The Reincarnationist (17 page)

He looked out at the horizon to the faintest dusting of golden morning light. Julius knew he was behaving like a child, allowing his personal feelings to interfere with monumental issues that threatened their way of life. They were facing a crisis the likes of which none of them could imagine, and he was jealous of his own brother and his fellow priests because they had been given more responsibility?

“We can go soon to start another difficult day,” Lucas
said, nodding toward the dawn. “But there's still one more treasure.”

In the penus—the Vestals' inner storeroom and the best protected room of the house—a carved box containing the Memory Stones was reported to be buried under the floor. The exact location was a secret that had been passed on from one generation of elders—the head priest and priestess—to the next, and after so many centuries, some thought the stones were only legend.

“You believe they're real?”

“I believe they are there. What their power might be, I don't know. No one has seen them in hundreds of years.”

“But you know where they are?”

Lucas smiled. “I know where they are supposed to be. So does the head priestess.”

It was said that every time there had been a fire—and there had been many—the reigning Pontifex had made sure the Vestals' house had been resurrected identically to the old structure so that the penus remained in the same spot. In this way the treasure could be found if it was ever deemed appropriate to dig it up.

Months ago, in the sacred grove, Sabina had told him that they should steal those stones and run away. As head priestess, she knew where the spot was. He remembered that day now—how he had left the city that morning fearful, thinking that the threat they were under couldn't be worse. How they had made love in the shadows of the trees and bathed in the pond. How he'd found out she was carrying his child. Carrying a baby and a death sentence. All in one.

“You will, of course, take the stones,” Julius said.

Lucas shook his head. “Anyone who guesses what we're planning will presume I'll take responsibility for the most precious objects, which is what I want everyone
to think. That's why I'll disappear first. There will be chaos. Rumors will start that I've taken the stones. Next, the Vestals and senior priests, everyone except for you, will flee. All remaining suspicion and conjecture will go with them. By then our treasury will be empty. It will appear everything of value is gone. No one will suspect the greatest treasure remains behind. That's when you'll go.”

For a moment the pressure lifted. Lucas had anointed him. His skin tingled and his head swam with the idea that he was going to be the first man in so many years to touch them.

According to the legend, the stones had been part of a cache of treasures dug up in Egypt during the infamous grave-robbing siege of Dynasty Twenty, where they had been discovered in Ramses III's coffers. Next they became the property of the Nubian King Piankh/Piye of Kush, who came from Sudan, conquered the various kingdoms of Egypt, and founded the Nubian dynasty. Stolen from that king by a deposed member of Egyptian royalty, the stones next were given to Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, as a tribute by the prince who had requested sanctuary.

When Numa received them, it was well known that the stones were an ancient aid to remembering past lives. But the mystery of how to use the stones had been lost long before. Visibly, each was inscribed with symbols, but no one in Numa's court had been able to make sense out of them. He offered a large purse as a prize, and scholars traveled far distances to try their hand at interpreting the markings. Failure only made Numa more determined to unlock the stones' powers.

Yes, he wanted to know the secrets of his past so his soul could find peace, but he was also desperate to use
the tools to garner power and wealth, to find all the treasures and mysteries that had long been lost to civilization.

Each year he increased the size of the prize, and by the time of his death, the award was rumored to be one full quarter of his wealth—but still no one could decipher the markings on the stones and unleash their powers.

Numa Pompilius believed, as many did, that after he died he would one day return in another body to live and rule in Rome again. If he couldn't learn from the stones in his present lifetime, he wanted to ensure he'd have a second chance in the next. So, shortly before his death, he announced that he'd appointed two women, Gezania and Verenia, to protect the sacred hearth and make sure its flames remained burning so that Rome would be assured the benefit of fire. He named the priestesses Vestals after the goddess, Vesta; gave them honors and great power; decreed they would remain pure and set up rules of progression so their order would continue far into the future.

But guarding the fire was only the cover for the real reason Numa ordained the women: their holy contract with him was to guard the sacred stones after his death. He also made it a crime, punishable by death, for a man to take a Vestal's virginity. If, he thought, he could make men fear the women, it would keep them from entering their inner sanctum; thus, the stones would remain safe.

