Evolution

The Scythian turned and surveyed the rows of heaped-up residential buildings. He murmured, and Papak translated. 'How strange that you people choose to live in cliffs, like gulls.' Athalaric had heard the contempt in the Scythian’s voice.

When they returned to their villa Athalaric found that the purse he carried around his waist had been neatly slit open and emptied. He was angry, with himself as much as the thief — how was he supposed to be looking after Honorius if he couldn’t even watch over his own purse? — but he knew he should be grateful that the invisible bandit had not slit open his belly in the process and robbed him of his life as well.

The next day Honorius said he would take the party out into the country, to what he called the Museum of Augustus. So they piled into carts and went clattering over metaled but overgrown roads, out through the farms that crowded around the city.

They came to what must once have been an exclusive, expensive small town. An adobe wall contained a handful of villas and a cluster of meaner dwellings that had housed slaves. The place was obviously abandoned. The outer wall had been broken down, the buildings burned out and looted.

Honorius, with a scrawled map in his hand, led them into the complex, muttering, turning the map this way and that.

A thick layer of vegetation had broken through the mosaics and floor tiles, and ivy clung to fire-cracked walls. There must have been agony here, Athalaric thought, when the strength of the thousand-year empire had failed at last and its protection was lost. But the presence of the new vegetation in the midst of decay was oddly reassuring. It was even comforting to imagine that after another few centuries, as the green returned, nothing would be left of this place but a few hummocks in the ground, and oddly shaped stones that might break an unwary farmer’s plow.

Honorius brought them to a small building at the center of the complex. It might once have been a temple, but it was as burned out and ruined as the rest. The porters had to haul aside a tangle of vines and ivy. Honorius rummaged over the ground. At last, with a cry of triumph, he retrieved a bone, a great scapula the size of a dinner plate. 'I knew it! The barbarians took the petty gold, the shiny silver, but they knew nothing of the true treasures here.'

At the sight of Honorius’s spectacular find, the others began to root in the dirt and vegetation with the enthusiasm of prospectors. Even the doltish porters seemed fired by intellectual curiosity, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Soon they were all unearthing huge bones, tusks, even misshapen skulls. It was an extraordinarily exciting moment.

Honorius was saying, 'This was once a bone museum, established by Emperor Augustus himself! The biographer Suetonius tells us that it was first set up on the island of Capri. In later times one of Augustus’s successors imported the best of the pieces here. Some of the bones have crumbled away — look at this one — they are clearly very ancient, and have been subject to grievous misuse.'

Now Honorius found a heavy slab of red sandstone, with startling white objects embedded within it. It was the size of a coffin lid and much too heavy for him, and the porters had to help him raise it. 'Now, sir Scythian. No doubt you will recognize this handsome fellow.'

The Scythian smiled. Athalaric and the others crowded around to see.

The white objects, suspended in the red matrix, were bones: the skeletal remains of a creature embedded in the rock. The creature must have been as long in its body as Athalaric was tall. It had big hind limbs, clearly visible ribs suspended from its spine, and short forearms, folded before its chest. Its tail was long, something like a crocodile’s, Athalaric thought. But its most surprising feature was its head. The skull was massive, with a great hollow crest of bone, and a huge, powerful jaw hinged under what looked like a bird’s beak. Two empty eyes stared out of time.

Honorius was watching him, rheumy eyes glittering. 'Well, Athalaric?'

'I have never seen such a thing before,' Athalaric breathed. 'But—'

'But you know what it is.'

It must be a griffin: the legendary monsters of the eastern deserts, four-footed, and yet with a head like a great bird’s. The images of griffins had permeated paintings and sculpture for a thousand years.

Now the Scythian began to talk, rapidly, fluently, and Papak scrambled to keep up his translation. 'He says that his father, and his father before him, prospected the great deserts to the east for the gold that washes down from the mountains. And the griffins guard the gold. He has seen their bones everywhere, peering out of the rocks, just like this.'

'Just as Herodotus described,' Honorius said.

Athalaric said, 'Ask him if he has seen one alive.'

'No,' the Scythian said through Papak, 'but he has seen their eggs many times. Like birds they lay their eggs in nests, but on the ground.'

Athalaric murmured, 'How did the beast get into the rock?'

Honorius smiled. 'Remember Prometheus.'

'Prometheus?'

'To punish him for bringing fire to humans, the old gods chained Prometheus to a mountain in the eastern deserts — a place guarded by mute griffins, as it happens. Aeschylus tells us how landslides and rain buried his body, where it was trapped for long ages until the wearing of the rock returned it to the light. Here is a Promethean beast, Athalaric!'

On they talked, rummaging among the bones. They were all strange, gigantic, distorted, unrecognizable. Most of these remains were actually of rhinos, giraffes, elephants, lions, and chalicotheres, the huge mammals of the Pleistocene brought to light by the tectonic churning of this place, where Africa drove slowly north into Eurasia. As in Australia, as all over the world, so here; people had even forgotten what they had lost, and only distorted trace memories of these giants remained.

And as the men argued and pried at the fossil, the skull of the protoceratops — a dinosaur trapped in a sandstorm only a few centuries before the birth of Purga — peered out with the sightless calm of eternity.

'…These are accounts written down by Hesiod and Homer and many others, but handed down by generations of storytellers before them.

