Foretold by Thunder

by Edward M. Davey

  “Don’t be so silly.”

  “Go on then, what were you going to say?”

  “He was going to say that Constantine ordered the destruction of the Disciplina Etrusca,” Dr Nesta replied. “He trusted to Christianity instead. It was a poor decision. And again, history is our prime witness. Consider the greatest historian of them all, your Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire blames only Christianity for what befell the empire.” Again Dr Nesta crossed himself.

  “Gibbon merely argued that with Jesus as a rival figurehead to the emperor, Rome lost cohesiveness,” said Jake. “And without the figure of a divine Caesar to hold the empire together, it fell apart.”

  “Gibbon identified the symptoms, but he misidentified the cause. Do you think the ancients would have kept on about this science for a thousand years if it didn’t work? What modern arrogance! It’s as Roger always said. There is this public misconception that ancient people were not fully evolved – cavemen grunt, modern humans think and our ancestors were somewhere in between. But the human who emerges from ancient literature is the same species as us. You see, the people who the ancient texts portray were every bit like us. They loved and lost. They planned for the future. They lied and schemed and were afraid of disease. Indisputably the classical world contained true genius, and yet still Rome clung to augury. Ask yourself why?” He grimaced. “For centuries Rome was governed as badly as … as Italy today, for instance. The emperors were mad, the civil wars were unending, the society was a stew of corruption. And yet for all its flaws Rome always seemed to prevail. What edge did it have?”

  “If what you’re saying is true,” Jenny pressed, “then why isn’t thunder prophecy the central theme of Roman literature?”

  Dr Nesta laughed. “First, because there was something very un-Roman about it – relying on superstition for success. The Romans liked to pretend everything they achieved was through hard work and endeavour, not some stolen secret. And if you had the edge on your rivals, wouldn’t you keep it to yourselves?”

  “The Romans made a big show of taking the omens,” Jake observed.

  “And yet it was examining livers and interpreting the flight of birds that were central to public ceremony,” said Dr Nesta. “If you knew the future was encoded in bolts of lightning, how clever to celebrate such ludicrous, such silly techniques.”

  The group had meandered to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses charged with keeping the sacred flame of Rome alight. All that remained was a circular row of columns; it reminded Jake of a classical folly in the grounds of some Victorian mill-owner.

  “And these were the women who kept the secret for so long,” said Dr Nesta. “Every Roman knew the Vestal Virgins were fundamental to the security of Rome – but not why. A dire power is best kept by a secretive group. Who controlled the Vestal Virgins controlled the fate of Rome. For they were keepers of the sacred flame.”

  “Power in the hands of women?” Jenny snorted. “I thought we were second-class citizens.”

  “Roger had a theory that females were more capable of interpreting the omens than men,” said Dr Nesta. “More perceptive, more open to the frequency. It was not for nothing the Etruscans gave their women a degree of freedom that scandalized the ancient world.”

  Jake thought of Florence.

  “Enough of this.” Jenny’s eyes glittered. “We met you at considerable risk, hoping for information about Roger. Stuff that would stand up in a court of law. Have you got anything useful to tell us? Anything at all?”

  The scientist grimaced again. “Beyond what I have already said? No. But they killed him, signora. You must believe what I say.”

  “With a lightning bolt?” Jenny laughed. “Even if that was possible, why would they get him like that? It’s so blatant.”

  “I believe you have the phrase in English,” said Dr Nesta. “Hiding in plain sight.”

  *

  “That’s what you get when you bring together a pseudo-scientist and a disturbed historian,” Jenny growled as they returned to the hotel. “And we risked everything to meet him. I should have my bloody head examined.”

  “Perhaps there was a grain of truth in what he was saying about the grave of Tages,” muttered Jake. “All that stuff about the haemorrhage. It was interesting, at least. And it wouldn’t be the first time in history somebody with a brain defect was hailed as saviour.”

