We found no more information in or around that street. No one else owned to seeing or hearing anything. But we’d found enough for today. I was no closer to jumping to a complete account of what had been happening since those two bandits crossed us on the road. Even so, I now had a good idea of how and where Maximin had been killed. And One-Eye was part of the story. As if I needed an atom more of evidence, I knew that this hadn’t been a casual robbery and murder.
And Lucius had begun my training in the art of investigation. I tried to persuade Lucius that the letters must have been taken by the killers.
‘It’s obvious,’ I’d said. ‘The fact is surely plain.’
‘A fact is not a fact until it’s been checked,’ he’d snapped smartly back. How did I know the letters had even been connected with the death? They probably were, and it was worth making what the lawyers call a rebuttable presumption. But this was open to rejection if further evidence should turn up. And if some connection with the letters was to be presumed, their current whereabouts remained an entirely open question.
Yes, Lucius had set me on the path to finding the killers. We’d reconstructed the main details of the murder. Much remained, of course. I still had no idea why those letters had been worth killing for, or who wanted to recover them so badly. But Lucius had revealed a method of getting answers to my questions. Back home, the truth in these matters was apprehended – if at all – by a sudden assault. Here, it would need to be subdued by a possibly long siege.
I was tired again, and feeling half dead from hunger. Marcella’s breakfast aside, I hadn’t eaten in over a day. The progress of the afternoon had brought back my appetite. I suggested eating in one of the little cookshops that dotted the centre.
Lucius turned up his nose. ‘By all means, eat there if you want. If you’d rather avoid food poisoning, though, come back with me. I don’t think I can raise a banquet at short notice, but I can offer something that isn’t soaked in herbs to cover the taste of decay.’
We walked back to the Forum, where Lucius had his slave buy me a black cake from a stall set up beside the locked Senate House. This had last been opened, he said, for the acclamation of Phocas, seven years earlier. This had been an embarrassingly chaotic event, he added. It was the first meeting of the Senate in ages, and none of the senators who’d bothered to attend had realised they had to bring their own chairs. They’d had to stand like the congregation of a Greek church.
But I looked dubiously at the cake. It looked more like a block of charcoal than anything edible.
‘It won’t taste very nice,’ Lucius explained, ‘but it will perk you up for the time between now and dinner. I may try some for myself later. I can’t say what’s in it, but priests and lawyers eat the stuff before a long session.’
He was right. The taste was utterly horrid. But I soon felt a comforting warmth that started in my belly and spread rapidly over my whole body. The tiredness fell away from me. Even the misery lost much of its dullness.
As we waited for the drug to take better effect, Lucius showed me several more inscriptions in the Forum that commemorated his ancestors. There was even a marble statue, lying on its back, that he told me was of the Basilius who’d paid to have the Colosseum put in order. Lucius had already paid to have it set up again once, but it had been thrown down again in a bread riot. Since it was too big to take back to his house, he’d decided to have it left until a more permanent solution could be found.
From here, we set off slowly up the Capitoline Hill. I’d recovered some of my drained energy, but still had to stop every so often to steady myself. I’d seen the Temple of Jupiter with Maximin from below. Now, it was coming much closer. If you know anything of history, you’ll know that this was the spiritual heart of Rome in the days of the Old Religion. It was here that the formal inspection of entrails took place, and here that the triumphal processions terminated. I think it was here that the Sybelline Books were kept.
After Constans turned up in Rome, some decades later, he stripped the gilt bronze tiles off as many temples as he could easily get at. He didn’t touch the Temple of Jupiter, but the pope had the tiles removed to replace those from a now more important building. That was the end of the place. The last time I was in Rome, it was a ruin.
Back then, though, it was still standing more or less as it had for centuries past. Of course, it had lost all its adornments, and the doors had been smashed open so beggars could squat there. In better circumstances, I’d have turned tourist. But we walked right past the temple and continued on our way. We walked along a wide street lined with the ruins of ceremonial buildings, then into a maze of side streets so narrow that even the lowish buildings there kept out the daylight. Some of the bigger tenements in these streets were still inhabited.
‘That is the remnant of the Basilius fortune,’ Lucius said, pointing. ‘I collect the rents in person, and sometimes pay my creditors with the proceeds. I suppose I’ll have to shell out something to them next month. But Constantinople and Ravenna aren’t cheap places to visit. So, for the moment, they can go fuck themselves.’ He laughed and moved on.
We came suddenly into a large square, dominated by a cluster of temple buildings. The main courtyard had once been a colonnaded rectangle. But the columns had mostly been taken off for use elsewhere. The temple, though, remained – itself apparently in all its former glory. I could see brick here and there, but most of the marble facing was still in place. It was easily the biggest temple I’d ever seen – a cylinder about a hundred and fifty feet across, topped by a vast dome that terminated perhaps another hundred and fifty feet above the ground. It was fronted by a portico that, big as it was, seemed nothing by comparison with the main building. I leant against an empty plinth.
‘What is that?’ I asked, pointing at the building.
‘That,’ said Lucius, ‘is something you have to see, tired as you are.’
