The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  He heard grunting and cursing through his intercom, and looked up to see Costas part-way into the fissure. He began to swim back up to help him, and then Costas was through, dropping down until they both came level at twelve metres depth. ‘This place is phenomenal.’ Costas was still panting from his exertion, but was peering down. ‘The crack of doom.’

  ‘I can’t see the bottom,’ Jack said. ‘It must be at least fifty metres below us, maybe more.’

  ‘I didn’t wager for a decompression dive under Rome,’ Costas said. ‘We haven’t got the gas for that.’ They both checked the readout inside their helmets, which showed the gas mixture from their rebreathers adjusting for depth. ‘I’d say half an hour, no more, with a twenty-five-metre maximum. Any deeper than that and it’s a bounce dive, then we’re out of here.’

  ‘We may be lucky,’ Jack said. ‘Look along the top of the fissure.’ He panned his headlamp beam along, and Costas followed it. They could see the glistening reflection of the water surface at their entry point, then nothing but rock for about ten metres, then another wavering patch of white, this one at least three metres long. ‘Looks like it breaks surface again,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s go up.’

  They began to swim in the direction of Jack’s beam. Costas rolled on his back, peering up and down the fissure, then looking hard at the rock directly above them. ‘This fissure’s clearly a seismic cleft, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years old. It looks as if it’s always been filled with water, spring-fed. Then right above it there’s that tunnel built by Claudius, buckled by a more recent earthquake. You can see sections of the Roman rock-cut ceiling from the tunnel above us. My guess is, the tunnel was never intended to break into the fissure, but extended above it to that pool we’re heading towards. The tunnel must be a kind of outlet, an overflow conduit for when the water here got too high.’

  ‘Look at that,’ Jack exclaimed, pointing to the side of the fissure. ‘There’s a flight of four, five rock-cut steps, leading up to the pool.’

  ‘It looks like a wellhead,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe this was where they accessed the spring. We’re coming up almost directly under the place where those prehistoric huts were found, the House of Romulus on top of the Palatine, about sixty metres above us.’

  Jack broke surface first, then cautiously walked up the steps, craning his neck round to ensure there was ample headspace. He looked back to check that Costas was behind him, then reached down and pulled his fins up behind his calves before walking up out of the water on to a flat rock surface. He was inside another tunnel, but it was spectacularly different from the one they had come through. Jack turned around, looking. To the north, about ten metres from him, the tunnel came to an end at what looked like a small chamber, slightly larger than the dimensions of the tunnel. At the other end, about the same distance away, it opened into a rocky cavern, obscured in shadows. The tunnel itself was hewn out of the living rock, about three metres wide and five metres high, with a trapezoidal cross-section like a truncated pyramid. Jack swivelled around and scanned the whole length again, then looked closely at one wall, inspecting the ancient pick-marks. This was old, far older than anything else they had seen. He looked again. It suddenly clicked. ‘My God,’ he whispered.

  ‘Another tunnel,’ Costas said, his dripping form appearing beside Jack.

  ‘Not just another tunnel,’ Jack murmured. ‘A dromos.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Where have you seen this shape before?’

  Costas gazed along the tunnel, the rectilinear profile of the walls framed by his beam. ‘Bronze Age,’ he suddenly said, sounding triumphant. ‘The Greek Bronze Age. Those tombs you showed me at Mycenae, in Greece. A dromos was a sacred corridor. The time of the Trojan Wars, Aeneas, all that.’

  ‘And this may finally pin down the origin of Rome, once and for all,’ Jack said, his voice hushed. ‘We’re on the edge of the age of myth again, Costas, just like Atlantis, myth made real. But I’m thinking of somewhere closer to home. This is almost identical to the dromos in the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae.’

  ‘The Sibyl,’ Costas murmured. ‘So she had an apartment in Rome, too.’

  ‘This is all beginning to make sense,’ Jack said. ‘The Lupercale, the sacred cave of Rome’s origin. I’ll bet that’s what lies ahead of us, that cavern. And we’ve just emerged from the spring, vital for the survival of Rome. A sacred place, sanctified and protected. We know the ritual at Cumae involved lustral waters, rites of purification. The Vestals probably did that too. And then there’s the dark side.’

