Wrath of Rome

VI

As the litter moved off into the dusk, Athanasius and the woman dressed like Cleopatra sat cross-legged facing one another. “You’re dirtier than all the prisoners here, Tribune.”

The way she said “Tribune” told him she knew exactly who he was, or rather who he was not. “Why are you helping me, Cleopatra?” he asked her, using the same tone on her name that she had used with him.

“Call me Cleo, mistress of the Sea Nymph,” she told him. “And who says I am helping you? I am helping John. My pleasure barge pays regular visits to Patmos. My girls service the guards, well, most of them. Some of the guards come aboard and slip my girls secret letters that we take to other ports of call.”

“Like this one?” Athanasius showed her the letter that John had given him.

She looked it over and then nodded. “Exactly. I was waiting to receive something like this from Cornelius before you assassinated Barbatio.”

“It wasn’t an assassination,” he insisted. “It was more of an accident.”

“Too bad. He terribly mistreats my girls. I was going to have to do the honors of serving him tonight until you spared me.”

Athanasius studied her as he pondered this unusual arrangement she had with the last apostle and his key leaders in Ephesus. “If you’ll pardon my asking, Cleo, why would a man like the last apostle trust you?”

“A whore?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “For the same reason he probably trusts you. I tell him what his bishops and acolytes won’t: the truth. Now you’ll have to trust me too. Quick, crawl under my ass.”

Athanasius cocked his ear to make sure he had heard correctly, then pulled back the veil of the litter slightly to see that they were entering the harbor. Night had fallen, and the torches were lit. Cornelius, awake and alert now, barked orders for the ranks to form lines. The last of the garrison’s pleasure seekers were quickly disembarking the Sea Nymph and putting on their helmets.

He dropped the curtain and looked at Cleo. Her knees were drawn up to her heaving bosoms, and she had pulled back the cushion underneath to reveal a secret compartment. It was only a Roman foot or so deep but ran the length of the litter and was wide enough for him to crawl in and lie flat. She then rolled the cushion back and sat on him.

“Easy does it, my slaves,” he heard her call out.

The litter stopped. Then came the sound of approaching boots and a voice.

“Madame, you are safe,” said a loud voice, which he recognized as belonging to Cornelius. Perhaps he was playing to the troops. “There has been a tragedy. Commander Barbatio has been assassinated.”

“Have you found the assassin?”

“We are turning the island over now. We have a centurion from the assassin’s ship who can identify him. The captain refuses to help.”

“Have you searched my ship? My girls could be in danger. I won’t board until you’ve searched it from top to bottom.”

“Search the whore barge!” Cornelius shouted, and Athanasius heard the thunder of boots going up the gangway to the boat.

There were holes in the bottom of the litter, through which Athanasius could see the ground and breathe quietly, but not without some struggle. Cleo had made a good play. The troops were bound to search the ship at some point. Better now than after he was on board.

A short time later there was more thunder as the troops came back down the gangway, and a voice said, “I have searched the whore ship from top to bottom, sir. There is nobody but the whores and crew on board.”

“Very well,” said the voice of Cornelius, and as the sound of boots faded away he addressed Cleo. “Such a tragedy, Madame.”

“Yes, it is,” she said in a droll tone. “Barbatio hadn’t consummated our deal, and my girls only serviced the first round of the night. Barbatio had ordered five rounds. I expect to be paid in full. We made a special trip to Patmos. I have Nubian oarsmen, sailors and marines to pay, and girls to feed.”

The voice turned stern as it addressed Cleo, again, it sounded to Athanasius, for public consumption. “You will be content to leave with your lives and return at a later visit to finish our business and get paid. Now be gone, and take your whores with you.”

And with that Athanasius could see the stone of the quay give way to the wood of the gangway as the litter carrying him and Cleo was walked up to the deck. Minutes later he crawled out of his secret hold and stood at the rail of the Sea Nymph gazing back upon the dark waters. The black cutout of Patmos slowly began to fade into the night until it disappeared.

“Oooh, how it must hurt, Pharaoh.”

