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

tell him more stories, daring ones, frightening ones sometimes. About the darkness and the old things that lurked there.
    Alessio glanced at the seven doors. He hadn’t looked to see which one Giorgio used when he left. He was mad at him. Giorgio hadn’t wanted him to watch, and he knew that without being told. But now…For a moment he wished he’d kept that watch. Maybe it would have provided some kind of marker by which to judge his father and the things he did.
    There was another sound from the corridor, and this time he was certain. It was a distant, low, male voice. Giorgio was there surely, waiting for him, wondering what he would do. This was the Palatino again, only more severe, a bigger test. Alessio stared down at his clean school clothes and wondered what his mother would say if he arrived home with them ruined.
    Games.
    There were so many games. Theirs was an entire relationship based on play, because when Giorgio wasn’t engaged in some obscure diversion he was somewhere else, inside a book, head bent deep over a computer, always avoiding what Alessio’s mother called “the real world.” Games connected them. Hide-and-seek. Show-and-tell. Games that collided with the past sometimes, and the stories he told too.
    Theseus and the Minotaur.
    That was one of his favourites. A brave lost warrior, a stranger in a strange land, meets a beautiful princess and, in order to win her, must accept a challenge. A monster lurks in a lair, a hidden labyrinth of corridors beneath the ground. Half man, half bull, a dreadful, unnatural being that devours young men and women—seven of each, which, Alessio thought, was one reason he remembered so clearly—as a tribute.
    Theseus offers himself as a sacrament, enters the labyrinth, finds the monster and—this was very clear in his memory too—beats the creature to death. Not a clean end, cut in two by a sword, but with some crude bloody club, because this was a beast, not a man, and a beast deserved no better.
    Or a half beast, half man. To Theseus there wasn’t much difference.
    The princess, Ariadne, helped Theseus with a gift: a ball of string which he unwound as he entered the caves, and then used to find his way back home to safety, with those he had rescued.
    Alessio sat calmly at the table in the bright, bright cave, remembering all this, wondering what it meant. Giorgio had retold this story only a few days before. Alessio knew that his father was a man who rarely wasted anything—breath, a sentence, the simplest of physical acts. Was that conversation, then, significant in some way?
    Mithras, the god his father knew so well, had killed a monster too. One that was all beast. Alessio had looked in Giorgio’s desk once and seen a photograph there, lurking like a secret waiting to be found. The bold, strong god, straddling the terrified animal, gripping its head, thrusting a sword into its neck. Mithras hadn’t resorted to a club for this killing. But this was all beast, so perhaps that was different.
    One more memory. In the picture, beneath the animal, there were creatures, strange and familiar, doing things he didn’t quite understand. The scorpion in particular, which wielded its pincer claws at those parts of the animal small children weren’t supposed to see, least of all mention.
    “A game,” Alessio repeated quietly to himself. In the end, everything came down to this, whether it was seeking a monster in a cave to prove oneself worthy of respect, or peering through the keyhole of an order of ancient knights, looking for a familiar shape across the river, one whose presence would keep in balance the myriad worlds he saw through those stupid glasses.
    A game was what Giorgio wanted. That was why they had come here in the first place. It was a challenge. Perhaps the challenge, one so large, so daunting, so difficult, like the Minotaur pitched against Theseus, that it would be his making. Giorgio Bramante was waiting for his son to understand, to rise and