Brotherhood of the Tomb (29 page)

‘How long you going to be?’ The old man spat and took a mouldy pipe from his inside pocket.

‘Not long,’ Patrick replied. ‘We just want to look at the church. Let’s say a couple of hours at the most.’

The boatman shrugged and started filling his pipe with foul-smelling tobacco.

‘Suit yourselves. But I can’t stay here all day. I want to get back to Burano well before dark. A man can get lost in these waters. There aren’t no lights out this far.’ He found a small knoll further inland and sat on it, lighting his pipe and puffing out smoke like a chimney with indigestion.

‘If you aren’t back in two hours, I’m leaving. And if I leave, you’re stranded. Nobody comes here, understand? Nobody. If I’ve got to come back for you tomorrow, it’ll cost you double. No skin off my nose.’ He spat a gob of brown saliva on the ground and stuck his pipe back in his mouth.

There was no direct route to the church, but after a bit they came across what might once have been a path.

‘Why should anyone build a church on its own

out here?’ asked Assefa. ‘It seems sort of pointless.’

Patrick nodded. ‘It does now, yes. But the lagoon has a long history. There used to be some important settlements in these parts, before Venice became the centrepiece of the region. Places like Torcello or Mazzorbo, where we called this morning. They were great places once, with cathedrals and monasteries and palaces of their own. There’s not much of all that left now, so we think of the lagoon as just a wilderness.

‘I think this church must have served as a monastery church at first, then as a basilica for the surrounding islanders. Later, as Venice took over, people would have migrated there, leaving the church stranded among the reeds. No other explanation makes much sense.’

Assefa looked round at the rough, windswept landscape, the broken campanile whose bell had once tolled daily across bleak and treacherous waters.

‘Unless someone actually wanted a church where no one else would want to come,’ he said.

Patrick did not answer. He was thinking of the screams of the boy in his dream. How loud they had sounded, how easily they could be lost in all this wilderness.

They carried on in silence.

THIRTY-NINE

Close up, the church was more dilapidated than it had appeared from the sea. Parts of the roof had collapsed, many of the windows were broken, the main doors were unhinged and gaping. Pieces of masonry had fallen from the walls and lay scattered among long grass and reeds. Occasional flooding had left its mark on the lower courses of stone, and in the damp cracks between the brickwork, thick green moss had taken hold. And yet, in view of its age and the length of time it had been abandoned, the building was in remarkably good shape. It was as though, from time to time, someone had come to tidy it up a bit and hold back the elements a little longer.

The main door led directly into a dark, malodorous narthex, a hovel of crumbling plaster and spiders’ webs. An archway opened straight out of it into the main body of the church. Beyond the arch, wintry sunlight filtered through a thousand holes, creating a secret paradise in stone, as though another substance had come in place of it. Each brick, each marble fragment, each chipped and fractured piece of limestone shook with its own hue, its own antiphon of light. The ceiling, broken and torn, hung like a canopy of alchemical glass above the empty nave.

Like children, coming at last upon a place that adults have long reserved to their own uses, Patrick and Assefa stepped over the dim threshold. The silence unfolded about them like a Mass, plainchant rising among rose marble pillars, a solemn litany, stone and light made song. To their right, a great window of perforated alabaster sent shaft upon shaft of nacreous light into the hushed and hollow spaces

below. Bushes grew among fallen ornaments, grass wreathed the heads of saints, a heron had made its nest in a baptismal font.

But their eyes were riveted in front. The walls and roof of the apse had suffered least of all, and though the altar had been uprooted and the Host removed and the light extinguished forever, it was as if some miracle were still being worked there. Above the stone benches of the priests, above the single window of smoked glass, above the marble cladding, a figure of the Virgin holding her child rose triumphant to the domed ceiling. Fragments of the mosaic had fallen away, yet nothing had marred her beauty. She seemed to float against a sky of gold. She was slender and sad and full of light, and on the blue field of her robe, tiny red flowers lay like drops of a child’s blood.

From his jacket, Assefa took a thin white candle. He lit it with a match and set it on a stone in front of the apse. For a time he stood gazing at the Madonna, then he genuflected and recited a quiet prayer. When he had finished, he turned and spoke to Patrick.

