Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 41

She knew she stood out from the crowd. Though she had eschewed the Order's habitual white robes for a simple dress of brown-dyed wool, she wore a thick layer of cream and unguent on her face to protect her skin from the unaccustomed sun, and spectacles made of blue gla.s.s protected eyes used to candlelight and oil lamps. She lookeddifferent , and therefore was no doubt a target for beggars and thieves alike.

She had no fear, for with her was a Frangipani: a tall, imposing, well-dressed young man with a very visible sword at his waist, a scion of one of the city's wealthier families. But to Francesca, used to the calm of the Crypt's underground cloisters, this was a crowded, dirty, disturbing place.

And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity. Just as in ages past they had no doubt been drawn to the Colosseum, or the triumphs of the Caesars-other contagious ideas, all now vanished like the dew.

But she was pious, and the Order itself was of course deeply Christian; she felt dismayed to be formulating such doubts, and did her best to put them out of her mind.

As they climbed up out of the residential area toward the higher ground of the ancient hills, Francesca got a broader view of the city. She could see how small and cramped the densely populated area was, set within the area called thedisabitato , the great expanse of scrubland and farms that occupied the rest of the s.p.a.ce within the old walls. Here and there monuments of the imperial age loomed out of the green, but many of them had been badly damaged by time, demolished by siege weapons, or the marble broken up and burned for lime.

There had been centuries of conflict, with Rome a battleground between popes and antipopes, and between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors. Rome had paid a terrible price. But now the papacy had thrown off the yoke of the German emperors, and Rome had begun slowly to recover. On the higher ground, the mansions and palaces of the rich loomed with their towers of burnt red brick. The Frangipani family, in fact, had built a series of towers all the way around the old Circus Maximus, the emperors'

racetrack.

Leo was watching her.

She could read what he was thinking. He was trying to make out her body through her ground-length dress, its hem and sleeves now stained by Roman dirt. He was a good-looking boy, and he was scarcely older than she was, at twenty-four.

She felt a welcome flush. She was, after all, a woman. Which was, indirectly, the reason she was here.

"We're here to talk business," she reminded Leo gently.

"That's so." He stepped back, his smile apologetic, and averted his eyes.

"You have secured your interests in the land in Venice?"

"In principle." He smiled. "All I need is the deposit . . ."

Times were changing-and it was Francesca's instinct that the Order must change to suit.

Over the centuries the Order had continued to develop its charitable work. But it was a business, after a fashion. For every hundred of the poor or unfortunate whom the Order helped-so had been learned- there was always one who became rich enough later to make a significant donation to the Order's coffers, wishing to show his grat.i.tude to those who had saved him when he was at his lowest. It was a long game, but the amounts doled out to the poor were actually so small that the gamble was more than worth taking. It was a business, like Rome's pilgrim-fleecing industry-but if it served a pious end it was surely a business worth carrying out.

But now there were new opportunities. After the death of the last Emperor in Rome, the cities and towns across western Europe had shrunk back, to be replaced by small hamlets and migrants, with few communities numbering more than a thousand. Now agricultural innovations were seeping across Europe from Germany. Major communities were developing again-Venice, it was said, had more than a hundred thousand inhabitants-and with this revival had come new opportunities for profit.

Young Leo's scheme was simple: to buy marshland close to Venice, drain it, and then farm it until such time as he could sell it off in the face of the expected expansion of the city. Francesca could see the sense of it. For a small initial outlay he could multiply his holdings many times within a few years, and thus make his name within his family.

Francesca was prepared to make the loan to enable him to do this. But she had asked something in return. Now she outlined her latest plans: she needed soldiers.

As it spread out relentlessly, deep beneath the old Appian Way, the Order had broken through into another set of underground chambers, occupied by a group of Aryan Christians with a way of life strangely similar to the Order's: run by a small group of women with ma.s.sive extended families, served by a network of childless nieces and daughters . . . It seemed that similar pressures, surrounding the collapse of Rome, had induced similar solutions. It said a great deal for the secrecy of the Crypt and its dark twin that the two groups had remained unaware of each other for so long.

