Free The Ancient Curse by Valerio Massimo Manfredi Page B

Both men were slaughtered by an enormously powerful wild animal with huge fangs. We’re talking six or seven centimetres.’
    Fabrizio scowled and remembered the canine tooth he’d picked out of the box downstairs. He stuck his hand in his pocket and felt it there, long, smooth and sharp, as if twenty-four centuries had passed without making a dent. He pulled it out and showed it to Lieutenant Reggiani, holding it by the tip.
    ‘Like this one?’ he asked.

6
     
    L IEUTENANT R EGGIANI stared in amazement at the sharp fang between Fabrizio’s index finger and thumb, then raised his eyes and held the archaeologist’s gaze for a long, tense, silent minute before saying, ‘Yes . . . I would say so. What is it?’
    ‘I should have an answer for that,’ said Fabrizio. ‘But I don t. A colleague of mine who is an expert in palaeozoology should be arriving soon from Bologna. She has studied a vast number of ancient bone fragments and skeletons of every species, both wild and domesticated. If she can’t figure this one out, I know of no one else who can. This tooth belongs to a complete skeleton of which I’ve sent her a photograph by email, but she seemed quite puzzled. She thought it was a canid, but wouldn’t hazard anything else. It’s the dimensions which are astonishing, along with its uncommon anatomical features.’
    ‘Where did you find it?’
    Fabrizio opened his desk drawer and pulled out a photograph, setting it down on the table for the officer.
    ‘In a roughly carved sarcophagus, without an inscription of any sort, inside the tomb I excavated at the Rovaio site.’
    ‘How extraordinary,’ exclaimed Reggiani as soon as he had managed to work out what he was looking at. ‘But . . . what is it?’
    ‘It’s the first and only physical proof we have ever found of the most frightful rite of the Etruscan religion. This is the tomb of a Phersu. Until now, we’ve only suspected its existence from iconography – most notably, a fresco in the Tomb of the Augurs in Tarquinia, along with a couple of others. But we’ve never had tangible evidence and certainly nothing so explicit.’
    ‘Go on,’ prompted Reggiani, as if he were interrogating a witness.
    ‘Habitually it was a sort of human sacrifice dedicated to the soul of a high-ranking person who had died. The rite has very ancient roots and was performed by diverse civilizations. Even the Greeks, in the most archaic age. Do you remember the Iliad ?’
    ‘A little, here and there. I haven’t read it since high school,’ said Reggiani, certain that the professor was about to give him a lecture on classical culture.
    ‘You must certainly recall the funeral games honouring Patroclus, including a sword fight between two men. The referee, who is Achilles in this case, interrupts the combat at first blood. But it’s thought that in more ancient cultures the duellers were forced to fight on until one of them died, so that his soul could accompany into the afterlife the dead person for whom funeral rites were being celebrated. In later ages, these duels were purged of their bloodier components and became purely athletic competitions, converging in great sporting and religious performances like the Olympics. In Italy, on the other hand, the duels maintained their violent connotations and evolved into the gladiator fights of the Roman age.’
    ‘I had no idea,’ admitted Reggiani. ‘So the origins of Roman combat in the arena were Etruscan?’
    ‘Most probably. But, as I said, it started out as a religious rite, as far-fetched as that may seem to us now. Human sacrifice was a way of appeasing the gods. Usually a prisoner of war would be forced to fight against a wild animal, or more than one, under conditions which doomed him to lose.
    ‘But what I’ve found evidence of here makes me hypothesize an even more cruel variant. I think that when the crime committed was beyond the pale, a real monstrosity, a horrible act that broke the laws of man and nature,