The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Read online

  They were sitting under a gnarled old oak on a summer-parched brown hillside at the edge of the little town of Monte Saturno in central Sicily, looking southward into a steep gorge densely covered on both slopes with tough, leathery-looking gray-green shrubs. The sky was a hot iron dome, painted a pale blue. Even at this early hour of the day the air was stifling. Gardiner felt a little dizzy. This was a dizzying place, Sicily. The air, rich with lemon and herbs. The heat. The dark fissures of decay everywhere. The beauty. The taint of antiquity, the unfathomable mysteries lurking in every narrow alleyway, behind every crumbling facade.

  He had arrived in town late the night before, driving down from Palermo, and had known her for less than half an hour. He was just finishing breakfast at the little albergo where he was staying when she came in to chat with the proprietor, her uncle. Gardiner had lured her out for a stroll: past the low lopsided cathedral, the scruffy and padlocked municipal museum, the ancient windowless building that was the post office. Almost at once they were in the open countryside, staring out into the island’s immense empty hinterland. She was long and lean, nearly as tall as he was, with prominent cheekbones, a long sharp nose, dark penetrating eyes. She had been born in this village, she told him, but lived in Palermo and had spent considerable time in Rome; she had come here a few days before to visit her grandfather, who was ninety. Gardiner found her attractive, and also oddly forward, flirtatious. But of course he knew better than to indulge in any fantasies. This was Sicily, after all.

  “The history of art? You come to Sicily to study Italian art? There is some confusion here, I think. You should be in Florence, Venice, Rome.”

  “Not Italian art, especially. Byzantine. I’m writing a doctoral thesis on the transition from the Roman style of mosaic work to the Byzantine.” How tidy that sounded! But he hardly wanted to tell her that he had come to Italy seeking something that he could not define, that his life, though satisfying in some ways, seemed fundamentally static and insubstantial: that he yearned for a coup, a grand achievement that would establish him before the world. Serafina sat leaning toward him, listening intently, with her long legs crossed, her hands outstretched on her knees. “You understand what that is, a doctoral thesis?” he asked.

  “Capisco, si.” She was speaking mostly in English, which she handled well, though she dropped into Italian now and then for emphasis. Gardiner, fairly fluent in Italian, had begun the conversation in that language but something about her expression made him think that she found that condescending, and he had cut it out. She could be, he suspected, a prickly, difficult woman. “You write your thesis, they make you a dottore della filosofia, and then you become a real professor, that is how it works, no?”

  “A full professor.”

  “Ah. Si. So you are here to see our mosaics. Already you have seen the mosaics in Palermo? The Capella Palatina, the church of La Martorana, the cathedral at Monreale?”

  “All of them. Plus the one at Cefalu. They’re all later than the ones I’m studying, really, but how could I pass them up?” Gardiner loved mosaics with a powerful passion. Not for the religious scenes they depicted, which had no real importance or significance to him beyond an esthetic one. He was in no way a religious man. The holy saints and martyrs of the Christian mosaics and the gods and goddesses of the older, pagan ones were simply just so much mythology for him, quaint, mildly amusing. But the mosaics themselves—their plasticity of design, their glinting surfaces, their inner light—that was what excited him. It was nearly impossible for him to put his feelings into words: an almost sexual yearning, focused on bits of colored tile glued to walls. He was possessed, and he knew it.

  “And now?”

  “Today I’ll head down to Piazza Armerina, the Villa Romana, the palace of the Roman emperor. With absolutely wonderful mosaics.”

  “I have never been there,” she said.

  Never? That was odd. Piazza Armerina was, he calculated, no more than an hour’s drive away. But New Yorkers never went to the Statue of Liberty or Parisians to the Eiffel Tower, either. Gardiner toyed with the idea of inviting Serafina to accompany him. “From Piazza Armerina I’ll continue on south to Agrigento for a look at the Greek temples, and then up along the coast to Trapani, where I can catch the ferry for Tunis. The Bardo Museum in Tunis has one of the finest collections of mosaics in the world.” Into his mind now there sprang the wild notion of asking her to join him for the Tunisian expedition too, and he was startled by the sudden throbbing beneath his breastbone at the idea. On half an hour’s acquaintance, though? At best she would laugh; she might spit in his face. The old days of impenetrably guarded chastity might be gone here, but at the outset she would want him at least to pretend that he thought of her as a respectable woman. He looked guiltily away, as if fearing that his intentions were visible on his face.

