The Reincarnationist (9 page)

Was that his imagination? Or was it his madness?

W
hile Josh waited, he lifted the camera to his eye and looked through the viewfinder. As he snapped shots of the woods bordering the site to the right and the landscape off to the left, the sound of the shutter reverberated in his ears, like an old friend's greeting.

Right now he preferred the world framed in this oblong box, all peripheral excess and activities cut out. Reframing the image, Josh went for an even wider shot and saw a break in the line of trees that suggested an opening into the forest.

As if he were standing there, not sitting in the car, he could smell the pine sap—fresh and sharp—and feel the green-blue shadowed space undulating around him. No. He didn't want to leave this present, not now.

Struggling, Josh brought himself back, to the car, to the metal camera case in his hands. To the smell of the stale cigarette smoke.

Rome and its environs were triggering more episodes than he'd ever had before in one time period. What was happening?

He knew what Malachai would say. Josh was experi
encing past-life regressions. But despite these multiple memory lurches, Josh remained skeptical. It made more sense that reincarnation was a panacea, a comforting concept that explained the existential dilemma of why we're on earth and why bad things can happen—even to good people. It was easier to believe reincarnation was a soothing myth than it was to accept the mystical belief that some essential part of a living being—the soul or the spirit—survives death to be reborn in a new body. To literally be made flesh again and return to earth in order to fulfill its karma. To do this time what you had failed to do the last.

And yet how else to explain the memory lurches?

Josh had read that even past-life experiences that seemed spontaneous were precipitated or triggered by encountering a person, a situation, a sensory experience such as a particular smell or sound or taste that had some connection to a previous incarnation.

He hadn't seen a single movie in the past five months, but he'd devoured more than fifty books on this single subject.

Something the Dalai Lama—who had been chosen as a child from dozens of other children because it was believed he was the incarnation of a previous Dalai Lama—had written in one of those books had stuck in Josh's mind.

It was a simple explanation for a complex concept, one of the few things he'd read that made Josh feel that if what was happening was related to reincarnation, then perhaps it wasn't a curse, but an enviable gift.

Reincarnation, the Dalai Lama explained, was not exclusively an ancient Egyptian, Hindu or a Buddhist concept, but an enriching one intrinsically intertwined in the fabric of the history of human origin—proof, he
wrote, of the mind stream's capacity to retain knowledge of physical and mental activities. A fact tied to the law of cause and effect.

A meaningful answer to complicated questions.

Something was happening to him, here in Rome. Time was twisting in on itself in amazing detail, and the pull to give in and explore it was stronger than it had ever been. Josh put the camera down. He stared out at the break in the tree line. He could keep fighting the memory lurches or he could open his mind and see where they took him. Maybe he would come out on the other side of this labyrinth understanding why he'd had to travel its path.

Julius and Sabina
Rome—391 A.D.

H
e left the city early that morning while the sky was still dark and sunrise wasn't yet aglow on the horizon. No one was in the streets, except a few stray cats that ignored him.

She always teased him that he was early for everything, but it was urgent now that they be careful. It was better for him to leave with the cloak of nightfall to protect him, to arrive at the grove before daybreak.

As he passed the emperor's palace, he glanced, as he always did, at the elaborate calendar etched on the wall. The passing of time had taken on a new and frightening significance lately. How many more days, weeks and months would they have until everything around them had changed so much so that it was unrecognizable? How much longer would he be able to perform the sacrifices and rituals that were his responsibility? How much longer would any of them be able to celebrate and participate in the ancient ceremonies passed down to them by their forefathers?

In the past two years he'd doubled up on his duties as fewer men entered the colleges, and now, in addition to overseeing the Vestals, he'd taken on the additional job of the Flamen Furinalis, the priest who oversaw the cult of Furrina and tended to the grove that belonged to her.

Not to the emperor.

Not to the power-hungry bishops in Milan.

But to the goddess.

Past the palace, he turned onto the road leading out of the city. A man, probably overcome with too much wine, had fallen asleep sitting up against the side of a four-story dwelling. His head was lowered on his chest, his arms by his sides and his palms open, as if he were begging. Someone had dropped food into his cupped hands. There were always poor fools on the street at night, homeless or drunk, and others who always took care of them.

Except something was wrong with this man.

Julius knew it intuitively before he understood it. Maybe it was the crooked angle of the man's head, or the utter stillness of his body. He reached down and lifted up the man's face and, at the same time, noticed how his robe was slit up the front and torn open. On his chest were the dreaded crisscrossing lines, one vertical, one horizontal, the flayed skin exposing guts oozing, blood still dripping and staining the ground beneath him a deep scarlet.

Now he could see the man's features. This was no homeless drunk; this was Claudius, one of the young priests from the college. And his eyes had been gouged out in a final ritualistic indignity.

