Search the Seven Hills (27 page)

“Of course,” he said softly. “Of course—it’s the biggest deserted building in Rome. It’s been shut up for—what did you say, Sixtus? Going on fifteen years?”

“Going on that,” murmured the old man.

“If the cult of Atargatis was proscribed in the first year or so of Trajan’s reign, and the temple was deserted...”

“But it wasn’t deserted,” said Sixtus, “was it?”

“No—no, of course not. Not if the Christians were using it for their major sacrifices. We can—”

Surprisingly strong, the old man’s hand closed on his arm as he started forward. Beyond the trees the music had become insistent, driving, like thinned amber fire streaming through me blood veins; there was an urgency to it, like lust or fear. Sixtus whispered, “Listen to me, Marcus...”

He tried to pull away. “They’ll have started...” It might have been his overwrought imagination, but he had thought for a moment that among the cool scents of vines and water and midsummer night, he had smelled smoke.

“Listen to me anyway.” Though he spoke in a whisper, such was the authority of Sixtus’ voice that Marcus stopped, as though he were one of the old man’s soldiers. A lifetime in the field had given this deceptively frail old gentleman a habit of command that rivaled the emperor’s.

Behind the throbbing rise of the music, his voice was low. “Do you remember the story of the Maenads? The worshipers of Dionysus who tore to pieces any who intruded upon their rites?”

“Yes,” whispered Marcus uneasily, suddenly aware that as well as being the largest deserted building in Rome, the old Temple of Atargatis was also one of the most isolated. “That was in—in
The Bacchae
—Euripides...”

“I’m glad you remember your schooldays,” said the old man grimly. “Remember then also that we are greatly outnumbered, and that we are dealing with people who may be in the grip of a religious frenzy. If we make our presence known to them in any way, it may very well be the last thing that either of us ever does.”

In the darkness the flutes twisted, the music seeming to gasp and keen, like the mounting urgency of passion. This time Marcus was sure of it; there was smoke on the air. “But Tullia...” he whispered desperately.

“You’re a philosopher,” retorted Sixtus impatiently. “Do you know the difference between what is possible and what is impossible?”

The sudden plunge into elenchus startled him. He blinked for a moment and said, “Uh—no.”

“Well, I’m a military commander,” snapped the old man, “and I do. Now follow me, and we’ll try to get in round the back.”

The temple grounds were surrounded by a wall, and as Sixtus had said, there was a man at the gate. But fifteen years of neglect had taken its toll. The wall was crumbling, its stones forced apart by steel-fingered vines, and in places the local farmers had made free with the fabric of it to wall their own gardens. There was neither light nor any sign of life in the woods surrounding the temple precinct, only the occasional hoot of an owl, or the soft continual rustling of the temple doves. Marcus found his eyes had grown used to the dim starlight, however, and his companion seemed to be able to see in the dark like a cat. They found a gap in the walls on the far side of the temple itself. Marcus scrambled through it and helped Sixtus up, then they both dropped to the ground on the other side.

Beyond the dense shadows of the trees that surrounded it, the temple of the Syrian goddess sprawled like a vast white mausoleum, its weather-stained walls half-choked with vines and smeared from the eaves down with a streaky cascade of dove droppings. Darkly gleaming in the starlight the great ponds that had contained the goddess’ sacred fish lay like black pools of oil, clogged with weeds and mud. No light shone from the pillared porch that enclosed the front entrance, but in one of the high small windows on the bare dirty flank of the building, Marcus thought he glimpsed a red flicker of firelight. From here the music was clearly audible, a wild obscene wailing against the thrusting rhythm of the drum, and below it, the steady beating of hands marking time. Once he heard another sound that prickled the hair of his nape with horror: the protesting wail of a small and terrified baby.

For one instant his eyes met Sixtus’ in the dark. Then the old man was moving off again, light-footed despite his staff, soundless in the deep carpet of matted leaves that strewed the entire precinct. Marcus smelled smoke again, and in the eaves of the temple the doves stirred, fluttering in the darkness.

