Sanctus

Chapter 93

Liv looked at the T-symbol — the Tau. She’d read a lot about the Sacrament on the flight over, never dreaming it would somehow be connected to her brother’s death.

‘The fact your brother had this mark on his arm means he had knowledge of the Sacrament,’ the Ruinologist continued. ‘He may have been trying to share it.’

Liv remembered what Arkadian had said: Solve the mystery of the Sacrament, solve the mystery of Samuel’s death. She looked up at Dr Anata. ‘You must have come to your own conclusions about what the Sacrament might be,’ she said.

The Ruinologist shook her head. ‘Whenever I feel I’m about to grasp it, it always eludes me. I can tell you what it isn’t. It’s not the cross of Christ, as some people believe. Compared to the religious order inside that mountain, Christ is a relative newcomer. So it isn’t His crown of thorns either, or the spear that pierced His side, or the Holy Grail He drank from. These are all myths perpetuated by the Citadel over the years as diversions to obscure the Sacrament’s true identity.’

‘Then how do we know there’s anything there at all?’ Liv said. ‘If no one’s ever seen it.’

‘You can’t build the world’s biggest religion on just a rumour.’

‘Can’t you? Think about it. You’ve got these two prehistoric tribes fighting it out. To get the upper hand, one holes up in this mountain and claims it’s got some divine weapon. Maybe there’s a drought or an eclipse and they claim they did it. People start believing they have power and treat the tribe like gods. They like it, so they keep up the bluff. So long as no one finds out there’s nothing there, the bluff still works. Wind forward thousands of years and people still believe it, only now a massive religion has been built on it.’ She thought of Samuel walking away from her. Telling her he wanted to get closer to God. ‘And if my brother found that out, discovered after everything he’d been through that the one thing keeping him going, his faith, was actually built on — nothing. .’

Miriam saw the tears in Liv’s eyes. ‘But there is something there,’ she said. ‘Something with power.’ She picked up her bottle of water and looked at the picture on the label. ‘Let me ask you this. .’ She poured water into her glass and her silver rings clinked against the bottle. ‘What do you want from life? What do we all want? We want health, happiness, a long life, right? Same now as it ever was. The most ancient of our ancestors, the ones who first made fire and sharpened sticks to protect themselves against the wild beasts, they wanted exactly the same things: and the mountain existed even then, and so did the holy men within it. And those simple tribesfolk, who just wanted to live a little bit longer and not get sick, they worshipped those people, not because of some clever rumour, but because the people in the mountain lived a long, long time, and disease did not touch them. Tell me, when you think of God, what image comes to mind?’

Liv shrugged. ‘A man with a long white beard.’

‘Where do you think that image comes from?’ She turned the bottle round and pointed to the picture of the Citadel on the label. ‘The earliest man looked up at this mountain and saw occasional glimpses of the gods who lived there; men with long hair and long white beards. Old, old men in a time when you were lucky to live past thirty.

‘This water is exported all over the world, has been since Roman times when the emperors first found out about it. You think they shipped it all the way back to Rome ’cause it tasted nice? They wanted what every man has always wanted, and kings more than most: they wanted more life. Even today a person can expect to live on average seven years longer in Ruin than in any other major capital city and people still come here in their thousands and get cured of all sorts of things. These things are not rumour. These things are fact. Still think there’s nothing there?’

Liv dropped her eyes down to the ashtray. Her ten-year nicotine addiction did seem to have vanished since arriving in Ruin. Miriam was right, there had to be something there. Samuel would not have dragged her into all this if there was no point to it; and he wouldn’t have scratched those letters on the seeds unless they pointed to something. The question was, what?

She turned to the page in her notebook where she’d copied the letters. Looked at them again. And like the sun breaking through clouds, she recognized something new in them.