trying to will the professor to live, Josh was certain he’d tasted death in that place before. He didn’t know what had happened here in the past, only that he now felt he was on some unimaginable journey of repetition that was out of his power to stop.
Sitting on the ground, feeling the professor’s pulse slow, he trained his eyes out the opening, up toward the sky. This way, as soon as the paramedics arrived, he’d see them.
The air undulated around him, and shivers of anticipation shot up and down his arms and legs. Even while he sat perfectly still in one dimension, he was being sucked down into a vortex where the atmosphere was heavier and thicker, where he floated like a ghost rather than walking like a man, and where he felt pleasure more purely and pain more acutely.
It began like every episode. The scene developed slowly, the way photographs appear, as if by magic, on pristine sheets of paper, swimming up out of a swirl of liquid. He was the stranger outside looking in as the scene opened before him. He saw the players and the stage. And then, in a matter of seconds, he became the person he was observing. Saw now through another’s eyes, spoke in the other’s voice. Was not himself. Had lost himself. Did not know there was another self.
Chapter 10
Julius and Sabina Rome—386 A.D.
The screams alerted him as the wind blew the smell of the acrid smoke into his bedchamber. They all lived in fear of it, and most of them had been witness to some form of it at some point in their lives. Fire was their most sacred possession, and fire was their fiercest enemy.
The story of the great conflagration that burned two-thirds of the city down more than three hundred years before was still told as a cautionary tale. During the night of July 18, a blaze started in the merchants’ area. There were too many structures, all made of wood, squeezed too close together. Hot summer winds fanned the flames until one by one, the stores and dwellings, some five-, six-stories high, caught on fire. For six days and seven nights, the inferno raged, and then for several days afterward, it smoldered.
The city was left in ruins.
The historian Tacitus wrote an account describing how terrified men and women, the helpless old and the helpless young, fugitives and lingerers alike, tried to escape all at once, which only added to the confusion.
Some, it was said, those who’d lost too much, or who were consumed with guilt at not having been able to save their loved ones, chose not to run, but freely gave themselves to the fire and died in the blaze. To make it worse, many who might have helped had been afraid to fight, since menacing gangs were attacking those who tried. That’s where the rumors came from that Nero had ordered the fire to persecute early Christians. After all, Nero had been tormenting them for years, using them as human torches, crucifying and sacrificing them. But would the emperor destroy his own city, his own treasures?
Others blamed that great inferno on angry gods and ill luck. Still others believed the early Christians themselves started the fire to destroy the pagan city they despised. For weeks before that fated July night, in the streets of the poorest neighborhoods, early radical upstarts were passing out leaflets prophesying the burning destruction of Rome and stirring up public opinion against the old order.
Now, three centuries later, as Julius ran toward the temple, nostrils burning, feeling the heat on his face intensifying, he worried that this blaze was politically motivated. He and many of the other high priests held that these were the last days of the Roman Empire, as they’d known it. The emperor and the Bishop of Milan were seeing to that. The ideological fight between the all-encompassing pagan order and the thousands of Romans who believed in the teachings of the Jewish prophet Jesus, or who paid lip service to it in order to curry favor with their emperor, was becoming an ugly battle between two ways of life, between many gods and one god.
Paganism was a mosaic, like the designs on the temple floors. It was made up of dozens of sects, faiths and cults it had absorbed over the years. As a result, religious freedom reigned in Rome for centuries. Why must an old faith be destroyed to make room for a new one?
Using the gray, billowing clouds as a map toward the site, Julius could tell that the fire was close to the Atrium Vestae, the house where the Vestals lived, just behind the circular Temple of Vesta at the eastern edge of the Roman Forum. The eighty-four-room palace built around an elegant courtyard had burned to the ground several times in the past. Ironic that the Goddess Vesta was the greatest threat to those who kept her safe.
As the strong orange blaze reached higher into the blackened sky, one by one they came: priests and citizens, breathing in the fumes, choking on them, but determined to save the house and ensure the fire didn’t encroach on the temple. It wasn’t only buildings at risk, but legendary treasures that were said to be hidden in a secret substructure under the holy hearth.
By the time Julius arrived there were two dozen firefighters, men from every walk of life who volunteered and were trained to race to the fire site and fight the blaze as soon as it was reported. One small fire—because of all the wooden buildings—could turn into an inferno in no time.
Much to his horror, Julius realized that one of the firefighters wasn’t a man—but a woman who hadn’t stayed back with her sisters. She shouldn’t be there, it was too dangerous. But the men were too busy to try and pull her away or warn her to be careful. Even if they’d tried, he knew it wouldn’t have made any difference: she would have been right back on the front line two minutes later.
Defiance was typical of Sabina, who’d been a constant challenge to the sisters who’d trained her. Although they marveled at her clairvoyance, they complained that her tenacity and willfulness weren’t suited to being a priestess.
Neither was her contempt for him.
In front of others, she showed him the minimum of respect required to keep out of trouble. But when no one else was around, if their paths crossed, she let her feelings show. There were days it made him want to laugh that she looked at him with so much antagonism; others when he wanted to punish her for her impudence. It disturbed him because there was no reason for her reactions. And even less reason that despite her antagonism to him, he felt drawn to her. Admired her. Cheered her on.
As the head priestess, she proved exemplary. But unlike the other Vestals, Sabina possessed a stubborn streak, a refusal to give up all of her personality to the group, which propelled her to become one the most educated of all the nuns in recent years, studying medicine and learning how to be a healer, although it added extra responsibility to her already full life. When tired customs didn’t make sense to her, she questioned them, changed them and breathed life into the old order. Even when it alienated her from the older sisters and conservative priests, she fought back bravely, passionately. Recently, the most traditional among them were applauding her efforts.
A section of the house collapsed with a loud crash. The fire was winning the battle. Sabina worked as hard as Julius did to smother the flames; she was as valiant a fighter as any man there. When their eyes met for a brief second, Julius looked away, chilled, despite the fire’s heat, by the look she flashed at him. She was determined to live, which meant the fire had to die. But either she’d inhaled too much smoke or she was just too exhausted, because suddenly she fell to the ground.
Angry blisters marred her cheeks. Her robe was ripped up the side and across the front, exposing her long legs and breasts, all blackened with soot.
None of the other men seemed to have noticed. If she wasn’t dead, one of them was bound to trample her to death. Julius couldn’t let that happen. Leaving his post, he ran to her, picked her up and carried her lifeless body out of the way, the heat at his back becoming less and less intense until he wasn’t aware of it anymore.
Sabina was heavy in his arms, and he felt the full burden of her: of her position as head of the nuns, of her complicated response to him, of her power and vitality. Finally far enough away from the fire, he laid her down on a patch of grass, allowing himself to focus on her and give in to his curiosity and his obsession—because if he was honest with himself, despite his best efforts and for no rational reason he knew, that was what she’d become.