Search the Seven Hills (25 page)

Not that it spoiled your supper-party much,
thought Marcus. But he only asked, “And when will Varus be back?”

The big man blew his breath out in a sigh. “Four days, five days. As I said, I’m glad there’s someone Lady Aurelia can trust. These next weeks will be busy ones in the treasury. This is the time of year we have to settle down with all our mingy little clerks, bless their circumcised little souls, and get everything straight for the elections. It’s going to be worse than a circus until September. With this happening in the middle of it...” He shook his head again. “The thing is, we don’t know whom we can trust. You know they’ve arrested the physician Nicanor?”

“What?” gasped Marcus, the guilt like the prick of a dagger.

“Seems some Christian whore denounced him—I’d never have thought it. Still, slaves are master dissemblers. I’ve never met one who didn’t lie, given a chance. But betrayal of a man who was as good to him as my poor cousin Varus was...”

Marcus felt his stomach turn, as though he’d swallowed poisoned food. Tonight was Midsummer Eve—Arrius was calling in all his debts. But still... The shady cool of Varus’ atrium returned to him, the desperate anxiety in the Greek’s dark eyes. “...If he thought there was it’d be the rack for us all...” The darkness under the Capitoline Prison, a woman’s hysterical sobbing, naming anyone to save herself pain...

Quindarvis growled. “If I was that blamed centurion I’d have that boy Hylas strung out as well. He should never have left her...”

“She ordered him away, and she was within fifty feet of her own front door!” protested Marcus indignantly. “She wanted to talk to me in private.”

“Blast it, boy, don’t you know all good slaves are deaf? It didn’t save her, did it? We’ve suspected all along they had a Christian confederate in the household, haven’t we? How else would they have known just when to expect her to return?”

“But—” Enlightenment hit him. He gulped hastily, “I have to go. Excuse me...” He dashed to where his mother stood, caught her by the arms, and gave her and the startled Lady Aurelia quick kisses. He gathered up his toga and went clattering down the stairs, hearing the praetor’s gruff voice behind him mutter, “Zany philosopher.”

He headed for the Forum at a loping trot.

“So you see, he can’t know anything.” Flies hummed in the high corners of the cracked plaster ceiling. The small officers’ room of the prison, facing east across the Forum, was already blisteringly hot. Under his mail-shirt Arrius’ tunic was dark with blotches of sweat. “They didn’t need a confederate within the household at all. Not if Tiridates set the whole thing up.”

“For a philosopher you’re making a mighty big leap there, Professor,” growled the centurion, turning over the wax tablet he’d been writing on to continue on the back. The wax was dark and soft already with the heat. “Just because they didn’t need Nicanor to set up the ambush doesn’t mean he wasn’t in on it, and isn’t a Christian.”

“But that woman would have accused anyone! She was nowhere near right about Lady Aurelia’s maid!”

“No?” He glanced up from under jutting brows. “But it happens Nicanor wasn’t able to account for his whereabouts last night—when we raided the catacombs—or the night before, when the jail was broken. He’s refused to talk at all.”

Marcus stared. “But—he has to. I mean...”

Arrius said dryly, “Precisely.” He set the tablet aside and cracked his broken heavy knuckles. “So what about it, Professor? You want the hangman to have a few words with him this afternoon, or do you feel sure enough of his innocence to throw double or quits on tonight?”

In the hot heavy silence the noises from the Forum outside sounded very loud: the flutes of streetcorner dancers, the harsh cry of a Chaldean woman, hawking amulets against the evil eye. From the guardroom beyond the open door a soldier could be heard, cursing the poxy whoreson of a faggot charioteer who’d lost him his money on the races. Marcus thought of what Sixtus had said, that if Tiridates’ house had a passage out of the cellar, Arrius and his men could sit all night around it. Even though the men would be scattered, to pick up the Syrian if he emerged some distance from his house, they couldn’t cover the whole Aventine. He thought of the rack and of the physician’s stiff-necked, unpracticed pleas.

“Let me talk to him,” he said.

Arrius shrugged. “You’re welcome to try. I couldn’t make him open his mouth.” He stood up and stretched, to unkink his back. “I’m going over to that eating-house down on Tuscan Street. Let our Son of Asclepius know that I plan to have some answers, one way or the other, by the time I come back.”