Seated on a small divan in Cleo’s private cabin aboard the Sea Nymph, Athanasius tried to relax as a girl named “Nefertiri” bathed his cuts in oils, dabbing them gently with a cloth. She seemed genuinely concerned for each and every scratch, blowing on and kissing them.

She offered him wine. “Medicine for your stomach, Great One, as we cruise the Nile on your royal barge?”

Athanasius, recalling his last experience with wine offered to him from Galen aboard the Pegasus, was inclined to decline, but took a small sip anyway, his bones and muscles feeling crushed and not wanting to spoil this little fantasy Nefertiri had created.

Then Cleo spoke from the door in Greek. “Phyllis, back to your quarters.”

Phyllis sheepishly scooped up her assorted comfort potions and tools, then bowed before him and Cleo. She smiled at Athanasius on her way out.

Cleo entered and poured herself a cup of the wine. “Cornelius will see to it that the logs on Patmos will show that the Sea Nymph is going to Alexandria. But first we’ll stop at Ephesus for you. We’ll anchor offshore, and you can go in by boat. You will have to watch yourself going in. I think your Pegasus will beat us with its two additional decks of oars. Consider your career as a tribune over for now. You will have to put away your costume.”

Athanasius nodded. He knew as much. “I don’t suppose you have any other disguises for a man in my position?”

“Wigs, beards and dyes for your hair, too,” she said as she drank her wine. “Everything you could want. We could even make you a woman, although I’m afraid you might draw even more unwanted attention from some men than you already have with the assassination of Barbatio. I can’t imagine old John is happy with you. You must be somebody special if he trusts you.”

“He doesn’t trust me,” Athanasius said. “He thinks I’m a spy from the Dei sent to destroy the Church.”

At the mention of the Dei the blood drained from Cleo’s face and her hand holding her cup froze in mid-air. For a wild moment Athanasius worried he had said the wrong thing and might not reach Ephesus after all. Women like Cleo could be quite cunning, and she did have a deck full of Nubian strongmen at her call. But instead she laughed and put the cup down, then lay on top of him on the bed.

“I can look into your eyes and tell that you are not one of them.”

“And how is that?” Athanasius asked, shifting beneath her.

“You don’t have the empty, dead eyes of the Dei that are devoid of any humanity.”

Athanasius could see that he didn’t have to worry about her killing him, although he did begin to worry about where this evening in bed was going. He could only think of Helena, and how important to his survival it was to hold onto his hatred of Domitian and Ludlumus. To let up for even a moment might deprive him of the full venom he needed. “So you know the Dei?”

Cleo nodded soberly. “Who do you think runs the church in Ephesus?”

Athanasius bolted upright in her bed. “You’re lying now.”

She sat back, startled. “I thought that is why John is sending a man like yourself, to do what his acolytes in the Church cannot and smoke out the Dei.”

“Who told you that the Dei was evil?” he pressed her. “I thought the Dei defended The Way and the helpless, and only attacked Roman power.”

She said, “The Dei preys on the weak and helpless, on the least of these, to make itself more powerful. And it has compromised the church in Ephesus.”

Athanasius said, “According to the Book of Revelation, Jesus lauds the church in Ephesus for its sound doctrine, for not falling into apostasy.”

“Its doctrine is fine,” Cleo told him. “In practice, however, it has been hopelessly compromised. John knows it. But Bishop Timothy, who is a disciple of Paul’s, and his second, Polycarp, who is a disciple of John’s, apparently don’t. I suspect John is sending you to Polycarp because he doesn’t trust Timothy’s disciples, who are thick with the Dei. I know these men, because they run me too.”

Athanasius looked her in the eye. “Tell me everything.”

For the first time since entering her cabin, Cleo smiled.

Over several hours Cleo explained to Athanasius what she knew about the Dei, working backward from her own experience aboard the Sea Nymph to the opium dens and whore houses the Dei operated in ports all around the Great Sea, to the flesh they shipped out of Ephesus—women to the temples, and men to feed the galleys, the mines and the Games in Rome.

