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“Sixtus doesn’t know anything about this.”

Another furious battery of knocks. Churaldin strode quickly to the door, unlocked it, and pulled it open. Framed in the light from the alley outside stood Alexandras, burly as a bear, also armored in the uniform of the Praetorian Guard. With him were Dorcas, Telesphorus, and Ignatius.

Alexandras was saying, “...now the epistle general of James the brother of Jesus clearly states that Christ
is
the Lord God and therefore...” and Dorcas, hurrying through the door with her arms full of blankets, said, “These were all I could come up with on short notice, Churaldin, but they’ll do until—”

Churaldin shut the door behind them and turned to face Marcus, who stood, dumbfounded, in the center of the cellar. Quietly he said, “If you tell Sixtus about this I’ll break your neck.”

There is little point in expecting much of your own projects, when Fate has projects of her own.

Petronius

T
ELESPHORUS’ HARSH EYES
flickered over him once. “It’s the centurion’s little clerk,” he said.

“I am not one of his informers!”

Dorcas had gone over to lay the folded blankets beside Churaldin’s discarded armor. She straightened up. “Of course you aren’t,” she said warmly and brushed back the thick curls of her black mane from her face.

Like a man speaking around the pain of a wound, Churaldin said, “Why don’t you go, Marcus? Sixtus knows nothing of any of this. It kills me to deceive so good a master—so good a man—but he wouldn’t understand.”

“You could get him killed,” whispered Marcus. “If you were caught...” He looked over at Alexandras, enormous and awkward in the white light of the slit window. It came to him suddenly why the other servants had worked so hard to give him the impression that the young Briton was a womanizer-—a reputation he had never quite understood. What better reason for those nightly excursions, he reflected bitterly. A game, a fakement, like “wicked uncle.” In despair he cried, “Is the whole household Christian?”

“Yes,” admitted the gardener, and in the same breath Churaldin said, “No.” They looked at each other.

“If there’s a general persecution, they’ll never believe he didn’t know!” pleaded Marcus. “He’s offered you your freedom more than once, he told me that. The least you could have done was take it!”

“We could have,” said the Briton carefully. “But—it was an extremely good cover.”

“You would kill him for the sake of your stinking cover?”

Someone else knocked. Alexandras crossed the room to open it. Churaldin faced Marcus in hopeless silence, like a man caught
in flagrante
in the worst type of sin, with no possible justification—which was, in fact, the case. Marcus remembered what Sixtus had said—that he had known people suspected of being Christians. He was a man who understood truth; it wasn’t that he hadn’t suspected. But once Varus returned to the city, once the mechanism of persecution ground into operation, no one, not even men like Arrius who had served under him, was going to believe in the old man’s carefully engineered innocence.

Marcus had the despairing sense of having been surrounded, meshed in a far greater conspiracy than he’d known. Then he turned and saw Judah Symmachus and the other Christians from the jail quietly enter as Alexandras closed the door behind them. Belatedly, he understood what Ignatius’ presence should have told him from the first.

“You broke them out of jail!”

“You always did have a fine talent for the obvious, Silenus,” commented Judah acidly. “You should be in the civil service, you and my father would get on famously.”

“You’re going to have the Praetorian Guard combing the city!”

“And finding nothing,” insisted Churaldin. “By nightfall they won’t be in the city. There’s nothing to fear.”

“I won’t run from any Roman dogs!” snapped Ignatius savagely. “I fear nothing of the beasts of the arena! The rending of my body—”

“Well, since the games are over you’ll probably end up being sentenced to work in the marble mines,” Churaldin shot back at him. “It isn’t death and it isn’t life, and you’ll have God’s own time getting yourself martyred there!”

“You barbarian scum! Anyone who would believe in the coequality of the two natures of Christ
would
take that attitude...”

“Shut him up,” whispered Churaldin through his teeth.

“...no better than a Persian fire worshiper...”

“Now, you can’t speak that way of coequality,” began Alexandras reprovingly, and another one of the Christians sailed in with, “And in any case the dualistic nature of God...”

Under the rising bicker of their voices Marcus said, “You were behind it all along, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Churaldin quietly.

“Are you Papa?”

