New Rome Rising Read online

  NEW

  ROME

  RISING

  RENE FOMBY

  Book Ness Monster Press

  4530 Blue Ridge Drive

  Belton, Texas 76513

  Copyright © 2018 by Rene Fomby.

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-947304-08-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.renefomby.com

  Fomby, Rene. New Rome Rising. Book Ness Monster Press. Kindle Edition.

  To Janice.

  Contents

  the mousetrap

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  the conclave

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  the light at the end

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  the wall

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  the gathering storm

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  the rabbit hole

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  a new rome rising

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  109

  110

  111

  112

  113

  114

  115

  116

  117

  118

  119

  120

  121

  122

  123

  124

  125

  126

  127

  the lost church

  128

  129

  130

  131

  132

  133

  a resumed innocence

  134

  135

  136

  137

  138

  139

  140

  141

  142

  143

  144

  145

  acknowledgments

  other books by rene fomby

  coming soon

  bonus materials

  the mousetrap

  1

  Cappadocia, Turkey - Saturday

  William Tulley pulled himself out of bed just before dawn, as he had every day since the headaches started. Throwing a thin cotton robe over his shoulders and slipping his feet into a pair of well-worn leather sandals, he paused to retrieve the Cup from its protective niche cut deep into the cold stone wall, then padded over to his private elevator. A short two-story ride up to the surface brought him to his lush private garden, a welcome paradise on the arid, sun-parched plains of western Turkey. The sun was just beginning to show its face in the east as he reached into a pocket of his robe and pulled out a small bottle of purified water. Very slowly he poured a trickle into the Cup, careful not to let any water slosh over the sides, two thirds of which were missing. Then, holding the Cup carefully at an angle in the palm of his left hand, he screwed the top of the bottle on single-handedly with his right and returned it to his pocket.

  The edges of the Nanteos Cup were well worn from the hungry mouths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of supplicants who had sipped from it over the past two millennia, desperately longing for the curative powers of this, the legendary Holy Grail. A cup used by Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper. A cup Tulley’s top general, Peter Boucher, had stolen from the family that had owned it for the last century, leaving behind a clever forgery to cover the theft. A cup Tulley hoped would grant him a long life. Even, with God’s grace, life everlasting.

  He turned his face toward the sun, and as the first full rays of light burst over the lip of the earth, he tipped the water into his mouth, holding it for just a moment on his tongue before swallowing the healing nectar down in one long gulp, leaving him once again whole and holy before the Lord. With the water finally gone, he stole a glance back over his shoulder toward the west, toward the wounded city that, like the sun, would soon rise once again to take her rightful place at the heart of all Christendom. The sun lit up the plain behind him in a sea of gold, and in minutes would be washing over that city’s broken walls as well, bringing a new day, a new tomorrow, to a city that had patiently awaited God’s redemption for five hundred years. New Rome.

  ※

  After Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium in 324 CE, the empire’s fortunes ebbed and flowed like the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea washing up upon its far-flung shores. The emperor named the city New Rome, a name abandoned by its citizens in favor of Constantinople, the city of Constantine.

  Somehow, despite all of the glaring inadequacies that marked most of Constantine’s successors, New Rome stood guard as the impenetrable gateway to Europe for the next twelve hundred years. Dozens of would-be conquerors would blunt their swords and spears against the city’s thick walls, but each time the greatest city in the world found a way to keep them all at arm’s length.

  To the west, though, the venerable city of Old Rome was not so fortunate. Within a century of Constantine’s departure, the gates of Rome were ravaged by a succession of Goths, Visigoths and Huns, each taking turns raping the ancient city as the spoils of war. All too quickly, the population of Rome declined, precipitously, driven by waves of famine, disease and war, until the Latin language itself grew almost extinct. Even the Church abandoned Rome, as the Bishops of Rome—now pompously calling themselves popes—moved the Holy See to such fa
r-away cities as Ravenna, Viterbo, Orvieto, Perugia, and, finally, Avignon.

  The collapse of Rome left a power vacuum that was soon filled by a long line of Germanic kings and chieftains, and even the new popes found themselves drawn by the intoxicating siren’s call of temporal pleasures, as well as the very real risks imposed by occupying powers. The lines between worldly and other-worldly authority began to blur.

