The beast slayers had almost done their work. The last animals were released-but they were not beasts but humans, Regina thought at first. Very tall, very naked, they ran like the wind, faster than anybody she had ever seen. And, she saw, their heads above their very human faces were flat, their brows reaching back from great ridges set over eye sockets, within which terror and bafflement was easy to discern.

No, not human; they were a kind of ape, her mother told her. These ape-folk's proximity to humanity made them a favorite of the crowds. They were brought to Rome along lengthy trade routes from China, far to the east, where isolated pockets of these creatures survived in the mountains. In this age, which seemed so crowded here in Rome, the world was still an empty and largely unexplored place, and its corners contained many relics of a deeper antiquity. The ape-folk would not fight, but they were lithe and very fast, and the beast slayers had to run them down with chariots before they could be killed.

"Next there will be executions," Julia said. "Bandits, rapists, heretics, and embezzling shopkeepers tied to posts so that beasts may maul them. It is a pitiable spectacle, but the crowd loves it."

"Mother, I brought thematres . From ourlararium . I always took care of them."

Julia's face was composed, but there was something in her eyes, Regina thought, something a little warmer.

Chapter 27.

Once again Lucia journeyed with Rosa into the deep heart of the Crypt.

This time they took a different route, using older elevator shafts and stairs. They pa.s.sed down from the bright upper level with its cla.s.srooms, libraries, offices, and computer centers, down through the vast, sprawling, comfortable layer of hospitals and dormitories, recreation rooms, sports halls and food centers, and then down into the deepest level, the complex of narrow interconnected corridors and small chambers, the level where thematres lived.

Lucia wanted to close her eyes, to shut out the detail that crammed into her mind: if you didn't need to know it, you shouldn't know it.

It was two weeks after the end of Lucia's ostracism. Rosa had come to find her, at the end of Lucia's working day.

Rosa had smiled. "I'm glad you look so well."

Lucia returned the smile. But she felt uncomfortable. She didn't want to think about the recent past.

Rosa seemed to perceive this. "I understand how you feel." She brushed Lucia's cheek with her fingers.

"There's somebody I want you to meet."

"Somebody? . . ."

"He's waiting for you now."

Lucia had followed her-but once more her head buzzed with unwelcome questions.He? There were very few boys or men here in the Crypt, and she was close to none of them.He . . . She couldn't help but think of Daniel. She remembered his face, his oddly high forehead, his pale blue eyes, so different from everybody in the Crypt. But now that face was a dissolving memory, and she knew she must put him aside.

On the third story, Rosa led her down a long, gloomy corridor. They came to a nursery. This was a large, bright room with smoothly rounded walls and tiny pieces of furniture in glaring red or yellow plastic.

The walls were brightly painted with huge smiling faces, and from hidden speakers tinkling music played.

And the floor was covered with infants. "The current crop of one- to two-year-olds," Rosa murmured.

There were about two hundred babies here, in this one great room. Adults dressed in pale gray uniforms walked among them. The children were dressed in identical blue-and-white romper suits, though some of them had worked free an arm or leg. The children played with each other and the toys that littered the floor, exploring, gnawing. The babies were a carpet of wriggling forms-like worms, Lucia thought oddly, or like stranded fish. She could smell them, a dense, pale smell of milk and p.i.s.s and p.o.o.ps, and the noise they made was a shrill roar. And when they chanced to look toward her, they all had the same oval face, pale hair, smoke-gray eyes.

The attendants looked young themselves-some of them surely younger than Lucia herself. It occurred to Lucia that there was a pattern of age in the Crypt. She had seen it for herself. In these deep levels most people were young, children and young adults helping in the nursery, and doing basic maintenance.

Older women, like Pina, tended to work at the higher levels, the schools and libraries, and in the surface offices. It wasn't an exclusive pattern; a few people, like Rosa, seemed comfortable everywhere. But still, she thought, the Crypt was like a great onion, layers divided by age, the oldest outside, getting younger as you penetrated deeper-until at the center were the youngest of all, the babies, and, paradoxically, the very oldest, thematres .

But this was another heretical a.n.a.lysis that she must try to block from her mind.

"I know what you're thinking," Rosa murmured.

"You do?"

"You've mixed with outsiders. I was brought up as acontadino , remember. You're seeing this through the eyes of an outsider-and you're thinking how strange this would seem to them."

Perhaps I was,Lucia thought.

"You don't have to deny it," Rosa murmured. "Well, so it would be strange to anybody who grew up in a little nuclear family. It seemed strange to me, until I understood howright it all was . . . Once you were a child like this, Lucia. Once you played in this room, as these children do now."

