Jake awoke to find himself lying on grass – a moment of confusion. Further down the slope a campfire made a smudge against the night and as he watched a swarm of embers took wing like disturbed fireflies. There were voices around the flames; he sensed electricity in the air. Suddenly it made sense: he was at Glastonbury. Jake felt a rush of gladness and ran to join in.
Only this wasn’t Glastonbury, he saw that now. There was no dance music, no hiss and rush as balloons inflated with laughing gas. He couldn’t place the language being spoken around the fire. Yet it was familiar somehow. A spurt of flame illuminated thatched huts. Geese pecked in the dirt. What was this place?
A young woman beckoned him to sit. She was flaxen-haired and pretty, but there was something primeval about her face – the flat cheekbones, the heavy brow. She handed him a hollow ostrich egg and produced a jug of silver. The lines of the vessel were timeless, it could have been purchased from a Chelsea designer. But then he saw the archaic touch: a ram’s head where handle joined rim. The red wine she poured him tasted tannic and astringent.
An old man wearing robes of red and yellow tartan approached the flames – his palms were open to the skies and he wore a hat shaped like an inverted funnel. Jake had seen one of these caps in Britton’s office, on a statue that belonged in a museum.
Now he knew where he was. This was Etruria. It was a very long time ago. And he was looking at a fulguriator.
At first the lightning priest spoke softly. But there was a cadence to his voice, a rhythm. No, a beat, that better described it: a drumbeat that grew with intensity. The woman poured a slick of wine onto the fire, which sizzled in response. Next a goat was led forward. It seemed ignorant of its fate, willing even, and the priest seized it by the chin. Yet it didn’t shock Jake when iron flashed in the flame, nor was he repulsed at the spilling of blood onto earth. The goat’s legs surrendered, the animal pulled down by gravity to rejoin its mother element. Still the old man’s words unfolded themselves, and the drumbeat of his tongue echoed about the hillside.
Jake could understand him.
He heard the priest invoke Tages, the child who had risen from beneath a plough to reveal the proper discourse between Gods and men. He felt the supplication to the pitiless consentes, advisers of the supreme Tin. He absorbed the appeal to dii novensiles, Tin’s consorts, casters of lightning. And he trembled at the final entreaty to Tin himself, whom Eusebius had called the Great All-Seeing Eye.
At Tin’s name the villagers cast themselves to earth. The clouds tumbled over each other, gathering their strength, and there was the rumble of thunder on the north-west horizon. At this a moaning arose on the hillside – the villagers pulled clods of grass from the earth, clawed at their cheeks. Still the priest continued his exhortation, still the drumbeat rose, and the thunder began to circle them in a dark halo. The beat was in Jake’s ears, in his blood, it pounded through his heart and the air and the earth.
The lightning struck.
A rod of energy, smashing through the nearest hut, a column of light that lanced from the heavens to earth. For two seconds the beam held its form. It shrivelled eyes, blasted eardrums, the villagers’ faces shone a ghastly white. Yet it was wondrous and no one could look away.
The chain of supercharged ions was broken. The hut burst into flames. The valley was quiet again, air filmy with heat. A few villagers whimpered; a baby started crying. A dog which had been pressed into the earth judged the time was right to flee and bolted down the hillside.
The fulguriator spoke once more, and at last Jake realized what he was witnessing. This was the foretelling of the end of the Etruscan kingdoms. This was the announcement of the always-appointed date, when the Etruscan age would cease, when the baton of power would be passed to a new and brighter people. This was the prophecy of the turning of the wheel.
And the war of civilizations would go on.
*
Jake awoke, gasping for breath. For the second time he was disorientated. Was he still asleep? A dream within a dream? He sat up to find himself on a sofa in a pay-by-the-hour hotel room. His belly was covered in sweat. A sleeping figure lay in the single bed, and slowly it came back to him. The inscription in the Roman Cistern. The woman with the ginger hair. He shook his head like a dog casting off water, trying to rid himself of the dream – the despair of its climax was all-pervasive. Something Florence had said about Etruscan faith came back to him.
A dark religion. Before the Gods man was a complete non-entity, his fate utterly in their hands.
Jake shook his head again – bewildered at the power of his own imagination – when his phone began to ring.
London calling.