The Seventh Sacrament

Book 1 A Child in Darkness

The boy stood where he usually did at that time of the morning: in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, on the summit of the Aventino hill, not far from home. Alessio Bramante was wearing the novelty glasses that came in the gift parcel from his birthday party the day before, peering through them into the secret keyhole, trying to make sense of what he saw.

The square was only two minutes’ walk from Alessio’s front door, and the same from the entrance to the Scuola Elementare di Santa Cecilia, so this was a journey he made every day, always with his father, a precise and serious man who would retrace his steps from the school gates back to the square, where his office, an outpost of the university, was located. This routine was now so familiar Alessio knew he could cover the route with his eyes closed, no longer needing that firm, guiding adult hand every inch of the way.

He adored the piazza, which had always seemed to him as if it belonged in a fairy-tale palace, not on the Aventino, which was a hill for ordinary, everyday men and women. Ones with money, like bankers and politicians. But not special people, kings and queens, banished from their homelands to live in the grand villas and apartment blocks dotted through its leafy avenues.

Palms and great conifers, like Christmas trees, fringed the white walls that ran around three sides of the piazza, adorned at precise intervals with needle-like Egyptian obelisks and the crests of great families. The walls were the work, his father said, of a famous artist called Piranesi, who, like all his kind in the Rome of the past, was as skilled an architect as he was a draftsman.

Alessio wished he could have met Piranesi. He had a precise mental image of him: a thin man, always thinking, with dark skin, piercing eyes, and a slender, waxy moustache that sat above his upper lip looking as if it had been painted there. Piranesi was an entertainer, a clown who made you laugh by playing with the way things looked. When he grew up, Alessio would organise events in the piazza, directing them himself, dressed in a severe dark suit, like his father. There would be elephants, he decided, and dancers and men in commedia dell’arte costumes juggling balls and pins to the bright music of a small brass band.

All this would come at some stage in that grey place called the future, which revealed itself a little day by day, like a shape emerging from one of the all-consuming mists that sometimes enshrouded the Aventino in winter, making it a ghostly world, unfamiliar to him, full of hidden, furtive noises and unseen creatures.

An elephant could hide in that kind of fog, Alessio thought. Or a tiger, or some kind of beast no one, except Piranesi in his gloomiest moments, could imagine. Then he reminded himself of what his father had said only a few days before, not quite cross, not quite.

No one gains from an overactive imagination.

No one needed such a thing on a day like this either. It was the middle of June, a beautiful, warm, sunny morning, with no hint of the fierce inferno that would fall from the bright blue sky well before the onset of August. At that moment he had room in his head for just a single wonder, one he insisted on seeing before he went to Santa Cecilia and began the day, as befitted a school dedicated to the patron saint of music, with a chorus of song in which he made sure his own, pitch-perfect voice was always uppermost.

“Alessio,” Giorgio Bramante said again, a little brusquely.

He knew what his father was thinking. At seven, tall and strong for his age, he was too old for these games. A little — what was the word he’d heard his father use once? — headstrong too.

Or perhaps, as his grandmother once said, he recognised himself in his son. They were alike, or so some claimed. And, at the party, his father was the one who picked out the parcel with the glasses, hoping, perhaps, to bring the event to an end as quickly as possible. So it was only right that he bear some accountability for the toy.

Alessio was unsure how old he was when his father first introduced him to the keyhole. He had soon realised that it was a secret shared. From time to time others would walk up to the green door and take a peek. Occasionally taxis would stop in the square and release a few baffled tourists, which seemed a sin. This was a private ritual to be kept among the few, those who lived on the Aventino hill, Alessio thought. Not handed out to anyone.

The secret was to be found on the river side of the piazza, at the centre of a white marble gatehouse, ornate and amusing, one of the favourite designs, he had no doubt, of that man with the moustache who still lived in his head. The upper part of the structure was fringed with ivy that fell over what looked like four windows, although they were filled in with stone — “blind” was the word Giorgio Bramante, who was fond of architecture and building techniques, used. Now that he was older Alessio realised the style was not unlike one of the mausoleums his father had shown him when they went together to excavations and exhibitions around the city. The difference was that the gatehouse possessed, in the centre, a heavy, two-piece door, old and solid and clearly well used, a structure that whispered, in a low, firm voice: Keep out.

Mausoleums were for dead people, who had no need of doors that opened and closed much. This place, his father had explained all those years ago, was the entrance to the garden of the mansion of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, leader of an ancient and honourable order, with members around the world, some of whom were fortunate enough, from time to time, to make a pilgrimage to this very spot.

Alessio could still remember first hearing that there were knights living nearby. He’d lain awake in bed that evening wondering if he’d hear their horses neighing in the warm summer breeze, or the clash of their swords on armour as they jousted in the secret garden beyond Piranesi’s square. Did they take young boys as pages, as knights in the making? Was there a round table? Some blood oath which swore them to silent, enduring brotherhood? A book where their good deeds were recorded in a hidden language, impenetrable to anyone outside the order?

Even now Alessio had no idea. Hardly anyone came or went from the place. He’d given up watching. Perhaps they only emerged in the dark, when he was in bed, wide awake, wondering what he’d done to be expelled from the living world for no good reason.

A Carabinieri car sat by the gatehouse most of the time, two bored-looking officers inside ostentatiously eyeing visitors to make sure no one became too curious. That rather killed the glamour of the Knights of Malta. It was hard to imagine an order of true gallantry would need men in uniforms, with conspicuous guns, to watch the door to its grand mansion.