  I should ask her now, he thought, about herself: where she went to school, what she does, how it happens that she speaks English so well. But he hesitated, momentarily unwilling to plod through the standard conversational gambits. A sharp silence fell between them. Gardiner heard the buzz and click of insects all around, and a peculiar ticking coming from a nearby tree, as though the heat were shrinking its bark. The sudden tension sharpened his senses, and he became aware of a tumult of Mediterranean scents assailing him on all sides, lavender, maybe, rosemary, the fragrance of prickly-pear blossoms and lemon leaves.

  A hawk drifted diagonally across the sky. Gardiner, idly following its path with his eyes, watched it descend abruptly into the gorge as if diving to seize a rabbit. As his gaze traveled downward with the plunging hawk he noticed for the first time what appeared to be a small isolated building on the far side of the valley, all but hidden in the scrubby brush. Not much more than the curving arc of its low white dome was visible. Something about the shape of that dome aroused his attention. He had seen buildings like that before. But not in Sicily.

  “What is that across the way?” he asked her, pointing.

  She knew what he meant. “A ruin. Not important.”

  His guidebook had said nothing about ruins in Monte Saturno. So far as he knew there was nothing of that sort here, neither Greek, Roman, Byzantine, nor Norman, none of the multitudinous layers upon layers of superimposed realities out of which this island was built. He had stopped here last night simply because he had had a late start out of Palermo and decided en route not to risk driving on into Piazza Armerina after dark on this rough country road. It had been pure luck that the town’s one trattoria maintained a few upstairs rooms for tourists passing through.

  “A church of some sort, is it?”

  “Of some sort, yes. Not Catholic. A Greek church, the Orthodox faith. Empty a long time. Not a holy place any more.”

  “Empty how long?”

  A shrug. “A long time?”

  “Five hundred years? A thousand?”

  “Who knows? But a long time. It is very ruined. Nobody goes there except goats. And young innamorati. You know, lovers looking for a place to be alone.”

  Gardiner felt a slow stirring of excitement.

  “A Greek church,” he said slowly. “Byzantine, you mean?”

  “That may be.” Serafina laughed. “Ah, you think there are mosaics there? You think you have made a great artistic discovery? There is nothing. Dirt. Ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “It is very haunted there. Yes.”

  She sounded almost serious. He had, for a moment, a sense that a door had opened into a dark place forever inaccesible to him and Serafina was standing on the far side of the threshold. He knew that many of the villagers here lived on the interface between modern civilization and that shadowy realm of antiquity that was beyond his understanding; but Serafina, he had thought, was entirely of his world. He saw now that he might have been wrong about that. But then she grinned and was a contemporary woman again.

  He said, forcing a grin of his own, “I’d be interested in seeing it, haunted or not. Is there any way of getting
to it?”

  “A road. Very bad, very rough.”

  “Could you take me there? I very much would like to have a look at it.”

  Anger flashed like summer lightning in her eyes. “Ah, you are so subtle, you inglesi!”

  “American,” he said. And then, comprehending: “And you misunderstand me, if you think I’m trying in some roundabout fashion to engineer a rendezvous with you. Lei capisce, ‘rendezvous’?” She nodded. “But as long as I’m here—a Byzantine church that isn’t even in the guidebook—”

  Another eyeflash, this one more mischievous. She still seemed angry, but in a different way now.

  “Truly, Professore, you are interested only in the architecture of this dirty abandoned church? You take me to this rendezvous for lovers merely to see stone walls? Ah, I think I misjudge the kind of man you are. A beautiful woman means nothing to you, I think.”

  Gardiner sighed. He was caught in a no-win situation. Bluntness seemed the best tactic.

  “They mean a great deal. And you are extremely beautiful. But I know better than to proposition a Siciliana five minutes after I’ve met her, and in any case there’s a bed in my hotel room, if that’s what I was after. I don’t need to take you to an abandoned building full of goatshit and straw. But I would like to see the church. Honestly.”

  Serafina’s expression softened. She looked merely amused now.

