Evolution

A thick layer of vegetation had broken through the mosaics and floor tiles, and ivy clung to fire-cracked walls. There must have been agony here, Athalaric thought, when the strength of the thousand-year empire had failed at last and its protection was lost. But the presence of the new vegetation in the midst of decay was oddly reassuring. It was even comforting to imagine that after another few centuries, as the green returned, nothing would be left of this place but a few hummocks in the ground, and oddly shaped stones that might break an unwary farmer’s plow.

Honorius brought them to a small building at the center of the complex. It might once have been a temple, but it was as burned out and ruined as the rest. The porters had to haul aside a tangle of vines and ivy. Honorius rummaged over the ground. At last, with a cry of triumph, he retrieved a bone, a great scapula the size of a dinner plate. "I knew it! The barbarians took the petty gold, the shiny silver, but they knew nothing of the true treasures here."

At the sight of Honorius’s spectacular find, the others began to root in the dirt and vegetation with the enthusiasm of prospectors. Even the doltish porters seemed fired by intellectual curiosity, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Soon they were all unearthing huge bones, tusks, even misshapen skulls. It was an extraordinarily exciting moment.

Honorius was saying, "This was once a bone museum, established by Emperor Augustus himself! The biographer Suetonius tells us that it was first set up on the island of Capri. In later times one of Augustus’s successors imported the best of the pieces here. Some of the bones have crumbled away — look at this one — they are clearly very ancient, and have been subject to grievous misuse."

Now Honorius found a heavy slab of red sandstone, with startling white objects embedded within it. It was the size of a coffin lid and much too heavy for him, and the porters had to help him raise it. "Now, sir Scythian. No doubt you will recognize this handsome fellow."

The Scythian smiled. Athalaric and the others crowded around to see.

The white objects, suspended in the red matrix, were bones: the skeletal remains of a creature embedded in the rock. The creature must have been as long in its body as Athalaric was tall. It had big hind limbs, clearly visible ribs suspended from its spine, and short forearms, folded before its chest. Its tail was long, something like a crocodile’s, Athalaric thought. But its most surprising feature was its head. The skull was massive, with a great hollow crest of bone, and a huge, powerful jaw hinged under what looked like a bird’s beak. Two empty eyes stared out of time.

Honorius was watching him, rheumy eyes glittering. "Well, Athalaric?"

"I have never seen such a thing before," Athalaric breathed. "But—"

"But you know what it is."

It must be a griffin: the legendary monsters of the eastern deserts, four-footed, and yet with a head like a great bird’s. The images of griffins had permeated paintings and sculpture for a thousand years.

Now the Scythian began to talk, rapidly, fluently, and Papak scrambled to keep up his translation. "He says that his father, and his father before him, prospected the great deserts to the east for the gold that washes down from the mountains. And the griffins guard the gold. He has seen their bones everywhere, peering out of the rocks, just like this."

"Just as Herodotus described," Honorius said.

Athalaric said, "Ask him if he has seen one alive."

"No," the Scythian said through Papak, "but he has seen their eggs many times. Like birds they lay their eggs in nests, but on the ground."

Athalaric murmured, "How did the beast get into the rock?"

Honorius smiled. "Remember Prometheus."

"Prometheus?"

"To punish him for bringing fire to humans, the old gods chained Prometheus to a mountain in the eastern deserts — a place guarded by mute griffins, as it happens. Aeschylus tells us how landslides and rain buried his body, where it was trapped for long ages until the wearing of the rock returned it to the light. Here is a Promethean beast, Athalaric!"

On they talked, rummaging among the bones. They were all strange, gigantic, distorted, unrecognizable. Most of these remains were actually of rhinos, giraffes, elephants, lions, and chalicotheres, the huge mammals of the Pleistocene brought to light by the tectonic churning of this place, where Africa drove slowly north into Eurasia. As in Australia, as all over the world, so here; people had even forgotten what they had lost, and only distorted trace memories of these giants remained.

And as the men argued and pried at the fossil, the skull of the protoceratops — a dinosaur trapped in a sandstorm only a few centuries before the birth of Purga — peered out with the sightless calm of eternity.

"…These are accounts written down by Hesiod and Homer and many others, but handed down by generations of storytellers before them.