Julius realized what Claudius was holding in his hands: not food, but the poor soul's own eyes.

How much suffering had been inflicted on this man, and why? Julius stumbled backward. The emperor's endless thirst for power? What made it worse was that the
people doing the man's bidding didn't realize he was using them and that no god was speaking through him.

“Get away. Go now,” a voice whispered.

It took several seconds for Julius to find the old woman hiding in the shadows, staring at him, the whites of her eyes gleaming, a sick smile on her lips.

“I've been telling you. All of you. But no one listens,” she said in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it had been rubbed raw. “Now it starts. And this—” she pointed a long arthritic finger toward the direction Julius had just come from “—is just the beginning.”

It was one of the old crones who foretold the future and begged for coins in the Circus Maximus. For as long he could remember she had been a fixture there. But she wasn't offering a prediction now. This was no mystical divination. She knew. He did, too. The worst that they had feared was upon them.

Julius threw her a coin, gave Claudius a last look and took off.

Not until he passed through the city's gates an hour and a half later did his breathing relax. He straightened up, not aware till that minute that he'd been hunched over, half in hiding. Always half in hiding now.

Throughout history, men fought about whose religion was the right one. But hadn't many civilizations prospered and thrived side by side while each obeyed entirely different entities? Hadn't his own religion operated like that for more than a thousand years? Their beliefs in and worship of multiple gods and goddesses and of nature itself didn't preclude the belief in an all-powerful deity. Nor did they expect everyone else to believe as they did. But the emperor did.

The more Julius studied history the more it became clear to him that what they were facing was one man
using good men with good beliefs to enhance his own authority and wealth. What had been proclaimed in Nicaea almost seventy-five years ago—that all men were to convert to Christianity and believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth—had never been enforced as brutally as it was being enforced here now. The killings were bloody warnings that everyone must conform or risk annihilation.

Julius and his colleagues weren't under any delusions. If they intended to survive they needed to abandon their beliefs or at least pretend to do so. And if they were going to continue into the future they needed to relax some of their laws and adapt. But right now they had worse problems. Emperor Theodosius was no holy man; this was not about one god or many gods, not about rites or saviors. How clever Theodosius and his intolerant bishop were! Conspiring to make men believe that unless they adopted the current revised creed, they would not only suffer here in this life but would suffer worse in the next life. The danger to every priest, every cult, everyone who held fast to the old ways, increased daily. The priest he'd seen in the gutter that morning was yet another warning to the rest of the flamen.

Citizens everywhere were taking up the emperor's call to enforce the new laws, publicly declaring their conversion. But behind closed doors, other conversations took place. The men and women who had prayed to the old gods and goddesses for all of their lives still hoped for a reprieve from the new religious mandate. Yes, in public, they would protect themselves and prove their fealty to their emperor, but as modern as Rome was, it was also a superstitious city. As afraid as the average citizens were of the emperor, they were more afraid of the harm that might befall them if they broke trust with
the familiar sacred rituals. So while there was outward acquiescence, even energy for a religious revolution, much of it was false piety.

But for how much longer?

The old ways would die a little more with every priest who was murdered and with every temple that was looted and destroyed until there was nothing left and no one to remember.

The trunks of the lofty trees were gnarled and scratched, the boughs heavy with leaves. The forest was so thick the light only broke through in narrow shafts, illuminating a single branch of glossy emerald leaves here and a patch of moss-covered ground there.

There were myrtle trees, cypress and luxuriant laurels, but it was the oaks that made this a sacred grove, an ancient place apart from the everyday world where the priests could perform their rituals and pray to their goddess.

He sat down on a mossy rock to wait for Sabina. There, miles outside of the city gates, he couldn't hear the sounds of soldiers training or citizens arguing or chariots rolling by. He couldn't smell the fear or see the sadness in people's eyes—ordinary people who didn't understand politics and were frightened. In the grove there was only birdsong and the splashing of water that fell from between the cracks in the rocks into the pool below. The consecrated area stretched deep into the woods, and no matter how often Julius went there, he never felt as if he saw it all or understood the mysteries that it contained. Nothing there was commonplace. Every tree was a sculptural arrangement of boughs branching off into more boughs, with more leaves than any man could count, all shimmering in a light that was always softer and gentler here than anywhere else in Rome. Every patch of ground offered a bounty of sprouting grasses, moss, shade plants and flowers.

When he was a boy, his teachers told the story of how this grove was where Diana, the goddess of fertility, assisted by her priest, had performed her duties. The King and Queen of the Wood, they were called. Bound together in a marriage, they made spring buds give way to summer flowers and then to fall fruits.

The boys snickered, glancing at each other, making up stories about what else they did up there, all alone in the woods. Joking about the bacchanals that must have gone on in the grove—sacred or not—because they all knew what men did with other men and with women. It was not secret, it was not profane.

