The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘The amphitheatre was built later,’ Jack murmured. ‘If this is who I think it is, she was buried at least a decade before work on the amphitheatre was started.’

  ‘Maybe the Romans deliberately built the amphitheatre on a site they knew was sacred, this grove to Andraste,’ Costas murmured. ‘A way of stamping their authority on the natives after the revolt.’

  ‘And the perfect place to conceal a secret cult, right under the noses of your enemy,’ Jack said.

  ‘Have you seen the chariot axle?’ Costas said. ‘It’s lying under her shoulders. With the chariot pole aligned north-south under her body, it makes a cross.’

  Jack grunted, only half listening. ‘In Iron Age chariot burials, the axle was usually placed below the feet.’ Suddenly he gasped, and reached out to the shield. ‘It was staring us right in the face. He placed it right over the shield boss.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Someone who was here before us.’ Jack began to reach for the object, a metal cylinder. Then he paused, and drew his hand back.

  ‘You must be the only archaeologist who has trouble taking artefacts from burials, Jack.’

  ‘I couldn’t violate her grave.’

  ‘I’m with you there. I wouldn’t want to raise this lady from the dead. In this place, it’s not as if we have anywhere to run.’ Costas paused. ‘But if you’re right, this cylinder wasn’t part of the original grave goods. I’m willing to take the risk.’ He reached over and picked up the cylinder, then passed it to Jack. ‘There. Spell’s broken.’

  Jack took the cylinder and held it carefully, rotating it slowly in his hands, staring at it. A chain dangled off a rivet on one side. The cylinder was made of sheet bronze, hammered at the join to form the tube, and one end had been crimped over a disc of bronze to form the base. On the bottom was a roundel of red enamel, and swirling around the cylinder were incised curvilinear decorations. Jack saw that the decoration was in the shape of a wolf, an abstract beast that wrapped itself round the cylinder until the snout was nearly touching the tail. ‘It’s British metalwork, no doubt about it. There’s a bronze cylinder just like this from a warrior grave in Yorkshire. And the wolf is another symbol of the Iceni, Boudica’s tribe, along with the horse.’

  ‘What about the lid?’ Costas said.

  ‘There’s a lot of corrosion, bronze disease,’ Jack replied, peering closely at the other end of the cylinder. ‘But it’s not crimped over like the base. There’s some kind of resinous material around the join, pretty cracked up.’ He pushed a finger cautiously against the crust of built-up corrosion on the top, then flinched as it broke off. ‘Thank God our conservators didn’t see me do that.’ He angled the cylinder so they could both see the surface. Around the edge were the remains of red enamel, from a roundel similar to the one on the base. But here the enamel seemed to have been crudely scraped back to the bronze, which had an incised decoration. The incision was angular, crude, unlike the flowing lines of the wolf on the side of the cylinder, more like scratched graffiti. Jack stared at it. He suddenly froze.

  It was a name.

  ‘Bingo,’ Costas said.

  The letters were large, shaky, the name curving round the top, the other word below, like an inscription on a coin:

  CLAVDIVS DEDIT

  ‘ “Claudius gave this”,’ Jack said, suddenly ecstatic. ‘Claudius did come here, where we are now, and he placed this in Boudica’s tomb.’ He held the cylinder with sudden reverence, looking at the name and then at the fractured join at the lid, hardly daring to think what might be inside.

  ‘How come Claudius has a British bronze cylinder?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Maybe he got it when he first came to Britain, during the conquest,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe Boudica herself gave it to him, and afterwards he used it to hide away his treasured manuscript, what we’re looking for. It might have been less obvious than one of those Egyptian stone jars from his library in Herculaneum.’

  ‘But the bronze cylinder would have fitted inside one of the smaller stone jars, like the one we found in Rome,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe there’s one of those lying around here too.’

  ‘If this bronze cylinder was inside a stone jar, then it’s been disturbed and opened by someone since Claudius came down here.’

  ‘Are we going to open it?’

  Jack took a deep breath. ‘These aren’t exactly controlled laboratory conditions.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before.’

