Search the Seven Hills

by Barbara Hambly

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” the miserable butler was sobbing.

  Judah shook him like a rag doll. “Is she in the house?”

  “No! She isn’t anywhere! They took her away! She was never here in the first place!”

  “Search the house,” snapped Sixtus, turning with the gladiator’s sword in his hand. He faced out into the cricket-crying darkness beyond the torchlight. “Surround the villa!” he called out. “Kill anyone who tries to leave.” All the slaves on the terrace cowered and tried to look as homebound as possible. Sixtus limped back, caught Clietos’ tunic in a rough grip, and stared at him with the cold imperiousness that had terrified two generations of frontier legionnaires. “Where’s the girl?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t know! They took her away from the house...” He almost choked himself on denials.

  “Is there a fire still in the kitchen?”

  “Yes, sir, of course—I mean, no!” he gasped, realizing belatedly the intent. “It’s gone out, I don’t know anything, don’t—”

  “You.” Sixtus pointed to a cowering Syrian boy. “Go light it and put a poker and a handful of coins and some tongs in the coals.”

  The boy raced off like a little hare, pursued by the major-domo’s despairing screams. “Lock him up,” ordered Sixtus offhandedly. “Tie these two and lock them in the cellar. Judah, Anthony, keep guard over these scum”—he flicked a scornful glance over the slaves—“Marcus, come with me.”

  “You aren’t really going to torture him?” whispered Marcus in a horrified undervoice as they swept from the terrace into the house.

  “Of course not. I’m almost certain the man knows nothing. But I’ve managed to terrorize the rest of them without lifting a hand.”

  Telesphorus and Hebe met them in the atrium. Around them the house was in confusion, slaves running this way and that, shadows slipping through other shadows. The bobbing of lamps and torches threw eerie racing gleams over dark pillars of porphyry and lapis, the sparkle of gilding and the cool green malachite floor. “This place is enormous,” complained the priest. “It stinks of effeminacy, of fornication and idolatry. We’ve searched the lower floor...”

  “They wouldn’t keep her in an inhabited part of the house, would they?” protested Marcus, and Sixtus gave him a sharp sidelong look.

  “What slave of Quindarvis’ would have nerve enough to tell anyone if they did?”

  “Miriam went through the attics,” continued Hebe. “Martin and his group took the stables; Dio, Narses, and Josephus are going through the other wing of the house.”

  “There’s a little temple kind of place farther out in the gardens,” added Marcus. “There’re supposed to be grottoes, too, down in the water gardens below the terrace...”

  Telesphorus groaned, “We haven’t got all night.”

  “No,” agreed Sixtus, “and it’s only a matter of time before one of the household slaves decides not to believe my convincing remarks about the house being surrounded. You check the temple—can it be seen from the terrace? Marcus, we’ll look through the water gardens...”

  From the distant terrace Judah’s voice bellowed, “We have guests!” and the richly painted walls suddenly echoed with the pounding fury of hobnailed boots as Quindarvis’ private troop of tough-guys effected an entrance from both sides of the villa at once.

  “Drat,” said Sixtus. “Can you handle this?” He handed Marcus the sword he’d had from the original gladiator.

  “No! I’ve never touched one of the things in my life!”

  From an adjoining drawing room a wild shrieking cry rose, “I will smite the Philistines in the name of the God of Hosts!” accompanied by a splintering crash, and the cacophonous rattle of an armored body hitting the marble.

  Sixtus grabbed Marcus’ cloak and dragged him toward the triumphal arch that led into the hallway. Gladiators poured into the atrium, drawn swords flaming in the ruddy glare of the few lamps, scarred ugly faces offering no hope of quarter. Half of them bore down on Telesphorus and Hebe, only to have the two Christians duck aside at the last moment to reveal the impluvium in the shadows behind them. As half-a-dozen men hit the water in a foaming wrath of shining muscle and armor, the Christians and their allies faded like wraiths from the room.

  “Which way is it to these grottoes?” asked the old man, dodging into the first door they came to in the darkness of the corridor.

  “We’re not still going to search them?”

