by Albert Noyer
“Woman,” Diotar retorted, “the Great Mother resurrected him. Augustine, one of your own bishops, declared that man through his nature is forever damned by sexual desire.”
“Augustine recommended continence, not castration,” Getorius reminded him.
“A half measure,” Diotar sneered, then turned toward the window. “The music outside has stopped. Our ‘Day of Blood’ is celebrated in March, at the spring equinox, but I was unable to come then. As ArchGallus—”
“ArchGallus?” Vidimir had called him an archpriest.
“Our priests are called Galli.”
“Cocks?” How ironically inappropriate, Getorius thought, suppressing an impulse to laugh.
“Galli,” Diotar went on, “not from the Latin word, or its vulgarism. The Gallus is a sacred river near Pessinus. But I hear that the dance has ended. Come witness our fertility ritual. One of your poets even immortalized it.” In a swish of expensive fabric and perfume, Diotar started toward a door at the left side of the apse.
Getorius hesitated, wondering what further repellent surprises were ahead, but then considered that he had in fact come to find out more about the cult of the Great Mother.
“Surgeon,” Diotar called back, “few are privileged to actually experience what your poet only read about.”
“My wife?”
“The woman may watch.”
“Lead the way, then.”
Arcadia came alongside her husband. “Do you remember which poet he was talking about?”
“No. My tutor evidently didn’t cover that arcane an aspect of my education.”
The door opened onto a walled garden, where smoky, pine-pitch torches gave light to a field of trampled grass. Black earth at one end was mounded into a low hillock and planted with young evergreens, to resemble a miniature mountain. The tallest pine at the near edge was draped with purple cloth. A group of spectators stood to one side of the mound; the people who had brought the offerings, Getorius assumed. Directly ahead, at the back wall, a booth covered with pine boughs displayed a smaller statue of Cybele, but this image bore the benign aspect of the goddess. Two priests dressed in a manner similar to Diotar flanked the shrine, holding silver bowls. To their right, water gushed into a basin from the mouth of a leering stone face, identified as that of a river god by the wreath of marsh reeds in his flowing hair.
“That’s probably a personification of this Gallus River that Diotar mentioned,” Getorius muttered.
On the other side of Cybele’s shrine, sat a woman wearing a full white tunic and a mantle that hid her face. She was holding the tether of a white ram.
“Could that be Claudia?” Arcadia whispered.
“We didn’t see her on the galley, but she could have been in Virilo’s cabin.”
Several young men and women wearing short white tunics stood near the fountain, still catching their breath after the dance. Some of the women had small hand cymbals, and the men held round drums.
As Diotar approached the Cybelene shrine, a youth and girl, who had been waiting at the edge of the pine trees, walked out to the center of the grassy area. The youth, whom Getorius thought looked somewhat familiar, wore the same soft cap as the Attis figure on the footstool of the temple statue, and also held a shepherd’s crook and set of pan pipes. He was dressed in tight-fitting trousers that were buttoned down the legs, but with the front left open to uncover his lower abdomen, to make it evident that his genitals were not mutilated. The girl wore a forest nymph’s short tunic made of a transparent material, which even by the wavering torchlight revealed her small breasts and dark pubic triangle.
Diotar motioned for Getorius and Arcadia to stand by the fountain, then stood in front of the statue and raised his hands. “Magna Mater, both mother and consort of Attis,” he intoned, “your son will not consummate his love for you, nor you for him, thus he offers you his blood. May it seep into the earth and revive its dead vegetation, even as we hope to be reborn, like Attis, and ascend with him into the sky until the coming of the new world cycle that will follow our Atlantis.
“Grant your Galli the courage to release themselves from worldly pleasures and thus rise to you in spiritual ecstasy.”
After the two priests scooped water from the fountain into their bowls and passed it around for the dancers to drink, the young man began playing the high-pitched notes of a melody on his panpipes. Getorius recognized the shrill Phrygian mode of music, recalling his tutor had said that the emotional frenzy the instrument evoked had been used in pagan religious rites. The youth’s female companion began to sway around him in a teasing, erotic dance. The other women imitated her, softly tinkling their cymbals in time with her steps. One added the piercing notes of a twin-reed aulos. The men joined in by tapping the hide on their drums. Swaying in cadence with the rhythm, the group began to sing.
