The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘The Special Raiding Squadron, an offshoot of the SAS, parachuted on to the cliff above us and forced the Italian coastal defence battery to surrender, throwing their arms into the sea. When we first dived here the site was strewn with ammunition.’

  Costas rubbed his hands. ‘That’s what I like. Real archaeology. Beats bits of old pot any day.’

  ‘Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. You can play bomb disposal later.’

  Costas grinned, and held up the feed hose from his rebreather. ‘Lock and load.’ He clicked it home, then watched Jack do the same.

  ‘Done.’ Jack angled his neck down to check his equipment, then eyed Costas. ‘You up for it?’ he said. ‘I mean, going deep?’

  Costas raised his eyes, then gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Let me see. Our last dive was in an underground passageway beneath the jungles of the Yucatán, being swept towards some kind of Mayan hell. And before that it was inside a rolling iceberg. Oh, and before that, an erupting volcano.’

  ‘You saying you’ve had enough, or can manage one more?’

  Costas gave his version of the thousand-yard stare, then gave a haggard grin and began pulling up his diving suit. ‘You just say the words.’

  ‘Time to kit up.’

  2

  Maurice Hiebermeyer leaned back against the wall of the passageway, panted heavily a few times and eyed the ragged hole ahead of him. He would not be defeated. If the Bourbon King Charles of Naples could do it, an ample girth if there ever was one, then so could he. Once again he heaved himself up on his hands and knees, aimed his headlamp at the hole and threw himself bodily forward, his hard hat clattering against the ceiling and the jagged protrusions tearing at his overalls. Once again he ground to a halt, stuck like a cork in a bottle. It was no good. He looked through the filthy sheen on his glasses at the dust cloud he had created in the tunnel beyond. He could hardly believe it. The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, the greatest unexcavated treasure in Italy. Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, rediscovered by the Bourbon kings of Naples in the eighteenth century, hardly excavated since. And then an earthquake, a rushed international response, and here he was, first archaeologist ever to reach this far into the villa, stopped dead by his own girth. He felt like weeping. They would have to get in a pneumatic drill, widen the hole. It would mean more delays, more frustration. Already they were two weeks behind schedule, days spent pacing and sweating in the superintendency lobby while the bureaucracy inched towards releasing their permit. Precious time he could ill afford to lose, with his new excavation in full swing in the eastern desert beside the Red Sea.

  Then he saw it.

  He gasped, and whispered in his native German. ‘Mein Gott. No, it can’t be.’ He reached out, and felt the smooth surface. A snout. ‘Yes, it is.’ He let his hand drop, and stared in amazement.

  The guardian god of the dead.

  A few feet ahead the grey mottled wall of the eighteenth-century tunnel had fallen away to form a shallow cavity, no more than a foot in depth. In the centre was a head, peering out, black and shrouded with dust but unmistakable, the ears pointing high up and the snout jutting out defiantly. He who walked through the shadows and lurked in dark places, guardian of the veil of death. Hiebermeyer stared at the sightless eyes, surrounded by the thick black line of kohl, then shut his own eyes tight and silently mouthed the name. Here, at the threshold of the unknown, at a place of unimaginable terror and death, where those who last lived truly saw the fires of hell. Anubis. He opened his eyes again, and saw three vertical lines of hieroglyphs running down the chest of the statue, the text instantly recognizable. A man remains over after death, and his deeds are placed beside him in heaps. Existence yonder is for eternity, and for him who reaches it without wrongdoing, he shall exist yonder like a god. Hiebermeyer stared past the statue into the empty blackness of the tunnel beyond. For a brief, bizarre moment he pitied all of them, the ancients who placed such store in the world beyond, whose crumbled dreams of the afterlife had become his own kingdom of the dead. Not for the first time he felt he was on a mission, that his true calling as an archaeologist was to bring those in limbo some semblance of the immortality they had so craved.

  ‘Maurice.’ A muffled voice came through from behind.

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘Relax for a moment.’

  There was a massive jolt and he sprang forward, tumbling awkwardly down the cascade of rock fragments that filled the tunnel entrance. He began to cough violently and quickly replaced the dust mask where it had been wrenched off. He grimaced, pulled his legs through, then crouched upright in the narrow tunnel.

  ‘Sorry.’ Maria’s face appeared through the hole, capped with a yellow hard hat and wearing protective glasses and a dust mask, her long dark hair tied back. Her voice was strong and mellifluous, English with a hint of a Spanish accent. ‘Always best to catch people unawares, I find. If you tense up it’s hopeless.’

  ‘You’ve done that often?’

  ‘I’ve been through a few holes in my time.’ She slipped effortlessly through and crouched beside him, their two bodies exactly filling the width of the tunnel with scarcely enough headroom to stand upright. ‘I hope you’re still intact. A few bruises seemed better than another sentence to the superintendency office, begging for a pneumatic drill.’

  ‘My thoughts precisely.’ Hiebermeyer rubbed his left leg gingerly. ‘The permit only allows us to follow this old tunnel, not to dig new ones. Even widening that hole created by the earthquake would be a criminal transgression. It’s madness.’ He peered back through the dust. ‘Not that the superintendency people will notice what we do right now.’

