Search the Seven Hills (29 page)

“We have no rights in a court of law,” she said slowly, “but I’ll tell anyone it would do good to know.”

“You were with him last night, and the night before?”

She nodded. “My master was at...”

“I know where your master was,” said Marcus. “And I know what he’d be likely to do to you if it were to come out.”

She gave him a bitter sideways smile. “Let’s hope not. You’re young to know things like that. But I can’t let him take it for me.” She still did not meet his eyes but kept her gaze cast down, fixed on her long, slim hands drawing the edge of her russet cloak over and over through her fingers. The grubby torchlight spangled her beaded head with fire. Her womanhood was fragrant, like cinnamon and musk.

“Where’s Craessius tonight?” he asked softly.

“With Paris. That’s his boy. He’s starting to tire of me already. We hoped...” She shrugged. “But there’s not much hope for slaves, now, is there? Maybe Nicanor had the right idea, after all.”

“No,” said Marcus. “Look at me, Hypatia.”

She raised her eyes to meet his, gleaming with tears, though her mouth was smooth and still as cast bronze.

“I’ll tell the centurion what you’ve told me, and I’ll tell him why Nicanor would prefer death to questions about his whereabouts on the last two nights. Nothing’s come to official trial yet, and nothing will until the city prefect returns.”

She sighed, like a child cheated too often of promised treats. “And when he returns?” she asked dully.

“With luck nothing about Nicanor will be brought up at all. There’s no need for it.” He thought it wiser not to mention that the city prefect, when he returned, might well be half-crazed with grief and fury and likely to punish anyone within reach.

Hypatia lowered her eyes again to her stacked fingers. Her plum-dark lips tightened momentarily, then she said, “So we can go on as before.”

“You can choose,” he said softly, “what you will do. Would you like to see him now?”

She shook her head. “If he’s ill he’ll be sleeping,” she said. “And he’ll be angry enough at me for coming at all. If your centurion doesn’t believe you, send for me. I’ll come.” She stood up and drew her veil over her head. “Life means little enough as it is. I might as well finish it, as Niko’s always saying, ‘worthily.’” She moved to the door with the grace and swiftness of a lioness and was gone almost before Marcus could lift his hand in farewell. He was left with a despairing sense of tragedy, far beyond the tales of ancient kings.

One of the guards said, “There goes one splendid woman.”

And though he knew they spoke only of her body, Marcus could not imagine her better described.

“I am shocked. I must tell you, Marcus, I am deeply shocked.” Priscus Quindarvis stared through the latticework of the arbor at the leaping waters of the fountain, the sunlight glittering hard as diamonds on the bronze flanks of the nymph and satyr, caught there in their eternal play. He shook his head, his thick brows meeting heavily over his nose. “One of the chief members of the Syrian community. A man trusted, respected...”

“I never trusted him,” said Aurelia Pollia unexpectedly. She looked up from the plucked lily she had been turning in her fingers as Marcus gave them an edited version of the night’s events. “And I never respected him. I always felt him to be... ugly inside.”

Quindarvis raised his brows, startled to hear the usually timid and retiring Lady Aurelia speak out on any subject. She looked much better than she had in days. Though she was still pale, her brown eyes sunk back into bruised pits of sleeplessness, a perilous kind of calm seemed to have descended on her spirit. Her hair was brushed, oiled, and fixed in a simple style, and for the first time Marcus had the feeling that she wasn’t half-drugged with poppy or some other herb of forgetfulness. Whether it was Isis who had wrought this change or his mother, he was not sure.

The praetor laughed, “He was never any prize outside either, Aurelia. A rolling suet pudding, stuck with jewels...”

...
whom you thought well enough of to court for support three days ago,
thought Marcus, looking across the hot dappling of the afternoon shadows at the big man’s square, cynical face. Yesterday not a man would have mocked him.

“You seem to have plenty of connections in the prison these days, Marcus,” said the praetor, after a few more cutting comments on the Syrian’s fatness, his bought citizenship, his boys, his audacity at trying to arrange a match with the daughter of the city prefect, just as if he himself had not actively fostered the match to win favor with both sides. “Do you know what will be done with his holdings, at the sell-up? A man could turn a little profit there if he gets in quick enough.”

