Read Search the Seven Hills for Free Online Page B

explain himself. With great presence of mind, he reached into the satchel that lay on the floor at his feet, produced another cup, and slopped it full from the wine mixer on the table without spilling a drop. “Thought I’d bring my own dishes,” he added brightly, carrying it over to the couch where Marcus sat gingerly probing the bruise on his side. “Save us grubbin’ around for yours and havin’ to haul the water up to wash ’em.”
    Marcus let this perfectly justified slur on his housekeeping pass and sipped at the watered vintage. “So that meddling centurion told you after all,” he sighed. “I asked him not to.”
    “Nor did he that I’ve heard.” He looked down at his senior, his head on one side, rather like some ungainly bird of exotic plumage. “Some slut who lives downstairs sent me word you’d been brought in by the watch at all hours of the morning with a cracked head and the looks of a prize brawl printed all over your noble frame, so I thought I’d push along and see what a philosopher looks like after a night on the tiles.”
    Marcus sighed and lowered his tangled head to one hand. “Gods, if only it were that,” he whispered.
    “The centurion Arrius was good enough to send one of his warriors to the Basilica Ulpias, where I had repaired, as is my custom, to teach,” Timoleon informed him kindly. “Hearing that you had been somehow injured, I was greatly distressed and, dismissing my other students, came here with all speed, to find your brother already in possession of the field, if not of the facts. I enlightened him insofar as I was able, from what I had myself learned at third hand from the soldier who first brought me the news.”
    Felix’s gentle vacuous eyes filled with admiration. “I say, Professor, will you talk like that when you become a philosopher?”
    Timoleon looked down his long elegant nose at him and made no comment.
    Not being a citizen, Timoleon was not entitled to wear a toga and garbed himself instead after the fashion of the Athenian philosophers in a simple Greek chiton, which left his right arm bare. He was a tall, graceful man, Jove-like in his grave dignity, his tawny hair fading in streaks from russet to straw to white. He reminded Marcus at times of a statue of the god, wrought in old ivory and worn gold, an oracle of times past, imbued with the wisdom and dignity of former ages.
    Beside him Felix looked hot and overdressed, the white toga his father insisted it was his duty as a citizen to wear contrasting absurdly with the blue and scarlet birds and grapes embroidered on his cream-colored tunic. Felix himself was a ridiculous caricature of his older brother, having the same long, narrow face, in which all the features were exaggerated: the nose beakier, the chin weak instead of square, the wide, gentle brown eyes blinking, lamblike, and heavily painted with malachite and kohl. On his head Marcus’ unruly brown curls were a carefully wrought confection of perfumed ringlets. The scent of balsam and depilatories breathed from the folds of his elaborately wrought toga as he fished among them for a handkerchief and carefully blotted his brow.
    “Say, I was badly rocked to hear about this, you know?” he said after a time. “Tullia bein’ snatched, and all. No word?”
    “Not yet,” said Marcus, in a voice cracked with exhaustion and anxiety.
    “Lady A. takin’ it all right?” For all his ludicrous appearance, there was genuine concern in his tone. “Awful for her, of course. She was always kind to me.”
    “Not well,” said Marcus quietly. “She’s been given a sleeping draft, but she’ll have to wake up sometime.”
    “May the gods endow her with the strength to endure this misfortune with philosophic mind,” said Timoleon gently. Shrill and distant as birds, the cries of children rose from the court below, along with a man’s voice, free and lazy and clear, singing in Aramaic. Marcus thought of the sound of Aurelia Pollia’s tortured