‘Whatever we have to do, Patrick, let’s do it now.’

There were several tombs, all in a state of disrepair, around the sides of the church. It did not take long to find Pietro Contarini’s: it lay to the left of the spot where the main altar had once stood, an elaborate Gothic sepulchre built in marble and terracotta. The paint and gilding had long vanished, limbs had been broken from the figures of saints that stood in its niches, and the casing had cracked in places; but the tomb had remained intact. At the top, beneath a canopy held erect by angels, an effigy of Pietro Contarini lay in slumber. By his head, a marble jar held the stems of withered flowers. They could not have been there more than a year at the outside.

Patrick had no very definite idea of what he was looking for. But he was certain that the tomb held the answers to his questions. He began to go carefully over the reliefs carved in the facade of the monument, and soon a pattern began to emerge. With a shudder, he recognized the first of a series of panels as a representation of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The boy was strapped and gagged and lay on his back across a large rock, while his father stood over him, knife in hand.

The next panel was more obscure, and Patrick was not at first sure what it represented. A man was sacrificing a goat beside a tall stone pillar, watched by silent onlookers. And then he remembered the story of Jacob, and how he slaughtered a beast at Jegar-sahadutha, where he had set up a pillar of stone, and built a cairn of rocks. Someone was making the most of the play on words.

A third panel showed the Children of Israel slaughtering lambs and smearing their blood on the stone lintels of their houses: the institution of the Feast of Passover. Patrick felt his heart beat rapidly. Things were beginning to fit into place.

Other reliefs followed, most of them portraying scenes of sacrifice from the Old Testament. Above the first row stood a separate register of panels depicting incidents from the life of Christ, culminating in a relief of the Resurrection. Christ the supreme sacrifice, Christ the symbol of eternal life. For some reason, the thought made Patrick uneasy.

But clear as the iconography was, it seemed to offer no further help. Patrick had hoped for more than a lesson in how the Old Testament prefigured the New. He felt suddenly downcast, as though someone had broken a solemn promise to him.

‘Damn it!’ he exclaimed. ‘It makes no sense. Why

all the mystery? Why the cryptic verses? Half of them don’t even fit these scenes, and the ones that do are scarcely earth-shaking. There has to be something more.’

‘Not necessarily, Patrick. The religious mind sees significance even in the mundane. Perhaps the man who gave the verses to Corradini just wanted him to understand some esoteric interpretation of our Lord’s sacrifice. After all, that seems to be the message of the tomb. It’s nothing very new or exciting, but it has its own profundity.’

Patrick shook his head.

‘No, it isn’t that. Not just that. The sacrifice motif refers to something else. I know.’

They started to go over the carvings again, as though they concealed a message that they might read if only they had the eyes to see it. Panel by panel, figure by figure, they examined the scenes, trying to relate them somehow to the verses in Corradini’s book. Half an hour later, they gave up.

They had brought a little lunch in bags. Assefa opened them and spread the food out on a flat stone. They ate in silence, dejected, beaten, shivering in the damp air. Each man knew that, when they had finished their meal of salami and cheese, they would return to the boat and ask the old man to row them home. They drank by turns from a large bottle of Recoara water. The food was tasteless to Patrick; he ate slowly, without appetite. When he had taken his last mouthful, he raised the bottle to his lips. As he did so, he noticed the words on the label: Sorgente Recoara - Recoara Spring. And in that moment he knew.

It had been staring at him all along, like a clue in a cryptic crossword, that eludes the conscious mind and caves in all at once to the unconscious. He got to

his feet and walked back to the tomb. Assefa watched him, puzzled.

He had not been mistaken. Following the scene of the Passover, there had been one of Moses striking the rock in the desert, causing springs to gush out for the Children of Israel. Except that, where there should have been twelve springs - one for each of the twelve tribes, each tribe in turn a prefiguration of one of the twelve apostles - there were only seven. Perhaps the artist had been careless, perhaps he had preferred the number symbolism of the lower figure. But Patrick knew it was not that.