It was one thing to keep the men away from the women. It was yet another to guarantee the women would not invite men into their house. So Numa not only made their virginity sacrosanct, he ordained that a Virgin's punishment for breaking her vow of celibacy would be her own slow death by suffocation.

Numa's last act of caution to ensure that his precious
hoard would remain untouched until his rebirth was to start rumors that the stones were cursed and that anyone who even tried to find them would be afflicted by unforgetting everything that was meant to stay forgotten and be haunted for all the days of his life with waking nightmares.

All these years later, that curse still hung over the stones. Romans were superstitious people. No man had invaded the Vestals' house. Even those virgins who, like Sabina, broke their vows and gave in to love or lust, did so outside the residence.

As far as anyone knew, the stones, if indeed they had ever existed, were buried there still.

Like Julius, Lucas stared out into the sky, watching the pale orange and light blue morning emerge.

“How soon do you think we should leave?”

“Seven or eight weeks. No longer if we want to be safe.”

That was close to when Sabina would give birth. It would be dangerous to leave just when the baby was due. Either they needed to leave before or wait until well after.

Soon it would be bright enough for him and Lucas to venture out from the safety of the temple. In the few minutes left to them, Julius knew he had to tell his mentor and friend the truth. Sabina had been able to hide her growing secret under the more voluminous cloak she now wore all the time, but that was becoming more and more difficult. If they were going to try to escape, instead of Sabina going into hiding at her sister's house, which was one of their plans, he needed Lucas's help, not his umbrage at being kept ignorant.

Will he understand and protect us? What if he won't? I can't be afraid. I have to trust him, take the risk and confide in him. If I am going to save Sabina I must have Lucas's help
.

“I can't go if it means leaving Sabina behind.”

Lucas didn't say anything for a few seconds. Julius felt the first rush of fear.

“You're like a son to me. I've known you since you were a child. Did you think I didn't know about you and Sabina?”

Julius was momentarily stunned.

“But you never said anything.”

“What was there to say? Would you have listened to me?”

Julius almost smiled—but there was more to tell him. And he was sure Lucas didn't know the rest.

“And I can't just walk out of the city with her and my child by my side and the stones in my pocket.”

Lucas nodded like a condemned man accepting a sentence. “The worry of that possibility has kept me up many nights.” He was silent for a few moments, thinking. “Everything is falling apart around us. The times are confused. Maybe we can use Sabina's pregnancy to our advantage. It might be just the thing to make it appear that we are following the rules when in reality we will be smashing them to pieces.”

Julius felt the first stirrings of hope he'd had in months.

* * *

Half an hour later, the two priests walked down the steps of the temple out in the open. Without incident they reached the cemetery's summit and the large bronze statue of Augustus Caesar. His shimmering shoulders looked powerful enough to hold up the world.

Lucas gestured to him as they passed by. “There were a hundred years of civil war before he took over. Maybe you're right about the tides turning again in our lifetime.”

They all knew what their first Roman emperor had done. They were the lucky recipients of his efforts. The currency system, highways, postal service, bridges, aqueducts and
many of the buildings that he had built still stood. The greatest writers: Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Livy, whose works were still read, all had lived in Caesar's reign.

“Under his rule we wouldn't need to run and hide,” Julius said.

“We're going to take this into our own hands now, we're going to survive.”

“And when—”

The force of the first rock, coming from such a distance, threw Julius off balance. The second felled him.

“Julius? Julius? Can you hear me?”

It was an effort to make sense of what Lucas was saying.

“Julius?”

He forced himself to open his eyes and instantly felt searing pain over his right eyebrow.

“You were hit. You're bleeding badly.”

Lucas leaned over the younger priest, peering into his face anxiously. But to Julius, he was going in and out of focus. He closed his eyes.

“Julius?”

His head throbbed.

“Julius?”

This time he opened his eyes and kept them open.

“What happened?”

“They must have been waiting for us the whole night, waiting in the trees to cut us off.”

