of their former magnificence.
‘Rome built this,’ said Maria. ‘The old Rome that rose by the river Tiber in Italia.’
‘But you are the Romans.’
‘We are the new Romans.’
The ruins of the towers lay in huge ashlar blocks among which berries and flowers had begun to grow. Here and there were fragments of carved human forms, a muscular leg, an arm and shoulder, a partial head covered with short curly hair; it was as if here the old gods had waged their last battle, their bodies now frozen amid the titanic wreckage of that ultimate struggle. ‘The old Romans,’ asked Haraldr, ‘what happened to them?’
Maria stooped to caress the ancient stone face of a beautiful young man, a fragment so curiously lifelike that it seemed as if the delicately parted marble lips might take in air and restore a blush to the weathered cheeks. ‘Travellers who have visited the old Rome make the cross of Christ the King when they talk of it, so vast is that tomb, as vast as the Queen of Cities, yet peopled only by spirits and demons and slinking dogs. All like this. Stade after endless stade, all like this. A vast sepulchre. So sad. To think of them . . .’ Maria touched the stone youth’s lips. ‘They were flesh as we are, soft lips . . . dust. All to dust.’ She drew back as if the lips had burned her fingers, or, perhaps, as if they had stirred to life.
She took his arm now, curling her elegant, statue-smooth fingers just above his elbow and pulling him next to her so that her silk flank swished against his. Haraldr was stirred and yet the awe, the holiness of the place, overwhelmed him. He looked up at a wall covered with carvings of young men; naked athletes, not armoured warriors. Maria led him beneath an arch that pierced the wall and descended a dozen steps into a brilliant field of light. Haraldr gasped; what was this place? It was a vast, long field of unkempt grass and shrubs surrounded by row upon row of steps. No, seats, as if for a thing-meeting. But there was room enough here for every man in Norway, it seemed.
‘The stadium,’ said Maria. ‘For the games.’
Haraldr shielded his eyes from the glare off the bleached stone seats. ‘What sort of contests?’
‘The ancients called them Olympics, after the mountain on which Zeus dwelt. The man who won here became a god. As one, every citizen of Antioch stood to sing the victor’s name.’ Maria paused. A flight of small black birds descended on a shrub at the end of the field nearest them and chorused noisily. ‘Can you hear the name they are singing?’ she asked wryly, though her scrolled lips had a bitter set.
Maria guided Haraldr around the pathway at the top of the stadium to a row of almost intact, neatly fluted columns. The columns were the entrance to a large, cottage-sized niche carved into the very rock that seemed to embrace the long southern flank of the stadium. Haraldr peered into the gloom behind the sun-warmed columns. In the shadows a huge figure loomed. Haraldr bent for the dagger he had hidden in his boot.
‘You think he lives.’ Maria laughed. Haraldr’s eyes adjusted to the light. He saw a stone man taller than himself, even if the statue were to be taken off the stone pedestal upon which it stood. The figure’s marble arms were coursed with living veins, and every other detail was equally lifelike, even the curl of hair that crowned his manhood. Haraldr was embarrassed.
‘Heracles.’ Maria sighed, as if she was a rapt maiden. ‘He was half man, half god. They say that Apollo and Hermes were fairer. Perhaps. Yet one does not reflect on their beauty in his presence.’ She stepped around an empty basin that stood before the statue and wrapped her fingers about Heracles’s veined marble ankle and softly ran her fingers up to his bulging stone calf. She pressed her cheek to the leg and nuzzled it for a moment, then leaned her head back and looked directly at the demigod’s flaccid, strikingly human organs. Haraldr could not believe her immodesty, but her boldness stirred him far more than downcast eyes and fluttering lashes.
Maria slowly released the demigod and stepped towards Haraldr. Her hips inclined slightly forward, only a thumb’s width from his thighs. She held her hands just above his chest and spread her fingers. For a moment she looked directly at him, her eyes reflections of the brilliant azure sky outside, her lips slightly parted. Her fingers touched his chest like the barest breeze. That was all. She closed her eyes for a moment and stepped away. She looked once again at the towering Heracles and then went into the sun by herself.