Dance on Cybele’s ground, where the cymbals tinkle.
Dance where the drums thump, and the pipes shrill.
Where Maenads wildly toss ivy-crowned heads,
And robins flit restlessly above the thicket.
Where the holy scream signals the emasculating rite.
It was soon obvious from his erection that the youth was responding to the nymph’s teasing movements. He joined in the dance with her for a time, then threw down the pipes with a cry of passion and pulled the girl into the shadows of the pine trees.
The aulos player stopped. Other women slowed the rhythm of their dance and lowered their voices so the sound of the couple’s lovemaking could be heard. In moments a climactic gasp was followed by an interval of silence, which was timed to a repetition of the last verse of the song.
“And the holy scream signals the emasculating rite.”
After a rending shriek sounded from the pine grove, the youth staggered out of the darkness. His left hand clutched his bleeding scrotum, and the other held a red-stained golden sickle. He threw something down, looked around in a daze, then collapsed beneath the pine tree.
“Christ,” Getorius blurted, “that’s what Diotar implied! The boy has ritually castrated himself!” He started over to help the youth, but the male drummers blocked his way, their eyes fixed in an ecstatic trance. “I’m a physician,” he told the closest one. “Let me examine him.”
“Surgeon, I wouldn’t interfere,” Diotar called out in warning. “The hypnotic waters of the Gallus River have ‘trapped them in a snarl of frenzy,’ as your poet put it. They’ll offer you an unwelcome gift of chastity with that sickle.”
“Getorius, come back!” Arcadia screamed.
He retreated and put an arm around her, watching, helpless, as the mutilated youth writhed on the ground.
Getorius became aware that the chirping of night insects had suddenly stopped. Watchdogs somewhere in the residential compound began to bark. Other dogs in the night blackness beyond the temple took up their yelping. The ram bleated in panic, then began to struggle at its tether.
“What’s happening, Getorius?” Arcadia asked, puzzled.
“I…I don’t know. This satanic ritual…” His voice trailed off as he glanced around. The woman holding the ram’s leash dropped it, stood up from the chair and tried to tear off her head covering, as if she had trouble breathing.
Arcadia saw there was something familiar about her movements, then the shawl fell back to reveal the girl’s face. “It is Claudia Quinta! Getorius, she’s about to have another epileptic seizure.”
Getorius ran to help the girl. He had just loosened the shawl around her neck when a roar, louder than any he had heard before, came from beyond the wall. It was a deafening sound he could only compare to the din that a thousand farm wagons might make, rumbling along the rough paving of the Via Honorius in Ravenna.
Arcadia, kneeling alongside him, stood and looked up at the dark mountains beyond the wall. Then the roar became louder and the ground rolled beneath her feet. She lost her balance and fell. Claudia’s body arched with the sickening motion, stiffened and lay still.
&nb
sp; “My God, we…we’re in…an earthquake!” Getorius shouted, finally realizing what was taking place.
One of the woman dancers screamed, then cried out the name of Gallus and pointed to the fountain. The river god’s mouth spewed a stream of mud that oozed down to cloud the clear water. As the wall behind the head rippled and cracked, the stone basin fractured, spilling its contents onto the flattened grass. Cybele’s shrine collapsed onto her cult image in a tangle of support poles and pine branches.
The ram, now released, darted onto the wooded mountain to butt at the trees in frantic terror.
“Everyone get away from the temple!” Getorius yelled, seeing a thick cloud of black dust roll out of the building’s apse door and into the garden. “Part of the ceiling must have collapsed.”
Despite his warning, the two priests, with several men and women, ran coughing through the doorway, and into the building. Getorius was aware of someone dropping beside him.
“How is she?” a youth asked. “How is Claudia?”
Getorius looked up into Atlos’s—or his ghost’s—concerned expression. “Atlos? H…how did you—?”
“He was my brother,” Adonis snapped. “Will Claudia be all right?”
