‘Go away, scum,’ Antonius shouted down at them before closing the window.
‘Who are they?’ Balbilus asked him.
‘I don’t know, master.’
‘Find out.’
Balbilus hurried down the stairs and found Vibius drinking wine in the crowded courtyard.
‘You were followed,’ Balbilus growled at him.
‘So I hear,’ he answered coolly. ‘I told you we should have waited until nightfall.’
‘Maybe so. Now what do we do?’
Vibius finished his drink, tossed the goblet into the reflecting pool and unsheathed his sword.
‘What good will that do against a mob?’ Balbilus asked.
‘While they’re chasing after me, take everyone down to the columbarium. It’s your only hope. They may burn the villa but they’ll leave as soon as their stomachs start growling. Get word to Nero. Go to Antium. You’ll think of something. I’ll kill as many of them as I can.’
There were more shouts from the garden and a torch flew through one of the reception room windows. A young Lemures quickly plucked it from the floor and doused it in the pool.
In the garden Peter and Cornelius had arrived. ‘Cease your violence!’ Peter shouted at the torch-thrower. ‘Know you whether there are innocents inside?’
Vibius waved his sword and ran out a side door. Roaring and swearing fiercely at the assembled throng he fled toward the Via Appia. The younger Christian men were upon him like dogs on a hare.
A strong young Christian caught up with Vibius and tackled him from behind. The two men grappled fiercely on the ground for a few seconds. At first contact, Vibius had dropped his sword but he managed to get his hands around the young fellow’s neck and pressed his thumbs hard against his windpipe. Gasping, the man pushed Vibius away with a foot to the chest. As they separated, a chain around the man’s neck broke off in Vibius’s hand.
Vibius cast it away and grabbed the nearby sword. Rising to one knee, he sliced the Christian’s belly open in a deft move, spilling coils of guts. On his feet again, Vibius fled toward the Appian Way, the men in hot pursuit.
‘Quickly!’ Balbilus yelled at the Lemures. ‘To the columbarium! Follow me!’
They streamed from the villa through his fruit grove and entered the rectangular mausoleum with its barrel- vaulted roof. Antonius held the trapdoor open until his master and all his guests had descended the narrow stairs. Then he pushed a small altar over the trapdoor to conceal it and ran toward the grove, hurdling over the man with spilled guts. Something he saw on the ground caused him to stop: a silver medallion attached to a broken silver chain. He picked it up, swore an oath and ran back to the columbarium.
Satisfied that the coast was still clear, Antonius slid the altar aside and banged on the trapdoor.
‘Master, it is Antonius! I know who they are! Open quickly!’
Balbilus did so and looked up the gloomy shaft. Antonius dropped the medallion into his hands, closed the trapdoor and once again concealed it with the altar. In the grove he stopped under a tree, sat down and without a second’s hesitation defiantly slit his own throat.
By the light of a smoky oil lamp Balbilus examined the pendant.
The chi-rho monogram.
It was the Christians!
A hundred Lemures crammed into the columbarium, fighting for every centimeter of floor space.
Balbilus stood under his fresco of astrological signs and demanded quiet. A small child cried. He threatened to kill her if someone didn’t shut her up.
‘Hear me,’ he hissed. ‘We need only to survive the night. In the morning we’ll find sanctuary elsewhere. We’re stronger than they are. We’re better than they are.’
Above ground one of the Christians had seen Antonius running away from the mausoleum. He found him still twitching and warm, blood pouring from his neck. Soon the Christian man was running to find Cornelius and Peter. ‘Come!’ the man insisted. ‘You must see this!’
When they stood over Antonius’s corpse, the man pulled down the slave’s breeches.
‘Dear Lord!’ Cornelius cried.
Peter steadied himself with an outstretched arm against the trunk of a tree.
When the young Christian men returned to the villa, their fists and sandals stained with Vibius’s blood, they found Peter by the tree. One of them had a knife in one hand – and something else in the other. He showed it to the Apostle. It was a bloodstained pink length of tail.
‘There is no denying it,’ Peter said, shaken. ‘They are not ghosts. They are real. What must we do when we find true evil – evil such as can only be the work of the Devil himself – in our midst?’ he asked.
‘We must purge it,’ Cornelius said.
‘There is no other answer,’ Peter whispered. Then he raised his voice. ‘In the name of Almighty Christ you may set the torch and send these devils back to Hell.’
Balbilus looked to the dark ceiling and heard the muffled shouts of the Christian marauders and the sound of their stamping feet.
The Lemures squatted in front of him, packed tight like salted fish in a barrel: the men stoic, the women angry, the children fidgety. Above their heads, the loculi in the walls were full of ash-filled urns and the skeletal remains of their recent ancestors. The pungent smell of rot filled their nostrils.
Suddenly the muffled shouting above their heads stopped and all grew quiet.
Balbilus strained and listened.
He heard the voice of Peter but couldn’t make out the words.
Balbilus heard a faint whooshing sound and felt his ears pop as a roaring fire took hold above and sucked some of the air out of the chamber.
He felt his skin tingle as the temperature in the vault crept higher by the minute.
After a long while he heard a thunderous rumble when the vaulted roof crashed down onto the mausoleum floor.
More time passed and he saw the oil lamps sputter out one by one in the depleted air. When the last one died they were in complete darkness.
And in that darkness he heard the gasps and wheezes of a hundred men, women and children.
He was the strongest and the last to go. Sinking to his knees in the blackness and angrily clutching the chi- rho pendant so hard that it made his hand bleed, his final emotion was a shuddering rage so great and hot that it seemed to incinerate his brain.
It would be weeks before the soil of Rome was cool underfoot but Nero swiftly set about bringing some cheer to his beleaguered citizens.
His soldiers rounded up every Christian who had survived the fire and had been foolish enough not to flee. There were few public spaces left to celebrate their mortification properly so Nero invited Rome’s refugees to the gardens of his only untouched estate, across the Tiber.
There, at his personal racetrack, as hungry citizens feasted on fresh bread, Nero made a grand entrance dressed as a charioteer astride a golden quadria. To a blare of trumpets Peter the Apostle was dragged onto the track. He’d been arrested along with the priest Cornelius and several followers at a Christian house near the Pincian Hill. When the soldiers arrived Peter had smiled at them as if he were welcoming old friends.
Pater was hauled onto a high wooden platform at the center of the racetrack for all to see and Tigellinus loudly proclaimed him to be the ringleader of the plot to destroy Rome. When he finished his speech he sat beside Nero in the royal stands and they watched together as the Praetorians began their work with hammer and spikes.
‘We have it on good authority that this man Peter and his mob were the ones who trapped Balbilus and the others,’ he told Nero.
‘My hate for them was already great,’ Nero said through clenched teeth. ‘Now it is a thousand times greater. They killed my great astrologer and have taken from us the cream of the Lemures. Members of their Church will forever be our foremost enemies. Kill them. Crush them. Damn them to eternity.’
