a city until Gallienus had the place sacked and looted. I used to know a couple of Armenian hookers-twin sisters they were-each would start at different points of your body and work their way to the center.' Ortius sighed deeply and scratched his ass.
'Ahh! But I was younger then. It would probably kill me to try something like that now. Still a man is tempted to always recapture something of his youth, even if there is a price to pay. Is that not so, my overmuscled friend?'
Casca merely grunted noncommittedly and stuffed his face with fresh oysters from the bay. Rising, Ortius paid the bill and said, 'I'm off for a massage and piling. You finish up with the stevedores and make sure none of the bales are broken open.'
They set sail with the dawn tide and were out to sea by the time the day broke in fully on them. The group of tourists going to Carthage immediately started chanting and wailing while they conducted a ritual among themselves. Words drifted up through the open hatch.
Casca was standing beside Ortius near the oar sweeps. Turning to him, he squinted as a beam of reflected light from the sea struck his face.
'They're Christians?'
Ortius nodded. 'Aye, they're going to Carthage to escape. The word is out there will soon be another purge in Rome. In Carthage they are not bothered so much and even on occasions have been permitted to conduct their services openly. There are hundreds if not thousands there. Personally, I could care less what cult or gods they worship so long as their gold and silver is good. One thing about Christians-their god forbids them to cheat or lie.' Laughing, he cleared his throat and spat phlegm over the side. 'Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous in your life?'
After an uneventful trip, they docked at the inner harbor and tied up next to the storage houses used for transhipment of goods from the interior of the great African plains and mountains, most of which went to Rome.
The Christians were met by others of their sect and quickly left the harbor to find new homes and what they hoped would be safety from the coming persecutions.
Casca spent the day wandering through this miniature Rome where once the Carthaginians had challenged the power of Rome and were destroyed by the legions of Scipio. The city had resisted fanatically, the last survivors fighting to the death under the leadership of Hasdrubal in the Temple of Eshmun. With their death came also the death of the city as the conquerors pillaged and butchered. The stones of the buildings were broken and all human habitation of this place was forbidden on pain of death.
For twenty years only lizards and desert creatures lived in the rubble that once housed 700,000 men, women and children who were now no more. Mars is a vengeful god.
While Ortius attended to ship's business, Casca rented a piebald pony from a local stable and went for a tour of the city, glad to exchange the swaying of the ship for the bump of the saddle. On several walls he saw the symbols of old, of the hated gods of Carthage that the Romans detested so, for their savagery and rites of human sacrifice. Rome seemed to find no parallel between those who died in the name of a god and those sent to the arena to die for the amusement of the Romans. Casca wondered how the difference affected the enthusiasm of those to be killed. Passing a stone panel used to rebuild a wall enclosing the sumptuous domus of a retired senator who had taken up farming, he saw the emblems of Tanith, the supreme goddess of the city. Properly called Tanit pene Baal, the Other Face of Baal, the carving was that of the disk and crescent moon. The other face of Baal… the one he showed was bad enough.
Passing a market place, Casca saw a small bronze figure of the insatiable diety who demanded the firstborn of every family to be offered to him and fed to his flames. The small figure still held an aura of sinister depravity in the shape of human lips above the beard; crowning the figure were the horns of a beast.
Baal, Moloch, Jupiter, Quetza.
'Damn, what's the answer… what's the question?'
The African sun beat heavily on his back as he headed back to the wharves where ships lay in wait. Ortius was ready to put out to sea but had to wait for the tide on the morrow. That night was spent in a small inn near the waterfront. The morning found them cutting their way into the clear blue of the Mediterranean, heading northeast, carrying a new cargo of skins and ivory and amphorae of salted fish.
Casca cast one look back at the city founded by Queen Dido when she sought refuge on this hostile shore. It was said the king of the land offered her only the area that could be covered by the hide of a bull, but Dido (smart bitch that she was), held him to his word and cut the bullhide into thread-thin lengths and from this encircled the area that was to be her city.
The sea trail leading to Byzantium was marked by only a couple of minor storms. Two sailors and a pilgrim saw the shrine of Athena on one of the lesser islands of the group between Crete and Achea. Perhaps he should have been a devotee of Father Neptune or Poseidon as the Greeks knew him, but what's in a name-a god by any other name is still a pain in the ass.
At last with the coming of the summer solstice, they pulled into sight of Byzantium-nearly a thousand years old and founded by the Greeks, those great settlers of the' Mediterranean world. Here, Casca knew his sea road would end.
Bidding a sad farewell to Ortius at the dock, he made his way through the streets which had not yet recovered from the ravages Gallenius had inflicted in order to squelch what he thought was a beginning insurrection. Across the straits lay Asia Minor, the gateway to the east. For some time now, the words of Shiu Lao Tze had haunted his dreams: 'Come to the East beyond the Indus.'
Casca left Ortius tending to his usual condition of bribing the port officials and made a deal with a fisherman to get to the opposite shore across the propontis and land in the Asian city of Calchedon. From there he would begin his odyssey to the far east across the known lands of Cappadocia, Armenia, Media, Hyrcania and Parthia to the Oxus River, eighteen hundred miles as the crow or vulture flies. It would be next spring before he reached the frontiers of Bactria and from there he knew nothing of the way to Khitai, other than to head east, but others knew the way. In Rome itself, he had seen men of Shiu's race trading their cargoes of precious silk to the merchants of the city. The trail they took was called the Silk Road. Silk was smooth and soft, but Casca had the feeling this description would have nothing in common with the road he would ride. Securing the animals and supplies, he climbed into the saddle, tugging at the lead rope of his pack animal and headed out, out to whatever fate awaited him in the distance.
Ortius drowned his sorrow of the loss of his comrade by finding the twin sisters still in residence in the city-a little older and perhaps a trifle more shopworn then when he last saw them, but they had lost none of their enthusiasm for the trade of Aphrodite. They still knew how to work their way to the center of a man's attention and it had little to do with food. Casca was gone, but life went on. Ortius wished the Roman well and with the aid of the two sisters, drowned his sorrows with a rare vintage of 50-year-old Lesbos wine.
Seven
The flickering red glow of a distant flame told of the presence of men. Casca and the boy had seen no sign of life for the last two weeks. The limits of the Roman Empire were now far behind, past even the boundaries of the divine Alexander. The city of stone and mud-baked bricks that bore his name marked the end of his conquests. Here the Jaxartes River turned from the mountains to flow northward to the Aral Sea from the land of Han. From Eschate the Silk Road ran all the way to Rome, but there also was the wild country, filled only with danger for the unwary man or beast.
Occasionally, roving bands of savages would sweep down from the steppes ravaging along the way, like monstrous locusts, leaving nothing in their path. Tarters, Huns and Mongols- along with lesser nations composed only of herds of horses, sheep and people: they were only a little better than their beasts and then only by the degree of cruelty they relished, that was unknown to the animals of the world.
As Casca wrapped his cloak closer about him, the scent of brush and dry air reached his nostrils. The slender