Julius fought off a wave of dizziness. The thicket of cypress where the men must have been hiding was a perfect camouflage. Of course, two or three men could stand within the curtain of their heavy foliage and appear invisible. If you didn't know they were there you would never guess to look for them.

When Julius was a boy, his father used to draw complicated pictures for him and then ask him to find the
hidden bird or donkey or urn. He'd stare hard at the drawings, studying the spaces between the spaces, and sure enough, in the places where you didn't expect them, in the shapes of the emptiness, was the hidden object.

Hiding in plain sight, his father had called it.

That's what the rock throwers had done.

And that's how he and Lucas were going to save Sabina. They were going to use the shapes of the emptiness.

Rome, Italy—Wednesday, 11:55 p.m.

L
eo Vendi, the driver of the black SUV, left the plastic bag from Signora Volpe under the front passenger seat, got out of the car, locked it, hid the keys on top of the right tire, walked two blocks west where his motorcycle was parked, climbed on, turned his key in the ignition and sped away. He didn't think about waiting to see who was going to show up and claim the bag of papers the old lady had thrown down from Gabriella's apartment. It was late and he was tired and hungry. Leo was a pro, and if someone wanted papers left in a bag, in a parked car, in a residential neighborhood, he would deliver exactly that.

A quarter of an hour later, while Leo was eating a plate of pasta and drinking a good but cheap red wine, a man named Marco Bianci approached the black sedan, casually picked up the keys, let himself in and drove away. After he'd driven a dozen blocks he finally allowed himself to look in the passenger seat at the bag—it looked full. That was good. He hated to disappoint clients, and he'd already had one serious mishap on this job.

All that was left now was to meet the priest in front of St. Peter's after the first mass of the morning. Marco would stay in the car until then; he didn't mind. He didn't want to risk having anything happen to his bounty. The priest was going to pay him well for his trouble.

“You deserve to be generously compensated. These are crimes against our Lord, our Christ,” the priest had said. “It seems like a small thing—a broken window, a pile of papers—but it's not. It is blasphemy against the will of God. Our very entrance to heaven is at risk.”

Marco had bowed his head and Father Dougherty had blessed him. Then he had taken the American priest's money and arranged how the deal would go down.

Rome, Italy—Thursday, 7:20 a.m.

J
osh woke up to the ringing of the telephone but didn't answer it. The ancient vista of Rome and the conversation with Lucas were more real to him than the bed he was sleeping in. So was his headache. No, it was Julius who'd had a headache, in the dream. Josh couldn't also have one in reality.

Turning over, he tried to get back to where he'd been. There were urgent decisions Julius and Lucas still needed to make, dangers that had to be thwarted. Josh tried to conjure the landscape that had been so clear in his mind only minutes before. The orange-pink sky. The statue of
Augustus. The tall cypress trees. And the problem that needed to be solved: how to save Sabina.

Was there any way to get back, or had he lost his mental grasp of the membrane that held him tethered to the dreamscape? He rubbed his eyes—the movement hurt his hands. He opened them and looked down. The scratches he'd gotten in the tunnel had scabbed over the day before. Now many of them, too many of them, were freshly opened.

Fresh blood oozed from the angry lines.

In a rush he remembered the recent past, the scene hours before, being hunted and then his hunter being hunted.

Brushing his hair off his forehead, he was careful not to touch the two-inch gash there. But there was no gash. That was part of the memory lurch. Josh was going mad. How could there have ever been any doubt? This was not some crisscrossing of who he was now and who he had been in a past life. This was his imagination spinning out of control, caused by the trauma incurred during the terrorist attack being exacerbated now by new violence. Of course it was, and the sooner he could get out of Rome and away from the endless flashbacks, the better.

No. Stay. Solve this. Save her.

He felt as if he was being wrenched through a hole in a wall that was far too small for him. Why was he chained to another time and place and to people who were long since dead? Josh didn't have an adequate way to describe the agony of being forced back to the present when every ounce of your soul says you need to stay in the past. When you are so certain that the people you love won't survive without you. If Julius didn't come for her, Sabina would think she had been abandoned. She would think she was unloved.

There is no “she.” You're a lonely man whose imagination is spinning out of control
.

