This date was also, Vignola had pointed out, during one of their early discussions about the beliefs and practices of Mithraism, Bill Gates’s birthday. The relevance escaped Ludo Torchia but he had learned something. He was a mature student of twenty-two, who’d spent the previous couple of years travelling Asia and South America before settling down to university. The rest had come straight from school. They were just nineteen, no more than kids, at a mutable age, a time for being easily led.
The passageway was so low here they had to crouch, bumping into one another, getting closer and closer. He wished he’d managed to find Giorgio Bramante’s cavern map, for one surely existed. They had to be almost there. He’d passed several of the anterooms without showing them in. There wasn’t enough time. He needed to maintain their attention.
Then, without warning, Toni LaMarca was screaming, sounding more than ever like a girl, his falsetto yells bouncing up and down the corridor, forwards, backwards, like a virus trapped in some empty stone artery, looking for a way out.
“What is it?” Torchia demanded, running the big flashlight’s beam over the idiot, who seemed frozen to the craggy, rough wall.
LaMarca was staring in horror at his right hand, which he’d just lifted off the stone. It had made contact with something there, something living. It was about fifteen centimetres long, as fat as a finger and about the same colour too. As they watched, it moved a little, wriggling its smooth, lean body as if it hated the touch of Toni LaMarca as much as he loathed it in return.
Dino Abati cast his own beam on the creature.
“Flatworm,” he announced. “You get them down here. Though…” — he took a closer look — “I’ve never seen one quite like that in my life.”
“Make the most of it…” LaMarca grumbled, then flipped the worm off the wall with one quick finger and ground his right sneaker into the thing until it was just mush on the floor.
“Oh my,” Abati said with heavy sarcasm, when LaMarca was done. “You’ve stomped a worm. That was so impressive.”
“To hell with it!” LaMarca yelled back. “I’ve had enough. I’m out of here. Now.”
“Even for a babbo like you,” Abati replied, as cool as could be, “premature withdrawal seems excessively stupid in the circumstances. Remember your geology, Toni. This is tufa we’re in. Valuable rock. These corridors aren’t natural, formed by water or anything. They were dug. Part of a quarry sometime probably. Or…” — Abati’s confidence dropped for a moment — “or something else I don’t know,” he concluded.
“So?” LaMarca demanded, with a dumb, petulant aggression.
“So man-made tunnels come to an end,” Abati answered wearily. “It can’t be much further either. I’ve never seen an offshoot of a tufa quarry this big in my life.”
Torchia nodded into the deep velvet blackness ahead of them.
“You haven’t seen anything. Not yet.”
After a minute or so — it was difficult for Ludo Torchia to judge time in this shadowy world where the dimensions seemed unnatural, impossible to gauge — a low opening emerged to his left. It looked familiar. This had to be the place.
To Torchia’s amazement, LaMarca was starting to moan again.
“You said…” he mumbled.
“I said what?”
“You said there had to be seven.”
“There would have been seven. If that shit Vincenzo hadn’t turned chicken.”
“You said there had to be seven. Otherwise it didn’t work. You—”
Furious, Torchia turned and grabbed LaMarca’s jacket, took hold of him hard, swung him past his shoulder, sent him headfirst down the rough steps, into the cavern that now opened to their left, as he expected.
Then he took all the big lamps off the others, who stood mute, a little scared, and placed them in a line on the floor, shining inwards.
As their eyes adjusted, the room in front of them emerged from the gloom. A shocked silence fell on everyone for a few moments. Even Torchia couldn’t believe his eyes. With better illumination, the place was more wonderful than he could ever have hoped.
“What the hell is this, Ludo?” There was now a note of grateful amazement in Abati’s voice.
With more light he could appreciate the detaiclass="underline" the paintings on the seven walls, still with the distinct shades of their original colours, ochre, red, and blue, little muted by the years. The two rows of low stone benches in front of each of the chamber’s facings. And at their focus, in the wall facing the main entrance door, the altar, with its dominating statue of Mithras slaying the sacrificial bull, an image so characteristic of the cult it could have come from a textbook. Torchia had spent an hour staring at the statue when he first sneaked in here, touching the ghostly white marble, feeling the precise, human contours of its players. He felt now as he did then: that he was born to be part of this place somehow, created in order to belong to what it represented.
He picked up two flashlights and approached the flat white slab set before the statue. The figures seemed alive: the human Mithras, taut and powerful, standing, legs apart, over the crouched, terrified bull in its death agony. The god wore a winged, high-peaked Phrygian cap and held the beast’s head with his right hand, thrusting a short sword into its throat with his left. A scorpion rose from the carved grass below to feed greedily from the tip of the bull’s sagging, extended penis. A muscular, excited dog and a writhing snake clung to the dying animal’s shoulder, sipping the blood from its wound.
“At a guess,” Torchia said, answering Abati’s question, “I’d suggest we’re in what could be the largest and most important Temple of Mithras anyone’s ever seen. In Rome anyway.”
He walked up to the altar table then ran a finger across the surface, noticing the way it cut through both the dust and the colour. He’d been right the first time. The stains there, like old rust, weren’t marks of the stone at all.
“Until the butchers came and put an end to it all. Am I wrong?”
“What happened here, Ludo?” Abati asked, gazing wide-eyed around the chamber.
“See for yourself. You tell me.”
Abati walked to one side and picked up some shards of pottery from the floor. They’d been shattered by some kind of heavy blow. Then he looked at the wall painting: an idyllic country scene, with the god in his Phrygian cap, amid a crowd of fervent devotees. Axe marks scored the paint in deep, symmetrical lines. The god’s face had been hacked out from the stone and was now little more than mould and dust.
“It’s been desecrated,” Abati said. “And not by a couple of grave robbers either.”
Torchia picked up more fragments of pottery, from what looked like a ceremonial jug.
“It was Constantine,” he said.
This was clear in his own mind now. What they stood amidst was the precursor — the template for everything to follow, from the Crusades to Bosnia, from Christian slaughtering Christian in the sacking of Constantinople, to Catholics murdering Aztecs with the blessing of the priests who watched on, unmoved. This was the moment, hours after Rome fell to Constantine’s troops, where the Christian blade sought the blood of another religion, not on the battlefield but in the holiest of holies. October 28, 312, had changed the shape of history, and in this underground chamber, perhaps just a few brief hours after the crossing at the Milvian Bridge, the oppressed had turned into the oppressors, and sought a savage, final vengeance on everything that had gone before.