Search the Seven Hills (39 page)

Movement caught his eye, and he swung back, hearing a soft
thunk
and the violent rustle of bodies hitting the leaves. He ducked and felt something slide by his ear, turned and rammed forward with his head into something armored that nevertheless gave back with a gasped “Woof!” Hard fingers clawed at his throat as he was rolled and spun down into the leaves. Marcus clutched at them, managed to get a final squeaking gasp of air, and rammed his knee up as hard as he could between his assailant’s legs, nearly breaking his kneecap on the hard-boiled leather of the man’s codpiece. Above him he saw the white glint of teeth in a tangled beard, as he had in the darkness of the street outside Consul Varus’ house, a little over a week ago. Thumbs dug into his throat, elbows curving outward to block his flailing hands. His ears roared, and he felt his struggling muscles slack. He rolled, trying to shake off the death that pinned him, and felt something jab his ribs on the ground. It was one of the long brooch pins that had been in Felix’s lovely cloak.

The man above him was armored, but through his blurring eyes Marcus could see the gleam of sweat in the exposed hollow of the brown throat. It took his last strength, but he felt skin, muscle, windpipe puncture, and Lucius’ weight rolled back from him, his eyes staring and his breath whistling in horrible gasps as he pawed at the knot of jewels sticking out of his flesh. Marcus heaved him off, gagging himself on returning air. The man tumbled thrashing into the leaves, and when he tried to rise, more from instinct than anything else, Marcus kicked him with all his strength in the side. The man shot backward... and fell.

He heard one of the girls cry out, and a sudden bass snarling roar from animal throats. Someone dragged him to his feet, shoved a torch into his hand, thrust him stumbling through a world that dipped and spun. The dragged hem of his ridiculous Persian robe tripped him as he stumbled, and a heavy hand pulled him upright. The ringing in his ears occluded sound; then he became aware of a deep urgent voice saying, “Do you hear me? Marcus? Can you do it? Marcus?”

He nodded, gasping, as the world slowly came into focus and the darkness around him became once more cool and open, instead of black and close and beating. He whispered, “Yes,” and felt the pinch of his cracked ribs again.

“You’re sure?”

Sixtus’ face was scratched and bleeding, close to his; farther away Churaldin lay among the leaves, blood spilling over his slashed face, close by the body of a dead gladiator whose cut throat had sprayed the surrounding trees in gore. The night stank of blood, the roaring of the lions filling his ears as the beat of his own heart had filled them a few moments before. He gasped, “Yes. Yes, I can.” He saw two other men unconscious on the ground and remembered the old man’s deadly facility with his hardwood staff.

The strong grip half-supported him, half-thrust him toward the makeshift rope. “Quindarvis and one other are still in the pavilion, I believe. We could force our way in, but it would take more time than we’ve got.”

It was no easy task to scramble down the knotted cloth and keep one hand free for the torch. The lions were still horribly busy, tearing and snarling; their lashing tails and tawny backs made a dark knot in the moonlight. There were more of them than he’d thought—eight or ten. Some of them looked up with dripping muzzles as he stepped away from the cliff, their eyes like amber mirrors in the torchlight.

Something fell from above, the lions all startling and backing. Looking down he saw it was Sixtus’ staff. With a ringing clank a sword was dropped as well, and before he could protest, the old man came sliding nimbly down the improvised rope.

“You’re crazy,” he gasped, and Sixtus said, “Move! Go slow and smooth, and for God’s sake don’t startle them. They have their taste of blood now.”

Dark-muzzled as though they had been drinking wine, the lions circled them. The ammonia reek of their urine, the dusty fetor of their pelts, and the rankness of carrion filled the air of the pit. Marcus could feel his own blood hammering in his veins, life and terror burning in him as he edged his way across the rank deep weeds to the shorter grass near the pavilion; saw how the lions were already prowling back to the dying glow of the spent lamp oil. Dorcas and Tullia had got to their feet but were standing perfectly still against the wall; only the glint of their eyes moved in the growing dark. A shift in the night wind rippled in their garments, outlining their bodies where the cloth stuck to them with sweat.

Dorcas said, “I knew you’d come. Did you torch the villa?”

