by Tom Harper
So why was Porfyrius concerned about the poem? Was he worried about the allusions to Crispus? It hardly seems worth killing a man for. But Porfyrius had been exiled once before: he might well have had a horror of suffering it again.
I take out the poem and align it with the necklace, hoping I’ll see something I missed before.
There are five red beads set into the gold, making the points and centre of a cross. Through the glass you can see fragments of words underneath. I press my thumbnail into the papyrus to underline them, then lift the necklace away to see what I’ve found.
SIGNUM INVICTUS SEPELIVIT SUB SEPULCHRO. The unconquered man hid the sign under his tomb.
I don’t know what it means, but I need to get to the funeral.
The procession will have set out by now. If Flavius Ursus is watching, he’ll have noticed I haven’t taken my place, perhaps mentioned it to one of his assistants. It’s too late for me. But from the palace to the mausoleum is almost two miles: it’ll take at least an hour to get there. I duck down a side alley, away from the ceremonial route, and join a wide and empty boulevard heading west. In the distance I can hear the shouts of the crowds, a roar like the sea that’s strangely stifled by the windless day. Every man, woman and child in the city must be there. I walk a full mile, and the only living thing I see is a cat curled up on a doorstep. Windows are shuttered, shops barred. I might be the last man left alive in the world.
The illusion fades as I approach the mausoleum. I can see its copper dome flashing above the surrounding rooftops; the gold trelliswork in the arches underneath. Nervous soldiers guard the street corners in twos and threes. It’ll be some time before the funeral gets here, but the mourners have already gathered twelve deep behind the wooden barricades that line the route.
The road ends at a wall. Twenty guards from the Schola make a human gate, ready to admit their emperor one last time. I show them my commission from Constantine, the ivory diptych he gave me the day Alexander died. They don’t question the fact that the portrait on the lid is of a corpse. Even in death, Constantine hasn’t surrendered his grip on the throne. New laws are issued every day in his name; his coins still pour out of the mints. The bureaucracy’s given him eternal life.
‘Has Publilius Porfyrius arrived yet?’ I ask the guard.
‘Here since this morning.’ He nods towards the mausoleum. ‘It’s been a bit of a rush job. The clerk of works wanted him to inspect the foundations, just to be sure. Embarrassing if it fell with all the city watching.’
‘How about Flavius Ursus?’
‘He’ll be in the procession.’
‘I need you to get a message to him. As quickly as possible, even if it means running in front of the Emperor’s coffin.’ I repeat the five words of Porfyrius’s hidden message. ‘Tell him it comes from Gaius Valerius.’ I push my commission under his face. ‘Do it!’
He looks surprised – doubly so when I step past him through the gate. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To find Porfyrius.’
The wall makes a compound, broad and square, covering the hilltop. One day this will all be gardens: at the moment, it’s a builders’ yard. Squares of earth show where the stacks of bricks and timber have hurriedly been moved around the back. Even now, Constantine’s legacy is a work in progress. Ahead, the mausoleum stands surrounded on three sides by arcades. Eventually, the fourth side will be closed off to make a courtyard. Today, it stands open, framing the immense rotunda rising in its centre. The gold facing ripples in the sun.
In front of the tomb stands a huge pyre, half as high as the building behind. It’s almost a building in its own right: stripped tree trunks make columns around its base, painted to look like fluted marble; planks form storeys inside. Gold banners hang over the sides, and at the very summit a live eagle preens itself in a gilded cage. Wooden stands have been erected on the open ground either side, so that the assembled senators and generals have box seats.
I skirt around the pyre and climb the steps to the courtyard. Huge crimson banners woven with portraits of Constantine’s three sons hang from the unconnected pillars; guards in gilded ceremonial armour stand at every column.
I find their centurion. ‘Has Publilius Porfyrius come this way?’
‘In the tomb.’
