Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  Caius bent his head in respect. Straton came in with a lamp; the flicker of its oily topaz flame threw shadows over the guest’s face and drew a deep glint of long-burning anger from the dark eyes. Caius said, “Straton? Will you go to Lady Aurelia Pollia and tell her that her husband, the prefect Varus, has returned and is looking for her.”

  XVII

  When you are going to take any act in hand, remind yourself what kind of an act is it. If you are going to bathe, place before yourself what happens in the bath; some splashing the water, others pushing against one another, others abusing one another, and some stealing: and thus with more safety you will undertake the matter, if you say to yourself, 1 now intend to bathe, and to maintain my will in a manner conformable to nature.

  Epictetus

  PLOTINA’S BROTHEL WAS BUILT above and behind the Baths of the Golden Swordsman, and Marcus spent a long time simply lying in the warm tiled pool, watching the play of the steam before his eyes. In spite of imperial edicts requiring the closing of all baths by the eleventh hour of the day, at the second hour of the night these showed no signs of emptying. The high arches of the ceiling rang with giggles and raucous laughter; rose and amber lamplight sparkled on the waters of the dark lapis pools. Through the skylight, stars blazed in a warm black ocean. Marcus stared straight ahead and thought of Tullia and Dorcas, wondering if he would find them after all, or whether they would simply retreat again, dreamlike, as Tullia had done from the catacombs, and from the temple on the Janiculum Hill.

  The warmth of the water swirled around him. With barely a splash, a woman had slipped down to sit on the underwater bench at his side. She offered him a cup, dark wine, unmixed and smelling of the vineyards of Chios. “Wine sometimes helps sadness,” she said quietly, her eyes dark as plums in a fine-boned, angular face.

  “Thank you,” he said and drank—cautiously, since he hadn’t stayed for the funeral dinner. The woman watched him, but said nothing, and in his heart he thanked her for her undemanding silence. After a time she leaned her head back against the tiled rim of the pool and like him seemed content for a time merely to watch the antics of the bathers. But he felt her awareness of him and, every now and then, the touch of those dark eyes.

  It was the first time Marcus had been inside one of the fashionable baths-cum-brothel; for a while he only looked around him, at the expensive marbles, the mosaics on the tessellated walls, the giggling riot of wet gilded bodies and splashing water. It was as different as possible from the only other time he’d ever visited a brothel.

  The memory of that first visit still scalded him with shame. It had been, he supposed, part of the reason he’d given up the gladiatorial games. For Sixtus had been right, of course: death, or the closeness to death, is a terrible aphrodisiac. For a boy of fifteen the sight of men trapped hopelessly between the threat of torture and the certainty of death in battle, the sight of women screaming under the claws of leopards worrying at their white, blood-splattered throats, brought a pain to his loins that nothing would satiate. The blowsy woman who’d picked him up as he’d stumbled, taut-legged, down the ramps had doubtless seen a million boys and men come walking out of there in that fashion. The brothel had been black as a pit and stunk like a vomitorium, and had left Marcus feeling shamed, filthy, and violated. When he’d discovered the next day that he’d traded his virginity for body lice, he had seriously considered suicide as an alternative to asking Straton for a remedy.

  He had avoided Tullia for days, out of sheer shame.

  The Golden Swordsman, however, was an entirely different matter, a world removed from the stinking cribs that lined the arcades of the arena. Golden lamps in the shape of nymphs hung low over the water; music pervaded the rooms. The place was redolent of perfume, bath oils, and women. Pillars of pink marble, veined and mottled with white and black, threw a kind of rosy reflection over everything, and on the arched pediment above the main entrance to the lobby, a voluptuous Leda twined in amazing embraces with her feathered lover.

  Marcus found himself wondering what the rest of the place was like.

  He looked quickly sideways, to meet those dark painted eyes. She sat close to him, her arm just brushing his beneath the rippling surface of the warm silken water. Her hair, piled in loose coils on top of her head so as not to get wet in the pools, looked tousled, the tendrils of it that hung about her face sticking to those high cheekbones.