But there was a miracle there, one he’d grown up with. He could still remember the days when his father used to pick him up, firm arms beneath his weak ones, lifting gently, until his eye reached the keyhole in the door, old green paint chipped away over the centuries to reveal something like lead or dull silver beneath.

Piranesi — it must have been him, no one else would have had the wit or the talent — had performed one last trick in the square. Somehow the architect had managed to align the keyhole of the Knights’ mansion directly with the basilica of St. Peter’s, which lay a couple of kilometres away beyond the Tiber. Peering through the tiny gap in the door produced an image that was just like a painting itself. The gravel path pointed straight across the river to its subject, shrouded on both sides by a tunnel of thick cypresses, dark green exclamation marks so high they stretched beyond the scope of the keyhole, forming a hidden canopy above everything he could see. At the end of this natural passageway, framed, on a fine day, in a bright, upright rectangle of light, stood the great church dome, which seemed suspended in the air, as if by magic.

Alessio knew about artists. The dome was the work of Michelangelo. Perhaps he and Piranesi had met sometime and made a pact: You build your church, I’ll make my keyhole, and one day someone will spot the trick.

Alessio could imagine Piranesi twirling his moustache at that idea. He could imagine, too, that there were other riddles, other secrets, undiscovered across the centuries, waiting for him to be born and start on their trail.

Can you see it?

This was the ritual, a small but important one that began every school day, every weekend walk that passed through Piranesi’s square. When Alessio peered through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta, what he saw through the lines of trees, magnificent across the river, was proof that the world was whole, that life went on. What Alessio had only come to realise of late was that his father required this reassurance as much as he did himself. With this small daily ceremony the bond between them was renewed.

Yes, the young child would say, day after day, earnestly squinting through the narrow metal hole, trying to locate the vast white upturned coffee cup across the river hovering mystically in the bright air, a solid if mysterious fact in the world around them, one that never changed, one that predated their own existence and would stay with them forever through never-ending time.

Yes. It’s still there.

The day could begin. School and singing and games. The safe routine of family life. And other rituals too. His birthday celebration was a kind of ceremony. His entry into the special age — seven, the magical number — disguised as a party for infants. One where his father had picked out the stupid present from the lucky dip, something that seemed interesting when Alessio read the packaging, but just puzzled him now he tried it out.

The “Fly Eye Glasses” were flimsy plastic toy spectacles, large and cumbersome, badly made, too, with arms so weak they flopped around his ears as he tucked the ends carefully beneath his long jet-black hair in an effort to keep them firm on his face. Perhaps Giorgio was right. He was too old for toys like this. But Alessio Bramante was aware of what he had inherited from an archaeologist father, digging the past out of the ground, and an artist mother, whose paintings he admired but never quite understood. For him the world was, and always would be, intensely physical: a visual maze to be touched, examined, and explored, in as many different ways as he could find.

The glasses were supposed to let you witness reality the way a fly did. Their multifaceted eyes had lenses which were, in turn, hosts to many more lenses, hundreds perhaps, like kaleidoscopes without the flakes of coloured paper to get in the way, producing a universe of shifting views of the same scene, all the same, all different, all linked, all separate. Each thinking it was real and its neighbour imaginary, each, perhaps, living under the ultimate illusion, because Alessio Bramante was, he told himself, no fool. Everything he saw could be unreal. Every flower he touched, every breath he took, nothing more than a tiny fragment tumbling from someone else’s ever-changing dreams.

Crouched hard against the door, trying to ignore the firm, impatient voice of his father, Alessio was aware of another adult thought, one of many that kept popping into his head of late. This wasn’t just the fly’s view. It was that of God too. A distant, impersonal God, somewhere up in the sky, who could shift his line of vision just a millimetre, close one great eye, squint through another, and see His creations a myriad of different ways, trying better to understand them.

Alessio peered more intently and wondered: is this one world divided into many, or do we possess our own special vision, a faculty that, for reasons of kindness or convenience, he was unsure which, simplified the multitude into one?

Fanciful thoughts from an overimaginative, headstrong child.

He could hear his father repeating those words though they never slipped from his lips. Instead, Giorgio Bramante was saying something entirely different.

“Alessio,” he complained, half ordering, half pleading. “We have to go. Now.”

“Why?”

What did it matter if you were late? School went on forever. What were a few lost minutes when you were peering through a knights’ keyhole searching for the dome of St. Peter’s, trying to work out who was right, the humans or the flies?

“Because today’s not an ordinary day!”

Alessio took his eyes away from the keyhole, then, carefully, unwound the flimsy glasses from his face, and stuffed them into the pocket of his trousers.

“It isn’t?”

His father snatched a glance at his watch, which seemed unnecessary. Giorgio Bramante always knew the time. The minutes and seconds seemed to tick by in his head, always making their mark.

“There’s a meeting at the school. You can’t go in until ten thirty…”

“But…”

He could have stayed home and read and dreamed.

“But nothing!”

His father sounded a little tense and uncomfortable, with himself, not his son.

“So what are we going to do?”

Giorgio Bramante smiled. “Something new,” he said, smiling at a thought he had yet to share. “Something fun.”

Alessio was quiet, waiting.

“You do keep asking,” his father continued. “About the place I found.”

The boy’s breathing stopped for a moment. This was a secret. Bigger than anything glimpsed through a keyhole. He’d heard his father speaking in a whispered voice on the phone, noticed how many visitors kept coming to the house, and the way he was sent from the room the moment the grown-up talk began.