  “Certainly we are. The guards were expecting force—they haven’t the slightest idea what’s happening. They’ll storm through the house for a good twenty minutes looking for someone to fight.” They hastened across the lapis floor of a small dining room, Sixtus’ staff clicking on the inlays, and slipped through heavy curtains into a courtyard redolent of jasmine and rustling plane trees nourished on wine. Like a cat, another shadow faded into being beside them, Marcus startling at the sight of armor. Churaldin’s voice said, “Nowhere in the house.”

  “Kitchen wing?”

  “Just came from there. Cellars, too. Great Llyr!” he cursed, backsliding into momentary paganism as a sudden scarlet flare leaped in the windows of a room across the court. A moment later the dark yellowish flicker in the room next to it strengthened suddenly to hot springing orange.

  “Just as well,” said Sixtus callously. “We can search the outbuildings in some kind of peace.” Greedy light illuminating other dark windows marked the fire’s spread; if a large lamp had been knocked over, thought Marcus, spilling oil would carry it everywhere. “Are those two thugs in the cellar?”

  Churaldin shook his head, flame sliding on the edge of his burnished helmet. “We left them tied on the terrace.”

  “Good. Their—” He looked up suddenly, startled at some sound, and over the growing roar of the fire Marcus heard it, too. Hooves clattered wildly beyond the walls, and with them, the careening scrunch of wheels on the gravel on the drive.

  They exchanged one fast, horrified look, and Marcus said, “Quindarvis. He brought Aurelia Pollia to the funeral in a cisium...”

  “He’ll go straight to her.” Sixtus was already headed for the doors that would take them through to the terrace, Marcus and Churaldin catching up behind. Firelight from the opposite windows banded his toga with blood as he crossed through the shadows of the columns. “He has nothing to lose now and he knows it.”

  The younger men broke into a run, leaving Sixtus limping behind. Marcus flung open a bronze-bound door that he recalled led into the great dining room, and found himself staring into an inferno of blazing curtains and couches, the wild illumination rippling and spreading along the painted panels of the ceiling. Churaldin yelled, “The whole wing’s burning!” wrapped his face in his short soldier’s cloak, and ran like a madman through the blaze. After a split-second hesitation, Marcus followed. A burning rafter fell between them. He leaped over it, seeing as he did so a fire-framed tableau of two slaves at the far wall, trying to wrest a pair of enormous gold-and-ivory sconces from their bolts. The Briton kicked open the doors to the terrace, and he and Marcus plunged through the flaming curtains into the safety of the outer air.

  Blazing red light poured onto the drive, throwing into stark relief the light open cisium with its two stamping, terrified horses. It was surrounded by armed men, the gladiators shouting, waving their arms, fire and shadow dyeing them red and black like an ancient vase. Marcus saw Quindarvis’ face, set with rage and horror and that cold hard look men have when their plans come to grief and they seek a way to salvage what they can at any cost. Turning to follow the praetor’s gaze he saw the reason: The whole villa was one great pyre, sheets of flame like a waterfall streaming upward from its roof. He heard him curse and shout an order to his driver, saw the heads of the horses wrenched brutally around, and the black-snake lick of the whip. The carriage bounced high on its two wheels as it hit the rough stones of the drive, then vanished into the darkness.

  “Follow them!” yelled Marcus, and started
to race along the terrace. The roar of falling beams echoed from the dining room behind him, and with a hoarse cry he swung back, remembering Sixtus’ slower, limping steps.

  Every curtain of that room was blazing; beyond the archways was nothing but a wall of searing flame, as though he looked into a furnace. Black against the unbearable brightness, Churaldin was dragging his master, who was choking on inhaled smoke and struggling to get free. As Marcus came running to them, Sixtus managed to get breath enough to snap, “Don’t just stand there gawping, which way did they go?”

  “Down the road, toward the woods.”

  The old man wrenched his arms free irritably and started to limp along the streaming firelight of the polished pavement. “What’s in that direction?”

  Marcus and Churaldin caught him up between them, half-dragging him with their swifter strides. At the end of the terrace they dropped off into a wall of myrtle and scented shrubs, the smell of roses surrounding them like the summer ocean. Firelight poured over them bright as day, but beyond, the night seemed the blacker for it. Over the bellowing roar of the blaze, the shouting of the slaves, the gladiators’ curses, Marcus strained his ears to catch the wild retreating clatter of the carriage.

