Search the Seven Hills (15 page)

From a huge dark archway to his right a man emerged, stinking of urine and sweat, like a dyer’s shop, and scarred all over his body like a dog-chewed piece of leather. Marcus caught him by the arm and asked if there was a centurion down below talking to a condemned man, and the beast-catcher, after subjecting him to a long scornful scrutiny, allowed, in language so foul as to be almost unintelligible, that there was.

Marcus went on up the dark stairs.

Though he had haunted the place as an adolescent, he had very little idea of how to get from the public portions of the Flavian to its underground mazes where beasts, prisoners, and props were kept. In the vaulted immensity of the passage, his footfalls echoed weirdly, and up ahead, through the arched and gilded opening, he saw the stars, white and cold and shining in the blue of the night sky.

It did not seem to be the same place as it had been that afternoon. The silence, the emptiness, changed it, the starlight on its thousands of concentric marble circles making each faint crack and shadow eerily clear. Below him the white sand lay in a round, oceanless beach, still smelling faintly of the raw feral stink of animals and blood. Round it the marble wall gleamed in a flawless ring of white, its gold rail gleaming softly under the uncertain light. From here the noises of the city seemed distant, attenuated, the rattling of the wheels of produce wagons on the cobbled streets softened to a rumble like the sea worrying the rocks on the shore. Beneath the ground a lion roared, a fauve and African sound in the milky Italian night. Somewhere iron creaked, and a man’s voice rose in rich Greek and undying musical love.

A shadow appeared, small and black and wavering, upon the sand.

“Oh precious boy, your cheeks are like the roses,/Those eyes the pools in which my love doth drown...”

Marcus walked down to the gilded rail. “Hullo!”

The man paused with his sand rake and shaded his eyes against the uncertain starlit distance. “Hark ho!” he called theatrically, “Walks Endymion by starlight?” The accent was a combination of Ionian Greek and Vatican wine.

“Does that door you came through lead down to the prisons?”

“Sweet nightingale in darkness, it does.”

Marcus judged the drop for a moment, then slithered under the railing, lowered himself over the marble edge to the full length of his arms, prayed briefly for the best, and dropped. It was farther than it had looked in starlight, but the sand was soft. Like a man crossing a desert he trudged toward the black maw of the beast door and its tall loose-jointed keeper, who had begun to moondance with his rake.

As he had feared, the man ceased his dancing at his approach and pirouetted up to him. He stank of wine, but, Marcus supposed, if your job was to go rake up snippets of human bodies out of the sand at the end of a long day, perhaps it paid to be drunk to do it.

“Ah! And why sojourns sweet Endymion, lover of the faithless lady of the moon, to these insalubrious shores?” In the starlight the man’s face was brown, claw-scarred, and foolishly smiling; he leaned on his rake directly in Marcus’ path. “The fruits of the seas these shoreless sands do yield...” He held up something from the bucket that hung at his waist, two human fingers stuck together by a rag of skin. “Here’s shrimp that’ll never crawl into a gold-lined purse again.”

“Very nice,” said Marcus queasily, and tried to edge his way past.

“You don’t tike shrimp?” The man interposed himself before the door, leering good-naturedly. “They aren’t to the taste of all, I fear. What toll shall you give me then, fair boy, to let you pass?”

“I’m afraid there’s been some mistake,” Marcus said politely. “My name is Orpheus, not Endymion. I’m looking for the road to hell, and I fear”—he took the rake from the janitor’s hand, stood it upright like a sundial, and consulted the resulting shadow on the sand—“I fear I’m desperately late.”

“Yonder lies hell all right,” said the drunkard, his smile momentarily fading. “You’ve but a short little trek, Orpheus, and no goddess at its end, either.” He leaned closer, surrounding Marcus in an affectionate arm and a vast reeking gust of stale wine. “But there! Now what’s our toll?”

“You have your toll,” said Marcus quietly, stepping back and holding up his hand to make a sign in the air as he had seen the priests of Isis do in processions. “I have set my music in your mind and heart, and my dancing in your feet. What more can sorrowful man ask of the children of gods?”

The drunkard bent his long supple body in an exaggerated bow. “Nothing, my lord.”

Copiously leaking sand from every fold of his toga, Orpheus passed him by and plodded on into the maw of hell.

