Search the Seven Hills (12 page)

There was no crowd to hide her, but neither could he conceal himself amid the usual mob in the Forum. Keeping as much distance as he dared, he trailed her among the statues of the Caesars—that ill-assorted family-party of deities whose spirits still guarded the city that had murdered most of them—and through the shadows of Augustus’ great triumphal arch. They passed the tall portico and round altar that marked the spot where Julius Caesar’s body had been given to the fire, and crossed to the monumental shadows of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Here the crowds were thicker, coming and going from the New Way and the shops around the base of the Palatine Hill. Marcus found himself snared in a gaggle of men around a Vespasian memorial, his shopping basket catching on someone’s elbow. He tugged at it, cursing, casting a despairing glance after the girl as she vanished into the narrow New Way itself. By the time he’d got it free he had to run to catch up; moreover, the hare he’d bought for dinner was beginning to leak through its saturated wrappings, dripping down his toga and drawing after him curses and flies.

Ahead of him the girl was moving faster, heading straight along the New Way, the shadows of the overspanning arches barring her in a flickering series of patches of gold and black. Once she glanced over her shoulder, and his heart was in his throat lest she see him. But she turned neither left nor right. She followed a path beside a ruined wall, past the broken columns and tumbled masonry that had been Nero’s fabulous palace, turned along the main way under the shadow of that incredible gilded porch. They passed the towering marble Colossus, a 110-foot statue by the greatest dilettante of all time...

...And he realized where she was headed.

When anyone said they were going to the Colossus, they were seldom referring to that staggering piece of frivolity. Already people had begun referring to the Flavian Amphitheater by that name. As he came around the comer and into the mobbed square before those towering white walls, Marcus heard the baying of the crowd again, a deafening elemental howl like the sea. He made a run to close the distance as the brown head-veil and blue dress plunged ahead of him into the throngs that surrounded the amphitheater as thick as porridge, and found himself entangled in an almost inextricable morass of sidewalk fortune-tellers, blanket dancers, fig sellers and bookies, each with their attendant mob of idlers. Ahead of him the girl was edging and darting her way through the press like a fish through weeds, and turtlelike, Marcus swam after her. His shopping basket caught on some woman’s parcel; he tried to pull it free and found himself engaged in a desperate tug-of-war, the woman shrieking and striking him with her cane as Dorcas plunged into the roaring vaults of the arcade that surrounded the Flavian itself.

With a final determined wrench, Marcus saved his dinner and went shoving through the mobs into the shadows of that preposterous edifice. The shadows of the arcade seemed black after the sunlight of the square; the bellowing of the crowd was deafening. He glimpsed Dorcas as she turned in an arched doorway that led inside, and this time their eyes met. Then she plunged inside and out of sight.

Marcus darted after her into a vaulted stairway whose gilt-and-purple ceiling rang with the noise of the crowds. Someone caught him by the back of the toga with a grip that all but lifted him off his feet—“You got a ticket, boy?” growled a burly man with an ex-pug’s cauliflower ear.

“But I have to...” he gasped desperately.

“I know, I know,” sympathized the guard, “but youse still gotta have a ticket.”

Marcus fumbled in his shopping basket, dropping the leeks, trickling hare’s blood down his foot, while people crowding behind him cursed at him in languages he’d never heard before in his life. He slapped the grimy bit of clay into the man’s hand and ran up the wide marble stairs, pushing past the crowds that blocked his way. Sunlight streamed through the vast archway ahead of him, blindingly white on the dirt-smutched marble of the walls. It flashed blue-black on Dorcas’ dark hair as she reached the top of the stairs ahead of him, pulled off her veil, and vanished past the archway into the light. Cursing, Marcus struggled into the open air.

The slopes of the arena stretched before him like a reversed mountainside, the white of citizens’ and senators’ togas forming a solid block to halfway up the slope, and from there, the blues and browns and dull greens that marked the ranks of the poor, of foreigners, or slaves. Overhead the vast awning rippled in the wind. In the center of the ring, where the sunlight struck directly, the white sand glared like salt, blotched with crimson dabblings of blood. From this distance the half-dozen pairs of men still struggling there looked very small. Their armor and weapons were edged in sun-fire as they moved—Thracians, like men of leather and bronze, faceless in their bizarre helmets, the lighter-armed hoplites dodging their blows with sun and sweat and blood gleaming on exposed flesh.

