"Our records are almost as good as yours are reputed to be," he said dryly. "Your Order contributes a great deal to the city-far more than most, in these times of declining civic sentiment. The Emperor understands, and he wants me to transmit his grat.i.tude.

"But, madam," he went on, "we face a grave problem. The Germans are in Italy again. Their leader is a man called Odoacer: not a brute as some of these fellows are, but resourceful and uncompromising."

"Where are your legions?"

"We are overcommitted elsewhere. And tax revenues have been declining-well, for decades. It is not so easy to raise, equip, and pay an army as it once was . . ." He began a dismal litany of military commitments, triumphs, and setbacks, and the complexities and difficulties of the taxation system. What it amounted to was that Gratian was trying to raise a ransom from Rome's richer citizens and foundations: a bribe to make Odoacer go away, with minimal loss of blood.

And suddenly she saw what this thin, elegant man wanted of her. Sitting in this grand, ancient room, surrounded by the trappings of imperial power, she felt as if the whole world were swiveling around her.

So it has come to this,she thought with gathering dismay.That an emperor should come to mefor help: me, helpless little Regina.

She had always believed that one day things wouldget back to normal -that the security she had perceived in her childhood would return. In the Order she had found a place of safety, even if they were "huddling in a hole in the ground," in the unkind words of Ambrosius, a place where they could wait out the storm, until it was safe to emerge into the light again. But Rome wasn't going to recover-she saw this clearly for the first time in her life. The fall had gone too far. "Normal" times wouldnever come back.

She felt angry. The Emperor himself and his incompetent predecessors had betrayed her-as had her mother, Amator, Artorius in turn. And she felt afraid, as she hadn't even when the Vandals were raging within the walls of Rome. The future held only darkness. And all she had was the Order, which would have to preserve her family, her blood, not just through an uncertain hiatus, but-perhaps-forever.

I must go home,she thought.I have much work to do, and little time left.

She stood up, interrupting Gratian's monologue.

He seemed bewildered by her abruptness. "Madam, you haven't given me an answer."

"Bring him here," she said.

"Who?"

"Your German. Odoacer. Bring him here to the palace. Show him the marbles and tapestries, the statues and mosaics. Impress him with Rome's past as you have me, and perhaps he will spare the present.

You're good at it-theact ."

He looked at her angrily. "You're unnecessarily cruel, madam. I have my job to do. And that job is to preserve Rome from bloodshed, perhaps ruin. Is that ign.o.ble?"

She felt a stabbing pain in her stomach-as if the thing in her belly had rolled and kicked, like a monstrous fetus. But by a monumental effort of self-discipline, she kept her posture upright, her face clear. She would not show weakness before this creature of a boy-Emperor.

She walked out of the palace without regret, and hurried home. But the pain followed her, a shadow in the brightness of the day.

Chapter 33.

After the birth, Lucia recovered quickly.

She understood what she was going through. She worked through her postnatal exercises for her abdomen and waist and pelvis. Her uterus was returning to its normal size. Her postpartum discharges did not trouble her and were soon dwindling. Like everything about the pregnancy, her recovery seemed remarkably rapid.

But she was not allowed to see the baby again.

Lucia tried to immerse herself in the workings of the Order once more, toforget as she was supposed to.

But her anger grew, as did an indefinable ache in her belly, a sense of loss.

Rosa worked in a small office on the Crypt's top story. She had a role in the management of the larger corporate clients of thescrinium .

Lucia stood before her desk, and waited until Rosa looked up and acknowledged her.

"Why can't I see my baby?"

Rosa sighed. She stood, came around her desk and had Lucia sit with her in two upright chairs before a low coffee table. "Lucia, must we go through all this again? You have to trust those around you. It is a basic principle of how we live. You know that."

Perhaps, Lucia thought. But it was also a basic principle that they should not have conversations likethis . You weren't supposed to talkabout the Order at all; ideally you wouldn't even be aware of it.

Rosa had her own flaws, she saw. Perhaps it was inevitable that Rosa, who was once acontadino , had a broader perspective than the rest, whether she liked it or not. She said none of this aloud.

She insisted, "I want to see my baby.I don't even know what name you have given her. "

"So? . . . I think we're talking about your needs, not the baby's. Aren't we, Lucia? You grew up in nurseries and creches. Did you knowyour mother?"

"No-"

"And did that harm you?"

Lucia said defiantly, "Perhaps it did. How can I know?"

