She Walks in Darkness (7 page)

Exhausted, faint with hunger, he plodded on and on down those entangling, smothering passages. The silence and the darkness were awful; he could see nothing, he could hear nothing but his own footsteps, his own heavy breathing. “Air must have been coming from somewhere, but there wasn’t much of it, and it seemed to be getting worse. And when I tried to turn back, I found out there’d been some truth in the jolly old doubts. I was lost, completely lost. The harder I tried to get out, the deeper in I got.”

Once, for what seemed hundreds of feet, he had to wriggle forward on his belly, feeling the stone roof above him scrape his hair. Nothing in his whole life had ever seemed so good as the moment when that pressure ceased.

But his relief did not last long. Soon all the passages began to slope sharply uphill; the only one in which he could stand upright became positively steep. He staggered on, sweat-soaked, his breath whistling, determined only to keep going until he dropped. Knowing that if—or rather, when—he would die there in the suffocating, stony dark.

Several times he fell, but managed to get up again. The last time was just within sight of another turn.

For beyond that turn, he saw a glimmer of light.

He staggered forward, shouting, burst into a room where bottle-filled shelves lined the walls. An old man yelled and dropped a pitcher of wine.

He was in Prince Mino’s wine cellar. “And it looked like heaven. For hours I hadn’t been able to see my hand before my face. Until you’ve been trapped in darkness like that, you don’t know what it means to be able just to
see.”

He fell again then, his last strength gone. “And a good thing I did too, because a man chasing you looks dangerous. A man lying on the ground doesn’t.” The old fellow, who had been in full flight, heard that fall and the groan that went with it; he came back to peer down into the gaunt face.

“You! You, signore!”

It was Mattia Rossi; he remembered Roger from that young man’s pre-war visit to the villa, and he was quick to understand. He brought back the wine and gave him a drink.

“I will bring food too, signore. Thanks to God that here we are too deep beneath the earth for my foolish yells to have been heard! Most of us here would be glad to help you, but there is always one Judas.”

The old fellow’s simplicity, his kindly decency, breathe through every word that Roger Carstairs wrote. Mattia Rossi cannot have dreamed then who that Judas would be; when he did know, the knowledge must have meant heartbreak. I am sorry to think that he had to live through all those years remembering, perhaps knowing that it was he himself who unwittingly had set death to waiting, watching in the shadows.

All Roger knew then was that he was sinking comfortably, happily, into an abyss of peace. When the old man tried to raise his head and feed him, he could eat little. “Funny. I’d been so hungry. But all I wanted then was rest. Just to lie there and not move.”

He slept. And woke, hours later, in a completely
strange place. A huge, circular chamber from the center of whose ceiling a grinning Gorgon’s head glared down at him. Round the walls a black, hideous man-vulture, his taloned hands brandishing whips made of snakes, was chasing the terrified shapes of men and women. “For a minute I thought I’d died and gone to Hell.”

Then he understood. He was in a typical late Etruscan tomb, built when the Rasenna’s power was fading and their once blissful belief in an afterlife had turned into a nightmare, perhaps because they thought their gods were punishing them for some known crime. He was lying on a camp cot, in clean silk pajamas, with clean sheets over and under him. Funeral urns lined the walls and, by turning his head, he could see the sarcophagus built against the massive central pillar, beneath the glaring Gorgon’s head. Here the master and mistress of some ancient household slept, their dependants around them. Their painted, life-sized effigies half-sat, half-reclined upon the sarcophagus, side by side. In the dim light, the two looked startlingly, almost threateningly alive, capable of rising to chastise an intruder.

Light! Where was it coming from? Roger raised himself on one elbow and saw the whole room. A gray-haired man sat at a folding table on which was an oil lamp strong enough to give his work full light. He was writing, his fine aquiline face set in lines of concentration. The beautiful fabric of his pinstripe gray suit looked as if he had just dressed to welcome an honored guest in his elegant drawing room.

Mattia Rossi’s master—the master of all here, above ground and below! Prince Mino Carenni.

He heard Roger’s movement and turned, smiling. “Welcome, signore. I hope that you are better.”

“Mattia told you I was here?” Roger himself could not have explained why he felt such surprise.

