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Her smile was startling, like the sweep of spring sunlight on a cloudy day. “No, you were good. I don’t think I’ve seen even”—she hesitated, barely perceptibly swerving from a name—“even an actor in the theater do better.”

Instinctively, he knew she had been going to say, “even Papa,” and he remembered again that little comedy called wicked uncle that she and Telesphorus had played, to get her safely out of the prison with her message to that powerful and elusive priest. “Are you all such good actors?”

She shook her head. “Only when we have to be.”

“And do you often have to be?”

She stood still, studying him for a moment in the shadows of the steep, hot, echoing street. The strong brows drew downward again, the brown eyes turned grave. “As often as the fox has to lay false trails for the hunters,” she replied quietly. “We do a lot of it, to protect our own. You saw yourself, back there”—she nodded in the direction of the street where they’d met—“how easy it is to create a totally false impression with very few words.”

He abruptly remembered Sixtus at the orgy, acquiring his reputation for unnamed vice, and had to laugh. “Now that you mention it, I’ve seen a man do it with no words.” He grinned. And then, his smile fading, “Does that kind of thing happen often? Being baited that way?”

Dorcas shook her head and shuddered, drawing her veil closer around her shoulders, as though involuntarily seeking to cover herself from the memory of those obscene hands. “It’s never happened to me. Even if people know—and many people in my neighborhood do—they mostly let us alone.”

They had resumed walking, descending the steep cobbled stairs through a canyon of five-story apartment houses whose projecting upper stories almost met above their heads. Someone far above sang, “Heads up below!” and the two of them flattened against the wall just in time to avoid the subsequent shower. Marcus found himself astonishingly at ease with this girl, in spite of what he knew about Christians. She had many of the qualities that he loved in Tullia Varia—the spirit, the humor, the high courage that had taken her into the prison, the wits that had eluded him in the mobs at the amphitheater. It was increasingly difficult to remember that the puckish, triangular face masked cannibalism, treason, perversion. That this girl who walked so trustingly at his side might very well know where her brothers in Christ had taken Tullia, and what they had done to her.

Maybe she’d been there herself.

She looked up at him again. “You’re the man who followed me to the Flavian,” she told him simply. “Does this mean I’m under arrest?”

“I’m not sure,” said Marcus helplessly.

The smile returned, ruefully amused. “I suppose I ought to thank you even if you had saved me to arrest me, but it wouldn’t be very sincere thanks in that case. But thank you, whyever you did what you did. As I said it—it’s never happened to me. Sometimes boys will follow me, or call me names. But this... Since that girl was kidnapped I’ve been afraid to go out. Not because of the soldiers, but because of ordinary people in the street.”

“This Papa I keep hearing about should have thought of that,” said Marcus grimly, “before he had her kidnapped.”

Dorcas whirled on him, bristling like a bating hawk. “Papa never ordered it!” she cried fiercely.

Her very sureness took him aback. “But if he’s the head of the Christians, he’d have to have known,” he pointed out.

“It’s a lie!” she said. “The Christians would never have done such a thing.”

The street debouched into the New Forum. The pillared porch in which they now walked was almost empty, a cool shaded forest of white marble occupied only by occasional strollers and a fortune-teller half-asleep on a blanket-load of cut-rate amulets. As if in a sunlit clearing, the gleaming bronze statue of the emperor himself shone in the open spaces beyond the porch.

Marcus retorted, “Not even if her father had had their friends thrown to the beasts?”

Dorcas paused, her full lips tightening, and in a moment the sparks of anger faded from her brown eyes. “No,” she said softly. “I suppose you could call that the bone in the throat about Christianity, or one of them, anyway. Revenge—Well, we’re taught that if someone strikes you on your right cheek, you should turn the other one to them so they can strike that, too. No reproach intended,” she added, with a quick flicker of a smile. “Or that if someone steals your cloak, to give them your coat as well. It’s very hard to return good for evil,” she concluded. “And I’m not very good at it, myself, yet. It was even harder when I was a slave.”

“Are you a freedwoman, then?” His stomach turned suddenly at the thought of this pretty, courageous girl in the power of someone like the dissolute Porcius Craessius, or even of a man like his own father.

