Chapter 16: Churches and Demons Are Good Company

AFTER I LEFT the palaces of the Peloponnese, I paused long enough to pay my respects to the patroness of Athens and erect a small temple in her honor. Soon after Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon, there was an earthquake that made the small kingdom of the Acropolis self-sufficient with its own water source. Erectheus, the ruler of the microcity, wanted to build and reinforce a wall around the top of the Acropolis. I agreed to do so on condition that he also erect a small temple to Athene within its precincts.

Well, I was there for four or five years, creating the fortification and the temple. It wasn’t huge, but Athene had blessed it and my work, so I was pleased. No, this was not the famed Parthenon of later years. It was just a small temple near Erectheus’s equally small palace. But it served to separate and protect the Acropolis from the curse of the House of Atreus that had claimed so many lives, including Agamemnon. I’ll tell you about that story sometime, but I stayed away from the family as far as I could, and as soon as the little temple was finished, I headed on north.

I’m tired of talking about ancient history. Yes, I met some famous people, like Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Caesar, and such, but I’ll get to their stories later. For a few centuries, I enjoyed wandering through northern and eastern Europe, before heading south into Mesopotamia again. There were places where I thought I might successfully settle down and hide the satchel before crawling in and living there with my family forever. But every time I thought I’d found such a place, I’d see people moving that direction.

Not that we didn’t have some good times. There was Impi, for example—a Finnish girl whose name meant ‘virgin,’ which was true for most of the first day I met her. The day was only a few minutes long and then it was night for hours. What’s a demon to do to keep a girl warm when the night is twenty-three or more hours? I built a little hut and we stayed in it for several years. Sadly, the people of that region were not terribly long-lived and I once again bid farewell to a perfectly lovely wife.

CENTURIES AFTER Homer wrote, there was a great revival of the arts and literature. People dug up the bones of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and made translations and books. I’m sure if he read and understood them today, Homer would be appalled at how his precious words have been twisted. Well, serves him right if you ask me. He glorified the barbaric Greeks and denigrated the Trojans. Didn’t even mention the underhanded horse trick. I’m glad Virgil got that part right in The Aeneid. Romans should be proud to have the blood of Troy in their veins instead of on their hands.

The whole story of being chased all over the Mediterranean by Poseidon reminds me of another unpleasant voyage or two. But let’s put off talking about more ancient history. I’ll get to Caesar and Cleopatra later. I know you want to hear about them. But everyone has heard about them. This next adventure I want to tell you about happened, oh, less than a millennium or so ago.

I love the sea, so I’d spent years sailing on waters Poseidon had never touched. Of course, by this time, things had become so crazy on earth that the Olympians pretty much gave it up as a bad game and moved on. I didn’t understand for a long time, but when the king of the gods loses control of the kingdom, he gets pouty and out of sorts. Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, all decided eventually to get out of town when the new god started pushing them around. I’ll tell you about him later.

The seas I sailed in this time were far in the south and in the Far East as I made my way from island paradise to island paradise. Those were some good times and I met some interesting people. Remind me to tell you about the Great Khaan sometime. The journey eventually brought me up the west coast of Africa until I once again found myself sailing the familiar seas of the Mediterranean. It was nostalgic. I’d thought I might visit some of the old places and see if anything I remembered was still there. That thought ended with my first stop in Italy. A plague had just begun and they called it the Black Death. People who caught it tended to die.

I considered getting right back on my boat, but it had become infested with rats in almost no time after I made port. I abandoned ship. There were thousands of people living in the infinity room world by this time, so most did not recognize my long absence. I placed a sealing spell on the case making it impervious to anything that might attack it. Especially, rats. After some time in Rome, working on the center city of the church, I made my way north through Italy, hoping to find a place to sit out the plague.

What I found was construction. There were ancient buildings in Rome which had fallen into ruin. The forum and Colosseum were a shambles. But there was a construction boom in Italy. Mostly churches. I was an old hand at building temples by this time and it was easy for me to find small churches either being built or needing repair. I could work pretty rapidly, easing the burdens of many of the workers so their work also went more swiftly. I never stayed longer than it took to complete a specific task or project, then I moved on.

