That night Jake lay awake, listening to the ambient noise of Italian lives floating through his window. Almost midnight, and children were still out playing. The journalist padded to the window and watched them thwack a football against a wall. A mother emerged from her apartment to shepherd the kids inside and a teenager ambled to his scooter, scorching away downhill. In the window opposite Jake could see a television flickering, half of a man wearing a vest with a beer in his hand. This was still a happy city – despite the Eurozone meltdown, despite all the difficulties Italy faced.
How much Roman blood pumped through their veins? Jake had once read that most Italians have a splice of Arabian in their DNA, testament to the millions of Middle Eastern people sucked into ancient Rome as economic migrants or as slaves. That revelation had been seized on by twentieth-century eugenicists to explain the fall of Rome; yet now Jake found himself drawn towards an equally outlandish conclusion.
Why had this people lost the reins of power? It was the most important question in history, and especially for the West.
What would Augustus make of Italy today? Bankrupt; globally irrelevant; derided for lack of organization and, by Roman standards, worse: for lack of grit. Italy had been superseded by states that were also in the process of being superseded, and Augustus would think the Italians flowery and fey. Cultured, yes, but still to be sneered at. As Rome once sneered at the flowery Greeks.
Jake rinsed out his cafetière and watched the suds swirl anticlockwise around the basin. Was the dance of each dot pre-ordained? How could any intelligence keep track of so many multitudes? Anyway, wasn’t that what the rules of physics were for: controlling the path of earth and the planets and each of these thousands of dots in their ballet? But how were the laws of physics chosen? And if you knew those laws, if you had a big enough calculator …
Jake rested his head on the sink – you could go mad thinking about this stuff. He wondered whether Jenny was asleep, smiled to think of her lying a few feet away in the neighbouring room. Then he stopped smiling and raised his eyebrows, impressed anew at her leap of intuition.
Chapter LXVIII: An Allusion to the Phoenix.
We cannot compare Constantine with that bird of Egypt which dies, and rising from its own ashes soars aloft with new life. Rather he did resemble his saviour, who, as sown corn multiplied from a single grain, yielded abundant increase through the blessing of God. A coin was struck. On one side appeared the figure of our blessed prince, with the head veiled. The reverse exhibited him as a charioteer drawn by four horses, a hand stretched downward from above to receive him up to heaven.
Was it not, Jenny had suggested, about Tages? A saviour who had himself risen from the ground? Did a charioteer with four horses not allude to the plough that had disturbed him?
Sown corn multiplied from a single grain.
And Eusebius described a hand stretching downward to pull the saviour up to heaven – as a ploughman had yanked Tages from the ground. The more Jake considered it, the more it made sense. Eusebius hid the final inscription in the most fitting place of all: the tomb of the child who had taught humans the proper discourse between Gods and men.
Jake could not sleep. His mind whirred over the day and with dismay he realized he believed every word Dr Nesta had said. The scientist’s theories explained not only everything that had happened during the last few weeks, but history itself. Something had happened in 800 BC. The Book of Thunder had been appropriated by Rome. And with that advantage, a provincial town had become a superpower. And the results were all around him still – in law, in language, in literature and democracy, in aesthetics and architecture, a culture handed faithfully down to the modern age across twenty centuries. Not just in this city; not just on this continent; across the world. Jake saw then how – after a hiatus between the collapse of Rome and the Renaissance – western culture had become humanity’s culture. Everywhere doing well, at least. Western transport, Western medicine, Western industry and banking and communications: the toolkit had been adopted wholesale almost as far you might travel.
Yet Europe was in trouble. America stagnated. Meanwhile China and India raced to catch up, a host of other nations on their heels. The rest of the world had identified what made the West great after the kick-start of the Disciplina Etrusca, and it had copied the lot.
Jake glanced at the minibar; he was never going to get to sleep at this rate. He crossed the room in three strides and flung open the fridge so that a corridor of light bathed the floor. With trembling hands he selected a miniature Scotch and fiddled off the lid.
*
When Jake slept at last he dreamed of it again. He was standing on a lunar landscape, staring into space, his arms flung behind him and fists clenched. A wave of luminosity crashed over him and he bathed in it: ions, particles, starlight, energy. The stream of light was running straight through him; he looked at his torso and realized that was made of light too.
The incantation, the drumbeat, that devil tongue.
With each verse the radiance grew in intensity until Jake was staggering through a world comprised only of light. And then he saw the light was in fact a grid of astonishing intricacy. He could stare at each passing electron and see how it linked to every other electron in existence: all pulsing and swelling, singing to one another. Suddenly he was far above, looking at the plane of the known universe from the outside. The grid swelled into a spike, as if a drop of water had landed in the celestial pond. The spike was stretching, getting taller and thinner, and Jake realized the universe had flipped upside down and he was looking up at it: a stalactite the size of billions of Milky Ways, reaching down to touch him. But it was losing the smooth curves of its form, becoming jagged. And the beat had changed too – it was no longer the bang of a drum. It had evolved into a different rhythm: tramp, tramp, tramp.
Jackboots.
Jake knew then this grid was not godly but capricious, it delighted in playing with the dreams of mortals to appease the boredom of its intelligence. Still the spike lengthened, became crooked, craning towards him.
Zap! Crack!
Lightning disgorged from its tip and blasted him through the forehead.
Jake awoke with a cry. His hand shot to his head. He was panting, shaking compulsively, his sheets were drenched in sweat. The darkness of the dream was like nothing he had ever known.
Jake stumbled out of bed and leaned on the windowsill. A strip of gold was spreading across the horizon. A new dawn. He knew then what he had to do – why he had been put upon this earth, no less.
He had to find the last inscription.
And destroy it.