She must have read the pity and disgust in his eyes, for she said gently, “It could have been worse. I had one horribly bad master, and one who could have cured anyone of hatred of mankind.”

“And yet you became a Christian in spite of him.”

The dark heavy curls swung against her cheek as she raised her head. “You don’t understand.”

He could have said that he did. A week ago he would not have—a week ago it had been inconceivable to him that anyone would have indulged in bizarre rites, in wholesale treason, in a vicious sect whose brotherhood was deliberately designed to undermine social order. But a week ago he had not known about Hypatia and Nicanor, nor seen a human being drowned simply for a man’s amusement at the way the words “Drown him” rolled off the tongue... A week ago he had not understood what comfort lay in the illogical assurance that someone—Isis, Atargatis, Christ, or Papa—had all things in hand, or what evil could lurk behind the most smiling of facades.

Looking down into those grave dark eyes, clear and simple-seeming as a woodland spring, he reminded himself that by her own admission this girl was versed in the foxlike art of laying down false trails, of seeming to be what she was not.

The longer he spoke with her, the more difficult it was to believe.

“If you Christians don’t even agree on whether your god was a god or not, how can you agree on what he taught or didn’t teach?” he asked her. “There might be a branch of you who believe in returning vengeance for wrongdoing, against the enemies of the Lord.”

“Papa would know,” she insisted quietly.

“How would he know?” Marcus cried.

She took a step back from him, holding her veil about her, her puckish face troubled by the vehemence and misery in his voice. Then her dark brows lifted. “It’s you,” she said. “You’re the girl’s lover—the girl who was kidnapped. Papa told me...”

And when she broke off into silence, he demanded, “Papa told you what?”

“Papa told me that the lover of the girl who was kidnapped was seeking her. That’s how you came to follow me, isn’t it?”

“What does Papa know about it?” cried Marcus furiously. He strode toward her to seize her wrist, but she backed from him, dodging among the pillars. “Who is Papa?”

In the shadows her eyes flooded with compassion. She whispered, “I’m so sorry.” He lunged at her and she was gone, her footsteps light and swift on the marble of the pavement. He plunged after the sound, but the forests of columns baffled him. Despairingly he cried, “Come back here!” and his only answer was a disapproving glare from a couple of aged senators, walking in the porches in the quiet of the afternoon, who plainly thought little of young men who played catch-me with pretty girls in the colonnades of the imperial basilicas.

Angry, disgusted, and perplexed, he turned away, making his way down Silversmith’s Rise to that small ugly building on the flank of the Capitoline Hill.

He found Arrius there, still in the same faded red tunic and chain-mail shirt he’d worn last night, writing up a report on wax at the warden’s desk. There were big blue smudges under his eyes, and his unshaven face was lined with fatigue. Standing in the doorway watching him, Marcus was uncomfortably aware that if he’d got any sleep at all in the last twenty-four hours, it had probably been on the bench at the back of this room. He glanced up as Marcus came in, his greenish eyes hard and cold as a hunting cat’s.

He said, “We’ve got them.”

Marcus blinked at him stupidly. “Got who?”

“The Christians who had Tullia Varia.”

The room, the world, did one slow, deliberate spin. Then he cried despairingly, “Had?”

The centurion tossed something across the desk to him, something that tinkled softly on the wood. “We found this in their meeting place.”

It was a bronze earring, shaped like a lily, snagged with a single strand of brown curling hair.

marcion: Recognize us! [as members of the Church] saint polycarp: I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan!

Saint Polycarp of Smyrna

“T
HE USUAL THING,”
reported the centurion in his dry, uninflected voice. Marcus followed him into the dingy twilight of the guardroom, his head buzzing and the ache that he had felt before returning to his whole body but mostly to the wound in his arm. “An informer told us about a meeting this morning, down near the circus. We surprised half-a-dozen Christians in a cellar they’ve been using regularly for a meeting place. We found this on a blanket in a corner.”

“Papa would know,” Dorcas had said.

Well, maybe Papa had known. And maybe Dorcas had, too.

Marcus felt like a child who has been robbed by a kindly stranger.

“It lets your friend Nicanor and his lady off the hook, anyway,” continued Arrius, climbing down the ladder ahead of him. “But it’ll be hell if these characters turn stubborn.”