And he strode from the room, deadly and impersonally cruel as a tiger.

Marcus descended the ladder from the guardroom to the smothering darkness of the corridor below in an almost unbearable torment of mind. Justice cried out to him to tell Arrius to wait. Why dislocate every joint in an innocent man’s body—or a guilty one’s, for that matter—if the night would bring them the proof they sought? Why put anyone through the hideous torment of the rack on the say-so of a prating, cowardly person who had clearly been making accusations at random, especially if they were going to follow Tiridates that night to the rendezvous and the Christian sacrifice, and recover Tullia anyway?

But if they did not, after tonight it might be too late. If they failed—if Tiridates proved too clever for them, as the Christians had twice now slipped through the fingers of the guards—if Tiridates was, in fact, Papa—they would have no further clue. When Varus returned in four days from Sicily, it would be to find his daughter still gone, either dead or a forced participant in Christian rites. Then all of them—Nicanor, and the girl Dorcas, Judah Symmachus and his innocent father—would be consumed by his revenge.

Did he have the right to endanger them all, for a man who might just possibly be guilty anyway?

The guard on the cell that had once held the Christians gave Marcus a half-comical salute, and said, “‘Mornin’, Professor. Callin’ on our friend here?” Under the greasy yellow of the torchlight his face looked stupid and cruel, for all its amiable expression.

Marcus straightened the inexpert folds of his soiled toga. “Yes. Please.”

The guard unlocked the door. “Popular fella. Hear he’s got afternoon callers lined up, too.” He held up his torch to illuminate the cramped little hole.

The stink of the place was like mud in the nostrils. Nicanor lay in the dense shadows at the far corner of the cell, his face turned to the wall. He neither moved nor looked up when Marcus entered.

“Nicanor?” said Marcus doubtfully. He received no response. “Nicanor, it’s me, Marcus. I have to talk to you.” He crossed the room to that unmoving figure in the darkness. “I’m sorry I—” He stopped. From the door the general stink of the room had overwhelmed it, but this close it was unmistakable. The hour or so he’d spent in the pits of the amphitheater, if nothing else, had taught him the stench of fresh blood. “Holy gods...” He dropped to his knees, turning that hunched and drawn-up body over. His hand came away blazing red, as if he had set it down in paint.

“How’d he do it?” Arrius pushed the plate of bread and stew across the little table at him; Marcus shook his head weakly. Behind them on Tuscan Street, the male whores for whom this district was famous were beginning to parade in their long-sleeved tunics and eye paint, primping their perfumed curls.

“He had a cloakpin. He ripped the veins in his wrists.” Marcus shivered at the memory. “The physician from the gladiatorial school was the closest we could reach—the one down by the Flavian. He was working on him when I left.”

Arrius finished off his wine and stood up, shaking straight the folds in his red cloak. “So he’s not dead?”

“Not when I left.”

He paid his reckoning and a little over for the girl who’d served him, who favored him with a big smile from which half the teeth were gone. “You’d be surprised how tough men can be,” he mused, as they jostled through the crowds on that narrow street. “I’ve seen men crawl twenty miles with a broken spear-head in them, then have the camp doctor cut it out at the end of it, and have them wake up and ask for food just as we were rolling them up in their shrouds. Doctors at the gladiatorial schools will tell you stranger things than that.” They detoured around a little knot of brightly clothed Syrians, grouped in the doorway of a fortune-teller’s shop, their rings flashing with the waving of their arms. “We’ll see what we can find out tonight, but if—”

He broke off, as the clamor from a side street interrupted him, a medley of jeers and curses and men’s voices yelling, “Murderer! Corpse-eater!”

“What the—”

Halfway down the lane a mob had gathered, flinging stones and garbage at the bent, spiderlike figure of a man crouched against the pink-washed wall of a tall building that ran the length of the block. They were idlers, men out of work for the most part. Men who yesterday had occupied their time at Quindarvis’ celebrated games, thought Marcus, and hadn’t quite had their fill. But a couple of the local shopkeepers had joined them, a slippermaker in his little leather apron and a man with an ironworker’s soot-blackened face. Children crowded the lane, picking up dung from the road to hurl. Cries of “Christian! Jew! Christian!” tangled in the thick hot air.

Arrius snarled a startled curse and left Marcus to stride toward the mob.

