Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  Marcus whispered, “That bastard.” Certainty and rage poured into his veins like fire. “That callous, calculating, vicious, coldhearted bastard.”

  “No,” protested Felix, “quite a decent fellow, for a moneylender.”

  Marcus swung around on him with startling fury. “Quindarvis knew it!” he raged. “He knew what would happen if there was a general persecution of Christians! That if Varus’ daughter was kidnapped it’d be the amphitheater for every Christian they could find and their families...”

  “Well, of course,” argued Felix reasonably. “I mean, stands to reason. If you’re going about eating babies, you can’t hide something like that, y’know.”

  “They do not eat babies!”

  “‘Course they do,” protested his brother, laying a soothing hand on his arm. “Everyone says so. You look a bit fagged, brother. Tryin’ day, and all. Here’s a wineshop, by midnight the old farm’ll be cleared out enough that we can cut on home...”

  “You go home,” said Marcus quietly, resisting his brother’s well-meaning tug on his mantle. His rage had turned suddenly to ice within him. “You go home, and if someone comes demanding to see Quindarvis, delay them. Do whatever you have to, but keep Quindarvis from leaving Rome for as long as you can.”

  “Here, are you all right?” twittered Felix, feeling his hands for fever. “What’s Quindarvis got to do with it all, anyway?”

  “Everything,” said Marcus softly. “Everything. Listen to me, Felix. You’re Priscus Quindarvis. Praetor of Rome. Friend of all the aristocrats, in with the richest, the most socially prominent. It’s an expensive crowd to run with—parties at a million sesterces a night, a villa that would make Nero’s Golden House look like a shed. Pet lions. Dancing girls. Your wife lives apart from you and you can’t touch her wealth, hut your father made a fortune from trade.

  “But things haven’t gone so well for you. You’re living above your means. You can make money off your office, but if you lose that you’re in over your head. So you make a bid to win popularity by giving the most fantastic games Rome ever saw. They’re expensive, but the investment is worth it—and besides, it isn’t your money anyway. All right?”

  “All right,” agreed Felix, puzzled, his soft eyes completely sober now, and grave.

  “So you’ve got a clerk, who works with you, handling the treasury side of your affairs. A little Jew you despise, but he’s smart. He knows money, and he’s going to know when they run the general audit in July that the books don’t balance. You know it’s only a matter of time, but people have already begun to talk. Everyone in Rome knows you’ve been all to pieces for the last few years. If this little Jew should happen to choke to death on his Chanukah-fish or get beaten up by toughs in the street, maybe someone would think your ill will had something to do with it.”

  “Well,” agreed Felix uneasily, “it doesn’t do to rub folks’ noses in things.”

  “No,” said Marcus, “it doesn’t. Especially if people have already begun to talk. But you happen to know your little Jew has a son. And his son’s a Christian. And a lot of people aren’t very clear anyway on the distinction between Christians and Jews—I’m not, myself, except that Jews don’t scream at one another over their theology like Christians do. But the real distinction between Christians and Jews is that you can’t be killed simply for being a Jew. Your whole family doesn’t come under suspicion of treason simply because you’re a Jew. Are you still following me?”

  “Marcus,” said Felix quietly, “I don’t like this.” In the jumping light and shadow from Giton’s torch he looked ill.

  “So what do you do?” pursued Marcus softly. “You might just kidnap the daughter of a powerful man who’s once run spectacularly afoul of the Christians, which he could hardly help doing, being city prefect. Kidnap her in the presence of her mother and leave a Christian amulet on the scene. You don’t even have to leave it, you can just palm it and pretend to pick it up from the mud yourself. You start rumors... You wait for Varus to come back to town... and his first morning back in town—”

  “Marcus, stop it!” cried his brother, horrified.

  There was an ugly, momentary silence in the lane, broken only by the clatter of cart traffic in the markets and the singing of a drunk two streets away. Then Marcus said softly, “Go back home. See if someone doesn’t try and talk to Quindarvis.”

  Felix swallowed. “All right.”

  “And thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  Felix turned and pattered off down the lane, the gold stars flickering in the light of his slave’s torch. Then he turned, seeing Marcus starting off up the rise to the Forum of Peace, and called out, “Brother?”