“Yes.” He paused, wondering what this all meant. “Please.”

“Well.” Giorgio Bramante hesitated, with a casual shrug, laughing at him in the way they both knew and recognised. “I can’t tell you.”

“Please!”

“No.” He shook his head firmly. “It’s too… important to tell. You have to see!”

Giorgio leaned down, grinning, tousling Alessio’s hair.

“Really?” the boy asked, when he could get a word out of his mouth.

“Really. And…” — he tapped his superfluous watch — “…now.”

“Oh,” Alessio whispered. All thoughts of Piranesi and his undiscovered tricks fled.

Giorgio Bramante leaned down farther and kissed him on the head, an unusual, unexpected gesture.

“Is it still there?” he asked idly, not really looking for an answer, taking Alessio’s small, strong arm, a man in a hurry, his son could see that straightaway.

“No,” he answered, not that his father was really listening anymore.

It simply didn’t exist, not in any of the hundreds of tiny, changing worlds Alessio had seen that morning. Michelangelo’s dome was hiding, lost somewhere in the mist across the river.

They were fifty metres beneath the red earth of the Aventino hill, slowly making their way along a narrow, meandering passageway cut into the soft rock almost twenty centuries before. The air was stale and noxious, heavy with damp and mould and the feral stink of unseen animals or birds. Even with their flashlights and the extra shoulder lanterns stolen from the storeroom, it was hard to see much ahead.

Ludo Torchia trembled a little. That was, he knew, simply because it was cold, a good ten degrees or more chillier below the surface, where, on that same warm June day, unknown to him, Alessio Bramante and his father now stood at the gate of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta, not half a kilometre away through the rock and soil above them.

Ludo should have expected the change in temperature. Dino Abati had. The young student from Turin wore the right clothes — a thick, waterproof, bright red industrial jumpsuit that clashed with his full head of curly ginger hair, heavy boots, ropes and equipment attached to his jacket — and now looked entirely at home in this man-made vein tunnelled by hand, every last, tortuous metre. The rest of them were beginners, in jeans and jackets, a couple even wearing sneakers. Aboveground Abati had scowled at them before they started work on the locks of the flimsy iron entrance gates.

Now, just twenty minutes in, their eyes still trying to acclimatise to the dark, Toni LaMarca was already starting to moan, whining in his high-pitched voice, its trilling notes rebounding off the roughly hacked stone walls just visible in their lights.

“Be quiet, Toni,” Torchia snapped at him.

“Remind me. Why exactly are we doing this?” LaMarca complained. “I’m freezing my nuts off already. What if we get caught? What about that, huh?”

“I told you! We won’t get caught,” Torchia replied. “I checked the rosters. No one’s coming down here today. Not today. Not tomorrow.”

“So why?”

“So we can leave you down here to rot, you moron,” someone said from the back, Andrea Guerino, judging by the gruff, northern voice, and he was only half joking.

Ludo Torchia stopped. So did they. That much of his superiority, his leadership, he’d established already.

“What did we say last night?” he demanded.

“Search me. I was drunk out of my mind,” LaMarca replied, looking at each of them in turn, searching for confirmation. “Weren’t we all?”

From dope and drink came dreams. It had been a long night in the bar in the Viale Aventino. They’d all spent too much money. They all, Dino Abati excepted, had smoked themselves stupid when they got back to the dingy house they shared near the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, the one with the statue Torchia couldn’t help but stare at each day he passed on the way to the tram and college. The abattoir was surmounted by the struggling figure of a winged man fighting to wrestle a bull to the ground, amid a sea of bones, animal and human. Mithras lived, Torchia thought. He was simply invisible to the masses.

“We said we would finish this,” Torchia insisted.

He held out his wrist, showed them the small wound each of them shared, made with the blunt razor blade he’d found in the bathroom, late that night.

“We said we would do this together. In secret. As brothers.”

They were all drones really. Torchia didn’t like a single one of them. Didn’t like anyone in Giorgio Bramante’s archaeology class if he was being honest. Except Bramante himself. That man had class and knowledge and imagination, three qualities Torchia judged to be supremely important. The rest were mere marionettes, ready to be manipulated by anyone who wanted to, though these five he’d picked with care and reason.

LaMarca, the skinny offspring of some minor hood from Naples, dark-skinned, with an untrustworthy face that never looked anyone in the eye, was quick and crooked and could surely help if things went wrong. Guerino, a none-too-bright farmer’s son from Abruzzo, was big enough and tough enough to keep everyone in line. Sandro Vignola, the sick-looking kid from Bologna, short and geeky behind thick glasses, knew Latin so well he could hold rapid, fluent conversations with Isabella Amato, the plain, bright, fat girl Vignola adored so much he blushed whenever they spoke, and still didn’t dare ask her out. Raul Bellucci, always on the edge of terror, had a lawyer for a father, one who’d recently won himself a seat in the Senate, the kind of man who would always turn out to help his son, should the sort of influence LaMarca possessed fail to do the trick. And Dino Abati, the class cave-freak, fit, knowing, shorter than Guerino but just as powerfully built, was there to keep them all alive. Abati seemed to have spent half his life underground, and cast a greedy eye at every manhole, cave, and underground working he walked past in Rome, where there were many, most of them awaiting investigation.