“You’re going to give me a worse reputation than I have already,” murmured Sixtus, holding out his hand for them. A lioness crouched to spring; Marcus took a step toward her, thrusting with the torch, and the circle of cats broke a little, snarling and flashing their stained dripping teeth. The girls came slowly, their eyes wide with fear but untouched by panic, barefoot and smooth as dancers in the sparse stony grass.

They moved from the wall, and like sharks around a slave galley, the lions moved with them. Marcus swung the torch and the circle widened again; he felt his every nerve strained to the cracking point, conscious of each movement in that dense hunting darkness. They picked their way over the stones, the girls pressing close to his back, Sixtus moving behind with his sword. Every now and then the lions would prowl too near, and he would slash at them with the fire; to his keyed nerves the world narrowed to the tiny ring of amber light, the black dark just beyond it, the touch of a small cold hand every now and then on his shoulder, the hungry hate of the gleaming eyes, and the thick panting breath in the darkness.

And thus he didn’t see Priscus Quindarvis until it was far too late.

Tullia gasped “Marc!” at the same instant he thought he heard a wasp buzz close by his ear—only wasps do not fly at midnight. He felt her stumble against him, clutching at the slippery silk of his fringed sleeve, and turning saw the red gash on her arm and, beyond her, Sixtus crumpling slowly to his knees. Tullia cried out, and from the darkness the lions closed in. With a desperate yell of fury he lashed about him with the torch, blindly concentrating on one thing at a time, and when he looked up, the makeshift rope lay like a heap of old clothes at the bottom of the cliff, directly below where Quindarvis stood.

He had a bow in one hand, the arrows lying on the ground at his feet. Sweat plastered his white tunic of mourning to his heavy body, and his face gleamed in the light from the pavilion, sticky with unguents from the funeral banquet. His mouth was a taut black line of anger, not a personal hate, but the enraged frustration of a businessman whose plans have been thwarted by malign fate.

He said, “You stupid meddling boy.”

Behind him Marcus heard Sixtus whisper, “Get away from me. Get under the cliff, he can’t hit you from there.” Glancing back he saw the old man propped on one arm, the arrow standing in his right shoulder and blood running down the shaft to drip from the saturated feathers to the grass. The lions were growling, scenting the blood, and Marcus stepped back to stand over him, slashing at them with the torch. They backed, but not nearly as far as before; they were hungry, and the blood drew them.

Marcus turned to yell, “You’ll never get away with this!”

The praetor didn’t even bother to reply. He stooped to pick up another arrow, his cynical eyes hard and angry, choosing his victim. It occurred to Marcus that he knew his plans were shattered beyond repair. Instead of running, he had stayed to take his revenge.

He was nocking the arrow as he straightened. Marcus wondered if he would shoot him first or the girls. The torchlight against the darkness made them all splendid targets, and at this range he could hardly miss.

Then a voice screeched like a wildcat from the darkness, “
DEATH TO THE BEAST OF A THOUSAND NAMES!
” and Ignatius—small, vicious, and wholly unexpected—slammed into Quindarvis’ back like a bolt from a catapult, swinging hard little balls of fists and screaming apocalyptic curses. Balanced on the very edge of the precipice Quindarvis staggered, tottered, his hands clinging to the bow and his mouth opening in horrified shock. Dirt crumbled under his sandals; the arrows showered down around him like falling twigs while the little saint screeched with vindictive triumph on the pit’s edge.

The lions swung, snarling, toward the sudden movement as the praetor hit the long grass at the base of the cliff. But Quindarvis had a speed and a kind of hard grasping strength that Marcus had hardly credited him with. He flung himself to his feet in a long rolling dive and launched himself at Marcus in a flying tackle, his hands grabbing for the torch. The impact of his body threw them both backward; Marcus felt knees jab into his broken ribs, a powerful grip wrenching and twisting at the wood in his hands, and he held to it with the blind certainty that to let go would be death indeed. His mouth was full of sand and rocks and long dry grass. He rolled, clinging to the grappling body, smelling the sweat and dirt and smoke mixed with musk and cinnamon perfume, hearing the lions roaring in anger and confusion all around them. His hand was slammed down, beating on some rocks. His fingers opened, empty.