"Can you be so selfish as to blight your baby's life?"

Rosa's calm composure enraged Lucia. "Why didn't youtell me that my pregnancy would only last thirteen weeks instead of thirty-eight?"

"Is that what the Internet says a pregnancy ought to be? Lucia, there are twenty-sevenmamme-nonne , who must among them produce a hundred babies a year-three or four each and every year . . . If you hadn't filled your head with nonsense from the outside, you would haveexpected a thirteen-week pregnancy, because that's the way we do things here. And whether you knew what was going on or not- Lucia, there was nothing to fear. It is what your body is designed for, you know." Rosa leaned closer and touched her hand. "Let her go, Lucia. You are one of themamme now. In a sense you are already the mother of us all."

Lucia tried not to draw back. We always touch, she thought with a faint sense of distaste, we are always so close we can smell each other. "Andthis will be my life? Morning sickness and labor rooms forever?"

Rosa laughed. "It needn't be so bad. Here." She went to her desk, opened a drawer, and produced a cell phone.

Lucia studied the phone. It had gone dead. "It is my cell. Patrizia took it."

"Have it back. Use it as you like. Look at the Internet, if you want. Would you like to go outside again?

There's no reason why not. I can talk to Pina-"

"I thought you didn't trust me."

"You mustn't turn this into some personal conflict between the two of us, Lucia. I am not your monitor.

I am merely reacting to how you behave, in the best interests of the Order, which is all any of us do.

"Lucia, things are different now, for girls like you. You saw the pictures in Maria Ludovica's apartment -scenes like the Sack of Rome. Once a girl growing up in the Crypt had no realistic choice but to stay here. The world outside, chaotic and uncontrolled, was simply too dangerous. Now things have changed." She pointed to Lucia's phone. "Outside is a bright and superficially attractive world.

Technology has liberated people in a way that could not have been imagined a couple of centuries ago.

People are free to travel wherever they want, to speak to whoever they want, at any time, to call up any information they like.

"And all this penetrates even the Crypt. It is all shallow, of course." She snapped her fingers. "The great information highways could break down tomorrow, just as the Roman aqueducts once fell into ruin. But the world outsidelooks attractive. That's my point. You feel you have a choice, about whether to stay on in the Crypt, or seek some new life outside. But the truth is, you have no choice. Perhaps you must see that for yourself."

No choice because I'mdifferent,Lucia thought.I would never find a place outside the Crypt. And besides, there is something that will hold me here forever. "I can't leave, because of my child. That's why you're letting me go outside, isn't it? Because you know I'll have to come back. Because you have my baby."

A look of uncertainty crossed Rosa's face. "There is noyou andwe -this conversation has been inappropriate. We should forget it."

"Yes," said Lucia.

"Take your phone. Go out, have a good time while you can. I don't think we'll need to talk again." Rosa stood; the meeting was evidently over.

As it turned out, Rosa was right, unsurprisingly. Despite her new freedom Lucia felt very reluctant to leave the Crypt. It would have felt like an abandonment of the baby that was even now yelling its lungs out in one of the Crypt's huge nurseries, even if she never saw it again. She returned to her studies, and considered going back to work in thescrinium . She would go back outside sometime in the future, she decided. Not yet.

Two months after the birth, though, she detected yet more changes in her body. Changes unexpected, and unwelcome. She went to Patrizia again. The strange truth was quickly confirmed.

She knew the time had come to go out. If not now, then never. She still had Daniel's business card. It wasn't that she'd consciously kept it, not exactly, but it was there nonetheless. It took her only a moment to find it.

Chapter 34.

In the last days they gathered around her bed, faces drifting in the candlelit gloom.

Here were Leda, Venus, Julia, pretty Aemilia, even Agrippina. Oval faces, strong noses, eyes like cool stone, eyes so like hers, as if she were surrounded by fragments of herself. And there beyond them, silent witnesses to her death as her life, were the threematres , her lifelong companions, the last relic of her childhood home.

She was still concerned about the Crypt, the Order. Even as the illness rose around her like a b.l.o.o.d.y tide, she thought and calculated, worrying obsessively that there might be something she had overlooked, some flaw she had failed to spot. If the Order was to survive indefinitely, it had to be perfect -for, like a tiny crack in a marble fascia, enough time would inevitably expose the slightest defect.

When a coherent thought coalesced in her mind, she would summon one of the women, and insist she record her sayings.