Abati didn’t say much. Torchia half suspected Dino didn’t believe in what they were doing at all, and was just looking to extend his knowledge, to pierce yet another mystery in the vast, unknown territory that was subterranean Rome. But he knew more of this strange and dangerous landscape than any of them. Abati had even led the team that found the trapdoor in an ancient pavement, close to Trajan’s Markets, which had revealed an underground cavern housing a hidden room and tomb dating from the second century, rich with paintings and inscriptions. His idea of weekend leisure was to spend long hours in a wet suit, waist-high in water and worse, walking the length of the Cloaca Maxima, the ancient sewer that still ran through the city, beneath the Forum, on to the Tiber and, as Torchia had discovered the one time he went down there, continued to take foul matter from unknown pipes and flush it towards anything that sought to penetrate its secrets.

Most important of all, though, and the reason Torchia had entangled him in this scheme, Dino Abati knew caves, was comfortable with ropes and lights, knots and pulleys. He understood, too, how to respond in an emergency: a broken leg, a sudden flood, the collapse of a corridor or roof.

For some reason — jealousy, Torchia guessed, since Abati was clearly going to be a professional archaeologist one day — Professor Bramante had kept him out of this last part of the dig. Torchia himself had only found out about the discovery by accident, overhearing Bramante and the American postgrad student, Judith Turnhouse, discussing it quietly in the corridor of the school after classes. After that he’d stolen a set of keys from the department office, copied every last one, tried his versions until they worked, letting him get further and further into the labyrinthine warren Giorgio Bramante was progressively penetrating, with Turnhouse and a coterie of other trusted members of the department. It was easy to keep secret too. From the surface, nothing was visible except the kind of iron gate most Roman subterranean workings possessed, principally for reasons of security, to keep out kids and vandals and partygoers. Nothing on the outside hinted at what lay in the soft rock beneath the red earth just a little way along from the archaeology department office, beside the church of Santa Sabina, beneath the little park, with its lovers and old men led by dogs, which the locals insisted on calling, to Torchia’s annoyance, the Orange Garden.

The park’s real name, as he and Bramante knew well, was the Parco Savello, from the ancient Roman street, the Clivo di Rocca Savella, which led up from the choking modern road by the Tiber below, still a narrow cobbled path cut into the rock, now strewn with rubbish, the occasional burned-out Lambretta, spent syringes, and used condoms.

There’d been a garrison at the summit of this hill once. Battalions of men had marched down that road, one of the first to be paved in Rome, defending the empire or expanding it, whatever their masters demanded. Beneath their barracks they’d created a magical legacy. Torchia was unsure of its precise date. Mithraism had come from Persia to Rome in the first century AD, the favoured religion of the military. Two thousand years ago, those soldiers must have started digging secretly beneath their barracks, creating a labyrinth with one purpose: to bring them closer to their God, then, through a series of trials and ceremonies, to bind each of them together in a fierce, unbreakable bond, a chain of command and obedience they would take to the grave.

He’d only appreciated a part of this before. When he stole the keys and discovered, with a growing amazement, what lay in the warren of underground corridors and caverns, he began, finally, to understand. As they would surely too. In the final hall, the holiest of holies, desecrated, stomped on by some brutish, all-conquering might, came the revelation, an epiphany that had left him breathless and giddy, clinging to the damp stone walls for support.

This was one of those rare occasions when history left a timestamp on something so old that, by normal thinking, it was incapable of being dated with any precision. He’d looked at the contents of that final room, once so glorious, once the very heart of those battalions’ Mithraic aspirations, and knew he could now name the very day it all came to an end: October the 28th, AD 312. The date of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when a victorious renegade called Constantine destroyed centuries of history and turned the Roman Empire away from a multiplicity of faiths and put one, Christianity, in their place.

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 detail: 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.

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.

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.

Alessio waited. When Giorgio didn’t give the final name, he asked.

“Who was the last one?”

“The leader was called Pater. Father.”

“He was their father?”

“In a way. Pater was the man who promised he’d always look after them. For as long as he lived. I say that to you because I’m your real father. But if you were Pater you were a great man. You were responsible, ultimately, for everyone. The men in the cult. Their wives. Their families. You were a kind of greater father, with a larger family, children who weren’t your real children, though you still cared for them.”

“You mean a god?”

“A god living inside a man, perhaps.”

“What kind of sacrament do you need? To become like that?”

Giorgio Bramante looked puzzled.

“We don’t know. We don’t know so much. Perhaps one day…” He looked around him. There was some disappointment in his features at that moment. “If we get the money. The permission. You could help me find those secrets. When you grow up…”

“I could help now!” Alessio said eagerly, certain that was what his father wanted to hear.

All the same, he wasn’t so sure. There was so much that was unseen in this place, lurking at the edge of the flood of yellow light bulbs above them, seeming to cling to one another, as if they were afraid of the dark. And the smell… it reminded him of when something went bad in the refrigerator, sat there growing a furry mould, dead in itself, with something new, something alive, growing from within.

His father wasn’t being entirely frank either.

“You do know some of the gifts they gave. You said. About Miles and the lion.”

“We’re familiar with a few. We know what Corax had to undergo….”

Giorgio hesitated. Alessio knew he’d say what was on his mind in the end.

“Corax had to be left on his own. Probably somewhere down one of those long, dark corridors. He had to be left until he became so frightened he thought no one would come for him. Ever. That he’d die.”

“That’s cruel!”

“He wants to be a man!” his father replied, his voice rising. “A man’s made. Not born. You’re a child. You’re too young to understand.”

