Search the Seven Hills by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page A

from the steam rooms, still dictating away to their pink and sweating secretarial slaves, wealthy sportsmen returning from the training room, bronze as statues under the oily dust of the track and trailed by a string of slaves carrying hardballs, towels, strigils, oil. Despite his present mode of life, Marcus was enough of a rich man’s son to place baths above food, and to patronize only the best.
    Timoleon rose as a bathman appeared, carrying their two neat piles of clothes. He rested a white slender hand briefly on Marcus’ shoulder. “Torturing yourself will not lessen another’s pain,” he said quietly. “This young girl is in the hands of Fate. Comfort yourself with Plato’s assertion that no true evil can befall a truly just person, and cultivate the detachment necessary to see both good and evil as necessary parts of this earthly existence.”
    Marcus was silent as he dressed, silent as the well-trained slaves draped his toga, and in silence he followed the Athenian through the vast hall of the indoor swimming pool, where slanted sunlight flickered on the sparkling water. They passed through an enormous vestibule, where fig-sellers and bookstalls displayed their wares between columns of rose-red Samian marble, and out into the dusty brilliance of the square outside.
    “Marcus,” said Timoleon quietly. “Please believe that I am not insensible to the grief that you feel—with justification—at this shocking event. You are young in your philosophy, and this makes it difficult for you to understand that to a true philosopher all events, good and bad, are like ripples upon the sea. They are not the sea itself. This horror that has befallen your friend is less than the horrors that happen in war. You must prepare yourself to meet waiting and anxiety, and possibly greater horrors, with a calm and equable mind. As Plutarch has said, we are all the sport of the gods.”
    In the square before them a few groups of people had stopped to watch a religious procession, winding its way to an imposing columned temple opposite the steps of the baths. The priests walked with heads covered in the folds of their togas, lest they should see an inauspicious omen; the obligatory flute players followed, piping to drown out any profane interruptions that would cause the entire ceremony to have to be repeated again from the beginning. A hot drift of breeze blew the words to Marcus—they were in archaic Etruscan, memorized by rote, an unfailing ritual to a god whose very name had been forgotten in the course of the centuries.
    Gods like those? he wondered.
    He raised his head, his heart a sounding hollow of misery within him. Over the roofs that shut in the square he could see the towering walls of the Flavian Amphitheater, high even from the hilltop beside them, and glittering like sugar in the sun. Through a break in the buildings where a wide street ran down the hill, he could see the forest of columns that marked the various forums, the glint of the gilt roof of the Vesta temple, the smoke that rose from the multicolored pillars of red and green Egyptian porphyry on the porch of the temple of Avenging Mars. Far off he could discern the marble woods around the newest imperial forum, flanked by its libraries, its temples, its deep-cut curves graven into the bones of the shouldering mass of the Quirinal Hill itself, and above and behind it all, rising like a solemn finger, clean as a sword blade in the sun, the emperor’s column with its lacework of embroidered stone.
    Timoleon’s hand rested lightly upon his arm. “I’m sorry,” said the philosopher gently. Then he, too, was gone, moving down the steps of the baths, erect and aloof from the troubles of a filthy world.
    For a time Marcus only stood, staring sightlessly before him. Why not accept it? he asked himself. There’s nothing you can do. Even if you were to rescue her, she’d still he betrothed to someone far richer than you, someone who hasn’t been cast out by his