Blood of the Lamb (3 page)

He pulled open the basilica’s heavy door and slipped inside. Shouts and panicked footfalls fell away, replaced by the patient hush of old, worn stone. Traces of incense lingered in the cool air, hardly discernible to most, perhaps, but murmuring to Damiani of desert caravans and exotic Eastern cities. Lately, Spencer had been wanting to travel, to see distant lands and wonders. Damiani had always maintained that Rome was enough to satisfy the soul of any man; but now, for the first time, he felt something of Spencer’s yearning. Yes, he decided: once reunited, he and Spencer would travel, to see miracles and marvels. Perhaps Spencer, though he’d always scoffed at the idea of going west to the young land, might be persuaded to journey to America, to see cities of vigor, of ferment.

Damiani shook his head and grinned.
Fine, Mario. An Atlantic crossing. Perhaps you’d care to find your way out of Rome first?

Three votive candles, evidence of someone’s concern for the next world even as Louis Napoleon’s soldiers tramped the streets of this one, provided the basilica’s only light. No matter; Damiani saw well in the dark, and had spent countless hours in this place. He trotted up the center aisle, knelt, and crossed himself. It was an old habit, one he’d found he could not break. Spencer had accused him of not trying so very hard to break it, of actually enjoying the atavistic nature of the gesture. Well, perhaps.

Rising, he vaulted the altar rail.

There he knelt again. Before him lay Stefano Maderno’s breathtaking, delicate statue of Santa Cecilia, head so oddly turned away from those who looked on her. The executioner’s ax had fallen on Cecilia three times, but her neck had not been severed, and for three days she hadn’t died. A beautiful, terrible thing for a sculptor to depict; made more terrible, and more wondrous, by the model Maderno had used: the remains of the saint herself, uncorrupted when disinterred twelve hundred years after death.

Terrible, wondrous, and to the Noantri, Damiani’s people, a particular and secret astonishment.

For Damiani, it was a bittersweet thing that his chase should end here, at the small, tender work he loved most of all Rome’s glories. From his notebook he tore the leaf, blank but for the five lead letters. He folded the paper and, after a brief pause, slid it deep into a gap at the statue’s base. He reached out when he was done to trace his finger on the thin line across the saint’s marble throat, where her life should have left her but had not. Then he rose, crossed himself again (hearing, in his mind, Spencer’s sigh), and, after a glance about him (even in the dark, he knew the angels, he knew the saints), made his way back up the center aisle.

Opening the groaning church door, Damiani flinched at the way the din of the invaded streets splintered the stillness. Across the courtyard he took a deep breath and pushed through the gate. Here, as before, swarming people, burdened wagons, horses and donkeys being ridden or desperately pulled along. Damiani laughed again, as Spencer’s sardonic voice rang inside his head.
Really, Mario. Such vast drama—is it necessary? Concealed clues, a hunt for treasure—it seems like a great deal of bother.

Oh, Spencer,
Damiani thought, hurrying on the ancient stones (did he hear the snort of warhorses, the in-step tramp of troops?).
Oh, yes, a great deal of bother. But when you find the treasure, when you hold in your hands the document itself, you’ll understand why.
Rash and reckless Damiani, who never planned anything beyond the next line of verse, had hidden the document a year ago. Had first made a copy and sent it out of Rome. Now, this evening, he’d left a note in Spencer’s study at the deserted villa:
Look to your poem.
It was an instruction that would be cryptic to all but Spencer, and with it he was proposing to lead his historian lover in a merry dance. All this should in itself convince anyone of the gravity of his intention.

Except, of course, Spencer would laugh at him in any case, as they sat sipping cognac in the Piedmont. None of the steps Damiani had taken to secure the document would be of the least importance except in the case of his own death. He raced now to render them all useless, for he did not intend to die.

On Via di Santa Cecilia he charged left, toward Via dei Genovesi, the river, his hidden boat, and, if his purse of gold had been of any use, his hidden boatman. He’d reach the mooring well before the arranged time. If the boatman had been seized with fear and had fled? Mario would handle the boat himself. If the boat was gone? He’d jump into the Tiber and swim until he reached a French-free shore. He’d fight his way to the Piedmont, sweep triumphantly into the villa, drink the excellent wine Spencer could be trusted to lay in wherever he found himself, and make poems until his moment came. Then he’d return and retrieve his hidden treasure, and the world would change.