This casual dismissal annoyed him. “Tell me.”

“In a cruel world a man must sometimes do cruel things, Alessio. This is part of growing up. A man must carry that burden. Out of practicality. Out of love. Do you think it’s kind to be weak?”

Giorgio’s face creased in distaste when he said that last word. Weakness was, Alessio Bramante realised, some kind of sin.

“No,” he answered quietly.

“Cruelty can be relative, Alessio.” His father calmed down somewhat. “Is a doctor cruel if he cuts off a diseased limb that could kill you?”

Alessio Bramante had never thought of doctors this way. It left him uneasy.

“No,” he replied, guessing this was the right answer.

“Of course not. Men are here to make those kinds of decisions. I learned this. You will, too. What hurts us can also make us strong. That’s why Corax had to endure what he did. If it was a way of reaching some kind of god…”

“It was still cruel. What happened to him? Corax? In the end?”

“Someone, not Pater perhaps, but someone who hoped to become Pater one day, would rescue him. And the boy would be reborn. As Corax. Overjoyed to be a part of everything that was happening in this place, wondering where he’d rise next on the ladder. Whether he might, perhaps, become Pater himself in time.”

Alessio felt an acute sense of injustice on behalf of all those tortured adolescents, one mitigated only slightly by the thought that came fast on the heels of his outrage: they must have inflicted the same torture on those who followed.

Then a question occurred to him.

“What was there left for Mithras to do?” he asked. “If they all cared for each other so much?”

His father smiled. “You like words, don’t you? I did when I was young. We’re so similar in many ways. Here’s a word,” Giorgio Bramante went on. “Psychopomp. Mithras mattered to them all because, among many other things, he was their psychopomp.”

It sounded like a made-up word, one not quite real.

“Couldn’t Pater be a psyche… psycho…?”

“No,” Giorgio said firmly. “A human being is mortal. A man could never be anyone’s psychopomp. He — or she or it — is something people all over the world believe in, whatever their religion. A being — perhaps an animal, a spirit, a ghost or something we simply don’t comprehend — whose job it is to find the souls of those who’ve died and lead them home, to their place of rest. Heaven, if you like. These people believed Mithras would be waiting for them, ready to perform an act of kindness that was beyond even Pater at the very end. To bring them to peace.”

Alessio Bramante shivered. He didn’t like the idea of a psychopomp. Not at all. For one very good reason, which occurred to him immediately. What if they forgot, or became lazy or confused? Where did all those lost souls go then?

“What do we do now, Daddy?”

“We could always play a game.”

Giorgio Bramante had his head cocked to one side, like a blackbird listening for worms in the garden, Alessio thought. “Did you hear that?” he asked.

“No…”

“I heard something,” Giorgio said, getting up, looking at the dark entrances of the corridors. Seven of them. Wondering which to choose.

“It’s safe here, Alessio. Just stay in your chair. Wait for me. I have something to do. Be patient.”

Alessio shivered. He stared at the scarred surface of the cheap table, trying not to think. Giorgio had brought a thick jacket with him. It occurred to his son that his father had known all along that they would end up in this chill, damp chamber beneath the ground. Alessio wore just a pair of thin cotton school trousers and his white T-shirt, a clean one that morning, with the symbol his mother had designed for the school outlined in distinct colours on the front: a star inside a dark blue circle, with a set of equidistant smaller stars set around them.

Seven stars. Seven points.

“I will,” he promised his father.

It began, Torchia knew, with Giorgio’s lecture the previous month, three hours of a long, warm afternoon in the airless aula in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, one he’d never forget. Bramante was in his finest form: brilliant, electrifying, incisive. The subject, nominally, was what little was known about the philosophy of the Roman military Mithraic sects. But it was about much more than that, though Ludo Torchia suspected he was the only one in the class who knew it. What Bramante was really talking about was life itself, the passage from child to man, the acceptance of duty and deference to those above, and the need, absolute, unquestionable, for obedience, trust, and secrecy within the tight, closed ranks of the social group to which an individual belonged. He was talking about life itself.

Torchia had listened, rigid in his seat, unable to take his eyes off Giorgio, who sat on his desk, fit and muscular in a tight T-shirt and Gucci jeans, a leader at perfect ease with his flock.

One part came back to Torchia now. Bramante had been discussing the seven-ranked hierarchy. Vignola had asked a question that seemed, on the face of things, sensible. How did structures like this begin? At what point, in the nascent stage of Mithraism’s emergence, did someone dictate that there would be seven ranks, with set rituals for the progression from one to the next? Where, he wanted to know, did it all come from?

Bramante had smiled at them, an attractive, knowing smile, like a father indulging a son.

“They didn’t need to ask that question, Sandro,” the professor replied in his measured, powerful voice. “They knew the answer already. Their religion came from their god.”

“Yes, but… in real life,” Vignola objected. “I mean, it didn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.”

“How do you know?” Bramante had asked.

“Because it couldn’t! If Mithras was real, where did he go?”

“They murdered him.” Torchia said it without thinking, and was pleased, and a little disturbed, too, by Giorgio’s reaction to his impulsive answer. Bramante was staring at him, an expression of surprise and admiration on his handsome face.

