“I found myself wondering if this could be what Poppaea was talking about, so I asked her if their secret place was underground.” Anatolius pulled bits of twigs from his hair as he spoke. “She nodded but would say no more. Of course, she didn’t realize what she’d revealed. This is just the sort of hiding place that children love, John. In fact, when I was a lot younger I played here myself, in a manner of speaking.”
“And that means…?”
“I would hide here with one of the girls from the kitchen,” Anatolius replied, with a grin. “Let me go first. The stairs were in sad repair even then.”
As Anatolius paused beneath the doorway the sound of stealthy movement floated up from the depths of the small building.
The missing girl?
A small shape raced up out of the mithraeum and skittered away. It was a small, striped cat. Obviously frightened, it vanished into the thick undergrowth pressing in around the clearing.
Anatolius called Sunilda’s name as he led the way down the crumbling stairway.
Sunilda was not there.
It was obvious from a cursory glance that the area at its foot had originally been an antechamber. Now only a few fragments of the woven wickerwork screen that had separated it from the rest of the mithraeum remained. From where they stood, the whole of the narrow room with its rough plastered walls, far smaller in size than the mithraeum concealed in a cellar on the grounds of the Great Palace, was visible in the greenish light filtering down the steps. An odor of decay hung heavily in the small chamber’s thick air.
Anatolius started forward but John placed a hand on his shoulder, directing him look down.
There were small, muddy tracks on the cracked flagstones.
“The children’s footprints!” commented Anatolius.
“All that’s obvious is that they are small footprints,” John replied thoughtfully.
Anatolius was struck by inspiration. “Barnabas! Of course! He was hiding here!”
John made no reply.
They stepped over a dead rat that lay at the foot of the stairway, accounting for the rank smell that had greeted them.
“Evidently we disturbed that little cat at its supper,” Anatolius commented idly as they walked slowly up the narrow space between low benches set along the two longer walls. A quick glance revealed that the benches were formed of thickly plastered solid slabs with no hiding places beneath.
The stone altar in front of the far wall was carved with bas reliefs of Mithra. Reaching it, the two men paused and bowed their heads briefly in honor of their god, who had acquired a holy place in an unexpected manner.
Stepping away, they glanced around again.
Anatolius picked up a clay pot. It rattled as he up-ended it and the skull of a small animal, perhaps another rat, spilled out.
“Sacrifice or some spirited play?” Anatolius wondered aloud. “But it shouldn’t be left here to pollute Lord Mithra’s house. I’ll get rid of it and the rat when we leave. And what’s this?”
A board game was hidden behind the altar, along with a pair of small ceramic plates and two cups.
John examined the ceramic ware. They all bore the mark of Zeno’s household.
“The children obviously borrowed these from the kitchen to play with, Anatolius. You’ll recall Poppaea talked about a party. I thought she was referring to their picnic but now I’m beginning to think she wasn’t. Perhaps she meant that they had played here later that day?”
The wall behind the altar was decorated with the traditional sacred scene depicting Mithra killing the primeval bull. The wall painting would have originally displayed brilliant reds and greens, but now it was faded. Patches of plaster had fallen off, leaving much of the scene missing, and the blade in Mithra’s hand had been reduced to little more than a few flakes of pigment clinging to the rough surface of the wall.
Anatolius slipped into the cramped space between wall and altar.
“I made this little hiding place before I realized it was blasphemous and an insult to Mithra,” he confessed shamefacedly. “I’m sure He understands that I was but a child at the time and that it was not meant as an affront to Him.”
A slight scraping ensued as he quickly pulled an irregularly shaped piece of stone from the back of the altar, exposing a small niche in which nestled a sheaf of parchments.
The letters Sunilda had written to her besieged aunt in Italy.
John rapidly scanned them when they had emerged back into the green-tinted light of the small clearing.
The girl’s handwriting and grammar were certainly very accomplished for one of her age, he thought. As for her imagination, as he read Sunilda’s visions of her future as a queen, her descriptions of conversations with Porphyrio the whale and accounts of marvelous events and astounding adventures that simply could never have happened, he found it difficult to credit that a child could possess such powers of invention. Surely she must simply be describing the world as she truly saw it, however mistaken such a view might be.
He remarked on this to Anatolius, adding, “I suppose we all live in different worlds. The one I live in now is not the one I inhabited as a young man.”
Then he abruptly stopped scanning the neat lines of writing and reread the passage that had startled him.
“What is it?” Anatolius asked.
“It seems Mithra has indeed smiled upon us,” John replied. “For indeed his sacred ravens were right, whichever version of that old rhyme you accept, Anatolius!”
“But how can that be?”
“Because from this letter I know where to find the girl,” John said rapidly. “She’s gone to meet the whale. Apparently it’s promised to take her to Gadaric. She describes her plans to her aunt, right down to the last detail.”
Anatolius sadly shook his head over the girl’s mistaken notion of being reunited with her brother, characterizing it as a childish fantasy. “But at least we now know where she is. Where is that, John?”
The parchment crackled as John’s fingers tightened around it.
“We’ll find her hiding near the headland when the straw man festival is under way.”
“That’s at dawn tomorrow! This is wonderful news! But how does she expect to meet a whale on a cliff top? Does she suppose it will fly up to carry her off?”
“Hardly, Anatolius,” John replied. “Unless we can stop her, it seems she intends to throw herself into the sea at the same time as the straw man-just like the Gadarene swine.”
Chapter Thirty
The sea was the bright and unnatural green of a hand-blown glass vessel, its frozen waves, far below, flaws just underneath the bright surface. Sunlight glanced off the swells with the painful brilliance of the dog days of summer yet the rocks beneath John’s feet felt cold. He could not remember how he had come to the precipice or why, yet he had the distinct feeling that if he stepped over its edge he would soar out across the water like a raven. Some urgent matter pulled at the edge of his memory. He had to be in attendance at a particular place at a specific time. But where? And at what hour? He couldn’t recall. Looking down at the solid sea made him giddy.
Suddenly a sluggish line of light rippled across the green, glassy seawater.
He leapt from his bed, blade in hand before he was fully awake.
“Master!” Peter’s flickering oil lamp made his shadow huge as he advanced a few steps. The room thus illuminated was now better furnished than it had been when John had moved into it. Although the Lord Chamberlain did not care much about comfortable beds and good furniture, his servant knew what was fitting and proper for one of such standing and had requested them for his master.
John sat on the edge of his bed. The dream lingered, sea and precipice submerging the room for a few heartbeats until the vision flowed away into the darkness like a wave from a beach, leaving behind only the racing of his heart.