The Last Gospel (6 page)

‘Precisely.’ Hiebermeyer clicked his fingers. ‘The last thing you said. A sacred site. And like other sacred sites, like the caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel, people yearn to find out what lies inside, yet they also fear it. And believe me, there’s one very powerful body in Italy that would rather not have any more written records from the first century AD.’

At that moment the dust in the air seemed to blur and there was a palpable tremor, followed by a sound like falling masonry somewhere ahead. Maria braced her hands on the floor of the tunnel and looked at Hiebermeyer in alarm. He quickly whipped out a palm-sized device with a prong and jammed it on to the wall of the tunnel, watching the readout intently as the tremor subsided. ‘An aftershock, a bit bigger than the one last night but probably nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘We were told to expect these. Remember, the walls around us are solidified pyroclastic mud, unlike the ash and pumice fallout on Pompeii. Most of it’s harder than concrete. We should be safe.’

‘I can hear the others, coming up the tunnel behind us,’ Maria said quietly.

‘Ah yes. The mysterious lady from the superintendency. You know she’s an old friend of Jack’s? I mean, close friend. It was after you’d left, when he was finishing his doctorate and I was already in Egypt. For some reason they don’t talk. I can see the torch light now. Best behaviour.’

‘No, I didn’t know,’ Maria said quietly, then looked up at the snout. ‘Anyway, Anubis should stall them.’

‘Anubis will probably halt the whole project,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘It’ll be hailed as a great discovery, vindication of their decision to explore the tunnel. It’ll be enough for them to withdraw our permit and seal this up. The only reason we’re here is that someone leaked the discovery of the tunnel to the press after the earthquake, and the archaeological authorities had no choice but to put up a show.’

‘You’re being cynical again.’

‘Trust me. I’ve been in this game a long time. There are much bigger forces at play here. There are those who are fearful of the ancient past, who would do all they can to close it off. They fear anything that might shake the established order, the institutions they serve. Old ideas, ancient truths sometimes obscured by those very institutions which sprang up to protect them.’

‘Ideas that might be found in a long-lost library,’ Maria murmured.

‘We’re talking the first century AD here,’ Maurice whispered. ‘The first decades anno domini in the year of our Lord. Think about it.’

‘I have.’

‘It’s your call whether or not we continue down the tunnel to see what else we can find before they shut us down. I’ve got an excavation in Egypt waiting for me. You need a rest.’

‘Try me.’

‘I take it we’re in agreement.’

‘Let’s take the chance now while we’ve got it,’ Maria said. ‘You’ve found your treasure, now I need mine.’

Hiebermeyer stowed the oscillator in his front overall pocket, sneezed noisily then peered at Maria. ‘I can see what Jack saw in you. He always said you might make something of yourself, if you got out of the Institute of Medieval Studies at Oxford and took a job with him.’

Maria gave him a withering look, then crawled forward until she was just beyond the statue. The dust was settling, and ahead of them they could just make out a white patch where another fragment of the tunnel wall had been dislodged by the tremor. As the beams of their headlamps concentrated on the fracture, they could see something dark at the centre. Hiebermeyer pulled himself forward and turned to Maria, his face ablaze with excitement. ‘Okay, we’ve passed Anubis, and we’re still in one piece.’

‘Superstitious, Maurice?’

‘Let’s go for it.’

 

C
laudius gulped at the wine, holding the cup with trembling hands, then shut his eyes and grasped the pillar until the worst of the fit was over. Tonight he would go to the Phlegraean Fields, stand before the Sibyl’s cave for the last time. But there was work to do before then. He lurched sideways on to the marble bench, lunging wildly at his toga to stop it from slipping off, then tripped and fell heavily on his elbows. His face twisted in pain and frustration, willing on tears that no longer came, retching on empty. In truth he was going through the motions. He barely felt anything any more.