Only the Vestal Virgins were sacred. Vestals promised a vow of chastity during their term of service and in exchange were ranked above all other Roman women and many men. Powerful, on their own, free in so many ways, they were not bound by the shackles of motherhood or the rules of men.

In exchange for that power and importance, each woman gave up her chance of a physical life with a man until after she had served for thirty years: the first decade learning, the second serving as a high priestess and the third teaching the next generation. Some thought it was a lot to ask of a woman; others didn't agree. From the time she was six, or eight or ten, until the time she was thirty-six or thirty-eight or forty, she remained chaste. Never to feel a man's hand on her skin or suffer the pressure between her legs that was natural and good. Never give in to the hot eyes of the men who came to her as a priestess but saw through the veils to the woman. Because if she did give in, if she lost her fight with virtue, there was no leniency. The punishment was grave and unrelenting. She was buried alive. It was harsh. But the Vestals were sacrosanct. And only a small percentage broke her vows.

Occasionally a nobleman did get away with seducing a Vestal. Hadrian had stolen one and made her his wife, and nothing had happened to either of them, but throughout history, as of that day in the grove, of the twenty-one Vestals who had been with a man, seventeen had been buried alive and fifteen of the men they had been with had also been put to death. The rules did not bend easily.

Although it was blasphemy and he only let himself think it for a moment, Julius thought that if they adopted the emperor's new religion, he and Sabina would be allowed to live together openly and without fear. But could they give up everything they believed?

“Julius?”

He heard her before he saw her, and then she stepped into the path of a sunbeam. Red hair almost on fire. White robes glowing. He walked to her, smiling, forgetting for just those few minutes the massacred priest he'd seen that morning and what it portended for their future. Sabina stopped a foot away and they stood apart, looking at each other, drinking each other in.

At last.

“The news in the atrium is bad. Did you know Claudius was killed?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, but didn't want to bring the full horror of what he'd seen into the grove.

“What does this mean? Another priest killed?” She shook her head. “No, let's not talk about this. Not now. There's time for this conversation later.”

“Yes, there is.”

“How many times have we met here? Fifteen? Twenty?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I don't know if we can build enough memories to last the rest of our lives on so few meetings.”

“For me, all it took was one.”

He reached her in one stride and took her in his arms as she lifted up her face to his. Bending to meet her, he pressed his lips on her lips and pulled her closer until there was no air between them, no space between them, and they just stood like that, breathing each other in.

Purring, like a temple cat, Sabina made contented noises deep in her throat. “I want you,” she whispered.

Since the night of the fire, she had never been coy. While the flames blazed she had looked at Julius, openly, blatantly and finally told him that she'd known for a long time that he was her fate. That was why she'd been so hostile to him—to try to change that destiny—but she knew better now. As Oedipus learned, the more you run away from what is predetermined the more you run toward it.

But Julius was five years older than Sabina. Supposedly wiser. Even if she was willing to give her virginity to him, he couldn't assume she understood the full weight of that decision. So he asked her that first day and each time they came together afterward, as a preamble to their lovemaking, as if they were taking vows all over again, if she was sure she understood the significance of what they were doing.

The grove was a place of rituals and sacrifices.

This was his: to always give her an opportunity to say no anew although he desperately wanted her.

“Sabina, are you sure this is a chance you want to take?” he'd ask, and wait for her response.

There were times when she laughed at him, undoing her brooch and letting her robes fall to the ground as if her defiance alone should be answer enough. Other days she took the question seriously and answered with gravitas, bowing her head and saying, “I am as sure of this as anything I've ever done. Or ever will do.”

Her virginity had not been given to Julius lightly, although it had been given with pleasure. No matter how intensely they felt the pushes and pulls, spasms and clenches of each other's bodies, they never forgot that if she was found out, her punishment would be severe. There would be no grace given to her.

Or to him.

“Sabina, are you sure this is a chance you want to take?” he asked that day while she was fully dressed and they had only exchanged a dozen kisses.

Her eyes filled with tears. “I'm sure,” she said, and dug her fingers deeper into his flesh.

At least for him, for now, everything that was going on below them in the city ceased to matter.

“I'll always be sure,” she said, and reached for the knot of his robe, pushing the fabric away and off his shoulders until he was naked in front of her. Then she ran the flat of her hands up and down his arms, down his chest, around his waist and up his back, and though he wanted badly to undress her, too, touch her skin, and feel her naked against him, he didn't want to do anything to make her stop touching him or rush her. If only he could slow down each movement until she stopped moving altogether and, forever frozen, they could stand in the grace of each other's tastes and touches and smells. The breeze was cool when it blew over him, contrasting with the heat she had inflamed. Julius burned and chilled at the same time.