The Last Gospel (33 page)

‘The tributary of the Walbrook stream, where they found the skulls,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe we’ve got a chance after all. If we can get into it and find another opening upwards, we might be able to get beyond that rubble obstruction to the edge of the Roman amphitheatre.’

‘Or we might join the city of the dead down here. Permanently.’

‘Always a possibility.’

‘Okay.’ Costas pulled out his waterproof GPS computer unit, and called up a 3D topographical outline he had programmed into it while they were waiting for the equipment to arrive in the church. ‘The flow of the stream is easterly, towards the Walbrook, which then flows south into the Thames. The outer edge of the amphitheatre is only five metres to the north of us. If we somehow get beyond that point, then we may as well turn back. We’ll be into the area that was dug up in the recent excavations.’

‘I’ll be right behind you,’ Jack said.

‘See you on the other side.’ Costas dropped below the water out of view. For a few moments there was a commotion as his feet broke the surface, then it settled down and the pool became a glistening sheen of darkness. Jack squatted in the water up to his chest, and listened to Costas’ breathing through the intercom. He thought for a moment of his own secret fear, the claustrophobia he fought so hard to control, and realized that his mind sensed a lifeline to this place, an exit route through the ancient crypt and the burial chamber to the church above. What lay beyond this pool was that crucial extra step beyond the escape route that could unnerve him, and he took a few deep breaths as he stared at the limpid surface. He felt vibrations, a slight tremor through his body, and watched the surface of the water shimmer. He guessed it was an underground train, passing through a tunnel somewhere far below. The sensation drew him back to the reality of the twenty-first century, and in his mind’s eye all of the tumultuous events of the past, the dark rituals of prehistory, the blood of the Roman amphitheatre, the Great Fire of 1666, the 1940 Blitz, all seemed to speed past him like a fast-motion film, leaving their imprint blasted into the cloying sediment around him.

He shut his eyes, then opened them again. He pressed the digital readout display inside his visor, scanning the figures that showed the remaining oxygen in his rebreather, the carbon dioxide toxicity levels. It was a reality check, and it never failed him. He heaved himself up, and realized he had nearly become stuck fast in more than a metre of mud at the bottom of the pool. After extracting himself he floated face down on the surface with his visor underwater, staring into swirling darkness with the dim patch of light from Costas’ headlamp directly below him. Jack arched down, bleeding air from his buoyancy compensator, and sank into blackness. About two metres down he could sense the flow of the underground stream, and he saw a tumult of clearer water where the silt was being swept away. The visibility was still only a matter of inches, but it was better than the black soup at the surface of the pit.

‘There’s an obstruction.’ Costas’ voice came over the intercom. ‘I’m nearly around it.’

Jack could sense Costas’ feet directly in front of him, churning the water as he heaved himself round a bend in the tunnel. Jack stayed back to avoid being kicked, and then as the turbulence subsided he let himself slowly fall forward, his hands splayed out to feel for any obstacle. After about two metres he felt something smooth, metallic, and then his shoulders came to rest on Costas’ legs. He felt a wriggling, then no movement at all, then a dull metallic thumping, then everything was still except the sound of their breathing.

‘It’s a Series 17 fuse. Good.’

‘What is?’ Jack exclaimed. ‘What’s good?’

‘This is.’ There was a clanging noise, then a curse.

‘What? I can’t see anything.’

‘This bomb.’

Jack’s heart sank. ‘What bomb?’

‘German SC250, general-purpose bomb. Carried by the Stuka, Junkers 88, Heinkel 111. They dropped thousands of them over here during the Blitz. Should be pretty routine.’

‘What do you mean, routine?

‘I mean, they weren’t delayed-action fuses, so they’re pretty routine.’

Jack had another sinking feeling. He thought of the tremor again, the vibration of the train. Suddenly this place seemed less solid, less stable, ready for history to have another go. ‘Don’t tell me what you’re about to do.’

‘Its okay, I’ve done it already. Done as much as I can.’ Costas’ legs shifted forward, and Jack dropped another metre in the water. ‘The forward fuse pocket was right in front of my nose, and I happened to have just the right socket in my e-suit equipment pouch. The after-pocket’s the problem. I can feel it, but it’s all rusted over. It’s not my style, but we might just have to leave it.’