  Jenny gripped his wrist.

  “What?” asked Jake. “What is it?”

  “Grain … saviour …”

  “I don’t follow,” he said.

  “I think I’ve just worked out where Eusebius’s final hiding place is.”

  67

  That night Jake lay awake, listening to the ambient noise of Italian lives floating through his window. Almost midnight, and children were still out playing. The journalist padded to the window and watched them thwack a football against a wall. A mother emerged from her apartment to shepherd the kids inside and a teenager ambled to his scooter, scorching away downhill. In the window opposite Jake could see a television flickering, half of a man wearing a vest with a beer in his hand. This was still a happy city – despite the Eurozone meltdown, despite all the difficulties Italy faced.

  How much Roman blood pumped through their veins? Jake had once read that most Italians have a splice of Arabian in their DNA, testament to the millions of Middle Eastern people sucked into ancient Rome as economic migrants or as slaves. That revelation had been seized on by twentieth-century eugenicists to explain the fall of Rome; yet now Jake found himself drawn towards an equally outlandish conclusion.

  Why had this people lost the reins of power? It was the most important question in history, and especially for the West.

  What would Augustus make of Italy today? Bankrupt; globally irrelevant; derided for lack of organization and, by Roman standards, worse: for lack of grit. Italy had been superseded by states that were also in the process of being superseded, and Augustus would think the Italians flowery and fey. Cultured, yes, but still to be sneered at. As Rome once sneered at the flowery Greeks.

  Jake rinsed out his cafetière and watched the suds swirl anticlockwise around the basin. Was the dance of each dot pre-ordained? How could any intelligence keep track of so many multitudes? Anyway, wasn’t that what the rules of physics were for: controlling the path of earth and the planets and each of these thousands of dots in their ballet? But how were the laws of physics chosen? And if you knew those laws, if you had a big enough calculator …

  Jake rested his head on the sink – you could go mad thinking about this stuff. He wondered whether Jenny was asleep, smiled to think of her lying a few feet away in the neighbouring room. Then he stopped smiling and raised his eyebrows, impressed anew at her leap of intuition.

  Chapter LXVIII: An Allusion to the Phoenix.

  We cannot compare Constantine with that bird of Egypt which dies, and rising from its own ashes soars aloft with new life. Rather he did resemble his saviour, who, as sown corn multiplied from a single grain, yielded abundant increase through the blessing of God. A coin was struck. On one side appeared the figure of our blessed prince, with the head veiled. The reverse exhibited him as a charioteer drawn by four horses, a hand stretched downward from above to receive him up to heaven.

  Was it not, Jenny had suggested, about Tages? A saviour who had himself risen from the ground? Did a charioteer with four horses not allude to the plough that had disturbed him?

  Sown corn multiplied from a single grain.

  And Eusebius described a hand stretching downward to pull the saviour up to heaven – as a ploughman had yanked Tages from the ground. The more Jake considered it, the more it made sense. Eusebius hid the final inscription in the most fitting place of all: the tomb of the child who had taught humans the proper discourse between Gods and men.

  Jake could not sleep. His mind whirred over the day and with dismay he realized he believed every word Dr Nesta had said. The scientist’s theories ex
plained not only everything that had happened during the last few weeks, but history itself. Something had happened in 800 BC. The Book of Thunder had been appropriated by Rome. And with that advantage, a provincial town had become a superpower. And the results were all around him still – in law, in language, in literature and democracy, in aesthetics and architecture, a culture handed faithfully down to the modern age across twenty centuries. Not just in this city; not just on this continent; across the world. Jake saw then how – after a hiatus between the collapse of Rome and the Renaissance – western culture had become humanity’s culture. Everywhere doing well, at least. Western transport, Western medicine, Western industry and banking and communications: the toolkit had been adopted wholesale almost as far you might travel.