He plowed headlong through the tumult, his ears so full of shouts and his own labored breathing that he didn’t hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves until the horses themselves pranced into Via di Santa Cecilia, practically on top of him.

Damiani pressed into the shadow of an overhanging window. The street’s panic swelled, though most of these people had nothing to fear from the French. Nothing immediate, in any case. Damiani himself was a different matter. He still wore the trousers and rough cotton shirt of Garibaldi’s troops, though he’d prudently thrown aside the officer’s coat he’d so proudly donned the year before. The general himself, seeing Rome was lost, had wisely negotiated a truce and taken his army north. Oudinot’s plans to deliver Garibaldi with Louis Napoleon’s compliments into the hands of the Pope being thus foiled, his troops were now hunting soldiers who had remained in Rome—men like Mario Damiani.

Were hunting, and had found. Shouting, the lead cavalryman reined his horse so hard it reared, and charged forward with his saber raised.

An instant to decide: left? right? Damiani had once assured a friend he was a hard man to kill, and so he was; but to capture would be easier, and especially compassed round, as now, with tons of stone and horseflesh. To his right, down Via dei Genovesi, lay the river, so close he could smell its damp stone channels: but that street was wide enough for horses. Even if he were to successfully bolt, a straining fat poet is no match for a galloping horse. In the dark wall on his left, a slice of deeper darkness: an alley’s opening. It would be more useful if this alley connected to another street, which Damiani, who had walked every public inch of Trastevere (and many of the private inches, too) knew it did not. Still, the horses couldn’t follow. If the cavalrymen dismounted and chased him on foot, perhaps the shadows of the tiny inner piazza would shelter him until they gave up, decided he’d ducked into a doorway, and went away. Fighting foot soldiers, if it came to that, would still be preferable to fighting horses. He exploded out from the wall.

The soldiers, without pause, swung off their horses and swarmed after. Damiani crouched behind the piazza’s absurdly tinkling fountain. The French captain gave an order: one man with him, circling left, two more going right. The rest remounted at the alley’s mouth. One of each stalking pair tested doors while the other watched the shadows. These men might be French fops, but they were no fools and they were closing like pincers. Still, they were only four. Damiani was Blessed with tremendous strength, in the way of his people, and it was not unreasonable that he could defeat four Frenchmen. But then what? Into the street again, to where the rest of the troop waited? Diving under the horses’ bellies to escape?

That, he thought as the first to see him shouted, was a question for later.

They rushed him; he leapt back from the fountain to a recessed doorway. Let them come at him from the front. Let them come.

They came. The captain first, a privilege of rank. Ducking the saber-swinging arm, Damiani rammed his shoulder into the man, throwing him into the soldier behind. For a moment all movement stopped. Any plan they’d had to attack him singly, as gentlemen would, was abandoned now that they saw his strength; and he’d just made a fool of their captain. All four charged in a gale of shouts and swords. He felt the sting of a blade on his wrist, then a fiery slice down the length of his thigh. Meaningless in the end but distracting in the moment, as pain always was. Two soldiers tackled him, knocking out his breath, throwing him down. He shoved a hand up under one man’s sweaty chin, pushed and pushed, straining until suddenly the man tumbled off; but the other was still pummeling him and two more dove down hard. Damiani’s head rang. He drew a great breath and with a roar and a thrashing of arms, he erupted. Jumping to his feet, he hurled one man against the wall, punched another squarely on his thin French mustache. But still they came, fists and sabers sweeping the night air.

Mario,
Damiani thought,
this may not turn out as well for you as you hoped.
He ducked a blade that chipped the doorpost where his head had just been, then twisted his arm to throw off a hand clamping his wrist. That hand, though, did not yield. Its strength was as great as his, and it yanked him left, then backwards. Damiani braced to slam the wall. Instead he fell flat on his back in darkness. An urgent voice whispered, “Come!” and a door was slammed and barred against angry French pounding. Damiani jumped up and ran, following a shadow down a dark passage, followed himself by a tall shadow behind.