'Long before the existence of modern humans, the Earth was empty. But the primordial ground birthed a series of Titans. The Titans were like men, but huge. Prometheus was one of them. Kronos led his sibling Titans to slay their father, Uranos. But his blood produced the next generation, the Giants. In those days, not long after the origin of life itself, there was much chaos in the blood, and generations of giants and monsters proliferated.'

They sat in the half-ruined atrium of the rented villa. The air had remained hot and still as the evening had drawn on, but the wine, the hum of the insects, and the luxuriant, unlikely greenery draped around the atrium made this place somehow welcoming.

And in this decayed place, over glass after glass of wine, Honorius tried to persuade the man from the desert that he must travel with him much further: back across the wreckage of the empire, all the way west to the fringe of the world ocean itself. And so he told him stories of the birth and death of gods.

Another generation of life had passed, and more new forms evolved. The Titans Kronos and Rhea gave birth to the future gods of Olympus, the Romans’ Jupiter among them. Eventually Jupiter led the new, human-form gods against a coalition of the older Titans, Giants, and monsters. It was a war for the supremacy of the cosmos itself.

'The land was shattered,' Honorius whispered. 'Islands emerged from the deep. Mountains fell into the sea. Rivers ran dry, or changed course, flooding the land. And the bones of the monsters were buried where they fell.

'Now,' Honorius went on, 'the natural philosophers have always countered the myths — they seek natural causes that conform to natural laws — and perhaps they are right to do so. But sometimes they go too far. Aristotle holds that creatures always breed true, that the species of life are fixed for all time. Let him explain the giants’ bones we dig out of the ground! Aristotle must never have seen a bone in his life! The thing embedded in the rock in the museum may or may not be a griffin. But is it not clear the bones are old! How long can it take for sand to turn to rock? What is that great slab but evidence of different times in the past?

'Look beyond the stories. Listen to the essence of what the myths tell us: that the Earth was populated by different creatures in the past — species that sometimes bred true, and sometimes produced hybrids and monsters radically different from their parents. Just as the bones show! Whatever the precise facts, is it not clear that the myths hold truth, for they are the product of a thousand years of study of the Earth, and contemplation of its meaning. And yet, and yet—'

Athalaric laid a hand on his friend’s arm. 'Calm yourself, Honorius. You are speaking well. There is no need to shout.'

Honorius, trembling with his passion, said, 'I contend we cannot ignore the myths. Perhaps they are memories, the best memories we have, of the great cataclysms and extraordinary times of the past, witnessed by men who might have comprehended little of what they saw, men who might have been only half men themselves.' He caught Athalaric’s frown. 'Yes, half men!' Honorius produced the skull that the Scythian had given to him, with its human face and apelike cranium. 'A human, but not a human,' he murmured. 'It is the greatest mystery of all. What came before us? What can answer such a question? What but the bones? Sir Scythian, you told me that this skullcap comes from the east.'

Papak translated. 'The Scythian cannot say where it originated. It passed through many hands, traveling west, until it reached you.'

'And with each transaction,' Athalaric murmured almost genially, 'no doubt the price increased.'

Papak raised his thin eyebrows at that. 'It is said that in the land of the people with the pale skin and narrow eyes, far to the east, such bones are commonplace. The bones are ground up for medicine and charms, and to make the fields rich.'

Honorius leaned forward. 'So in the east we now know that there once lived a race of men of human form but of small brain. Animal men.' His voice was trembling. 'And what if I were to tell you that in the furthest west, at the edge of the world, there was once another race of pre-men — men with bodies like bears and brows like centurions’ helmets?'

Athalaric was stunned; Honorius had told him nothing of this.

The Scythian began to talk. His smooth vowels and subdued consonants sounded like a song, barely perturbed by Papak’s clumsy translations, a song from the desert that soared up into the humid Italian night.

'He says there were once many kinds of people. They are all gone now, these people, but in the deserts and the mountains they linger on in stories and songs. We have forgotten, he says. Once the world was full of different men, different animals. We have forgotten.'

'Yes!' Honorius cried, and he suddenly stood up, flushed. 'Yes, yes! We have forgotten almost everything, save only distorted traces preserved in myth. It is a tragedy, an agony of loneliness. Why, you and I, sir Scythian, have almost forgotten how to talk to each other. And yet you understand, as I do, that we float, like sailors on a raft, over a great sea of undiscovered time. Come with me — I must show you the bones I have found — oh, come with me!'

III

Athalaric and Honorius came from Burdigala, a city of the thirty-year-old Gothic kingdom that now spanned much of what had once been the Roman provinces of Gaul and Spain. To get home, they were forced to travel back through the patchwork of territories which had emerged as Roman dominion had broken down across western Europe.

The relationship between Rome and the clamoring German tribes of the north had long been problematic, as the Germans pressed down hard on the old empire’s long, vulnerable northern border. For centuries some Germans had been used as mercenaries by the empire, and at last whole tribes had been allowed to settle inside the empire on the understanding that they fought as allies against common enemies beyond the border. So the empire had become a kind of shell, inhabited and controlled not by Romans but by the more vigorous Germans, Goths, and Vandals.

As the pressure on the border increased — an indirect result of the mighty expansion of the Huns out of Asia — the last elements of Roman control had melted away. The governors and their