"I know."

"And then, with your year group, you moved through the stages of your life, the creches and nursery schools, and then your formal schooling on the top story . . . And more children took your place here."

Lucia shrugged. "Everybody knows about that. It's the way the Order is renewed."

"Yes, of course it is. Now come." She walked on, and Lucia followed.

They went through a door, and pa.s.sed down another corridor. It was colder here, and darker, lit only by a string of dangling bulbs.

Rosa said as they walked, "Ten thousand people live here, in the Crypt. Every year, about one percent of us die-some accidents and illnesses, mostly old age. That'sa hundred a year . That's how many have to be replaced. You said it yourself: the Order must be renewed. Has it occurred to you to wonder how?"

Lucia frowned. "There must be a hundred babies a year, then. To maintain the numbers."

"That's right. Just as we saw in the nursery. The future of the Order: every year a hundred warm bodies are pa.s.sed into the great processing machine of the Crypt at one end, and a hundred cold ones carried out the other. Eh?"

Lucia shuddered. "That's a horrible thing to say."

"But accurate enough. All right. But where do the babies come from, Lucia?"

Lucia, uncomfortable, said, "Thematres ."

"That's right. Thematres , the mothers of us all. Lucia, you know that the Order is very old. Once the Order was small, and there were only threematres -like the three ancient G.o.ddesses in this alcove. But the Order grew, and we needed more babies, and thematres had to become nine, three times three. And then the Order grew again, and the nine became twenty-seven, three by three by three . . ."

It didn't seem at all strange to Lucia that to keep up an output of a hundred babies each of those twenty- seven must produce three or four babies each, every year.

They came to a little alcove, carved into the wall. In the alcove, behind a thick slab of gla.s.s, stood three tiny statues, grimy with age, worn with much handling. They looked like women, but they all wore hooded cloaks. Perhaps they were figures of Befana, Lucia thought.

Rosa touched the gla.s.s. "This is bulletproof . . . These are the firstmatres , the symbolic heart of the Order-just as the twenty-seven flesh-and-bloodmatres are its wombs.

"But soon, the twenty-seven will become twenty-six. Maria Ludovica is not, in fact, the oldest of thematres , but she is the frailest. And Maria is dying, Lucia." Rosa's eyes seemed huge in the dark.

"The last decade, as Maria has weakened, has been a time of turmoil, and more girls like you have emerged-who have become mature, I mean. It is the way of things. Soon somebody must replace Maria. The twenty-seven must be restored."

"You're talking about me," Lucia whispered.

"It has taken me some time to convince certain others thatyou are the right candidate." Rosa seemed proud, as if she had won some victory.

Lucia felt only numb. She couldn't imagine the consequences of what Rosa was saying. She could see nothing to connect her fifteen-year-old self to the wizened, pregnant old woman she had met. "But I am nothing," she said. "A month ago I was starving to death because n.o.body would talk to me."

"In a way it was your-ah-breakout that helped me establish you as the right candidate. You have strength of mind, Lucia, strength of character. Not many of your contemporaries could have endured so much. And we need strength to face the future. The world changes, and the Order must change with it.

We need a certain independence of thinking in our children, a will to accept the unfamiliar-even though there is a paradox, for to get by we all must accept our place in the Order, and not thinktoo hard, as you know to your cost."

"It's impossible," Lucia whispered.

"No." Rosa took her arm. "Just a little hard to imagine, that's all. And now, here is the man I want you to meet . . ."

Lucia turned. The man was right behind them. She hadn't heard him approach.

He was perhaps thirty. He was taller than Lucia, and bulkier; his body looked a little soft, flabby, and his skin was pale. He wore casual clothes, a pale blue shirt and jeans. His hair was dark and neatly combed, but he had something of the features of the sisters, of Lucia and Rosa themselves.

He smiled at her. And as he glanced over Lucia's figure his gray eyes were alive with something of the intensity of thecontadino boys.

Rosa touched Lucia's lips with one fingertip. "Don't say anything. You mustn't speak to each other.

Lucia, this is Giuliano Andreoli. He's acontadino , strictly speaking. But he's actually your distant cousin -you can tell from the coloring-you can look him up in thescrinium if you like. He lives in Venice.

He's a bricklayer . . . I think that's enough. Come now."

She took Lucia's arm and led her away. Lucia looked back, but Giuliano was already out of sight, around the bend of the corridor.

"I don't understand," whispered Lucia.