  ‘The crack of doom,’ Costas said.

  ‘The entrance to the underworld.’

  ‘Just like Cumae, the Phlegraean Fields,’ Costas said.

  ‘And on top of it all sits a Sibyl.’

  ‘I wonder if she was here when they arrived, the first Romans, or whether they brought her with them?’ Costas mused. ‘And I wonder how the Vestal Virgins figure in all this?’

  ‘Maybe there are answers here. We need to get to that cave. Come on.’

  ‘Before you do that, Jack, you might want to take a look at the other end of this tunnel. There’s something in the middle of that chamber.’

  Jack swivelled round to follow Costas’ gaze. With their two beams concentrated together the chamber was more clearly illuminated. They walked along the passageway towards it. The ancient walls were streaked with accretion, calcite deposits that covered the tufa like dirty whitewash. They reached the edge of the chamber. It was a perfect dome, about eight metres in circumference, with small rectangular openings in the ceiling that might once have been air vents, evidently clogged up. On the far side was what looked like the decayed remains of a statue, on a plinth. In front of it was a circular depression in the floor about three metres wide, surrounded by a rock-cut rim and filled with a dark mass, what looked like a black resinous material sealed under calcite accretion. Jack stared at it, and then at the decayed figure behind it. ‘Of course,’ he whispered.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That statue, it looks as if it might once have been female,’ he said. ‘A seated woman. A cult statue. And this is a hearth, a sacred hearth.’ He was suddenly elated. ‘That’s why the shrines of Vesta in the forum and on the Palatine were never inaugurated, never made into temples. It’s because they were outliers, just the public face of the cult. This chamber was the real Temple of Vesta.’

  ‘Jack, the statue. It’s got an inscription.’

  Jack stepped around the hearth and followed Costas’ beam. At the base of the statue was a thin slab of marble veneer, about thirty centimetres across. Jack squatted down and peered at it. ‘Odd,’ he said. ‘It’s not a dedicatory inscription, not part of the plinth. It’s propped up here loose, or at least was until the calcite glued it in place.’ He bent down as far as he could, then got down on the floor. The Latin was clear in his beam, and he read it out:

  COELIA CONCORDIA

  VESTALIS MAXIMA

  ANNO DOMINI CCCXCIV

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Coelia Concordia, Chief Vestal, AD 394. She was the last one, and that was the year the cult was abandoned. Odd that they used Anno Domini, though. Year of Our Lord. The Empire had been Christian for almost a century by that date, but you’d have thought the Vestals would have resisted Christianity to the end. It’s what sidelined them, along with the other pagan cults of Rome.’

  Costas was silent, and Jack peered at him. ‘You still with me?’

  ‘Jack, this is no statue.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jack struggled to his feet, then slipped on the floor and fell into the statue, holding it close. He winced, and drew back, leaning for a moment while he flexed the knee that had hit the floor, staring at the decayed shape inches from his face. He suddenly froze. It was not limestone at all. It was calcite accretion, a weird, shapeless stalagmite that rose more than a metre from the floor, encasing a stone seat. He looked again at what had startled him. It was a sculpted stone serpent, green, writhing u
p the back of the chair, staring out at him through a diaphanous mask of accretion.

  ‘Not that, Jack. Over here. Inside.’

  Jack moved a step to the left and followed Costas’ beam. Then he saw it, trapped inside the calcium, lolling off to one side.

  A human skull.

  He gasped, stepped back, then stared again. There was more. A sternum, ribs, shoulder blades. Costas was right. The statue was no statue at all. It was a skeleton, a human skeleton. Small, almost childlike, but with the jaw of someone old, very old, the teeth all missing. Then Jack saw something else. She wore a necklace, a neck torque, solid gold, an extraordinary sight in the heart of Rome, some ancient booty perhaps from the Celtic world. And above the skull encased in the accretion were sparkling fragments of gold leaf and jewels from an elaborate hairdo, the coiffure of a wealthy Roman woman, a matron.

  Then Jack realized. She had come here to die. Coelia Concordia, the last of the Vestals. But a Vestal wreathed in serpents. Not just a Vestal. A Sibyl.

