In her lifetime of turmoil and destruction, as the Saxons had burned across Britain like a forest fire, as even Rome itself crumbled and shuddered, Regina had come to see her family — not as something to release to freedom — but as something to preserve : a burden that had to be saved. Even if it meant burying it in a hole in the ground. It was as if she had not allowed Brica to be born at all, but had kept her in the safety of her own womb, a dark thing, bloody, resentful — but safe.
In the last days the women were distracted. They talked excitedly about a new light in the sky, like a burning boat that sailed the great river of stars, and what such a remarkable omen might portend.
But Regina felt no apprehension. Perhaps it was the fire ship that had lit up her childhood, returned to warm her now that she was growing cold.
And then there was no more talk. The lights seemed to dim, one by one, in the corridors of her thinking.
But then she thought she heard someone calling her.
She ran through passageways. She was light and small, laughing, free of the thing in her belly. She ran until she found her mother, who sat in her chamber with a silver mirror held before her face, while Cartumandua braided her golden hair. When she heard Regina coming, Julia turned and smiled.
In that same year — the year 476 after Christ, the year of Regina’s death — the boy-Emperor Romulus Augustus was deposed by the German warrior Odoacer. There wasn’t even a nominal attempt to find a replacement. At last the system of the emperors broke down. Odoacer proclaimed himself king of Italy.
Odoacer was no Saxon. Odoacer and his successor, Theodoric, were advocates of harmony and a reverence for the past, and they tried to ensure continuity and preservation. Theodoric imposed a tax on wine, and used the revenue to restore the imperial palaces. He repaired the amphitheater after earthquake damage, and he instructed watchmen to listen for the subtle ringing sound that would betray a thief trying to steal an arm or leg or head from one of the city’s thousands of statues.
In the time of these first barbarian kings of Rome, there were many rumors of hoards and treasures to be found underground, and even of rich convents full of beautiful women, perhaps nuns, laden with gold and jewelry. The lieutenants of Theodoric searched for the truth behind these legends, even going so far as to break open some of the old Catacombs along the Appian Way and elsewhere. But nothing of importance was ever found.
THREE
Chapter 37
The da Vinci Airport is a few miles southwest of Rome. I got a cab to the city center. The driver might have been fifty. His face was like brown, crumpled leather. He seemed cheerful enough. He had a little wooden puppet hanging from his rearview mirror, like a red-painted Pinocchio.
We drove through rings of development. The outermost belt was the most modern, as you’d expect, a string of deeply ugly modern residential suburbs — tower blocks that would have shamed Manchester at its worst — and industrial sites, power plants, and other necessary but unattractive infrastructure. There were posters for British and American movies and pop stars, and an awful lot of kids in MANCHESTER UNITED soccer shirts and Yankees baseball caps. I could have been anywhere.
But within that concrete girdle there was a more attractive zone, of apartment blocks laid out around narrow roads and small greened squares. It looked like a nineteenth-century development. Here the traffic knotted up. My driver edged forward, honking, muttering, and gesturing.
We were close to the people now, pedestrians who squeezed their way along the narrow roads, mopeds that buzzed around us. Romans looked small, dark, round, a bit careworn. There was dirt and litter everywhere. Evidently the Romans had cleaned up their city in a great burst of enthusiasm to greet the year 2000. If that was so, I’d have hated to visit in 1999. The apartment blocks had rows of shuttered windows, and they were painted startlingly bright colors, yellow, orange, purple, even pink. It didn’t look British — colors like that don’t work well in the rain of London or Birmingham — still, I could have been in any great European city, I thought, in Paris or Brussels.
But then we reached the Aurelian Wall. “Mura, mura,” said the cabdriver, pointing. It was a great shoulder of brick, looming high above the road, dark, brooding, powerful, and the cars crept around its base like tinfoil toys. Even this first great slab could have absorbed all the scraps and fragments of wall I had seen in London, I thought, awed.
There was graffiti on the mura, though, in among the ads for trashy pop music and the political posters. I had no Italian, but I could recognize that the slogans were about immigrants and crime. The graffiti was everywhere, on every wall and doorway, every lamppost and bus shelter. Not the sign of a contented society.
I had twenty-four hours free before I was to meet Claudio Nervi, the tame Jesuit whose name I had extracted from Gina, and the resumption of my search for my sister. Twenty-four hours to decompress.
I had booked a hotel close to the Forum area, just like a regular tourist. The receptionist was a thin, neat young man in a black suit. His English was broken but serviceable: he was actually the first Italian I’d encountered since landing who had any English at all beyond a couple of words.
My room was small, and had a view of what looked like a back alley. But the Roman Forum was in sight from my room, just as the hotel’s brochure promised, although you had to peer through alleyways of brickwork to make out the fallen pillars and strolling tourists. But that brickwork, I found out later, was itself a ruin of a development called Trajan’s Market, a kind of giant shopping mall of antiquity. Anyhow the restricted view kept the price of my room down.
I unpacked, and searched unsuccessfully for a tea maker. The only English-language TV channel was CNN. But the room had an Internet connection, workable through the TV for the hire of a portable keyboard for a charge of a few euros, or a few thousand lira, according to the yellowing, outdated note on the TV cabinet.
I found a series of emails from Peter, sent from wherever he was ensconced with his Slan(t)ers in America. I paged through most of it, filing it in my mental category of “Peter’s spooky stuff” — and enduring the occasional heart-stopping moment as the connection, always slow, threatened to freeze altogether. Some of it was kind of interesting, though.
One of the Slan(t)ers’ principal activities was to search the world’s media for “anomalies” — any peculiar patterns, inexplicable events, that might show the fraying of the fringe of our worldview. It’s a hobby that’s been enjoyed by the UFOlogists since the fifties, I understand. And of course the rise of the Internet has turned this into an industry: the Slan(t)ers had search and pattern-recognition software, more powerful than the fastest commercial search engine, Peter boasted, capable of picking through the vast slurry of information, rumor, hoax, and plain garbage that pours onto our information superhighway every day.
And, Peter said, while he had been in the States this endless searching had turned up something about his mysterious dark matter.
“If a chunk of dark matter were to pass through the Earth, we wouldn’t see it. It would just pass through the planet’s substance. But its gravitation would trigger seismic events: shock waves in the Earth’s structure radiating away from its path. And, happily, we monitor seismic activity quite comprehensively …”
There is a global network of some five thousand government-sponsored seismic survey sites. They listen for the songs of the Earth, the great low-frequency waves that travel through the planet’s crust. What the government monitors specifically look for are waves emanating from a single point source, which could be the location of an earthquake, say, or an illegal underground nuclear test. “Clean” signals of that kind are extracted from the data and published. The rest of the information is written off as meaningless noise. “And much of it probably is,” said Peter. “You can get a seismic signature if a heavy truck passes by your station.”