by David Hewson
“See for yourself. You tell me.”
Abati walked to one side and picked up some shards of pottery from the floor. They’d been shattered by some kind of heavy blow. Then he looked at the wall painting: an idyllic country scene, with the god in his Phrygian cap, amid a crowd of fervent devotees. Axe marks scored the paint in deep, symmetrical lines. The god’s face had been hacked out from the stone and was now little more than mould and dust.
“It’s been desecrated,” Abati said. “And not by a couple of grave robbers either.”
Torchia picked up more fragments of pottery, from what looked like a ceremonial jug.
“It was Constantine,” he said.
This was clear in his own mind now. What they stood amidst was the precursor — the template for everything to follow, from the Crusades to Bosnia, from Christian slaughtering Christian in the sacking of Constantinople, to Catholics murdering Aztecs with the blessing of the priests who watched on, unmoved. This was the moment, hours after Rome fell to Constantine’s troops, where the Christian blade sought the blood of another religion, not on the battlefield but in the holiest of holies. October 28, 312, had changed the shape of history, and in this underground chamber, perhaps just a few brief hours after the crossing at the Milvian Bridge, the oppressed had turned into the oppressors, and sought a savage, final vengeance on everything that had gone before.
Abati laughed.
“You can’t know that. It must have been early. But…”
Abati was both amazed and baffled by what he saw. This pleased Ludo Torchia.
“It was the same day Constantine entered Rome. Or perhaps the day after. There’s no other explanation. I’ll show you…. After you,” he said, ushering Abati and the others through a low doorway to the left. He was glad of their company. This discovery had shaken him when he came across it alone several days earlier. He turned the light full onto what lay in front of them, a sea of human bones: ribs and skulls, shattered legs and arms, the cast-off props of some ancient horror movie, tossed into a heap when they were no longer needed.
Abati moaned, “Sweet Jesus…”
LaMarca, behind, began to whinny in fear.
“What the hell is this?” Abati asked.
“It’s where they killed them,” Torchia answered without emotion. “I’d say there’s more than a hundred, maybe lots more. I’m no expert, but I think they’re mainly men, though I think there are some children too. They were probably cut down naked.”
He shifted the beam into the far corner.
“If you look there, you can see their clothes. I couldn’t find any uniforms or weapons. They didn’t intend to fight, not anymore. They were made to strip. Then they were cut down. You can see the marks on their bones if you look closely. It was a massacre. Just like Kosovo or Bosnia.”
LaMarca was shaking again, half curious, half terrified. The kid from Naples liked violence, Torchia guessed. But only from a safe distance.
“I don’t want to see any more of this,” LaMarca muttered, then crept back into the main chamber, chastened. Abati took one last look at the scattered bones on the stone floor then followed.
“Professor Bramante knows about all this?” he asked when they were back by the altar. “And he never told anyone?”
Torchia had his own theories on that.
“What would you say? I’ve found the greatest Mithraic temple in existence? Oh, and a few hundred followers cut to pieces by the Christians? How do you handle the publicity on that just now?”
“I can’t believe…” Abati began, then faltered.
Ludo Torchia had been through this argument in his own mind already. Giorgio Bramante had uncovered one of the world’s greatest archaeological finds. And one of its earliest examples of mass religious homicide. Those were real bones in the next room, the remains of real people, a shocking display of shattered skulls and limbs thrown together like some grisly precursor of a scene from the Holocaust. Or the thousands in Srebrenica who’d been handed over by “peacekeepers” to the Serbs, then routinely, efficiently slaughtered when a different bunch of Christians decided to cleanse the gene pool. That story still made headlines. There was shame throughout Europe that such acts could still happen just a few miles away from the beaches where contented middle-class holidaymakers were sunning themselves, wondering what to have for dinner that night. These were politically correct times, even for people who merely dug up the past. Perhaps Bramante was waiting for the right moment, the right words, or some other find that would soften the blow of this one. Perhaps he lacked the courage, and hoped to keep this very large secret to himself forever, which would, in Torchia’s eyes, be a crime in itself.
Something in Abati’s face told Torchia he, too, was beginning to see the true picture now.
“Why do you think they came here?” Abati asked. “To make some kind of last stand?”
“No,” Torchia insisted. “This was a temple. Do you think the Pope would have fought in front of the altar in St. Peter’s? These men were soldiers. If they wanted to fight, they would have made a stand outside. They came here…”
He scanned the room.
“…to worship one last time. This was a holy place. Not somewhere for human blood.”
In his mind’s eye he could see them all now, not afraid, knowing the end was near, determined to complete one last obeisance to the god whose strength slaughtered the bull and gave life to the world.
He bent down and turned the light onto the floor. There was a crude wooden cage there. Inside it were bones that must have been those of a chicken, now looking like the dusty remains of some miniature dinosaur, legs tucked beneath carcass, beaked head still recognisable. The temple followers never had time to finish their sacrifice before the Christian soldiers arrived, racing into the holiest chamber en masse, Constantine’s symbol, the chi-rho symbol, for christos, on their shields, screaming for more deaths on a day when the city must have run red with slaughter.
