On the Fifth Day (19 page)

ness of the image.

Is this what Ed felt in that final second: a freeing plummet
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into a new, life-giving element that washed away the accumu

lated dust of life?

He would like to think so, but death still seemed to him a blankness, a wall: an end, not a transition. Ed had not swum into cooling waters, or climbed ashore in some Elysian field any more than he had ascended to join the heavenly choir. He was merely gone, and Thomas--after yet another strange day traipsing around ancient places that had been home to rank upon rank of the dead--was no nearer to knowing why. He looked back at Ed's notes.

"Where's the other?" he asked an elderly curator who had looked up to reprimand someone for taking a flash photo

graph.

"Other?" he said, peering quizzically at Thomas's face, where a cut above his eye had reopened.

"Tombs of the divers," said Thomas, reading aloud from the journal. "More than one. Where are the others."

"No others," said the man, slightly offended. "Only this one. Only this in the world."

Thomas opened his guidebook to the map of the site.

"Where was it found? I couldn't see it outside."

"Not in the town," he responded, as if he were talking to some kind of mental defective. "In
necropolis.
" And the cura

tor stabbed his finger at the edge of the map beyond the walls. Then he looked up and pointed north. Thomas did not wait to hear any more.

As he walked along the road that skirted the site, looking for the Porta Aurea--the golden gate in the old city walls--

Thomas began to feel his scuffle with Satoh starting to tell. Apart from the cuts, his right hip was beginning to throb where he had fallen on it, and his left side ached with each deep breath: bruised ribs?

Should take your mind off your sprained knee.
He was walking in the direction of the modern town, he thought, but this was no urban site like Pompeii and Hercula

neum; beyond the walls there were only fields, derelict barns, 136

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and colossal thistles as tall as elephant grass. He kept going, feeling the increasing strain on his rib cage as he labored, feel

ing the sweat on his neck as he hiked along the shadeless and deserted road, increasingly doubtful of any sense of purpose. The heat stood in a dense haze over the vivid greens and yel

lows of the fields, and even the birds had vanished, so that the only signs of life were the dry rattlings of stalks as the ubiqui

tous lizards skittered for cover at his approach. Then, before he saw the weavings of stone in the ragged grass, he saw a distant lean-to and a bright array of gleaming metal and vivid orange tape: part of a dig. He cut sharply off the road and headed straight through the brush. In seconds he caught sight of a tall, angular man in shorts and a widebrimmed hat stooping to consider something on the ground. The man had his back to Thomas, who was able to ap

proach unseen, getting a few seconds to prepare his opening remark. He stepped over the orange tape and down into a brushed-out rectangle of dusty earth in which stones were set like the base of a wall.

"Excuse me, sir," he said. "Do you speak English?"

The man leaped to his feet, turned, and swept the hat from his head in a single fluid motion. Except that it wasn't a man. It was a woman, unusually tall and broad, but sinewy-slender, with dark hair that now fell about her shoulders in rumpled waves. Her green eyes were lit with fury.

"What do you think you're doing? Get out of that square!"

"I'm sorry," said Thomas, his composure lost, as he glanced stupidly at his feet. "Right." He started to step forward.
She's American.

"Not that way, you idiot," she roared. "Back the way you came."

Then she stared at him, her eyes narrow against more than the sun, as if she couldn't see him properly or as if he re

minded her of someone.

"I thought . . . ," said Thomas again, bridling a little. "I'm sorry,
who
are you?"

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"Who am
I?
" she snapped, her eyes wide at his audacity.

"I'm Deborah Miller, I'm in charge of this site, and I want you out of it."

CHAPTER 34

"Yes, I knew your brother," she said. "Not well. But I'm sorry to hear he is dead."

Her anger had evaporated almost as quickly as it had come, dispersed the moment Thomas told her who he was.

"He came to the site about a week after the find," she said.

"He was baffled at first."

"What find?" said Thomas.

"The second diver tomb," she said. "I assumed you knew."

Thomas smiled ruefully and shook his head. So his brother's pluralized "tombs" was right after all. He thought as much. Ed didn't make mistakes like that.

"For a week or so he kept coming around here," she said.

"He didn't talk much, which I was glad of, to be frank, espe

cially with his being a priest and all. I don't have much expe

rience with priests. Anyway, the last time I saw him he was excited, scribbling constantly in a notebook and beaming like an eight-year-old who's just won a year's supply of ice cream. Then he disappeared."

Her eyes were sad, not full of tears or anything so melo

dramatic, but sad nonetheless, and Thomas decided to trust her.

"So there's a second diver tomb," he remarked, half to himself. "I'm amazed it's not common knowledge, at least around here, given the pride of place given to the original."

"Original is right," she said. "This one won't get the same press because it's later. Much. Good news for me."

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"Why?"

"The place would be crawling with archaeologists. Some local university would be given control of the dig or it would simply be commandeered by the Italian government. The original tomb dates from about 500 BC. This is early me

dieval, more than a thousand years later. Come on, I'll show you."

She got up, and Thomas was again struck by her gangling height. Not that she was graceless. Far from it. She moved with a surprising economy if not actually elegance, like a gi

raffe, he thought, knowing immediately that to say anything of the sort would likely get him in serious trouble. This was a woman who didn't take a lot of crap from anybody.

"So," he said, "if you don't mind me asking, why are you running the dig? You're from . . . ?"

"Atlanta," she said, "currently."

She had no trace of a southern accent.

"I'm here because I persuaded the Greek government to help support a little expedition to what was once a Greek site. The Italians don't mind so long as nothing leaves the country and I don't destroy anything precious in the process. They send an inspector every week or so to see if I found the Light

house of Alexandria. Otherwise they leave me alone."

