The Sacrifice Stone (3 page)

For a moment, forgetting she was angry with Joe, she thought she would rush straight home and tell him what she’d found. Then, getting up and walking out of the church, she changed her mind and set off to continue her exploration.

She crossed the square into a narrow street sloping steeply downhill, lined with tall houses. Some of them had washing hanging on poles outside. A man watering his potted plants smiled at her.

The street curved round in a tight bend, then opened out on to a wider road.

Staring at what stood immediately in front of her, she thought she must be imagining it.

Vast and solid at the top of a wide flight of steps, its double tier of arched walls soared up into the blue sky and curved away to either side in perfect symmetry. It was huge, dominating the scene and crowding out all the little houses, shops and bars that huddled around it as if flexing its great muscles and shouldering them away.

At first she just stood and stared. Then, coming back to herself, she wondered what it could be, answering her own question instantly: it’s an amphitheatre.

She felt illogical tears start in her eyes. I didn’t
know
, she thought, angrily brushing them away. I’m so ignorant that I had to actually stand here looking at it before I realized there was a Roman amphitheatre in Arles!

Ashamed, she had the fleeting feeling that everyone must be jeering at her, pointing accusing fingers and saying,
she
didn’t know! She’s stupid!

Stop being ridiculous, she told herself. It’s not down to me, it’s my family’s fault, them and their dreadful, archaic attitude that you only need educate your sons, it doesn’t matter about your daughters, all they’re going to aspire to is to be someone’s secretary or someone’s cook. It’s certainly not necessary to tell them about the Roman occupation of Provence.

‘Damn you, Father,’ she muttered.

The emotion ebbing, she was surprised at how much it could still hurt. Here, I’m miles from home and it’s years since I used to be so in awe of him, so spineless that I couldn’t summon the guts to rebel, yet the resentment is as strong as if he’d only just this minute put my school report in the drawer without even glancing at it.

‘You can’t get at me any more,’ she said softly. ‘Not now.’

She crossed the road to the steps, walking slowly up them, the amphitheatre rising up above her till it blotted out the bright sky. There was an entry booth under one of the deep archways into the arena, beside it a notice informing her of the opening times and how much it cost to go in. She was reaching in her bag for money when the thought came: not yet.

No, she thought, rationalizing, now probably isn’t the moment. In all fairness, I ought to wait for Joe. And besides, it’s very hot — it’s the middle of the day, and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

She moved away from the entrance; observing that it was possible to walk round the arcaded walls on the outside, she set off, keeping close to the massive stones where there was some shade.

Peering through the arches into the shadowy galleries inside, she wished she were better informed. On a building opposite she noticed a poster advertised bullfights; the Romans used their amphitheatre for something fairly similar, didn’t they? They had gladiators, she thought, fighting each other with peculiar weapons — nets that they flung over their opponents, long ropes with hooks on — and they also fought wild beasts. The crowd could vote for whether a beaten gladiator should be executed or not — they shut their thumbs inside their fists if they wanted him to live, or put their thumbs out if he was to die. Then sometimes the beasts would be set to fight each other — they used to bring back exotic wild animals from all over the Empire, to satisfy the crowd’s perpetual desire for something new. And they threw Christians to the lions, when they weren’t cutting their throats.

An echo of the dizziness came back: she made herself stride on.

What a feat of architecture! She stared up at the walls, deliberately turning her thoughts away from Christian martyrs. Here it’s stood since — since — oh, for a couple of thousand years, roughly, and it looks as if it will last for ever.

A group of people were walking round inside the gallery, being addressed by a guide. I’d like to do that, Beth thought, I’d like someone telling me about it, filling in the enormous gaps in my knowledge.

The group moved on round the structure’s curve and out of sight. She stood looking after them into the deserted arcade, where patches of brilliant light alternated with deep shade. On the far side of the gallery, she could see steps leading down into deeper darkness, and she seemed to feel the chill, clammy air rise up from underground to disperse in the sunlight.

She started to shiver.

This is crazy! Here I am, standing in the full sunshine in a temperature that must be well up in the eighties, and I’m shivering!

She swayed slightly, and, stepping forward, leaned against the wall for support. Perhaps it’s something I ate — perhaps one of last night’s mosquito bites has infected me with something — God, but I feel awful!