He sent the slave off to order food for us at his house. We would follow more slowly behind. ‘We’ll be safe enough as a pair. It’s not even dark yet,’ he said.
We’d approached from the side. I moved back from the portico, so I could take it all in from the front. The portico was made of three rows of granite columns topped with Corinthian capitals. Above this was a long entablature. On this was the inscription: ‘Marcus Agrippa Son of Lucius Consul for the Third Time Made This’.
‘Who was this Agrippa?’ I asked.
‘He was the son-in-law of the great Augustus,’ Lucius replied. ‘He built this temple around the time your Galilean carpenter was born.’ He looked at me closely. ‘Or is he your Galilean carpenter?’ he asked. ‘I’m beginning to wonder what you do actually believe… But never mind this.’ Lucius turned back into well-informed guide. ‘The temple was almost entirely rebuilt by Hadrian a hundred or so years later. You know Hadrian? He was my favourite emperor – a man of great learning and of piety for the Old Gods.
‘Do you know about Antinous?’ he asked with a change of tone.
I knew something, but shook my head. I’d read something of Hadrian’s catamite in the Encyclopaedia that Saint Jerome put together. Since I didn’t know what of this I should believe, I waited for Lucius to enlighten me. But he shrugged and turned back to his main theme.
‘The main structure is all by Hadrian,’ he said. ‘He left only the portico. He left Agrippa’s name because he was always too modest to have his own put on his works.
‘Let’s go in.’
We walked through the portico and Lucius rapped on the huge bronze door. It wasn’t locked, but swung noiselessly open, just enough for a priest to stick his head round.
‘This building is shut until the consecration,’ he said officiously. ‘Come back for the ceremony.’
Lucius pushed his usual key in the lock: ‘I am Lucius Decius Basilius,’ he drawled. ‘I go where I please. You will open the door now.’
Another priest looked out, then withdrew his head. There was a whispered conversation inside. Finally the door opened and we entered.
Nothing had prepared me for the astonishing beauty of the interior. It was one great circular room, topped by the coffered, hemispherical dome. The light of a very late afternoon entered obliquely through a hole, or oculus, at the centre of the dome. This fell directly on the upper part of the dome, and was then diffused lower onto walls of the most glorious polychrome marble. Around the walls, taking the weight of the dome, was a circle of elegant Corinthians.
The overall impression in that late, golden light was of immense yet restful magnificence. I could hardly reconcile the people of the Rome I knew with the race that could have conceived and built something so completely wonderful. It was like the most beautiful and technically perfect ancient poem, enlarged and made into stone.
We stood awhile in silence, then Lucius said: ‘It was built as a temple to all the Gods. Now it is to be stolen and given over to the worship of the Jewish Sky God of the Galileans.’
Then I noticed for the first time the frantic work all around us. I was confused for a moment as to how I could possibly have ignored it. Workmen ran up and down ladders. They were taking down any obvious symbol of the old worship. Already, a giant cross was in place before one of the main recesses. There was a high altar that hadn’t yet been set in position.
In another of the recesses I saw a pile of broken statuary. We walked over to this. The disfigured beauty of the Old Gods pierced my heart, lifting me for a moment from my own personal grief.
‘The “demons” are to be cast out,’ said Lucius flatly. ‘When I was last in here, they were still in the places given them long ago. Now, they have been pulled down, and the smashed fragments are to be burnt for cement. The walls are to be scraped. I am told there are to be twenty-eight cartloads of corpse parts delivered from the catacombs to complete the desecration. They’ll need to burn half a ton of incense to cover the stench of death. But these will be old relics. I regret to say your friend looks set to join this lot. He’ll be a nice, fresh, convenient martyr to add to the pile and inflame the passions of the mob.’
Would Maximin have wanted this? Probably, he would. ‘When is the consecration to be?’ I asked.
‘Around the Ides of next month, I believe,’ said Lucius. ‘If Boniface is still sweating pus in Naples – a punishment, be assured, for his impiety here – it may all be delayed. Or this new plague may force delay. Or the dispensator may take his place. That’ll please the grisly old creep, I’m in no doubt.
‘Do you know, he helped stop my father’s legal challenge to the will that left everything to the Church? He was only a deacon back then. Even so, he was in thick with Pope Gregory. If beggaring his own family helped advance him in the corpse cult of the Galileans, he didn’t care shit.’
Suddenly: ‘Did you miss something? Would you have me speak louder?’ Lucius wheeled round and spat the questions at the priest who’d let us in. He’d been following us round the temple.
‘My lord Basilius,’ the priest answered, looking panicky, ‘you speak too freely in this house of God.’
‘Well, you can speak freely too – that is, if you want a stick taken to your back one night. Fuck off back to your work, scum, and stop snooping on your betters. Do you hear me?’
The priest walked away with a stiff dignity. The dispensator would have this on this desk well before breakfast, I had no doubt. But Lucius seemed untouchable. Perhaps I was too, if I kept in with him, but my own mouth shut. Just to make sure, though, that something acceptable got back, I turned and ostentatiously crossed myself as we left.