The Christian straightened up a little, and a familiar voice screeched over the din of the crowd. “You stone the prophets of the Lord! God made himself manifest as Christ Jesus to smite the abodes of sin, to delve out the taproots of abomination! Oh ye wicked and adulterous generation...”

“Abomination yourself, you dirty ghoul!” someone yelled, and a piece of dog shit splattered stickily against the Christian Ignatius’ dirty robe.

The shrill voice rose. “Repent of your evils! Cast aside your wickedness and your fornications! God shall smite this city with his fire, and shall shatter it into atoms...”

“That stupid little...” The centurion began to force his way through the crowd with businesslike brutality. In the crowd behind him Marcus heard one idler mutter to another.

“Serves the little bastard right. Anyone who’d believe the Lord made himself manifest as Christ, rather than merely imbuing the human substance with divine nature, deserves to be stoned.”

“‘Specially after it clearly states in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that there was one God and one Lord Jesus Christ.”

“You’d know that little bugger’d get it all wrong.”

Marcus swung around, but people were pressing up so closely behind him he could not see who’d spoken. All around him mouths were open, men and women howling, “Murderer! Kidnapper! Kill him!”

A bigger stone tore a jagged bruise of red in Ignatius’ cheek. He fell back against the wall behind him, shaking his bony fists at them all and screaming, “Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortionate shall inherit the Kingdom of God...” Juice from a burst plum trickled down the side of his bald head into the blood in his beard. In the doorway of the house behind him women had appeared, clutching their thin robes about them, some of them shrieking in excitement, others giggling. A bigger rock smashed him in the shoulder, whirling him around, and he fell to his knees in the muck of the lane. Baying, the mob closed in.

“Here!” roared Arrius, in a voice trained to carry over urban bread riots. “What is all this? Get back, curse you...”

At the sight of his armor the mob milled a little, losing their momentum. Some of them dropped the rocks they bore. One man who’d been kicking the hunched little form on the ground gave it a final boot and turned sulkily away, like a child called to order by an unloved older brother. In the crowded doorway of the tall house a woman pushed her way to the fore, her gilt hair dressed in careful curls around a heavily made-up face, her thin tunic and toga of flame-colored silk leaving neither her profession nor her charms in any question. In a face like Venus’ her eyes were cold as a moneylender’s.

“Take that little pig out of here and keep him from slandering decent people!” she cried, in a voice rich and sweet as Samian wine. “I run an orderly house, and I can’t have filthy little troublemakers like him...”

The crumpled form in the mud stirred itself; a bloody, angry face was raised, fire sparking from those dark brilliant eyes. “Whore that sitteth on the waters! Scarlet mother of adulteries, drunken on the blood of the martyrs of Christ!”

The red rosebud mouth popped open in shocked distaste. “Well, I never!”

Arrius seized Ignatius by the arm and hauled him to his feet.

“Pig! Devil! Scum!” shrieked the Christian, spitting on the man’s scarred brown arm. “Bloody beast of Caesar! You persecute the servants of the Lord!”

Around them the mob was already losing interest, drifting away down the narrow street or returning to abandoned pursuits. Behind the blonde woman the gaggle of girls still peeked, or else pulled the thin gauze of their dresses tight, so that the rouged tips of their breasts showed through the cloth, and blew kisses to the men who still lingered, as though to say that it was not too early in the day for other matters than killing Christians.

The centurion held his rescued martyr at arm’s length and looked up at the madam. “What’s our boy here been up to, Plotina?”

“You saw him! Cursing at customers, blocking the doors, ranting that garbage...” She shrugged, her big hard breasts shifting like melons under the thin silk. “I’ve always run an orderly house and I pay taxes to keep it that way. I can’t have this kind of thing. My customers come here to relax, have a little decent fun...”

A little decent fun like you were having at Quindarvis’ supper-party,
thought Marcus suddenly, recognizing that round pink face in its frame of too-bright hair. It occurred to him to wonder if she’d helped provide the entertainment, and he felt a kind of sick distaste, as though he’d bitten into something rotten.

Meanwhile Ignatius was striking ineffectually at his rescuer’s arm. “Beast of seven heads! Pimp of Antichrist! In the days to come you will be thrown into the fiery pit, and the saints of God shall laugh to hear you scream!”