  And distantly, he heard another sound over the blowing confusion of the night, a bass booming echo, deadly and feral.

  It took him a moment to realize that it was the roaring of lions.

  The little pleasure pavilion glowed in the darkness like a lighted lamp. The richness of its interior that Marcus had only been able to guess at before showed up like an illuminated window: the worked marble of the floor, scattered with carpets of Persia and the East, the lampstands of nymphs and chimeras bearing their soft glowing flames. The cushions of the couches were white, embroidered with red flowers—at this distance they might have been stippled with spilled blood.

  But all this Marcus saw as a hideous backdrop, like the painted scenery on a stage, behind the struggling figures between the columns that supported the pavilion’s roof. As he broke from the woods to the narrow clearing around the rim of the pit, he heard Tullia’s voice, choked and inarticulate over the some fifty feet that separated them, and then Quindarvis’, clear and hard, saying, “You silly bitch, I haven’t got time for your stupid tricks.” He saw the praetor silhouetted against the rosy glow from the little dining room, gripping a small thin form that struggled determinedly, kicking at his shins and fighting to free her arms. He knew with a part of his mind that there were other men in the pavilion, but those two only he saw, fighting as the big man dragged her to the rim of the gilded floor, and the twelve-foot drop, the lions stalking back and forth below. Quindarvis cursed as she bit his arm. Marcus moved toward the distant bridge, then froze in horror as the man shoved her between the pillars. For an instant they rocked on the brink, the girl fighting for balance against his greater weight and strength; there was a crashing, a man’s voice cursing, in the pavilion behind. Time seemed to stand still. He was aware of Churaldin racing along the brink of the pit for the bridgehead, and equally aware that he would never reach it in time. In a sort of detached slow motion he saw Tullia’s feet slip, saw Quindarvis shove her outward, and the white flash of her limbs in the tangle of her pale dress as she fell.

  She hit the ground hard at the foot of the wall, the lions startling back. In the next second a great slopping drench of fire fell from above, thrown outward and down, hitting the ground in a rough semicircle in front of where she lay and blazing up brightly against the darkness. From the pavilion there was a ringing clatter of a falling lampstand, men cursing, and the meaty slap of blows. Two men in armor shoved another woman forward, her black curling hair falling thickly over her bleeding face. Down below the lions were shying back from the blaze of the spilled lamp oil that lay between them and Tullia; Quindarvis was heard to say, “You whoresons should have stopped the little slut.” He caught Dorcas by the back of her dress with the gesture of a man shoving his way impatiently through a crowd, and thrust her unceremoniously out over the edge.

  She was conscious enough to grab at the edge, but missed it and fell hard. The lions were circling, snarling; she crawled weakly for the protection of the fire and Tullia scrambled on her hands and knees to drag her behind it. The darkness all around them seemed to be alive, a moving ripple of tawny fur, and the jeweled flash of eyes.

  The whole could not have taken more than ten seconds.

  “Marcus! Churaldin!” It was the voice of the hunter who calls his dogs, and like trained dogs they returned to the man who could command. Sixtus was already stripping off his toga. “There’s six of them in the pavilion, the footbridge can be defended by one. Give me your cloak, Marcus.”

  He fumbled with the long ornamental pins that held the folds to his shoulders, pricking his fingers and cursing. His eyes never left the two girls, sitting against the rough wall of the pavilion’s base. Tullia got cautiously to her feet, moving with the slow grace of a perilous dancer; in a chorus the lions growled, watching her beyond the sinking wall of the flames. Slowly she glided to the bronze door that was set in the rough stones, tried its handle, pulling as hard as she could without making a sudden movement. Two lionesses began to circle around the end of the puddle of burning oil and the rank sparse grasses and weeds that had caught, and Tullia slipped hastily back to Dorcas’ side. Her dark hair hung down in a mane over her back. Against the short, unbleached slave’s tunic she wore, her arms were like peach-colored silk, burnished by the light of the flames.

