The Last Cato (25 page)

My companions got to their feet, and the iron hand turned me loose. That’s when I realized it was Farag. Standing in front of me, he timidly extended that same hand like a gentleman, offering me help getting to my feet.

“Where in the world are we?” pronounced the Rock.

“Read Canto X and you’ll know,” I murmured, my legs still trembling and my pulse racing. That place smelled damp and rotten, in equal parts.

A long line of torch holders, attached to the walls by iron rings, lit up what seemed to be an old culvert, a drainage ditch. We were on its ledge. From that ledge, where a trench of black and dirty water flowed, to the wall, there must have “room for three men’s bodies laid out end to end,” the exact width of the slab we had descended upon. The same vaulted tunnel extended as far as I could see, all the way to the right and to the left.

“I think I know what this is,” the captain said, settling the backpack on his shoulder with a decisive gesture. Farag was brushing the dust and dirt off his jacket. “It’s very possible we are in some branch of the Cloaca Maxima.”

“Cloaca Maxima? It still exists?”

“The Romans didn’t build things halfway, Professor. When it comes to engineering, they were the best. Aqueducts and culverts held no secrets for them.”

“In fact, the Roman aqueducts are still in use in many European cities,” I added. I had just found the remains of my purse scattered everywhere. My flashlight was destroyed.

“But the Cloaca Maxima!”

“It was the only way they could build Rome,” I explained. “The entire area occupied by the Roman Forum was a swamp and had to be drained. They started building the sewer in the sixth century B.C., by order of the Etruscan king, Tarquin the Old. They expanded and reinforced it until it reached colossal dimensions. It was in perfect working order during the Roman Empire.”

“Where we are standing was, no doubt, a secondary branch,” Glauser-Röist said, “the branch the Staurofilakes use for their test of pride.”

“Why are the torches lit?” asked Farag, taking one of them from its holder. The fire roared as it struggled against the air. The professor put his other hand up to protect his face.

“Clearly, Father Bonuomo knew we were coming.”

“Well then, let’s get going,” I said, looking up toward the distant opening, which was nowhere to be seen. We must have descended quite a few feet.

“Right or left?” asked the professor, planting himself in the middle of the path, holding his torch high, resembling the Statue of Liberty.

“Definitely through here,” indicated Glauser-Röist, pointing mysteriously toward the ground. Farag and I walked over to him.

“I can’t believe it!” I murmured, fascinated.

Right where the ledge started to our right, the stone ground was wonderfully etched with scenes in relief, just the way Dante described it. The first was Lucifer’s nosedive from heaven. You could see his beautiful angel face wearing a terrible look of anger as he reached toward God as he fell, begging for mercy. Such artistic perfection and attention to details gave me chills.

“It’s Byzantine,” commented the professor, impressed. “Look at that strict Pantocrator thinking over his favorite angel’s punishment.”

“The prideful punished…,” I murmured.

“Well, that’s the idea, right?”

“I’ll get out the
Divine Comedy,
” announced Glauser-Röist. “We need to check out the similarities.”

“Don’t worry, Captain. They’ll match, they’ll definitely match.”

The Rock leafed through the book, then looked up with a smile in the corners of his lips.

“Did you know that the tercets in these iconographic representations start in verse twenty-five of the canto. Two plus five, seven. One of Dante’s favorite numbers.”

“Don’t get carried away, Captain,” I implored. There was quite an echo.

“I’m not getting carried away, Doctor. For your information, the series in question started in verse sixty-three. Six plus three, nine, his other favorite number. We’re back to seven and nine.”

Farag and I weren’t paying much attention to that spate of medieval numerology. We were too busy enjoying the beautiful scenes on the ground. After Lucifer came Briareus, the monster son of Uranus and Gaia, heaven and earth. He was easy to recognize by his one hundred arms and fifty heads. Believing he was stronger and more powerful, he rebelled against the gods of Olympus and died, pierced by a celestial arrow. Despite how ugly Briareus was, the image was incredibly beautiful. The light from the torches gave the reliefs a terrifying lifelike quality, while the flames from Farag’s torch gave them greater depth and volume. Nuances stood out that might have gone unnoticed.

