The Seventh Sacrament (4 page)

Something continued to bug him, though. Toni LaMarca was right. Seven was the magic number. And they were one short.

T
HE BIRTHDAY PARTY HAD TAKEN PLACE IN THEIR
small garden, beneath the shade of the dusty vine trellises, on the terrace with its uninterrupted view down the Aventino towards the green open space of the Circus Maximus. There were nine classmates there, invited by his mother, not Alessio. Clio, the stupid blonde girl from one of the apartments near the school, had pointed at the remains of the stadium, to which emperors had once walked from their palaces on the Palatino behind, and complained, in her high-pitched, petulant voice, that it wasn’t a circus at all. There were no animals, no clowns, no cheap, noisy brass bands. At that moment Alessio, older, more conscious of those around him, realised Clio wasn’t actually a friend at all, that, from now on, he would prefer the company of others—children, adults, age didn’t matter. Or at least it shouldn’t. He simply wished to be with those like him, with open, curious minds and active imaginations. Like his father, extracting the secrets of the past from the cold, grubby earth. Or his mother, locked in her room, painting wild scenes on blank canvas.

People with passions, because passions were important. Alessio possessed three: pictures, numbers, and words. Of the first, his favourite remained that image of St. Peter’s, seen through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta. It was always present, part of the daily ritual, one that never failed him, except in poor weather, or when he tried to use those stupid glasses, proof again that childish things were no longer of any use.

As far as numbers were concerned, only one mattered, and that wasn’t simply because it represented his age. Alessio’s father had taken him aside and talked of it a little, before the other children came.

Seven was the magic number.

There were seven hills in imperial Rome. The Bramantes still lived on one that, in parts, was not that much changed over the centuries.

Seven were the planets known to the ancients, the wonders of the world, the elementary colours, the heavens deemed to exist somewhere in the sky, hidden from the view of the living.

These were, Giorgio Bramante told his son, universal ideas, ones that crossed continents, peoples, religions, appearing in identical guises in situations where the obvious explanation—a Venetian told a Chinaman who told an Aztec chief—made no sense. Seven happened outside mankind, entered the existence of human beings of its own accord. The Masons, who were friends of the Knights of Malta, believed seven celestial creatures called the Mighty Elohim created the universe and everything in it. The Jews and the Christians thought God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. For the Hindus, the earth was a land bounded entirely by seven peninsulas.

Jesus spoke just seven times on the cross, and then died. Seven ran throughout the Bible, his father said, during that private time they had before the balloons and cake and the stupid, pointless singing. In something called Proverbs—a word Alessio liked, and decided to remember—there was a saying his father recalled precisely, though they were a family that never went to church.

“‘For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumbles to ruin.’”

He’d shuffled on Giorgio’s knee, a little uncomfortable, and asked what the saying meant. The Bible puzzled him. Perhaps it puzzled his father too.

“It means a good person may do the wrong thing time and time again, but in the end he, or she, can still make it right. While the bad person…”

Alessio had waited, wishing the hated party would begin soon, and quickly end. He wouldn’t eat the cake. He wouldn’t be happy till he was left alone with his imagination again, his father back deep in his books, his mother in the studio upstairs, messing with her smelly paints and unfinished canvases. Some of the others in the school said it was bad to be an only child. From what he understood of his parents’ whispered conversations, which grew heated when they thought he was out of earshot, it wasn’t a matter of choice.

“The bad person stays that way forever, whatever they do?” Alessio suggested.

“Forever,” Giorgio Bramante agreed, nodding his head in that wise, grave fashion Alessio liked so much he imitated it from time to time. This gesture, knowing and powerful, established what his father was: a professor. A man of learning and secret knowledge, there to be imparted slowly over the years.

Forever seemed unfair. A harsh judgement, not the kind someone like Jesus, who surely believed in forgiveness, would make.

That thought returned to him the next day when, in the hill beneath the park with the orange trees, he listened to more secrets, bigger, wilder ones than he could ever have imagined. Alessio Bramante and his father were in a small, brightly lit underground chamber only a very short distance from the iron gate in an out-of-the-way channel at the riverside edge of the park near the school. A gate Giorgio, to his obvious surprise, had found unlocked when he arrived, though the fact didn’t seem to bother him much.

Seven.

Alessio looked around the room. It smelled of damp and stale cigarette smoke. There were signs of frequent and recent occupation: a forest of very bright electric lights, fed by black cables snaking to the doorway; charts and maps and large pieces of paper on the walls; and a single low table with four cheap chairs, all situated beneath the yellow bulbs hanging from the rock ceiling.

He sat opposite his father in one of the flimsy seats and listened in awe, as Giorgio told of what they’d found, and what greater secrets might lie elsewhere, in this hidden labyrinth beneath the hill where pensioners walked their dogs and the older children from the school sneaked to take a quiet cigarette from time to time.

Seven passageways, just visible in the sudden gloom at the edge of the illumination given off by the lights, ran off the room, each a black hole, leading to something he could only guess at. Treasure. Or nothing. Or a chasm in the ground that fell away so steeply no one could possibly return, only continue onwards, hoping to see light, not realising that they only worked their way deeper and deeper into the sour and poisonous gut of some subterranean world which would, in the end, consume them entirely.