  For a time, the Germans managed to maintain a relative peace in the city, if not prosperity. but in 751 the Lombard king Aistulf conquered the Roman exarchate of Ravenna and threatened Rome itself. Alarmed, Pope Stephen II turned toward the north for help—not the east—begging Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, to come save the ancient city. Pepin quickly drove the Lombards out of Ravenna, but rather than return the territory to its rightful owner, the emperor residing in Constantinople, he gave the land instead to the Roman pope. The Bishop of Rome thus took on a new, temporal crown as the reigning king of central Italy, the King of the Papal States. It was a role that would continue until the House of Savoy finally conquered Rome in 1870, establishing the Kingdom of Italy and driving the popes deep into the Vatican as self-imposed prisoners for the next fifty-nine years. An exile that would finally and fitfully end with a treaty negotiated and signed by Benito Mussolini, then acting prime minister of the Italian kingdom.

  Meanwhile, the Roman emperors and bishops back in Constantinople had their own sets of problems, and over the centuries they had grown to ignore the feeble machinations of the various Bishops of Rome, who they rightly regarded as paper tigers. Of much greater concern to Constantinople was the empire directly to their east—Persia. The Roman-Persian wars raged back and forth for 680 years, the longest period of perpetual warfare in recorded human history. Those wars came to a stunning conclusion in 627, when the Roman emperor and general Heraclius launched a winter offensive into Mesopotamia, crushing the last remnants of the Persian army at the Battle of Nineveh.

  While the Roman Empire had finally emerged victorious from the seven-century-long war with Persia, that victory came at a terrible price. Both empires lay broken and spent, and each turned inward to lick its wounds, largely ignoring any threats that might crop up along its borders. A retreat that could not possibly have come at a worse time for the Empire, nor at a better time for a new group of religious warriors that were just beginning to emerge from the hot desert sands to the east.

  In 622, an Arab “Messenger of God” named Muhammad was forced out of Mecca and into exile in a city he would later name Medina. There he quickly set about building an army of religious zealots that rose up seven years later to take Mecca and the entirety of the Arabian Peninsula by force. Muhammad declared to his followers that the world would now be divided between Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the House of War), and that the sacred duty of Dar al-Harb was holy jihad, expanding the House of Islam at the point of a sword and spreading the providence of Allah across all of the civilized world. Within five years, his armies burst out of the desert and fell upon the hapless Persians, who were quickly and utterly defeated. Next up were the Romans. Using the stars as their guides and slaughtering their own camels for food and water, Arab raiders burrowed into the boundless desert wasteland lying along the Roman border, racing periodically out of the trackless sands to ravage Roman positions, then melting invisibly back into the desert. The Roman army was clueless about how to respond to the new threat, and seemingly powerless to stop it. Finally, in 636, they chased a large Muslim contingent to a distant tributary of the Jordan River, where over the span of six short days the Romans were soundly and ruinously defeated. Those Romans who somehow managed to survive the battle attempted to surrender—and were massacred by the Muslims on the spot. The message of Islam after this battle was crystal clear: for those who opposed Islam and its Allah there would be no mercy.

  Muhammad himself died of a fever in 632, but his armies nonetheless continued to rage unchecked across the eastern stretches of the Roman Empire, quickly taking Antioch, then Jerusalem. In North Africa, mighty Alexandria was laid to waste, its world-renowned library burned to the ground, its population raped, murdered and sold into slavery. Adding insult to mortal injury, the Muslims then abandoned Alexandria and built a new capital for North Africa up the Nile at Al-Fustat, a tiny village lying in the sandy shadow of the pyramids. A city that would later be known to all the world as Cairo.

  By capturing the Roman capital cities of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, the Muslims had eliminated three of the five Holy Sees of the Christian Church, leaving only the Bishop of Rome and the Bishop of Constantinople to face off against one another for leadership of the Christian faith. A confrontation that would soon rip that faith in two.

  Of more immediate concern to the Romans in Constantinople, though, was the survival of the Empire itself. With all their riches in Africa and three of their capital cities now lost, the Empire was in dire peril as the Muslims gathered their forces for the final coup de grâce, the conquest of Constantinople itself. By 646 the Muslims had slipped the bonds of the desert sands and fashioned a formidable Mediterranean war fleet, which in 655 crushed the mighty Roman navy at the Battle of the Masts, sending five hundred Roman vessels to the bottom of the sea. The Muslims then turned their full attention to the Siege of Constantinople.