“But where do these people come from?” Athanasius asked.

“There are caves in the hinterlands of Asia Minor,” she told him. “Vast, endless caves where the Christians hide in underground cities. Tens of thousands of them. Most live there because they have nowhere else to live, and they crawl out into the day to work as field laborers if they can find work. Many others have moved there for protection from Roman troops, who have better things to do than crawl into holes in the ground. And a vast majority are convinced the world is about to end and have shut themselves in with their families and food stores in preparation.”

Athanasius listened carefully. He had heard rumors of these underground cities, much like the urban legends of catacombs beneath Rome, where a growing army of Christians were breeding to one day surface and overwhelm the city like locusts. But he had chalked that up to Domitian’s propaganda machinery, which always seemed to go into full motion just before the start of the Games every summer.

“What do the caves have to do with the Dei, Cleo?”

“I told you, the caves are where the Dei gets its flesh to feed the Games,” she explained. “Masked men dressed like the Minotaur of Greek mythology make raids to grab young girls and men and terrify the population. The Christians think they are armed bands of local gypsies. But they are Dei. They drug the men and women with opium, and bring them to the port cities, the biggest of which is Ephesus. The women become whores, the men mostly slaves or gladiators, and are shipped out to the far corners of the empire, never to return.”

More myths and mysteries, he thought. Each seemed to reveal yet another when it came to Dominium Dei. He had been led to believe that the Dei was an imperial organization. But Cleo was describing something else, something more like a trade organization based on commerce, not politics. “So the Dei sells opium and flesh for money?”

“No, secrets. They use their sex clubs and ships like this: The Dei employ young boys and girls to have sex with customers and blackmail them. The Christians are the easiest marks and make no trouble. Bishops who come to Ephesus for church conferences, for example, are often lured into compromise and then, once under the control of the Dei, are sent back to their provincial churches.”

“None resist?” Athanasius asked.

“No,” she said. “I tell my own girls that God has given them free wills. The only opium they use is for the pleasure of their guests. The ones who are Christians, they are ashamed to go back to their hometowns and families. The few who have are shunned and come back to me. Only one girl, a very young girl who was terribly mistreated, went back to the caves to warn the others and never came back. I heard she was alive, but that was months ago. Today, God knows.”

“Why don’t you resist?”

“I do,” she said. “I stay employed by the Dei in order to help the real Church and men like John—and my girls. I cannot choose their life for them. But I can do my best to keep them safe as much as depends on me.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Two reasons,” she said. “The first is that you said something about the Dei being an imperial organization. Perhaps it is. But in Asia Minor it is very much associated with the Church.”

“Why don’t the bishops denounce it?”

“They do,” Cleo said. “That is, they denounce murderous acts like the slaying of the astrologer Caelus, despite their belief that astrology is of the devil. But they don’t know about everything else the Dei does. They don’t even know that their prime benefactors are members of the Dei, because their society in the Church goes by a different name than it does in public.”

“What name is that?”

“The Lord’s Vineyard. It’s a fellowship of tradesmen and commercial businessmen.”

“And the Lord’s Vineyard and the Dei are one and the same?”

“I think so.”

“You think?”

“I know that the owner of this ship is a member of the Dei by the code name Poseidon. He is the Dei chief in Ephesus. I also believe he is a member of the church there, and a representative of the Lord’s Vineyard. His daughter goes by the name Urania and runs a honey trap in Ephesus called the Club Urania, using her girls to nab men who go there. Her father then ships them off to Rome along with more girls and opium. If you find him, he might be able to lead you to the head of the Dei itself in Asia Minor.”

“What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “One of my girls claimed to have seen his face during a church communion. But before she could give us his name, she disappeared.”

Athanasius nodded. “What is the second reason you are telling me this?”

“I was not always this way, and neither were my girls,” she answered. “I want you to remember this, to remind the church leaders, if you live long enough to meet them. Now, rest up. You’ll need it.”

And with that warning, Cleo rose to her feet and left him alone in her cabin. As soon as the door shut behind her, Athanasius fell fast asleep.