"The Lighthouse of . . . what?"

"Sorry," she said, and her habitual sternness flicked into a smile. "Archaeological humor. The Pharos lighthouse was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It's nowhere near here."

"I see," said Thomas, watching her with interest. She was in her midthirties, he supposed. Peter the Principal would have called her an "odd duck." He found himself liking her.

"I'm a museum curator," she said. "Sounds grander than it is. Anyway, I wanted a little break, get a little fieldwork under my belt. And I had done a sort of favor for the Greek govern

ment, so they helped land me this. Impressive, isn't it?" she said, dryly, gazing out over the deserted tangle of weeds and shallow trenches. "Once in a while I get a little help from 139

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

some local students, but for the most part it's just me. Which is okay."

He believed her.

A kindred spirit, perhaps. Would rather be by herself.

"This is it."

They had arrived at a ramshackle construction made of transparent sheet plastic and old scaffolding, a tent of sorts, just under six feet high and half as much again in length. She stooped and showed him through a flap in the plastic. The air inside was hot and slightly sweet-smelling, moist like mown grass, but the light was filtered and Thomas felt his face relax as his eyes adjusted. The find was clearly of the same basic construction as the earlier Greek tomb: five stone slabs, all currently draped with transparent sheeting. She re

vealed each one with tremendous care and the hint of a smile that softened her features still further.

Thomas caught his breath. In place of the lounging drinkers of the Greek tomb, the two longer side panels showed what were clearly crosses. The shorter end panels showed a stylized fish with prominent front fins and oddly well-defined teeth. The final slab, the lid, was what made the connection to the other tomb explicit. It was almost exactly the same image: the naked diver slicing through space into water. The only dif

ferences were that the cross and fish motifs appeared here too, in the corners of the painting's border, and that the water to

ward which the diver was plummeting was a deep crimson. CHAPTER 35

"Why is the water red?" he said, staring at the painting.

"The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," she said. "Your brother asked the same thing."

"And?"

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"It's a Christian tomb," she said, studying the images again as if seeing them for the first time, considering them with a meticulous reverence, "about seventh century AD. The Christian cross and fish symbols have been worked into the older imagery of death. I'm not an expert on Christian theol

ogy, but I'd say that if the water in the original diver tomb represents passage into death, then what we're seeing here is a kind of resurrection: the diver--the dead man--about to be cleansed . . ."

"By the blood of the Lamb," Thomas concluded for her.

"Right. The blood of Christ that is consecrated in the mass, the blood shed for sinners on Calvary: these are the means of salvation. It's a typically Christian reusing of centuries-old iconography for its own purposes. Your brother loved it."

"Why?"

"Because the gap between the original Greek tomb and this one was more than a thousand years. The culture and re

ligious climate had changed radically. But even though the people had turned their backs on paganism, the way they un

derstood and expressed themselves as Christians was still in

formed by folk memory and custom from their pagan period. This is a Christian burial, but the religious images are derived from people who worshipped Apollo and Poseidon a thou

sand years earlier, people who lived a few hundred yards back that way."

"Is that normal?" said Thomas. He knew in general that Christianity, like most successful religions, had often absorbed as much as it had replaced, but he had never seen so strikingly specific an example.

"Did you see the terra-cotta statues of Hera in the archaeo

logical museum?" asked Deborah.

"I think so. I didn't pay them too much attention."

"There are dozens from this site and others in the area. The local form shows the queen of the gods holding a pomegran

ate, which is, presumably, a fertility symbol because of all the seeds, right?"

"So?"

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"So, if you drive down the road to Capaccio and check out the local Catholic church there, guess what the Virgin Mary there is holding?"

"A pomegranate?"

"Bingo. The Madonna of Granato of Capaccio. I think it's pretty cool, but some people . . . not so much."

"Why?"

"The usual," she said. "People want their religion to be unique, self-contained, uninformed by things like culture, so

cial structure, and politics. If they admit that any part of that religion is shaped by people and the times they lived in, then they have to deal with the idea that it didn't spring whole from the mind of God. Some people find that idea troubling."

"Not you?"

"Not me."

"What about Ed?"

"Didn't seem to, no," she said, seeming to really think about it. "It was part of why I let him nose around."

"Not everyone gets that privilege, I take it."

She frowned. "The site was discovered by accident and I didn't get here till a few weeks later, by which time there had been unofficial digging."

"Looting?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "The human remains had rotted to nothing. This area was frequently inundated by marsh, and moisture plays havoc with bones. We can tell from soil sam

ples that the body decayed here, but there's nothing left of it."

"But you think there may have been other things in the tomb?" he asked. "Things that were stolen?"

"Hard to say," she said, brooding. "If stuff was taken it happened before anyone official got a look at the place. Noth

ing is clearly missing. But it seems odd to me. The other me

dieval tombs around here tend to contain grave goods: armor, weapons, jewelry, vases and such, buried with the dead per

son. This one . . . nothing."

"And people have been snooping around since you took over?"

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"It's a good thing you look like Father Ed," she said. "I'm getting real tired of it."

"A Japanese guy, for instance."

"You know him?" she said, quick, even suspicious. Thomas gestured to the cut above his eye.

"We met today," he said.

"He's been by here several times, mostly by night when there was no one around, taking pictures, asking questions--

nothing specific--avoiding me, generally. After he showed up the first time I told him where to get off, which seemed to irk him." She grinned at the recollection. "I couldn't figure out his interest in the tomb. He also asked why the water was red and about the other symbols."

"Did he discuss a cross found in Herculaneum?" asked Thomas. He was trying to be cautious, but he instinctively trusted this lanky, cantankerous woman and he needed to get her response to what Satoh had told him.