“Naturally.” A faint lift of the fine brows. “My servants are well trained.”

“You could get into trouble for harboring me, sir.”

“My dear boy, this is my house. At least it is a Carenni possession, on—or rather, under—Carenni land. Never yet has a Carenni surrendered a guest to enemies. Not even when they were civilized men of his own race, and their cause was just. I have no intention of surrendering you to barbarian invaders.” The prince still smiled, but his voice was dry.

I believe now that that was true! That Prince Mino would have borne torture without betraying to the Nazis any man whom he had received as a guest. Even though Roger Carstairs never was to come up out of that underworld beneath the Villa Carenni. Never again to see the sun....

Roger himself had no doubts whatsoever. “The Prince is a fine old boy; he’s being jolly decent. Couldn’t be doing more for me if he were my own father. Makes me ashamed to remember how, before the war, we young fellows used to think him such a queer fish.”

He liked and trusted his host at first; so much is clear. Certainly it never occurred to him that his diary
might be read; but it was read, I think, from the very beginning. One stained page rather pathetically records his gratitude for the gift of the little leather notebook, made with one of Prince Mino’s most gracious smiles. “I remember that you write. Perhaps this will help to pass the time.”

“The time! There is no time down here. You can’t tell day from night. The kind of food old Mattia brings—breakfast, lunch, dinner—that’s your only clue.”

Writing did help. But when he had slept off his fatigue, Roger grew restless. Inexplicably uneasy too.

On May 14th he wrote: “Had breakfast. That seems to be all there is to say. I take exercises, I’ve got to keep fit, but I’ve had to slack up on even those. One day I took too many and got a crick in my back that crippled me for a couple of days. For the time it took old Mattia to bring six meals down, anyhow.

“Even a clock would be company down here; it would tick. You have to live in a place like this before you know what silence is. Real silence, not all the funny mess of tiny sounds that goes by that name up above. There’s nothing alive down here, in all this stone; it doesn’t shelter bugs, or make little snaps, the way wood does. Sometimes the silence seems as loud as a yell. Makes me feel like kicking the furniture and yelling too.”

I know how you felt, Roger Carstairs. Since I came to the Villa Carenni, I too have learned how loud silence can be. How very loud.

“May 17th: I hate to ask for anything more; the oldboy’s already done so much for me—but a clock would help. If I could count the time—just say, ‘This twelve hours is noon, that one’s midnight’—I could keep in touch with reality. Where there’s so much silence, it oughtn’t to be so easy to imagine sound.”

It had begun. Death had come, creeping, spying, on perhaps not quite noiseless feet....

Then: “May 20th: I think it’s that. Yesterday—I suppose it was yesterday, I’ve slept since then—Prince Mino came and I asked him for a clock. He said, ‘I am sorry that a guest of mine should be bored, but if I took one from its place the servants would wonder and talk among themselves.’ I said I understood, and he said, ‘I had hoped that books might entertain you. But youth—even scholarly youth—craves action, excitement.’ He wasn’t quite pleased.

“I said I’d had enough of both to last me a lifetime; what ailed me now was nerves, and I’d soon adjust. ‘As for books, it’s a great privilege to have access to yours, sir. Any real scholar would give a year of his life for my chance at them.’ He smiled at that, and was completely friendly again, more so than I’d ever seen him. ‘I hope that you will always think so, my young friend. I had not known that you English were such courtiers.’

“It wasn’t flattery, and I told him so. Libraries that have books like his keep them under lock and key. For a while we talked so hard that we forgot everything else. He really opened up, told me his own pet theories.

“‘You know—who does not?—that civilization is said to have begun in the ancient Near East. Yet though it appears later in Egypt, it already wears a somewhat superior form. Why, if a civilizing “Pre-Dynastic Race” brought it from the East, as some say?’

“I said, ‘Perhaps the native Egyptian genius had already improved it before we find traces of it, sir.’

“‘No. The same race that brought it to the banks of the Nile had already carried an earlier stage of it to the banks of the Euphrates. All growth, all improvement, took place among the original culture-bearers. Among people of the pure ancient blood.’

“I remembered then some of the reasons why we’d thought him a queer fish. I asked him, as tactfully as I could, if he had any idea just who those original culture-bearers could have been.