“Your brother?” Getorius realized this was the man he had seen dancing with the girl. “I don’t understand…you…you just castrated yourself.”
“Never mind that. What about Claudia?”
“She’s had an epileptic attack. We’ve got to get her…everyone…into open space, away from the temple. Weren’t you on the galley? Who are you?”
“I’m called Adonis.”
“Take her feet.” Getorius was on one knee, supporting Claudia’s shoulders, and Adonis was ready to lift her legs, when the second shockwave shook the earth.
As the ground buckled in another series of nauseating ripples, a crack split the temple apse masonry. Roof tiles slid to the ground in a crash of dust and broken slate shards. The statue of Cybele inside was heard toppling to the floor, smashing the marble around her meteorite face. Through the settling dust, orange light appeared at window openings. The lamps had spilled their flaming fuel onto the floor paving, where it oozed, burning, into the side aisles and ignited the draperies. Offerings of olive oil, spreading from broken jars, caught the blaze.
Diotar stood clutching a pole from the goddess’s shrine, immobilized by fear. Arcadia grabbed him by the sleeve. “My husband wants everyone out the front gate. If the temple collapses we’ll be trapped in this yard.”
Getorius pushed Adonis aside, then scooped Claudia up in his arms and followed his wife around the side of the temple. He stumbled on the uneven ground, but had reached the center of the buckled stones on the front pathway when the front nave piers and right-hand tower gave way in a deadly shower of mortar bits and blocks of ashlar. After the sickening sound of the impact, a momentary silence was broken by the muffled screams of cult members trapped inside the temple and the coughing of those fortunate ones who had managed to stagger out the front entrance. They were still only black silhouettes against the light of the flaming interior when a third, less intense, tremor hit.
Arcadia, outside the wall gate, screamed as she saw Getorius fall under Claudia’s weight on the shattered paving. He staggered up again and ran with the girl. The warped gate hinges shrieked like a malevolent daemon when he pushed through them. Once outside the wall, he ran across the roadway to lay the girl in an open field beyond. Arcadia raced after him.
Panting, Getorius sucked in gulps of dusty air as he watched the shattered, burning temple in horrified fascination. Three of the women dancers shoved through the gate, just before the arch above it collapsed and the smashed letters of the Great Mother’s name were strewn among the rubble of her temple entrance.
Getorius turned to Arcadia, sitting next to him as she cradled Claudia’s head in her lap. “Where’s Atlos, or, rather, this Adonis? Did he escape?”
“Atlos? Adonis? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t see him? Atlos, or his shade, came from Avernus to ask about Claudia.”
“Getorius, this has been a horrifying experience—”
“I’m not insane, woman, I know who I saw.” He noticed Diotar a few paces away. The ArchGallus had recovered and was evidently trying to rationalize the destruction of Cybele’s temple to the surviving spectators and his followers. Atlos-Adonis was not with him. Getorius looked along the road and saw a glow to the south. “The earthquake must have set fires in Olcinium. We should take Claudia to the galley…if it’s still afloat…and see if we can help with anyone who’s injured in the port.”
Diotar detached himself from the group and came to where Claudia lay. The light from the flames gave his sagging face an uncharacteristic ruddy glow, and his powdered, rouged cheeks were smudged with dirt.
Getorius faced him in anger. “It’s criminal to use the girl’s epilepsia to promote your cult.”
“I believe Claudia’s illness is a sacred one. Even your Christian priests believe daemons are responsible for sickness.”
“I’m not a theologian. Some may teach that, but all the illnesses I’ve seen have a physical cause.”
Arcadia heard Claudia moan as she stirred into consciousness and looked slowly around. “You’re safe, child,” she murmured to reassure the girl. “Do you remember me? I examined you in the clinic a few days ago.”
Claudia did not respond. Getorius looked past Diotar to the orange light in the sky over Olcinium. Heavy smoke was visible now, drifting in from the port. How much harm had been done to the buildings? Perhaps the harbor and Virilo’s galley were damaged, even destroyed.
“Surgeon, I’ll take charge of Claudia,” Diotar said, bending to pull the girl up by the hand.
