Читать книгу Sacred Bones - Michael Spring - Страница 9

SIX

Several weeks later a voice came to me in my sleep, urging me to return to the tombs. I went alone.

As I felt my way along the dim, dank corridors, I was surprised by the absence of images of pain and torture. A gentle Jesus played his lute in a garden, taming the hearts of man and beast, drowning the world in sweetness. Lambs gamboled. Doves floated on the still air. What I saw—what God had led me to—was a world of quiet joy and peace, beyond suffering, where compassion triumphed over death. Persecution had no victims here.

I learned what I could about Peter and Mar-cellinus, but there was little anyone could tell me. Marcellinus had been a priest, leading men to God. Peter was an exorcist, fighting the devils that hide in our closets and under our beds, claiming us at night. An exorcist is younger, usually just starting his training for the priesthood, so the smaller bones must have been Peter’s.

The two Christians were beheaded for their faith during the reign of Pope Damasus, the thirty-fifth pope after Saint Peter. The executioner led them to a thicket overgrown with thorns and briars, where no one was likely to find them. Cheerfully, the martyrs went to work clearing space for their graves, then offered their necks to the executioner’s blade. They were buried on the spot, and would have been lost to us if two pious ladies, Lucilla and Firmina, hadn’t found their bodies and arranged to have them transferred to the chapel ad duas lauros (at the two laurel trees), along the Via Labicana, a short walk south of the city walls. They were buried in niches in the earth, one above the other, wrapped only in shrouds. Damasus learned all the particulars from the mouth of the executioner himself, who subsequently converted.

I explained all this to Luniso one afternoon, but he barely listened. This was today; the catacombs were yesterday. What had he to do with death?