  He shouted “Tullia!” and she looked up, her face flooding with joy.

  But she called out to him, “There are men in the pavilion.” The practicality was so typical of her that he would have laughed had the danger not been so terrible. In danger, he thought, it was like her to warn him first, and thank him after. It would take more than lions to break courage like hers.

  He called back, “I know.” Close by, he saw Churaldin cinching the end of a rope of knotted cloth around the bole of the beech tree at the precipice’s edge: his scarlet soldier’s cloak, Sixtus’ toga, poor Felix’s beautiful green-and-bronze peacock silk. Between the girls and the lions, the wall of fire was sinking as the oil burned itself out.

  Movement caught his eye, and he swung back, hearing a soft thunk and the violent rustle of bodies hitting the leaves. He ducked and felt something slide by his ear, turned and rammed forward with his head into something armored that nevertheless gave back with a gasped “Woof!” Hard fingers clawed at his throat as he was rolled and spun down into the leaves. Marcus clutched at them, managed to get a final squeaking gasp of air, and rammed his knee up as hard as he could between his assailant’s legs, nearly breaking his kneecap on the hard-boiled leather of the man’s codpiece. Above him he saw the white glint of teeth in a tangled beard, as he had in the darkness of the street outside Consul Varus’ house, a little over a week ago. Thumbs dug into his throat, elbows curving outward to block his flailing hands. His ears roared, and he felt his struggling muscles slack. He rolled, trying to shake off the death that pinned him, and felt something jab his ribs on the ground. It was one of the long brooch pins that had been in Felix’s lovely cloak.

  The man above him was armored, but through his blurring eyes Marcus could see the gleam of sweat in the exposed hollow of the brown throat. It took his last strength, but he felt skin, muscle, windpipe puncture, and Lucius’ weight rolled back from him, his eyes staring and his breath whistling in horrible gasps as he pawed at the knot of jewels sticking out of his flesh. Marcus heaved him off, gagging himself on returning air. The man tumbled thrashing into the leaves, and when he tried to rise, more from instinct than anything else, Marcus kicked him with all his strength in the side. The man shot backward... and fell.

  He heard one of the girls cry out, and a sudden bass snarling roar from animal throats. Someone dragged him to his feet, shoved a torch into his hand, thrust him stumbling through a world that dipped and spun. The dragged hem of his ridiculous Persian robe tripped him
as he stumbled, and a heavy hand pulled him upright. The ringing in his ears occluded sound; then he became aware of a deep urgent voice saying, “Do you hear me? Marcus? Can you do it? Marcus?”

  He nodded, gasping, as the world slowly came into focus and the darkness around him became once more cool and open, instead of black and close and beating. He whispered, “Yes,” and felt the pinch of his cracked ribs again.

  “You’re sure?”

  Sixtus’ face was scratched and bleeding, close to his; farther away Churaldin lay among the leaves, blood spilling over his slashed face, close by the body of a dead gladiator whose cut throat had sprayed the surrounding trees in gore. The night stank of blood, the roaring of the lions filling his ears as the beat of his own heart had filled them a few moments before. He gasped, “Yes. Yes, I can.” He saw two other men unconscious on the ground and remembered the old man’s deadly facility with his hardwood staff.

  The strong grip half-supported him, half-thrust him toward the makeshift rope. “Quindarvis and one other are still in the pavilion, I believe. We could force our way in, but it would take more time than we’ve got.”

  It was no easy task to scramble down the knotted cloth and keep one hand free for the torch. The lions were still horribly busy, tearing and snarling; their lashing tails and tawny backs made a dark knot in the moonlight. There were more of them than he’d thought—eight or ten. Some of them looked up with dripping muzzles as he stepped away from the cliff, their eyes like amber mirrors in the torchlight.

  Something fell from above, the lions all startling and backing. Looking down he saw it was Sixtus’ staff. With a ringing clank a sword was dropped as well, and before he could protest, the old man came sliding nimbly down the improvised rope.

  “You’re crazy,” he gasped, and Sixtus said, “Move! Go slow and smooth, and for God’s sake don’t startle them. They have their taste of blood now.”