by David Hewson
“It was still cruel. What happened to him? Corax? In the end?”
“Someone, not Pater perhaps, but someone who hoped to become Pater one day, would rescue him. And the boy would be reborn. As Corax. Overjoyed to be a part of everything that was happening in this place, wondering where he’d rise next on the ladder. Whether he might, perhaps, become Pater himself in time.”
Alessio felt an acute sense of injustice on behalf of all those tortured adolescents, one mitigated only slightly by the thought that came fast on the heels of his outrage: they must have inflicted the same torture on those who followed.
Then a question occurred to him.
“What was there left for Mithras to do?” he asked. “If they all cared for each other so much?”
His father smiled. “You like words, don’t you? I did when I was young. We’re so similar in many ways. Here’s a word,” Giorgio Bramante went on. “Psychopomp. Mithras mattered to them all because, among many other things, he was their psychopomp.”
It sounded like a made-up word, one not quite real.
“Couldn’t Pater be a psyche… psycho…?”
“No,” Giorgio said firmly. “A human being is mortal. A man could never be anyone’s psychopomp. He — or she or it — is something people all over the world believe in, whatever their religion. A being — perhaps an animal, a spirit, a ghost or something we simply don’t comprehend — whose job it is to find the souls of those who’ve died and lead them home, to their place of rest. Heaven, if you like. These people believed Mithras would be waiting for them, ready to perform an act of kindness that was beyond even Pater at the very end. To bring them to peace.”
Alessio Bramante shivered. He didn’t like the idea of a psychopomp. Not at all. For one very good reason, which occurred to him immediately. What if they forgot, or became lazy or confused? Where did all those lost souls go then?
“What do we do now, Daddy?”
“We could always play a game.”
Giorgio Bramante had his head cocked to one side, like a blackbird listening for worms in the garden, Alessio thought. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
“No…”
“I heard something,” Giorgio said, getting up, looking at the dark entrances of the corridors. Seven of them. Wondering which to choose.
“It’s safe here, Alessio. Just stay in your chair. Wait for me. I have something to do. Be patient.”
Alessio shivered. He stared at the scarred surface of the cheap table, trying not to think. Giorgio had brought a thick jacket with him. It occurred to his son that his father had known all along that they would end up in this chill, damp chamber beneath the ground. Alessio wore just a pair of thin cotton school trousers and his white T-shirt, a clean one that morning, with the symbol his mother had designed for the school outlined in distinct colours on the front: a star inside a dark blue circle, with a set of equidistant smaller stars set around them.
Seven stars. Seven points.
“I will,” he promised his father.
* * *
It began, Torchia knew, with Giorgio’s lecture the previous month, three hours of a long, warm afternoon in the airless aula in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, one he’d never forget. Bramante was in his finest form: brilliant, electrifying, incisive. The subject, nominally, was what little was known about the philosophy of the Roman military Mithraic sects. But it was about much more than that, though Ludo Torchia suspected he was the only one in the class who knew it. What Bramante was really talking about was life itself, the passage from child to man, the acceptance of duty and deference to those above, and the need, absolute, unquestionable, for obedience, trust, and secrecy within the tight, closed ranks of the social group to which an individual belonged. He was talking about life itself.
Torchia had listened, rigid in his seat, unable to take his eyes off Giorgio, who sat on his desk, fit and muscular in a tight T-shirt and Gucci jeans, a leader at perfect ease with his flock.
One part came back to Torchia now. Bramante had been discussing the seven-ranked hierarchy. Vignola had asked a question that seemed, on the face of things, sensible. How did structures like this begin? At what point, in the nascent stage of Mithraism’s emergence, did someone dictate that there would be seven ranks, with set rituals for the progression from one to the next? Where, he wanted to know, did it all come from?
Bramante had smiled at them, an attractive, knowing smile, like a father indulging a son.