  Yet Europe was in trouble. America stagnated. Meanwhile China and India raced to catch up, a host of other nations on their heels. The rest of the world had identified what made the West great after the kick-start of the Disciplina Etrusca, and it had copied the lot.

  Jake glanced at the minibar; he was never going to get to sleep at this rate. He crossed the room in three strides and flung open the fridge so that a corridor of light bathed the floor. With trembling hands he selected a miniature Scotch and fiddled off the lid.

  *

  When Jake slept at last he dreamed of it again. He was standing on a lunar landscape, staring into space, his arms flung behind him and fists clenched. A wave of luminosity crashed over him and he bathed in it: ions, particles, starlight, energy. The stream of light was running straight through him; he looked at his torso and realized that was made of light too.

  The incantation, the drumbeat, that devil tongue.

  With each verse the radiance grew in intensity until Jake was staggering through a world comprised only of light. And then he saw the light was in fact a grid of astonishing intricacy. He could stare at each passing electron and see how it linked to every other electron in existence: all pulsing and swelling, singing to one another. Suddenly he was far above, looking at the plane of the known universe from the outside. The grid swelled into a spike, as if a drop of water had landed in the celestial pond. The spike was stretching, getting taller and thinner, and Jake realized the universe had flipped upside down and he was looking up at it: a stalactite the size of billions of Milky Ways, reaching down to touch him. But it was losing the smooth curves of its form, becoming jagged. And the beat had changed too – it was no longer the bang of a drum. It had evolved into a different rhythm: tramp, tramp, tramp.

  Jackboots.

  Jake knew then this grid was not godly but capricious, it delighted in playing with the dreams of mortals to appease the boredom of its intelligence. Still the spike lengthened, became crooked, craning towards him.

  Zap! Crack!

  Lightning disgorged from its tip and blasted him through the forehead.

  Jake awoke with a cry. His hand shot to his head. He was panting, shaking compulsively, his sheets were drenched in sweat. The darkness of the dream was like nothing he had ever known.

  Jake stumbled out of bed and leaned on the windowsill. A strip of gold was spreading across the horizon. A new dawn. He knew then what he had to do – why he had been put upon this earth, no less.

  He had to find the last inscription.

  And destroy it.

  68

  Jake awoke filled with a determination he had only known during the golden years after university, when he had soared to that improbable job on Fleet Street. He had often since marvelled at his escape from the local press. That had been before he began drinking every day of course, but now he felt the same single-mindedness.

  He was going to succeed.

  Jenny reckoned they would be best advised to fly back to the UK to launch the media assault. But Jake convinced her it was worth a visit to the tomb as it was nearby, claiming another discovery would give the story more legs.

  The Pian di Civita was once home to one of the foremost Etruscan city states, and there were plenty of references online to the 1982 dig. But to frustrate grave-robbers exact coordinates were withheld. The most they had to go on was the disclosure that the tomb was found in a “cavity on the hill”. The expedition looked speculative, but at least there was a town nearby – perhaps the locals could point them in the right direction.

  “Are you feeling all right?” asked Jenny once they hit open country. “You seem quiet.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  Jenny took her eyes off the road to study him, much as she had as they fled the Monastery of Debre Damo. “Sure?”

  “Really. I had a bad dream and I didn’t get much sleep after that.”

  “It’s understandable,” said Jenny, one hand resting on the steering wheel. “I’m scared too, you know.”

  For a few kilometres neither of them spoke and Jake stared out across the Mediterranean, sparkling in the early spring sun. Presently they wound into the hills; he knew this landscape from his dreams. Poppies had turned the fields matt-scarlet, like blood seeping into the land, and the mountains in the distance were parabolas of violet.

  “Beautiful world,” she muttered.

  Jake glanced at Jenny, a fist in his stomach. Still the determination coursed through him, and he knew if he was to eradicate this accursed text from the face of the earth he might need her help. There was something he had to say – or at least try to say.