  Jack’s mind was in a tumult. So the cult of the Sibyl had not come to an end with the eruption of Vesuvius after all. She had come back here, back to her cave under Rome, to another entrance to Hades. And the oracle had survived, lived on for more than three centuries after Claudius met his end, after the old world of the Cumaean Sibyl had been consumed by fire. This Sibyl had seen out Rome, seen Rome rise and fall to the end, seen out the pagan world and ushered in a new order, one whose beginnings she had watched all those years before, among the outcasts near her cave beside the Fields of Fire.

  ‘Jack, take a look at her hand.’

  Jack peered down, barely able to breathe. He looked again. So that was what had happened to the Sibyls. They had become what they had foreseen. They had fulfilled their own prophecy. She was holding a crude metal forging, two iron spikes joined at right angles. A cross of nails.

  Suddenly there was a flash of light, a momentary surge. For a second Jack thought he might be hallucinating. Then he was dragged violently sideways, to the edge of the chamber, down to the floor. A hand slammed the side of his helmet and his light went off. He was in total darkness. The hold relaxed, and Costas came over the intercom, his voice tense. ‘Sorry about that, Jack. But there’s someone else down here.’

  13

  For a few moments they remained on the floor of the chamber, in utter darkness. Their intercom was virtually inaudible with the external speaker deactivated, though they instinctively talked in low voices. ‘Jack, I thought you said nothing else would be living in here.’ Costas moved to the edge of the chamber, and peered along the line of the dromos tunnel towards the cave at the other end. Jack crawled up behind him. Their headlamps were still switched off, but they had activated the night-vision goggles inside their e-suit helmets. There was just enough natural light for the sensors to work, not enough to be discernible to the naked eye but enough for Jack to make out Costas’ form in front of him, speckly and green, an eerie apparition that seemed to be constantly forming and re-forming with every movement. It made sense that there would be light coming from cracks and fissures leading outside, where the archeologists’ probe had reached into the cave somewhere ahead of them.

  ‘You’re sure it was a torch?’

  ‘Positive. I was looking in the opposite direction, while you were communing with our dead lady. One look at that thing was enough for me. Then I saw the beam. It flashed out from somewhere on the left side of the cave.’

  ‘That’s where the other tunnel, the one from the House of the Vestals, should enter,’ Jack whispered. ‘But God knows how they got in.’

  ‘If we could do it, someone else could.’

  ‘Massimo’s map showed entrances into the Cloaca in the Forum of Nerva and under the Colosseum,’ Jack said. ‘His guys were turned back by a flooded culvert, didn’t have the right equipment. Someone with the right gear could have found a way, but not one of his people. He’d have told us.’

  ‘Is this a coincidence?’

  Jack paused, then stared into the darkness. ‘There’s something that’s been on my mind since yesterday. It wasn’t going to stop us coming to where we are now, and I was waiting to speak to her more, on the phone. You remember Elizabeth at Herculaneum, the superintendency official? My old friend?’

  ‘What’s she got to do with this?’

  ‘She caught up with me for a few moments yesterday in Herculaneum before we left the villa.’

  ‘Maria and I noticed.’

  ‘She was taking a big risk, with the guards around. Maurice had already warned us about how somebody seemed to be sitting on the superintendency people, keeping them from talking. She wanted to tell me something. About what we’re up against. An organization as deeply rooted in the history of Rome as you can imagine, that goes right back to the time of St Paul. An organization that knew the villa concealed a threat to their very existence, something they had hoped lost for ever in the eruption of AD 79. Elizabeth was whispering, and I didn’t have time to question her. She said they will do anything in their power to keep this threat at bay.’

  ‘You think we’re being followed?’

  ‘If it’s who I fear it is, they’ll have tentacles everywhere. And if they know we’re in here, they must assume we’re on to something. And if they somehow have an idea what it is we’re after, it’s a prize they’d die for.’

  ‘And kill for.’

  Jack drew up behind Costas, and peered over his helmet. All he could make out was speckly green, with darker smudges at the end. ‘The only thing we can do is brazen it out. My guess is, it’s likely to be only one guy. The entrances from the forum and the Colosseum are pretty public. More than one might be too much of a risk, to get in unseen.’

