by Tom Harper
A light flares in the darkness. One of the men around me has touched a glow-worm to a lamp. For a moment, my eyes can’t see anything. As they adapt, I see brick vaults above my head; a circle of men standing around me. And a little distance away, hanging back as if ashamed of something, the face that’s haunted my nightmares for ten years.
I stare. My heart shatters at the impossibility of it.
I’m looking at a dead man.
Rome – Present Day
She’d never been claustrophobic, but this was something else. All Abby could think of was being surrounded by the dead. The passage was so narrow her shoulders almost rubbed the walls – a waxy grey rock that still carried the scars of the chisels that had carved it. Abby tried to imagine the gravediggers who’d quarried out the catacombs by hand, trapped below ground without light or air. How did they survive?
Dr Lusetti put a hand on the wall. ‘You know this rock? It is called tufa. In a natural state, it is soft and easy to quarry, but when you expose it to the air, it becomes hard like concrete. It is why the catacombs were so easy to dig – and why they have survived so well.’
The walls weren’t solid. From floor to ceiling, with minimal gaps in between, shelves had been cut into them. Some lay open; others were walled up with pieces of tile or marble. The whole effect was to make the walls seem like giant filing cabinets.
‘Cubicula,’ Lusetti said. ‘This is where they buried the people.’
He pointed his head torch at a marble plaque. Scratched into the striated surface was a crude X-P Christogram. ‘They decorated the tombs so they knew where to find their ancestors.’
It made Abby think of something. ‘Do you know a symbol called the staurogram?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are there any instances of it down here?’
Lusetti frowned. ‘This catacomb has been closed for many years – it is a long time ago I have been down myself. And most of the inscribed pieces have been stolen by the thieves.’
For the first few hundred yards, a string of electric bulbs lit their way. Then they gave out. The lamps on their helmets were the only light now, four narrow beams nodding and swivelling as they advanced deeper into the tunnel.
‘How did people find their way down here?’ Mark asked. Abby thought he only said it to hear the sound of a human voice.
Lusetti’s torch beam moved to a small niche, about waist high. ‘This shelf is for an oil lamp. We find them everywhere we dig in the catacombs. In Roman times, you saw hundreds, maybe thousands of lamps lighting the way.’
They carried on, past countless rows of cubiculae. After another twenty yards, the tunnel split into three. They halted.
‘Which way now?’ Barry asked.
‘There’s no sign of Dragović’s people.’ Mark’s torch beam inscribed an arc across the walls as he looked around, back the way they’d come. ‘If he’s coming, he hasn’t arrived yet. We should get back upstairs and set up the surveillance.’
He hates this even more than me, Abby thought. She wondered if the catacomb had tapped some dark terror – or if it was just the discomfort of youth suddenly faced with the bare bones of mortality. She forced herself to breathe slowly. It’s not an evil place, she told herself. On the wall, her torch beam settled on a small piece of marble lodged in the opening of a cubicula. IN PACE, said the inscription, and even Abby knew what it meant. In Peace. Next to it was a Christogram, and above it a crudely drawn dove with an olive branch in its mouth.
Peace and hope. For a moment, Abby glimpsed the humanity of the people who’d been buried here, row upon row of them patiently waiting. The tombs no longer seemed so macabre. They felt almost companionable.
Her beam moved along – and as it moved, it caught something. A shadow in the stone, a pattern flitting into the light like a moth. She turned her head back slowly, trying to pin it down.
There. The design was thin and shallow, angled slightly so that lit from below it cast almost no shadow. It was only because the lamp was mounted on her helmet that she’d caught it. Even then, she had to keep the beam slightly oblique: if she pointed it straight, the incisions melted back into the rock. The shape that had governed her life since Michael gave her a jewellery box in Pristina two months ago. The staurogram. It sat above the door of the left-hand passage, inviting her on.
She squeezed past Lusetti and padded down the passage. She heard a plaintive ‘Hey’ from Mark behind her, but ignored him. Ten yards further along, the passage ended at a T-junction. She looked left and right, and there it was again: the same symbol carved above the left doorway.
