Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  Marcus wondered if they were making for the river. The Arabs went on, after a momentary pause for consultation, but they halted several times more, the echoes of their footsteps erratic against the black walls that closed them in. They turned twice more and crossed a tiny square, where the moonlight flashed on a public fountain under the guardianship of a particularly gross bronze Priapus. Marcus almost lost them at the square, hanging back in the shadows of one street until they had crossed that small space of paving stones and moonlit mud, then hurrying as silently as he knew how to catch them up on the other side. Only by the reflection of the lantern light from the walls of the dark tenements was he able to follow them. He began to wonder how he’d manage if they did cross one of the Tiber bridges.

  They reached a larger square, at the foot of the Publician Rise. The noise of the markets was clearer here, the bellow of beasts in terror at the smell of the shambles, the yelling of stevedores at the docks. Every window around the dark open space was black; there was no sign of life but the two shapes of the men and the gold puddle of light bobbing around their feet. Somewhere in the tangle of streets to his right, Marcus could hear a gang of rowdies beating on a door, yelling drunken words of love to the woman within. He huddled in the darkness, watching the light retreat across the square and into the black canyon of another street. As soon as it was out of sight he scurried forward, trying to muffle his own footfalls as he headed for the entrance to the Publician Rise...

  The men were waiting for him just around the first corner. They’d doused the lantern; the first he knew of it was the brutal force with which a great weight slammed into his back, the rasp of breath in his ear, and the bone and muscle and leather that crushed his throat. His ears filled with a dim roaring, and his nostrils with the stink of sweat and mud; his knees gave way and he fell into a hole of ringing blackness.

  “By the grace of Christ he’s alive,” someone whispered. The stench of mud and decayed fish and pig’s offal wrapped him up like a winding-sheet. He wondered if he’d ever be able to swallow again.

  He was turned on his back. Cold hands searched his face, his throat. From the inky darkness above him a woman’s voice whispered, “Thank God—but Christ could only be a recipient, or at most the vehicle, of grace. Your priest must have told you—”

  “Our priest has told us that that’s an error common to those who think they understand the true meaning of Christ’s words,” hissed the first voice back. “But in point of fact, the God of the Books of the Jews is clearly a god of cruelty, imperfection, and repulsiveness—the god of this world, in fact.” The cold hands, surprisingly strong, dragged him over something that oozed and stank horribly, and propped him up against a wall. “The grace of Christ supplanted that old god with a new law, and the unknown god, as Paul proved in his first letter to the—”

  “Paul!” retorted another voice out of the gloom. “That self-seeking little Pharisee’s limitations of thought were the only things that his letters ever proved. John understood more about the emanations of the Divine Soul, and Plato...”

  Wonderful, thought Marcus. I have been rescued by the Christians.

  “Who were they?” hissed the woman.

  “Well, the Divine Father himself is known as Bythos and Chaos, and at his side sits Sige, or Charis, the incomprehensible silence and grace of—”

  “Not the emanations, you pox-ridden Gnostic, the men who slugged this poor fellow!”

  “I heard them speak in Arabic,” said someone else. “But they could have been hired killers or just thugs out to rob him—not that he looks like he has anything to rob, poor little scruff. What do we do with him?”

  Another group of Christians? wondered Marcus. Sixtus had said there were factions. Actually members of two other groups, by the sound of it...

  “We can’t leave him here,” whispered Cold Hands.

  “We can’t take him anywhere, we haven’t the time,” replied the voice that had championed Plato over Paul. “It’s nearly the end of the watch, and Papa said it would be at the start of the third watch of the night. We have barely time to get there now.”

  “Right,” whispered the woman’s voice. “Anthony, Sulpicius, you stay with him...”

  “I refuse to stay here and listen to that heretic prate about the letters of Paul!”

  “Look, offal-brain...”

  “All right, Josephus stay with Anthony! By the Three, I should have let you people find your own way there...”

  “How can you heretics swear by the Three, when God is One...”

