Constantinople still used Roman law, and the language of the state remained Latin. But, Athalaric found, its bureaucracy was difficult, entangling, altogether more
eastern.
Evidently Constantinople’s engagements with the mysterious nations that lay beyond Persia in the unseen heart of Asia were influencing its destiny. At last, however, all the paperwork was arranged— even though Honorius’s dwindling supply of gold was diminished further in the process. They joined a boatload of pilgrims, mostly minor Roman aristocracy from the western lands, bound for the Holy Land. After that they traveled by horseback and camel into the deeper interior.
But as the days of their journey wore on, and Honorius grew visibly more frail and exhausted. Athalaric felt increasingly regretful that he had not, after all, persuaded his mentor to turn back at Rome.
Petra turned out to be a city of rock.
“But this is extraordinary,” Honorius said. He dismounted hastily and strode toward the giant buildings. “Quite extraordinary.”
Athalaric clambered down from his horse. Casting a glance at Papak and his porters as they led the horses to water, he followed his mentor. The heat was intense, and in this dry, dusty air Athalaric did not feel protected at all by the loose, bright white local garment Papak had provided for him.
Huge tombs and temples thrust out of a steppe so arid that it was all but a desert. It was still a bustling city, Athalaric could see that. An elaborate system of channels, pipes, and cisterns collected and stored water for orchards, fields, and the city itself. And yet the people looked somehow dwarfed by the great monuments around them, as if they had been shrunken by time.
“Once, you know, this place was the center of the world,” Honorius mused. “There was a battle for ascendancy between Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Egypt— all centered on this region, for under the Nabataeans Petra controlled the trade between Europe, Africa, and the east. It was an extraordinarily powerful position. And under Roman rule Petra grew even richer.”
Athalaric nodded. “So why did Rome come to rule the world? Why not Petra?”
“I think you see the answer all around,” Honorius said.
“Look.”
Athalaric could see nothing but a few trees struggling for life among the shrubs, herbs, and grasses. Goats, tended by a ragged, wide-eyed boy, nibbled low branches.
Honorius said, “Once this was woodland, dominated by oak and pistachio trees: so say the historians. But the trees were felled to build houses, and to make plaster for the walls. Now the goats eat what remains, and the soil, overfarmed, grows dry and blows away into the air. As the land has grown poor, as the water is pumped dry, so the population flees— or starves. If Petra did not exist here already, it could never be sustained by such a poor hinterland. In another few centuries it will be abandoned altogether.”
Athalaric was struck by an oppressive feeling of waste. “What is the purpose of these magnificent heapings of stone— all the lives that must have been consumed in their construction— if the people are to eat themselves to barrenness and ruin, and all is to decay to rubble?”
Honorius said grimly, “It may be that one day Rome itself will be a place of shells, of fallen monuments, inhabited by filthy people who will herd their goats along the Sacred Way, never understanding the mighty ruins they see all around them.”
“But if cities rise and fall, a man may be master of his own destiny,” Papak murmured. He had come up to them and was listening intently. “And here is one such, I think.”
A man was striding out of the city toward them. He was remarkably tall, and he wore garments of some black cloth that clung tightly to his upper body and legs. A crimson swatch enclosed his head and covered much of his face. The dust seemed to swirl around his feet. It seemed to Athalaric that he was a figure of strangeness, as if from another time.
“Your Scythian, I take it,” Honorius murmured.
“Indeed,” said Papak.
Honorius drew himself up and reached for the fold of his toga. Athalaric felt a flicker of pride, complicated by a sense of envy, or perhaps inferiority. No matter how imposing this stranger was, Honorius was a Roman citizen, afraid of no man on Earth.
The Scythian unwrapped the cloth over his face and head, scattering more dust. His face was sharp-nosed, a thing of weather-beaten planes. Athalaric was startled to see that his hair was quite blond, as yellow as a Saxon’s.
Honorius murmured to Papak, “Bid him greetings, and assure him of our best intentions to—”
Papak cut him short. “These fellows of the desert have little time for niceties, sir. He wants to see your gold.”