“They came here to make a final sacrifice,” Ludo Torchia said. “Before the light went out on their god forever. And they weren’t even allowed to finish that.”
He slung the rucksack off his shoulder onto the floor then unzipped it. Two sharp eyes gleamed back at him. The cockerel was shiny black with an erect, mobile red comb. It had cost him thirty lire early that morning in the busy local market in Testaccio, close by the Via Marmorata down the hill.
The bird was still and silent as Torchia lifted the cage out of the bag.
“Wow…” LaMarca whispered excitedly into the dark, turned on all of a sudden.
Torchia had only ever killed one living thing before and that was a stray cat that kept annoying him, back when, as a young kid, he’d lost his key to the apartment, was waiting, bored and a little scared, for his mother to come home and bawl him out. But there was plenty of reference material in the standard Latin texts about how to offer a sacrifice correctly. It wasn’t hard. He could do it just the way an emperor used to.
Something continued to bug him, though. Toni LaMarca was right. Seven was the magic number. And they were one short.
* * *
The birthday party had taken place in their small garden, beneath the shade of the dusty vine trellises, on the terrace with its uninterrupted view down the Aventino towards the green open space of the Circus Maximus. There were nine classmates there, invited by his mother, not Alessio. Clio, the stupid blonde girl from one of the apartments near the school, had pointed at the remains of the stadium, to which emperors had once walked from their palaces on the Palatino behind, and complained, in her high-pitched, petulant voice, that it wasn’t a circus at all. There were no animals, no clowns, no cheap, noisy brass bands. At that moment Alessio, older, more conscious of those around him, realised Clio wasn’t actually a friend at all, that, from now on, he would prefer the company of others — children, adults, age didn’t matter. Or at least it shouldn’t. He simply wished to be with those like him, with open, curious minds and active imaginations.
Like his father, extracting the secrets of the past from the cold, grubby earth. Or his mother, locked in her room, painting wild scenes on blank canvas.
People with passions, because passions were important. Alessio possessed three: pictures, numbers, and words. Of the first, his favourite remained that image of St. Peter’s, seen through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta. It was always present, part of the daily ritual, one that never failed him, except in poor weather, or when he tried to use those stupid glasses, proof again that childish things were no longer of any use.
As far as numbers were concerned, only one mattered, and that wasn’t simply because it represented his age. Alessio’s father had taken him aside and talked of it a little, before the other children came.
Seven was the magic number.
There were seven hills in imperial Rome. The Bramantes still lived on one that, in parts, was not that much changed over the centuries.
Seven were the planets known to the ancients, the wonders of the world, the elementary colours, the heavens deemed to exist somewhere in the sky, hidden from the view of the living.
These were, Giorgio Bramante told his son, universal ideas, ones that crossed continents, peoples, religions, appearing in identical guises in situations where the obvious explanation — a Venetian told a Chinaman who told an Aztec chief — made no sense. Seven happened outside mankind, entered the existence of human beings of its own accord. The Masons, who were friends of the Knights of Malta, believed seven celestial creatures called the Mighty Elohim created the universe and everything in it. The Jews and the Christians thought God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. For the Hindus, the earth was a land bounded entirely by seven peninsulas.
Jesus spoke just seven times on the cross, and then died. Seven ran throughout the Bible, his father said, during that private time they had before the balloons and cake and the stupid, pointless singing. In something called Proverbs — a word Alessio liked, and decided to remember — there was a saying his father recalled precisely, though they were a family that never went to church.
“‘For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumbles to ruin.’”
He’d shuffled on Giorgio’s knee, a little uncomfortable, and asked what the saying meant. The Bible puzzled him. Perhaps it puzzled his father too.
“It means a good person may do the wrong thing time and time again, but in the end he, or she, can still make it right. While the bad person…”
Alessio had waited, wishing the hated party would begin soon, and quickly end. He wouldn’t eat the cake. He wouldn’t be happy till he was left alone with his imagination again, his father back deep in his books, his mother in the studio upstairs, messing with her smelly paints and unfinished canvases. Some of the others in the school said it was bad to be an only child. From what he understood of his parents’ whispered conversations, which grew heated when they thought he was out of earshot, it wasn’t a matter of choice.
“The bad person stays that way forever, whatever they do?” Alessio suggested.
“Forever,” Giorgio Bramante agreed, nodding his head in that wise, grave fashion Alessio liked so much he imitated it from time to time. This gesture, knowing and powerful, established what his father was: a professor. A man of learning and secret knowledge, there to be imparted slowly over the years.
Forever seemed unfair. A harsh judgement, not the kind someone like Jesus, who surely believed in forgiveness, would make.
That thought returned to him the next day when, in the hill beneath the park with the orange trees, he listened to more secrets, bigger, wilder ones than he could ever have imagined. Alessio Bramante and his father were in a small, brightly lit underground chamber only a very short distance from the iron gate in an out-of-the-way channel at the riverside edge of the park near the school. A gate Giorgio, to his obvious surprise, had found unlocked when he arrived, though the fact didn’t seem to bother him much.
Seven.
