The Last Gospel (29 page)

‘Great to see you again, by the way, Jeremy,’ Costas said. ‘Hadn’t expected it so soon.’

‘The whole thing still seems like a dream, our expedition,’ Jeremy said. ‘The hunt for the lost Jewish treasure, Harald Hardrada and the Vikings, the underground caves in the Yucatán. I thought I might try to write it down, but nobody would believe it.’

‘Just make it fiction,’ Costas said. ‘And leave our names out of it. At the moment, we’re trying to remain anonymous. We’ve had a slightly unpleasant encounter in Rome. Underground.’

‘So Jack tells me,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘You guys seem to make a habit of it. I thought I recognized someone in the art gallery above, from
Seaquest II
.’

‘Good,’ Jack murmured. ‘They’re here.’

‘We’ve got half an hour until we can get into the crypt.’

‘Crypt?’ Costas said.

‘Fear not,’ Jeremy said. ‘It’s empty. The first one is, anyway.’

Costas gave him a dubious look, then sat down on a chair and leaned back, stretching out his legs. ‘Okay. So we’ve got a little time. Some questions. Put me in the picture. Tell me about this place before the Romans. In the lead-up to Claudius,’ he said.

Jack looked at him keenly. ‘Prehistoric London was a weird place. Not a settlement, as far as we can tell, but a place where something was going on. Best guess is some kind of sacred site. Trouble is, we don’t know much about religion in the Iron Age, because they didn’t build temples or make representations of their gods that have survived. Almost all we have to go on are the Roman historians, most of them biased, all second-hand.’

‘Druids,’ Jeremy said, sitting down on the edge of the amphitheatre wall and leaning forward. ‘Druids, and human sacrifice.’

Jack nodded. ‘When the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus heard of Boudica’s revolt, he was attacking the remote island of Mona, modern Anglesey off north Wales. It was the last bastion of the British who’d refused to come under Rome’s yoke, and the sacred stronghold of the druids.’

‘Guys in white robes,’ Costas murmured.

‘That’s the Victorian image of the druid, a kind of Gandalf figure, Merlin, gathering mistletoe and travelling unharmed between warring kingdoms. The idea of priestly mediators is probably accurate, but the rest is pure fantasy.’

‘Tacitus paints a pretty appalling picture,’ Jeremy said.

Jack nodded, extracted a book from his khaki bag and flipped it open. ‘Tacitus’ father-in-law Agricola had been governor of Britain, so he knew what he was talking about. The Romans at Mona were confronted by a dense mass of enemy along the shoreline. Among them were the druids, who he says were “raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses”. After the Romans were victorious, they destroyed the sacred groves of the druids, places where they “drench their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult their gods by means of human entrails”.’

‘Sounds like a few modern priests I’ve known,’ Costas said wryly. ‘Power through terror.’

‘There are plenty of historical parallels, as you say.’

‘The Church in the Middle Ages, for one,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘Submission, obedience, confession, vengeance, retribution.’

‘All things the earliest Christians would have abhorred,’ Jack said.

‘And it wasn’t just male druids on Anglesey,’ Jeremy said.

Jack opened the book again. ‘The thing that really terrified the Romans, that awed them to the point of paralysis, was the women.’

‘This gets even better,’ Costas murmured.

‘Hordes of fanatical women, “black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches”.’ Jack put down the book. ‘It was the Romans’ worst nightmare. The image of the Amazon, the warrior queen, really kept the Roman male awake at night, and it wasn’t lust. Tacitus may have exaggerated this aspect of Britain to play on Roman fantasies about the barbarian world, a world beyond control, a world with no apparent method or rationale. But all the evidence suggests it was true, that the Romans in Britain really had walked into their own vision of hell, a world of Amazon queens and screaming banshees.’

‘Boudica,’ Costas said. ‘Was she some kind of druid?’

‘We know of one other British queen, Cartimandua of the Brigantes,’ Jack replied. ‘And queen usually meant high priestess. There was nothing unusual in that. The Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus, the Egyptian pharaohs were priest-kings, the queens and kings of England are Defenders of the Faith.’

