had been in Alexandria, no one there spoke Egyptian any longer, they all spoke Arabic. And the play on words, Patrick now knew, had not been in Italian or Latin or Greek: it had been in Arabic.
The Arabic word ayn has two chief meanings: ‘eye’ and ‘spring’. It means other things besides, of course, but those are its basic meanings. Upon a single rock were set, not seven eyes, but seven springs.
Patrick put his hand on the rock, near the figure of Moses. He felt it give slightly and pushed harder. The panel slid aside. Inside, there was a handle, a great iron ring set in the stone. Inside the ring, carved into the stone, was a circle. And inside the circle a menorah bearing a cross.
He pulled the ring towards him. As he did so, the facade of the tomb shifted half-an-inch. He pulled again, harder this time. The stone moved, as though swinging on a pivot. Bracing himself, he pulled for a third time. The side of Pietro Contarini’s tomb swung away from the wall, exposing a dark, gaping aperture.
FORTY
Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?’ whispered Assefa. He stood beside Patrick, gazing into the hole that had opened in the wall. They could just make out the dim shape of a staircase leading down.
‘They shall go down to the grave ... and the deep that crouches beneath,’ said Patrick. The meaning of the verses quoted by Corradini had suddenly become crystal clear.
Patrick took the flashlights from his bag and handed one to Assefa. He switched his on and started down the stairs.
The walls of the staircase were cased in plaster and covered in an elaborate fresco. A row of figures in antique Roman dress walked in a solemn procession bearing small crosses over their shoulders. Some led small children by the hand, others followed with musical instruments: citharas, tabrets, timbrels, harps, dulcimers and cymbals. Yet no one danced. Whatever music they were playing was sad and slow.
Patrick set foot on the first step. He had expected the staircase to be mildewed and thick with cobwebs, but to his surprise it was clean and dry, as though swept only yesterday. Though they showed signs of age, the frescoes on the walls beside him were in an excellent state of preservation.
The steps were of marble and little worn. Patrick counted twenty in all. They ended at a rounded archway, much in the Byzantine style of those in the church above, leading into a vast underground chamber with a low, slightly domed ceiling. The
beam from Patrick’s flashlight swept over a painted universe, confined, huddled deep beneath the earth, independent of the world above.
Assefa joined him, and together they let the light from their torches trace the lineaments of the secret world to which they had descended. Above them, dark constellations turned to fire, and burning stars fell endlessly through a golden sky. Among them, angels in purple robes, their wings ablaze, tumbled in confusion. But at the centre, Christ sat in majesty upon a throne of glass. Around him, death and confusion ceased, and a great stillness crept out into the vortex.
Upon the walls, the chaste procession wove its way across the world: past tall towers, across the tops of hills, through forests, over rivers, along the shores of silent, waveless seas. They came from everywhere to join it - men and women in antique robes, kings, journeymen, musicians, priests, nuns, lepers ... and children everywhere, alone or led by the hand. In the air, birds with strange feathers flew above their heads, on the earth, curious animals watched them pass, and in the oceans, fish with monstrous eyes turned their heads and stared at them.
Whether intended or not, the artist had created a world of deep unease, in which the only comfort lay in the procession and the bearded face of Christ made God, serene in His contemplation of madness.
They followed the procession on each side, up and down the wall, now this way, now that, until they came together to the far end of the chamber, that had been in darkness until now. A great city stood domed and golden on a hill of grass. Above it, the sun shone out of a blue sky. Birds with beaks of jasper sang on tall, columned trees, and angels flew upwards, echoing their song. Patrick did not have
to ask what city it was the pilgrims had come to. He had seen numerous Byzantine representations of Jerusalem.
But none quite like this. In a complex series of paintings along the front wall of the city, the fresco he had seen in the Palazzo Contarini was repeated and expanded. In the centre, three crosses stood, black and naked, on a deserted hill. On either side, the artist had depicted scenes from the life of Christ: the raising of Lazarus, the expulsion of the demons known as Legion, the cleansing of the Temple. But below the crosses, as before, was a painting of an open tomb. Ten men carried Christ, bound and screaming, into the sepulchre.
Below that, the tomb appeared shut, a great stone rolled against its mouth. And near the entrance to the tomb, another stone had been set up, a sacrificial altar. This was the end of the long pilgrimage through an insane world: one by one, the pilgrims were bringing their children to be sacrificed; one by one, the children were being tied and laid on the stone. And on their left, a figure in a mask was turning a grinding wheel, sharpening long, thin knives.
In the exact centre of the room, beneath the face of the risen Christ, stood a stone altar exactly like the one in the painting, draped with a white cloth stained with blood. On the altar stood a silver candlestick. It had seven branches, elaborately worked by a master craftsman. And its stem was a cross. Seven candles had burned low, dripping thick white wax on the cloth.
‘Patrick, come over here.’ Assefa was in a corner of the room, holding something in his hand.
Patrick joined him. Assefa had discovered a pile of clothing in the corner.
‘Look,’ he said. He held out a scarlet-trimmed soutane and a scarlet biretta. ‘These belonged to a cardinal. They’re quite clean, no dust.’ He bent down and picked up a small object. ‘And here,’ he continued. ‘A cardinal’s ring. It has a coat of arms.’ He passed it to Patrick.
The arms consisted of a broad cardinal’s hat with tassels falling on either side of a shield. In the shield were set a heraldic sun and moon. Patrick had seen the coat of arms before. In Corradini’s book, in the section about the Migliau family.
It took a long time for Patrick to explain about the murdered child discovered in Ireland, the fresco in the Palazzo Contarini, and the dream he had had the night before. Assefa listened in silence, with mounting horror. Corradini’s hints did, in the end, have substance behind them. At some point in the past, the Contarinis and certain other families had practised child sacrifice in Venice. Today, they or their successors still kept the cult alive. The question was why. And what was Passover? And what had the patriarch of Venice been doing in a painted chamber beneath Pietro Contarini’s tomb?
It was beginning to grow dark when they left the church. They found the faint path that led back to their landing-place and hurried to get there before the boatman decided he had had enough. Behind them, the church huddled in the twilight, protecting its secrets.
The old man was nowhere to be seen. Patrick called, but his voice was swallowed up in the silence. No one answered. He looked at his watch: their two hours were not quite up.
‘The bastard’s gone!’
Assefa nodded.
‘So I see. What do we do now?’
Wait until he comes back, I suppose. He’ll be here in the morning, looking for his double payment.’
Assefa wandered down to the water’s edge and looked out at the lagoon, at the dim light fading across miles of empty water. He turned to come back, then stopped and looked at something to his right.
‘Patrick, come here!’
Patrick heard the urgency in Assefa’s voice and hurried to the little beach.
‘Look.’
The old man’s sandolo was there, still beached at the spot to which they had dragged it. They went closer.
Someone had taken a heavy stone and smashed the boat’s light hull in several places.
FORTY-ONE
There was no earth, no sky; no heaven, no hell. Only darkness, only the sound of waves, and once, far in the distance, the horn of a great ship passing in the night.
It was curious, thought Patrick, how easy it had been to beat them in the end. There had been no need for