  “Three or One, Papa’s going to have all our hides if we’re not on the spot with the blankets when the doors are opened!” Quibbling, the voices retreated into the darkness, among the squishing of many feet in the muddy lane. Marcus’ dazed mind groped for some kind of meaning behind their speech, but found none. Did “stay with him” mean guard him until they could return to dispose of him properly? But in that case why not simply let their brethren murder him in peace? Had they had some kind of conflicting order from Papa? Were they going to take him prisoner, perhaps to where Tullia was?

  But even that theory was dashed when the woman’s voice called back from some distance off, “You’ll see that he gets home?” Someone must have nodded—though how anyone could see in the absolute blackness of the alley was beyond knowing—for the footsteps faded moistly into the gloom.

  He struggled to rise, and a firm hand pushed him back against the wall. “Are you all right?” asked the voice that had referred to him as a “poor little scruff.” “You were set upon by robbers.”

  “Was I?” he mumbled. Against the lighter gloom at the mouth of the alley, he could see a group of dark flitting shapes, but here the shadows hid everything but the silvery glitter of eyes. “Who are you?” he asked, hoping they wouldn’t think he knew too much.

  “We saw you being attacked,” replied the Christian’s deep voice—not, Marcus noticed, answering his question. “The men who struck you down ran away. We’ll see you get home, as soon as you’re fit to walk. Whereabouts do you live?”

  “In the Subura,” he answered groggily, “near the Neptune shrine,” and then realized how stupid it was to give away his lodgings to the Christians. If they ever learned who it was they had rescued, they could simply show up some night and murder him at their leisure. “But I’m fine now, I can get there alone...”

  “Easy, boy,” said a second voice, with a strong accent of an Alexandrian Jew. “There’s no need to be running, you’ve had a bad shock.”

  “I’m all right, I really am,” he protested, struggling ineffectively to free his arm from the man’s prodigious grip. He struggled to keep the panic from his voice. “I have to be going.” To his surprise they helped him to his feet, as if they feared he’d collapse again. “I’m all right,” he repeated groggily. “I wasn’t hit on the head...”

  “You’ve the earth’s own lump,” pointed out the Jewish Christian doubtfully.

  “No, that’s all right, that happened days ago. Really, I’m fine.” He made a move to flee, missed his footing on the slippery cobbles, and all but fell into the Christian’s arms.

  “You make a habit of bein’ assaulted?” He could see the wag of the Jew’s gingery beard, silhouetted against the moonlight of the square. “Eh, well, none of my affair. Let’s go, son.”

  Marcus felt too exhausted to make further protest. Whatever nefarious plots the Christians had in mind for him, he was too tired to flee. He stumbled along between them through the darkness of the alleyways, until they reached the relatively straight stretches of Tuscan Street. The lane was narrow, and the moon westering, and beyond the fact that the Jewish Christian with the gingery beard was the taller of the two, and that both were wearing the worn dark tunics of poor laborers or slaves (much like his own), he could see very little of them. He wondered if he could ask them about the feasts of the Christians, about the times of sacrifice, but knew it would be foolish to reveal to them that he even knew what they were.


  The noises of the markets faded behind them. The dark looming mass of the Palatine on their right overshadowed the narrow street. Looking up, Marcus could see the last light of the sinking moon as it touched the gilded roofs, making slivers of electrum among the velvet darkness of the trees.

  Discordant singing caught his attention; he turned, startled, as a gang of rowdies emerged from me darkness of an alley-mouth opposite them, lantern light illuminating grinning distorted faces, slippery with scented oils and rouge. There were half a dozen of them, their elaborately brocaded dinner suits smeared with food and wine, leaning drunkenly on one another or on their staggering girl friends. They seemed to have picked up some unfortunate citizen in their inebriated wanderings; a little man in a plain toga was among them, wreaths askew on his balding head, anxiously casting glances left and right as if seeking escape.