But they could not coexist, of course. Francesca had seen that straight away, felt it on a deep gut level.

The other "Crypt" had to be broken up, a.s.similated.

If you uncovered a problem you were expected to fix it yourself: that was the Order's central mode of working. So Francesca had made a quick decision. Leo would find soldiers to cleanse the parallel crypt, and the Order would break through and occupy the abandoned chambers. At a stroke the Crypt's effective size would be increased by more than half, and the Order would gain many servants.

If Francesca succeeded in her scheme she would gain great prestige within the Order-and, she hoped, get close to thematres . She had realized a year ago that Livilla, oldest of thematres , was dying. And it had been only a few months later that her own blood had started to flow-at the age of twenty-three, for the first time in her life. Then had come the realization thatshe , through skill, cunning and luck, might take Livilla's place.

The next time a bachelor was brought in from the city, it would beher body that would bewitch him,her loins that would bear his child. When she thought about that prospect she felt a dull ache in the pit of her belly, and a soreness in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Conversely, if Leo's Venice adventure succeeded he would gain great influence in his family. They were both the same, really, she thought. The pursuit of individual ambitions, tied into the goals of the group: it was the way things were. As she studied his face, she saw that Leo understood this.

Leo still wasn't sure, though. He rubbed his nose. "I'm no soldier, Francesca. I've no idea if this plan, of sending mercenaries into the Catacombs like field mice into a sewer, will work."

She smiled. "Then hire a general who will know."

He laughed. "I don't think we need a general. But I do know somebody who might be able to help, as it happens . . ."

"Then bring him to me."

They concluded their business. When they parted he made playfully to kiss her cheek, despite its thick plastering of cream, but she would not allow it.

Chapter 41.

Peter turned up at my hotel a couple of days after my first descent into the Crypt. He stood there in the lobby, as big as Fred Flintstone, crumpled, faintly smelling of sweat, and yet untroubled. He arrived oddly short of luggage, bringing not much more than a carry-on bag, and he was out of money.

The first thing he said was, "Did you bring your duffel coat?"

"What? . . . No, I didn't bring my duffel coat. What's that got to do with anything?"

He grinned. "In Roman times the British used to export duffel coats. A duffel was a modish item for a while. It was called thebyrrus Britannicus . George, you could have been fashionable for once in your life."

"Peter, forget duffel coats. What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

"Cash-flow problems," he said.

"What are you talking about? You own a house, for G.o.d's sake. You must have savings-"

"My accounts have been frozen," he said. "Long story. Look, obviously I'll pay you back . . ."

Maybe I'm naive. It was a time in my life in which various people, including a Jesuit and my long-lost sister, seemed to have little difficulty keeping me away from awkward truths with simple deflections and guile. But that day I was distracted, as I had been since coming out of the Crypt. I couldn't get the memory out of my head; it was as if the milky air of the place were a drug, and I had been addicted in one quick hit.

So that was why I went with the flow concerning Peter, why I found it hard to focus on his evasions about what he'd been doing, why he'd turned up in this state. It just didn't seem to matter.

I didn't want to stump up for a separate room; the hotel was cheap but not that cheap. I upgraded to a twin, in my name. We moved into the room that afternoon.

It didn't take Peter long to unpack. That carry-on contained nothing much but his laptop and a couple of changes of clothes, some of which still had shop labels on them, as if he had purchased them in a hurry.

He didn't even have a razor; he borrowed mine until he bought a pack of disposables.

He showered, shaved, sent his traveling clothes down to the hotel laundry. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon voraciously reading the little book Rosa had given me on my alleged ancestress Regina.

That evening, he let me buy him a meal at my favorite of the little roadside restaurants. I told Peter as much as I could about my sister Rosa, and the Order, and the Crypt. He just listened.