  Marcus halted. “What is it, brother?”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Looking for Christians!” he yelled, and vanished at a run into the night.

  XVIII

  All things are lawful unto me—but not all things are expedient.

  Saint Paul

  “AS I THOUGHT.” Sixtus came limping back to the silent group that waited in the shadows of the dark elms by the road. “They’re watching the wall, all the way along here.” In the darkness of the trees, his toga and silvery beard gave him the moonlight glimmer of a ghost, a spirit risen from the tombs that lay like scattered bones among the groves on either side of them. “They’ve already been panicked. We’re going to have to slip in among them without their knowing if we’re going to get the girls out alive.”

  No one, Marcus noticed, had asked if the old man had a plan. After this long it was something one took for granted.

  Telesphorus asked, “Are you sure they’ll still be alive?”

  The old man hesitated. “I think so. Quindarvis didn’t know when Varus would be returning to Rome.”

  “This is madness,” whispered Judah. In the Roman helmet his brown face looked stark, somehow stripped to its bones and very severe. The reached red crest stirred in the breeze as he moved his head to scan the dark countryside between them and the park wall. “If anything goes wrong, if that girl is killed, with Christians raiding the place, we will have precipitated the very thing you’ve been fighting to avoid.”

  “Hardly.” Sixtus leaned on his staff. “The die has already been thrown—it was thrown the moment Varus walked into Caius Silanus Senior’s house. We can only hope to delay the consequences long enough to disarm the trap.” He glanced from Judah to the other three soldiers in the company—Churaldin, Alexandros, and Anthony, whom Marcus had encountered on the night of the jailbreak. Word had evidently gone out—some twenty Christians had been mustered from groups all over Rome. Only their universal awe of Sixtus kept them from a major doctrinal showdown on the spot.

  “You think this’ll work?” inquired Anthony, unworriedly.

  “It stands an even chance. Faced with authority, Quindarvis’ slaves might not be so willing to lay down their lives for their master, particularly if they are under the impression that he has already been arrested. There’s a handful of toughs we may have to worry about, ex-gladiators mostly, but they’ll all be down watching the road.”

  “Yes, the road,” sneered Ignatius. “Or are we all going to disincorporate the coequal portions of our bodies and spirits and pass among them unseen?”

  “We will use deeper means than that,” replied Sixtus serenely, while from the half-seen posse the tall woman’s voice hissed, “And in any case only a heretic would think that kind of disincorporation possible, since the divine spark—”

  “—is too extensive a topic to be discussed now,” finished Sixtus for her. He turned to the others, mostly men and boys but including two women, the gigantic Hebe and Anthony’s tough little wife, Miriam. “You all understand what you must do?” he asked them. “We’re searching for Dorcas and another girl, a thin girl of sixteen with curly brown hair. If she isn’t found—or if she’s found dead—we’re finished, and the Church of Rome with us. We’re not here to fight, and we’re not here to prove anything. We’r
e here to clear the Church of a hideous charge and to save everyone—family, wives, children—from being wiped out in a general persecution. The men we run into may be armed, so by all that’s holy, if you can do it, run. We’ll regroup at the catacombs when Betelgeuse rises, fall back at the old Mithraeum at dawn. All right?”

  There was a murmuring among them—Marcus thought he saw the woman Miriam grin and slap a little piece of steel braided in rawhide into her palm. Judah growled, “Thus shall the unrighteous be smitten by the hand of God,” and Sixtus retorted, “Since the unrighteous are going to be extremely well-armed I’d advise you to be careful about whom you smite.” He gathered up his toga and set off up the bank, scrambling through the long rank grass with the Christians following like a border patrol behind him. An owl hooted somewhere in the night. Rather like an old white owl himself, Sixtus led the way toward the pale bulk of a tomb, set apart in its little orchard.

  Marcus recognized it at once, the dirty marble walls, the overgrown pepper and willow trees. It was the old tomb that had once belonged to some member of the Flavian family, the entrance to the Christian catacombs. He whispered, “Sixtus?” The old man, engaged in hanging a lantern on the end of his staff, glanced over at him curiously. “You aren’t... ? What you said to them, about the Church of Rome... ?”

