“No mammal lives longer than humans, no elephant, no dog or horse. Your grandmother’s parrot might beat a century. The oldest insects are jewel beetles that die at thirty; the crocodiles might last to sixty. The oldest land animals of any kind are tortoises—Captain Cook gave one to the king of Tonga that supposedly lived one hundred eighty-eight years—and some mollusks, like the ocean quahog, a thick-shelled clam, can last a couple of hundred years. But that’s all. So if you go just two centuries deep into the abyss you leave behind all the living animals.

“Deeper than that and there are only the plants. In the gardens of the villa of the Emperor Hadrian there is said to be a cypress tree that has lived a thousand years, but even that is only halfway back to Hadrian himself. Oh, there is a great redwood that is said to be seven thousand years old, and living bacteria found in the gut of a frozen mastodon were more than eleven thousand years old—but such wrinklies are rare. Everything else has since died as we do, George, the grass, the fungi, the bugs; we may as well all be mayflies . . .

“Nothing living survives from the time of the emperors—not even vegetable memories. You are delving in deep time indeed, George. But you mustn’t let it frighten you.”

A new message came in. From Claudio, it was a telephone number for the Order. In fact, said Claudio’s note, it was a direct line for my sister, for Rosa. My heart beat faster.

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

It was in the year 667 that Totila came to Rome. He wore an iron collar around his neck, for he was a criminal who undertook this pilgrimage as expiation.

Totila was a simple man, a farmer from southern Gaul. He had not denied the charge against him, of stealing a little bread to feed his daughters’ swollen bellies. His crops had been ruined by floods and banditry, and he had had no choice. That didn’t make it any less of a sin, of course. But the bishop had been lenient; his mouthfuls of bread had won him only a flogging, which would probably leave no scars, and the great chore of this journey to the capital of the world.

But in his whole life Totila had never walked more than half a day’s journey from the place he had been born. Across Europe, the calm of empire had been replaced by turbulence, and this was not an age for traveling. The journey was itself overwhelming, a jaunt into endless strangeness.

And as he neared Rome itself, when he joined the flood of pilgrims who trampled along the weed-choked road that led to the city, and when he walked through the great arched gateway into the city itself, Totila felt as if his soul would spin out of his body in bewilderment.