Abati laughed.
“You can’t know that. It must have been early. But…”
Abati was both amazed and baffled by what he saw. This pleased Ludo Torchia.
“It was the same day Constantine entered Rome. Or perhaps the day after. There’s no other explanation. I’ll show you…. After you,” he said, ushering Abati and the others through a low doorway to the left. He was glad of their company. This discovery had shaken him when he came across it alone several days earlier. He turned the light full onto what lay in front of them, a sea of human bones: ribs and skulls, shattered legs and arms, the cast-off props of some ancient horror movie, tossed into a heap when they were no longer needed.
Abati moaned, “Sweet Jesus…”
LaMarca, behind, began to whinny in fear.
“What the hell is this?” Abati asked.
“It’s where they killed them,” Torchia answered without emotion. “I’d say there’s more than a hundred, maybe lots more. I’m no expert, but I think they’re mainly men, though I think there are some children too. They were probably cut down naked.”
He shifted the beam into the far corner.
“If you look there, you can see their clothes. I couldn’t find any uniforms or weapons. They didn’t intend to fight, not anymore. They were made to strip. Then they were cut down. You can see the marks on their bones if you look closely. It was a massacre. Just like Kosovo or Bosnia.”
LaMarca was shaking again, half curious, half terrified. The kid from Naples liked violence, Torchia guessed. But only from a safe distance.
“I don’t want to see any more of this,” LaMarca muttered, then crept back into the main chamber, chastened. Abati took one last look at the scattered bones on the stone floor then followed.
“Professor Bramante knows about all this?” he asked when they were back by the altar. “And he never told anyone?”
Torchia had his own theories on that.
“What would you say? I’ve found the greatest Mithraic temple in existence? Oh, and a few hundred followers cut to pieces by the Christians? How do you handle the publicity on that just now?”
“I can’t believe…” Abati began, then faltered.
Ludo Torchia had been through this argument in his own mind already. Giorgio Bramante had uncovered one of the world’s greatest archaeological finds. And one of its earliest examples of mass religious homicide. Those were real bones in the next room, the remains of real people, a shocking display of shattered skulls and limbs thrown together like some grisly precursor of a scene from the Holocaust. Or the thousands in Srebrenica who’d been handed over by “peacekeepers” to the Serbs, then routinely, efficiently slaughtered when a different bunch of Christians decided to cleanse the gene pool. That story still made headlines. There was shame throughout Europe that such acts could still happen just a few miles away from the beaches where contented middle-class holidaymakers were sunning themselves, wondering what to have for dinner that night. These were politically correct times, even for people who merely dug up the past. Perhaps Bramante was waiting for the right moment, the right words, or some other find that would soften the blow of this one. Perhaps he lacked the courage, and hoped to keep this very large secret to himself forever, which would, in Torchia’s eyes, be a crime in itself.
Something in Abati’s face told Torchia he, too, was beginning to see the true picture now.
“Why do you think they came here?” Abati asked. “To make some kind of last stand?”
“No,” Torchia insisted. “This was a temple. Do you think the Pope would have fought in front of the altar in St. Peter’s? These men were soldiers. If they wanted to fight, they would have made a stand outside. They came here…”
He scanned the room.
“…to worship one last time. This was a holy place. Not somewhere for human blood.”
In his mind’s eye he could see them all now, not afraid, knowing the end was near, determined to complete one last obeisance to the god whose strength slaughtered the bull and gave life to the world.
He bent down and turned the light onto the floor. There was a crude wooden cage there. Inside it were bones that must have been those of a chicken, now looking like the dusty remains of some miniature dinosaur, legs tucked beneath carcass, beaked head still recognisable. The temple followers never had time to finish their sacrifice before the Christian soldiers arrived, racing into the holiest chamber en masse, Constantine’s symbol, the chi-rho symbol, for christos, on their shields, screaming for more deaths on a day when the city must have run red with slaughter.
“They came here to make a final sacrifice,” Ludo Torchia said. “Before the light went out on their god forever. And they weren’t even allowed to finish that.”
He slung the rucksack off his shoulder onto the floor then unzipped it. Two sharp eyes gleamed back at him. The cockerel was shiny black with an erect, mobile red comb. It had cost him thirty lire early that morning in the busy local market in Testaccio, close by the Via Marmorata down the hill.
The bird was still and silent as Torchia lifted the cage out of the bag.
“Wow…” LaMarca whispered excitedly into the dark, turned on all of a sudden.
Torchia had only ever killed one living thing before and that was a stray cat that kept annoying him, back when, as a young kid, he’d lost his key to the apartment, was waiting, bored and a little scared, for his mother to come home and bawl him out. But there was plenty of reference material in the standard Latin texts about how to offer a sacrifice correctly. It wasn’t hard. He could do it just the way an emperor used to.
Something continued to bug him, though. Toni LaMarca was right. Seven was the magic number. And they were one short.
The birthday party had taken place in their small garden, beneath the shade of the dusty vine trellises, on the terrace with its uninterrupted view down the Aventino towards the green open space of the Circus Maximus. There were nine classmates there, invited by his mother, not Alessio. Clio, the stupid blonde girl from one of the apartments near the school, had pointed at the remains of the stadium, to which emperors had once walked from their palaces on the Palatino behind, and complained, in her high-pitched, petulant voice, that it wasn’t a circus at all. There were no animals, no clowns, no cheap, noisy brass bands. At that moment Alessio, older, more conscious of those around him, realised Clio wasn’t actually a friend at all, that, from now on, he would prefer the company of others — children, adults, age didn’t matter. Or at least it shouldn’t. He simply wished to be with those like him, with open, curious minds and active imaginations. Like his father, extracting the secrets of the past from the cold, grubby earth. Or his mother, locked in her room, painting wild scenes on blank canvas.