Athalaric growled, “We’ve come a long way to be insulted by a sand flea.”
Honorius looked pained. “Athalaric, please. The money.”
Glaring at the Scythian, Athalaric opened his wrap to reveal a sack of gold. He tossed a piece to the Scythian, who tested it with his teeth.
“Now,” whispered Honorius. “
The bones.
Is it true? Show me, sir. Show me—”
That needed no translation. The Scythian drew a bundle of cloth from a deep pocket. Carefully he began to unwind the cloth, and he spoke in his own liquid tongue.
“He says this is a treasure indeed,” Papak murmured. “He says it comes from beyond the desert with the sand of gold, where the bones of the griffins—”
“I know about griffins,” said Honorius tightly. “I do not care about griffins.”
“From beyond the land of the Persians, from beyond the land of the Guptas— it is hard to translate,” Papak said tightly. “His sense of who owns the land is not as ours, and his descriptions are lengthy and specific.”
At last— with a shopkeeper’s sense of timing, Athalaric thought cynically— the Scythian began to open up the wrapped bandages. He revealed a skull.
Honorius gasped and all but fell on the fragment. “
It is a man.
But not as we are—”
In the course of his education Athalaric had seen plenty of human skulls. The flat face and jaw of this skull were very human. But there was nothing human about the thick ridge of bone over the brow, or that small brain pan, so small he could have cupped it in one hand.
“I have longed to study such a relic,” Honorius said breathlessly. “Is it true, as Titus Lucretius Carus wrote, that the early men could endure any environment, though they lacked clothing and fire, that they traveled in bands like animals and slept on the ground or in thickets, that they could eat anything and rarely fall ill? Oh, you must come to Rome, sir. You must come to Gaul! For there is a cave there, a cave on the coast of the ocean, where I have seen, I have seen—”
But the Scythian, perhaps mindful of the gold that still lay out of his reach, was not listening. He held up the fragment like a trophy.
The
Homo erectus
skull, polished by a million years, gleamed in the sunlight.
Under Honorius’s pressure, the Scythian eventually agreed to come to Rome. Papak came along too, as a more or less necessary interpreter— and, to Athalaric’s further dismay, so did two of the porters they had used in the desert.
Athalaric confronted Papak during the sea crossing back to Italy. “You are milking the old man’s purse. I know your kind, Persian.”
Papak was unperturbed. “But we are alike. I take his money, you empty his mind. What’s the difference? The young have always fed off the wealth of the old, one way or another. Isn’t it so?”
“I have pledged that I will bring him home safely. And that I will do, regardless of your ambitions.”
Papak laughed smoothly. “I mean Honorius no harm.” He indicated the impassive Scythian. “I have given him what he wants, haven’t I?” But the Scythian’s demeanor, as he coldly watched this exchange, made it clear to Athalaric that he was not to be regarded as anybody’s property, however temporarily.
Still, even Athalaric’s curiosity was pricked when this desert-dwelling nomad was brought to the greatest city in the world.
On the outskirts of Rome, they spent a night in a villa rented by Honorius.
Set on a slight rise on the edge of the city proper, this was a typical imperial-period home, its design drawn from Greek and Etruscan influences. The house was built on a series of bedrooms grouped around three sides of an open atrium. At the back were a dining room, offices, and utility rooms. Two street-facing rooms had been given over to shops. Honorius told him this had not been uncommon in the days of the empire; he reminded Athalaric of the shop his own family had once run.
But, like the city it overlooked, the villa had seen better days. The little shops were boarded up. The
impluvium,
the pool at the center of the atrium, had been crudely dug out, apparently to get at the lead piping that had once collected rainwater.
Honorius shrugged at this decay. “The place lost a lot of its value when the sackings came— too hard to defend, you see, so far out of the city. That is how I was able to rent it so cheaply.”
That night, amid this battered grandeur, they ate a meal together. Even the mosaic on the floor of the dining room was badly damaged; it appeared that thieves had taken any pieces that showed traces of gold leaf.