“They didn’t need to ask that question, Sandro,” the professor replied in his measured, powerful voice. “They knew the answer already. Their religion came from their god.”
“Yes, but… in real life,” Vignola objected. “I mean, it didn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.”
“How do you know?” Bramante had asked.
“Because it couldn’t! If Mithras was real, where did he go?”
“They murdered him.” Torchia said it without thinking, and was pleased, and a little disturbed, too, by Giorgio’s reaction to his impulsive answer. Bramante was staring at him, an expression of surprise and admiration on his handsome face.
“Constantine murdered Mithras,” the professor agreed. “Constantine and his bishops. Just as they murdered all the old gods. If you talk to the theologians they’ll give you other answers. But I’m not a theologian, nor is this a theology class. We’re historians. We look at facts and deduce what we can from them. The facts state that much of the Roman army followed Mithras for the best part of three centuries. Then, with Christianity, Mithras died, and with him the beliefs of those who followed him. Whether you view that literally or not, that is, inescapably, what happened. If you want more complicated answers, you’re in the wrong department.”
“It must have been terrible,” Torchia remarked, unable to take his eyes off his professor.
“What?” Bramante asked.
“Terrible. To have lost your religion. To have watched it ripped from you.”
“The Christians had to put up with that for three centuries,” Bramante pointed out.
“The Christians won.”
There was a flicker of something — knowledge, perhaps even self-doubt — in Giorgio Bramante’s eyes. Torchia couldn’t stop looking at it.
“What would have been truly terrible, I think,” Giorgio continued, “would have been if one were denied a final chance to make peace with what one was losing. A Christian would hope to confess before dying. To have that last comfort snatched from your hands…”
He said nothing else. It would be two weeks before Ludo Torchia understood the misty, almost guilty look in his eyes at that moment.
“But…” Vignola complained, then fell quiet. There was an expression in Bramante’s face that indicated this was the end of that particular thread. Giorgio was a patient, knowledgeable professor, but he led them like a general led his troops. What he sought was their understanding, not their approval. Torchia understood this implicitly, and understood, too, that the rest of them were still just kids really, and he knew what to expect from kids. Fear, interest, then the onset of boredom before, with the right leader, in the correct, ritual circumstances, comprehension.
So he hadn’t just brought the live cockerel from the market in Testaccio. While he was there he’d visited a dealer in one of the tenement blocks, purchased, on long credit, two ready-rolled smokes, harsh black Afghan mixed with cheap cigarette tobacco. He’d read there’d been some kind of drug down here in the beginning. The Romans knew hemp. They introduced the drug from the colonies they’d absorbed over the years. They knew alcohol too. Many of the Mithraic rites had been stolen and incorporated into Christianity. For the winter solstice, celebrated around December 25 each year, they drank wine and ate bread together, a symbolic feast upon the blood and the body of the sacrificial bull. Torchia wondered how many good Catholics knew that when they were on their knees taking Holy Communion under the candles.
Toni LaMarca fell greedily on one of the two joints straightaway a
nd sneaked into the shadows like the fool he was. Raul Bellucci and the Guerino oaf were now choking on the second, giggling, alive with that childish pleasure of being an illicit visitor in a strange and forbidden place. Torchia hadn’t any intention of joining them. There was too much to think about in this magic site. Nor was the arch-geek midget Sandro Vignola much interested either. He’d been goggle-eyed since they entered the temple. Now he was down on his little hands and knees in front of a slab next to the altar, looking for all the world like some overweight choirboy come to do homage to the deity who stood above him, sword in hand, straddling the bull, blade buried in its writhing neck.
Torchia watched Vignola mouthing the Latin inscription on the stonework, set beneath a cut-out half moon, and wished he were better at languages himself. He nodded at the slab.
“What does it say?”
Latin was rarely simple, old words for new. It was a tongue from another era, a lost culture, close yet unknown too, a code, a collection of symbolic letters, each with a meaning obvious only to the initiated.