‘Yes, we might,’ Jack said quietly. ‘How dangerous is it?’

‘The usual fill for an SC250 bomb was only 280 pounds of Amatol and TNT, sixty-forty mix.’

‘Only?’ Jack said incredulously.

‘Well, enough for us to be toast, of course, but the financial hub of the world would probably remain intact.’

‘I think there’s probably been enough human sacrifice at this spot,’ Jack said. ‘How stable is it?’

‘The problem’s that corroded rear pocket fuse,’ Costas murmured. ‘It’s been happily dormant for almost seventy years, but with our arrival, who knows.’

‘You mean after you tampered with it, who knows.’ The silt had settled slightly, and Jack could see the bomb casing about three inches from his face. It was corroded, deeply pitted, with no visible markings, and looked about as menacing as Jack could imagine. He was making the usual mental calculations, and this time the odds were not looking good. He sensed Costas shift forward and upward, beyond the bomb. ‘I think it might be time to leave now.’

‘Oh no.’

‘What do you mean, no? This thing’s still live. We need to get out.’

‘No. I don’t mean that. I mean this, in front of me.’ Costas was almost whimpering. ‘It’s another nightmare. It’s just getting worse.’

‘Okay. I’m coming.’ Jack eased himself deeper, with the corroded bomb casing just in front of his face, until he saw where it curved down to the nose cone and suspension lug. He turned over on his back and put his hand on the lug to keep his body from jolting against the casing, which seemed to be suspended perilously in mid-water. He slowly pulled himself up until he felt the casing between his legs, and then below his e-suit boots. At the point where he imagined the base plate and tail fins should be, he suddenly broke surface, his face inches from a slimy mud wall. He had been fine in the silt, underwater, with his face pressed close to the bomb casing, but now he suddenly felt unnerved, as if those extra few inches of visibility were just enough to give him a sense of how confined the space was. He knew he had to fight hard now, concentrate entirely on what they were doing. He rolled over slowly, careful not to budge the bomb casing, until he was beside Costas and facing in the same direction. He could feel the compacted gravel of the ancient stream bed below his feet, showing they had come under the archaeological layers. He angled his headlamp upwards, and gasped with astonishment. They were inside some kind of structure, a chamber, with unworked tree trunks lining the roof about two metres above them. He saw massive beams of blackened oak, with bracing timbers around the walls. He looked down, following Costas’ gaze.

Then he saw it.

He could hardly breathe. He shut his eyes, forced himself to inhale hard, and looked again.

It was a skull, a human skull, blackened with age, lying face up with the jaw still in position, slightly ajar. He could see the vertebrae of the neck, the shoulder blades, all cushioned in a red fibrous material. He looked again. The fibrous material seemed to be coming out of the skull. Then he realized what it was. Human hair.
Red hair
.

He panned his beam down again, to something he had seen lying on the neck bones. He put his hands on a wet timber beside the water’s edge, tested it, and heaved himself up slightly. He was only inches away now, and gasped in disbelief. It was gold, lustrous, a solid gold neck ring. Just like one they had seen on another body, deep under Rome. A
torque
. Then Jack realized. This was no medieval crypt burial.

‘Looks like we might have found our goddess,’ Costas whispered.

‘Andraste,’ Jack said, scarcely believing what he was saying.

‘Not exactly immortal,’ Costas murmured.

‘Everything looks right,’ Jack said. ‘That neck torque is Celtic, the amphoras at the entrance are the right date. Some kind of high priestess, buried about the time of the Boudican revolt.’

‘Maybe the revolt signalled the end of the old order,’ Costas murmured. ‘The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Like the eruption of Vesuvius, the disappearance of the Sibyls.’

Jack looked at the skull again. He leaned over, and peered more closely, right over the empty eye sockets. The black accretion covering the skull was not black at all. It was blue, dark blue. He gasped as he realized. ‘
Isatis tintoria
,’ he murmured. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

‘Huh?’

‘Woad. Blue woad. She was painted with blue woad. Must have looked terrifying in life.’

‘Couldn’t be worse than in death,’ Costas croaked.