The food itself was a signature of the great pan-Eurasian mixing that had followed the expansion of the farming communities. The staples were wheat and rice from the original Anatolian agricultural package, but supplemented by quince originally from the Caucasus, millet from Central Asia, cucumber, sesame, and citrus fruit from India, and apricots and peaches from China. This transcontinental diet was an everyday miracle, unremarked on by those who ate it.
The next day they took the Scythian into the old city itself.
They walked to the Palatine, the Capitol, the Forum. The Scythian gazed around him with his horizon-sharp eyes, assessing, somehow measuring. He wore his desert garb of black clothing with scarlet wrap around his head; it must have been uncomfortable in Rome’s humid air, but he showed no signs of discomfort.
Athalaric murmured to Papak, “He doesn’t seem very impressed.”
Now the Scythian snapped out something in his terse, ancient language, and Papak translated automatically. “He says he understands now why the Romans had to take slaves and gold and food from his land.”
Honorius seemed obscurely pleased. “A savage he may be, but he is no fool— and he is not intimidated, not even by mighty Rome. Good for him.”
Away from the monumental areas, central Rome was a clotted network of streets and alleys, narrow and gloomy, the product of more than a thousand years’ uncontrolled building. Many of the residences here were five or six stories tall. Raised by unscrupulous landlords determined to get as much income as possible out of every scrap of precious land, they towered unsteadily. Walking through sewage-littered, unpaved streets, with buildings crowded so closely they almost touched above their heads, it seemed to Athalaric that he was passing through an immense network of sewers, like one of the famous
cloacae
that ran beneath Rome to the Tiber.
The crowds in the streets wore masks over their mouths and noses, gauze soaked in oil or spices. There had been a recent outbreak of smallpox. Disease was a constant threat: People still talked of the mighty Plague of Antoninus of three centuries earlier. In the millennia since the death of Juna, medical advances had barely slowed the march of the mighty diseases. Immense trade routes had united the populations of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia into a single vast resource pool for microbes, and the increased crowding of people into cities with little or no sanitation had exacerbated the problem. Throughout Rome’s imperial period it had been necessary to encourage a constant immigration of healthy peasants into the cities to replace those who died, and in fact urban populations would not become self-sustaining until the twentieth century.
This swarming place was a pathological outcome of the farming revolution, a place where people were crowded like ants, not primates.
It was almost a relief when they reached an area that had been burned out during one of the barbarian sackings. Though the destruction was decades past, this scorched, shattered area had never been rebuilt. But at least here among the rubble Athalaric could see the sky, unimpeded by filth-strewn balconies.
Honorius said to the Persian, “Ask him what he thinks now.”
The Scythian turned and surveyed the rows of heaped-up residential buildings. He murmured, and Papak translated. “How strange that you people choose to live in cliffs, like gulls.” Athalaric had heard the contempt in the Scythian’s voice.
When they returned to their villa Athalaric found that the purse he carried around his waist had been neatly slit open and emptied. He was angry, with himself as much as the thief— how was he supposed to be looking after Honorius if he couldn’t even watch over his own purse?— but he knew he should be grateful that the invisible bandit had not slit open his belly in the process and robbed him of his life as well.
The next day Honorius said he would take the party out into the country, to what he called the Museum of Augustus. So they piled into carts and went clattering over metaled but overgrown roads, out through the farms that crowded around the city.
They came to what must once have been an exclusive, expensive small town. An adobe wall contained a handful of villas and a cluster of meaner dwellings that had housed slaves. The place was obviously abandoned. The outer wall had been broken down, the buildings burned out and looted.
Honorius, with a scrawled map in his hand, led them into the complex, muttering, turning the map this way and that.
A thick layer of vegetation had broken through the mosaics and floor tiles, and ivy clung to fire-cracked walls. There must have been agony here, Athalaric thought, when the strength of the thousand-year empire had failed at last and its protection was lost. But the presence of the new vegetation in the midst of decay was oddly reassuring. It was even comforting to imagine that after another few centuries, as the green returned, nothing would be left of this place but a few hummocks in the ground, and oddly shaped stones that might break an unwary farmer’s plow.