“Constantine murdered Mithras,” the professor agreed. “Constantine and his bishops. Just as they murdered all the old gods. If you talk to the theologians they’ll give you other answers. But I’m not a theologian, nor is this a theology class. We’re historians. We look at facts and deduce what we can from them. The facts state that much of the Roman army followed Mithras for the best part of three centuries. Then, with Christianity, Mithras died, and with him the beliefs of those who followed him. Whether you view that literally or not, that is, inescapably, what happened. If you want more complicated answers, you’re in the wrong department.”

“It must have been terrible,” Torchia remarked, unable to take his eyes off his professor.

“What?” Bramante asked.

“Terrible. To have lost your religion. To have watched it ripped from you.”

“The Christians had to put up with that for three centuries,” Bramante pointed out.

“The Christians won.”

There was a flicker of something — knowledge, perhaps even self-doubt — in Giorgio Bramante’s eyes. Torchia couldn’t stop looking at it.

“What would have been truly terrible, I think,” Giorgio continued, “would have been if one were denied a final chance to make peace with what one was losing. A Christian would hope to confess before dying. To have that last comfort snatched from your hands…”

He said nothing else. It would be two weeks before Ludo Torchia understood the misty, almost guilty look in his eyes at that moment.

“But…” Vignola complained, then fell quiet. There was an expression in Bramante’s face that indicated this was the end of that particular thread. Giorgio was a patient, knowledgeable professor, but he led them like a general led his troops. What he sought was their understanding, not their approval. Torchia understood this implicitly, and understood, too, that the rest of them were still just kids really, and he knew what to expect from kids. Fear, interest, then the onset of boredom before, with the right leader, in the correct, ritual circumstances, comprehension.

So he hadn’t just brought the live cockerel from the market in Testaccio. While he was there he’d visited a dealer in one of the tenement blocks, purchased, on long credit, two ready-rolled smokes, harsh black Afghan mixed with cheap cigarette tobacco. He’d read there’d been some kind of drug down here in the beginning. The Romans knew hemp. They introduced the drug from the colonies they’d absorbed over the years. They knew alcohol too. Many of the Mithraic rites had been stolen and incorporated into Christianity. For the winter solstice, celebrated around December 25 each year, they drank wine and ate bread together, a symbolic feast upon the blood and the body of the sacrificial bull. Torchia wondered how many good Catholics knew that when they were on their knees taking Holy Communion under the candles.

Toni LaMarca fell greedily on one of the two joints straightaway and sneaked into the shadows like the fool he was. Raul Bellucci and the Guerino oaf were now choking on the second, giggling, alive with that childish pleasure of being an illicit visitor in a strange and forbidden place. Torchia hadn’t any intention of joining them. There was too much to think about in this magic site. Nor was the arch-geek midget Sandro Vignola much interested either. He’d been goggle-eyed since they entered the temple. Now he was down on his little hands and knees in front of a slab next to the altar, looking for all the world like some overweight choirboy come to do homage to the deity who stood above him, sword in hand, straddling the bull, blade buried in its writhing neck.

Torchia watched Vignola mouthing the Latin inscription on the stonework, set beneath a cut-out half moon, and wished he were better at languages himself. He nodded at the slab.

“What does it say?”

Latin was rarely simple, old words for new. It was a tongue from another era, a lost culture, close yet unknown too, a code, a collection of symbolic letters, each with a meaning obvious only to the initiated.

He shone his torch on the carving in the dusty white stone.

“What does it say?” Torchia asked again, more loudly this time when Vignola ignored him.

“Deo Invicto Mithrae, Lucius Antonius Proculus, Praefectus Cohors Tertiae Praetoria, et Pater, votum soluit libens merito.”

The bright round eyes stared at him from behind the oversize spectacles.

“‘To the invincible God Mithras, Lucius Antonius Proculus, Praefect of the Third Cohort of the Praetorian Guard, and Father, willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow.’ I can’t believe you don’t understand that,” Vignale said.

“I don’t read Latin well.”

Dino Abati joined them. He’d been poking around in the corners with his gear, bright ginger hair bouncing around in places he didn’t belong.

“You should still know the name,” he told Torchia. “We covered it in class, remember? Lucius Antonius Proculus was with the Praetorian Guard for the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Praetorian backed Maxentius. The one who lost. Remember?”

“I don’t waste time on old names,” Torchia murmured. He didn’t like being treated like a moron. “So you think he was here?”

Abati shot a glance towards the anteroom, where the dead were.

“Perhaps he still is,” he suggested. “Constantine wiped out the Praetorian Guard completely after he entered Rome. They’d backed the wrong side. He felt he couldn’t trust them. So he razed that headquarters of theirs… what was it?”

“The Castra Praetoria,” Vignola answered.

“Wiped it out completely. And here, too, I guess,” Abati added. “It’s creepy, really. Did anyone know about this place until Giorgio came along?”

“Of course not!” Vignola squealed. “Don’t you think it would be in the books? This is the best mithraeum in Rome. Perhaps the best in the world.”

Abati thought about this.

“And Giorgio’s not sure whether he dare tell people? That’s nuts. He can’t keep it hidden forever.”

Vignola shook his head, dragged himself off the floor, and rubbed the grime off his hands.

“He can keep it hidden for as long as he likes. The department has charge of this entire excavation. Bramante can just carry on as he is now, working quietly with Judith Turnhouse and whoever else is in on the secret. Then someday, when the time’s right, he calls up the right people and says, ‘Look what we found.’ Behold, Giorgio the hero. The discoverer of unknown wonders. Schliemann, Howard Carter, all rolled into one. Wouldn’t he just love that?”