He raised himself and peered rheumily at the moonlight that was now shimmering across the great expanse of the bay, past the statues of Greek and Egyptian gods that lined the portico of the villa. The nearest to him, the dog-headed one, seemed to frame the mountain, its ears and snout glowing in the moonlight. From his vantage point on the belvedere of the villa he could see the rooftops of the town he knew intimately but had never visited, Herculaneum. He could hear the clinking and low sounds of evening activity, the rising and falling of conversation, peals of laughter and soft music, the lapping of waves on the seashore.

He had all he had needed. Wine from the slopes of Vesuvius, rich red wine that flowed like syrup, always his favourite. And girls, brought for him from the back alleys below, girls who still gave him fleeting pleasure, years after he had stopped pondering what it did for them.

And he had the poppy.

He sniffed and wrinkled his nose, and then looked up. The soothsayers had been right. There was something about the sky tonight.

He looked across the bay to the west, past the old Greek colony of Neapolis towards the naval base at Misenum, on the far promontory beside the open sea. The shadow of the mountain darkened the bay, and all he could make out were a few merchantmen anchored close inshore. He was used to looking out for the phosphorescence left in the wake of the fast galleys, but tonight he could see nothing. Where was Pliny? Had Pliny got his message? It was hardly as if he was away on naval manoeuvres. Claudius knew exactly what the commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum did. The fleet had not put out for action since Claudius’ grandfather Mark Antony had been defeated at Actium, over a century before.
Pax Romana
. Claudius nodded to himself. He, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus,
Imperator
, had helped to keep that peace. He looked back towards the half-empty pitcher on the table. Pliny had better get here soon. What he had to say tonight demanded a clear head. It was getting late.

He reached out to pour himself another cup, letting the wine overflow and trickle down the table to join the wide red stain that had permeated the marble floor over the years. He could see back into his little room and the line of wax images ranged along the wall, caught in the moonlight. Ancestral images, the only things he had saved from his past. His father Drusus, cherished in memory. His beloved brother Germanicus. With his waxen skin, Claudius felt he was already one with them. He was old, old enough to have lived through the Age of Augustus, the Golden Age tarnished for ever by the debauchery of Tiberius and Caligula and then Claudius’ successor, Nero. Sometimes, in his bleaker moments, usually after the wine, he felt that time had made a monster of him just as it had ruined Rome, not by some hideous malformity but through a slow and inexorable wasting, as if the gods who had inflicted the ailment on him, the palsy, were making him endure the full extremity of torment in this life before they pitched him into the fires below.

He shook himself out of his trance, coughed painfully and looked over the balcony of the villa again, over the rooftops of Herculaneum. When he had faked his own poisoning and escaped Rome, when his work there was done and he craved his former life as a writer and a scholar, his old friend Calpurnius Piso had blocked off an annex to his villa and made a home for him here, his hideaway now for almost a quarter of a century, overlooking the sea and the mountain. He missed nothing in Rome that was not already gone, and had all that a scholar could need. He knew he should be more grateful, but there were irritations. Calpurnius’ grandfather had been a patron of the Greek philosopher Philodemus, whose library of unreadable nonsense was always in the way. And then poor Calpurnius Piso had been forced to commit suicide, here, in front of Claudius’ very eyes, after his failed plot against Nero, leaving the villa to a grudging nephew who did not even know who Claudius was, who thought he was just another one of the Greek charlatans who seemed to beg their way into every aristocratic household around here. It was exactly the anonymity that Claudius sought, but it was also the ultimate humiliation.

But he had the memories, one above all others. The fisherman by the inland sea, that afternoon all those years ago. The promise Claudius had made him. Everything the fisherman had predicted had come to pass. Now forces beyond Claudius’ control were closing in on him. Claudius would not let him down.

‘
Ave, Princeps
.’

Claudius straightened with a start. ‘Pliny? My dear friend. I told you to stop calling me that. We have known each other well since you were a young cavalry officer with my legions in Germany. You have been my closest companion since I summoned you to visit me here when you took up your appointment with the Fleet. I stopped being
Princeps
when you were still a young man. It is I who should be honouring you, a veteran and an admiral. But we are both citizens of Rome, no more, no less, for what that is worth these days.’