  One glittering youth yelled out across the road, “Hey! Wh’re y’all going? Party—party at Shenat’r Shevr’s housh—Y’know where we’re all going?”

  “To perdition, I should imagine,” retorted the deeper-voiced Christian—a rash remark, thought Marcus, in momentary terror. But the bejeweled drunks went into gales of laughter, slapping their thighs and punching one another (and their distressed little captive) in the ribs, and went reeling on their way, falling in the mud and bouncing against walls as they went. The respectable citizen’s voice drifted after them, helplessly expostulating that he didn’t really wish to attend a party at all...

  “And there’s some as seeks to be rich,” sighed the Jewish Christian, shaking his head.

  They emerged into the Forum, magical in its empty silence. The pillars of its porches gleamed all around them like a monochrome forest of marble; the statues of gods and Caesars, their colors deadened and flattened by the silvery light, stood like guards on their plinths, staring ahead with somber, shadowed, agate eyes. The shorter, deeper-voiced Christian whispered to the Jew, “What time do you make it to be?” and the gingery beard moved in the moonlight as the man shook his head.

  Then Marcus heard it. A faint sound, over the distant clamor of the market carts, noises that were almost drowned. Then the sound rose suddenly. A riot of voices, cries, curses, borne on the drift of the night winds, a shouting confusion and the sudden wild clattering of hooves from the direction of the Flavian Amphitheater. Not the sound of one chariot team, or even a dozen. A roaring surge of hoofbeats, echoing from the warren of close-seamed walls that surrounded the gladiator schools, the stable complexes, the wineshops and holding jails attached to that great arena. Marcus gasped involuntarily, and almost choked on the pain in his windpipe, “What’s that?”

  The Jew whispered, half to himself and half to the other Christian, “He’s done it!” and in the zebra shadows of the porch where they stood his eyes were shining.

  Marcus blinked for a moment, not comprehending. Then like the bits of a puzzle falling together he understood what the little bands of Christians had been doing, abroad in Rome at night—and what it was that Papa had done.

  “He’s very neat, I’ll say that for him.”

  Arrius dumped a dipperful of watered wine into a cup and brought it over to Marcus’ bed. Sixtus, perched on the windowsill, broke a chunk from the halfpenny loaf he’d brought with him that morning and threw it across to Marcus, who caught it wearily and began to sop it in the wine.

  Though the Christians had seen him to his door with every evidence of concern for his health, Marcus had not slept much the night before. His neck felt even worse than it looked—the bruise across his windpipe had begun to blacken already. He was almost wholly unable to swallow. Past Sixtus’ shoulder the big window was blinding with morning sun, and the cries of children at play floated up from the courtyard below.

  “It was timed to the minute,” went on the centurion, seating himself on the foot of Marcus’ narrow cot. “The patrols were at their farthest from the holding jail when the stables were broken open, so naturally the guards from the jail itself ran to help round up the horses. Half the guards and grooms at the stables themselves had been drugged, it turned out later; they were found sleeping like dead men in the straw. Mithras alone knows what caused the whole herd of horses to stampede past the jail...”

  “They were driven with blankets,” whispered Marcus painfully.

  “What?”

  “Groups of Christians stood in the alleyways near the stables and flapped blankets at them, to run them past. I met a band of them—the Christians, that is. Two bands, really.” And he gave a brief account of his adventures of the previous night, concluding with, “And they said Papa wanted them there on time, and by the gods they were. I have to say I was impressed.”

  “So was I,” added Churaldin, who sat blinking in the sunlight like a satisfied tomcat at his master’s feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such confusion in my life.”

  “Were you there?” asked Marcus in a kind of breathless croak.

  “I was coming back from paying a visit on the Caelian Hill in time to catch the tail end of the show,” smiled the slave. “I admit it beats any put-up beast-hunt in the amphitheater I ever saw.”