Again, Constantine’s pass lets me through – into the courtyard, into the presence of the mausoleum. The open side faces south, so that the golden wall catches the midday sun face on, bending its rays around the courtyard like a mirror. It dazzles me; from ten feet away I can feel the heat coming off it.
Suddenly, I need to sit down. I’m an old man who’s walked too far on a hot day. I’m parched. My mouth is dry, my limbs are like sand. I feel as if I’m drowning in a shimmering sea of heat and light.
‘Gaius Valerius?’
I spin around, unsure where the voice came from. The sun’s burned out my senses, I can’t locate anything. The dark figure stands in the glare like a spot in front of my eyes.
‘Porfyrius?’ I guess.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I read your poem.’
‘I wondered if you’d work it out.’ I can’t see his face, but he doesn’t sound angry. ‘I hoped the Emperor had destroyed it when he burned the papers from Alexander’s bag.’
‘There was another copy. In the Chamber of Records, the Scrinia Memoriae.’
‘Memory’s a funny thing.’
‘Did you kill Alexander?’
He laughs. ‘Poor Valerius. You’ve been stumbling around, chasing shadows and ghosts. You have no idea what this is really about.’
I’m sick of hearing that. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Come and see.’
He takes my hand and leads me around the rotunda. The tomb eclipses the sun; I can see again. Even the mausoleum isn’t what it seems. The gold panelling only comes halfway round, and a roofer’s scaffold is still erected against its north side, where no one will see it. Next to it, a small flight of steps descends to a little door in the tomb’s basement. Porfyrius knocks – a precise rhythm that sends a message.
The door swings open. To my aching eyes, the interior is perfect darkness. Porfyrius pushes me forward.
‘We won’t hurt you. You’ve waited ten years for this moment.’
The moment I step through the door, strong hands pin my arms to my side. I’d cry out, but another hand is clamped over my mouth.
The door closes and I’m plunged in darkness.
XLV
Rome – Present Day
THREE MILES FROM the centre of Rome, Via Casilina was an unlovely artery: four lanes of traffic split down the middle by a light rail line. Behind the San Marcellino metro station, a pink plastered church stood dedicated to the early Christian martyrs Saint Peter and Saint Marcellinus. Next door was a brick school that looked like a warehouse, and in between ran a concrete wall with two gates, one large and one small. The large gate opened on to an asphalt car park that doubled as a playground for the school; the small one, which was barely high enough for an adult, led on to a narrow passage between two walls. A metal gate barred the way.
Mark studied it through a pair of binoculars. They were parked in the forecourt of the petrol station across the road – Mark and Abby, Barry and Connie. Abby was getting sick of the sight of them.
‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Barry said. About fifty metres back from the road, the broken curve of a brick rotunda poked above the line of the wall. It had no roof, and more than half its wall was missing. It was a poor cousin to the grandeur of the Fatih Mosque, or even Diocletian’s mausoleum in Split.
‘It belongs to the Vatican,’ said Connie from the back seat. ‘I suppose they can’t look after everything.’
Mark swore. ‘First it was a mosque, now it’s the Pope. Can’t we go somewhere that doesn’t belong to a touchy religion that’s famous for starting holy wars?’
‘Why don’t you bring in the police?’ Abby asked.
‘And pis
s off another country?’ Mark shook his head. ‘Our ambassador in Ankara is currently grovelling in front of Turkish intelligence explaining why we mobilised five hundred policemen, almost invaded one of their holiest mosques, then skipped town without so much as a thank you. From now on, we act on the basis of credible intelligence.’
‘I’m sure that’ll make a pleasant change for you.’
A white Fiat pulled in to the petrol station and stopped alongside them. Mark rolled down his window and gestured the driver to do likewise. Barry cradled a black semi-automatic pistol on his lap.
‘Dr Lusetti?’ Mark enquired.
The Fiat driver nodded. They all got out and shook hands, like travelling salesmen carpooling to a conference. Dr Mario Lusetti from the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology was a middle-aged man with a severe buzz cut and rimless spectacles. He wore jeans, a white shirt and a black blazer. He didn’t look as if he smiled very often; just then, he looked particularly unhappy.