Pliny came quickly in and helped Claudius back to his seat, taking his cup and filling it. He passed it over and poured himself one, holding it up formally. ‘The gods give you salutations on your ninetieth year.’

‘That was three weeks ago.’ Claudius waved his hand dismissively, then looked at the other man with affection. Pliny was tall, unusually so for a Roman, but then he did come from Verona in the north, the land of the Celts. Rather than a toga he wore the emblazoned red tunic and strap-on boots of a naval officer, and he had a sinewy toughness about him. He was everything that Claudius most admired, a decorated war veteran, a natural leader of men, a prodigious scholar who was author of countless volumes, and now the new encyclopedia. Claudius clenched his fist to stop his stutter. ‘Have you b-brought me the book?’

‘The first twenty volumes. My present for your birthday,
Princeps
, even if a little belated. I could not imagine a more auspicious occasion or a more exacting reader for my work.’ Pliny pointed proudly to a leather basket beside the door, carefully placed away from the wine, brimming over with scrolls. ‘A few details on the flora and fauna of Britannia I want to check with you, and of course the space you asked me to keep in the section of Judaea. Otherwise complete. The first natural history of the world not written by a Greek.’

Claudius gestured at the half-empty shelves in the room, then at the scrolls lying in bundles on the floor. ‘At least now I’ve got space to store them. Narcissus has been helping me to box up these other scrolls. I’ve never been able to bring myself to throw any book away, and I never had the heart to tell old Calpurnius, but these ones by Philodemus aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.’

‘Where do you want them? My books, I mean. I can shelve them for you.’

‘Leave them where they are by the door. Narcissus is making space in my library tomorrow. Yours will have pride of place. All of that Greek nonsense will be removed.’

‘Narcissus still does all your writing for you?’

‘He castrated himself, poor fellow, so he could serve me, you know. It was when he was a boy, a young slave. I was going to free him anyway.’

‘I’ve never quite trusted Narcissus,’ Pliny said cautiously.

‘You can always trust a eunuch.’

‘It’s always been your Achilles’ heel, if I may say so. Wives and freedmen.’

‘Achilles is one thing I’m definitely not. I may be a god, but I’m no Achilles.’ Claudius stifled a giggle, then looked serious. ‘Yes, Narcissus is a bit of a mystery. I sometimes think his fall from being Prefect of the Guard in Rome to being little more than the slave of an old hermit must be hard for him to bear, being part of my own disappearing act. But Nero would have executed him if he hadn’t faked his death too. Narcissus has always been a shrewd fellow, with his business interests in Britannia. And his religion, the quirky stuff he picked up when he was a slave. He’s a very pious chap. And he’s always been very loyal to me.’ Claudius suddenly smiled, lurched up, and caught Pliny by the arm. ‘Thank you for your books, my friend,’ he said quietly. ‘Reading has always been my greatest joy. And there will be much to help me with my own history of Britannia.’ He pointed to an open scroll pinned on the table, one edge splattered with wine. ‘We’d better get to work while I’ve still got a modicum of common sense left in me. It has been a long day.’

‘I can see.’

The two men hunched together over the table, the curious hue of the moonlight giving the marble a reddish tint. It was unseasonably hot for late August, and the breeze wafting over the balcony was warm and dry like the sirocco that swept up from Africa. Claudius sometimes wondered whether Pliny the great encyclopedist was not just flattering him by calling on his expertise on Britannia, a hollow victory if there ever was one. Claudius had been there, of course, had ridden out of the freezing waves on a war elephant, pale and shaking, not in fear of the enemy but terrified that he might have a seizure and fall off, bringing dishonour to his family name. Yet Britannia was his one imperial achievement, his one triumph, and he had devoted himself to writing a history of the province from the earliest times. He had read everything there was to read on the subject, from the journal of the ancient explorer Pytheas, who had first rounded the island, to the blood-curdling accounts of headhunting that his legionaries had extracted from the druids before they were executed. And he had found her, princess of a noble family, the girl the Sibyl had told him to seek out, she who would rise and fall alongside the warrior-queen.