The saving sign that lights the path ahead.
* * *
Lusetti led the way, with Barry and Mark behind him. Abby brought up the rear. Sometimes she imagined she could hear soft footsteps behind her, though each time she pointed her torch back down the tunnel she saw nothing but the graves.
It was like walking through fog – timeless and placeless. The rows of tombs, sometimes interrupted by doorways that led into small chambers where richer or grander families had been buried; the dark passages that forked and crossed, weaving a web deep underground. If the staurograms had led them in a circle, they might have followed it round and round for ever.
They went down a staircase, then another. The air grew colder. The ground underfoot was damp and clammy, like wet sand. The ceiling got lower, pressed down by the weight of the world above them. Abby lost count of the number of turns they’d made. Without the staurograms, she was pretty certain they’d never find their way out.
They stopped – so abruptly she bumped into Mark. The tunnel had reached a T-junction. Lusetti, in the lead, shone his torch right and left, and right again.
‘There is no mark here.’
‘There must be,’ said Mark. Tension told in his voice. ‘They can’t have brought us all this way to drop us now.’
‘They?’ echoed Lusetti. ‘You think they are leading you where you want to go?’
Four torch beams crisscrossed the grainy rock. All they illuminated was the scrapes and gouges of the hand tools that had cut the passage. And, ahead, a dirty brick wall filling a niche in the rock from floor to ceiling.
‘Is this recent?’ Mark asked. Lusetti shook his head.
‘This is Roman brickwork.’
‘Maybe we’re supposed to go straight on,’ Abby said. She edged past Mark and Barry and tapped the brickwork. Even after so many centuries, it felt solid.
‘I think maybe –’
The bullet caught Mark clean in the chest. The gunshot roared down the catacomb. Barry dropped to one knee, turned and squeezed off three shots of his own. Abby hurled herself to the floor of the passage and started to crawl.
More shots echoed behind her; lights flashed. In the tight space, it sounded like an artillery battle. She picked herself up and ran down the tunnel, looking for a side passage that might help lose her in the labyrinth.
The tunnel ended in a rough-finished wall. No bricks, no turnings – just a piece of rock where the diggers’ patience or will had run out, where they’d shouldered their tools and turned for the surface.
The sound of gunfire settled in the tunnel like dust. The silence was even more unnerving, though it didn’t last long. From behind – not far – Abby heard slow footsteps coming after her.
Metal snapped on metal as the slide of a gun slid back.
XLVI
Constantinople – June 337
SOMEONE MUST HAVE died. At this moment, I don’t know if it’s him or me. The man I’m looking at died on a beach eleven years ago. I put the knife in his back myself; I carried his corpse halfway across the empire and buried it in the deepest hole I could find.
And now he’s standing in front of me – living, breathing, dark eyes watching me.
I close my eyes, squeezing them until all I see is spots. When I reopen them, he’s still there.
It’s all I can do to stop my stomach emptying itself on the floor. My head feels as if it’s about to break
open. This isn’t possible.
I concentrate on the eyes. Are they really his? They’ve lost their clarity, as though a veil’s been drawn over them. They don’t seem to focus. He looks bewildered, as though he doesn’t know what he’s doing here.
I don’t either.
‘Crispus?’ I stammer.
Something like terror creases his face. He steps away, sinking into the shadows. I’m glad. Having to look at him is like staring at the sun: too stark, too painful to endure.
I turn to Porfyrius.
‘How have you done this?’
‘I told you.’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible through God,’ he answers calmly. ‘Do you want to stick your fingers into the scar you made in his back?’
How does he know I stabbed Crispus in the back? Everyone believes he was poisoned.
‘Impossible,’ I whisper again.
‘Once, I thought the same as you.’
‘And why …?’
From outside, rendered distant by the thick walls, I hear the blare of trumpets. Constantine’s funeral procession must be coming near. And with the sound, a resonance. At long last, too late, I know what Porfyrius is going to do.