  Jack looked back at the slurry of water where they had come into the tomb, slopping back and forth and distinctly brown in their torchlight. ‘I’m worried the seal on the lip of the cylinder might have decayed. If we take it back underwater, we might destroy what’s inside for ever. And I don’t want to risk going back to get a waterproof container. This whole place might be atomized.’

  ‘At any moment,’ Costas said, looking at the tail fin of the bomb rising above the water. ‘Right, let’s do it.’

  Jack nodded, and put his hand over the lid. He shut his eyes, and silently mouthed a few words. Everything they had been striving for suddenly seemed to rest on this moment. He opened his eyes, and twisted the lid. It came away easily. Too easily. He tipped the cylinder towards his beam, and stared inside.

  It was empty.

  17

  Early the next morning, Jack sat in the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, beneath the great dome facing the high altar to the east. The cathedral had opened to the public only a few minutes before and was still almost empty, but Jack had chosen a row of seats well in from the central aisle of the nave where they would be less likely to be overheard. He glanced at his watch. He had arranged to meet Costas at nine o’clock, five minutes from now, and Jeremy would join them as soon as he could after arriving back from Oxford.

  Jack and Costas had spent the night in IMU’s flat overlooking the river Thames, a place where Jack often stayed between projects when he needed to carry out research in one of London’s libraries or museums. After the exhilaration of the ancient tomb and then the empty cylinder they had been too tired to talk, and too numb to feel disappointed. Jack leaned back, stretched, and closed his eyes. He still felt drained from their extraordinary exploration the day before, and his morning coffee was only just kicking in. He felt strangely discomfited, unsure whether their quest had gone as far as it could, whether he should look back on what they had discovered, begin to relish the extraordinary finds of the past few days for what they were and not see them as clues to something even bigger. He opened his eyes, and peered up at the magnificent dome far above him, so similar to the dome of St Peter’s in the Vatican, to the dome of the Pantheon in Rome built over fifteen hundred years earlier. Yet here Jack felt he was looking not at replication or continuity but at the unique brilliance of one man, the architect Sir Christopher Wren. The interior dome was set below the ovoid dome of the exterior, a way of elevating the cathedral externally yet ensuring that the view of the dome from inside was pleasing to the eye. Jack narrowed his vision. As so often in the best works of human creation, the view was not quite what it seemed.

  ‘Morning, Jack.’ Costas came sliding along the seats from the central aisle, and Jack eyed him with some concern. He was wearing one of Jack’s fisherman’s guernseys from the IMU flat, slightly too small for him around the middle but about two sizes too long, the sleeves pushed up to reveal his muscular forearms. He looked a little pale and red around the nose, and his eyes were watery. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said, slumping down on the seat beside Jack and looking miserable, sniffing and digging in his pocket for a tissue. ‘Every decongestant I could find. I’m beginning to float. I don’t know how you can breathe when the air’s so damp. And cold.’ He sneezed, sniffed noisily and groaned.

  ‘I gather the all-clear’s been given in the City,’ Jack said.

  ‘They’re removing the barriers now. The disposal team dug straight down through the Guildhall pavement, craned out the bomb and choppered it away in the middle of the night for a contro
lled explosion. It was quite a commotion. I made sure they dug in from the east, so I don’t think there was any damage to the tomb.’

  ‘I’ve just been speaking to my friends at the London archaeological service,’ Jack said, pointing to his cell phone. ‘They’ve got a real challenge on their hands. They need to make some kind of protective bubble over the site to maintain the atmospheric conditions in the tomb, to keep it from decaying. They’ve got the best conservation people on standby. It’s probably going to take months to excavate, but it should be amazing when it’s revealed. I’ve suggested they leave the tomb in situ, make a museum on the spot. It could be completely underground, entered from the amphitheatre.’

  ‘They don’t want to be disturbing her.’ Costas sniffed. ‘No way.’

  ‘Did they let you in on the act?’ Jack enquired. ‘The disposal team?’