Jack stared again. It was something Costas had said.
The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration
. Had they found something people had been seeking for hundreds of years, in the heart of the City of London, in a tiny wedge of undisturbed ground in one of the most dug-up, excavated and bombed-out places in the world? He turned to Costas, who seemed numb, rooted to the spot, splayed out on the edge of the pool of sludgy water, staring through his visor at the skull.

‘Another Agamemnon moment?’ Jack said.

‘That thing’s no ghost. It’s real,’ Costas whispered. ‘After the body liqueur and everything. I’ll never sleep again.’

‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Remember we’ve got a rusty bomb on slow broil for company.’ He crawled over the soggy timber clear of the hole, and Costas heaved himself out. They both slowly stood up, dripping profusely, with their helmets and breathing gear still on, mud slicked over their e-suits like brown paint. Jack flicked his headlamp to wide beam, and took out a halogen torch. They stared in awe at the scene revealed in front of them.

It was a breathtaking sight. Jack instantly saw images that were familiar to him, artefact types, the layout of the grave goods, but nothing this intact had ever been found in Britain before. It looked like one of the tombs he had visited of ancient Scythian nobility on the Russian steppes, girt in massive timbers and miraculously preserved in the permafrost, yet this was the heart of London. Somehow the waterlogged atmosphere and the thick clay that surrounded the tomb had kept the timbers from rotting and the tomb from imploding.

And it had not just preserved the skeleton. Jack could see that the red-haired woman had been laid on a bier, a square wooden platform about three metres across, a metre or so short of the edges of the chamber. There were strange shapes, curved shapes, on either side of the skeleton. Jack drew his breath in as he realized what they were. ‘It’s a chariot burial,’ he exclaimed. ‘Those are the two wheels, tilted up towards the body. You can see the spokes on each wheel, the iron rim and the hubcaps.’

‘Take a look at this.’ Costas was peering closely at the base of the bier, at the legs of the skeleton, and then between the wheels. ‘There are cut marks on the bones, slash marks, a couple of healed fractures. Looks like she’s been through the wars. This was some lady. And she’s lying in some kind of canoe, a wooden dugout.’

Jack shifted over, slipping on the mud. ‘Fantastic,’ he exclaimed, as he came alongside. ‘There are boat burials from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, Viking ship burials, but I’ve never seen one like this from the late Iron Age.’

‘Maybe this was what they used to get her to this place on her final journey, to her sanctuary up the river. To the heart of darkness.’

Jack stood up as far as he could, and stared for the first time properly at the torso of the skeleton. It was one of the most incredible things he had ever seen, like a computer-generated image of a perfect Iron Age burial. He edged up the side of the bier, then slipped and fell heavily on one knee beside the chariot wheel.

‘Watch out,’ Costas exclaimed from behind. ‘The hub of the wheel’s got a metal spike sticking out of it.’

Jack looked at the corroded iron protrusion that had just missed skewering him, and felt his chest tighten as he realized how close he had been. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked again. It was a vicious spike, one of three that stuck out from the hub about half a metre, twisted like aircraft propeller blades. This was no ordinary chariot. Jack heaved himself up and moved alongside Costas, who had gone round him and was crouching over the torso of the skeleton. ‘I think this lady was preparing to do battle with the gods, in the afterlife,’ Costas murmured. ‘And I think she was going to win.’ They stared in awe at the accoutrements laid over the skeleton. There were leaf-shaped iron spear-points, their shafts snapped where the spears had been broken over the grave. Strewn everywhere were numerous pine cones, charred where they had been burned for incense. Parallel to the body on the left side, from the neck to the hip, was a great iron sword, unsheathed, with a decorated bronze scabbard lying alongside. The incised pattern on the scabbard matched the shape of the inlaid wire decoration on the bronze handle of the sword, gold lines that swirled up towards a great green jewel embedded in the pommel. On the other side of the skeleton was a wooden staff, like a wizard’s wand. But the most extraordinary treasure was lying across the torso of the skeleton, covering the ribcage and pelvis. It was a great bronze shield, in a figure-of-eight shape, its central boss surrounded by swirling curvilinear forms in enamel and raised repousée decoration.