‘You’re going to present … him … as Constantine’s successor.’
‘When the flames go up and the eagle flies out of the fire, the people will see Constantine’s true heir. A miracle. What chance will Constantius and his brothers have against that?’ A chuckle. ‘Of course, we’ve bribed some of the guards as well. They’ll cut Constantius to pieces, and Crispus will rally the empire.’
‘With you behind the throne telling him what to do?’
‘This isn’t about me,’ he snaps. ‘This is for the empire, and for God.’
I’ve heard too many people telling me they’ve done things for God recently. ‘Is this all because of the Arians? Because of Eusebius and Alexander?’ Compared with the enormity of what I’ve just witnessed, their jealousies and hair-splitting seem irrelevant.
‘I couldn’t give two obols for Eusebius, or his enemies.’ There’s genuine frustration in Porfyrius’s voice. ‘Do you think Christ returned from the dead so that men would kill each other debating whether he was co-eternal or consubstantial with the Father? Eusebius and his kind are like men who inherit a book of wisdom and simply use it as kindling for a cooking fire.’
I’m lost. ‘What then?’
‘I’m doing this for Constantine. Because he was right – that unity is the only way to save the empire from tearing itself apart. One God, one church, one emperor. The moment you divide it, the divisions multiply on themselves until they consume the world in chaos. Constantine knew that – but in the end, he wasn’t strong enough to defeat the forces of chaos. By this miracle, we have a second chance.’
I try to digest it. So much of what he’s saying makes such perfect sense, it’s easy to forget it’s built on the most ludicrous foundation.
In order to rule the world, we have to have the perfect virtue of one rather than the weakness of many.
Crispus – the new Crispus – is still obscured in the shadows. Out of sight, the shock receding, reason reasserts itself.
‘Do you really think the people will accept this imposter you’ve dug up?’
‘They’ll accept it because it’s the truth.’ A grunt. ‘And because they’re desperate to believe.’
A knock sounds from the door, the same intricate pattern that Porfyrius used. One of his men cracks it open.
‘It’s time.’
Rome – Present Day
There was nowhere to hide – not even a niche. The gravediggers hadn’t cut any cubicula here. With a flash of despair, she realised even the darkness didn’t hide her. The lamp on her helmet was still on, shining its futile light on the rock wall and drawing her pursuers like a beacon.
She thought of what Mark had said – almost his last words, it turned out. They can’t have brought us all this way to drop us now. It reminded her of a line from an old gospel record her parents used to play when she was a child.
Nobody told me that the road would be easy.
‘Abby?’
It was the last voice she expected to hear – warm and reassuring in the darkest place imaginable.
‘Michael?’
‘You can come out now.’
She didn’t ask why or how; she didn’t stop to think. She turned back and walked slowly around the bend in the tunnel. There was Michael, caught in the head torch like a deer in headlights. And there, behind him, two men with raised guns.
There was no fight left in her. All she could do was stare.
Michael gave a sad, tight smile. ‘I’m sorry, Abby. I had no choice.’
A fourth man appeared in the shadows beyond them, a dark silhouette against a light whose source she couldn’t see. He was smaller than the others, a slight man with close-cropped hair, maybe a small beard. He seemed to absorb light: the only part of him that reflected anything was the chrome-handled pistol tucked in his waistband.
‘Abigail Cormac. Again, I have to ask you: why are you not dead?’
Dragović. Abby had no answer. He laughed, then shrugged.
‘It does not matter. Now that I have you, you will wish you were dead. Many times, before I let you die.’
One of his men came down the passage and pinned her arms. She didn’t resist. He dragged her back to the junction. Her feet kicked against something soft and recently human on the ground; she didn’t look down.
Dragović’s men all had head torches, though no helmets. They trained their beams on the brick wall.
‘This is the place you came to,’ said Dragović. ‘Left is nothing; right is nothing. I think we must go straight on.’