‘It is so dark in there,’ she said, taking Haraldr’s arm again. ‘Sometimes in the dark I feel I cannot breathe.’ They entered a shaded arcade roofed with thick ivy. She was quiet for a while. They left the stadium and wandered in a small poplar grove, poking at statuary fragments with their feet. Between the rows of trees, the limestone cliffs fell away to the green-and-gold plain below. The trees that ringed Daphne shimmered in the late- afternoon breeze. Maria’s fingers moved softly against Haraldr’s sleeve. She spoke as if mesmerized. ‘Do you fair-hairs believe in the Apocalypse?’
Haraldr asked Gregory to clarify, but Maria interrupted. ‘The End of Creation.’ She looked out over Daphne, now a mosaic of golden spires and long, misty, smoke-purple shadows. ‘We shall subdue the sons of Hagar, the Emperor shall regain Illyricum, and Egypt shall bring her tribute once more. And he shall set his hand upon the sea and subdue the fair-hair nations.’ Her recitation was dreamlike. ‘Then a base woman will rise up and rule the Romans and there will be conspiracies and slaughter in every house and this impure queen will anger God and He will stretch out His hand and seize His strong scythe and cut the earth from under the city and order the waters to swallow it up. And the waters will crash forth and raise the city spinning to great height, and then cast it down into the abyss.’
Haraldr knew that Maria had sensed his tremor of anxiety. Was she testing him with this reference to an ‘impure queen’?
‘I see I have frightened you,’ Maria said, her voice light. ‘It is such a wicked tale. Do you have one like it?’
Haraldr assumed she had only been playing. ‘Yes. Ragnarok. The Doom of the Gods.’ Haraldr watched Daphne glitter in the lowering sun and felt Odin stir to life. ‘The sun turns black, earth sinks in the waves, the blazing stars are quenched from the sky. Flames leap fierce to scorch the clouds, until Heaven itself is seared to ashes.’ Haraldr lost the skaldic rhythm with the words that followed. ‘And then the wolf, Fenrir, will devour all, even one-eyed Odin the All-Father.’
‘Odin? Is he your fair-hair demon?’
‘He is the god of war, verse and vision. He hung from the tree of infinite roots to seize the mead of verse from the Underworld, and in his palace, called the Valhol, slain warriors raise their swords again, to wait for Ragnarok.’
‘So you do not believe in Christ the King.’
‘I was baptized with the water of all-conquering Christ.’
Now Maria seemed perplexed. ‘So you believe that Christ will rule in the end, after Odin perishes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you believe that you will be spared to enter the New Jerusalem?’ She gathered that he did not understand. ‘You see, when the Empress City has been cast into the abyss, God will allow the fair-hairs to rage forth upon the earth and they will consume blood and flesh and the sun will turn to blood and the moon darken. And then the Antichrist, a serpent in the guise of a man, will arise to battle Christ. After terrible tribulations Christ will cast the Devil and all of the unjust into a lake of fire. And the just shall be brought into a great city of crystal and gold, the new Jerusalem that will descend from heaven.’ Maria seemed to recite from some text. ‘And there shall they dwell in the sight of God, and there shall no longer be night, nor need of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will give them light, and the just shall reign for eternity.’
Haraldr pondered this tale in which the Norsemen played such a menacing role. Was this why the Romans feared the northern nations, even with their God-granted gift of liquid fire? He looked down and saw Maria’s flickering blue challenge. ‘So you believe that we fair-hairs will hasten the rise of Christ’s great foe the Devil Antichrist?’
‘Those are the visions of the prophets.’ Maria paused and reflected, as if she gave partial credence to these visions. ‘What do you think?
Haraldr remembered the words of the Christian skalds at Olaf’s court. ‘We believe that . . . that after Ragnarok, Christ will raise up a hall more fair than the sun, thatched with gold, at a place called Gimle. Perhaps that is this New Jerusalem you speak of. It is said that the gods shall dwell there in innocence and bliss.’
‘How extraordinary! That you fair-hairs would also know of the Holy City of God.’
‘That is not the end of the tale.’ Haraldr felt as if he could see beyond sun-flecked Daphne to the dark border of creation. Maria clutched his arm tightly. Odin spoke, death dark on his own tongue. ‘Now comes the last black dragon flying, the glittering serpent from Nidafell. He is a blackness that will consume all flesh, all life, all light,