The thumps and angry cries faded as Damiani and his rescuers—his own people, he now knew—emerged into another alley. A horn sounded, the French patrol raising the alarm. “They will be everywhere now,” the man behind Damiani said, a calm dark voice Damiani simultaneously recognized and was astounded to hear. “We cannot risk the streets. Filippo, that door. Ahead, on your left.” The lock would not give, but Filippo—Filippo Croce, it must be; he was the other man’s personal secretary—threw his shoulder against it twice. The wood shrieked as it tore. A nail plinked on the cobblestones. The door, complaining, opened, and the three stepped through.

The light in the room was low but the aroma was unmistakable. Before Filippo lit a torch, Damiani, hands on knees as he drew breath, knew they had entered a stable. Dancing shadows showed him to be correct. The smells of dung and hay thickened the air, but the place was silent: the horses were all in the North, under the backsides of Garibaldi’s troops.

“Thank you,” Damiani panted, still bent over. He rubbed the wound on his leg, painful but not as deep as he’d thought. “How did you find me? Or am I just lucky beyond belief?”

The tall man shook his head. In his deep, slow voice, he said, “We have been searching for you, Mario. Do I have to tell you why?”

A jolt caused Damiani’s heart to skip. Heat suffusing his skin, he straightened slowly. After a moment he replied, “No, Lord.”

“Then tell me where the document is hidden.”

Another moment; another breath. In a voice at once trembling and sure, Damiani said again, “No, Lord.”

“Mario.” A shake of the dark head. “I understand your cause. I know you believe I do not, but I do. It is not time. The time will come, but it is not come yet.”

“Lord.” Damiani steadied his voice. “My Lord, the time will not ‘come.’ In all these years it has not yet come. We must make it come.”

“We cannot. To everything there is a season.”

Damiani blinked. “You’d quote Scripture to me? On this question?”

“And why not? Your argument, as I understand it, is with the papacy, not the Church.”

“If only the papacy allowed for the distinction!”

All three froze as rushing footsteps and jangling swordbelts in the next street told them the French were near.

The tall man said, “We cannot debate now. You must give me the Church’s copy of the Concordat that you have stolen. You will come to understand when you have lived as long as I have.”

“It is precisely those years that blind you to the chance these times create! The world has changed. It will continue to change. Reason and scientific thought gain the upper hand. We no longer need the Church!”

“You are wrong, Mario.” A slight nod signaled Filippo; Damiani saw it, but not in time. Together the two threw themselves on him, and though he was strong, they were stronger. He kicked and heaved, but heard a clanking, felt a constriction, found his arms and chest bound in iron. Filippo wound the chain tight and fastened it about a post. Trussed, Damiani lay on his back in the straw, staring up at the others.

“Filippo,” said the tall man. “Leave us.”

“My Lord—”

“Leave us!”

After a moment Filippo bowed and obeyed.

Damiani tugged at his chains, feeling them bruise his arms. Perhaps he could break them or tear down the post, but it would take time.

“Mario.” The words came gently. “Tell me.”

Damiani did not speak.

“This is useless, Mario. Garibaldi’s army is defeated and the Pope still rules. The Noantri must keep peace with the papacy and the Church.”

“Peace!” Damiani repeated bitterly. “This is not peace! This is serfdom! We wait, and wait, concealing ourselves, feigning and dissembling. You know what our lives are! But we need not! When the agreement comes to light, when the Church falls—”

“
It is not time!
If the Church falls, we also fall. The life you’ve had—the villa, your poetry, your fame—you are a wonderful poet, Mario. A great talent.”

Damiani stared stonily, not acknowledging the compliment, and the other man sighed and went on. “This agreement you so despise is what allows it all. You did not know the times before.” He paused. “You have been impatient, a hothead from the day you joined us. I should not have permitted it.”

“No, I didn’t know those times,” Damiani retorted. “But these are different times. You are living in the past. I am looking to the future.”

“The future.” The tall man’s voice held a new, sad note. “Do you not understand? Unless you give me the stolen document, I cannot let you live.”

Damiani’s blood ran cold.

“This is not something I want to do,” the other went on. “It will haunt me forever, I fear. But my responsibility is to our people. If you live, though it take years, you will retrieve the document and you will publish it. Am I wrong?”