  She asked simply, “D’you want to come upstairs with me?”

  He nodded, suddenly unable to speak for the dryness of his mouth.

  He left the money on the table, near the floating light of the alabaster lamp. The sum had been written on the door as they’d gone in, along with her name, which was Antara. As he was putting on his clothes, she looked up from the pillow and smiled her slow lazy cat’s smile. “Will you stay for a cup of wine?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I—I can’t.”

  She seemed to accept this, held out her hand to him, and kissed his fingers softly. In the heat she was covered only by a thin sheet of gauze and by her long hair, which had come undone. “Will I see you again?”

  He felt himself blush, a comprehensive effort that started from the navel, and hastily pulled on his tunic. She watched him uncritically, though her smooth lips tucked up a little at the corners. “I don’t think so,” he managed to stammer, his eyes wholly engaged by his belt buckle, and the tucks deepened.

  “You’re a sweet boy,” she said inconsequentially. Marcus blundered first into the doorpost, and then out into the hall.

  Above stairs Plotina’s was clean, but lacked the opulence of the baths. Frescoes and paintings on the walls depicted the loves of the Olympian gods in an awesome wealth of detail, but the rooms themselves were small and furnished sparsely. There were some two dozen of them on this floor—the one directly above the baths—laid out like the rooms in an apartment building along a wide central corridor. At one end a great stairway of worked chalcedony and lapis led to the baths, and the sound of them drifted upward like a breath of warmed perfume. At the other end of the hall a less elegant stairway led to the floors above.

  For the moment, the hall was deserted.

  The next floor up seemed to be laid out the same way, only the rooms were smaller. It had the smell of use, but as Marcus slipped down the hall like a thief, it appeared more deserted, quieter, and much darker. He paused before a shut door, hearing within the hissing whine of a whip. Tullia leaped to his mind, in a welter of anger and shame and guilt, then he heard a man’s voice whimper within and plead, “Again.”

  Gilded nymphs cavorting in warm water, he supposed, were not to everyone’s taste.

  He moved on cautiously up the stairs.

  This floor was deserted, and hot as an oven after a baking day. It was lightless but for the wan reflection of moonlight that leaked through the big square windows at either end of the hall, and it smelled of dust and mice. The doors he paused beside were silent; opening them, he found most rooms empty, though one or two at this end showed signs of not-very-recent habitation by maids or slaves. One, horribly, turned out to be a punishment room, its bare blood-stained couch scarred all over with the cuts of whips and decorated at the four corners with chains. He crept silently on, the floor squeaking under his feet, sick with apprehension and not daring to picture who might have occupied that room.

  There’s no reason they would hurt her, he told himself desperately.

  But there’s no reason they would have kidnapped her at all! The whole thing’s senseless, a vicious, filthy, meaningless act of terrorism that only fanatics could perpetrate!

  He pushed open a door near the end of the hall and saw that it bore not only a lock, but metal bolts on the outside. For a moment he thought it was another punishment room, but he saw it was only a kind of cell, the window boarded over, the darkness almost absolute. It smelled and felt of use, of recent habitation, but its smell was of neither sex nor blood. His groping hands encountered a sleeping-couch, a stand with a ba
sin for water on top and a chamber pot beneath, and a kind of little stool. Nothing further—no evidence of who had been here, or why.

  Then a stray sliver of light caught on something bright, like a coin in the shadows under the couch. He bent and picked it up, and saw that it was a silver cross, still fastened to its broken chain.

  He thought, Dorcas.

  And then: Where did the light come from?

  He hit the door in a desperate rush barely in time to prevent its being slammed to. Weight greater than his own shoved against it, skidding him back; he braced his feet and fought, worming to get an elbow or knee into the crack. Lantern light bounded crazily through the gap, and he glimpsed a brown bearded face and the glint of a gold earring.