He shone his torch on the carving in the dusty white stone.
DEO INV M
L ANTONIUS
PROCULUS
PRAEF COH III P
ET PATER
V S • L • M
“What does it say?” Torchia asked again, more loudly this time when Vignola ignored him.
“Deo Invicto Mithrae, Lucius Antonius Proculus, Praefectus Cohors Tertiae Praetoria, et Pater, votum soluit libens merito.”
The bright round eyes stared at him from behind the oversize spectacles.
“‘To the invincible God Mithras, Lucius Antonius Proculus, Praefect of the Third Cohort of the Praetorian Guard, and Father, willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow.’ I can’t believe you don’t understand that,” Vignale said.
“I don’t read Latin well.”
Dino Abati joined them. He’d been poking around in the corners with his gear, bright ginger hair bouncing around in places he didn’t belong.
“You should still know the name,” he told Torchia. “We covered it in class, remember? Lucius Antonius Proculus was with the Praetorian Guard for the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Praetorian backed Maxentius. The one who lost. Remember?”
“I don’t waste time on old names,” Torchia murmured. He didn’t like being treated like a moron. “So you think he was here?”
Abati shot a glance towards the anteroom, where the dead were.
“Perhaps he still is,” he suggested. “Constantine wiped out the Praetorian Guard completely after he entered Rome. They’d backed the wrong side. He felt he couldn’t trust them. So he razed that headquarters of theirs… what was it?”
“The Castra Praetoria,” Vignola answered.
“Wiped it out completely. And here, too, I guess,” Abati added. “It’s creepy, really. Did anyone know about this place until Giorgio came along?”
“Of course not!” Vignola squealed. “Don’t you think it would be in the books? This is the best mithraeum in Rome. Perhaps the best in the world.”
Abati thought about this.
“And Giorgio’s not sure whether he dare tell people? That’s nuts. He can’t keep it hidden forever.”
Vignola shook his head, dragged himself off the floor, and rubbed the grime off his hands.
“He can keep it hidden for as long as he likes. The department has charge of this entire excavation. Bramante can just carry on as he is now, working quietly with Judith Turnhouse and whoever else is in on the secret. Then someday, when the time’s right, he calls up the right people and says, ‘Look what we found.’ Behold, Giorgio the hero. The discoverer of unknown wonders. Schliemann, Howard Carter, all rolled into one. Wouldn’t he just love that?”
“This is holy ground,” Torchia said abruptly, without thinking.
“So what are we supposed to do, Ludo?” Abati demanded in that infuriating slow drawl of his. “Sing a few songs? Kill the rooster? Bow before the god, then go home and complete our assignments? You shouldn’t take this Mithras thing too seriously. It was all just a bunch of us messing round. Hey! Hey!”
He was shouting now, suddenly animated and angry. He flew across the dimly lit room and seized Toni LaMarca, who was about to stumble down a small rectangular exit on the far side, behind the altar and its figures.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Abati yelled.
“Looking…” LaMarca replied, his voice thick with dope.
“Don’t…”
“But…”
Something in Abati’s face silenced him. Then the figure in the red caving suit, who looked so much at home here, picked up a rock from the ground and threw it into the black hole ahead of them, where LaMarca had been about to enter. There was no sound. Nothing at all. Until, eventually, a distant echo of a hard, lost object falling into water.
Dino Abati gave each of them a filthy look in turn.
“This is not a playground, children,” he said with venom. “There’s a reason you should be afraid of the dark.”
* * *
The light was so bright it hurt. Alessio Bramante looked at the switches on the wall and knew he’d have to do something about them, that he couldn’t sit on his own under this incandescent yellow sea much longer. It was like being beneath the eyes of some harsh, electric dragon. He was happy in the dark. Not the total darkness his father entered when he was working. Just the quiet, half light of dusk or early morning, an hour when there was room in the world for imagination. A time when Alessio could think about the day ahead, and that walk down to Piranesi’s piazza, the moment when he would peer through the keyhole, locate the distant shining dome, and say to his father, for both of them, “I see it. The world is still with us. Life can go on.”