Quindarvis tried to free himself in a flopping dive and Marcus clinched his arms around that hard thick body in a death-grip. Past the man’s thick wet shoulder he could see the torch lying in a patch of stony sand, smothered and flickering its last. Dorcas caught at it, her tense pointed face blanched even in the warm light; touched the last of the fire to the raked bundle of dried weeds she held in her hand.

The light exploded into the faces of the lions. They sprang back like startled cats as she waded toward them, swinging the knot of fire. Marcus had a blurred vision of Tullia tearing at the weeds, winding them in a ripped piece of her dress as Dorcas had done, to protect her hand. Then Quindarvis’ weight rolled across him, and he was shoved brutally aside.

The big man was gasping, his hard face clotted with fury under the sticky mess of perfumed dust. He glanced quickly around, as if gauging his flight, knowing there was none. The torn weeds burned with a hot clear light, but they burned fast; those in Dorcas’ hand were already dimming, where she stood with her feet braced over Sixtus’ body in the bloodstained grass.

Marcus whispered, “You stinking coward.”

Quindarvis seemed hardly to have heard. His eyes were still traveling around the dark wall, the locked pavilion, seeking an escape. Marcus realized that he himself was as incidental to the man’s scheme as the Christians, or Tullia, or her mother’s hideous grief had been. Like the little dancing-girls at the banquet, they’d been part of the background; like so many thrushes, killed and plucked to make a pleasant meal. The man’s whole-souled self-centeredness had made no distinction between them at all.

“You murdering bastard!” he shrieked, more to get his attention than anything else, to get him to look, just once, at one of them as a human being instead of as a step toward the goal.

But the praetor’s glance held only irritation, as though a lobster had nipped his fingers from the pot. “You don’t know anything about it, boy,” he muttered, and swung around as Dorcas slashed with her improvised torch at the nearest of the advancing cats.

Like the blade of a sword, light touched them, a gold slit pouring through the door at the pavilion’s base. The darkness opened, like the gates of heaven; framed within the doors Marcus glimpsed Telesphorus’ bald shining head, the burnished gleam of the armor Alexandros wore, the crowding shapes of the rest of the Children of Light. With only a single guard left they must have forced the pavilion doors in silence.

Later, when he thought about it, Marcus thought Quindarvis should have known better. But whether he had got drunk at the funeral banquet of his colleague Silanus, or whether he had grown careless with despair, or whether from where they all crouched in the sparse wiry bloodstained grass, among the closing lions and the dying fire, it had looked to be a better gamble—Quindarvis made a run for the door.

Judah Symmachus told him afterward that they could hear him shrieking as far away as the villa, even over the noise of the fire.

One should not believe in conspiracies until they have attained their goal.

Domitian, emperor of Rome

“M
AD?”
F
ELIX CRITICALLY INSPECTED
a sliver of lobster held delicately between two fingers, then popped it into his mouth. “B’Castor, I’d be half-mad, too, if I’d had a villa that cost as much as his did, and came back to find the whole thing in flames. D’you know what that place must have cost him?”

“Close to ten million sesterces,” replied Arrius equably, “at a conservative estimate. But of course, he didn’t pay for it all.”

“Didn’t he, by Jove? Who did?”

“Your father, for one,” replied the centurion, holding out his cup for Alexandras to pour the wine. “And your brother Caius, and myself, and every other person in this city who’s ever paid taxes. You were right, Marcus. Old Symmachus started on the audit today. If word of that had got back to the emperor, I’d be surprised if our friend would have come out of it with his head.”

“He would not have.” Varus moved slightly on his couch, the gems of his rings flashing in the dappled light that came through the wall of vines. In that handsome face his dark eyes were brooding and angry. “His Highness may be a soldier, with a soldier’s tastes and crudities, but he is hardly a barrack-room emperor. He has striven to make Rome as clean, as upright, and as honorable under his rule as it was in the days of the ancient republic.”

“I pray Isis he will succeed,” murmured his wife, and lifted her cup in a small gesture of libation, which her husband ignored. She glanced sideways at her daughter, who sat, as all good Roman daughters should, at her parents’ feet. Her thin face glowed, and she added softly, “For I know truly now that Isis answers prayers.”

“By Jove I hope she’ll answer that one,” twittered Felix. “Don’t think I could stand another night like that one. Let’s have the mustard, O frater mine.”