Staring into the gallery, she saw something move. Something dark, a deeper black against the dense shade, it seemed to be issuing from the steps on the far side like some foul miasma that welled up from the underworld.

There was despair in the air, and she was overcome with a hopeless sorrow. Here we sit, awaiting our turn, and nothing can save us. We must renounce our God or die; since we will not abandon our faith, there is only death.

She pulled away from the wall, wrenching her head round so that she was no longer gazing into the dark.

Daylight, people, that’s what I need. I’m letting my imagination run away with me, and I didn’t even know I had one!

On woolly legs, she broke into a staggering run, away, away from the amphitheatre and its ancient miseries. Down the long flight of shallow steps, past a crowd of cheerful tourists laughing as they listened to their guide cracking a joke, and suddenly there in front of her was a bar. A wonderful, sunlit bar, where nice ordinary people sat drinking coffee and cold glasses of beer.

She collapsed into a seat, putting her elbows on the table and dropping her head into her hands. A voice said, ‘Madame?’ and she looked up to see a concerned waiter beside her.

‘Oh —
une
pression
,
s’il
vous
pla
î
t
.
Une
demie
.’

‘Une
pression
.
D’accord
.
’

He was back within moments, and gratefully she drank a few sips of beer. The faintness receded, and she drank some more. By the time she had finished it, she was feeling so much better that she wished she’d ordered
une
grande
.

She paid her modest bill, then, ready for anything and more than prepared to make Joe’s life hell if he hadn’t done his unpacking, she swung her bag over her shoulder and headed back towards the Place de la Redoute.

3

She got home to find that Joe had unpacked all the shopping and put it tidily away. He had also, she observed from the hall, turned the living-room table into a desk, with laptop, books, papers and stationery arrayed as if he was going to start work at any moment.

He’d also cooked supper: she could smell onions and garlic as she came in the door.

‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said as she entered the kitchen, where he was washing pans. ‘Supper’s ready when we want it.’

‘What have you made?’

‘A sort of ratatouille thing — I found a market down on the main road, and the veggies looked so good I couldn’t resist them.’

‘I didn’t know you could cook.’ It was an aspect of her brother she’d never suspected. Where had he learned? Not from their mother — Father would never have allowed anything as exotic as ratatouille on
his
dinner table.

‘I shared a flat with a chap who was dead keen.’ He opened the oven and peered at his casserole. ‘I got fresh fruit for pud — okay?’

‘Lovely. Let’s have a drink out on the terrace. I’ve got something to tell you.’

*

He was so excited about her discovery that he wanted them to go and look there and then.

‘The church is bound to be closed up now, it’s well after six,’ she said.

‘I suppose so.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘It’s all but unbelievable — the very first church you come across, there he is!’

‘Surely it must be mentioned in one of those books?’

He shook his head. ‘If it is, I haven’t seen it.’

‘Well, maybe the majority of Arles churches have a statue of St Theodore.’

It seemed likely to her, but he was apparently determined to look on it as a minor miracle. ‘No, I’m sure they haven’t. It really is amazing, I can’t get over it.’

‘Have another drink,’ she said, reaching out to top up his wine. ‘I always find that alcohol helps me keep my feet on the ground.’

He smiled. ‘It has the reverse effect on most people.’

‘Let’s look it up after supper,’ she suggested.

He looked at her gratefully. ‘I was going to propose we got down to work later, only I was afraid you’d think I’d done supper and everything just to soften you up.’

She laughed. ‘I might well have done. Don’t worry, I’m getting as eager as you.’ She glanced at him. ‘Well, nearly.’

The evening was bringing about a steep increase in mosquito activity, so they went into the kitchen to eat. Joe’s ratatouille was delicious, and afterwards he did the washing-up. By the time they were sitting at Joe’s improvised desk, she was sufficiently grateful to work for as long as he liked.

‘Right,’ he said decisively. ‘I suggest I give you a brief precis of what I’ve done so far, and perhaps find you something to read by way of background. Then we’ll list what I need to look at here, and tomorrow we can get on with visiting the sites and trying to find sources in libraries. And we’ll get out to the village where the girl had her vision.’

The light in his eyes made her think he was probably hoping for a similar experience. To bring him back to earth she said, ‘How did you come across Little Saint Theodore?’

‘In a huge tome in the university library on early Christian martyrs.’