  The man yelled, “Crescens! Pugnax! We got him!” He was drawing in his breath for another bellow when Marcus slammed his weight on the door, off-balancing him. He thrust hard and slithered through the crack. The kidnapper Lucius swung at him, a blow that would have felled a donkey, and he ducked and was satisfied to hear the man’s fist crack against the doorframe. Then he was running for all he was worth down the hall, the shorter man pounding at his heels.

  Two shapes, one massive and the other more massive, loomed against the light from the stairs. Torchlight flickered on edged steel. He dropped to his hands and knees, felt his pursuer’s shins collide briefly with his side as the man’s momentum somersaulted him into the arms of his friends. They were still tangling when Marcus ploughed his way past the whole melee, hearing his cloak snag and tear. As he plunged down the narrow stairs he heard men yelling, “Thief! Thief!” and footsteps pounding at his heels.

  Doors were opening all along the darker hallway of the floor below, white frowsty faces peeking out. He clattered down the stairs and was halfway toward the main staircase to the baths when he saw the shadows of men racing up from below with torches. Other people were running into the hall now, men clutching bedsheets and dignity inadequately about themselves, women wearing nothing but paint and jewels, all of them giving tongue like the hounds of Hades. Marcus flung open a door at random, dived through, shut it behind, and gasped, “Beg pardon...” as he fled for the window, hoping for a shed roof or, at worst, a nice soft midden below.

  The window was barred. Men were yelling in the hall, women screaming, fists pounding on doors. The woman in the bed sat up with a gasp of indignation, clutching the sheets around a magnificent bosom with somewhat inappropriate modesty. The man with her blinked at him, startled, in the dim light of a gold glass lamp, and said plaintively, “B’Castor, they’re right! Y’are a thief. That’s my best dinner suit you’re wearin’.”

  “Felix!” gasped Marcus.

  His brother sat up, his shorn hair making him look crumpled and rather pathetic. His eyes were red and puffy with weeping. “Here,” he complained, “what’re you doing here, Silenus?”

  Outside in the hall doors were slamming, voices yelling. Among them Lucius’ was recognizable, cursing like a gladiator. Marcus gasped, “Felix, you’ve got to switch clothes with me.”

  “What? Are you drunk?” Marcus was already stripping. “This’s a fine way to comport yourself on the night of your father’s funeral!”

  “As the pot said to the kettle. Put these on, get out there, and run like blazes, and when they catch you, tell them I’ve already left—tell them anything. I’ll get out a window...”

  “There’s a back stairs two doors down from this room,” said the girl, vastly interested, leaning back against the pillows and forgetting about the sheet. “My name’s Xaviera, if you’re ever back this way.”

  “Uh—pleased to meet you.” He finished slinging Felix’s elegant Persian silk cloak around his shoulders, fastening it with long ornamental pins. Felix was shaking his head as he struggled into the dark-blue tunic. Fists hammered the door across the hall, a man yelled, “He’s got to be in here somewhere...”

  “Y’know, Marcus, Caius might have been right when he said all that philosophy addled the brain.”

  “Just get going!” He thrust him squeaking toward the door.

  “Got a minute?” inquired Xaviera, with an inviting wriggle.

  “Another time...” He watched through a crack in the door as Felix went tearing down the hall. As he’d expected, every tough ex-pug in Plotina’s employ pelted at his heels, yelling for him to stop. Felix must have had more brains than any of them had given him credit for (Well, reflected Marcus, he could hardly have less), for he ran waving his arms, yelling, “Stop thief! Stop thief!” like a gawky rabbit at the head of a pack of slavering mastiffs who were also bellowing, “Stop thief!”

  The whole melee went pouring down the stairs in a noisy cataract. Marcus straightened his twice-borrowed silks, cast a quick look up and down the milling crowds in the hall, blew a kiss at Xaviera, and walked down the back stairs.

  As he passed through the baths he saw the group gathered at the foot of the main staircase. Bristling with indignation, Felix was being held against the wall by three armed bodyguards. In front of him were ranged Plotina, like a jewel-encrusted idol under at least ten pounds of gold ornaments, and Lucius, who sported a black eye. Lucius was snarling, “That isn’t him, you unprintable jackasses!” and Felix protesting in his highfalutin voice, “Flamin’ balls of Jupiter that’s what I’m tellin’ you! It’s m’cousin! Looks just like me! Stole my clothes, beat me up—gone berserk, I tell you! If this’s the sort of place you run, madam...”