  “This Charlie Waits of yours,” he began. “He’s one hundred and ten per cent convinced the Disciplina Etrusca is real, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And so is the Chinese Secret Service.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “These are intelligent people …”

  Jenny’s eyes flicked to her passenger. “What are you getting at?”

  “I just think perhaps we need to keep an open mind.”

  “You’re not going mad on me are you?”

  Jake saw amusement in the corner of her mouth and he forced a laugh. “No, I’m not a carrier of the defective Roger Britton gene yet.”

  A shadow moved across Jenny’s face.

  “What is it?” asked Jake. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Jenny shook her head. “No, nothing at all.”

  They didn’t talk at all after that, but the mood in the car had changed – as though the melancholy of his dream was contagious.

  *

  The defective gene.

  Jenny hadn’t received an update on her mother for days, but neither had she sought one. Clearly the worst had not happened – Dad would have been in touch. The guilt was still there though, the suspicion that she was a bad daughter. And there was something else. The notion had occurred on reflex when Jake said the word ‘gene’, yet that didn’t lessen how daft she felt for even thinking it.

  If the thing worked … she could find out whether she was a carrier too.

  Jenny sighed. She shouldn’t be too hard on herself. She was under a lot of stress. But there was clearly something wrong with any job so involving that one could forget about a dying mother for days at a stretch.

  Before you sign below the dotted line I want to make sure you’re ready to commit, regardless of any … emotional difficulties.

  As the final miles peeled away Jenny made herself a promise. When she got through all this, she would realign her life. If the case had taught her anything, it was that people were more important than work.

  The town was a hotchpotch of medieval houses, a lackadaisical air permeating cobbled streets. They bought bread, cheese and tomatoes from a small shop; Jenny watched with interest as Jake reached for a beer and then paused, hand wavering. Finally – some inner conflict resolved – he passed on.

  At the checkout was a bespectacled girl in her twenties.

  “Ciao bella,” said Jake as they left.

  The girl went red.

  “Do you know what you just said?” asked Jenny.

  “It’s a polite way of saying goodbye.”

  “No it’s not. You said
‘Goodbye, gorgeous’.”

  It was Jake’s turn to blush. “Did I? Christ. How embarrassing. That’s really not my style, I promise.”

  Jenny turned away, but Jake could tell she was grinning from the movement of the skin behind her neck.

  Nobody had heard of Tages, let alone his grave. But they were pointed in the direction of the Pian di Civita at a shop selling chic and expensive kitchenware.

  It was more in hope than expectation that they departed.

  *

  Maria Marcella returned to her window display. The spinster was proud of her little shop – to her mind it was certainly the most stylish in town, even if she rarely sold anything. She’d just found the spot for the Le Creuset when another group of tourists clattered in. Maria sighed and fixed her sales smile to her face.

  But here’s the strange thing.

  They were asking directions to exactly the same place.

  69

  The Pian di Civita rose above the surrounding countryside, a desolate bar of land covered in swaying grasses. Jake’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the hilltop for masonry, earthworks – anything that would indicate a tomb. But apart from the track there was no trace of man to be seen.

  “What do you think?” asked Jenny as she scoured the landscape.

  “I don’t know. We’re not going to find anything, are we?”

  No sooner had Jake spoken than he saw it: a pimple rising from the uniform flatness of the summit. The sides were rounded as a Christmas pudding and masonry was scattered across the peak – it reminded Jake of a boutique hill fort. This was where a sickly child was laid to rest more than twenty-eight centuries ago; where Eusebius’s trail came to an end.

  Jake felt it in his bones.

  They trekked across a field of sheep to reach the mount. Trees were dotted about the hillock and birdsong carried across the countryside.

  Suddenly Jenny’s hand was on his shoulder. “Over there – look!”

  A wall had been built into the far side of the mound, but this was not the dry-stone boundary of an Italian shepherd. The wall was composed of half-ton boulders and in its centre was a small cave, wild grasses shivering before the entrance.