"Reproductive biology, Lucia. To produce babies you don't need just mothers, but fathers, too. Oh, of course, nowadays the new biotechnologies could make anything possible, but the ancient ways are the best, I think . . . Ninety-five percent of the babies born here are girls. Most of the boys leave after their schooling, and those who stay are mostly either h.o.m.os.e.xual or neuter."Neuter: it seemed a strange, cold, clinical term. Rosa went on, "So where are the fathers to come from? From outside, of course-though we like to keep it in the family if we can."

Lucia stopped. "Rosa, please-who is Giuliano?"

Rosa smiled, but there was a wistful sadness in her expression. "Why, he's your lover."

Chapter 28.

It would be a multiple ceremony, Regina decided, an overlapping celebration of life, motherhood, and complicated relationships.

First there was the birth of Aemilia, daughter of Leda, Regina's half sister, and niece to Regina herself.

Then the girl Venus had reached her menarche. Venus was the daughter of Messalina, granddaughter of Regina's aunt Helena. And at the center of it all would be the marriage of Regina's own daughter Brica to the young, clear-eyed freedman Castor.

It would all be held, she had decided, on the spring feast of Beltane when, according to the tradition of the Celtae, the warmth of the returning sun and the fertility of the earth were celebrated. Regina and Brica had been here in Rome for two years already, and it would be a nice reminder of her days with Artorius.

Of course her elaborate plans immediately threw everybody into a state of confusion. For days the Order's big communal house on the Appian Way was filled with the smells of cooking, with the din of clumsily practiced musical instruments, and with the hammering of nails as decorations were put up everywhere.

Which was all, of course, according to Regina's design. For they all needed a distraction from the looming presence of the Vandals, the dreadful horde of black-painted barbarians who were even now, so it was said, camping on the plains north of Rome.

On the day before the ceremony, Amator came to visit her, at the Order's house.

He walked into her small office and prowled around its shelves and cupboards, fingering the heaps of scrolls and wax tablets. His face was caked with cosmetics, with white powder on his cheeks and black lining to emphasise his eyes. Despite these expensive efforts he looked his age, or older, and, she knew now, he was plagued by ulcers and gout, the sicknesses of an indulgent old man. Today he seemed oddly nervous.

"I see you have found yourself some gainful employment," he said. "How long have you been here- two years? You have been busy. Busy, busy, busy."

She spread her hands over her scrolls and tablets, her seals with the Order's kissing-fish symbol. "I deal in information. That is how things work, Amator. Businesses, cities, empires. You should know that."

"I had no idea you had developed such talents."

"There is much you don't know about me."

"Perhaps I should have hired you, rather than Brica."

She shook her head. "I don't think so, Amator. My ambitions have nothing to do with you."

He faced her. "You're cool now that you don't need my money anymore, aren't you? And are these records of your Order's work?"

"Yes. But there is some history of the Order here-reaching back to the days of Vesta, in fact. I like to maintain such things. And-" She hesitated.

"Yes?"

"There is something of myself as well." She had begun to write out a kind of biography, the story of her own complicated life and the great events that had shaped it. "I want my granddaughters to know where I came from-how they got here. You have a starring role, Amator."

He laughed. "You should make it into a play. Your petty self-justification and trivial complaints would be a great favorite in the Theater of Nero." He turned around, arms spread, almost elegantly, like a dancer. "But none of this sc.r.a.ping and scribbling will do you a grain of good when the barbarians come.

Allthey will want is your money. That and the bodies of your beautiful nieces."

"I have prepared for that contingency."

"You are a foolish and complacent old woman. The Vandals will slit your throat."

"We'll see."

He gazed at her, curious, clearly trying to be dismissive, not quite succeeding.

From her first days here she had, in fact, been preparing for the eventuality of breakdown. She had, after all, lived through it all before. Her life had been devoted to finding a safe haven for herself and her family. Rome itself, with its mighty walls and monuments of marble and eight hundred years of arrogant domination, would surely be more shelter than poor Verulamium had been. But still she had prepared what she thought of as a bolt-hole.

For all his bragging, she saw that Amator was not nearly so well prepared. Good, she thought; the more vulnerable he was the better, for she was not done with him yet. Toward that end, in fact, she had made sure to invite him to the wedding of her daughter and the other celebrations. The more he was close to her, the more opportunity she would have to deal with him.

"The ceremonies are not until tomorrow. Why are you here, Amator? Are you so sorry to lose a worker from your bread shop?"

"Brica is a flat, dull girl. She has looks, but none of your spark, little chicken." But his fencing was unconvincing. "I am more concerned about Sulla."

"Ah. Honesty at last. Your pretty boy."