  But the Romans finally caught a break. Surrounded by Muslim naval warships who threatened to breach their walls at any moment, the Romans turned to a devastating new weapon: Greek fire. Invented by a Christian refugee from Syria, Greek fire was a weapon unlike any that had ever been seen before in naval combat. It was an incendiary compound that ignited on contact with water, and it couldn’t be extinguished by any means then known to man. The mighty Muslim navy was devastated, and the few ships that managed to escape back out into the Mediterranean were quickly sunk at sea by a massive storm. The city of Constantine was saved, at least for the time being.

  But the Muslims refused to stay beaten. On the 29th of May in 1453, the final chapter in the city’s thousand-year history as the capital city of Christ and the Empire was written. A 21-year-old Ottoman Sultan named Mehmed the Conqueror employed a newly discovered Chinese invention called gunpowder to fling endless barrages of cannonballs at the city, breaking a fifty-three-day siege. The Ottoman army poured through the gaps in the city’s walls, and the citizens of the Roman Empire quickly surrendered. New Rome had finally fallen.

  ※

  Tulley checked his watch compulsively, even though he already knew the time. But clocks and watches promised to run differently today, slowing to a crawl like they did for little children the night before Christmas. Tonight would mark the beginning of his own private Christmas, the opening salvo in a war he’d been planning for years, and he couldn’t wait for the countdown to finally be over, for his years of waiting and scheming to finally come to an end.

  The throbbing in his skull was slowly fading away as the holy water trickled through his veins. Without the miraculous powers of the Holy Grail—he looked down at the cup reverently and shook his head. But the cup was his, now, and it served as even greater evidence that God had set him on this path for a purpose. To restore the Church to its former glory, and in the process restore New Rome to its proper place at the heart of his new Christian empire. The Holy Roman Empire.

  2

  Rome

  The old man shuffled slowly but deliberately across the well-worn blood red carpeting, eager to embrace the shelter of his private apartment. A winter storm had blown in during the late afternoon, bringing with it an early end to summer and an unseasonably bitter welcome to fall. The cold he felt in his aching joints might be in response to that, or more likely was just part of the normal ravages of time. Even God couldn’t hold back the inevitability of growing old.

  He finally reached the plain wooden door to his apartment. It wasn’t locked, so he turned the knob easily and slipped inside. Here, in this house, he needn’t worry about locks, or any other worldly concerns for th
at matter. His apartment was sacrosanct, open only to himself and the small group of trusted servants who dedicated their lives to his comfort.

  Turning on the lights, he saw that someone had already thought to deliver his nightly glass of warm milk, a small but welcome reprieve from the burdens he had to carry each and every day for his flock. And especially welcome on a night when he couldn’t seem to shake off the chills. He closed the open window on the other side of his bed, slipped out of his robes and into a simple cotton nightshirt, then settled onto the side of the bed to down the glass of milk in peace.

  He was almost to the bottom of the glass when his hands started to tremble and his body suddenly went flush, a fever spreading in a fiery wave across his entire body seemingly at once, pressing out the chill that had lodged there only moments earlier. He set the glass down on the bed stand before he dropped it, then laid across the bed on his back, trying to catch his breath, a simple task that was becoming increasingly difficult with each second that ticked by on the antique brass clock sitting beside him. Now panicked, he reached out to press the alarm button on the side of the bed, but the move seemed to trigger something like a knife cutting sharply down his spine, throwing him back against the bed in a violent spasm. He felt something erupting inside of him, clawing at his chest to get out. He vomited, once, and then again, spilling out his guts in a red torrent onto the clean white sheets. Blood began to gush from his nose, his ears, his bulging eyes. And then—nothing. His now empty eyes stared vacantly at the single lightbulb swinging slowly from the ceiling high above his bed.

  3

  United States Embassy, Rabat, Morocco - Sunday

  The howling winds outside the Embassy this morning were almost as stormy as Gavin Larson’s mood. Andrea Patterson had failed to call over the weekend, and every effort he had made to reach her went straight to voicemail. Even when she was out on special assignments, Andy had never forgotten to check in with him at least twice a week. This was so not like her, and Gavin couldn’t help but wonder if he had done something to make her angry.

  He glanced over at the small framed picture he had of her, sitting on his desk next to the larger picture of his kids. Actually, her picture was just a printout of her Facebook photo—he would never have had the courage to ask her for a real picture. Because he knew he would never hear the end of her teasing if he did.