  ‘Maybe the authorities turned a blind eye.’

  ‘Rome isn’t Naples,’ Jack said. ‘But you may be right. At the moment, whoever’s in that cave is going to be kicking themselves for having the torch on as they came out of the tunnel. I should imagine it was a pretty hairy ride, unless they had the kind of equipment we’ve got. And the longer we keep our lights off, the more likely they’ll assume we’ve rumbled them.’

  ‘You’re saying we should carry on as if we’ve seen nothing.’

  ‘Our intruder might think we’ve gone down a side passage, a dead end, come back up again. Let’s just switch on our lights, go forward. We’re going to have to have lights on anyway, to climb up that cavern to find the place beneath the shrine. They’re not going to have a go at us until we’ve found what we’re after.’

  ‘Okay. Lights on, sweeping them up from behind as if we’ve just come up from somewhere. I’m not armed, Jack.’

  ‘I’ve got the rock hammer in my right hand,’ Jack murmured. ‘If I hadn’t forced our security chief Ben to go on vacation, he’d have insisted that I carry the Beretta. There’s even a pocket for it in the e-suit. Lesson learned. Next time.’

  ‘Next time?’

  They switched on their headlamps, then stood out in the passageway and began to make their way forward, passing the edge of the pool they had come up through. They knew they were being watched, but had no idea where from. After about ten metres they reached the end of the tunnel and the edge of the cave. They swept their beams around, and could see it was a huge natural cavern, extending at least twenty metres upwards. To the right was an ancient rock-cut stairway, winding up the natural contours of the cave, the tufa steps so heavily eroded they were sloping. About halfway up the cavern was a series of massive fractures and displacements in the rock, and they could see a continuation of the stairs far above that, near the ceiling, above a jagged precipice. Directly below that point on the floor of the cavern they could see an opening identical to the channel they had come through earlier, with rivulets just visible flowing into it. ‘That’s the other channel,’ Jack murmured, scanning the folds of rock around the entrance. ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But thank God for Massimo and his rope. He was right. L
ooks as if we’re going rock-climbing.’

  ‘You are. I’m clambering round the base of the cavern, exploring for lost treasure, right? I might switch off my light, for better light contrast, you know, to see those secret chambers. Sometimes you might not see me.’

  ‘Be careful. This guy’s bound to be armed.’

  ‘He won’t shoot until he thinks we’ve found whatever it is we’re looking for.’

  ‘That’s the theory.’

  ‘Then don’t find it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when to move on him,’ Jack said. ‘Loudly.’

  Jack shifted the coil of rope off his shoulder in readiness and began to climb the steps. Costas was quickly lost to view among the folds of rock, and his beam disappeared. Jack hated the vulnerability, knowing that eyes were following his every move. Costas was no assassin, and was not the most inconspicuous of physiques. Jack stopped and looked up, ostentatiously. If they played their cards right, there was a chance. But some kind of showdown was inevitable. He steeled himself and carried on, focusing only on the challenge of the climb ahead. After thirty steps he reached the end, the point where the earthquake had pushed out a huge section of rock, creating a sheer face at least ten metres high. He inspected the rock, carefully judging the holds. It could be done. He clipped the rope to his harness, then unfastened the rebreather from his back, setting it down on the step behind him, unclipping the hoses from his helmet and lifting the visor. For the first time since the fetid blast from the drain an hour before he tasted the air. It was damp and warm, and he could hear water dripping all round him. The rainstorm Massimo had predicted must have started. He pulled himself on to the rock face. The tufa seemed friable, but he knew it was strong, volcanic stone that gave a good grip. He eased himself up, splayed on the rock, using his long limbs to find holds. About five metres up, he hammered in the first piton, the sound ringing through the cavern. He hammered another one in three metres higher. Another two metres and he was above the main precipice, with a ledge in front of him and then the stairs above, continuing into the rock face. To the right, he glimpsed a wide fissure that had walls covered with mosaic decoration, with embedded shells. It must be the fissure the archaeologists had found beneath the House of Augustus. He now knew with absolute certainty that the steps led up under the lost Palatine Shrine of Vesta, to the secret chamber they were seeking, only a few metres ahead.