GODS AND temples. I’ve never quite understood. I believe it is an immortal vanity. When Ninra got me to build his temple in Bathra, there was no slowing things down. Everyone knew the god and goddess had their hands in getting it built, as they were represented directly by the Queen and King—Bao and me. We worked beside the laborers to make a beautiful temple with Ninra and Namri’s blessing. People saw the hand of the gods at work.

To me, it was evidence that the Christian god didn’t command the building of a temple in every city of any size in the world. The churches were created to the glory of the architects and priests who made sure their names were attached to the various churches and cathedrals.

Here’s the thing. The god of the Jews, to whom I had been near but never met, had a single temple. His people knew exactly where they needed to go to worship. Oh, there were some smaller places regionally where people met to study the holy books, but sacrifice was strictly limited to the temple.

Then there was the whole debacle with the summoning of a messiah and not knowing what it was they wanted. Everyone had a different idea of what the messiah should be. When he didn’t turn out to be that, they looked for something more substantial. Now many people maintain the old ways, and worship the old god of the Torah. I have nothing against that, any more than I object to raising my glass to Aphrodite on occasion. But he quit working when the world began to collapse around him. Like the ancient Greek gods, he retired to Olympus or to Sinai or maybe to Miami.

Without a god and having rejected the message of the messiah they summoned, a new religion arose. It was designed according to the ideal that these adherents held—the new god would dominate not only his people, but the world. And if their god dominated the world, then his people dominated all other people. This general philosophy was present in the creation of some other religions and at least one competed for world domination.

You don’t have to believe my theories, of course. I am merely a 4,000-year-old demon. I have seen gods come and go. Gods that depend on the belief of their people. More than anything else, the new god destroyed the belief in other gods. It’s just my opinion, of course. I’m not about to try to find that god and interview him.

WHICH BRINGS me back to the elaborate and beautiful cathedrals. A simple survey of the names of the cathedrals and their dedications will tell you quickly that they were not erected to serve the god, but rather the various saints and priests and architects who attached their names to them. Hence—and since the objective of the religion was world domination—there was not a single temple where the god could be identified and worshiped, but rather a cathedral in every town, established with the mythos that the god is present in all at the same time.

All of which made no difference to me at all. I had built dozens of temples throughout the world at this point, and I saw no difficulty in helping build another. Which is what brought me to the temple in Firenze. I should remember to say cathedral. It had been begun fifty years before I got there and was expected to take another hundred years to finish. I revised my assessment that no god was lightening the load of the peasants cutting stone and elevating it to be stacked on the walls. The god, if he was involved at all, had provided engineers. The sleds used for hauling the heavy stones had wheels. They were pulled by horses. There was no need for a simple demon to come along and enchant the sled so whatever was on it was light enough for a man to pull. Stones moved steadily from the quarry to the temple.

I ADMIRED the men who dreamed dreams of these temples and then created them with essentially the same tools I used for the palaces in Knossos or the temple in Bathra. Oh, there were bright architects, engineers, and mechanics at work. A small item I contributed was to demonstrate how a groove on one stone could be matched with a tongue on the next stone to create a stronger weld between the stones. I’d learned that in creating the bricks in Bathra.

I tried not to practice too much magic around the cathedral, and none at all on the building itself. I’m not really that good with subtle magic. I did, however, find an ancient spell for binding two items together. When I saw the rickety scaffolding the workers were using to hoist the heavy stones into place, I made nightly trips around the structures and bound the joints together so they wouldn’t collapse. Otherwise, I was just a worker putting my back into the building of the cathedral, and leaving some well-placed drawings lying around where the architects could find and claim them.

During this time, I fell in with a monk named Brother Matteo, who spent his days in sober prayer for the safety of the workers and the glory of the building. Glory of God, I should say. I visited with Brother Matteo frequently and he took me to his home at night. His home, with others of his kind, was out in the countryside and most of the holy men spent their time tending vast plots of grapevines. The grapes were harvested and pressed into juice, then fermented into some of the finest wine I had ever tasted. They had reached a point of perfection. While Brother Matteo spent his days in sober prayer, his nights were not as sober.