‘A redhead arch-druid warrior queen,’ Costas said weakly. ‘God help her enemies.’

‘And how does London fit into all this?’ Jeremy said.

‘That’s where we really get our teeth into the archaeology. ’ Jack took a plan from his bag and rolled it out on the floor, and Jeremy knelt down and held the corners. ‘Or rather, the lack of it. This shows the London area during the Iron Age. As you can see, there’s no clear indication of habitation on the site of Londinium, where we are now. A few finds of pottery, some of the silver coins the tribes began producing in the decades before the Roman conquest. Not much else.’

‘What’s this?’ Costas pointed to an object marked in the river Thames west of the Roman town. ‘Armour?’

‘The Battersea Shield. One of the finest pieces of metalwork ever found from antiquity, rivalling the best the Romans produced. You can see it in the British Museum. It probably dates to the century before the Romans arrived, and it may suggest what actually went on at this place.’

‘Go on.’

Jack rested on his haunches. ‘Almost all the other major towns of Roman Britain were built on the site of Iron Age tribal capitals, often right next to the prehistoric earthworks. Camulodunum, where they built the temple to Claudius, was a colony for Roman veterans right on top of the Iron Age tribal capital of the Trinovantes. Verulamium was built next to the old capital of the Catuvellauni. It was an ingenious system, designed to stamp Roman authority on the heart of the tribal world, yet also to maintain the power base of the old tribal leaders who became the new magistrates. It was rule by devolution, maintaining the pretence of native authority, just as the British did in India.’

‘But London was the exception,’ Jeremy said.

Jack nodded. ‘After starting as a river port, London became the provincial capital when it was rebuilt following the Boudican revolt. But something was going on here before the Romans arrived, something really fascinating. The Battersea Shield was almost certainly a ritual deposition, a valued object deliberately thrown into the river as a votive offering. There are other finds like this from the Thames and its tributaries. Swords, shields, spears. It’s a tradition that goes back at least to the Bronze Age, and lasted well into the medieval period.’

‘Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake,’ Jeremy murmured.

‘Offerings seem to have been made on tribal boundaries,’ Jack continued, nodding. ‘Maybe the weapons were to arm the god of your tribe, a way of asserting territorial claims, a bit like the medieval ritual of beating the bounds of parishes on Rogation Day. And London was the biggest boundary site of them all, with at least five tribal areas converging on the river Thames. The distant island of Anglesey may have represented the edge of the British Iron Age world, but London may have been its ritual apex.’

‘Yet no Iron Age settlements have been found here, according to this plan,’ Costas said.

‘Remember Tacitus’ account, the sacred groves on Anglesey? London was densely wooded at the time of the Roman invasion, right up to the water’s edge. Within the forest, along the edge of the river and its tributaries, were clearings, groves, places now submerged under the streets of London.’

Costas peered hard at the map. ‘How about this. In AD 60, when Boudica rose in revolt, the one place the Britons really can’t stomach having a new Roman settlement is London, built on their sacred site. They save their worst retribution for it.’

Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘After the rebels had ravaged Camulodunum and driven the Roman survivors into the Temple of Claudius there, Tacitus tells us that the Celtic warriors heard an augury. At the mouth of the Thames a phantom settlement had been seen, in ruins. The sea was a blood-red colour, and shapes like human corpses were seen in the ebb tide. For Boudica, it was a sign of where to go next.’

‘What happened when Boudica hit London?’

‘There were no survivors. Tacitus says that the Roman general Suetonius and his army reached London from Anglesey before Boudica arrived, but Suetonius decided his force was too weak to defend the place. There were lamentations and appeals, and the inhabitants were allowed to leave with him. Those who stayed, the elderly, the women, children, were all slaughtered by the Britons.’

‘Cassius Dio tells more.’ Jeremy picked up another book Jack had taken out of his bag. ‘As I recall, he’s our only other source on Boudica, writing over a hundred years after the revolt but perhaps based on lost first-hand accounts.’ He found a page. ‘Here’s what the Britons did to their captives: “The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most eminent women, cut off their breasts and sewed them into their mouths, so that they seemed to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run through the length of their bodies. All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, feasts and wanton behaviour. This they did in their holy places, especially in the Grove of Andraste, their name for the goddess of Victory.”’

