Search the Seven Hills (34 page)

In a sore torment of mind he left the drawing room, crossed the evening shadows of the garden toward the bedroom that had been his as a boy. The house seemed hushed, the noises of mourning in the atrium very distant. As he passed the open door of Felix’ bedroom, he paused, hearing from within the soft sounds of drunken grief and catching the smell of the place, like the breath of a tavern. From within a boy’s voice whispered, “Who’s that?” And as Marcus turned, “Oh! Master Caius, sir, please don’t be angry with him...”

“I’m not Caius.” In the dim evening light, wearing a plain white tunic and toga, he realized how easy it would be to mistake them. “Is that Giton?” He stepped inside, peering through the darkness to identify the pretty young boy who’d poured out the wine at dinner.

He was sitting at the foot of Felix’s sleeping-couch, wearing only a little loincloth in the heat of the stuffy room. A clay wine jar was cradled against his bare side. Four others lay empty, amid lakes of spilled dregs, on the parti-colored marble of the floor. Felix himself was stretched, sobbing bitterly, face down on the couch.

At the sound of his brother’s voice he rolled over, his long perfumed curls plastered to his cheeks with runny, half-melted unguents. His eye paint had run too, streaking his face with black and purple. He forced a drunken smile. “Ah! Professor! Sorry ‘bout all this. Silly of me, an’ all. Maudlin in my cups, you know. Always was.” He held out his hands to his brother, tears shining on his blotched cheeks. “Fancy it, cryin’ for that old hardfisted roughneck.” His voice cracked grotesquely, and he sobbed, “Give m’brother wine, kid.”

Giton looked questioningly up at Marcus, who nodded.

“It’s all right,” said Marcus after a moment, as the boy fetched another cup from the sideboard. “Thank you,” he said softly, and the boy nodded, a little absently. He was watching Felix, sorrow and concern in his intelligent, hyacinth-dark eyes.

Felix pawed at his eyes with his long fringed red sleeve, making the mess worse. “Pious, an’ all,” he said. “Caius’d approve. Oughter call him in.”

“No,” said Marcus.

Felix nodded owlishly. “Unmanly,” he agreed. “Still...” He flung his cup down, the dark wine spilling like blood across the floor that was already awash in it. “I hated the old bastard!” he cried, his voice breaking with sobs. “Never gave nothing but pain—Mother, Aemilia, and you. Don’t even know why I’m cryin’.” And he sank back on the cushions, gulping, his body shaking with renewed grief.

“Maybe because it’s possible to love and hate the same person at the same time,” said Marcus softly. “You hated him at closer range than I did. You knew him.”

“An’ to know him is to love him,” he choked, with drunken sarcasm. “Kind of a messy theory for a ph’los’phr, frater mine.”

“Life’s messy.” He drank off the wine and handed the cup back to the boy. “Will you stay with him?”

Giton nodded. “He’ll be better after the funeral,” he predicted quietly. “He didn’t learn about it until the morning after it happened; that’s what hurts him, I think.” He walked with Marcus out into the breezeway, slender and effeminate-looking and diminutive, but with those bright, unsurprisable violet eyes. “In a way it’s too bad,” he continued, glancing toward the doors that led into the atrium, through which the sound of wailing had died away as the mourners packed up to go home, their day’s work done.

“What is?” asked Marcus. “That any man would make himself so hated that his own sons were avoiding his house at the time of his death?”

The boy glanced up at him, those long painted lashes throwing soft curved shadows on the alabaster cheeks. “That he was that unhappy. It’s very difficult to change the way you are.” The boy looked as though he would have said something else, but changed his mind. A moment later he slipped back into the stifling darkness, and as he walked away, Marcus could hear the murmur of his voice and Felix’s sobbing, drunken replies.

The mourners had left the atrium by the time he returned there. The only light now came from the four lamps on their tall bronze stands, set at the corners of the bier, making his father’s face look like something wrought clumsily of wax. Despite the heavy wreaths, roses and asphodel mingled with ripe fruit and colored ribbons, Caius was right about the necessity for a quick funeral. As he came from the quiet alcove into the main room, the woman at the foot of the high couch looked up and smiled lopsidedly. “Hello, Professor.”

“I thought you’d be asleep still.” He leaned down to kiss her unbruised cheek. “Caius and I went by to see you.”

