People with passions, because passions were important. Alessio possessed three: pictures, numbers, and words. Of the first, his favourite remained that image of St. Peter’s, seen through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta. It was always present, part of the daily ritual, one that never failed him, except in poor weather, or when he tried to use those stupid glasses, proof again that childish things were no longer of any use.
As far as numbers were concerned, only one mattered, and that wasn’t simply because it represented his age. Alessio’s father had taken him aside and talked of it a little, before the other children came.
Seven was the magic number.
There were seven hills in imperial Rome. The Bramantes still lived on one that, in parts, was not that much changed over the centuries.
Seven were the planets known to the ancients, the wonders of the world, the elementary colours, the heavens deemed to exist somewhere in the sky, hidden from the view of the living.
These were, Giorgio Bramante told his son, universal ideas, ones that crossed continents, peoples, religions, appearing in identical guises in situations where the obvious explanation — a Venetian told a Chinaman who told an Aztec chief — made no sense. Seven happened outside mankind, entered the existence of human beings of its own accord. The Masons, who were friends of the Knights of Malta, believed seven celestial creatures called the Mighty Elohim created the universe and everything in it. The Jews and the Christians thought God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. For the Hindus, the earth was a land bounded entirely by seven peninsulas.
Jesus spoke just seven times on the cross, and then died. Seven ran throughout the Bible, his father said, during that private time they had before the balloons and cake and the stupid, pointless singing. In something called Proverbs — a word Alessio liked, and decided to remember — there was a saying his father recalled precisely, though they were a family that never went to church.
“‘For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumbles to ruin.’”
He’d shuffled on Giorgio’s knee, a little uncomfortable, and asked what the saying meant. The Bible puzzled him. Perhaps it puzzled his father too.
“It means a good person may do the wrong thing time and time again, but in the end he, or she, can still make it right. While the bad person…”
Alessio had waited, wishing the hated party would begin soon, and quickly end. He wouldn’t eat the cake. He wouldn’t be happy till he was left alone with his imagination again, his father back deep in his books, his mother in the studio upstairs, messing with her smelly paints and unfinished canvases. Some of the others in the school said it was bad to be an only child. From what he understood of his parents’ whispered conversations, which grew heated when they thought he was out of earshot, it wasn’t a matter of choice.
“The bad person stays that way forever, whatever they do?” Alessio suggested.
“Forever,” Giorgio Bramante agreed, nodding his head in that wise, grave fashion Alessio liked so much he imitated it from time to time. This gesture, knowing and powerful, established what his father was: a professor. A man of learning and secret knowledge, there to be imparted slowly over the years.
Forever seemed unfair. A harsh judgement, not the kind someone like Jesus, who surely believed in forgiveness, would make.
That thought returned to him the next day when, in the hill beneath the park with the orange trees, he listened to more secrets, bigger, wilder ones than he could ever have imagined. Alessio Bramante and his father were in a small, brightly lit underground chamber only a very short distance from the iron gate in an out-of-the-way channel at the riverside edge of the park near the school. A gate Giorgio, to his obvious surprise, had found unlocked when he arrived, though the fact didn’t seem to bother him much.
Seven.
Alessio looked around the room. It smelled of damp and stale cigarette smoke. There were signs of frequent and recent occupation: a forest of very bright electric lights, fed by black cables snaking to the doorway; charts and maps and large pieces of paper on the walls; and a single low table with four cheap chairs, all situated beneath the yellow bulbs hanging from the rock ceiling.
He sat opposite his father in one of the flimsy seats and listened in awe, as Giorgio told of what they’d found, and what greater secrets might lie elsewhere, in this hidden labyrinth beneath the hill where pensioners walked their dogs and the older children from the school sneaked to take a quiet cigarette from time to time.
Seven passageways, just visible in the sudden gloom at the edge of the illumination given off by the lights, ran off the room, each a black hole, leading to something he could only guess at. Treasure. Or nothing. Or a chasm in the ground that fell away so steeply no one could possibly return, only continue onwards, hoping to see light, not realising that they only worked their way deeper and deeper into the sour and poisonous gut of some subterranean world which would, in the end, consume them entirely.
“Mithras liked the number seven,” Giorgio said confidently, as if he were talking about a close friend.
“Everyone likes the number seven,” Alessio commented.
“If you wanted to follow Mithras,” his father continued, ignoring the remark, “you had to obey the rules. Each one of those corridors would have led to some kind of… experience.”
“A nice one?”
His father hesitated.
“The men who gathered here came with an idea in mind, Alessio. They wanted something. To be part of their god. A little discomfort along the way was part of the price they were willing to pay. They wanted to make some sacrament, at each stage along their journey through the ranks, in order to attain what they sought. Knowledge. Betterment. Power.”
“A sacrament?” The word was… not new, but only half understood.
“A promise. A penalty. A gift perhaps. Some offering that binds them to the god.”
Alessio wondered what kind of gift could be that powerful. All the more so when his father said that the sacrament had to be repeated, perhaps made greater, through each of the seven different ranks of the order, rising in importance…
Corax, the Raven — the lowliest beginner, who died and then was reborn when he entered the service of the god.
Nymphus, the bridegroom — married to Mithras, an idea Alessio found puzzling.
Miles, the soldier — led blindfolded and bound to the altar, and released only when he made some penance that was lost to the modern world.
Leo, the lion — a bloodthirsty creature, who sacrificed the animals killed in Mithras’s name.
Perses, the Persian — bringer of a secret knowledge to the upper orders.
Heliodronus, the Runner of the Sun — closest to the god’s human representative on earth, the man who sat at the pinnacle of the cult, Mithras’s shadow and protector.