Pietro Contarini had brought something back from Egypt. He had returned there in later years, as had his son Andrea. The scene in the panel showed Moses in the desert, after the Exodus from Egypt. When Pietro Contarini had been in Alexandria, no one there spoke Egyptian any longer, they all spoke Arabic. And the play on words, Patrick now knew, had not been in Italian or Latin or Greek: it had been in Arabic.

The Arabic word ayn has two chief meanings: ‘eye’ and ‘spring’. It means other things besides, of course, but those are its basic meanings. Upon a single rock were set, not seven eyes, but seven springs.

Patrick put his hand on the rock, near the figure of Moses. He felt it give slightly and pushed harder. The panel slid aside. Inside, there was a handle, a great iron ring set in the stone. Inside the ring, carved into the stone, was a circle. And inside the circle a menorah bearing a cross.

He pulled the ring towards him. As he did so, the facade of the tomb shifted half-an-inch. He pulled again, harder this time. The stone moved, as though swinging on a pivot. Bracing himself, he pulled for a third time. The side of Pietro Contarini’s tomb swung away from the wall, exposing a dark, gaping aperture.

FORTY

Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?’ whispered Assefa. He stood beside Patrick, gazing into the hole that had opened in the wall. They could just make out the dim shape of a staircase leading down.

‘They shall go down to the grave ... and the deep that crouches beneath,’ said Patrick. The meaning of the verses quoted by Corradini had suddenly become crystal clear.

Patrick took the flashlights from his bag and handed one to Assefa. He switched his on and started down the stairs.

The walls of the staircase were cased in plaster and covered in an elaborate fresco. A row of figures in antique Roman dress walked in a solemn procession bearing small crosses over their shoulders. Some led small children by the hand, others followed with musical instruments: citharas, tabrets, timbrels, harps, dulcimers and cymbals. Yet no one danced. Whatever music they were playing was sad and slow.

Patrick set foot on the first step. He had expected the staircase to be mildewed and thick with cobwebs, but to his surprise it was clean and dry, as though swept only yesterday. Though they showed signs of age, the frescoes on the walls beside him were in an excellent state of preservation.

The steps were of marble and little worn. Patrick counted twenty in all. They ended at a rounded archway, much in the Byzantine style of those in the church above, leading into a vast underground chamber with a low, slightly domed ceiling. The

beam from Patrick’s flashlight swept over a painted universe, confined, huddled deep beneath the earth, independent of the world above.

Assefa joined him, and together they let the light from their torches trace the lineaments of the secret world to which they had descended. Above them, dark constellations turned to fire, and burning stars fell endlessly through a golden sky. Among them, angels in purple robes, their wings ablaze, tumbled in confusion. But at the centre, Christ sat in majesty upon a throne of glass. Around him, death and confusion ceased, and a great stillness crept out into the vortex.

Upon the walls, the chaste procession wove its way across the world: past tall towers, across the tops of hills, through forests, over rivers, along the shores of silent, waveless seas. They came from everywhere to join it - men and women in antique robes, kings, journeymen, musicians, priests, nuns, lepers ... and children everywhere, alone or led by the hand. In the air, birds with strange feathers flew above their heads, on the earth, curious animals watched them pass, and in the oceans, fish with monstrous eyes turned their heads and stared at them.

Whether intended or not, the artist had created a world of deep unease, in which the only comfort lay in the procession and the bearded face of Christ made God, serene in His contemplation of madness.

They followed the procession on each side, up and down the wall, now this way, now that, until they came together to the far end of the chamber, that had been in darkness until now. A great city stood domed and golden on a hill of grass. Above it, the sun shone out of a blue sky. Birds with beaks of jasper sang on tall, columned trees, and angels flew upwards, echoing their song. Patrick did not have

to ask what city it was the pilgrims had come to. He had seen numerous Byzantine representations of Jerusalem.

But none quite like this. In a complex series of paintings along the front wall of the city, the fresco he had seen in the Palazzo Contarini was repeated and expanded. In the centre, three crosses stood, black and naked, on a deserted hill. On either side, the artist had depicted scenes from the life of Christ: the raising of Lazarus, the expulsion of the demons known as Legion, the cleansing of the Temple. But below the crosses, as before, was a painting of an open tomb. Ten men carried Christ, bound and screaming, into the sepulchre.