  “A good general always gives his troops a pep talk before the battle,” smiled Sixtus.

  “But you said that the Church would perish ‘with us.’ You—you aren’t a Christian yourself, are you?”

  “I shall certainly be executed for one if Churaldin and Alexandras are gathered in.” He led the way down the worn marble steps, the iron foot of his staff scraping on the slick stone. It was only then that Marcus realized how they were going to enter Quindarvis’ private parklands. He noticed also that Sixtus, like the Christians he’d spoken to by the Tiber bridges, had not answered his question. He was beginning to realize that Sixtus very often didn’t.

  With a muted rattling of panoplies, their four counterfeit Praetorians followed them down the long gallery, the little lantern throwing immense shadows on the sealed niches and plasterwork garlands of the walls. Rats fled squeaking, red eyes gleaming balefully from the shadows; Sixtus limped ahead as though he were crossing the atrium of his own house. Looking behind him, Marcus saw the shadowy faces of the Christians like ghosts in the dark: Telesphorus with his black dog Ignatius at his heels, Hebe and Josephus arguing for all the world like a shopkeeper bickering with a stingy customer over the price of turnips, until you caught phrases like “...but if you don’t have the knowledge of the perfect gnosis, the divine emanations...”

  For the rest of them, they looked like the worst scum of the streets, dirty, uncouth, and ignorant. At least two wore the metal collars some masters put on slaves. If they were opposed by their faith to violence in any form, for some of them it didn’t look like a renunciation of long standing. As Sixtus scrambled down the ladder to the mazes below, Marcus heard the soft quibbling whispers. “...Well what does your priest know about it? Ours says a priest has to be pure before he can consecrate the bread and wine!” “Who says?” “Our priest says!” “Well it stands to reason that...” “You fleabitten heretic, there is no reason in faith!”

  Sixtus led the way unhesitatingly through the dark windings of the first level, turning and twisting through narrowing galleries with their gray sealed wall niches, until they reached a ladder going down. Marcus didn’t think it was the same ladder Arrius had found on his former visit, but in the damp, clay-smelling mazes it was hard to be sure. From the darkness below the smell of water came to him, and the wet slipping of furry bodies. Out of the black corridors behind, Ignatius whispered viciously, “Anyone who thinks they can buy their way to salvation by good deeds is a fool! The emperor does good, after his fashion, the prideful, maggot-eaten idolater! In faith, and faith alone, lies salvation...” “That’s a pile of horse-dung! Who gave you the authority... ?”

  “How did you know about this?” hissed Marcus, as Sixtus climbed nimbly down the second ladder to the black stinking seam of the lower level. “Don’t tell me this comes under the heading of research into eastern religions!”

  “Not directly,” returned Sixtus evenly, holding the lantern aloft to light his feet as he descended. “But as we found in the case of Tiridates, Rome is a honeycomb of tunnels; the Christians aren’t the only ones who use them. In my research I’ve come across whole conventicles of Black Gnostics who haven’t seen daylight in years and can travel underground from one end of Rome to the other, although personally I’ve always thought that a respectable appearance and a sufficiently authoritative manner can take you much farther.”

  Later Marcus calculated they could not have been underground for more than half a summer hour. But at the time the darkness seemed to go on forever. The stinking catacomb was succeeded by a repulsive tunnel roofed in ancient stone that had once been part of an Etruscan sewer, foul with ancient mud and alive with rats. This in turn gave onto the underground galleries of some other forgotten tomb, its roof half caved-in, the thin topaz gleam of Sixtus’ lantern dancing like a demon’s eye over broken slabs of carved sarcophagi and scattered, grinning bones. The stench of dust and water and decay filled his nostrils; the constant, fitful murmur of the Christians bickering trailed them like the cluttering of ghosts. At times the tunnels grew so narrow that his vision was limited to a splinter of deep rose light edging the white hair of the man before him and the red glint of eyes in the dark. Once the tunnel was half-flooded in several inches of noisome water; he whispered, as they hopped over it, “Was that the Styx?” and Sixtus whispered back, “Certainly. I hope you have no objections to three-headed dogs?”