‘I hadn’t realized there were enough of them to fill a huge tome.’

‘Well, the authors admit that some of the stories are probably apocryphal. You get the same details being mentioned in several cases, so it’s possible that the martyrdom aspect sometimes got grafted on afterwards.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it would bring visitors to a place if they could claim a canonized martyr, particularly if the saint had a few miracles accredited to him. Or her.’

‘Like St Theodore and the sore throats.’

‘Exactly. You often get a link between the method of martyrdom and the ailment the saint can cure. Or else it becomes the saint’s emblem — St Lawrence, for example, was roasted on a gridiron, which appears as his. And St Agatha had her breasts cut off, and she’s often depicted carrying them on a plate. Funnily enough, she’s the patron saint of bell-founders, because of the resemblance of breasts to bells.’

Beth didn’t think it was funny. ‘God. I’m not sure I’m going to enjoy this after all.’

‘You haven’t heard anything yet.’ He was reaching out for one of the books. ‘I’m just about to tell you what Nero did for illumination in his gardens.’

‘I don’t think I want to hear.’

‘Oh, but it’s important.’ He put down the book and stared at her. ‘Are you serious?’

‘No, go on.’ I said I’d help him, she thought. I can’t back out just because I’m squeamish about two-thousand-year-old atrocities.

‘Well, the Christians were a high-profile target for popular hatred from early times, although the ancient writers don’t specify exactly why. Perhaps it was just because they thought differently, and didn’t try to hide it. Anyway, when a fire started in Nero’s new palace which destroyed half of Rome, he diverted suspicion from himself by accusing the Christians of arson. Just to fuel public anger a bit more, he also said they were cannibals and practised black magic and incest. The Romans always enjoyed savage spectacles, the bloodier the better, and Nero obliged them by crucifying a few Christians in his garden and setting light to them.’

She swallowed. ‘But Nero was potty. They didn’t all carry on like that, did they?’

‘No. In the main, the Roman administration tolerated worship of any god, although of course there were the officially approved state gods that had to be recognized. They were pragmatists — provided you paid your taxes and your private worship didn’t threaten the security of the state, then what you believed was between you and your conscience.’

‘So how did all those people in your tome get to be martyrs?’

‘Because Christianity grew so fast, and the faith of its adherents was so strong, that it threatened to wipe out all other religions.’ His voice became more powerful as he spoke: she thought, I must bear in mind he’s not exactly an objective witness in all this.

‘The Christians became scapegoats,’ he went on. ‘In the second century AD, the general view seems to have been that everything dreadful that happened, from plague to earthquakes, was down to the Christians, as punishment for not worshipping the Roman gods. And, to whip up the hatred, the Christians got accused of the same old things Nero had thrown at them a century earlier.’

‘You told me before that your St Theodore was killed for refusing to worship the Roman gods.’

‘Well, bearing in mind what the Romans believed refusal led to, it’s not surprising it made people like Theodore public enemy number one.’ He leaned forward eagerly, riffling through a slim book. ‘Listen to what Tertullian had to say — he was a Christian convert — “If the Tiber reaches the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields, if the sky doesn’t move or the earth does, if there is famine, if there is plague, the cry is at once, Christians to the lion.” ’

He passed the book to her. She read where he was pointing. ‘He went on to say, “What, all of them to one lion?” ’ She hadn’t expected to find an early Christian with a sense of humour.

He appeared not to have heard. ‘Matters went from bad to worse around the middle of the second century,’ he said, ‘culminating in persecutions in Smyrna, Rome and in Lyons.’

‘What, Lyons that we drove past yesterday?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded slightly impatient. ‘Of course. They held an annual festival of games there, and it was cheaper to use Christians as wild-beast fodder than trained gladiators. They rounded up all the Christians in the town, subjected them to a mockery of a trial, and tortured their slaves to make them confess to witnessing all sorts of unlikely acts carried out by their masters and mistresses. If the Christians didn’t recant — and they didn’t — they were chucked into prison, from where the only exit was out into the arena to face the animals.’

The sense of despair she’d felt earlier, outside the amphitheatre, came back fleetingly. ‘Did they do that here, too? Make the Christians face the animals?’