One of his men – Abby counted four, plus Dragović and Michael – stepped forward and unslung the backpack he carried. From inside, he took out a nail gun and a coil of plastic tube that looked like a fat clothesline. He fired three nails into the brickwork, then wrapped the tube around them like wool, making a rough triangle against the bricks. Two metal plugs and a length of electrical cable came out of the bag. He stuck the plugs into the tube, then unspooled the cable. The hands that gripped Abby pulled her back down the tunnel; the others followed. Round a corner, they paused.
‘You’re going to be OK,’ Michael whispered in her ear.
They all crouched down. Her guard released her, though only so he could put his hands over his ears. Abby did the same. The man at the front connected the wires to a small, remote-control box.
Abby didn’t see him press the button. All she felt was the blast, pulsing through her hands and into her ears; and a punch of air against her chest. Fine grit rained down from the ceiling; Abby braced herself for worse, for the whole catacomb to shake itself apart and bury her. It didn’t happen.
The man with the detonator ran forward, shouted something. They all advanced down the tunnel. Now the wall was just a heap of bricks, wreathed in a cloud of dust that was still settling. The dust blocked the torch beams, but as it swirled small holes appeared in the cloud, letting the light through. Not on to brick or stone, but into dark space beyond.
One by one they ducked through the hole. For a moment, all Abby could feel was the dust, coating her tongue, choking her lungs. She gagged. Then she was through.
In the deepest part of the catacomb, seven torch beams played over a chamber that hadn’t been seen in seventeen centuries. It reminded Abby of the tomb in Kosovo: larger, though not much – perhaps three metres long and almost square, with a barrel ceiling just high enough for them all to stand upright. Every surface was painted: an eclectic mix of doves and fish, ranked soldiers standing to attention, a clean-shaven Jesus peering out from behind a huge Bible, and bearded saints or prophets leaning on their staffs. A curved niche filled one end, flanked on the walls by two enormous painted symbols, the Christogram and the staurogram.
Between them, filling the niche, stood a coffin. Not a plain stone
affair, as had served for Gaius Valerius Maximus: Abby could tell at once that this was different. It was made from a lustrous purple marble, intricately carved. Two rows of cavalry trotted towards each other on its face; on its pitched lid, a flotilla of boats seemed to be engaged in a naval battle. Even in the torchlight, the detail leapt out at Abby: every oar and rower, every link of armour and twist of rope.
‘How did they ever get that down here?’ Michael wondered aloud.
Dragović walked across the chamber. He bent over the sarcophagus, put his cheek against the surface and stretched out his arms to embrace it, communing with the cold stone.
‘Porphyry,’ he said. ‘The right and prerogative of emperors.’
‘Is that … Constantine’s?’ Abby asked.
‘Constantine was buried in Istanbul.’ Dragović straightened and turned to Michael. ‘This, I think, is for Constantine’s son Crispus.’
There was something in the way that he spoke to Michael that chilled Abby. Not cruelty or malice – familiarity.
She looked at Michael. ‘How did you get here?’
‘They caught me just outside Split. I didn’t have a chance.’
Dragović heard him and laughed.
‘Don’t lie to your little girlfriend. You still think she loves you? You came to me, just like in Kosovo. And for the same reason. Because you wanted money.’
Abby felt a pit opening inside her. ‘What about Irina?’
‘Irina?’ Dragović asked. ‘Who is Irina, please?’
Michael’s shoulders slumped. ‘There was no Irina.’
‘But – the photo? In your apartment.’
‘Her name’s Cathy. My ex-wife. She’s never been to the Balkans. So far as I know, she’s living with her second husband back in Donegal.’
Abby felt another part of her world collapsing in on her. Dragović sensed her pain and chuckled.
‘You thought he was one of the angels? The good sheriff in the white hat?’ He jerked his head dismissively. ‘He wanted money. Like everyone.’
Abby stared at Michael, willing it not to be true. ‘Why? What happened to doing the right thing? Fighting the barbarians?’