‘You want to see the catacombs?’
‘We think one of Europe’s most wanted men – a dangerous criminal – will try to break in to steal a priceless artefact,’ Mark said. He spoke loudly, an Englishman abroad; it made him sound ridiculously melodramatic.
Lusetti pursed his lips and blew out a puff of air. ‘The catacomb has a footprint of thirty thousand square metres. There are four and a half kilometres of passages and galleries spread over three levels, with twenty or twenty-five thousand burials inside. Even maybe there are more places that nobody has ever excavated. And, by the way, the catacombs have been discovered since the sixteenth century: every grave robber and thief in Rome has been down there. If your criminals are looking for something, probably they are four hundred years too late. If not, for sure it will take them another four hundred years to find it.’
‘I don’t care what they find. As long as we find them.’
Connie stayed in the car to watch. Lusetti led the others across the road and unlocked the little gate, then shepherded them down the narrow alley. At the end, a second gate led them through a steel fence topped with razor wire, into the circular enclosure that surrounded the old rotunda. Close to, Abby could see how vast it must have been: so big, in fact, that a two-storey house had been built inside the ruin. There were a few signs of restoration work – a couple of concrete buttresses, some broken-ended walls that had been squared off – but no evidence of recent activity.
‘You know the story here?’ Lusetti asked. ‘It was the tomb of Saint Helena. The Emperor Constantine decided he did not want to be buried in Rome, so he gave it to his mother instead. Before, it had been the cemetery of the Imperial Cavalry Guard – but they fought against Constantine at the battle of Milvian Bridge. He disbanded the legion and pissed on their bones.’
He unlocked the door to the house and led them in to a marble-floored hall. Shutters shaded the rooms, and Abby could taste dust and damp in the air.
‘This whole area had been an imperial estate called Ad Duas Lauros for centuries. After the Dowager Empress Helena was buried here, Constantine gave it to the papacy. We have it still.’
Two owners in two thousand years. In that moment, Abby began to understand the timescales that popes and emperors thought in.
Lusetti took hard hats, head torches and fluorescent workmen’s vests off wooden pegs and handed them round. Barry stared at the reflective stripes on the vests and frowned.
‘Do we want to be highly visible if we’re chasing a dangerous criminal?’
‘In the catacomb is very dark. If we lose you, maybe we never see you again.’
They pulled on the protective clothing. Lusetti opened a side door and flicked a light switch. The naked bulb illuminated a stone staircase going down.
‘Is that it?’ Mark asked. It looked like nothing, the sort of entrance any Victorian house might have going down to its cellar.
‘This is the way down.’
‘Is there any other way in?’
‘Officially, no.’
‘Unofficially?’
‘It is an ancient city.’ Lusetti shrugged. ‘If anyone digs under his basement, he will find caves, old quarries, lost tunnels. Not so long ago, they found a completely unknown catacomb under Via Latina.’
With Lusetti leading the way, they went down into the darkness.
Constantinople – June 337
‘Let me tell you some things about the dark places of this world.’
In the chamber beneath Constantine’s mausoleum, the darkness is absolute. My captors have pushed me down on to a stone bench against the wall – not so as to hurt me, but not gently either. They’ve let go my hands, though I can sense them hovering just out of reach, ready to pounce if I try to escape.
Where would I go? What would I say?
The only sense I have in that room is my ears. I listen to Porfyrius’s story.
‘Thirty years ago, during the persecutions, Symmachus sent me on a mission to Caesarea Palaestina. For a zealot like me, it was a career-making assignment: the heartland of the Christian religion.
‘I knew what to do. I commandeered a basement, not unlike this, and turned it into a dungeon. I was scrupulous in chasing down every rumour of a magistrate who refused to sacrifice, or a wife who didn’t emerge from her house on a Sunday.
