He smiled in the gloom. “Look around you, George. Consider the deep layers of history, the extended and changing usage, of this one small church alone; and consider how little we understand even of this patch of ground. Then remember you are in Rome, where everything is drenched in history, in continuity through change. And then think of the Order. Rather like the Vatican, the Order is woven into this fabric of history and humanity …”
I was beginning to form an impression that this smooth clergyman was a lot less forthcoming than his appearance suggested. He was good at eating up time, at deflecting my questions, at probing into my personality, uttering vague forebodings and generating doubt: better at all that bullshit than putting himself on the line and taking responsibility to do anything. Maybe that’s a quality you need to get along in the Vatican, I thought; the Church hasn’t survived two thousand years by being proactive. But it wasn’t helping me.
And it was more than that. It was a feeling I’d had when meeting the headmistress, even Gina, even Lou. Every time I tried to take a step closer to Rosa I felt as if I were pressing against an invisible, intangible barrier, a force field of words and looks and subtle body language. It was as if all these people had been trying to put me off the search — perhaps without even realizing they were doing it.
But I’m a stubborn bugger if nothing else, and having come so far I wasn’t about to give up. And maybe the wine was making me snappy. I decided to challenge him. “You work for the Order, don’t you?”
“I’ve had some dealings with it.”
“You find it recruits,” I said rudely. I was guessing, but I hit a mark.
He lost his smile. “If I perceive a person in need, and if through the Order I can meet that need—”
“Will you get me that contact or not?”
He nodded curtly. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll send it to your hotel.”
When I got back to my room I booted up the Internet connection again. I found two more emails from Peter. In the first mail, to my surprise, he said he had booked a flight to Rome. He said he thought I needed help.
“I think we’re up against a cult here, George. Some kind of weirdo mother-fixated Marian cult. And it’s nearly as old as the church itself. If the Vatican is siphoning funds they’re going to stonewall … Go back to your tame Jesuit,” he wrote. “Maybe he can get me into the Vatican Secret Archives. All Slan(t)ers know that the answers to most of the universe’s mysteries are to be found in there …” Well, maybe. I knew that Peter was of course following his own agenda — mine was just incidental to him — and I wondered if there was more to this sudden change of plan.
The second of his emails was more thoughtful.
“We’re so short-lived, George. The Empire is buried a long way down, so far down it defeats the capacity of life to measure it. The oldest recorded human lived about one hundred twenty years. So if you go just a little more than a century deep you would find no human who’s alive today — and yet you’re still just a twentieth of the way back to the emperors.
“No mammal lives longer than humans, no elephant, no dog or horse. Your grandmother’s parrot might beat a century. The oldest insects are jewel beetles that die at thirty; the crocodiles might last to sixty. The oldest land animals of any kind are tortoises — Captain Cook gave one to the king of Tonga that supposedly lived one hundred eighty-eight years — and some mollusks, like the ocean quahog, a thick- shelled clam, can last a couple of hundred years. But that’s all. So if you go just two centuries deep into the abyss you leave behind all the living animals.
“Deeper than that and there are only the plants. In the gardens of the villa of the Emperor Hadrian there is said to be a cypress tree that has lived a thousand years, but even that is only halfway back to Hadrian himself. Oh, there is a great redwood that is said to be seven thousand years old, and living bacteria found in the gut of a frozen mastodon were more than eleven thousand years old — but such wrinklies are rare. Everything else has since died as we do, George, the grass, the fungi, the bugs; we may as well all be mayflies …
“Nothing living survives from the time of the emperors — not even vegetable memories. You are delving in deep time indeed, George. But you mustn’t let it frighten you.”
A new message came in. From Claudio, it was a telephone number for the Order. In fact, said Claudio’s note, it was a direct line for my sister, for Rosa. My heart beat faster.
Chapter 38
It was in the year 667 that Totila came to Rome. He wore an iron collar around his neck, for he was a criminal who undertook this pilgrimage as expiation.
Totila was a simple man, a farmer from southern Gaul. He had not denied the charge against him, of stealing a little bread to feed his daughters’ swollen bellies. His crops had been ruined by floods and banditry, and he had had no choice. That didn’t make it any less of a sin, of course. But the bishop had been lenient; his mouthfuls of bread had won him only a flogging, which would probably leave no scars, and the great chore of this journey to the capital of the world.
But in his whole life Totila had never walked more than half a day’s journey from the place he had been born. Across Europe, the calm of empire had been replaced by turbulence, and this was not an age for traveling. The journey was itself overwhelming, a jaunt into endless strangeness.
And as he neared Rome itself, when he joined the flood of pilgrims who trampled along the weed- choked road that led to the city, and when he walked through the great arched gateway into the city itself, Totila felt as if his soul would spin out of his body in bewilderment.
Rome was a city of hills, on which great buildings sprawled — palaces and temples, arches and columns. But even at the center, two centuries after the last of the western emperors, white marble was scorched by fire, many of the buildings lacked roofs, and he could see grass and weeds thrusting through the pavement, and ivy and vines clinging to crumbling stone. Away from the central area much of the city within the walls was demolished altogether, flattened and burned out, and given over to green. Cattle and goats wandered amid bits of masonry that poked through the grass.
The many new churches, though, were fine and bright.
He wandered to the Forum area. It was dense with stalls selling food and drink, and many, many Christian tokens and relics. And people were buying. Some must be pilgrims like himself — he saw iron rings around necks and arms, marking out fellow criminals — but others were well dressed and evidently wealthy.
There was a blare of trumpets.
Suddenly he found himself being shoved along by a great swarm of bodies. Confused, scared, he kept his hand over his chest where, inside his tunic, his leather purse dangled on its bit of rope, for he had heard of the criminality of the Romans. He strained to see over the heads of the crowd.
A procession passed: a series of swarthy slaves, soldiers stripped to the waist with shield and trumpets, and a gilded sedan chair. In the dense Italian sunlight it was a dazzling, glittering vision, and Totila cast down his eyes.
“You’re blessed,” a voice whispered in his ear.
He turned, startled, to see a small dark man smiling at him. “Blessed?”
“It’s not every pilgrim who gets to see the Emperor himself. After all,” the man said dryly, “the great Constans does not grace us with his presence very often, preferring the comforts of Constantinople, where there are no goats nibbling your legs, so I’m told …”