The passage stank of animals, the musky stench of big cats mingling with the sharper odor of jackals. He could hear their roaring somewhere quite close and remembered Felix’s prattling voice from earlier in the evening, describing how the lions of the amphitheater were often trained to hunt men. The passage was pitch dark, and he wondered for a horrified instant if his drunken psychopomp had deliberately directed him into the cages themselves. But no—it was from this door that he’d seen the man emerge.

Other sounds reached his ears, shrill and confused. As he felt his way along the wall he remembered that on the last day of the games there was supposed to be a colossal beast-hunt, a mass slaughter of the most exotic creatures obtainable. Their voices dinned upon him from the darkness, a cacophony of screeches, growls, bays; the liquid slurp of water and the sudden booming belling of crocodiles, the wild frightened braying of wild asses. As he groped his way through the windings of those stinking tunnels, green or amber eyes flashed out of the darkness at him, the floor fouled and mucky under his feet. He blundered through the room where the Flavian band kept its instruments. Hunched like beasts themselves in the darkness were the gleaming rims of tubas, octopuslike groping shapes that turned out to be bagpipes, grinning monster teeth that were in actuality the pipes of the famous water organ. He turned a corner in the darkness and stumbled against the bars of a cage; there was a chorus of growls and swift sudden movement in the murk. A hand seized his arm, and he almost died of fright.

“‘Ere, wot yer doin’, scarin’ my babies?” snarled a voice from behind him. By the greasy ocher gleam of the single corridor lamp, Marcus could see a horrible old hunchback, his head bald and laced with scars, one eye socket gaping red and empty, with a reek to him that would have done credit to any lion in the place.

“I—er—I’m looking for the holding area for the condemned prisoners. The—the centurion’s a friend of mine.”

The hunchback sniffed and pointed down a corridor. “That way. Still no call to go a-puttin’ my lambs in a fret.” Growling, he shambled to the bars of the lion cage; as Marcus hastened down the new gullet of blackness, he could see the little man reaching through the bars to scratch the lions’ proffered ears. Presumably, he thought, they weren’t going to put their good man-killing lions into the beast-hunt. A cheaper grade of lion, perhaps, or those who were sick or injured.

The big holding cell had, up until today, contained several dozen people, “dishonest persons,” as the law called them, condemned for infamous or disgraceful crimes. Though slaves had raked out the filthy straw, the place stank of ordure, the smell overlain now by the sharper reek of sickness, vomit, and putrefying flesh. Only a tiny seed of light hovered above a hand-lamp, the gleam of it picking out the brazen edge of an armored body from darkness, the angle of a broken nose, the smooth line of a muscle rucked and broken where it was crossed by a scar. In the blackness beyond he sensed restless movement and the whimpering of a man in agony.

Arrius glanced up at the grating creak of the door. “So you decided to sit with the sick after all.”

Marcus nodded wearily. “Have you learned anything?” He gathered his toga about him and seated himself on the damp clay floor at the centurion’s side.

“Not much,” said Arrius. “He was wounded when he was taken; gangrene’s got to it, and fever. I doubt the lions would have touched him.” He rubbed at his eyes wearily. The stink of the wound turned Marcus queasy and sick. He was glad the centurion had not asked where he had been that evening, or why he had returned here.

Arrius went on, “He’s been pleading on and off with his father to forgive him for leaving the faith. He’s a Syrian Jew: I guess there’s enough of a difference between Jews and Christians for him to think he’s betrayed his father by going over.”

“Anything that causes you to leave your faith is evil to the Jews,” said Marcus. “Your faith is your family, it’s your nation; you’re a traitor to everything if you leave.”

Arrius raised his brows curiously. “Really?”

“Of course.” He kept his voice low, though he was certain that the dying man was too far-gone to hear. “One of the other students with me at Timoleon’s was the son of a strict Jewish family, and they raised a terrible dust when he turned philosopher. I remember his father used to come down to the Ulpias and have bitter quarrels with Judah, calling him traitor, Greek, apostate, accusing him of helping the men who razed the Temple of Jerusalem... It was terrible.” He looked out unseeing into the cramped stinking darkness of the cell. “At least my father never did that. I remember afterward Judah would sometimes be sick for days. It’s—it’s more to them than it is to us. Maybe that’s why he and I were friends.”