“Did you, dear? That was kind.” In the uneasy saffron light her face looked worse than it had earlier, drawn and exhausted. Her hair, loosened for mourning, was visibly graying.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “All the notables of the Senate have been in and out of the house all today and yesterday, including that horrid Garovinus man who’s still under the impression that he’s going to marry your sister. I couldn’t very well come to look at him then, not looking like a gladiator’s moll—not that any of them would have been so ill-bred as to ask, of course,” she added, with a faded smile. “But I feel that I owe it to him, to mourn beside him tonight.”

Marcus rested his hands on her shoulders. “You don’t owe him a thing, Mother.”

She sighed and shook her head. “I owe him the outward form of grief, since I feel none within. And even that isn’t strictly true.” Beyond the indigo curtains in the drawing room they could hear Caius moving about, giving orders to Straton in a low voice about the funeral banquet and wreaths for the pallbearers. At the foot of the bier, incense hissed in the burners, the clouds of it soft and blue and sweet-smelling over the oily smoke of the lamps. “I’ve been his wife for twenty-seven years, Marc—quite a record, these days. And I can’t remember ever being happy, or feeling anything but trapped by it, and helpless to get out. But still—it is twenty-seven years. One can’t just put it behind one without a backward glance.”

She turned from him and rested her big soft hands on the curved foot of the bier, the four torches touching her face with their multiple shadows. “I don’t know why I should feel there was something I could have done differently, some way I could have kept him from finding out...”

Marcus shook his head and put his arm around her waist. They stood almost shoulder to shoulder; standing as he had used to, the top of the dead man’s head would have come to his son’s chin, and to his wife’s lips. “If Caius was right, and it was a kind of sickness in him,” he said softly, “you could have done nothing to prevent it. One or the other of us would have provoked his wrath; if it had not been this, it would have been something else, quite soon.”

Her glance slid sideways, asking, then she smiled wanly and turned her head to kiss his cheek. Between Patricia Pollia Cato Silania and her sons there had never been much need of words.

With an odd sort of peace in his soul, he returned to his room and slept, for the first time in years, in the walled-in and expensive quiet that only the rich in Rome could afford.

It was as well that he did, for the morning was hellish. Marcus’ attempt to slip quietly away after a bite of breakfast was thwarted by his older brother, and he found himself involved in a bitter, sordid quarrel about funerary arrangements, the order of the procession, Felix’s drunkenness, and his own random and irresponsible lifestyle. As he so often had with his father, Marcus cried, “How can I make you understand?” and Caius retorted, pinch-lipped, “I hope I shall never be so lost to propriety as to understand how any man, no matter what his feelings toward his parents, can put a mere woman before his duty toward them. I hated our father as much as you did, but I respected him, something I fear neither you nor our drunken sot of a brother ever did. Since I am now the head of this family—”

“You may be the head of this family, but you do not have a father’s power over me!” Marcus shouted at him, losing his temper in his anxiety to be away. “My father is dead and I owe him nothing.”

“You may owe him nothing,” yelled Caius back, “but by Capitoline Jupiter you owe it to our house to remain here and to our mother not to desert her at such a time! If you will not do your duties to the House of Silanus, then depart from it and never look to us for another scrap of bread or another sesterce of silver as long as you live!”

“You can keep your filthy money if that’s all that matters to you!” cried Marcus, by now in a towering rage. “I don’t care...”

He was saved from further escalation of the quarrel by the entrance of Straton into the drawing room, crop-haired and wearing the ash-streaked white of mourning. “A visitor to see Lady Patricia,” he announced quietly, and with a withering glare at Marcus, Caius got to his feet and strode stiffly into the atrium. In the shadow of the vestibule Aurelia Pollia stood, her veil drawn over her head, looking timid and very small in the presence of the man who in life had so detested her husband and herself. Like a grave guardian, Priscus Quindarvis stood at her side, wearing, like her, plain white clothing, and Marcus took the opportunity to slip quietly away. Since the night of the banquet he had had badly mixed feelings about the praetor. As he let himself out a side door like a thief, he heard the voice of the time-slave calling out, “It is now the beginning of the third hour! It is now the beginning...”

There was not much time, he thought, to effect a rescue and get back in time for his father’s funeral.

He broke into a trot.

