The Last Gospel (35 page)

‘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 controlled 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 backtrack 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.’

‘So he comes back to Britain and finds her tomb, and here we are too,’ Costas said. ‘Always hide things in the most unlikely places.’ He sneezed. ‘The word of the Messiah clutched in the dead hands of a pagan priestess.’

‘That’s one thread in our story,’ Jack said. ‘Claudius, his motivations, what drove him. But there’s another thread that’s been fascinating me. It’s about women.’

‘Katya, Maria, Elizabeth? Careful, Jack. That’s one thing you don’t seem to be able to control.’

‘I mean women in the past. The distant past.’

‘The mother goddess?’ Costas said.

‘If the priesthood that Claudius writes about did survive from Neolithic times, then there’s every reason for thinking that the cult of the mother goddess did as well,’ Jack said. ‘She’s there in the Graeco-Roman pantheon,
Magna Mater
, the Great Mother, Vesta, whose temple we found in Rome, and among the Celtic gods too. But I’m not just thinking about female goddesses. I’m thinking about the earthly practitioners of religion, the priests, the oracles.’

‘The Sibyls?’

‘Something’s beginning to fall into place,’ Jack murmured. ‘It’s been staring at us for centuries, the Sibylline prophecy in Virgil, the Dies Irae. And now we’ve found the extra ingredient that suddenly makes it all plausible, that tips the balance into reality.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s about early Christianity.’ Jack suddenly felt a surge of excitement as he realized where his thoughts were leading him. ‘About women in early Christianity.’

‘Huh?’

‘What does that mean to you? First thought?’

‘The Virgin Mary?’

‘The cult of the Virgin probably incorporated pagan beliefs in a mother goddess,’ Jack said. ‘But I’m thinking about the early believers, the first followers of Jesus, who they were.’ He reached into his bag, and pulled out a red hardback book. ‘Remember I told you how elusive the written evidence is for early Christianity, how virtually nothing survives apart from the Gospels? Well, one of the rare exceptions is Pliny. Not our old friend Pliny the Elder, but his nephew, Pliny the Younger.’

‘The one who wrote about the eruption of Vesuvius,’ Costas said slowly. ‘And the Vestal Virgins.’

Jack nodded. ‘The account of Vesuvius was in a letter to the historian Tacitus, written about twenty-five years after the event. Well, here’s the younger Pliny again, in a letter written shortly before he died in AD 113. By that time he was Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia, the area of Turkey beside the Black Sea, and he’s writing to the emperor Trajan about the activities of Christians in his province. Pliny wasn’t exactly a fan of Christianity, but then he was echoing the official line. What had started out at the time of Claudius as an obscure cult, yet another mystery religion from the east, fifty years on had become a real concern to the emperors. Unlike the other big eastern cults, Mithraism or Isis worship, the Christians had become political. That was what really put Christianity at centre stage. Far-sighted Romans could see the Church becoming a focus for dissent, especially as Christianity attracted slaves, the great underclass in Roman society. The Romans were always frightened of another slave uprising, ever since Spartacus. They were also thrown off balance by the fanaticism of the Christians, the willingness to die for their beliefs. You just didn’t see that in any of the other cults. And there was something else that really terrified them.’

‘These Romans you’re talking about,’ Costas said, sneezing. ‘They’re all men. We were talking about women.’

Jack nodded, and opened the book. ‘Listen to this. A letter from Pliny the Younger to the emperor Trajan. Pliny’s seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians, as he’s never done it before. He calls it a degenerate cult, carried to extravagant lengths. He tells Trajan he has unrepentant Christians executed, though he generously spares those who make offerings of wine and incense to the statue of the emperor, the living god. But then listen to this. In order to extract the truth about their political activities, he orders the torture of “
duabus ancillis, quae ministrae dicebantur
”. Both the words
ancillis
and
ministrae
mean female attendants, but
ministra
is often equated with the Greek word
diakonos.
’