  “You want to go?” she said. “Really? Allora. We go, then.” She snapped her fingers under his nose. “Come! Up! We get ready, we go, at once, subito!”

  But of course they didn’t go subito. Nothing ever happened subito in Sicily. They had to prepare themselves properly for the expedition, sturdy boots, jackets to ward off brambles and wide-brimmed hats for the sun, plus a bottle of wine, some bread and cheese and salami and fruit, as if they were going on a long journey, not just down the side of one nearby hill and up another. The preparations mysteriously stretched on for hours. He had a suitable jacket and even a hat but no hiking boots, only sneakers, which Serafina glanced at with contempt. Her cousin Gino would lend him a pair of boots.

  Cousin Gino was twenty-three or so, sullenly handsome, a swarthy, bull-necked bushy-haired man with enormous forearms and bright, fierce eyes, unexpectedly blue in this land of dark-eyed people. Though Gardiner was a big man himself, broad-shouldered and ruggedly athletic of build, who looked more like a football coach than an assistant professor of the history of art, it appeared likely to him that in any kind of fight Gino would twirl him around his wrist like spaghetti. And just now Gino was glowering at Gardiner with what looked very much like unconcealed hostility, bringing to mind all of Gardiner’s stereotyped notions of the way the men of this island defended their women’s chastity. Serafina said something to him in the transmogrified and deformed dialect of Italian, both clipped and slurred, that was Sicilian—a patois which Gardiner found utterly opaque. Gino, replying with an equally unintelligible stream of brusque, sputtering words, gave them both a furious glare and went whirling away from them.

  “What’s bothering him?” Gardiner asked, still inventing Gino’s proprietary rage, imagining dire warnings, threats of vendetta.

  “He says your feet are too big, they will stretch his boots.”

  “That’s all?” Gardiner felt something close to disappointment. “Well, tell him not to worry. If anything, his feet look bigger than mine.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. He will get the boots anyway, he said. As a special favor for me. We are very good friends, Gino and I.”

  The image came unbidden to Gardiner’s mind of Serafina and her brutish cousin, over there across the gorge one languid summer night seven or eight years ago, lying naked in each other’s arms, ferociously entwined in the incestuous embraces that he assumed were altogether customary among the rural adolescents of this backward country. He doubted that any such thing had ever happened between them; but if it had, no wonder Gino was pissed off over her taking this straniero to their special place, and in his own best boots, yet.

  Gardiner smiled at his own foolishness. He was capable of engendering an ethnic cliche for any occasion. It was a habit, he told himself, that he needed to break.

  Eventually Gino came back with a pair of huge clodhoppers dangling from one immense hand. To Gardiner’s surprise, and apparently Gino’s, the boots were a perfect fit.

  It was a little before noon when they finally set out. The sun filled half the sky, blazing like a permanent atomic explosion, and the hot, shimmering air was full of madly dancing bugs that sang manic droning songs in his ears. There was a sort of a road at first, but it morphed into a narrow untidy trail after a few hundred yards and then, a little while later, became nothing more than a faint exiguous track through the dry stiff-branched chaparral.

  Despite the heat and the difficulties of the route, long-legged Serafina set a brisk pace. Gardiner kept up with her without much effort, but he was marinating in his own sweat under the jacket that she had insisted he wear. At the bottom of the Monte Saturno side of the gorge they came to a campsite, a flat rock and a fire-pit and enough discarded wine bottles to keep future archaeologists amused for centuries, and she said crisply, “We make the lunch here.”

  “Va bene.” He welcomed the break. The climb ahead looked formidable.