It had never before occurred to him that Papa might be a man of his own age. The slave hesitated, as though debating his answer, and Ignatius shot scornfully,
“Him?”

Goaded from all sides Marcus caught Churaldin by the shoulders. “Then who is Papa?” he demanded.

A sudden, unprecedented hush fell upon all that clamorous congregation. Churaldin raised his eyes, looking past Marcus’ shoulder. Marcus whirled.

Sixtus seemed to have materialized out of the rear wall of the cellar.

“Papa,” said the old man, gathering up the folds of his toga to pick his way down from the junk-littered dais that fronted the length of the. wall, “seems to be the informal title of the Bishop of Rome. Papa, Pappas, Pope... The central priest to whom all the other priests, whatever their opinions on the date of Easter or the coequality of the nature of Christ, owe allegiance. Really, Churaldin”—he looked about him mildly—“one does find the most extraordinary things when one investigates the secret passages in one’s cellars. And yes, I’ve known about that passage for years.” He studied him for a moment longer, in his eyes the mingled disappointment and reproof of a nurse who finds lewd drawings in her charge’s bedroom. Then he looked mildly past him, to survey the flock of the Children of Light who were, for once, absolutely silent. His eyes returned to his slave’s, and he shook his head in sorrowful regret.

Churaldin burst out unhappily, “I didn’t want you to know.”

The old scholar made no reply to that, merely continued to look around the cellar with interest. His gaze paused on Alexandras, and the big man flinched. Sixtus shook his head sadly, and his eyes moved on. Finally he said, “Well, in any case I now understand how you could be so sure of it when you swore to me that the Christians could not possibly have had anything to do with Tertullia Varia’s abduction.”

“I couldn’t tell you how I knew,” said Churaldin hastily.

Sixtus raised his eyebrows. “Evidently not. But I never believed it was the Christians, even before your so-well-informed assertions. I knew from the beginning that the amulet was a plant.”

Marcus gasped, “What?” Nobody else said anything. All eyes were fixed upon the old man, with mingled startlement and hope.

Serenely unconscious of his audience, he turned to Marcus. “Have you the amulet still?”

He produced it in silence. Sixtus limped over to the shaft of light that fell through the window and held it up. Its fellows dangled on the necks of at least half the persons there. “It is pure silver,” he said, “and quite soft. Look, here’s the nick I put in it that first day with my thumbnail.” He looked around. “Come here, Judah.”

As Judah crossed the room to him obediently, Sixtus continued, “I said before that the chain it hung upon might be instructive—its absence is even more instructive.” He touched the amulet that lay on Judah’s hard bronzed chest. It was clearly of the same manufacture, a small fish pierced through the head with a hole, through which a ring had been threaded, to hold it to the silver chain. “See how it’s attached?” the old man pointed out. “If I were to pull it free, it would involve either breaking the chain, breaking the fish, or breaking the connecting ring. Now, you said yourself, Marcus, that no chain was found on the scene. But neither is there any mark of the soft silver around the hole being so much as scratched, let alone broken. Inference?”

“If the ring were broken it could easily be lost in the mud,” said Judah, glancing down at the frail old scholar.

“But any force enough to break the ring would have scratched the metal around the hole,” pointed out Marcus. “You mean, it was dropped?”

“Palmed, presumably. And dropped at the last moment, to prevent it from being trampled into the mud during the fight.”

The big countrywoman asked, “But why would anyone want to throw the blame on us?”

Sixtus shrugged. “After Nero, the precedent is impeccable.”

“The Children of This World hate the Children of Light!” theorized Ignatius shrilly.

“Anybody got a rag?” grumbled another one of the Children of Light.

“Spawn of Lilith! You seek to gag—”

“Ignatius, be quiet,” snapped Telesphorus. “Is there anyone else who would want to kidnap this girl? Other than this young man, who would, I believe, do almost anything to prevent her from marrying a Syrian?”

Marcus swung around with a gasp of indignation. A calming hand was laid on his shoulder, and Sixtus answered, “Considering that Syrian is a devotee of Atargatis and has, in fact, been sacrificing children, I find Marcus’ reluctance to see her wed to him understandable. There remains, of course, the question of the earring that was found in your meeting place, Judah.”