Marcus felt, rather than heard, the thin swooshing of steel through air. With speed he had never dreamed he possessed he ducked and threw himself sideways, shutting his teeth against a cry of pain as he felt the flesh of his arm open. He saw a man—black and bronze in the shadows of the trees—standing over him as he fell, caught the thin starlight as it flashed on the descending blade. Marcus kicked desperately at his legs, making him stumble and miss; the air burned in his cut arm and his blood felt astonishingly hot against his flesh. His attacker caught his balance, and he had a blurred glimpse, through terror and pain, of a brown Arabian face framed in close-curled black hair, teeth horribly white in a grimace. The sword sheared down and sideways, slicing at his throat.

But the blow never landed. Sixtus had reached them in two swift strides and jabbed straight into the fray with the end of his staff, like a bargeman poling off a wharf. The end of the staff took Marcus’ assailant just where the ribs curled up around those rippling stomach muscles, meeting the man’s full-speed attack. The Arab’s mouth popped open, he made a horrible sound, between a groan and a wheeze, and his arms flipped awkwardly out, like the wings of a toy chicken when its string is pulled. Calmly and with lightning speed, Sixtus reversed his walking stick around the fulcrum of his hands, and its iron-shod foot took the man in the temple and dropped him like the dead across Marcus’ body.

The sword fell to the rustling leaves. From the pillared porch of the temple someone called out softly, warily. Sixtus called back in another language and got a satisfied grunt in reply. Then he knelt beside Marcus and whispered, “Are you all right?”

He managed to nod. Sixtus pulled the unconscious attacker off him and helped Marcus to sit up.

“Are you bleeding much?”

Marcus shook his head, feeling dizzy and very ill. Sixtus used the fallen sword to cut a long strip out of the hem of the attacker’s tunic. In the diffuse starlight Marcus could see it was the taller of the two Arab bearers, the one to whom Tiridates had spoken on the terrace of Quindarvis’ house. Working quickly and calmly, as though he did this every night of his life, Sixtus examined the wound, bound it up, and applied a tourniquet higher up on Marcus’ shoulder to staunch the bleeding. Then, while Marcus was still sitting dazedly trying to get his wits back, the old man pulled off the assailant’s belt and tunic, bound his hands with the belt, and cut strips from the tunic to bind his feet and gag him. Watching the frail old scholar engaged in this task, Marcus realized that the guard had chosen to attack him first, because he didn’t see a lame and white-haired old man as being any threat.

The idea of it made him giggle. “I thought you said Christians were opposed to violence,” he said, and Sixtus shot him a startled glance. “What’s a Christian doing trying to lop off somebody’s head with a sword?”

There was a long pause, while the old man finished up his work, and slung the sword and scabbard at his own belt. He handled the weapon as unthinkingly as Marcus would eat an apple. Then he said, “What makes you think these are Christians?” He sat back on his heels, called out into the darkness in another language—Syrian, Marcus thought, or possibly Arabic. The voice from the temple porch replied. Sixtus went into a rapid-fire string of instructions and was rewarded, a moment later, when two dark forms emerged from the shadows of the pillars and went hurrying away through the starlight into the darkness of the woods. He turned back to Marcus. “Are you well enough to go on?”

He nodded weakly and managed to get to his feet mostly unassisted. “What did you tell them?” he asked, nodding toward the temple porch. “And what do you mean, these aren’t Christians?”

Sixtus was already moving out into the open starlight, “I told them I thought I’d heard intruders on the north side of the grounds,” he whispered back over his shoulder. “It should keep them busy until we can get in and get out.” He moved with a swift scuttling hobble, from shadow to shadow, toward the darkness of the porch, and Marcus, with a quick glance to the right and left, followed. The music was like a drug in his blood, a fever that drew him to its crescendo; it was as though he could feel the heartbeat of the worshipers within the dark sanctuary through the surging beat of their hands.

The doors of the temple were shut, barred with wan starlight and the black shadows of the pillars. Crouching to either side were huge things of marble and bronze, things with eyes and wings, beaks and claws. There was an evil in them that made Marcus shiver as he passed the point where those horrible gazes locked, and he wondered if Sixtus felt it, too. The heartbeat of the drum was louder here, and as the old man pushed open the dark door, he became conscious of another sound, the whining snarl of a whip. The music grew stronger, insistent, like a streak of red in darkness; he heard a man groan and shrill voices chanting. He wondered how they would find Tullia in this place, and how they would get out when they did.