‘Sounds like a scene from
Apocalypse Now
,’ Costas murmured.

‘That may not be far off,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The name Boudica also meant Victory, and it could be that her sacred grove was some pool up the river, her own holy of holies.’

‘Her own private hell, you mean,’ Costas said.

‘Geoffrey of Monmouth thought there were mass beheadings,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘He wrote in the twelfth century, when human skulls started to be found along the Walbrook, just yards from here. They’ve been found ever since, when the river’s been dug into. Skulls, hundreds of them, washed down from somewhere and embedded in the river gravel, right under the heart of the city of London where the Walbrook flows into the Thames. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to link the skulls with the Boudican revolt.’

‘I don’t get it.’ Costas had picked up Jack’s copy of Tacitus, and was flicking through the pages, stopping and reading. ‘Here we go again. Sacrifices, orgies of slaughter. Whole towns razed, everyone murdered. Men, women, children. Correct me if I’m wrong, but these hardly seem acts of charity. I don’t get why Claudius would have brought his precious document with the word of Christ to this place, to the care of some pagan goddess.’

‘We don’t know what was going on,’ Jack murmured. ‘The British rebels who knew of Jesus, perhaps even Boudica, may have seen him as a fellow rebel against Roman rule. They may have been sympathetic to early Christians for that reason alone. If Tacitus and Dio Cassius are right about the violation of Boudica’s daughters by the Romans, she would have had ample cause for retribution, for vengeance wreaked in the ways of the barbarian, ways which she must have known would cast most fear into the hearts of Romans.’

‘She must also have known it was suicidal, that she was on a one-way ticket,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe it unhinged her. Remember
Apocalypse Now
, Colonel Kurtz. A noble cause, unsound methods. Maybe Boudica got swallowed up in her own heart of darkness.’

‘Speaking of which, it’s time.’ Jeremy lurched to his feet. ‘The rector’s opened the crypt specially for us during the lunchtime concert in the church. Come on.’

 

A few minutes later they stood just inside the portico of the Guildhall Art Gallery, looking out over the yard with the elliptical line of the Roman amphitheatre arena marked across it. To their right was the medieval façade of the Guildhall itself, and to the left the solid, functional shape of St Lawrence Jewry, reconstructed after the Second World War to resemble as closely as possible the original design built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

‘This place seems pristine now, but it’s seen three circles of hell,’ Jack said quietly, peering out into the drizzle. ‘Boudica’s revolt in AD 60, the massacre, possibly human sacrifice. Then the Great Fire of 1666. Of the buildings here, only the Guildhall wasn’t completely destroyed, because its old oaks wouldn’t burn. An eyewitness said it looked like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a Palace of Gold or a great building of burnished brass. Then, almost three centuries later, the inferno visited again. This time from above.’

‘The twenty-ninth of December 1940,’ Jeremy said. ‘The Blitz.’

‘One night of many,’ Jack replied. ‘But that night the Luftwaffe targeted the square mile, the City of London. My grandmother was here, a despatch rider at the Air Ministry. She said the sound of dropping incendiaries was ominously gentle, like a rain shower, but the high-explosive bombs had been fitted with tubes so they screamed rather than whistled. Hundreds were killed and maimed, men, women, children. That famous picture of St Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in flames but miraculously intact, comes from that night. St Lawrence Jewry wasn’t so lucky. It went up like a Roman candle, the flames leaping above the city. One of the men standing next to my grandmother on the roof of the Air Ministry watching the churches burn was Air Vice Marshal Arthur Harris, “Bomber” Harris. He said he saw total war that night. He was the architect of the British bomber offensive against Germany.’

‘Another circle of hell,’ Jeremy murmured.

‘My grandmother heard a terrible scream that night, like a banshee,’ Jack said quietly. ‘It haunted her for the rest of her life.’

‘Must have been a lot of horror,’ Costas said.

‘The scream came from the church,’ Jack continued. ‘The organ was on fire and the hot air rushing through the pipes made it shriek, as if the church was in a death agony.’