  Marcus tipped the bathman handsomely as he walked through the lobby. Felix’s purse was far better lined than his own.

  He waited for him in a discreet wineshop on the corner. Felix emerged from the baths a short time later, trailed by the faithful Giton and fulminating over the rip in his cloak. “B’Castor, you’ve torn it,” he accused, aggrievedly, as Marcus got to his feet and fell into step with him.

  Marcus looked at the slash. “I was lucky that wasn’t through my belly,” he said grimly. “That’s too clean for a tear. It’s a sword slash.”

  “Is it?” Felix examined it again, with renewed interest. Then, “Dash it, Professor, what were you doing messing about with swords? And why were they after you, anyway? Really, Caius has no call at all to say I get myself into stupid scrapes.”

  “This isn’t a stupid scrape.” They turned the corner of Tuscan Street, and along the New Way, the shadows of the torch sprawling drunkenly along the walls on both sides and the narrow archways overhead. “And where on earth did you get this outfit in the first place? I feel like somebody’s bedboy.”

  “Well, whoever it is has dashed bad taste,” sulked Felix. He skirted a particularly noisome pool of garbage. “Not that Caius’ll ever speak to either one of us again, after tonight,” he added as an afterthought. “Leaving him there with all those wretched mourners, and all.”

  “We’ll have to go back there,” said Marcus quietly, gathering the thick silk of his robe in one hand to keep it out of the mud. “We’ll have to talk to Priscus Quindarvis.”

  “Quindarvis? What d’you need that sleek brute for? And listen, Professor...” He pulled something from the purse at his belt. “I respect your philosophy, an’ all, but if you’ve turned Christian, Caius really will kill you.” He held up the silver cross on its broken chain and regarded his brother with earnest, worried, sheeplike brown eyes.

  “No,” Marcus assured him gently. “No, I haven’t turned Christian. Listen, Felix. Tullia was up in that place, held prisoner in the attics. I think she’s been there all the time. But this morning a girl—a Christian—went snooping around and discovered her there, and I think the kidnappers took fright and took her someplace.”

  “A Christian?” said Felix querulously. “But I thought she was snatched by the Christians? Only this evenin’ Consul Varus—You know Consul Varus is back? He said...”

  “The Christians didn’t take her,” insisted Marcus.

  “How d’you know? Stands to reason they would.”

  “They just didn’t. Shut up and let me
talk. That’s why I need to talk to Quindarvis. I know he’s—he’s a friend of Plotina’s. He might be able to learn something, to give us some kind of clue—something he’s heard...”

  “Friend!” hooted Felix. “Holy tits of Venus, brother, what rock d’you philosophers hide under? Quindarvis owns the wretched place.”

  Marcus stopped dead. “What?”

  “By Castor, yes. In fact it’s one of his chief sources of income—that and his office, I bet. I mean, there’s a difference between making money off a praetorship and havin’ your hand in the till, and I ain’t saying Quindarvis doesn’t know what it is, but... Well, if there’s ever an audit of his books he may find himself taking a quick trip to Gaul. Man’s been all to pieces for these two years gone. Don’t know how he coughed up the tin for the games.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean...” And Marcus’ voice trailed off. He felt as though his eyes had been smitten by an enormous light, and stood blinking, gazing into darkness of the narrow street. “Felix,” he asked quietly, “who audits the praetors when their term of office is over?”

  His brother shrugged. “Dashed if I know. Some Jew or other on the treasury staff, I suppose—half the staffs Jews, y’know. They’re everywhere. That’s why there’s all this shifting from an eight-day week to a seven-day—blasted confusing, tryin’ to figure out whether you’re on a sabbath or not. I made up a little chart, once, for use with my moneylender, but dashed if I didn’t lose it...”