“Mithras liked the number seven,” Giorgio said confidently, as if he were talking about a close friend.

“Everyone likes the number seven,” Alessio commented.

“If you wanted to follow Mithras,” his father continued, ignoring the remark, “you had to obey the rules. Each one of those corridors would have led to some kind of…experience.”

“A nice one?”

His father hesitated.

“The men who gathered here came with an idea in mind, Alessio. They wanted something. To be part of their god. A little discomfort along the way was part of the price they were willing to pay. They wanted to make some sacrament, at each stage along their journey through the ranks, in order to attain what they sought. Knowledge. Betterment. Power.”

“A sacrament?” The word was…not new, but only half understood.

“A promise. A penalty. A gift perhaps. Some offering that binds them to the god.”

Alessio wondered what kind of gift could be that powerful. All the more so when his father said that the sacrament had to be repeated, perhaps made greater, through each of the seven different ranks of the order, rising in importance…

Corax,
the Raven—the lowliest beginner, who died and then was reborn when he entered the service of the god.

Nymphus,
the bridegroom—married to Mithras, an idea Alessio found puzzling.

Miles,
the soldier—led blindfolded and bound to the altar, and released only when he made some penance that was lost to the modern world.

Leo,
the lion—a bloodthirsty creature, who sacrificed the animals killed in Mithras’s name.

Perses,
the Persian—bringer of a secret knowledge to the upper orders.

Heliodronus,
the Runner of the Sun—closest to the god’s human representative on earth, the man who sat at the pinnacle of the cult, Mithras’s shadow and protector.

Alessio waited. When Giorgio didn’t give the final name, he asked.

“Who was the last one?”

“The leader was called
Pater.
Father.”

“He was
their father?”

“In a way. Pater was the man who promised he’d always look after them. For as long as he lived. I say that to you because I’m your real father. But if you were Pater you were a great man. You were responsible, ultimately, for everyone. The men in the cult. Their wives. Their families. You were a kind of greater father, with a larger family, children who weren’t your real children, though you still cared for them.”

“You mean a god?”

“A god living inside a man, perhaps.”

“What kind of sacrament do you need? To become like that?”

Giorgio Bramante looked puzzled.

“We don’t know. We don’t know so much. Perhaps one day…” He looked around him. There was some disappointment in his features at that moment. “If we get the money. The permission. You could help me find those secrets. When you grow up…”

“I could help now!” Alessio said eagerly, certain that was what his father wanted to hear.

All the same, he wasn’t so sure. There was so much that was unseen in this place, lurking at the edge of the flood of yellow light bulbs above them, seeming to cling to one another, as if they were afraid of the dark. And the smell…it reminded him of when something went bad in the refrigerator, sat there growing a furry mould, dead in itself, with something new, something alive, growing from within.

His father wasn’t being entirely frank either.

“You do know some of the gifts they gave. You said. About Miles and the lion.”

“We’re familiar with a few. We know what Corax had to undergo….”

Giorgio hesitated. Alessio knew he’d say what was on his mind in the end.

“Corax had to be left on his own. Probably somewhere down one of those long, dark corridors. He had to be left until he became so frightened he thought no one would come for him. Ever. That he’d die.”

“That’s cruel!”

“He wants to be a man!” his father replied, his voice rising. “A man’s made. Not born. You’re a child. You’re too young to understand.”

This casual dismissal annoyed him. “Tell me.”

“In a cruel world a man must sometimes do cruel things, Alessio. This is part of growing up. A man must carry that burden. Out of practicality. Out of love. Do you think it’s kind to be weak?”

Giorgio’s face creased in distaste when he said that last word. Weakness was, Alessio Bramante realised, some kind of sin.

“No,” he answered quietly.

“Cruelty can be relative, Alessio.” His father calmed down somewhat. “Is a doctor cruel if he cuts off a diseased limb that could kill you?”

Alessio Bramante had never thought of doctors this way. It left him uneasy.

“No,” he replied, guessing this was the right answer.

“Of course not. Men are here to make those kinds of decisions. I learned this. You will, too. What hurts us can also make us strong. That’s why Corax had to endure what he did. If it was a way of reaching some kind of god…”

“It was still cruel. What happened to him? Corax? In the end?”

“Someone, not Pater perhaps, but someone who hoped to become Pater one day, would rescue him. And the boy would be reborn. As Corax. Overjoyed to be a part of everything that was happening in this place, wondering where he’d rise next on the ladder. Whether he might, perhaps, become Pater himself in time.”

Alessio felt an acute sense of injustice on behalf of all those tortured adolescents, one mitigated only slightly by the thought that came fast on the heels of his outrage: they must have inflicted the same torture on those who followed.

Then a question occurred to him.

“What was there left for Mithras to do?” he asked. “If they all cared for each other so much?”

His father smiled. “You like words, don’t you? I did when I was young. We’re so similar in many ways. Here’s a word,” Giorgio Bramante went on. “Psychopomp. Mithras mattered to them all because, among many other things, he was their psychopomp.”

It sounded like a made-up word, one not quite real.