had ever been. Josh put the camera down. He stared out at the break in the tree line. He could keep fighting the memory lurches or he could open his mind and see where they took him. Maybe he would come out on the other side of this labyrinth understanding why he’d had to travel its path.
Chapter 16
Julius and Sabina Rome—391 A.D.
He left the city early that morning while the sky was still dark and sunrise wasn’t yet aglow on the horizon. No one was in the streets, except a few stray cats that ignored him.
She always teased him that he was early for everything, but it was urgent now that they be careful. It was better for him to leave with the cloak of nightfall to protect him, to arrive at the grove before daybreak.
As he passed the emperor’s palace, he glanced, as he always did, at the elaborate calendar etched on the wall. The passing of time had taken on a new and frightening significance lately. How many more days, weeks and months would they have until everything around them had changed so much so that it was unrecognizable? How much longer would he be able to perform the sacrifices and rituals that were his responsibility? How much longer would any of them be able to celebrate and participate in the ancient ceremonies passed down to them by their forefathers?
In the past two years he’d doubled up on his duties as fewer men entered the colleges, and now, in addition to overseeing the Vestals, he’d taken on the additional job of the Flamen Furinalis, the priest who oversaw the cult of Furrina and tended to the grove that belonged to her.
Not to the emperor.
Not to the power-hungry bishops in Milan.
But to the goddess.
Past the palace, he turned onto the road leading out of the city. A man, probably overcome with too much wine, had fallen asleep sitting up against the side of a four-story dwelling. His head was lowered on his chest, his arms by his sides and his palms open, as if he were begging. Someone had dropped food into his cupped hands. There were always poor fools on the street at night, homeless or drunk, and others who always took care of them.
Except something was wrong with this man.
Julius knew it intuitively before he understood it. Maybe it was the crooked angle of the man’s head, or the utter stillness of his body. He reached down and lifted up the man’s face and, at the same time, noticed how his robe was slit up the front and torn open. On his chest were the dreaded crisscrossing lines, one vertical, one horizontal, the flayed skin exposing guts oozing, blood still dripping and staining the ground beneath him a deep scarlet.
Now he could see the man’s features. This was no homeless drunk; this was Claudius, one of the young priests from the college. And his eyes had been gouged out in a final ritualistic indignity.
Julius realized what Claudius was holding in his hands: not food, but the poor soul’s own eyes.
How much suffering had been inflicted on this man, and why? Julius stumbled backward. The emperor’s endless thirst for power? What made it worse was that the people doing the man’s bidding didn’t realize he was using them and that no god was speaking through him.
“Get away. Go now,” a voice whispered.
It took several seconds for Julius to find the old woman hiding in the shadows, staring at him, the whites of her eyes gleaming, a sick smile on her lips.
“I’ve been telling you. All of you. But no one listens,” she said in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it had been rubbed raw. “Now it starts. And this—” she pointed a long arthritic finger toward the direction Julius had just come from “—is just the beginning.”
It was one of the old crones who foretold the future and begged for coins in the Circus Maximus. For as long he could remember she had been a fixture there. But she wasn’t offering a prediction now. This was no mystical divination. She knew. He did, too. The worst that they had feared was upon them.
Julius threw her a coin, gave Claudius a last look and took off.
Not until he passed through the city’s gates an hour and a half later did his breathing relax. He straightened up, not aware till that minute that he’d been hunched over, half in hiding. Always half in hiding now.
Throughout history, men fought about whose religion was the right one. But hadn’t many civilizations prospered and thrived side by side while each obeyed entirely different entities? Hadn’t his own religion operated like that for more than a thousand years? Their beliefs in and worship of multiple gods and goddesses and of nature itself didn’t preclude the belief in an all-powerful deity. Nor did they expect everyone else to believe as they did. But the emperor did.
The more Julius studied history the more it became clear to him that what they were facing was one man using good men with good beliefs to enhance his own authority and wealth. What had been proclaimed in Nicaea almost seventy-five years ago—that all men were to convert to Christianity and believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth—had never been enforced as brutally as it was being enforced here now. The killings were bloody warnings that everyone must conform or risk annihilation.
Julius and his colleagues weren’t under any delusions. If they intended to survive they needed to abandon their beliefs or at least pretend to do so. And if they were going to continue into the future they needed to relax some of their laws and adapt. But right now they had worse problems. Emperor Theodosius was no holy man; this was not about one god or many gods, not about rites or saviors. How clever Theodosius and his intolerant bishop were! Conspiring to make men believe that unless they adopted the current revised creed, they would not only suffer here in this life but would suffer worse in the next life. The danger to every priest, every cult, everyone who held fast to the old ways, increased daily. The priest he’d seen in the gutter that morning was yet another warning to the rest of the flamen.
Citizens everywhere were taking up the emperor’s call to enforce the new laws, publicly declaring their conversion. But behind closed doors, other conversations took place. The men and women who had prayed to the old gods and goddesses for all of their lives still hoped for a reprieve from the new religious mandate. Yes, in public, they would protect themselves and prove their fealty to their emperor, but as modern as Rome was, it was also a superstitious city. As afraid as the average citizens were of the emperor, they were more afraid of the harm that might befall them if they broke trust with the familiar sacred rituals. So while there was outward acquiescence, even energy for a religious revolution, much of it was false piety.
But for how much longer?
The old ways would die a little more with every priest who was murdered and with every temple that was looted and destroyed until there was nothing left and no one to remember.
The trunks of the lofty trees were gnarled and scratched, the boughs heavy with leaves. The forest was so thick the light only broke through in narrow shafts, illuminating a single branch of glossy emerald leaves here and a patch of moss-covered ground there.
There were myrtle trees, cypress and luxuriant laurels, but it was the oaks that made this a sacred grove, an ancient place apart from the everyday world where the priests could perform their rituals and pray to their goddess.
He sat down on a mossy rock to wait for Sabina. There, miles outside of the city gates, he couldn’t hear the sounds of soldiers training or citizens arguing or chariots rolling by. He couldn’t smell the fear or see the sadness in people’s eyes—ordinary people who didn’t understand politics and were frightened. In the grove there was only birdsong and the splashing of water that fell from between the cracks in the rocks into the pool below. The consecrated area stretched deep into the woods, and no matter how often Julius went there, he never felt as if he saw it all or understood the mysteries that it contained. Nothing there was commonplace. Every tree was a sculptural arrangement of boughs branching off into more boughs, with more leaves than any man could count, all shimmering in a light that was always softer and gentler here than anywhere else in Rome. Every patch of ground offered a bounty of sprouting grasses, moss,