They came to a small, poky chamber. It was a kind of theater, Lucia realized. It had a raised stage, rooms for actors and scenery, and curved rows of seats, all carved from the tufa. It was very primitive, more or less cut out of the raw rock, and could hold no more than fifty people or so, but an elaborate chrome kissing-fish logo adorned one wall. There was a couch on the stage, which was otherwise bare.

The lighting was dim and smoky, coming from lamps in alcoves carved into the walls: Lucia could smell burning oil. And it was cold. She felt goose bumps on her arms, and her nipples hardened with the cold and pushed against the fine cloth of her shift. She longed to cover herself with her hands, but she knew she must not.

Rosa was here, waiting for her, and Rosetta, one of Lucia’s sisters from her age group, and a couple of older women she didn’t recognize. All of them were dressed in simple garments, like her own stola. Rosetta’s shift had no purple inlay, though, and the round-eyed girl was wearing training shoes and socks.

The older women — older meaning perhaps Rosa’s age — looked at her intently. She sensed hostility in their steady glare, as if they didn’t really want her to be here, as if they would have preferred it to be somebody else. Rosa by comparison seemed triumphant, glowing. Lucia remembered how Rosa had said she had had to fight to ensure Lucia’s acceptance as a new mamma. Perhaps these two women had fought for other candidates. Lucia knew nothing of these battles. But she was still fragile from her ostracism, and she quailed from their glares; she didn’t want anybody to dislike her.

And finally, two very old-looking ladies sat in wheelchairs. They were swathed in silvery high-tech heat- retaining blankets that looked very modern and out of place here. They were matres, mamme-nonne — perhaps even older than Maria Ludovica. Their eyes were like bits of granite, sparkling in the lamplight as they stared at Lucia.

Rosa walked toward her, smiling. She was holding three little statues; they were the tiny, crudely carved figures from the alcove. “Lucia, welcome to your new life.”

She turned away and began to talk softly in an unfamiliar language — it was Latin, Lucia realized after a time. Occasionally the mamme-nonne mumbled responses. Their voices were as dry as dead leaves.

Rosa beckoned Pina forward. Pina produced a small, folded white towel. She unfolded this, to reveal a scrap of linen, stained brown.

Lucia recoiled.

Rosa said, “A little of your first bleeding. You tried to destroy it all, didn’t you? It took poor Pina a long time to find it. Well, now we can finish the job …”

Rosetta carried over a lamp. It was just a wick floating in a pot of oil, small enough to hold in cupped hands. Rosa fed the bit of cloth to the lamp’s flame. It scorched, curled up, and vanished.

All through this the matres were chanting bits of Latin — the same phrases, it seemed, over and over.

Lucia whispered to Pina, “I don’t understand what they are saying.”

“That your blood is precious,” Pina whispered back. “And they are saying, Sisters matter more than daughters. Sisters matter more than daughters … ”

“It’s just like kindergarten,” Lucia whispered, trying to make her voice light.

Pina forced a smile. But her eyes were wide, scared.

“Now,” Rosa said, “it’s time.” She looked past Lucia’s shoulder.

Giuliano stood on the stage, beside the couch. He was wearing a shift like Lucia’s, and he was barefoot. He was looking at her with an intensity that burned through his smile. And an erection pushed out the front of his smock.

Rosa and Pina took her hands and led her toward the couch on the stage. The others were watching, wide-eyed Rosetta, the matres with their eyes like hawks. They chanted Latin, and Pina softly translated: “Your blood is the blood of the Order itself. It must not be mixed with water. I think that means, diluted by the blood of an outsider, a contadino. Your blood is precious …”

It was like a dream — the rhythmic chanting, the uncertain light, the ancient, rounded walls of the theater — everything was unreal save the prickle of cold on her arms. Yet she submitted, as she had at each step.

On the stage, Rosa bade her lift her arms. With a swift motion Pina and Rosa peeled her shift up and over her body. She was left truly naked now, and the little warmth that the cloth had given her was gone.

When she met Giuliano’s eyes, she thought she saw uncertainty. She wondered what he was thinking, how he was truly feeling. But then his gaze strayed to her neck, her breasts, and she was alone again.

Submitting to Rosa’s gentle prompting, she lay down on the couch. It was covered by a thin mattress and a rich crimson cloth, but the couch felt hard under her back, and the cloth prickled her skin.

“Lift up your arms,” Rosa whispered. “Welcome him.”

Lucia did as she was told.

She was looking up at the ceiling, grimed by centuries of smoke, through the frame of her white arms, her limp fingers. In this frame appeared Giuliano. She felt his hands on her thighs. She opened her legs. He lifted up his shift, and placed his arms to either side of her body, to support his weight. His face descended toward hers like a falling moon. She folded her arms over his back; she felt a mat of thick hair there.

Unbidden, a memory of Daniel’s face floated into her mind.

“This is the end of my life,” she whispered to Giuliano.

He frowned. “We mustn’t talk.”

“The end of all choices—”

“I will be gentle.” He leaned down and kissed her on the lips. She smelled garlic and fish on his hot breath.

She still had Daniel’s business card, hidden in a corner of her bag.

When Giuliano entered her it hurt, terribly.

Once the ceremony was over, Rosa told Lucia that she would never see Giuliano Andreoli again. Love, it seemed, was over for her.

And it was only a few days after the ceremony that she found out she was pregnant.

Chapter 30

In the morning of every seventh day, the Order’s governing Council would meet in the Crypt’s peristylium. Such meetings dated back to the difficult times after the Vandal incursion, already fifteen years ago, when the seniors, Julia, Helena, and Regina, had gathered with selected others to thrash out the priorities for the week.

Regina, now sixty-five years old and, since her mother’s death, the most senior survivor of the Order’s founding days, had deliberately developed a habit of being late for these meetings. This morning, instead of making for the peristylium, she began her day with a walk to the Crypt’s farthest reaches, where the tunnels were steadily being extended into the soft tufa rock.

These days the Order employed experienced miners for this work. They used socketed picks and axes, and carried out rubble in framed leather sacks. To crack harder rock faces they would set fires; water would be thrown on the heated rock, and the sudden cooling would shatter the face. All this used a lot of wood, and more wood was required for lumber to prop up the shafts they dug; there were generally more lumbermen at work, in fact, than miners.

The miners were working under much the same conditions as in mines of coal and metal ore across Europe. Their working lives in these dark, sulfurous, smoke-choked conditions were short — not that that mattered, as most were slaves. But here, of course, their legacy would not be what they extracted from the ground but the holes they left behind.

When the miners had roughly shaped out the new chambers and corridors, engineers followed to line and reinforce the walls with concrete, which they would later face with brick. The concrete was made from an aggregate of stone and tile set in mortar made with water, lime, and a particular volcanic sand called pozzolana. Making concrete like this took a toll on the slave labor used to ram it in place. But the use of that labor made it immensely durable.