“This is holy ground,” Torchia said abruptly, without thinking.

“So what are we supposed to do, Ludo?” Abati demanded in that infuriating slow drawl of his. “Sing a few songs? Kill the rooster? Bow before the god, then go home and complete our assignments? You shouldn’t take this Mithras thing too seriously. It was all just a bunch of us messing round. Hey! Hey!”

He was shouting now, suddenly animated and angry. He flew across the dimly lit room and seized Toni LaMarca, who was about to stumble down a small rectangular exit on the far side, behind the altar and its figures.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Abati yelled.

“Looking…” LaMarca replied, his voice thick with dope.

“Don’t…”

“But…”

Something in Abati’s face silenced him. Then the figure in the red caving suit, who looked so much at home here, picked up a rock from the ground and threw it into the black hole ahead of them, where LaMarca had been about to enter. There was no sound. Nothing at all. Until, eventually, a distant echo of a hard, lost object falling into water.

Dino Abati gave each of them a filthy look in turn.

“This is not a playground, children,” he said with venom. “There’s a reason you should be afraid of the dark.”

The light was so bright it hurt. Alessio Bramante looked at the switches on the wall and knew he’d have to do something about them, that he couldn’t sit on his own under this incandescent yellow sea much longer. It was like being beneath the eyes of some harsh, electric dragon. He was happy in the dark. Not the total darkness his father entered when he was working. Just the quiet, half light of dusk or early morning, an hour when there was room in the world for imagination. A time when Alessio could think about the day ahead, and that walk down to Piranesi’s piazza, the moment when he would peer through the keyhole, locate the distant shining dome, and say to his father, for both of them, “I see it. The world is still with us. Life can go on.”

He couldn’t think straight now, not with the constant flood of illumination pouring down on him from the lines of bulbs above his head. And how long was he supposed to wait? He didn’t have a watch. His grandmother had given him one for the previous Christmas. It had a picture of Santa Claus on the face. He didn’t wear it. Watches were hateful, intrusive things, unnecessary machines ticking away the minutes of a person’s life without mercy, without feeling. The face with its red hat and snowy beard grinned back at him all the time.

He knows when you’ve been bad or good… … said the old American song they played on the sound system sometimes, very loud, when they’d been drinking.

Santa Claus was an invention out of a fairy tale. A face on a dial. A spy on the wrist. Alessio didn’t like the idea of someone watching him like that. It wasn’t right.

Just as leaving him alone in this bare, bright chamber, in the red earth and grey rock, wasn’t right either. The place smelled of mould and decay. Not what he’d hoped for, the sharp citrus aroma of old fruit skins squashed underfoot.

They’re oranges on the surface only, he thought. Something else lies beneath. Bones and dead things, all the decay of the centuries.

He recalled staring through those stupid spectacles that morning, wondering who was right. The way he saw — or didn’t see — things. Or the multiple worlds envisioned by a fly.

Alessio sat at the table and said, in a calm, flat, unemotional voice, tinged only slightly with anger, more for himself than anyone listening, “Giorgio.”

Then again.

“Giorgio!”

He’d never used his father’s first name like that before. There was a rule, a law, that forbade children from speaking their parents’ real names out loud. Giorgio — Alessio had thought of him this way for months now — had told him stories about magical names. Of how the Jews had a word for God which no one but the highest priest could utter, and then only in special circumstances, deep inside the holiest of places. And now he knew about the followers of Mithras, with their secret rituals too, enacted in this underground labyrinth.

Seven orders of humanity. Seven trials. Seven sacraments. Precious rites, never shared with outsiders. Not until the moment of initiation, the point at which the blank, empty page of the novice gained a single scrawl, the birth of knowing.

The beginner became Corax.

After… what?

Giorgio had disappeared into the darkness minutes before. Alessio thought he’d heard distant sounds from down one of the black corridors. A faraway voice. Perhaps more than one. Perhaps it was his father watching from the shadows. Or maybe it was merely an echo of his own voice, deepened by the tunnels chasing off from those seven exits cut into the rock of the chamber in which he now sat, not afraid, just thinking, trying to work out what this was.

Games.

Giorgio played games sometimes. A few months before, Alessio’s father had taken him into a warren of excavated houses on the Palatino, had found, through a labyrinth of ancient stone rooms, the kitchen of someone called Livia, wife to a famous emperor, Augustus, and a woman of fearsome reputation, cruel and controlling, determined to do the utmost for her clan. A kind of Pater, but in a dress.

Giorgio was nowhere when Alessio had turned a corner and found himself in some dark rocky alcove, green with algae, alive with insects, centipedes and beetles, bristling with furry moss that clung like crude living skin on the damp stone walls, yellowing with the onset of decay. The boy had stood there for a long time, glad he’d never brought the watch because that would have made everything seem longer, placed a stamp on the act, one that said “guilty.”

He hadn’t done what Giorgio had wanted. Hadn’t broken down, cried, whined, kicked, and yelled, hammered his new white sneakers against the green, gunky stone until they were ruined.

Afterwards Giorgio had bought ice cream and, for Alessio, a toy he didn’t want. All in return for a promise never to tell his mother, one he readily agreed to, because men needed secrets, bonds, just like those of Mithras, whispered in this place two thousand years before. Secrets bound men together more tightly, made Giorgio tell him more stories, daring ones, frightening ones sometimes. About the darkness and the old things that lurked there.