The next scene was the death of the proud giants who plotted to do away with Zeus. They, too, died dismembered by Mars, Athena, and Apollo. Next was crazed Nimrod standing before the ruins of his Tower of Babel. After that came Niobe, turned to stone for daring to have seven sons and seven daughters in the presence of Latona, who only had Apollo and Diana. The path continued on: Saul, Arachne, Roboam, Alcmaeon, Senaquerib, Cyrus, Holofernes, and the razed city of Troy, the last example of punished pride.

There we were, our heads bent like oxen in a yoke, not talking, avidly studying it all. Like Dante, we walked along admiring those artful pieces of mythology or history that promoted humility and simplicity. After Troy, there were no more reliefs, and the lesson ended. Or did it?

“A chapel!” exclaimed Farag, squeezing through an opening in the wall.

We made our way through and found another Byzantine church identical to the Crypt of Adriano in size, shape, and layout. This chapel was different from its bigger twin in one important way: The walls were covered by wooden platforms from which hundreds of empty eye sockets in as many skulls glared at us from those perches. Farag put his free arm around my shoulders.

“Did that startle you, Ottavia?”

“No,” I lied, “I was just taken aback.” The truth was, I was terrified, paralyzed with fear by those empty gazes.

“This is one big necropolis, right?” joked Boswell. He flashed me a smile and walked over to the captain. I scurried behind him. I didn’t want to be separated by one centimeter.

Not all the craniums were intact. The majority were leaning directly on some upper teeth (if they had any) or on their base, as if somewhere they had lost the lower jaw. Many lacked a parietal bone, a temporal bone, pieces of the frontal bone, or even the entire frontal bone. To me, the worst part was the eye sockets. Some were totally empty, and others still had the orbital bones. All in all, it was hair-raising. There were literally hundreds of those remains.

“They are relics of Christian saints and martyrs,” announced the captain, carefully examining a row of skulls.

“What?” I was shocked. “Relics?”

“Well, that’s what they look like. There is an inscription engraved in front of each one with what looks like a name: Benedetto
sanctus,
Desirio
sanctus,
Ippolito
martyr,
Candida
sancta,
Amelia
sancta,
Placido
martyr…
”

“My God! And the church has no knowledge of this? Surely it gave these relics up for lost centuries ago.”

“Maybe they’re not authentic, Ottavia. Keep in mind, this is Staurofilax territory. Anything’s possible. Besides, if you take a good look, the names aren’t in classical Latin, but in medieval Latin.”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re fake,” warned the Rock. “That’s something for the church to decide. In that case, is the True Cross we are so desperately looking for real?”

“The captain is right about that. That’s up to the experts in the Vatican and the Reliquary Archives.”

“What’s the Reliquary Archives?” asked Farag.

“The Reliquary Archives is where they display, in cases and cabinets, the relics of the saints the church needs for administrative matters.”

“Why do they need them?”

“Well… Every time a new church is built, the Reliquary Archives has to send some bone fragment to be deposited under the altar. It’s mandatory.”

“Wow! I wonder if we have the same thing in our Coptic churches. I admit my ignorance in these matters is endless.”

“Surely your churches do. Although I don’t know if you also keep—”

“How about we get out of here and continue our journey?” Glauser-Röist cut us off and started walking for the exit.

Like well-behaved students, Farag and I followed him out of the chapel.

“The reliefs stop here,” the Rock pointed out, “right in front of the entrance to the crypt. I don’t like that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It looks like this branch of the Cloaca Maxima has no exit.”

“The water from the culvert is barely flowing,” Farag pointed out. “It’s practically still, as if it were dammed up.”

“Of course it’s flowing,” I protested. “I saw it moving as we walked along. Very slowly, but it’s moving.”