Marcus shook his head. He had not slept well, having not returned from the prison until after daylight, to lie sweltering for hours listening to the din of the streets outside. The time of the noon siesta was past, and by the time he could reach the prison, Arrius would have returned from the baths. His head felt heavy and his gashed arm ached, and Priscus Quindarvis, broad-shouldered and elegant in his purple-bordered senatorial toga, was the last person he would have wished to meet when he called upon his mother’s friend. But he had to answer politely, so he said, “The case won’t come to trial until Consul Varus returns. Beyond that I don’t know.”

Quindarvis sighed heavily and shook his head, but none of them spoke of what awaited the prefect on his return home. Marcus got to his feet and straightened the folds of his rather shabby toga. “I have to go now,” he said. “I’ll return later if I have news.”

The praetor nodded absently. “Very good, my boy.”

“I’ll see you to the atrium.” Lady Aurelia rose. “Excuse me, Priscus, will you, a moment?” She took Marcus’ arm and led him along the columned walkway from the arbor into the quiet marble coolness of the red summer dining room, with its stylish black statues and gilded trim. “I just wanted to ask you to tell your mother how grateful I am she came to see me,” she said softly. “Tell her I’ll understand if it’s a long time before we see each other again.”

Marcus took her gently by the shoulders. “She knows you will.”

Her brown eyes were anxious. “Your father won’t—won’t be too angry if he finds out?”

Marcus lied, “No.” He leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Don’t worry about it, Aunt Aurelia.”

A smile fluttered very briefly around the corners of her eyes. “It’s been years since you called me that.”

He held the embroidered curtains aside to let her pass before him into the atrium. Several of Quindarvis’ clients who were loitering there looked up hopefully, and though faces fell a little (after all, Lady Aurelia was certainly not going to invite them to dinner), there was a murmured chorus of “Good afternoon, Lady Aurelia Pollia Varia.”

She took his hands gently. “Thank you for stopping,” she murmured. “Tell your mother to be careful, Marc. And you be careful, too.”

He kissed her again. “I’m learning care from the experts,” he promised her, and a slave came to escort him out the door.

Care from the experts,
he thought wryly: a slashed arm, cracked ribs, assorted bruises, a stiff leg, and residual headaches and soreness of the throat, yes sir. But
nothing,
he thought,
to what others had to face.
Torture in the lower cells of the jail, or the more silken, spiteful tortures that could be performed in some quiet villa outside the city. Or merely the pain of living with a man you hated, who hated you, who could, on a whim, send you away from the city altogether to some dreary estate in Gaul or Africa. He remembered that once, as children, he and Tullia had found Felix clumsily trying to cut his wrists after his father had sworn he’d sell him to the galleys. He’d been eleven.

Marcus made his way down the sloping streets toward the New Forum, the din of the spice market rising in his ears. Activity was picking up again after the noontime siesta. A Thracian barber was yelling his trade and a couple of Carthaginian acrobats were performing on a blanket, to the almost total stoppage of all traffic in the narrow lanes. A beggar’s hand plucked at the hem of Marcus’ toga; a water seller jostled into him, wetting his feet; he was surged to the wall as a litter with six bearers trotted past, pursued by a train of sweating, toga-clad clients. Where the road curved over the shoulder of the hill, he glimpsed the curving porticoes and domed roofs of the Basilica Ulpias, the red tiles of its roof warmly glowing in the sun, with the slender column and the emperor’s statue rising beyond. He had come down this way so often, tacking back and forth across the steep streets of the spice market. He remembered a time when he had lived between the Ulpias and the libraries, so buried in his books and his metaphysical speculations that he had not heard of Tullia’s betrothal until a week after it had been publicly announced.

And that, he thought with a kind of astonishment, had been only a little more than a week ago.

He thought of the cool marble spaces of the Basilica, of its clustering columns, and the voices of the philosophers and their students who met there in the mornings to discuss the Truth, Beauty, and the Good. An overwhelming nostalgia filled him, a memory of that distant self still wearing this same ink-stained toga, sitting on a marble bench in those cool caves of knowledge, watching the sunlight falling through the high windows onto Timoleon’s fading red hair, listening to that beautiful voice quoting Plato against the deep harsh tones of Judah Symmachus’ questions. He wondered if he could return there now, find his former mentor, and sit once more at his feet.