Thus: "Three," she whispered.

"Three, Regina?" Venus murmured. "Three what?"

"Three mothers. Like thematres . At any time, three mothers, three wombs. Or if the Order grows, three times three, or . . . Three mothers. That is all. For the rest,sisters matter more than daughters -that is the rule."

"Yes-"

"When a womb dries, another must come forward."

"We need rules. A procedure for the succession."

"No." Regina grasped Venus's arm with bony fingers. "No rules, save the rule of three. Let them come forward, and make their own rules, their own contest."

"There will be conflict. Every woman wants daughters."

"Then let them fight. The strongest will prevail. The Order will be stronger for it . . ."

The blood must be preserved, kept pure, for the blood was the past, and the past was better than the future.Sisters matter more than daughters. Let them remember that; let them obey it, and the rest would follow.

And:"Ignorance is strength."

This time Leda was with her. "I don't understand, dear."

"Wecannot survive. We old ones cannot run the Order forever. But the Order must be immortal. This is not a little empire and it never must be so. There must be no leader to fall, no traitor to betray us. The seniors must step back into the shadows, the Council must abdicate whatever powers it can.The Order itself must sustain its own existence. Let no one question. Let no one know more than she needs to perform her tasks. That way, if one fails, another can replace her, and the Order will go on. The Order, emerging from us all, will prevail.Ignorance is strength. "

Leda still didn't understand. But in the corridors of her failing mind, Regina saw it clearly.

To survive into the future you needed a system: that was the one indisputable lesson she had learned since arriving in Rome. The Romans had had a genius for organizations that functioned effectively for generations, despite political instability and corruption and all the other failings of humanity. Though the army was shamelessly used by pretenders to the throne and other adventurers for their own ends, it had always remained a military force of unparalleled effectiveness; and even though senators and others would misuse the legal system for their own ends, throughout the Empire, normal and competent processes of justice had served enormous numbers of people in every aspect of their daily lives. Even the city itself had sustained its own ident.i.ty, its own organization, across a thousand years of unplanned growth, forty or fifty generations of people, for the city, too, was a system.

Systems, yes. And it was a system that she had been trying to establish here, following her instincts, bit by bit, as the years wore away. A system that would endure. A system that would work,even when the people it sustained had forgotten it existed.

The Order would be like a mosaic, she thought-but not of the kind her father used to make. Imagine a mosaic a.s.sembled not by a single master designer but by a hundred workers. Let each of them place her tesserae in harmony with those of her sisters. Then from these small acts of sympathy, from sisters simply listening to each other, a greater and enduring harmony would emerge. And it was a harmony that would survive the death of any one artisan-for the group was the artist, and the group survived the individuals . . .

You didn't need a mind to create order. In fact, the last thing you wanted was a mind in control, if that mind belonged to an ambitious idiot like Artorius.

"Listen to your sisters,"she said.

"Regina?"

"That's all you need to do. And the mosaic will emerge . . ."

She slept.

Chapter 35.

Lucia arranged to meet Daniel at the Diocletian Baths. This was a monument just to the northwest of the Termini, Rome's central station. She arrived early. It was a hot, humid August day, and the sky, laden with clouds, threatened rain.

She walked around the walls. These baths had been built in the fourth century, and like many of Rome's later monuments they actually presented an ugly face to the world, great cliffs of red brickwork. Over the centuries such monuments had been steadily stripped of their marble, so that all that was left was a kind of skeleton of what had been.

But the monument was still ma.s.sive, still enduring. Walls that had once been interior were now exterior, and she could make out the shapes of domes, broken open like eggs. Theexedra , once an enclosed s.p.a.ce surrounded by porticoes and seats where citizens would gather to talk, had been given over to a traffic- choked square.

The rain began to fall. She paid a few euros to enter the museum that had been built into the baths.

There were only a few tourists here. Bored attendants sat on plastic upright chairs, as still as robots switched off at the mains. The exhibits were spa.r.s.e, cluttered together, and poorly labeled, for, she learned, the museum was in the middle of a long, slow process of being rehoused. Lucia wasn't very interested.

At the center of the museum she found a kind of cloister, a colonnaded covered walkway surrounding a patch of green. More antique detritus had been gathered here, all unlabeled. There were fragments of statues, bits of fallen pillars, broken inscriptions whose huge lettering told of the size of the monuments they had once graced. Some of the monuments had been set in the garden, where they protruded from the untidy green.