‘They did it everywhere.’ He waved his hand expansively. ‘Round about that time — it was during the reign of Marcus Aurelius — the entire Christian church was under attack. God was too important to the Christians,’ — he wagged his finger at her — ‘and their utter devotion to Him meant, in the Romans’ eyes, that they must be failing in their loyalty to the emperor and the state. So there you have it — their lack of civic duty cast them in the one role the Romans wouldn’t tolerate.’

‘Their worship was threatening the security of the state,’ she said, remembering his exact words.

He looked gratified. ‘Excellent! You’ve got the picture.’

‘I find it hard to believe that a child would die for its faith,’ she said. ‘Adults, yes, especially if they were convinced they were going on to a better world. But surely it goes against any concept of self-preservation for a child to accept death rather than worship an alien god? After all, how much does religion matter to your average child?’

‘You’re looking at it from a twentieth-century viewpoint. But children are capable of such actions, if they believe strongly enough they’re doing the right thing. Look at Jude’s son in
Jude
the
Obscure
, who killed his brothers and sisters and then himself “because we are too menny”.’

‘That, as you said in another context, is just a story!’ she protested. ‘And anyway, I’ve always felt it’s a very weak bit of plotting by Hardy — like your Little Saint Theodore offering his teeny throat to be cut, it’s just not likely.’

‘St Theodore’s martyrdom happened,’ he said stubbornly, frowning at her levity.

‘How do you know? Go on, give me chapter and verse, and win me over to your view.’

‘Right!’ He opened his notebook, so eagerly that she found herself hoping she was going to be convinced. ‘He died in AD 175 in a town called Glanum — that’s not far from here, it’s in the foothills of the Alpilles near St-Rémy-de-Provence, we’ll go there. He was tied to a Roman altar in the hills behind the town, and his throat was cut. A man called Lucius Sextus wrote about it, recording how they found the body in the morning, and, although there were wolves scavenging on the hills, by a miracle they hadn’t touched him. Not only the wolves — they found the prints of a bull, which seems to have gone right up to the altar yet not touched the child.’

‘But bulls are herbivores,’ she protested. ‘And they normally leave you alone if you don’t move or flap red capes at them.’

He ignored her. ‘Here,’ — he was showing her his notes — ‘there’s the reference. I’d have brought the book out with me, only it’s so old and valuable it’s confined to the library.’

She read the pages of closely written notes. Joe had added some conclusions of his own to what he’d copied from the ancient writings: ‘Later references to breath still in body, despite wound; testimonies given that child was heard singing as body prepared for burial. Story that child killed on his way home from choir practice, because he annoyed Roman officer by singing Ave Marias, possibly a later embellishment,’ — what a concession! she thought — ‘cf. Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln,
c
. 1250. Ave Maria unlikely — of thirteenth-century origin. Poss. another Christian hymn. Check for early forms of worship.’

‘Was this Lucius Sextus a Christian?’ she asked, looking up.

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘I thought he might be,’ she muttered.

‘Turn the page,’ he said neutrally.

She did so. Pasted in the notebook was a photocopied paragraph; above it, in Joe’s handwriting, were the words, ‘From the magistrate’s records, Forum Julii (Fréjus), AD 176.’

The paragraph, fortunately, had been translated from Latin into English, and the magistrate had a fairly readable style:

*

In the matter of Theodore of Arles, outbursts of reaction against the punitive measures taken at Glanum have been contained. The determination of the Christian community in the area of Arles, who claim the child as one of their own, contrary to received intelligence, has been countered by application of firm control. Those of the community who persisted in the spread of sedition, based on the gossip of women and the garrulity of the credulous, have been removed.

*

The paragraph concluded with a series of letters, of which she could make no sense.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s abbreviations for the Latin — they did that when the phrases they wanted to write were a well-known and frequently used form of words. Like Fid. Def. on our coins for
Fidei
Defensor
, defender of the faith. Here, it’s saying that a group of Christian prisoners were tried, condemned, and sent to the amphitheatre at Arles.’

Again, a memory of that ancient despair. When it had subsided, she said, ‘I agree that this magistrate’s report verifies Theodore’s death, if that’s what he means by “punitive measures”, although there’s nothing about him having his throat cut. But, God, the rest of it’s pretty vague! What does he mean by the Christian community’s determination? To do what? Revere Theodore as a martyr? And what’s this about claiming him as their own contrary to received intelligence? That it was said he came from Arles but he didn’t really? And here, look, where it says —’