“‘I know. And soon I will prove it.’ His eyes blazed; he looked like an exultant fanatic. ‘Did not Plato say that Atlanteans once occupied the Tyrrhene coast? Whether the place that in his Greek foolishness he called Atlantis lies beneath the sea, or—as is more likely—beneath the sands of the Sahara, that land was the cradle-land, the birthplace of all the arts of man. The birthplace of the Rasenna.’

“I was startled. ‘But I thought they came from a place called Tyrrha, sir. Somewhere in Asia Minor.’

“‘There they rose again after the disaster that destroyed their earlier home. From there they came to Italy—yes, a fugitive starving remnant of them
came to teach the Western savages as once they had taught those earlier savages of Egypt and Sumer. Their civilization was the ancestor, the creator of all. None before or since, anywhere in the world, but has sprung from it.’

“I stared, then ventured feebly, ‘What about the New World civilizations, sir? The Mayas and the Incas?’

“‘Do not the Atlantic currents lead straight from the Mediterranean to Central America? To the place where the Mayas kept a calendar that dated back to a time thousands of years before the building of their own cities? Did not the Maya also wear feather crowns like those of ancient warriors of the Near East? Those ignorant savages who entered America through the Bering Strait—there were many pleasant lands in which they could have stopped to build cities before they reached Central America. Why there—amid deserts and jungles—did they suddenly learn how to build? Why?’

“I said truthfully, ‘I don’t know why.’

“‘Then think why! The Phoenicians fought with the Rasenna for a western ‘Isle of Refuge.’ I say that some of the Rasenna reached that isle, and went on to become teachers in the wild lands beyond, even as they had already taught all other civilized peoples in the world.’

“He stopped for breath, but his eyes still shone. ‘The Rasenna were the torch-bearers, the creators, born to lead all mankind. Had they kept their heritage pure—
not been corrupted by Greek wordiness, absurd Greek dreams of democracy—they would have built the empire that their bastard heirs, the Romans, built. But they would have held it. We would now be living in a sane and ordered world. Not in chaos—not in a mad, mechanized jungle where no man has time to enjoy beauty and the arts for frenziedly devising ways to kill his neighbor before that neighbor kills him.’

“He paused, searching my face for an answering light. I think I only looked bewildered and a little troubled, and his own face changed subtly. I wish it hadn’t.”

he old chap is mad,” Roger wrote. “But at least it’s a relief to hear of a master-race that isn’t blond.”

“I’m ashamed to say it, but I wish I had played up to him. He might have let a convert work with him. He is doing some sort of work in a place even deeper in the earth than this; he’s never made any secret of that. And I don’t think he’s unbalanced enough to have said so positively, ‘I will soon prove it,’ if he hadn’t found something. There are scraps of old tradition about early Etruscans in Egypt. Who knows? I might have been able to help him, to put his discovery on a sound scientific basis. And Lord knows I need something to do.”

For several days Prince Mino did not come again. And in his loneliness Roger began to imagine things, or to think he did.

On May 24th he wrote: “I am nervy; all this black wilderness of stone around my own snug little tomb
gets me. I’m afraid that part of my desire to explore it is really desire to prove that there’s nothing moving in it. That all the spooks are painted on the walls.

“So often I feel that there’s something in the darkness, just beyond the light of my lamp. Something watching me. The other morning—if it was morning—I woke up thinking I heard footsteps. And this book was lying open, though I’d have sworn I shut it before I went to bed. That was one of my bad mornings, too; sometimes I sleep too hard and wake up feeling rotten. It must be the air down here.”

Or was something being added to your trays, Roger? Slipped into your coffee, perhaps, while some casual-seeming remark made old Mattia look the other way? It must have been done deftly, cunningly, so that Mattia never knew.

Roger never knew, either. His next entry shows how good sense can blind a man.

“May 25th: I’m glad I wrote that yesterday; seeing it down in black and white shows me just how big a fool I’ve been making of myself. I need exercise, real exercise. If I took a nice long walk, nobody would ever know. If the prince comes, he always comes not long after Mattia has served my meals. Going would be so confounded easy! But it wouldn’t be cricket. Bluebeard’s wife was lucky; she had the run of his castle, except for one room. I’ve got to stay in just this one. The second time I saw him—when my legs were still wobbly—Prince Mino cautioned me about that. Very
politely. ‘You would run no risk of meeting my servants; only Mattia ever descends to this level. But you could easily become lost; also if the Germans should return, we would need to be able to find you quickly.’

