The Last Gospel (34 page)

‘Amazing,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse. ‘It’s virtually identical to the Battersea Shield, found in the river Thames in the nineteenth century.’

‘It’s made of thin sheet bronze,’ Costas said, peering closely at the edge. ‘Not very practical in battle.’

‘It was probably ceremonial,’ Jack said. ‘But that sword looks pretty real. And so do those scythes on the chariot wheels.’

Jack looked again, and suddenly it sprang out at him, imagery that had not registered at first but now seemed to knit together all the artefacts in front of him. There were horses, horses everywhere, swirling through the curvilinear patterns on the shield, racing along the sword scabbard, carved into the timbers of the bier. His mind was racing, daring to believe the unbelievable.
Horses, the symbol of the tribe of the Iceni, the tribe of a great warrior queen
. He saw a scatter of coins below the shield, and reached down to pick one up. On one side was a horse, highly abstract with a flowing mane, and mysterious symbols above. On the other side was a head, just recognizable as human, with long wild hair. An image from a people who left no portraits, who hardly ever depicted the human form in their art, yet here he was standing in front of her, one who had been revered as a goddess, whose true likeness none of her followers had dared capture. Jack carefully replaced the coin, then looked around again, appraising, cataloguing, allowing himself to see the unexpected. ‘The dovetail joints in the timbers show this tomb was made after the Romans arrived, by carpenters who knew Roman techniques,’ he murmured. ‘But there are no Roman artefacts here. She wouldn’t have allowed it. Those amphoras must have been outside the tomb, offerings made after her burial.’

‘She? Her? You’re talking about this woman, Andraste?’

Jack paused, then spoke quietly, his voice tense with excitement. ‘Nobody has ever been able to find the location of her last battle. The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that forty thousand Britons died, that she survived but went off and poisoned herself. Dio Cassius tells us her surviving followers gave her a lavish burial, somewhere in secret. For centuries scholars have wondered whether her tomb lies under London. It would have been the perfect place, the city laid waste and uninhabited, returned to the state it was in before the Romans arrived. Site of the sacred grove of the goddess Andraste.’

‘You still haven’t answered my question, Jack.’

‘It all fits perfectly,’ Jack murmured. ‘She would have been a teenager when Claudius arrived in Britain as emperor in AD 43, in the wake of his victorious army. She would have been brought before him when her tribe submitted to the Romans, a princess offering her fealty, probably a dose of defiance too.’

‘You’re talking about the warrior queen Boudica.’

‘A queen who was herself a high priestess, a goddess, and had some connection with the Sibyls,’ Jack murmured. ‘Something that made the Sibyl order Claudius to come here in secret as an old man, to seek her tomb.’

‘Jack, you’re wrong about there being no Roman artefacts here. Looks like our lady had a gladiator fixation.’ Costas had moved back to the foot of the bier, and now gestured down. Jack slithered over and confronted another astonishing sight. It was a row of helmets, five elaborate helmets arranged in a row just below the level of the bier, facing the skeleton.

‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘But these aren’t gladiators’ helmets. They’re Roman legionary helmets, fairly high ranking by the look of it. Centurions, maybe cohort commanders. And they’ve seen some pretty brutal action.’ He reached over and carefully tipped back the nearest one, which had a deep dent across the top. It was heavier than he had expected, and it stuck to the timber. He pushed harder, and it gave way. He let it drop, and flinched in shock.

They were still in there
.

Costas saw it too, and moaned. ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’

Jack looked closely along the row of helmets. They were all the same. Each one held a human skull, leering, several of them grotesquely smashed and splintered. The skulls were white, bleached, from heads that had been exposed and left to rot before they were placed inside the tomb. ‘Battle trophies,’ Jack murmured. ‘Collected from the field, or more likely the heads of executed prisoners, the highest-ranking Romans they captured.’ His mind was racing again. The warrior queen’s last battle. He remembered the accounts of Tacitus, Dio Cassius.
Living trophies of war, brought with her for sacrifice at the most sacred place, consigned with her in eternal submission
.

Then Jack saw them. Huge, shapeless forms emerging from the far side of the tomb, forms that seemed to struggle and rear out of the earth like the sculpted horses from the Athenian Parthenon, only these were real, the blackened skin and manes still stretched over the skulls, teeth bared and grimacing, caught for ever in the throes of death as they had their throats cut beside the body of their queen. It was a terrifying sight, even more so than the line of Roman skulls, and Jack began to feel unnerved again, aware that he and Costas did not belong in this place.

‘Time to go,’ Costas said, looking apprehensively at the bier. ‘I’m remembering that shrieking again. Your grandmother’s nightmare. Maybe there really is a banshee down here.’

Jack tore himself away from the image. ‘We haven’t found what we’re looking for. There has to be something more here.’ He slithered back towards the bier, and peered down at the skeleton and the array of weapons and armour. Costas took out his compass and aimed it down the bier. ‘It’s aligned exactly north-south,’ he said. ‘It points directly toward the arena of the amphitheatre.’

‘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:

‘ “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
.

E
arly 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.