"I trust you may not only see it," said Furca, gloating in anticipation over the prospect, "but also see her pale, proud mother, the Empress Prisca, humbled at your feet."
"Accomplish this, good Furca," exclaimed Fausta, with exultation, "and the goddess Cybele shall have such an offering as she never had before."
"We must be wary," said the priest, "or we may ourselves be crushed. They are too powerful to be attacked openly. We must plot against them secretly. I'll be a furca to them indeed," he added, punning upon his own name, which had also the signification of an instrument of punishment, something like a cross; and the conspirators parted with this pledge of mutual hate against their destined victims.
[CHAPTER XI]
THE SLAVE MARKET.
In the meantime Isidorus, with well-filled purse, and armed with credentials under the Imperial seal, had set off upon his difficult and doubtful quest.
"However it turn out," he said to himself, "it will be strange if I do not climb a few steps higher on the ladder on which my feet are now placed. Being the confidential agent of the Empress is better than being the secretary of the rude soldier, Sertorius, and being snubbed by him every day, too."
Mounted on one of the best horses in the Imperial stables, he rode forth upon the famous Salarian Way, which led straight as an arrow over the wide Campagna, and over the rugged Appenines to the distant city of Ravenna, among the marshes of the Adriatic. Now a decayed and grass-grown city, six miles from the sea, it was then a great and busy port, and had been for two centuries and a half an important see of the Christian Church. Not to the prefect of the city, but to the bishop of Ravenna, Isidorus, with his natural tact and shrewdness, betook himself. The sign manual of the Emperor, which he confidently exhibited, did not command that regard which he had anticipated; but a private letter from Adauctus, commending Isidorus to all Christian bishops and presbyters, procured for him a much more cordial reception. He was hospitably entertained, and every possible assistance given him in his quest. The bishop called together the deacons who had the care of the poor of the Church, but none of them knew anything of Demetrius. The bishop had ransomed many Christian slaves—prisoners taken in war, or captured by pirates. A few years before, when the resources of the Church had been completely exhausted by the exercise of this charity,[26] a company of captives had been sold by pirates to a Jewish slave-dealer named Ezra, and conveyed by him to the city of Mediolanum, or as we now call it, Milan, as offering, next to Rome, the best market for his wares. And one of the deacons remembered among this slave-gang an old man who resembled the description given of Demetrius.
To Milan, therefore, crossing again the Appenines, and riding up the broad, rich valley of the Po, went Isidorus. He was surprised to find a city, almost rivalling in extent Rome itself, and with a history reaching back to the times of the Etruscans, well-nigh a thousand years. First he sought the Jewish slave-dealer, who kept a regular mart for the sale or hire of human beings, just as one now-a-days keeps a livery-stable for the sale or hire of horses. There was as much fraud, too, in selling slaves then, as has been proverbially connected with horse-dealing and jockeying in every age. The ergastulum, or slave-pen of Ezra, was a large prison-like structure, surrounding the four sides of a hollow square. There were no windows to the street, and only very small iron-grated ones to the inner court; with heavy, iron-studded doors to the stable-like stalls, where the slaves were chained to a stout beam running along the wall.