“I said, ‘If they should come, you’d better just let Mattia lead me out onto the hillside, sir. I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble.’ But he smiled, rather grimly.

“‘No such violation of my hospitality will be necessary. Should the Germans penetrate too far into these vaults, they will encounter a small landslide. As Sulla’s men encountered a large one when that Roman butcher was besieging Volterra and thought to plunder the temple here. The priests of that day had to bury themselves with their treasure, but I have had time to lay my plans. To place explosives at strategic points. None of the treasures of this most ancient and holy shrine of the Rasenna ever will go to adorn the blond savages’ so-called museums in Berlin.’

“I jumped. ‘You mean you’ve got explosives down here? They’re risky stuff to handle, sir. You might blow up a lot more than you intended to.’

“For just a second, icy wrath stiffened my host’s face. ‘You think I do not understand what I do? What I guard will be buried, not destroyed. My explosions—if any—will be carefully sized and timed. Only barbarians will die; a civilized man can always outwit such as them.’

“I thought, ‘I hope you know as much about explosives as you think you do,’ but I had too much
sense to say so. And after that he was very pleasant again; we had a good evening. I’m sorry if I did offend the old fellow the other day; I miss him. Besides, I owe him a lot; I certainly should consider his feelings.”

On the twenty-seventh, Prince Mino did come back. The first part of the entry is lost, drowned in that brownstain, and from there on there is never a clear page, but I think we made out most of that scene. We had to start in the middle of a sentence. “...beginning to seem like my own tomb, sir. You’ve made me very comfortable here, but I must say these wall paintings would make almost anybody afraid of death.” Roger must have been looking at that vulture-demon, with his serpent-whip.

“But that was wisely arranged.” Prince Mino’s smile was tolerant. “The early Rasenna went dancing into battle. No race ever had a more fiery lust for life, but by teaching them to expect bliss after death, their priest-kings made them fearless warriors. Later, in their decline, when they had lost hope and desired only to drowse pleasantly toward death, then priests who were no longer kings had to make death terrible. The common people must always be told what to believe.”

“The fear treatment doesn’t seem to have worked.” Roger evidently couldn’t resist saying that.

“Because they had turned from their warrior kings; because Greek democracy had emasculated them. Democracy!” Prince Mino’s lip curled. “That never has lasted long anywhere. In Greece, its birthplace, it endured but a moment. In lands whose fat merchants are guarded by the sea, like your Britain and America, it soon will go down before planes and submarines. Young men like you should face that fact, make sounder plans for the future.”

Roger seems to have said slowly, “Any man would be a fool to try to say what this world will be like by 1990, sir. But this I do know: without democracy, it won’t be a place I’ll enjoy living in.”

“We disagree.” Prince Mino shrugged. “You think the people rule you. Your money-loving shopkeepers really do: men without taste or fineness. Fascism, if intelligently directed, could have saved the world. Mussolini had a gleam of real vision, one his poor peasant’s brain could never execute. Only those are fit to rule whose ancestors have ruled before them; judgment, true leadership, require both breeding and heredity. A base-born dog like Benito presumed too far when he dared to take as his own symbol the Etruscan axe—the
fasces.
He should have been whipped back to his kennel then.”

“We democrats are trying to do that now, sir.”

“To what end? Stop this precious pair—the butcher’s son and the housepainter—and more louts will rise. You lack the wit to keep such ruffians in their native gutters. Such foolishness comes of a faith that believes its God actually to have incarnated himself in a carpenter’s son.”

Roger says that he never had thought of himself as a religious man, yet that shocked him. He said bluntly,
“Like a good many other scholars—better known ones—I feel that their religion ruined your Rasenna, sir. Their belief that their race had to pass away at the end of a certain number of cycles.”

Prince Mino stiffened. “Each of those cycles could have lasted a thousand years. Or ten thousand. Corruption ruined the Rasenna; the poison they sucked in from the lower races. There was no flaw in the laws Tarchon laid down for his people.”

