found himself thinking that this man—kidnapper, pervert, and cannibal that he might be—was above his revilers.
He turned to his companion and saw the centurion’s mouth drawn together in a single hard line of distaste. “Do you think Papa will save them?” he asked him softly.
“It isn’t my affair to speculate,” replied Arrius in a dry voice. “My affair is to find out who he is.”
“Who?” A staff was leaned against the wall beside Marcus, a second jug of wine set in the midst of the table. Looking up in surprise Marcus found himself confronting bright fierce blue eyes under white brows like a hawk’s.
“Sixtus!” he said in surprise. “What are you doing—I mean, I thought you never...”
“The locks and bolts on my gates deceived you into thinking that I never emerged into the light of day,” replied the old aristocrat easily. “Hello, Arrius. Did you learn anything from your miserable Christian?”
“How’d you know about him, you old devil?” grinned the centurion, reaching up to clasp the blunt scarred hand in greeting.
“Don’t tell me there’s another reason you’d pay calls in that lion-reeking den.” The scholar took his place on the bench beside him and regarded him with mild challenge in his lifted brows. “So you did join the Praetorian after all.”
“I did, and how you knew me after all these years is more than I’ll ever figure out. And it’s just conceivable,” he added haughtily, “that you’re wrong about there being a Christian at the Flavian whom I went to see. I could be having an affair with the head cage-keeper.”
Sixtus studied him gravely for a moment, as if giving the matter careful thought. “Unless his taste has sadly declined, I hardly think he’d find you any rival for a handsome young lion. And as for how I knew you, you look a good deal like your father, you know. And a boy of your enterprising nature would be bound to end up in the Praetorian Guard.”
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