Josh's body ached as if it had been battered. Josh's body. Julius's thoughts. His skin was so dry it felt like sandpaper. His eyes were burning, his hair was dirty, the muscles in his legs felt as if he'd run a marathon. The smell of fire was inside his nostrils.

Insanity was frightening. Josh didn't want to analyze and dissect what was happening to him anymore. He just wanted it to cease. He wanted to return to a time before the accident, with recollections that started when he was four years old and got his first camera and he and his father went out into Central Park in the snow so that he could take his first roll of pictures.

The only way to break this spell was to get out of bed and into a shower. But not even the cold water pelting his body did anything to shake the sense that he was only half awake, that part of him had been left behind in that netherworld with Sabina.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This was nuts. There was no woman named Sabina. There was no past. There was only his brain, corrupted by some invisible trauma that had not yet presented itself clearly enough to be diagnosed.

Certainly, Josh had read hundreds of Malachai's and Beryl's reports of children who remembered their past lives with such accuracy that the foundation had been able to find historical proof of some of what they'd lived through. However, all the cynics said that if there was evidence, it was logical to think it had been planted rather than remembered.

Sometimes, yes. But over and over? With thousands of children? To what end?

Those kids had been tortured by their past lives. You could see that in their eyes, hear it in their breaking voices. There was no monetary gain for them or their parents. None of them or their families had ever gone
public. Other than the Phoenix Foundation helping the child put the disturbing scenes to rest, not one of the three thousand children Beryl and Malachai had helped had ever tried to cash in on their experiences.

So why couldn't Josh accept that what happened to them was what was happening to him? Why wasn't it possible that something had gone terribly wrong long ago in Rome, and now, all these centuries later, he was remembering what he was not meant to remember through some accident of metaphysics?

What if this woman whose mummified body had been discovered by the professor and Gabriella
was
named Sabina? What if there had been a Roman priest named Julius whose fault it was that Sabina had suffocated to death in that small, narrow space? Wasn't that the kind of horrific event that might have karmic repercussions that would reach through time to demand retribution?

But even if he believed it all, what the hell was he supposed to do?

He turned up the water. Made it hotter.

How do you avenge a death that took place in the year 391 A.D.?

You find the body her soul now inhabits and make it up to her
.

Wasn't that the thought that had been plaguing him since he woke up from the accident in the hospital?

Somewhere a woman was waiting for him and he wouldn't be himself again until he found her.

He'd been so confused and obsessed with the idea of this woman it had shredded his already-damaged marriage.

Somewhere a woman who once shared Sabina's spirit was waiting for him to help her and get it right this time.

Lust does not explain itself. There's no logic to the powerful hunger that can interrupt any single moment
and render you almost helpless. Standing in the shower, water dripping off him, trying to make some sense of his messed-up life, the last thing he expected to feel was overwhelming naked need for the woman's skin—for Sabina's skin.

Leaning against the cold tiles, he shut his eyes. He tried, but failed to stop himself. His body didn't care what his mind dictated. He wanted to find her. Wanted to smell her and taste her and bury himself high up inside of her. He wanted to know her again and disappear with her into that place where passion dissipated every bit of fear and existential panic. It didn't matter if their joining ultimately doomed them. Being together was worth dying for. All that mattered was that they were connected, that their bodies crashed together again and obliterated all the pain of living in an unfair world. That for a few minutes they could find some ecstasy to succor them through the bleakness and the blackness.

In the shower stall, back up against the wall, the imaginary lovemaking inflamed him. He was burning up, igniting, flaring and soaring: he was with her for what always felt like the first time.

He allowed himself to say the word—her name—moaned it out loud as his blood surged through his veins and her curls fell on his face and his chest, and the jasmine in her hair scented the steamy air, and he clutched her thighs as they wrapped around him and pressed himself deeper and deeper and deeper into her, and for a time he believed it was her muscles that moved him forward, forward, forward.

Out loud, in the cry of release, came her name again.

Sabina.

The sound of the final note of a sad song played on the strings of a harp. A long, solemn note, lasting, lasting, lasting and then gone.