Soundless as cats, they slipped into the pitch darkness of the temple.

After the faint starlight the temple anteroom was chokingly dark, the blackness like a muffling blanket. The room seemed alive, the walls vibrating with the deep groaning of the drum, the air seeming to shiver and flutter with the beat of hands, the drugged sway of the dance. The place stank of blood and incense, of smoke that could not mask the pungent salt muskiness of sex. There was a sickness, an ugliness, to the feel of the place, the insinuation of forbidden things, that turned Marcus’ stomach and made his skin crawl with an unspeakable feeling of horror. As his eyes grew used to the deeper darkness, he made out tenebrous shapes of couches, of dragged blankets and scattered pillows among the heavy Oriental columns, of old stains on the floor. A single slit of firelight from the sanctuary doors towered at least twenty feet in the darkness before them, red as blood; the black beating air was rank and living as a rapist’s breath in his face.

But he dared ask nothing, only followed Sixtus as though hypnotized. The dark shape limped softly before him, to the cyclopean doors.

As he approached them the smell of smoke grew stronger, and with it the stench of new blood, copper-sharp in the hot air, and the stink of superheated metal. Firelight widened over his face as he touched the door. It moved soundlessly on oiled hinges, to show what lay beyond.

He had a blurred impression of darkness, of pillars, of a double line of black marble phalluses six feet high, gleaming with the red glare of the fire. Beyond them like a mingling of fire and shadows men and women swayed, bodies half-naked and glistening with sweat, heads lolling, dark hair falling over faces drenched as though by rain, over eyes whose white showed in a rim all around dilated black pupils. Gimcrack jewelry and solid gold caught flashes of the light. The eyes were empty of feeling, of knowledge; they were wide with the demon emptiness of madness.

Boneless as the creation of a fever-dream, dancers leaped and swayed in the glare of the braziers. Thin androgynous bodies swayed and whirled, streaked all over with streaming blood. They had sharpened shells and little knives in their hands, ripping at their own flesh and one another’s with staring, uncaring, unconscious eyes, and the blood splattered up over the feet of the image, the One for Whom they danced.

She was exactly as she had been in the image Sixtus had showed him, back in his vine-cave of a study. Gross, obscene, but with a horrible fascination in that many-breasted body, her head covered in jewels, her piscine tail resting among the lions crouched at her feet. Her eyes stared out, wide and fixed and hideous beyond description; her hands, reaching out over the flames that flickered in her hollowed lap, glowed already.

As Marcus watched in horror something stirred on the floor among the priests, something huge and gross and glistening, like a mountain of wet leather polished with new blood. It heaved itself to its knees. The whips sang, crossing their weals over the rolled fat of that immense back, and where the welts joined, blood trickled to mingle with the man’s pouring sweat. The priests swayed closer, beating him not only with their whips but with their stringy hair, and the face he raised to the glowing idol was transformed by ecstasy almost beyond recognition. Firelight, catching in the jewels in his rings, scattered glittering over his arms. The fish of the goddess, tattooed in the flesh, seemed to swim beneath the surface of a sun-sparkling sea.

The man’s voice was the bellow of a dying bull. “Atargatis!”

Pounding, crashing, the beating hands and bodies of the congregation echoed back the cry, “Atargatis!”

“You are the Mother! You are all that was and is!”

“Atargatis!”

“You are the she-goat that suckles us all! You are the ocean in which we all swim!”

“Atargatis!”

“Grant us this prayer, give us this blessing that it is within your unending power to give!”

“Atargatis!” The roar of the voices was like the sea, like a drug or the hideous logic of a hallucination. An emaciated eunuch rose from the stairs where he had collapsed in exhaustion, his body pouring blood from a dozen gashes, even his hair sticky and pointed with the stuff. He stretched forth bony hands and took something from a basket that had been in the shadows at the idol’s feet, something that wriggled and began to wail in sleepy protest.

Tiridates extended his huge arms toward the idol, the priest, the glowing fire that heated the red-hot brazen hands of the statue; his voice sounded shrill and stiff, almost like something produced from metal and wind. “Atargatis, I must take this girl to wife! Find her where they have hidden her! Send her safe to us!”