He swung around, scanning the crowds on the benches behind. In the teeming mob it was hard to tell, but he thought he saw one figure climbing the steps between the tiers more swiftly than the others. Without the head-veil for identification he could not be sure. He struggled to follow, tripping over feet, murmuring a spate of “Excuse me’s” over the snarled yells of “Hey! Down in front!” Then another roar smote his ears like a thunderclap. As one man, the entire crowd was on its feet, surging around him and trapping him where he stood, roaring, “Make him fight! Get the irons! Coward!” Below, Marcus could see what had happened: a burly man in Samnite armor had lost his sword to a trident-man’s net. He had no other weapon; he had dropped his shield and fled. From the gates in the fifteen-foot marble cliff that rose above the sand, men were coming out already, with whips and a smoking brazier. The Samnite wheeled, tried to change the direction of his hopeless flight; the trident-man, light on his feet as a terrier, was before him, driving him back against the barrier. Light flashed on metal, the blood leaping out to splatter them both; even the food vendors were jumping up and down yelling, “Kill him! Kill him!” The whole arena was one tornado of noise, over which the thundering
oompah
of the Flavian band boomed in incongruous counterpoint.

The man was down, doubled around his spilt belly. Amid the shuddering roar of the crowds, if he had cried out in pain, no one had heard. Slowly he raised himself on one arm, turned a helmeted head as gold and shapeless as an ant’s toward the stands where the praetors, the sponsors of the games in the emperor’s absence, sat. Impassive, the trident-man stood over him, his short dagger in his hand. Marcus recognized Quindarvis when he raised his arm, even at that distance saw the haughty dignity, the power in every well-timed gesture. It was at his signal that the victor helped his beaten opponent to kneel, placed the razor point of the dagger against the hollow of his throat. As all good gladiators should, the Samnite, in spite of his ruptured guts, leaned into the deathblow; the cheering of the crowd rose to a deafening crescendo, drowning out the thunderous fanfares of the band.

Men around him were already sitting down, murmuring approval and anticipation. Marcus remained standing, scanning the stands above him without much hope. He reflected that even if Dorcas had been trapped by the surge of the crowd, she had less far to struggle to reach one of the stairways that led from the topmost tier. And she need not even have done that. His vision blocked by the mobs all around him, he had lost track of the precise place in which he had last seen her. She could be any one of hundreds of tiny moving figures; for that matter, she could have seated herself on the nearest bench. Marcus felt a sudden surge of sympathy for whatever worthy young heroine of legend it had been who had been required to separate a mixed bushel of wheat, barley, and rye.

“You gonna stand there all day blocking the view, kid?” demanded a hairy-eared Illyrian with grease stains on his toga.

“Sorry,” mumbled Marcus. He tripped over a long succession of feet on his return journey to the stairway and pushed his way through the tide of ascending crowds. It was only when he reached street level again and stepped out of the shadows of the surrounding arcade that he realized that his much-abused shopping basket swung considerably lighter in his hand.

One of the local cutpurses was going to have hare and stew for his dinner.

Marcus uncharitably wished the food poisoned and went dejectedly on his way.

Stick to the good old ways, my boy, and do as I tell you. I hate to see a good man corrupted by the filthy, perverted manners that pass for morality nowadays.

Plautus

“I
WAS HAD FOR A CHUMP
—a fool. A child could have done it better.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” advised Arrius easily.

“But I let her get away! She might be our last hope!”

“Not with half-a-dozen Christians in the prison, she wasn’t.” The centurion leaned his shoulders against the tiled curve of the niche and looked out across the vast expanse of steaming water and pink, heat-puffed, naked bodies. His arms, resting along the rim of the hot pool, were brown as leather up to the line where his tunic sleeve usually fell; after that they were startlingly white. Through the steam his greenish gaze seemed softened, as though, like asphalt, his soul become more malleable with heat. “She did exactly what I would have done, if I were being followed. And if her father’s a powerful member of the cult, she’ll have learned caution from the cradle. Did you stay for the rest of the games?”

“No,” said Marcus in distaste, and Arrius grinned.