“Tarchon, sir? I thought Tages was the law-giver—the gray-haired boy-god who rose out of the Earth.”

Prince Mino smiled gently. “Are you too naive to understand that myth? The boy must have been carefully chosen and coached. Silver-gilt was put on his hair, and he must have had some good blood to learn his lessons so well. Bastards can sometimes have great beauty, show great promise—yet if the mother is low-born, the promise always fails.” His face had darkened; for a moment his voice held bitterness, even pain.

“Tarchon understood that. After giving his people the laws that their king wrote down, the boy-god returned into the Earth, remember. In other words, he was buried, having been quietly smothered or poisoned. A wise ruler is unsentimental.”

“You think he was Tarchon’s own child?” Roger was startled.

“Assuredly. Sons can be dangerous, yet a man needs them. A race must have them. By papal dispensation I married my cousin, a gentle and lovely lady, but she
had only the fineness of our stock, not its vigor. She lived for many years but she bore no child, and in those days I was myself too sentimental to take the needed steps. Yet probably it did not matter; one man’s progeny could scarcely have given a race rebirth.”

“He was thinking out loud then,” Roger wrote, “not really talking to me. To have no son must be a great grief to a man like that. For him there’s no future. Hitler has (or had) plenty of hopes for his appalling race of super-men (super-bullies, rather), but for the prince everything that exists or that ever can exist is paltry beside his dead-and-gone Rasenna. Wonder what he’d think if he could go back in time and see them as they were. Some Roman playwright accused the women of earning their dowries by prostitution, I remember—the way the Ouled Nail still do in North Africa. But the prince probably would say that that was a foul slander, envious Roman women’s gossip. Etruscan ladies were famous for their beauty. I have a feeling that his highness isn’t exactly the man to be broad-minded about women.”

At that line Floriano laughed. Suddenly and harshly. “He was not altogether a fool, that Englishman!”

There was not much more of the entry left. “...I’m sorry for the old chap; his can’t be a cheerful obsession. But I’ve got to get out of this room occasionally, or I’ll soon be going queer myself.”

There anything like coherent narrative ends. Roger may have begun by going just a little way from his
tomb-chamber. One turn, two turns the first day, perhaps—then more. The desire to explore inevitably whetted, inevitably growing.

He went farther and farther. Not without qualms.

“...any noise doubly loud in a place like this...own footsteps sound like two men’s... I’d have sworn someone behind me. Conscience? I’m not disturbing anything...never speak of anything I’ve seen with(out) host’s leave, of course.”

A few fragments draw a dreadful picture. “...damned ugly sight.... Wish I had stayed in my room today.... A good old Etruscan punishment, of course; Virgil mentions it; and all of them must have been proud of their Etruscan blood, even if they weren’t obsessed by it, like Prince Mino. God knows what obsessed or possessed a man who could do a thing like that...heard the yarn years ago: How, whenever an heir of the Carenni comes of age, his father brings him down to see those two skeletons...lesson against treachery. And Prince Mino calls other people barbarians.... Never dreamed the thing could be true, but here they are!... Old saying about everybody having some skeleton in his closet, but those two—!”

Bewildered, I looked at Floriano. “Have you any idea what he’s talking about?

He looked surprised. “You do not know the story? How young Amedeo Carenni loved his father’s bride?”

A horrible thought came to me. “You mean that girl the villa was rebuilt for—?”

“She. Her husband caught her and his son together.”

“And then the boy’s own father killed him?”

“As he lay in his beloved’s arms. And she—that daughter of the people who had been bought from her humble parents like a cow—was chained living to his corpse and buried with him. That is the good old Etruscan punishment our friend spoke of.” Floriano’s mouth was grim; his eyes smoldered. “They say the old man said to her, ‘I will be kind. Since you wished to lie with my son, you shall do so until your bones crumble.’ And so it was done—that kindness of the Carenni!”

“Are you sure? I thought—my husband said nobody really knew what had happened—” I felt sick.

“When Prince Mino himself came of age, his father took him down into the vaults to see them. It is indeed a ritual with the heir of the Carenni. ‘The most noble and proud Carenni.’”