What Perennius had not expected – though it might have been the norm for Christian churches – was the fact that all the stonework inside had been brightly painted. The porous limestone provided a suitable matrix for the paint, and the rock’s natural soft yellow color was used both for
backgrounds and for the flesh of the figures. Those figures were painted in stiff, full-frontal poses which seemed to reflect local taste as much as they did the crudity of the efforts. While the paintings were not the work of trained artists, their execution displayed some of the same raw power that suffused the architecture of the church itself. The bright colors and the depictions of calm-faced men undergoing gruesome tortures affected Perennius as real events were not always able to do. The agent kept remembering Calvus’ face and the way it retained its surface placidity during her multiple rape.
It was Calvus herself who shook the agent from his grim imaginings. “How would they have gotten high enough to do that painting?” the bald woman asked in Latin. She gestured with a flick of her chin instead of raising her hand.
“Ah, that?” the agent said. “Scaffolding.” He had to swallow the “of course” that his tongue had almost tacked on. Calvus did not ask questions to which the answers would have been obvious if she had thought. There were surprising gaps in the traveller’s experience, but her mental precision was as great as her physical strength. “Would have needed it just to build the walls,” the agent went on. He wondered how on earth the tall woman had thought the stones had been lifted into place. Perhaps there were people – where – she came from who could make stones fly. She had denied that she herself could move anything of real size without touching it, but . . . “You’re right, they seem to have built this without so much as a staircase integral to it.”
Perennius was thinking as a military man. Any tendencies the architect – if that were not too formal a term – had toward military design were exhausted when the bottom level was pierced with arrow slits. A rope ladder served as access to the belfry, adequate for religious ends and as a watchtower. If there was no easy way to use the height of the upper levels against putative assault, then there seemed to be no reason to do so either. The thick walls, with the modicum of offensive capacity which the slits gave, would suffice against raiders. A real military force would make short work of an isolated tower, however strong it was individually. The waste of capacity still prompted an inward sneer. The agent thought that perhaps it was that from which arose his growing sense of unease.
“Herakles, Legate,” Sestius called cheerfully from behind him, “This isn’t the sort of place I expected to find out in the sticks. Or the kind of spread I thought we’d be offered, neither. Hey, what do you suppose they’ve got for wine?”
“Quintus,” the agent said. His voice was as flat as a bowstring. “Bag it. Pretend you’re at a formal dinner given by the Emperor. We need the help of these people.”
The centurion winked and clapped Perennius on the shoulder.
The thick columns had trefoil cross-sections which increased their resemblance to walls. Perennius had the impression that he was in a spacious maze. Ramphion himself guided the strangers to a table beneath the belfry. There was no aisle from the door to the other side of the circular building. Those entering the church had immediately to dodge one of the outer ring of pillars. There was another such pillar in alignment across the room. It might be barely possible to see from the outer wall at one point to the equivalent point across the building, but the focus of any mass services would have to be the center of the room rather than the side.
Villagers were entering and filling the long trestle tables set up between the two rings of columns. The movement was not quite formal enough to be a procession, but many of the local people were singing. The agent was not sure whether a number of separate hymns were being intoned at the same time, or whether the acoustics of the room were so terrible that they created muted cacophony from a single work. The drab, joyous villagers flitted among the brilliantly-painted stones like sparrows in a flower garden.