Even outside the cell, they could hear the voices raised in acrimonious conflict.

“I don’t care what kind of self-deceitful arguments you spout! The fact remains that it’s God’s grace and the holiness of Christ that make a sacrament efficacious, not how pious the priest is! It says in the Book of the Twelve Teachers...”

“You heretical drunkard, you wouldn’t know God’s Law if it came up and bit you!” screamed the familiar voice of Ignatius. “By that argument the city hangman could preside over the Supper of the Body and Blood! You’d have the priests of the Church no better than a bunch of thieving rascals, like the priests of Cybele—no better than yourself, I daresay...”

“I suppose we should all be as perfect as you are!”

“Neither the fornicators, nor the lustful...”

Arrius threw open the door with a crash just as a big muscular woman in the short tunic of a farmwife shoved the two would-be combatants apart. Typically, not a Christian in the room turned his head.

Around the massive peacemaker’s muscular arm, Ignatius continued to jeer. “A man who is as bound as you are to the sins of the flesh has no business meddling in the affairs of heaven! You should put aside your wife...”

“I’ll give you the priests of Cybele, you little...”

Another woman chimed in. “Anyone who would believe in the coequality of the human nature of Christ with the Divine—”

Arrius roared, “Silence, all of you!”

Neither of the two combatants over the purity of the priesthood so much as paused for breath; their peacemaker, moreover, plunged into a long misquotation from some neoplatonist philosopher on the subject of essence and accidents.

Marcus yelled into the rising din, “Shut up! I’ve heard enough! Does it matter how many natures your god had?”

Ignatius broke off mid-curse and whirled on him. “Of course it matters, you stupid idolater! How can anyone be saved by faith, if their faith be false and crooked? Only pure faith, and purity of the body...”

“No, it isn’t faith alone that’ll save a man from sin!” cried another woman, leaping to her feet. “‘A tree shall be known by its fruits...’”

“That filthy heresy was disproved by—”

From a comer a young man’s voice yelled, “Shut up, Ignatius! Your logic is as shoddy as your manners!”

And Marcus recognized the voice.

“Judah!”

The young man who had spoken rose from his place with the lithe powerful movement that Marcus remembered, and came to the patch of light that fell, grimy and yellow, through the open doorway into the fraught darkness of the cell.

“Marcus,” he greeted him quietly.

Timoleon’s two erstwhile students faced each other in silence, groping for words and finding none. It was as if bars of mistrust, and the threat of death, had been lowered between them. It is said that the saved cannot speak with the damned.

It was Judah who broke the silence. “I see you’ve turned informer.”

It was the second time in as many hours that this charge had been leveled at him, and Marcus cried out perhaps more vehemently than he need have, “I’m not! Dammit, I’m only trying to find Tullia!”

Judah’s dark brows knotted. He studied him for a moment, sweat gleaming on his dark breast, the silver fish that hung there flashing like a chip of fire.

Marcus cried, “Where is she? What did you do with her?”

Something changed in Judah’s eyes. “You’re arguing ahead of your facts, Silenus.”

“They found her earring in your damn cellar is all the facts I know.”

He made an impatient gesture. “I should have expected something like that from you. What Roman citizen would ever admit he doesn’t know what’s happening?” He flicked Marcus’ toga with a scornful finger. “The whore that sits upon many waters—but it won’t be her adulteries that bring her down. It’ll be her damn certainty that there’s nothing beyond what she already knows.” He stared bitterly at Marcus. “I’m a lying Christian, remember? You believe what you believe.”

Marcus was silent, carefully telling over the letters of the alphabet. At
F
he said, “I don’t know what to believe, Judah. I’m sorry I—I argued ahead of my facts.”

The Christian looked down his high-bridged nose at him, bleak scorn in his dark eyes. “I’m sorry, too,” he said coldly, “that your rotten little informers haven’t anything better to do than persecute the servants of the Son of man. But the Lord will look after his own. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord...”

“Where is she?!” shouted Marcus.

“Judah?” A hesitant voice spoke at Marcus’ elbow, and he turned, startled, as Isaac Symmachus hobbled diffidently into the grimy cell.