  “No, one of my mother’s lapdogs had three heads...”

  Then they ascended a makeshift ladder, and he felt dusty air open up all around him, warm and close. Only a thin chink of light escaped the lantern; he felt Sixtus’ hand on his sleeve, drawing him out of the way as the others emerged.

  “Where are we?” he whispered, hearing his own voice rebound from hard walls and a low ceiling.

  “The vaults below the little temple in Quindarvis’ gardens,” replied the old man softly. “It was built on the foundations of a much older and larger shrine.”

  “That filthy bag of abominations would take to his use the haunts of demons,” whispered Ignatius’ shrill voice out of the darkness.

  “How far are we from the main house?” inquired the ever-practical Anthony.

  “Not far—twenty yards or so. Soldiers with me. Civilians fan out, stay low, search as much and as fast as you can. Keep as quiet as you’re able. God knows when Quindarvis is likely to return. Your charming brother may be a doughty fighter, Marcus, but presumably he can’t hold him in Rome forever. Even if he went to the officials, I’m not sure that Arrius—if he could find him at this time of night—would respond to a complaint against so prominent a citizen on so little evidence.”

  Marcus caught the edge of his toga as they started toward the worn and ancient steps just visible as Sixtus uncovered his lantern. “You do think I’m right, don’t you?” he whispered anxiously. “About Quindarvis?”

  His strange old commander raised white bristling brows. “They’re certainly guarding the road against someone.”

  After the fetid dark of the tombs the night was a scented paradise, a bath of sweet-smelling oils and tepid water, redolent of roses, honeysuckle, jasmine. Like a Persian carpet, starry darkness stretched overhead; against its hem the hills of Rome glittered like a border of goldwork and gems. On such a night, Marcus thought, it was possible to believe that the stars sang.

  “Lights up in the villa,” whispered Churaldin.

  Sixtus nodded. “With me,” he said softly. “We’ll see how long we can bluff them. Light the torches.”

  They clattered up the terrace steps, four Praetorians in their crested helmets, a cold and haughty citizen with the bearing of a consul at least, and a gawky overdressed clerk in a
gay Persian cloak and swirling robe at his side. The noise brought them running, the fat majordomo in his scarlet tunic, the flock of house slaves, none of whom appeared to have been in their beds, and two grim ex-gladiators with muscles like wet shining rocks in the torchlight. The torches they’d lit from Sixtus’ lantern threw a brilliant circle of gold around them on the inlaid marbles of the pavement, gleaming on the burnished armor and incidentally blinding the eyes of everyone there to whatever movements might have been seen in the darkness beyond.

  Churaldin barked, “Clietos, slave of Priscus Quindarvis?” Sixtus had evidently learned the name of the majordomo on the night of the banquet, a circumstance that the slave found tremendously disconcerting. He approached cringing.

  Sixtus said, “In the name of Tullius Varus, consul of Rome and prefect of the city for His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Trajan, I place you under arrest on charges of kidnapping, rape, and conspiracy to do murder, and for these same charges you will be detained for questioning with regards to your master, the said Priscus Quindarvis.”

  The taller of the two gladiators rasped, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” in the same moment that Clietos cried, “We never laid a hand on her!”

  The gladiator drew his sword and struck in the same movement, a belly rip that somehow snagged in the voluminous folds of Sixtus’ toga as a dog’s teeth will snag in the loose skin of a twisting cat. In the instant it took for him to drag it free for another cut, Sixtus hit him and tripped him at the same time; the crack of his skull striking the marble was audible even above the general confusion of the fight. Panting, Churaldin and Alexandras threw the other armed man to his knees and took his sword, while Judah caught Clietos by the scruff of the neck and the majordomo wailed, “She was never here! I never knew anything about it! They made me do it!”

  “Where is she?” demanded Marcus furiously. The rest of the slaves who’d come flocking to the terrace stayed where they were in a scared huddle. Two of them had attacked Anthony in the general melee, but the one of them who was still conscious was sorry he had done so.