The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson Read Free Book Online Page A

the face. He didn’t wear it. Watches were hateful, intrusive things, unnecessary machines ticking away the minutes of a person’s life without mercy, without feeling. The face with its red hat and snowy beard grinned back at him all the time.
    He knows when you’ve been bad or good… …said the old American song they played on the sound system sometimes, very loud, when they’d been drinking.
    Santa Claus was an invention out of a fairy tale. A face on a dial. A spy on the wrist. Alessio didn’t like the idea of someone watching him like that. It wasn’t right.
    Just as leaving him alone in this bare, bright chamber, in the red earth and grey rock, wasn’t right either. The place smelled of mould and decay. Not what he’d hoped for, the sharp citrus aroma of old fruit skins squashed underfoot.
    They’re oranges on the surface only, he thought. Something else lies beneath. Bones and dead things, all the decay of the centuries.
    He recalled staring through those stupid spectacles that morning, wondering who was right. The way he saw—or didn’t see—things. Or the multiple worlds envisioned by a fly.
    Alessio sat at the table and said, in a calm, flat, unemotional voice, tinged only slightly with anger, more for himself than anyone listening, “Giorgio.”
    Then again.
    “Giorgio!”
    He’d never used his father’s first name like that before. There was a rule, a law, that forbade children from speaking their parents’ real names out loud. Giorgio—Alessio had thought of him this way for months now—had told him stories about magical names. Of how the Jews had a word for God which no one but the highest priest could utter, and then only in special circumstances, deep inside the holiest of places. And now he knew about the followers of Mithras, with their secret rituals too, enacted in this underground labyrinth.
    Seven orders of humanity. Seven trials. Seven sacraments. Precious rites, never shared with outsiders. Not until the moment of initiation, the point at which the blank, empty page of the novice gained a single scrawl, the birth of knowing.
    The beginner became Corax.
    After…what?
    Giorgio had disappeared into the darkness minutes before. Alessio thought he’d heard distant sounds from down one of the black corridors. A faraway voice. Perhaps more than one. Perhaps it was his father watching from the shadows. Or maybe it was merely an echo of his own voice, deepened by the tunnels chasing off from those seven exits cut into the rock of the chamber in which he now sat, not afraid, just thinking, trying to work out what this was.
    Games.
    Giorgio played games sometimes. A few months before, Alessio’s father had taken him into a warren of excavated houses on the Palatino, had found, through a labyrinth of ancient stone rooms, the kitchen of someone called Livia, wife to a famous emperor, Augustus, and a woman of fearsome reputation, cruel and controlling, determined to do the utmost for her clan. A kind of Pater, but in a dress.
    Giorgio was nowhere when Alessio had turned a corner and found himself in some dark rocky alcove, green with algae, alive with insects, centipedes and beetles, bristling with furry moss that clung like crude living skin on the damp stone walls, yellowing with the onset of decay. The boy had stood there for a long time, glad he’d never brought the watch because that would have made everything seem longer, placed a stamp on the act, one that said “guilty.”
    He hadn’t done what Giorgio had wanted. Hadn’t broken down, cried, whined, kicked, and yelled, hammered his new white sneakers against the green, gunky stone until they were ruined.
    Afterwards Giorgio had bought ice cream and, for Alessio, a toy he didn’t want. All in return for a promise never to tell his mother, one he readily agreed to, because men needed secrets, bonds, just like those of Mithras, whispered in this place two thousand years before. Secrets bound men together more tightly, made Giorgio