  ‘The CO of the Dive Unit turned out to be an old buddy of mine, a Royal Engineers officer from the Defence Diving School. We met when I did the Mine and Explosive Ordnance Disposal course at Devonport two years ago. I told him the second fuse on the bomb was too corroded to drill into, that they’d have to fill it with chemicals to neutralize it. But he couldn’t let me in to help. Health and safety regulations, you know.’ Costas sniffed again. ‘That’s the trouble with this country. Over regulated.’

  ‘You’d rather we were based in Italy, let’s say?’

  Costas’ eyes lit up. ‘Speaking of which, when are we getting back to the shipwreck of St Paul? A couple of weeks in the Mediterranean would suit me just fine. Might even kill this cold.’

  ‘Seaquest II’s still on station, and the Embraer jet’s on standby,’ Jack replied. ‘I’ve just been on the phone to Maurice about timing the press release on the Herculaneum library. Unless Jeremy’s got something new for us, I don’t see where we go from here with the Claudius connection. It’s already a fabulous addition to history, with the extraordinary finds we’ve made in Rome, and here in London. But the whereabouts of the manuscript might just have to remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time.’ Jack heaved a sigh, then peered up at the dome again. ‘Not my style, but a dead end’s a dead end.’

  Costas gestured at the laptop on Jack’s knees. ‘I see you’ve been scrolling through Maria’s images of the Herculaneum library.’ He pointed a soggy tissue at the page of thumbnail images. Jack nodded, then peered back at him with an expectant expression. ‘I know that look,’ Costas said.

  ‘I was just going through the pictures for the press release, then I suddenly remembered something,’ Jack said. ‘That page of papyrus I found in Herculaneum, lying on the table under the blank sheets. Historia Britannorum. Narcissus Fecit.’ Jack clicked on a thumbnail, and a page of ancient writing appeared on the screen. ‘Thank God Maria took plenty of pictures.’

  Costas blew his nose. ‘I knew you’d found something.’

  ‘I’d put that page from my mind because I’d guessed it was probably part of a treatise on military strategy, the kind of thing Claudius the armchair general would have relished, to show he really knew his stuff and was worthy of his father and brother. Maybe something on the lead-up to the invasion of Britain, on his planning sessions with his legionary commanders, all painstakingly recorded. But then I put myself back into Herculaneum, into that room. I began to think about the last things Claudius would have had on his mind, what he would have been writing. In the weeks leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius, we know Pliny the Elder was visiting him in the villa. Pliny was a military historian too, an experienced veteran himself, but he’d been there, done that, and what really fired him up in his final years was his Natural History, collecting any facts and trivia he could stick in it.’

  ‘Like that page on Judaea, you mean, his additional notes, that we found on the shelf in the room,’ Costas said.

  ‘Precisely. And what really would have excited Pliny about Claudius was the Britannia connection. Not the military campaign, the invasion, but anything Claudius could tell him about the natural history, the geography, the people, anything unusual, garish. Pliny would have badgered him about it. I can see him sitting with Claudius in that room, constantly questioning, steering him away from the triumph, the strategy, mining him for any trivia he might have learned about Britain, with wily old Narcissus at the table patiently transcribing everything Claudius said. After all, we know Claudius had seen the place with his own eyes, had visited Britain not just once, for his triumph, but twice, when he came in secret to the tomb as an old man, not long before the eruption. Britain was his great achievement, and he would have loved telling Pliny all about it, playing the old general reminiscing on his conquest for the glory of Rome and his family honour.’

  ‘Go on.’ Costas sneezed violently.

  ‘I’ve now read the entire text preserved on that page from the table, Claudius’ History of Britain. It’s clearly part of a preamble, an introductory chapter, setting the stage.’ Jack pointed at the fine handwriting on the screen. ‘The Latin’s easy, clearly written. We have to thank Narcissus for that. It’s about religion and rituals, just the kind of thing Pliny would have loved.’

  ‘And just what we need.’ Costas sniffed. ‘All that discussion yesterday about the Iron Age, about Boudica, Andraste. There are still some pretty big black holes.’

  Jack nodded. ‘The first part really staggered me. It’s the end of the description of a great stone circle Claudius had visited. “I have seen these things with my own eyes,” he says.’

