Elementals - A. S. Byatt [11]
It was a white stone, carved deep.
NON VENDO NI
SI AMANTIBUS
CORONAS
He translated: ‘I do not sell my crowns, except to lovers.’
‘I can read Latin. Thank you.’
He took her to see the gladiators. Lucius Pompeius, net-fighter, put to combat nine times, born in Vienna, dead at 25 years, rests here. Optata, his wife, with his money, made this tomb. Colombus, myrmillon from Severus troop, 25. Sperata, his wife. Aptus, Thracian, born in Alexandria, dead at 37, buried by Optata his wife. Quintus Vettius Gracilis, a Spaniard, thrice-crowned, dead at 25. Lucius Sestius Latinus, his teacher, gave this tomb. There were only replicas in the glass case in the museum. Nils said he had hoped to be able to work on the tombs of these dead fighters. Three or four centuries, he said, of dead young men, swordsmen and net-throwers, from all over the Empire and beyond, buried now under cafés and cinemas, pâtisseries and churches. Ten or so had got turned up by accident, he said, over the centuries, out of the thousands. He hoped to find a northman, perhaps.
‘Why?’ asked Patricia, without curiosity.
‘A buried berserker, with his amulets. It has been known.’
‘He would have done better not to come here,’ said Patricia. ‘Hypothetically.’
‘Do you know,’ said Nils, ‘that there is a theory that Valhall, in the Grimnismal, was based on the Roman Colosseum? Valhall was described with 640 doors – a circular place where the spirits of warriors fought daily and the dead were daily revived to feast on hydromel and the flesh of the magic boar, until the last battle, when they would go out to fight, eight hundred at a time, through the 640 doorways. The northern paradise is perhaps linked to these stone rings here. We were fighters.’
‘Tant pis,’ said Patricia. ‘They died long ago. Leave them in peace.’
‘Peace –’ began Nils. But she had walked away from stones and bones, along a corridor, up a stair.
In a long narrow dim room, she came face to face with two stuffed bulls. They faced the doorway, balancing trim muscular bodies on delicate hoofs, pointing sharp horns, staring from liquid brown glass eyes. They had been reconstructed with anatomical intelligence, with respect. They had been killed a century apart, ‘Tabenaro’ in September 1894, ‘Navarro’ in 1994 at the centenary corrida for the Granaderia Pablo Romero from which both came. Their hides were both glossy and dusty, Tabenaro pied, Navarro a flea-bitten iron grey. Both skins were slashed, ripped and stitched together like patchwork quilts, flaps reconstructed round the wounds of pic, of banderillas, of the sword. Behind them, along a central island trudged a dusty procession of beasts, a sample of rejects from the Ark, some wearing their reconstituted fur and skin, some standing bleached and bony. A wild boar, Sus scrofa, and five striped piglets; a Siberian bear; a musk bull and calf; two differing deer; a looming derelict moose; a young dromedary, its ears frayed to bare holes, but its eyelashes long, tufted and curving; behind this dusty beast the bone-cages of a giraffe and a llama; behind these a Camarguais calf, a very small Camarguais foal, and the skeleton of a Camarguais horse; behind these the huge bony head of a whale beached in 1874 at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
Round the walls of the long room were other beasts in cages: monkeys and sloths, weasels and beavers, spotted cats and a polar bear, orang-utan and gorilla. In one glass case were curiosities, two-headed sheep, a monster with one gentle face