He couldn’t think straight now, not with the constant flood of illumination pouring down on him from the lines of bulbs above his head. And how long was he supposed to wait? He didn’t have a watch. His grandmother had given him one for the previous Christmas. It had a picture of Santa Claus on the face. He didn’t wear it. Watches were hateful, intrusive things, unnecessary machines ticking away the minutes of a person’s life without mercy, without feeling. The face with its red hat and snowy beard grinned back at him all the time.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good… … said the old American song they played on the sound system sometimes, very loud, when they’d been drinking.
Santa Claus was an invention out of a fairy tale. A face on a dial. A spy on the wrist. Alessio didn’t like the idea of someone watching him like that. It wasn’t right.
Just as leaving him alone in this bare, bright chamber, in the red earth and grey rock, wasn’t right either. The place smelled of mould and decay. Not what he’d hoped for, the sharp citrus aroma of old fruit skins squashed underfoot.
They’re oranges on the surface only, he thought. Something else lies beneath. Bones and dead things, all the decay of the centuries.
He recalled staring through those stupid spectacles that morning, wondering who was right. The way he saw — or didn’t see — things. Or the multiple worlds envisioned by a fly.
Alessio sat at the table and said, in a calm, flat, unemotional voice, tinged only slightly with anger, more for himself than anyone listening, “Giorgio.”
Then again.
“Giorgio!”
He’d never used his father’s first name like that before. There was a rule, a law, that forbade children from speaking their parents’ real names out loud. Giorgio — Alessio had thought of him this way for months now — had told him stories about magical names. Of how the Jews had a word for God which no one but the highest priest could utter, and then only in special circumstances, deep inside the holiest of places. And now he knew about the followers of Mithras, with their secret rituals too, enacted in this underground labyrinth.
Seven orders of humanity. Seven trials. Seven sacraments. Precious rites, never shared with outsiders. Not until the moment of initiation,
the point at which the blank, empty page of the novice gained a single scrawl, the birth of knowing.
The beginner became Corax.
After… what?
Giorgio had disappeared into the darkness minutes before. Alessio thought he’d heard distant sounds from down one of the black corridors. A faraway voice. Perhaps more than one. Perhaps it was his father watching from the shadows. Or maybe it was merely an echo of his own voice, deepened by the tunnels chasing off from those seven exits cut into the rock of the chamber in which he now sat, not afraid, just thinking, trying to work out what this was.
Games.
Giorgio played games sometimes. A few months before, Alessio’s father had taken him into a warren of excavated houses on the Palatino, had found, through a labyrinth of ancient stone rooms, the kitchen of someone called Livia, wife to a famous emperor, Augustus, and a woman of fearsome reputation, cruel and controlling, determined to do the utmost for her clan. A kind of Pater, but in a dress.
Giorgio was nowhere when Alessio had turned a corner and found himself in some dark rocky alcove, green with algae, alive with insects, centipedes and beetles, bristling with furry moss that clung like crude living skin on the damp stone walls, yellowing with the onset of decay. The boy had stood there for a long time, glad he’d never brought the watch because that would have made everything seem longer, placed a stamp on the act, one that said “guilty.”
He hadn’t done what Giorgio had wanted. Hadn’t broken down, cried, whined, kicked, and yelled, hammered his new white sneakers against the green, gunky stone until they were ruined.
Afterwards Giorgio had bought ice cream and, for Alessio, a toy he didn’t want. All in return for a promise never to tell his mother, one he readily agreed to, because men needed secrets, bonds, just like those of Mithras, whispered in this place two thousand years before. Secrets bound men together more tightly, made Giorgio tell him more stories, daring ones, frightening ones sometimes. About the darkness and the old things that lurked there.