The Baths of Aphrodite were far less fashionable than the more elegant premises Marcus usually frequented. The arcaded roof was lower, and the big room with its warm swimming pool and series of hot tubs was far noisier. The clientele seemed to be mostly soldiers, laborers, shopkeepers and their wives, with some of the higher-class prostitutes of the neighborhood. Unlike the more stylish baths, these didn’t have separate facilities for men and women. During their soak in the hot tub his conversation with the centurion had suffered several momentary gaps.

“You said yourself there’s nothing more to be got out of the Christians in the jail,” fretted Marcus. “They’ve had her since the night before last!”

“And we haven’t heard—or found—a thing,” replied Arrius stolidly. “They’re holding her, you can depend on that. As for this morning, while you were out chasing skirts around the Flavian I got in touch with another one of my informers, greasy little ghoul that he is. He says he has another Christian for me.”

Marcus had ducked his head beneath the surface of the heated water to rinse the sweat from his cheeks, but the words brought him up like a dolphin. “Where?” he gasped, shaking his lank curls from his eyes.

“At the Flavian. He’d have gone to the lions this afternoon if he hadn’t been sick. The lion-keeper refused to send him into the ring, though why the silly bastard thinks lions will get sick from eating a sick man’s meat is beyond me. They live half the time on carrion in the wild. He wasn’t arrested for Christianity, in fact nobody knew he was a Christian at all, till he started raving.”

“What was he arrested for?”

Arrius shrugged. “He wasn’t—not technically, anyway. He was supposedly philandering with his master’s wife; his master’s a pal of your friend Quindarvis.”

Marcus started to reply and saw that his companion’s attention had been momentarily diverted by a bountiful young redhead, passing by with a towel thrown casually over one shoulder.

After a moment’s reflection the centurion continued, “In any case, this poor ass can’t have had anything to do with the kidnapping. But he might give us some names. Care to come?”

Marcus shook his head. “I—I have something else I have to do tonight.” In his heart he was not sure which brought him more dread—the thought of another visit to the amphitheater, or the scrawled message that he had found upon returning to his lodgings, summarily bidding him to his father’s house for dinner. “Did you learn any more from the Christians you have?” he asked, to change the subject.

“Nothing of value. And if what your girl Dorcas said to the priest was true—and there’s no reason to think it isn’t, since they didn’t know they were being watched—it’s no surprise. It’s possible the kidnapping was planned by another group of Christians entirely, or that word simply hasn’t got around about it yet.” He sat up and splashed warm water over his face. In the main pool beyond, a rowdy fight had broken out, men yelling good-naturedly, women shrieking and laughing, the noise bounding off the mosaic arches of the low roof.

“So what are you going to do with them?” Marcus hauled himself up, dripping, onto the edge of the sunken tub, and deliberately ignored a wink directed at him by a fat black Libyan girl across the room.

“They’re being transferred to the holding jail across from the amphitheater tonight. They’ll stand trial tomorrow and be sentenced in time for the last day of Quindarvis’ games.”

Marcus stared. “That’s awfully quick.”

“I didn’t give the orders. The games only last three days; it’d be a shame to waste ’em.”

“But what if they’re not guilty?”

Arrius had emerged from the water and stood dripping, like a scarred Neptune, drying his hair with a towel. He looked quietly down at Marcus. “Boy, they’re guilty,” he told him. “They’ve broken the law that forbids the worship of their crazy Jewish god, they’ve been formally denounced before a magistrate, and that’s enough, whether they practice abominations as part of their rites or not.”

“They’re not the only ones who do,” Marcus pointed out.

“No,” agreed the centurion. “We’re surrounded by abominations. I personally think any cult that requires its priests to geld themselves in a religious frenzy—with, I suspect, the help of drugs—should be looked into, but there are temples of Cybele all over Rome.

“But it isn’t the abominations. It’s the politics. When times get bad people get scared, and they want to know that at least in their own lifetime everything’s going to be fine. They want to kill what’s troubling them. And since you can’t blame the system or blame hard times, you blame the stars—which you can’t fight—or blame a bunch of people who are messing things up, personally, for you. That’s the Jews and the Syrians and the Christians. But the Jews are too powerful in the government—I don’t think there’s a department in the treasury that doesn’t have its little Jewish clerk looking after things—and the Syrians have too much money. The Christians are a cheap target, and they’ve made themselves a target. They could sacrifice their babies in the Forum, so long as they handed a slice of the meat to the priests of the genius of the emperor.