He leaned around the centurion and looked down at that wasted brown Semitic face. The young man was white under his tan, his skin dry and his eyes sunk in black pits. On his heaving chest gleamed the silver emblem of the fish, its chain shining like a ring of sweat around the tight-corded muscles of the straining neck.

Amid a salting of black stubble his white lips moved, mumbling cracked words in Aramaic,
“Abba
—
abba
—” and a string of broken phrases.

“What’s he saying?” whispered Marcus, when he had again fallen silent.

“Calling on his father. Says he was called—he had to follow. Something about the son of David, whoever David is.”

“David was their great king,” whispered Marcus in reply. “Judah—my friend—used to tell me there was a prophecy that David’s son or descendant would reunite the Jewish nation, and they’d go on to conquer the world.”

Distantly a lion roared, and at the sound the dying man whimpered pitifully, fumbling with dry hands at the bandages over his stinking wound. He began to whisper again, desperate.

“He says he was cheated,” translated Arrius after a moment. “Cheated of the glory of God. He says the gates of heaven will be closed to him. His death was not in the Lord’s name.”

“Didn’t the Christians this morning say something about that?” whispered Marcus, and the centurion nodded.

The dying man clawed suddenly at Arrius’ hand, his eyes opening wide. “Papa,” he gasped. “Papa...” His voice trailed off again in broken Aramaic. He began to sob weakly, clutching at his bandages, rolling back and forth on the heap of urine-saturated straw where he lay. Disturbed by his convulsions, a huge roach scurried indignantly across the grimy floor. Arrius carelessly crushed it with one hobnailed boot. Then, with no more ceremony, he pulled his dagger from his belt, reached across to take the Christian by the hair, and slit his throat.

Marcus turned his face hastily away, unwisely closing his teeth on the rising vomit and getting it, burning, in his nose instead. Darkness and the harsh coppery reek of fresh burning blood closed around him.

Arrius slapped him roughly on the shoulder. “Come on, boy, let’s go.”

He helped him get to his feet, and led him through black stinking corridors and out of the abyss.

They did not speak until they were in the wineshop across the street.

“Interesting.” Arrius poured wine from the jug a black-eyed Dacian slattern set on the table before them. “You hungry?”

“Quite the contrary,” murmured Marcus weakly. “What was interesting? Besides the accommodations, I mean.”

“‘Papa’ was the only Latin word he used.”

Marcus frowned. “But he was asking his father’s forgiveness for leaving the Jewish faith.”

“But he was speaking in Aramaic,” the centurion pointed out. “He called his father ‘
Abba
’; probably as he had done in childhood. The only word in Latin was ‘Papa.’ Who’s Papa?”

“Dorcas’ Papa?”

“That was my thought.”

Marcus set down his cup. To his great surprise the wine stayed down, and moreover made him feel better. It took the taste of straw, and human filth, out of his mouth and, with them, the taste of his father’s bread. “Then he might not really be Dorcas’ father at all.”

“He probably isn’t,” agreed Arrius, removing his helmet and laying it on the bench at his side. “The Christians aren’t the only ones to use a family terminology. The priests of Mithras are called ‘father.’” He leaned his chin on his hand and stared thoughtfully out across the dark square, where lights were still visible in the gladiators’ compound opposite the moonlit bulk of the amphitheater itself.

Others were filtering into the tavern now, as their duties freed them: janitors, cage-keepers, doctors. In the smutty orange glare, Marcus made out the shape of the drunken sand-raker, leaning on me shoulders of a doll-faced boy of ten or so. At the next table a couple of bovine gladiators were discussing technique, using their three-inch cloak pins for swords; across the room a trio of prostitutes, gaily tricked out in togas of blue and scarlet, were leaning on the marble-fronted bar, shrieking with laughter over the labored witticisms of a well-dressed young blood with gold dust powdering his hair and cosmetics that looked as though they’d been laid on with a plasterer’s trowel. The voices grated on Marcus’ nerves, brazen in the tawdry light; the place smelled like the changing room of a third-rate bath. He leaned his head on his hands, feeling suddenly drained and sick. His father, Felix pirouetting in his new robe, Dorcas in her brown head-veil, and the sand-raker moon-dancing with bloody hands—all blurred together in his exhausted mind. Soaking in the baths with Arrius seemed years in the past; wandering the streets in the predawn gloom to do his marketing, his cane basket slapping at his side, might have been an event that had taken place in distant childhood.