  ‘A stone circle? Stonehenge?’

  ‘He tells us that the stones were set up by the British people in honour of a race of giants who came from the east, escaping a great flood,’ Jack said. ‘The stones represent each of the priest-kings and priest-queens, who afterwards ruled the island.’

  ‘The Black Sea exodus!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘The priests of Atlantis. That shows Claudius wasn’t being fed a pack of lies.’

  ‘“These giants brought with them a Mother Goddess, who afterwards was worshipped in Britain,”’ Jack translated. ‘“The descendants of these priest-kings and priest-queens were the Druids.”’ He reverted to the original Latin: ‘“Praesidium posthac inpositum victis excisique luci saevis superstitionibus sacri: nam cruore captivo adolere aras et hominum fibris consulere deos fas habebant.” ’ He paused, then translated. ‘ “Who consider it their sacred duty to cover their altars with the blood of their victims. I myself have watched them at the stone circle, the place they call druidaeque circum, the circle of the Druids.” ’

  ‘In our last few expeditions, we’ve had Toltecs, Carthaginians and now ancient Britons,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Human sacrifice everywhere.’

  ‘The early antiquarians of Sir Christopher Wren’s day actually thought Stonehenge had been a druid circle, and they were right after all,’ Jack said. ‘It’s amazing. But this is the clincher. Listen to this. “They choose the high priestess from among the noble families of the Britons. I myself have met the chosen one, the girl they call Andraste, who also calls herself Boudica, princess of the tribe of the Iceni, who was brought before me as a slave but who the Sibyl ordered me to set free. For the Sibyl of Cumae says that the high priestess of these Druids is the thirteenth of the Sibyls, and the oracle for all the tribes of Britannia.” ’

  ‘Stop right there,’ Costas said.

  ‘End of page. That’s it.’

  ‘You’re saying Boudica, the warrior queen, she was the high priestess? That Boudica was a kind of arch-druid?’

  ‘I’m not saying it, Claudius is.’

  ‘And this druidess was one of the Sibyls?’

  ‘That’s what he says. And Claudius should know. We know he was a visitor to the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae.’

  ‘That’s because the Sibyl was his drug-dealer.’

  ‘There’s something extraordinary going on here, something people have guessed at but never been able to prove,’ Jack murmured, putting the computer on the seat beside him and staring up towards the altar. ‘Let’s backt
rack for a moment. Begin at the beginning. Claudius gets a document from a Galilean, a Nazarene.’

  ‘We know who we’re talking about, Jack.’

  ‘Do we? There were plenty of would-be messiahs floating round the Sea of Galilee at that time. John the Baptist, for a start. Let’s not leap to conclusions.’

  ‘Come on, Jack. You’re playing devil’s advocate.’

  ‘Let’s keep the devil out of this. We’ve got enough to contend with as it is.’ Jack paused. ‘Then, as an old man, Claudius makes a secret trip to Britain, to London. He has the manuscript with him, inside a metal container given to him during a previous visit to Britain, perhaps by a princess of the Iceni.’ Jack patted a bulge in his bag. Costas looked at the bulge, then at Jack.

  ‘That’s called looting,’ he said solemnly. ‘It’s becoming a habit.’

  ‘Just a precaution. In case that bomb cooked off. We had to have some evidence we’d really seen the tomb.’

  ‘No need to explain it to me, Jack.’

  ‘And like all good treasure-hiders, Claudius leaves a clue,’ Jack continued. ‘Or rather a series of clues. Some of them are by way of his friend Pliny.’

  ‘I think Claudius was having fun with us,’ Costas said, sniffing.

  ‘He’s addicted to riddles, to reading the leaves, has done it all his life, all those visits to the Sibyl. She has him wrapped round her shrivelled fingers, of course. Claudius becomes like a crossword freak, a cryptologist. And leaving clues seems to be part of the treasure-hiding psychology,’ Jack continued. ‘If you have to hide something, you hide it ingeniously, but you have to feel that somewhere along the line someone else might find it. If you leave clues, you’re in control of that process of discovery too. A way of assuring your own immortality.’