On a napkin I wrote down the three Latin slogans I had tried to memorize in the Crypt. He used online dictionaries, accessed through his handheld, to translate them: Sisters matter more than daughters.

Ignorance is strength.

Listen to your sisters.

"What do you think they mean?"

"d.a.m.ned if I know," he said. He filed them away, intending to research them later.

I tried to explain the appeal of the place.

Once I had a friend who had grown up in a series of military camps. They were rather bland fifties- flavor estates, dotted around the country. But they were secure, behind their barriers of wire and men with guns, and inside there were only service personnel and their families. There was no crime, no disorder, no graffiti or vandalism. Once he had grown up and completed his own service in the air force, my friend was finally expelled from his barbed-wire utopia. It seemed to me he spent his whole life after that looking back from our chaotic world at the little islands of order behind the wire. I had always known how he had felt.

And that was how I felt about the Crypt now. But there were conflicting emotions-yes, a desire to return, but at the same time a dread of being dragged back into that pit of faces, the scents, the endless touching.

I tried to express all this. Peter made Halloween gestures. "They'll eat your soul!"

It wasn't funny.

After we'd eaten, we strolled back toward the hotel. But it was a fine night, dusty and warm, and we were in Rome, for G.o.d's sake. So we stopped at a.n.a.limentari , a grocery store, where I bought a bottle oflimoncello . Close to the hotel there was a little square of greenery, with water fountains and cigarette b.u.t.ts and dog t.u.r.ds. We found a relatively clean bench and sat down. Thelimoncello was a lemon liqueur they manufactured down the coast near Sorrento. It was bright yellow and so sweet it stuck to your teeth.

But it wasn't so bad after the insides of our mouths were coated by the first couple of slugs, and it topped off the wine we had drunk.

The sky was smoggy that night, and glowed faintly gray-orange. There was plenty of light from the lamps that played on the monuments in the Forum and on the great gaudyVittoriano . We were cupped by the great shoulders of Trajan's Market, which loomed all around us.

I had taken a couple of walks around Trajan's Market, which I found astonishing. You couldn't say the ruins were attractive: the market was just a mound of brickwork, of streets and broken-open domes and little doorways. But it had been a shopping mall, for G.o.d's sake. The little units-all neatly numbered and set on multiple levels along colonnaded pa.s.sageways, or in great curving facades that would have graced the Georgians-had been planned and leased out, just like a modern development.

"That's what strikes you," I said to Peter. "There's nothing medieval about this area-not like the center of British cities. Everything is planned, laid out in neat curves and straight lines. The Forum looks antique, if you know what I mean. Columns and temples, very ancient Greek. But the big palaces look like the ruins of the White House. And this market looks like the ruins of Milton Keynes."

"Except Milton Keynes won't last so well as Roman brickwork. They didn't have slaves to mix the concrete so well."

"You know, in the Dark Ages they used this place as a fortress. From shopping mall to barricade."

He nodded thoughtfully. "Decline and fall, eh? But there were a few junctions in Rome's history where things might have turned out different."

"Such as?"

"Such as the loss of Britain. Needn't have happened. Britain wasn't just some kind of border outpost.

Britain was protected by the ocean-mostly anyhow-from the pressures of the barbarians, and internally it was mostly at peace. For centuries it was a key source of wheat and weapons for the troops in Gaul and Germany, and it had a reserve of troops that could have been used to reverse the setbacks in western Europe. Even after the calamities of the early fifth century-if the emperors had won Britain back, they might have stabilized the whole of the western Empire. Maybe your grannie understood some of this."

"If she ever existed."

"If she existed. Well, she was the daughter of a citizen, the granddaughter of a soldier. If you're living in great times, decisive times, you know about it, even if you only glimpse a small part of it."

"Do you think this story of Regina can be true?"