“We should take her back to her father.”
Diotar ignored Getorius. “Come, girl,” he ordered. “We’ll see if your room in the temple annex is undamaged.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Arcadia protested. “You can’t take her in there.”
“We’ll deal with our injured,” Diotar snarled, as Claudia slowly stood up. “Disciples of Cybele,” he called to the others, “follow me to the annex.”
Getorius watched the group walk around the remains of the wall, toward the low buildings at the right of the burning temple ruins. “I still don’t see this Adonis. I pushed him aside when I picked up Claudia and ran with her. Was he killed by falling roof tiles when the tower collapsed?”
“Adonis? Getorius, you babbled something about seeing Atlos.”
“It wasn’t babble. He was there.”
“It was dark, confused.”
“Arcadia. Either he, his ghost, or his twin, knelt down to ask me about Claudia.”
“His twin?” Arcadia echoed. “Wasn’t the sick youth on the galley named Kastor? Like Castor and Pollux in Roman mythology. When one of the brothers was killed, the other begged Jupiter to be allowed to share immortality with him.”
“Resurrection and immortality…like Attis.” Getorius smacked a fist into his palm. “Of course! That slave collar around Atlos’s neck said ‘Didymos.’ I thought it was a family name, but now I remember that it means ‘twin’ in Greek. That wasn’t Kastor I saw, Arcadia, but I smell a hoax, a conspiracy to deceive the gullible. It would have to happen at a big event, where Diotar could recruit converts. One twin publicly castrates himself, then the brother appears, unmutilated and ‘resurrected.’”
“But Atlos killed himself, or was murdered.”
“True, Arcadia, undoubtedly upsetting the plan. But Diotar is shrewd. If that youth who pretended to castrate himself under the pine tree is the Adonis who asked me about Claudia, he’s no eunuch.”
“We both saw the testes he threw on the ground.”
“Probably some organ from another ram, and the blood too. Kastor may once have been the unlucky twin in a previous ritual.”
“To think this could be going on in Ravenna.” Arcadia winced. “Getorius, what kind of people are these?”
“Pagan fanatics, far more dangerous than the Isis priests we saw last month.” He looked toward Olcinium again. “We’d better get down to the port. If Cybele allowed her stone sanctuary to be destroyed, perhaps the goddess was as careless with the wooden galley that’s named after her.”
“Now you’re thinking like a pagan.”
“To understand Diotar. Yet even Christ pointed out the inexplicable mystery of God allowing rain to fall equally on the just and unjust.”
“You mean Christians who might have been killed in the port, along with pagans here?”
He nodded. “How many of the people we treat still use magic amulets as protection?”
With a final glance at the burning hulk of the Great Mother’s temple, Getorius took Arcadia’s arm and guided her onto the road, toward the light in the sky that mimicked a reversed sunrise. Somewhere in the distance a rooster, deceived by the false dawn, crowed a faint, pitiful “ehr er-er ehrrrr.”
Chapter eleven
Nearing Olcinium, Getorius and Arcadia encountered groups of panicked citizens fleeing to the open fields north of the port. Some brought bundles of salvaged clothing, others carried articles of furniture, even terrified household pets—whimpering puppies or frightened birds in wooden cages.
Closer in, they saw that a wall section north of the Scodrae Gate had been thrown down by the earth tremors. Water leaking from a nearby aqueduct was rapidly turning the road and fields into an impassable marsh, and was threatening to run down and flood the main street that led back into the port.
Holding Arcadia’s hand while wading through the icy water, Getorius guessed that the earthquake had moved in a southwesterly direction and had caused the most damage in this northern quadrant of Olcinium.
No guards were at the gate, whose massive twin portals hung dangerously by only their upper hinges. In places along the street beyond, chunks of roofing slate, fallen cornice blocks, and stone rubble almost blocked the narrow sidewalks. Many of the buildings’ door and window lintels were cracked, and ceilings in several lower-level shops had collapsed into the rooms. The smell of wine from smashed storage barrels issued from the smoking ruins of a tavern identified as “The Golden Stag” by a wood sign dangling over its damaged entrance.