‘One day, in winter, my agents heard rumours of a Christian hiding in a certain merchant’s house. They searched it and found nothing; then they noticed he didn’t have the heating on. They stoked up the fire and waited. Soon enough, they heard noises from the hippocaust under the floor where the Christian was hiding. What they hadn’t realised was that he had no intention of coming out. When they opened the hatch, they found him trying to burn a manuscript on the very fire they’d set. Naturally, they were curious. They seized the man and the manuscript and brought them both to me.
‘The man told me nothing. I tried every tool in my arsenal and just played into his hands. All he wanted was martyrdom. But the manuscript …’ Porfyrius sighs, the sound of a great weight settling. ‘The manuscript told an extraordinary tale. You know that the Christian god Jesus Christ was crucified during the reign of Tiberius Augustus?’
I do. One of Constantine’s early reforms was to outlaw crucifixion as a punishment, because it offended him.
‘When Christ came down from the Cross, his followers kept the wood, because they couldn’t bear to let him go. When he rose again from the dead, they realised it had a power beyond any man – the weapon that killed a god. They kept it in a secret place that only a tiny circle knew, down eleven generations. The manuscript listed them all. Read carefully, it was easy to guess where they’d hidden it.’
‘You found it?’
‘Not then. My efforts hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Symmachus brought me back to Nicomedia. With Christians purged from every imperial office, there were plenty of opportunities for promotion. But I never forgot. Years later, in exile, I wondered if it might be true – if I could use it to negotiate my return to Rome. I sent a batch of poems to Constantine, hoping to impress him, but he rebuffed me. Then I heard what had happened to Crispus.’
Out in the darkness something stirs, like a monster from the old world chained up in its cave.
‘The manuscript told a legend that the early Christians attached to the Cross – that on the day when Christ was crucified the blood he shed seeped into the wood and transformed it. From then on, they said, it had the power to raise men from the dead.’
It’s such an absurd thing to say I actually burst out laughing. A stony silence reproaches me from the shadows. Porfyrius is deadly serious.
‘I guessed that the Dowager Empress Helena would have taken the death of her grandson badly. I wrote to her, hinting at what I knew. She was a pious woman, shattered by grief: she was ready enough to believe. She recalled me, heard what I had to say and set out at once for Palestine.’
This bit I know. The streets of Rome had barely been swept clean from the vicennalia celebrations before Helen
a took her trip to Jerusalem. At the time, we all assumed she was undertaking some sort of ritual purification for what had happened to Crispus, or that she wanted to get as far away from Constantine as possible. She returned a year later and died soon after.
‘She found it,’ Porfyrius says abruptly. ‘She followed the clues I gave her, and she found the old Cross. She brought it back to Rome. By then, thanks to her patronage, I was a praetor of the city – soon to be Prefect. I oversaw the estate at Duas Lauros.’ A touch of his old, crooked humour surfaces in his voice. ‘I think you might have been there, once.’
Once. June, that doomed vicennalia year. Constantine going through the motions of the vicennalia ritual like a statue, while a hundred thousand blank-faced Romans watched and cheered and pretended they’d never heard of Crispus. And late one night, when Constantine was drunk, I remember riding three miles out of Rome down the Via Casilina, to the old cemetery where Constantine had built his mausoleum. With me came two trusted guards from the Schola, and a long coffin we’d carried all the way from Pula. I remember the shadow of that vast rotunda over the old gravestones; the squeak of the lock and the slap of our feet as we went down the stairs. I remember the lamps like eyes in the walls, the deep shadows they cast down the endless tunnels. I remember the slam of the lid as we closed the sarcophagus in the deepest, furthest part of the catacomb; the noise echoing around the small chamber, knocking loose grit off the ceiling, and the flash of terror that I would be buried alive with the man I murdered. I remember the tears, wet on my face as I kissed his coffin and murmured my final farewell.
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ The memories are throttling me. My voice barely comes out as a croak.
‘So you’ll understand.’