"Well, I read the book. It's plausible. The place-names are authentic. Durnovaria is modern Dorchester, Verulamium Saint Albans, Eburac.u.m York. Some of the detail makes sense, too. The old Celtic festival of Samhain eventually mutated into Halloween . . . Trouble is, n.o.body really knows much about how Roman Britain fell apart anyhow. For sure it wasn't like the continent, where the barbarian warlords tried to keep up the old imperial structures, though with themselves on the top. In Britain we got the Saxons-it was an apocalypse, like living through a nuclear war. The history and archaeology are scratchy, ironically, precisely because of that."

I nodded, and sipped a little morelimoncello . The bottle was already getting low. "And if the Empirehad survived-"

He shrugged. "Rome would have had to fight off the expansion of Islam in the seventh century, and the Mongols in the thirteenth. But its armies would have handled the Golden Horde better than its medieval successors. It could have endured. Its eastern half did."

"No Dark Ages-"

"The one thing you get with an empire is stability. A solemn calm. Instead of which we got a noisy clash of infant nations."

"No feudalism," I said. "No barons. No chivalry. And no English language. We'd all have ended up speaking some descendant of Latin, like French, Spanish-"

"No Renaissance. There would have been no need for it. But there would have been none of the famous Anglo-Saxon tradition of individual liberty and self-determination. No Magna Carta, no parliaments. If the Romans had gone to the Americas they wouldn't have practiced genocide against the natives, as we did. That wasn't the Roman way. They'd have a.s.similated, acculturated, built their aqueducts and bathhouses and roads, the apparatus of their civilizing system. The indigenous nations, in North and South America, would have survived as new Roman provinces. It would have been a richer world, maybe more advanced in some ways."

"But no Declaration of Independence. And no abolition of slavery, either."

There would have been losses, then. But the fall of Rome-all that bloodshed, the loss of learning-the collapse of order:no, I realized, I didn't think that was a good thing. The order of empires appealed to me -even if, for example, the Soviet Union had been just such an empire by any reasonable definition. But that was my inner longing for order and regularity expressing itself.

We sat for a while, listening to the cicadas chirp in the trees, whose green leaves looked black as oil in the smoggy orange light. One of the other drunks was watching us; he raised his brown paper bag in ironic salute, and we toasted him back.

"So. My sister," I said. "What do you think ofher ?"

He shrugged. "Sounds inhuman. I don't know how youought to behave when your long-lost brother turns up out of the blue, but surely it's not like that."

I nodded. "What do you think we're dealing with?"

"A cult. A creepy fringe-Catholic cult. I think your sister has been indoctrinated. No wonder she reacted like a robot."

I forced a smile. "If you're thinking of deprogramming her, forget it. She says she doesn't need saving."

"Well, she would say that." More gently he said, "And after forty years, and after being taken at such a young age, there's probably very little left of your sister anyhow." He sighed. "Your dad was a good friend of mine. But he had a lot to answer for."

"What about the Order?"

"You know, Jesus Himself never meant to found a church. As far as He was concerned, He was living in the end times. He had come to proclaim the kingdom of G.o.d. The early church was scattered, chaotic, splintered; it was a suppressed movement, after all."

"And women-"

"When the persecutions began, women had it particularly tough. Women martyrs were made available for prost.i.tution. Women would need a place to hide, a way to gather strength, to endure . . ."

"So the story of the Order makes sense."

"Once it became the religion of the Empire, the church quickly tightened up. Heresy wasn't to be tolerated: for the first time you had Christians cheerfully persecuting other Christians. In the centuries that followed, as the popes got a grip, the church became centralized, legalized, politicized, militarized.

The Order would have had no place in the worldview of the popes."

"Yet it survived."

He rubbed his chin. "The Order is obviously secretive, but it's been sitting there an awfully long time, an hour's walk from the Vatican itself. The church has to know about it. There have to be some kind of links." He smiled. "I told you I always wanted to go have a root around in the Vatican's Secret Archives.

Maybe now's the time."