  Arrius growled deep in his throat, like an annoyed lion. There were blue smudges under his eyes, from a night badly spent. “What it does,” he said after a moment, “is knock your theory over the head, Sixtus, about the Christians being too disorganized to take concerted revenge for the massacre of their comrades by Varus. Whatever their stupid quarrels are about, there’s somebody who can make them act as a unit.”

  “True,” sighed the old man. “In which case we may be up against more than we know.” He leaned his elbows on his knees and gazed abstractedly into space for a moment. He looked nothing the worse for last night’s orgy; in fact, Marcus would have bet everything he owned that the old man was the only member of the supper-party on his feet this morning.

  “Sixtus,” said Marcus hesitantly. “If—if they did kidnap Tullia to sacrifice, would it be at a set time? On a holy day, like the ides of April or the seventh of June? Because Tiridates spoke of a sacrifice...”

  “I still refuse to believe that as cheap as children come in this city, the Christians would have gone to the trouble of kidnapping a sacrifice that could cost them all their lives.”

  “We don’t necessarily know that Tertullia Varia is going to be the victim,” said Arrius slowly. “Is there a Christian feast coming up, Sixtus?”

  The old man shook his head. “None that I know of. In fact, as far as I know the Christians can’t even agree on the date they celebrate the rebirth of their savior—they drew blood over it, at Antioch. I know that some of them celebrate his birth in December, like the Mithraists... Some say, very like the Mithraists. But I’ve never heard they celebrate the summer solstice.”

  “The summer solstice?”

  “Midsummer Eve,” said Churaldin softly, and there was a sudden glow in those dark Cymric eyes. “That my people celebrated with the pyre of the Green Man and the dancing among the standing stones. The shortest night of the year.”

  Arrius looked down at the Briton for a long moment; in the stillness, the heat of the little room was like a bake oven. “And when is the shortest night?”

  The Briton said, “Tomorrow night.”

  Marcus gasped, tried to sit up, and sank down again with a groan. He had grossly underestimated the effects of a three-mile run upon a totally untrained body. Moreover his cracked ribs were smarting again.

  Sixtus mused slowly, “I suppose that the Christians could celebrate the solstice. The part of the world they come from—Syria and Palestine—is heavily imbued with the effects of Chaldean astrology, though it tends to crop out in other religions far more noticeably. In which case—”

  “In which case we have only tonight and tomorrow,” whispered Marcus.

  “We’ll find her,” said Arrius grimly. “I have informers out all over town. We’ve been watching Tiridates’ house for him since he refused to let me talk to those two Arabs.”<
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  “For all the good it’s likely to do you,” commented the old scholar. Arrius raised an inquiring brow. “Oh, come! If there’s a secret passage connecting the cellar to another cellar, or to the sewers, your men could sit all night watching an empty house. Don’t you know you can cross Rome from the Quirinal Hill to the Aventine without ever coming above the ground?”

  The centurion was silent for a moment. “In which case she could have been taken outside the city altogether.”

  “It’s possible, but I doubt it. The Christians are a city folk; whatever they’ll do, they’ll do in Rome.”

  “It doesn’t mean they’ll hold her in Rome until it’s time,” returned the soldier. “We’ve turned up no sign of her...”

  “It hardly means she isn’t here.” Sixtus glanced sharply over at Marcus, who was following this conversation with anguish in his eyes. “Who lives upstairs from you here? I’ve heard them walking back and forth all morning.”

  Marcus shook his head. “I know there’s a Syrian family named Baldad and a—a girl named Delia, but other than that...”

  “She could be up there, then. They could have rented a room, kept her drugged... What’s that square building down the alley from here? The one with the black walls and the boarded-up porch?”

  “I think it used to be an old temple of Dagon, before the cult was proscribed,” said Marcus, puzzled. “But...”

  “Ever been in it? In its cellars?”

  He shook his head, mystified.

  “Rome is a city where you can do anything, centurion. You could kidnap the entire College of Vestal Virgins and conceal them all within a mile of the Forum and no one would be the wiser. Old buildings, warehouses, temples, caves in the banks of the Tiber...”