Alessio looked around the room. It smelled of damp and stale cigarette smoke. There were signs of frequent and recent occupation: a forest of very bright electric lights, fed by black cables snaking to the doorway; charts and maps and large pieces of paper on the walls; and a single low table with four cheap chairs, all situated beneath the yellow bulbs hanging from the rock ceiling.
He sat opposite his father in one of the flimsy seats and listened in awe, as Giorgio told of what they’d found, and what greater secrets might lie elsewhere, in this hidden labyrinth beneath the hill where pensioners walked their dogs and the older children from the school sneaked to take a quiet cigarette from time to time.
Seven passageways, just visible in the sudden gloom at the edge of the illumination given off by the lights, ran off the room, each a black hole, leading to something he could only guess at. Treasure. Or nothing. Or a chasm in the ground that fell away so steeply no one could possibly return, only continue onwards, hoping to see light, not realising that they only worked their way deeper and deeper into the sour and poisonous gut of some subterranean world which would, in the end, consume them entirely.
“Mithras liked the number seven,” Giorgio said confidently, as if he were talking about a close friend.
“Everyone likes the number seven,” Alessio commented.
“If you wanted to follow Mithras,” his father continued, ignoring the remark, “you had to obey the rules. Each one of those corridors would have led to some kind of… experience.”
“A nice one?”
His father hesitated.
“The men who gathered here came with an idea in mind, Alessio. They wanted something. To be part of their god. A little discomfort along the way was part of the price they were willing to pay. They wanted to make some sacrament, at each stage along their journey through the ranks, in order to attain what they sought. Knowledge. Betterment. Power.”
“A sacrament?” The word was… not new, but only half understood.
“A promise. A penalty. A gift perhaps. Some offering that binds them to the god.”
Alessio wondered what kind of gift could be that powerful. All the more so when his father said that the sacrament had to be repeated, perhaps made greater, through each of the seven different ranks of the order, rising in importance…
Corax, the Raven — the lowliest beginner, who died and then was reborn when he entered the service of the god.
Nymphus, the bridegroom — married to Mithras, an idea Alessio found puzzling.
Miles, the soldier — led blindfolded and bound to the altar, and released only when he made some penance that was lost to the modern world.
Leo, the lion — a bloodthirsty creature, who sacrificed the animals killed in Mithras’s name.
Perses, the Persian — bringer of a secret knowledge to the upper orders.
Heliodronus, the Runner of the Sun — closest to the god’s human representative on earth, the man who sat at the pinnacle of the cult, Mithras’s shadow and protector.
Alessio waited. When Giorgio didn’t give the final name, he asked.
“Who was the last one?”
“The leader was called Pater. Father.”
“He was their father?”
“In a way. Pater was the man who promised he’d always look after them. For as long as he lived. I say that to you because I’m your real father. But if you were Pater you were a great man. You were responsible, ultimately, for everyone. The men in the cult. Their wives. Their families. You were a kind of greater father, with a larger family, children who weren’t your real children, though you still cared for them.”
“You mean a god?”
“A god living inside a man, perhaps.”
“What kind of sacrament do you need? To become like that?”
Giorgio Bramante looked puzzled.
“We don’t know. We don’t know so much. Perhaps one day…” He looked around him. There was some disappointment in his features at that moment. “If we get the m
oney. The permission. You could help me find those secrets. When you grow up…”
“I could help now!” Alessio said eagerly, certain that was what his father wanted to hear.
All the same, he wasn’t so sure. There was so much that was unseen in this place, lurking at the edge of the flood of yellow light bulbs above them, seeming to cling to one another, as if they were afraid of the dark. And the smell… it reminded him of when something went bad in the refrigerator, sat there growing a furry mould, dead in itself, with something new, something alive, growing from within.
His father wasn’t being entirely frank either.
“You do know some of the gifts they gave. You said. About Miles and the lion.”
“We’re familiar with a few. We know what Corax had to undergo….”
Giorgio hesitated. Alessio knew he’d say what was on his mind in the end.
“Corax had to be left on his own. Probably somewhere down one of those long, dark corridors. He had to be left until he became so frightened he thought no one would come for him. Ever. That he’d die.”
“That’s cruel!”
“He wants to be a man!” his father replied, his voice rising. “A man’s made. Not born. You’re a child. You’re too young to understand.”
This casual dismissal annoyed him. “Tell me.”
“In a cruel world a man must sometimes do cruel things, Alessio. This is part of growing up. A man must carry that burden. Out of practicality. Out of love. Do you think it’s kind to be weak?”
Giorgio’s face creased in distaste when he said that last word. Weakness was, Alessio Bramante realised, some kind of sin.
“No,” he answered quietly.
“Cruelty can be relative, Alessio.” His father calmed down somewhat. “Is a doctor cruel if he cuts off a diseased limb that could kill you?”
Alessio Bramante had never thought of doctors this way. It left him uneasy.
“No,” he replied, guessing this was the right answer.
“Of course not. Men are here to make those kinds of decisions. I learned this. You will, too. What hurts us can also make us strong. That’s why Corax had to endure what he did. If it was a way of reaching some kind of god…”