But there was nothing that he could think of to say.

Like a sudden splattering of mud he heard voices, jeering and obscene. “Christian! Jew-whore!” He heard a woman cry out, and a man’s coarse laugh, and the crack of a stone against a wall. From an alley a woman emerged at a stumbling run, clutching her torn dress around her bosom. A band of men and boys surrounded her, catcalling and heading her off as she tried to flee. One of them grabbed her veil, pulled it off, and began waving it like a flag, giggling all the while. She tried to dodge down an alley, and another man sprang in front of her, spreading hairy arms and singing, “Come to me! Oh, come to me!” She veered away, slapping at the hands that snatched at her skirts from behind.

Marcus recognized her at once.

“Hey, Christian, lemme put my finger in your stew!” yelled one of the boys. “Look, I’m a Christian, too!” And he mimed hanging on a cross, his tongue lolling horribly.

“Come on, maybe you’ll get me to join!”

“Hey, I wanna be saved!”

One of the men grabbed her from behind, pawing her breasts. She twisted in his grip, gouging with her elbows, the black curly mane of her hair coming loose from its pins to fall over a tear-streaked face. She pulled free and another man grabbed her wrists, shoving her up against the wall. Men behind their shop counters were watching, but the ones who left their work only came closer to gawk. One passerby picked up a piece of dung and threw it, yelling, “Christian twat!” without pausing on his way. Marcus watched in sickened horror the girl’s struggles to get free and the faces of the gathering ring of spectators. Clearly no one was about to proclaim Christian sympathies. As she wrenched her face away from the man’s greedy mouth and fumbling fingers, it crossed Marcus’ mind to fight, and then he thought,
Six of them? Always provided I didn’t trip over my toga as I sallied to the rescue?

And for a Christian at that, who deserves this for what they’ve done to Tullia?

But he knew Tullia would never have countenanced his walking on.

With a sigh, he took the plunge. In his best imitation of Arrius’ parade-ground voice he bellowed, “Dorcas!”

At the sound of her name, the girl gave a cry and looked up. That, and the combination of outrage and authority in his voice, was enough to distract her molesters momentarily. Praying for the best, Marcus strode into the breach.

He roared, “You little whore, how dare you slip away from me?” Without sparing them a glance, he shoved his way through the midst of the men, bristling with righteous wrath. He pushed aside the man who held her against the wall, jerked her brutally forward by the arm, and dealt her two stinging slaps across the face. “When I get you home I’ll teach you to make a fool of me!” he yelled, shaking her until her head lolled, her dark eyes staring at him in uncomprehending terror. Her erstwhile tormentors looked on, yielding to his obvious authority and rage without lifting a hand.

Cursing her he thrust her before him; the men stepped aside, bemused and silent. She stumbled, and he dragged her from the muck and pushed her ahead of him, snarling abuse and thanking his guardian gods that he was wearing the toga that was the badge of Roman citizenship, however shoddy it might be.

Behind him, someone called out, “Mister!”

In panic he almost dropped her arm and ran. But he turned, blazing with his father’s wrath.

The fat little man who’d snatched her veil held it out to him mutely. Marcus took it with a sneer and thrust it at her. “Not that you’ll wear it enough to matter, you little bitch,” he muttered in a vicious and audible aside. She accepted it meekly, gathering it clumsily over the rips in her dress, and with downcast lashes whispered, “Yes, master.” Marcus shoved her ahead of him up the first alley he saw. With expressions of respect for his manliness, the men and boys watched them go.

They turned another corner, to a narrow street of steps that led down into the New Forum. Glancing at Dorcas from the corner of his eye, Marcus saw the color slowly returning to her face. As she readjusted the pins in the shoulders of her torn dress, he could see the small silver cross, glinting like flame on her heavy breasts. Then she looked up and asked, “How did you know my name?”

“Uh—” How do you explain to someone you have just rescued that you know her name because you spied on her?

“Did they tell you at the prison?”

“Yes—sort of.”

Under long lashes her wide brown eyes were grave. “Then you’re one of the centurion’s informers?”

“No,” said Marcus indignantly, “of course not. It’s just that—” He broke off, uncertain how to continue, and fell back lamely on, “I’m sorry I had to slap you.”