  Serafina assembled sandwiches while he opened the wine. As they ate and drank she offered snippets of autobiography. She had lived here until she was sixteen, she told him, and then was taken away to Rome by her uncle, not the same one who owned the trattoria, to be educated. There was a bit of extra spin about the way she said “uncle” and “educated,” and Gardiner flamboyantly hypothesized all manner of sinister iniquities, some wealthy waxed-mustachioed stranger buying the beautiful girl from her impoverished parents to be put to the most depraved uses in his elegant baroque apartment overlooking the Spanish Stairs. But she talked instead of learning English at a genteel Roman academy whose name meant nothing to Gardiner but sounded quite elite; then a stint in the Roman office of a big British investment bank; an affair, apparently, with a young British bond trader that brought her a transfer to the London office, a dizzying taste of the international high life, and, so she appeared to be saying, the inevitable accidental pregnancy and concomitant mess, letdown, and heartbreak. Her fair-haired bond trader operated out of Prague now and she, having had her fill of banking, worked at the Hertz Rent-a-Car office in Palermo. She was fluent in English, French, Spanish, and German, as well as Italian and the local dialect. So much for her being a simple peasant girl, he thought. He guessed that she was around twenty-nine. He was nine years older. In the thick afternoon warmth the aura of her lean sleek Mediterranean attractiveness expanded into the hazy air around him, dazzling and mesmerizing him, enveloping him in an unexpected and astonishing explosion of impulsive speculation. How it would startle everyone at the college, Gardiner told himself, if he came back from his summer research trip not only with material for his thesis but with a beautiful and cosmopolitan Italian wife!

  “Andiamo,” she said, the moment the bottle was empty. “Now I show you the fabulous Byzantine church.”

  The hill on the southern side of the gorge was steep, all right, and the heat was unthinkable now, and Serafina moved with jackrabbit energy up the slope, as though deliberately testing his endurance; but, fortified by the good red wine of Monte Saturno and his own implacable curiosity about the ruin ahead and now, also, this absurd but amusing new bit of romantic fancy of his, he matched her step for step, a couple of yards behind her with his gaze fixed steadily on the taut, tantalizing seat of her jeans.

  Suddenly they were in a little scraggly clearing, and the ruined church lay right in front of them.

  “Ecco,” she said. “Behold your heart’s desire.”

  The building was a little one, no bigger than a garage and half concealed in tangles of brush, but it was pure late-Byzantine in form, a squared-off Greek cross of a structure with a squat dome perched atop its four blocky walls. He knew of n
o other building of this sort in Sicily. It reminded him of nothing so much as the eleventh-century church at Daphni, outside Athens. But Daphni was world-famous for its luminous mosaics.

  It was impossible, Gardiner thought, that mosaics like those of Daphni could have gone unnoticed all this time, even in this obscure hilltop village.

  “Let’s go in,” he said hoarsely.

  “Si, si.” She beckoned to him. “Venga di qua.”

  The main entrance was sealed by a dense barrier of interwoven woody shrubs, but a smaller door stood slightly ajar on the northern side, a crudely made wooden one, cracked and crazed, that looked as though it had been tacked on about a hundred years ago by some farmer using this place as a barn. Serafina, with a surprising show of strength, levered it open just far enough to let them slip inside.

  The church was rank, musty, dismal, a claustrophobe’s nightmare. When Gardiner switched on his flashlight he saw that over the centuries enough sandy dirt had blown in through the narrow windowgrates and through crevices in the walls to lift the floor level at least eight feet in most places, so that he was standing practically within arm’s reach of the dome. Heaps of ancient mildewed straw were piled everywhere: a barn, yes. The pungent aroma of innumerable copulations hovered in the air. For how many generations had the passionate young of Monte Saturno committed sins of the flesh in this bedraggled former house of God?

  He aimed his beam upward, praying that he would see the stark somber face of Christ the Pantocrator scowling down at him, as at Daphni and other Byzantine churches. No. The dome was bare. He had not really expected anything else. Probably this had been some simple chapel for wayfarers, in use for perhaps fifty years a thousand years ago, then abandoned, forgotten.

  “You are satisfied?” Serafina asked.

  “I suppose.”

  “I myself parted with my virtue here,” she said, in a bold, cool, self-mocking tone. He looked at her, taken aback, angered and repelled by her unsolicited revelation. The idea that Serafina had ever engaged in any sexual event in this grim squalid place was sickening to him. She and some clumsy village Romeo sprawling on a scratchy tick-infested blanket, his shaggy eager body pressing down on hers, her splendid slender legs spraddled wide, toes pointed at the dome: the thrusts, the grunts, the gasps. “I was fifteen. We thought we were being very brave coming here, because of the ghosts. But every young couple in town is brave like that when the time comes. Some things are so urgent that even ghosts are unimportant. The ghosts must be defied.”