“Eppur si muove…,”
*
said the professor.

“Exactly. If it weren’t, it would be putrid. And it isn’t.”

“Boy, but it sure is dirty!”

We all agreed about that.

Unfortunately, when the captain went up ahead, he ascertained that the branch had no exit. Barely two hundred meters later, we came to a stone wall blocking the tunnel.

“But… the water is moving…,” I babbled. “How is that possible?”

“Professor, raise the torch as high as you can and go over to the very edge of the ledge,” said the captain as he lit up the wall with his strong flashlight. In the two sources of light, the mystery became clear. At the very center of the dike, about halfway up, you could make out a faint chrismon of Constantine scratched into the rock; a vertical line with irregular edges passed through its axis and divided the wall in two.

“It’s a floodgate!” wailed Boswell.

“Are you surprised, Professor? Did you think it was going to be easy?”

“But how are we going to move those two slabs of stone? They must weigh a couple of tons each, at least!”

“Well, let’s sit down and think it over.”

“It’s too bad this comes at dinnertime. I’m starting to get hungry.”

“Well then, let’s solve this puzzle in a hurry,” I advised, plopping down on to the ground. “If we don’t get out of here, there won’t be any dinner tonight, no breakfast tomorrow morning, no meals for the rest of our lives. Life seems pretty short right about now.”

“Don’t start that again, Doctor! Let’s use our brains. As we figure it out, we’ll eat the sandwiches I brought.”

“You knew we’d be spending the night here?” I was shocked.

“I wasn’t sure what would happen. Just try to solve the problem, please.”

We went round and round about the floodgate and examined it carefully many times. We even used a piece of wood from the platforms in the crypt to poke at the submerged part of the dike. A couple of hours later, all we’d figured out was that the stone slabs weren’t perfectly squared off and that water escaped through that minuscule chink in the wall. We went back to the reliefs again and again, up and down, down and up, but that didn’t clarify anything. They were beautiful, but nothing more.

Near midnight, exhausted and freezing, we returned to the church. By then, we knew that branch of the Cloaca Maxima really well, as if we’d built it with our own hands. Clearly, there was no way out of there without some magic intervention or unless we passed the test. If only we could figure out what the test was. On one end were the floodgates; a couple of kilometers away was the bucking flagstone; and in-between was a pile of rocks, a cave-in where the water filtered through several gaps. In a corner, we found a wooden box filled with burned-out torches. We concluded that that wasn’t a good sign.

We considered the possibility of moving those enormous boulders, since the prisoners of the first cornice suffered exactly that punishment for their pride. We decided that that was impossible; each one of those rocks must have weighed two or three times what we weighed. So we were trapped. If we didn’t find a solution soon, we would be stuck there until we were food for the worms.

My headache had disappeared for a few hours; but now it was back with a vengeance. I was tired and sleepy. I didn’t even have the energy to yawn, but the professor certainly did. He opened his mouth wide with growing frequency.

It was cold in the church, although not as cold as in the culvert. We carried all the torches we could to one of the oratories and built a bonfire. That warmed the corner enough so we could survive the night. Being surrounded by watchful skulls, however, wasn’t exactly conducive to sleep.

Farag and the captain got caught up in a long hypothetical discussion over the test we had to pass. They agreed that the only way was to open the floodgates. The problem was
how
to open them; they couldn’t reach an agreement on that point. I don’t recall much about that conversation. I was half-asleep, floating in an ethereal space lit up by a fire and surrounded by whispering skulls. The skulls
were
talking… or was that part of my dream? I was sure they were talking or whistling. The last thing I recall before slipping into a deep lethargy was someone helping me stretch out and putting something soft under my face. That was all until I opened my eyes halfway for a moment (it was a very peaceful rest) and saw Farag stretched out at my side, asleep. The captain was totally engrossed in reading Dante by the light of the fire. Not much time had passed when a voice woke me up. I stood up, startled, and saw the Rock on his feet, as tall as a Greek god, throwing his arms in the air.