“I tell you anything could have delayed her!” Sixtus limped to the corner of his shadowy cell and turned like an old white fox, driven to bay among his watching baals. From the green tunnel of the overgrown walkway Marcus could hear his voice, even before he stepped into the room.

“Anything!” spat Telesphorus harshly. “You send a chaste young woman into a brothel and you say ‘anything.’”

“Don’t be an ass, cleaning women go in and out of those places all the time!”

“You’d know best about that,” snapped the priest. “I say she should never have gone.”

“Who else would you have sent? Arete? That Quartilla woman, who’d start preaching about fornication and adultery the first time she glimpsed a naked bum? Dorcas is clever, and she has the courage of a soldier, she’d—”

“What’s happened?” asked Marcus quietly from the door.

Priest and philosopher both turned. They seemed equally at home, Telesphorus with the green cavelike room with its litter of scrolls, inscriptions, and unknown gods, and Sixtus with the presence of the Christian. Marcus had the impression they’d been arguing doctrine and elenchus since breakfast.

It was Telesphorus who spoke. He folded his big callused hands on his bony knee. “Dorcas hasn’t returned from Plotina’s brothel.”

“When did she go?”

“Shortly after the first hour of the morning,” replied Sixtus.

At this time of the year, the daylight hours were very long. “Is the place open now?” asked Marcus after a moment, and Sixtus nodded.

“But you’d be about as inconspicuous as a black cat in a roomful of laundry. I’m having the place watched.”

“By whom?” asked Marcus, and the old man looked embarrassed, as if he’d been caught in a social solecism.

Telesphorus’ eyes glittered maliciously. “Once a general, always a general,” he purred. “The habit of command dies hard.” He cocked one chill gray eye up at Marcus. “Christians, of course. You don’t think Rome isn’t meshed over with a net of Christian intelligence? The Children of Light may be in bondage to the Children of This World, but slaves, as has long been known, know all things before their masters. Some of them are silly, and heretical, and believe wrong and foolish doctrines, but at least they believe something. They may haggle over it like market women, but at least they aren’t busy numbing themselves with booze or the sight of other men’s spilled blood. And whatever their doctrinal differences, they—we—are all of us bound together by the baptism of water and fire, an invisible baptism as strong and binding as that dunking in animal blood that holds together the followers of the Persian god. God sees all, and what God does not”—and he flashed the first wry smile Marcus had ever seen out of that austere priest—“the Bishop of Rome certainly does.”

Marcus was silent for a moment, looking down at that tall rawboned man, who leaned back against the wall like an angular spider. “Are you the Bishop of Rome?” he asked softly, and then remembered the scene in the jail. “No, of course, you couldn’t be.”

“And if I were I certainly wouldn’t let a centurion’s clerk know it,” remarked the priest. “No, Papa’s a far cleverer man than I, despite his woolly-headed doctrinal errors. Far too clever,” he added spitefully, with a sharp accusing glance at Sixtus, “to have sent a girl on a dangerous mission, as our friend here has done.”

“When would be the earliest I could go there?” asked Marcus, looking from Telesphorus to Sixtus. “Tonight? After dark?”

“Second hour of the night. That’s when the crowd will be the biggest.”

“You’ll fit right in,” sneered the priest, “with that funeral-crop of yours, smelling of sacrificial incense.”

Marcus felt himself flushing to the hairline, not so much because he contemplated a trip to a brothel directly following his father’s funeral, but because he scarcely had remembered that it would be so.

Sixtus’ deep voice cut into the burning silence. “Yes,” he said gently, “he will. It’s very common, I believe. After the awareness of death, one seeks the act of generation. So the illusion will pass, provided,” he continued, “you are willing to go through with it. If you aren’t, we’ll contrive something else.”

“No,” said Marcus, “no, I’ll go. At this point I don’t know who Arrius suspects, but any one of your people might be recognized. And Plotina’s is expensive. If Alexandros or Churaldin is suspected, someone might wonder where slaves got the kind of money it takes to go there.”

Sixtus limped back to his desk. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “It’s a point well taken. Arrius was here this morning, furious over me disappearance of the Christians from the prison, but whether he suspects Churaldin, or Alexandros, or the whole household including myself of carpenter-worship I don’t know, and I’m not certain that he does, either. What will your family say if you do this?”