One hot night Clement found himself with a party of a dozen or so that ventured outside the city walls. They were drunk. There might be nothing to find out here, but at least it would be a break from the stink of the city itself, where, it was said, by now you couldn’t find a purse worth emptying or a virgin over twelve.

The Emperor’s soldiers followed an old road the locals called the Appian Way. It was overgrown and rutted, but you could still trace its line, arrow straight. They drank, sang bawdily, and as they walked they probed with sticks and spears at the ground. There were tales of Catacombs out here, and where there were Catacombs you might find treasure.

It was Clement, as it happened, who found the door. His broken stick, in fact a smashed-off crucifix, hit wood—he thought—something solid, anyhow.

He called the others over, and soon they were scrabbling at the turf and dirt, pulling it away in great handfuls. Gradually they exposed a great square door in the ground. They tried to haul it open, but it would not budge.

So Philip, a great slab of a man from southern Spain, got to his hands and knees and began to hammer on the door. If it was not opened it would be smashed in or burned, he shouted, and it would be the worse for whoever was inside. None of this provoked a response, so the men began to gather wood for a fire, to burn their way through.

Then, without warning, the door pushed open. Philip scrambled off, and soon all the men were gathered around, hauling at the door.

A chamber in the ground was exposed. It was walled with white-painted plaster, Clement saw, and lamps flickered in the breeze. And there were women here—six of them—none younger than sixteen or older than twenty-five, he judged, and they were wearing white dresses. They stood in a row, peering up, like nuns praying. They were very pale, like ghosts, yet beautiful, and all of them full-figured.

When the men roared and reached for them, the women’s nerve broke. They clung to each other and huddled back in their pit. But they could not escape the men’s eager hands. They were hauled out of the pit, stripped, and taken, there and then, on the surface of the ancient imperial road. When the men realized the women were all virgins they fought among themselves to be first to have them. But in the end all the women were used, over and again.

As their pale bodies writhed Clement was reminded oddly of maggots, or larvae, wriggling when exposed to the light.