“I swear I never knew it was there,” insisted Symmachus. “Not that anyone would believe the word of a Christian. But it was a satanic lie, a plant...”

“Of course it was a plant!” cried Marcus. “The informer who led the soldiers to your place was one of the men who kidnapped Tullia in the first place! He must have planted it himself beforehand...”

“Since he was the one who picked it up,” said the massive woman, “he didn’t even have needed to do that.”

“It’s all of a piece!” screamed Ignatius. “The Evil One seeks to destroy us, and his minions are everywhere. Many will be martyred to the greater glory of Christ...”

“They will be if that girl isn’t found before her father returns to the city,” said Telesphorus grimly. “Be quiet, Ignatius—”

“You bunch of cowards!” shouted the little man furiously. “You run this way and that, you escape, you break one another out of prison, whereas you should run to the lions of the amphitheater with open arms! You should seek the glory of the rack and the wheel, the everlasting splendor of the stake! The rack is but a gate, the fire a robe of glory, and beyond lies the sure and certain welcome into the Lord’s heaven! Cowardly, puling...”

“It isn’t suffering for my faith I mind,” rumbled Alexandras. “It’s suffering for some other man’s convenience that puts my back up. I don’t think any of you has been called to recant our faith, have you?”

“Precious little good it would have done if we’d offered,” grunted the big woman.

“Bah! A heretic Greek’s prevarication! It matters not why we die, but only that we welcome it in the name of Christ! You’re cowards, all of you, to flee from a simpleminded scheme—”

“Shut up, you flea-bitten little...”

“You would run from glory because you were scared by some whore’s earring!”

“She is not a whore!” Marcus launched himself at the Christian, hands outstretched in blind rage, and Ignatius ducked behind Telesphorus, his voice mocking, biting as a gadfly.

“She is a whore because a whore gave me this!” He pulled something from his robe and threw it at Marcus’ feet; something tiny and metal, which tinkled like a little bell on the rough stone of the floor.

Marcus stared at it, as though transfixed. “Where did you get that?” he asked, his voice barely audible, stiff and strange to his own ears.

Ignatius slid from around his protector, stared scornfully at him as he bent to pick it up. “From a whore.”

It was a bronze lily, delicate as a real flower on its tiny wire. Marcus grabbed him by the robe, as though by force he could wring the answer from that twisted little saint, and Ignatius threw back his head and stared at him with hot black furious eyes.

“Where?” Marcus shouted.

The Christian shrugged. “Rome is full of them.”

“And you go visiting them all, don’t you?” yelled another voice from among the Christians.

Ignatius twisted like a cat to face his new challenger. “Mocker!” he shrieked. “False Christian! ‘The scorner is an abomination...’”

“Ignatius!” Sixtus’ deep voice filled the hall like thunder. The little man flinched as Marcus let him go, cowering back from Sixtus, his dark eyes flashing defiance. Sixtus came slowly forward to him, holding his gaze as if with a chain of iron. “Where did you get that earring?” asked the old man quietly. Ignatius seemed to grow smaller, shrinking away from that frail awesome form like a yapping dog faced with its master. For a time his eyes burned in sullen anger. Then they dropped.

Into the utter silence of that dim stone room he said, “It was thrown down to me from a window the afternoon I was arrested.” He looked up with a last flash of defiance. “The window of a whorehouse.”

“Plotina’s,” said Marcus.

Sixtus’ gaze flickered to him. “You know the one?”

“I was in the crowd,” he replied in a stifled voice, sick with the thought that she might have been trying to throw it to him. How many days ago had that been?

“That’s just fine,” snapped Telesphorus scornfully, “I can just hear the news in the Forum now: ‘Christians Arrested Raiding Whorehouse...’”

Sixtus ignored him. “Would Arrius take his men in?”

Marcus hesitated. “Maybe. But Plotina’s well-connected. I’ve seen her dining with some of the most influential men in Rome. If we’re wrong...”

“Yes, it would make for some awkward explanations. Especially since, thanks to various members of my household, I seem to be in a rather ambiguous position myself.” He glanced across at Churaldin. “You haven’t converted Octavia yet, have you?”

The Briton looked sheepishly at the floor. Sixtus sighed.

“I could go in and have a look at the place,” said Dorcas quietly, “and see if she’s there.”