Alessio glanced at the seven doors. He hadn’t looked to see which one Giorgio used when he left. He was mad at him. Giorgio hadn’t wanted him to watch, and he knew that without being told. But now… For a moment he wished he’d kept that watch. Maybe it would have provided some kind of marker by which to judge his father and the things he did.

There was another sound from the corridor, and this time he was certain. It was a distant, low, male voice. Giorgio was there surely, waiting for him, wondering what he would do. This was the Palatino again, only more severe, a bigger test. Alessio stared down at his clean school clothes and wondered what his mother would say if he arrived home with them ruined.

Games.

There were so many games. Theirs was an entire relationship based on play, because when Giorgio wasn’t engaged in some obscure diversion he was somewhere else, inside a book, head bent deep over a computer, always avoiding what Alessio’s mother called “the real world.” Games connected them. Hide-and-seek. Show-and-tell. Games that collided with the past sometimes, and the stories he told too.

Theseus and the Minotaur.

That was one of his favourites. A brave lost warrior, a stranger in a strange land, meets a beautiful princess and, in order to win her, must accept a challenge. A monster lurks in a lair, a hidden labyrinth of corridors beneath the ground. Half man, half bull, a dreadful, unnatural being that devours young men and women — seven of each, which, Alessio thought, was one reason he remembered so clearly — as a tribute.

Theseus offers himself as a sacrament, enters the labyrinth, finds the monster and — this was very clear in his memory too — beats the creature to death. Not a clean end, cut in two by a sword, but with some crude bloody club, because this was a beast, not a man, and a beast deserved no better.

Or a half beast, half man. To Theseus there wasn’t much difference.

The princess, Ariadne, helped Theseus with a gift: a ball of string which he unwound as he entered the caves, and then used to find his way back home to safety, with those he had rescued.

Alessio sat calmly at the table in the bright, bright cave, remembering all this, wondering what it meant. Giorgio had retold this story only a few days before. Alessio knew that his father was a man who rarely wasted anything — breath, a sentence, the simplest of physical acts. Was that conversation, then, significant in some way?

Mithras, the god his father knew so well, had killed a monster too. One that was all beast. Alessio had looked in Giorgio’s desk once and seen a photograph there, lurking like a secret waiting to be found. The bold, strong god, straddling the terrified animal, gripping its head, thrusting a sword into its neck. Mithras hadn’t resorted to a club for this killing. But this was all beast, so perhaps that was different.

One more memory. In the picture, beneath the animal, there were creatures, strange and familiar, doing things he didn’t quite understand. The scorpion in particular, which wielded its pincer claws at those parts of the animal small children weren’t supposed to see, least of all mention.

“A game,” Alessio repeated quietly to himself. In the end, everything came down to this, whether it was seeking a monster in a cave to prove oneself worthy of respect, or peering through the keyhole of an order of ancient knights, looking for a familiar shape across the river, one whose presence would keep in balance the myriad worlds he saw through those stupid glasses.

A game was what Giorgio wanted. That was why they had come here in the first place. It was a challenge. Perhaps the challenge, one so large, so daunting, so difficult, like the Minotaur pitched against Theseus, that it would be his making. Giorgio Bramante was waiting for his son to understand, to rise and accept his fate, to find the courage to walk into the darkness and track down where he was lurking. After which… ?

It came to him, instantly. This was the first sacrament, the striking of fear in the beginner. Afterwards he would become Corax to Giorgio’s Pater, part of the greater secret. The elusive relationship of family, the eternal trinity, father, mother, and child, would be strengthened and one day made perfect by these changes. It would endure forever, never doubted, even in those dark moments when he heard the two of them, Giorgio and her, screaming at each other, full of drink and fury, bellowing words he didn’t quite understand.

Alessio Bramante looked around the room and laughed. Dark doorways didn’t scare him, nor the sounds he thought he continued to hear echoing from some distant, hidden location.

He got up and walked past each of the seven exits, thinking, looking, listening. He imagined that somewhere in the unseen distance he could discern his father’s voice, teasing in the dark.

Games involved two people. Both had to play.

He returned to the table and picked up the large flashlight his father had left there, deliberately, he now knew. It was big, almost half the length of Alessio’s arm, encased in hard rubber, and a long yellow beam spilled from it when he turned it on.

The light painted the shape of a full moon on the wall nearest the entrance, which was now almost completely in shadow, barely illuminated by the single bulb he’d left on. Alessio placed two fingers in front of the lens and made an animal shape. A beast with horns. Theseus’s Minotaur. The bull that Mithras sought.

There was a pile of tools near the exit he’d chosen. Pickaxes and shovels, iron spikes for marking things, spirit levels. And a large ball of twine, held at one end with what looked like a long knitting needle.

Alessio put down the flashlight and retrieved the twine, unpicking the iron object from the end. He tied the open loop of string to his belt and tugged. It came away easily and left a fresh end of the thread dangling in his hand. Alessio looked at the string again. Someone had tried to cut it once before, weakening it at the point before the loop. Quickly, he tied a second loop through his belt, tugged on that, made sure it was firm, then dropped the ball on the floor.

Then he retrieved the flashlight and turned to face the long corridor, wondering what, if anything, he — or Giorgio — would dare tell his mother when they finally came home.

Nothing, he decided. These were secrets, never to be repeated. This was part of the great adventure, the journey from boy to man, from ignorance to knowledge. He walked forward, feeling the tickle of the unwinding string fall against his legs like the desiccated wings of some dying insect, tumbling down to the ancient dust at his feet.