Now the Scythian snapped out something in his terse, ancient language, and Papak translated automatically. “He says he understands now why the Romans had to take slaves and gold and food from his land.”
Honorius seemed obscurely pleased. “A savage he may be, but he is no fool — and he is not intimidated, not even by mighty Rome. Good for him.”
Away from the monumental areas, central Rome was a clotted network of streets and alleys, narrow and gloomy, the product of more than a thousand years’ uncontrolled building. Many of the residences here were five or six stories tall. Raised by unscrupulous landlords determined to get as much income as possible out of every scrap of precious land, they towered unsteadily. Walking through sewage-littered, unpaved streets, with buildings crowded so closely they almost touched above their heads, it seemed to Athalaric that he was passing through an immense network of sewers, like one of the famous cloacae that ran beneath Rome to the Tiber.
The crowds in the streets wore masks over their mouths and noses, gauze soaked in oil or spices. There had been a recent outbreak of smallpox. Disease was a constant threat: People still talked of the mighty Plague of Antoninus of three centuries earlier. In the millennia since the death of Juna, medical advances had barely slowed the march of the mighty diseases. Immense trade routes had united the populations of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia into a single vast resource pool for microbes, and the increased crowding of people into cities with little or no sanitation had exacerbated the problem. Throughout Rome’s imperial period it had been necessary to encourage a constant immigration of healthy peasants into the cities to replace those who died, and in fact urban populations would not become self-sustaining until the twentieth century.
This swarming place was a pathological outcome of the farming revolution, a place where people were crowded like ants, not primates.
It was almost a relief when they reached an area that had been burned out during one of the barbarian sackings. Though the destruction was decades past, this scorched, shattered area had never been rebuilt. But at least here among the rubble Athalaric could see the sky, unimpeded by filth-strewn balconies.
Honorius said to the Persian, “Ask him what he thinks now.”
The Scythian turned and surveyed the rows of heaped-up residential buildings. He murmured, and Papak translated. “How strange that you people choose to live in cliffs, like gulls.” Athalaric had heard the contempt in the Scythian’s voice.
When they returned to their villa Athalaric found that the purse he carried around his waist had been neatly slit open and emptied. He was angry, with himself as much as the thief — how was he supposed to be looking after Honorius if he couldn’t even watch over his own purse? — but he knew he should be grateful that the invisible bandit had not slit open his belly in the process and robbed him of his life as well.
The next day Honorius said he would take the party out into the country, to what he called the Museum of Augustus. So they piled into carts and went clattering over metaled but overgrown roads, out through the farms that crowded around the city.
They came to what must once have been an exclusive, expensive small town. An adobe wall contained a handful of villas and a cluster of meaner dwellings that had housed slaves. The place was obviously abandoned. The outer wall had been broken down, the buildings burned out and looted.
Honorius, with a scrawled map in his hand, led them into the complex, muttering, turning the map this way and that.
A thick layer of vegetation had broken through the mosaics and floor tiles, and ivy clung to fire-cracked walls. There must have been agony here, Athalaric thought, when the strength of the thousand-year empire had failed at last and its protection was lost. But the presence of the new vegetation in the midst of decay was oddly reassuring. It was even comforting to imagine that after another few centuries, as the green returned, nothing would be left of this place but a few hummocks in the ground, and oddly shaped stones that might break an unwary farmer’s plow.
Honorius brought them to a small building at the center of the complex. It might once have been a temple, but it was as burned out and ruined as the rest. The porters had to haul aside a tangle of vines and ivy. Honorius rummaged over the ground. At last, with a cry of triumph, he retrieved a bone, a great scapula the size of a dinner plate. “I knew it! The barbarians took the petty gold, the shiny silver, but they knew nothing of the true treasures here.”
At the sight of Honorius’s spectacular find, the others began to root in the dirt and vegetation with the enthusiasm of prospectors. Even the doltish porters seemed fired by intellectual curiosity, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Soon they were all unearthing huge bones, tusks, even misshapen skulls. It was an extraordinarily exciting moment.
Honorius was saying, “This was once a bone museum, established by Emperor Augustus himself! The biographer Suetonius tells us that it was first set up on the island of Capri. In later times one of Augustus’s successors imported the best of the pieces here. Some of the bones have crumbled away — look at this one — they are clearly very ancient, and have been subject to grievous misuse.”
Now Honorius found a heavy slab of red sandstone, with startling white objects embedded within it. It was the size of a coffin lid and much too heavy for him, and the porters had to help him raise it. “Now, sir Scythian. No doubt you will recognize this handsome fellow.”
The Scythian smiled. Athalaric and the others crowded around to see.
The white objects, suspended in the red matrix, were bones: the skeletal remains of a creature embedded in the rock. The creature must have been as long in its body as Athalaric was tall. It had big hind limbs, clearly visible ribs suspended from its spine, and short forearms, folded before its chest. Its tail was long, something like a crocodile’s, Athalaric thought. But its most surprising feature was its head. The skull was massive, with a great hollow crest of bone, and a huge, powerful jaw hinged under what looked like a bird’s beak. Two empty eyes stared out of time.
Honorius was watching him, rheumy eyes glittering. “Well, Athalaric?”
“I have never seen such a thing before,” Athalaric breathed. “But—”
“But you know what it is.”
It must be a griffin: the legendary monsters of the eastern deserts, four-footed, and yet with a head like a great bird’s. The images of griffins had permeated paintings and sculpture for a thousand years.
Now the Scythian began to talk, rapidly, fluently, and Papak scrambled to keep up his translation. “He says that his father, and his father before him, prospected the great deserts to the east for the gold that washes down from the mountains. And the griffins guard the gold. He has seen their bones everywhere, peering out of the rocks, just like this.”
“Just as Herodotus described,” Honorius said.
Athalaric said, “Ask him if he has seen one alive.”
“No,” the Scythian said through Papak, “but he has seen their eggs many times. Like birds they lay their eggs in nests, but on the ground.”
Athalaric murmured, “How did the beast get into the rock?”
Honorius smiled. “Remember Prometheus.”
“Prometheus?”
“To punish him for bringing fire to humans, the old gods chained Prometheus to a mountain in the eastern deserts — a place guarded by mute griffins, as it happens. Aeschylus tells us how landslides and rain buried his body, where it was trapped for long ages until the wearing of the rock returned it to the light. Here is a Promethean beast, Athalaric!”
On they talked, rummaging among the bones. They were all strange, gigantic, distorted, unrecognizable. Most of these remains were actually of rhinos, giraffes, elephants, lions, and chalicotheres, the huge mammals of the Pleistocene brought to light by the tectonic churning of this place, where Africa drove slowly north into Eurasia. As in Australia, as all over the world, so here; people had even forgotten what they had lost, and only distorted trace memories of these giants remained.