Secrets of the Dead

‘It is an ancient city.’ Lusetti shrugged. ‘If anyone digs under his basement, he will find caves, old quarries, lost tunnels. Not so long ago, they found a completely unknown catacomb under Via Latina.’

With Lusetti leading the way, they went down into the darkness.

Constantinople – June 337

‘Let me tell you some things about the dark places of this world.’

In the chamber beneath Constantine’s mausoleum, the darkness is absolute. My captors have pushed me down on to a stone bench against the wall – not so as to hurt me, but not gently either. They’ve let go my hands, though I can sense them hovering just out of reach, ready to pounce if I try to escape.

Where would I go? What would I say?

The only sense I have in that room is my ears. I listen to Porfyrius’s story.

‘Thirty years ago, during the persecutions, Symmachus sent me on a mission to Caesarea Palaestina. For a zealot like me, it was a career-making assignment: the heartland of the Christian religion.

‘I knew what to do. I commandeered a basement, not unlike this, and turned it into a dungeon. I was scrupulous in chasing down every rumour of a magistrate who refused to sacrifice, or a wife who didn’t emerge from her house on a Sunday.

‘One day, in winter, my agents heard rumours of a Christian hiding in a certain merchant’s house. They searched it and found nothing; then they noticed he didn’t have the heating on. They stoked up the fire and waited. Soon enough, they heard noises from the hippocaust under the floor where the Christian was hiding. What they hadn’t realised was that he had no intention of coming out. When they opened the hatch, they found him trying to burn a manuscript on the very fire they’d set. Naturally, they were curious. They seized the man and the manuscript and brought them both to me.

‘The man told me nothing. I tried every tool in my arsenal and just played into his hands. All he wanted was martyrdom. But the manuscript …’ Porfyrius sighs, the sound of a great weight settling. ‘The manuscript told an extraordinary tale. You know that the Christian god Jesus Christ was crucified during the reign of Tiberius Augustus?’

I do. One of Constantine’s early reforms was to outlaw crucifixion as a punishment, because it offended him.

‘When Christ came down from the Cross, his followers kept the wood, because they couldn’t bear to let him go. When he rose again from the dead, they realised it had a power beyond any man – the weapon that killed a god. They kept it in a secret place that only a tiny circle knew, down eleven generations. The manuscript listed them all. Read carefully, it was easy to guess where they’d hidden it.’

‘You found it?’

‘Not then. My efforts hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Symmachus brought me back to Nicomedia. With Christians purged from every imperial office, there were plenty of opportunities for promotion. But I never forgot. Years later, in exile, I wondered if it might be true – if I could use it to negotiate my return to Rome. I sent a batch of poems to Constantine, hoping to impress him, but he rebuffed me. Then I heard what had happened to Crispus.’

Out in the darkness something stirs, like a monster from the old world chained up in its cave.

‘The manuscript told a legend that the early Christians attached to the Cross – that on the day when Christ was crucified the blood he shed seeped into the wood and transformed it. From then on, they said, it had the power to raise men from the dead.’

It’s such an absurd thing to say I actually burst out laughing. A stony silence reproaches me from the shadows. Porfyrius is deadly serious.

‘I guessed that the Dowager Empress Helena would have taken the death of her grandson badly. I wrote to her, hinting at what I knew. She was a pious woman, shattered by grief: she was ready enough to believe. She recalled me, heard what I had to say and set out at once for Palestine.’

This bit I know. The streets of Rome had barely been swept clean from the vicennalia celebrations before Helena took her trip to Jerusalem. At the time, we all assumed she was undertaking some sort of ritual purification for what had happened to Crispus, or that she wanted to get as far away from Constantine as possible. She returned a year later and died soon after.

‘She found it,’ Porfyrius says abruptly. ‘She followed the clues I gave her, and she found the old Cross. She brought it back to Rome. By then, thanks to her patronage, I was a praetor of the city – soon to be Prefect. I oversaw the estate at Duas Lauros.’ A touch of his old, crooked humour surfaces in his voice. ‘I think you might have been there, once.’

Once. June, that doomed vicennalia year. Constantine going through the motions of the vicennalia ritual like a statue, while a hundred thousand blank-faced Romans watched and cheered and pretended they’d never heard of Crispus. And late one night, when Constantine was drunk, I remember riding three miles out of Rome down the Via Casilina, to the old cemetery where Constantine had built his mausoleum. With me came two trusted guards from the Schola, and a long coffin we’d carried all the way from Pula. I remember the shadow of that vast rotunda over the old gravestones; the squeak of the lock and the slap of our feet as we went down the stairs. I remember the lamps like eyes in the walls, the deep shadows they cast down the endless tunnels. I remember the slam of the lid as we closed the sarcophagus in the deepest, furthest part of the catacomb; the noise echoing around the small chamber, knocking loose grit off the ceiling, and the flash of terror that I would be buried alive with the man I murdered. I remember the tears, wet on my face as I kissed his coffin and murmured my final farewell.

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ The memories are throttling me. My voice barely comes out as a croak.

‘So you’ll understand.’

A light flares in the darkness. One of the men around me has touched a glow-worm to a lamp. For a moment, my eyes can’t see anything. As they adapt, I see brick vaults above my head; a circle of men standing around me. And a little distance away, hanging back as if ashamed of something, the face that’s haunted my nightmares for ten years.

I stare. My heart shatters at the impossibility of it.

I’m looking at a dead man.