  ‘They’ll be catching up to us soon.’

  Hiebermeyer grunted, then raised his safety glasses and eyed Maria thoughtfully as he cleaned the lenses. ‘Anyway, I rather enjoyed our time together in the office. A crash course on medieval manuscripts from a world expert. Fascinating. And I was about to read you my doctoral thesis on the Roman quarries opened up by the emperor Claudius in Egypt.’

  Maria groaned. ‘You’re supposed to be in your element here, Maurice. Underground, I mean. Remember, I was on board Seaquest II when Jack took the call, after the earthquake here. Get an Egyptologist, he said. Someone used to catacombs, burrowing in the ground, the Valley of the Kings and all that.’

  ‘Ah, the Valley of the Kings,’ Hiebermeyer sighed. He watched as Maria backed up until her head was inches from the snout of the jackal. ‘But you’re right. I am in my element now. It’s fabulous. We have a new friend.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Turn around. Slowly.’

  Maria did as instructed, then yelped and threw herself back. ‘Dios mia. Oh my God.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s just a statue.’

  Maria was splayed against the tunnel entrance, but far enough back to take in everything that had been revealed. ‘It’s a dog,’ she whispered. ‘A wolf. On a human torso.’

  ‘Relax. It won’t bite.’

  ‘Sorry. My nerves are a little frayed.’ Maria took a deep breath, then leaned forward and peered closely. ‘It’s not possible,’ she murmured. ‘Hieroglyphs? Is this thing Egyptian?’

  ‘Anubis,’ Hiebermeyer said matter-of-factly. ‘A life-sized statue of the Egyptian god of the dead, in black steatite. The hieroglyphs are a copy of the Instructions for Merikare, a text of the third millennium BC, but that cartouche at the bottom is a royal inscription of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, of the Sixth century BC. I wouldn’t be surprised if this came from the royal capital at Saïs, on the Nile delta.’

  ‘That rings a bell,’ Maria said. ‘Wasn’t that where the Athenian Solon visited the high priest? Where he recorded the legend of Atlantis?’

  ‘You’ve spent some time with Jack.’

  ‘I’m an adjunct professor of the International Maritime University now, remember? Just like you. It’s like we’re all back at college again. He told me the whole story on board Seaquest II on our voyage back from the Yucatán.
I was completely hooked. It really helped to refocus me.’

  Hiebermeyer peered back at her through the dust. ‘I know this may seem an odd time to say it, but I do know what you went through. In the Yucatán, I mean, the kidnapping and torture, your friend O’Connor in Scotland. Jack told me on the phone before you joined me in Naples. I haven’t mentioned it before because the time was never right. Like now. Just so you know.’

  ‘I know.’ Maria straightened up and dusted off her sleeves. ‘Jack said he’d told you. Thank you, Maurice. Much appreciated. End of topic.’

  Hiebermeyer paused as if about to say something, then nodded. ‘So. Atlantis.’

  ‘Jack and Costas have plans to go back to the Black Sea to the site and find a Greek wreck they saw nearby, a trireme I think.’

  Hiebermeyer grunted. ‘I wish Jack would give me some time instead. I’ve got something much better for him. It’s supposed to be our job, feeding him any new leads. I’ve been trying to tell him about this one for months now.’ He sighed in exasperation, then looked at the statue. ‘But back to what we’ve got here. The Greek historian Herodotus also visited Saïs and described a lake outside the Temple of Neith, a sanctuary surrounded by statues like this, pharaohs and gods brought from older sites all over Egypt. By the Roman period Saïs was silted up and abandoned, but it would have been accessible to Roman ships and stripped of all its precious stone and statuary.’

  ‘You’re saying this was looted?’

  ‘I prefer the word transferred. The Romans who built this villa had access to great works of art from all over the Mediterranean and beyond, from many different cultures stretching far back in history. They were just like private collectors or museum curators today. Some of the best Greek bronze statues ever found came from this very villa, discovered only yards away from us when well-diggers broke through in the eighteenth century. Some Romans equated Anubis with Cerberus, guardian of the river Styx in the underworld, but to many he was a figure of derision, the barking one, a dog. This statue would have been an antiquity, a curio, probably seen as an amusing work of art and nothing more.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maria said quietly. ‘He seems to be staring at us, half in and half out of history, exactly like a guardian.’ She peered at Hiebermeyer. ‘Do you ever get superstitious, Maurice? I mean, King Tut’s tomb, the curse of the mummy, all that?’

  ‘No.’ Hiebermeyer spoke curtly. ‘I’m just a dirt archaeologist.’

  ‘Come on, Maurice. You must at least be thrilled by this. Remember when we were undergraduates, and you talked all the time about Egypt? And I mean all the time. Admit it.’

  Hiebermeyer looked at the jackal head, and allowed himself a rare smile. ‘I am thrilled. Of course I am. It’s wonderful. I can’t wait to see the rest of the inscription.’ He pressed the palm of his hand against the polished steatite, then looked down the tunnel. ‘But I really think this is the end of the road. This statue must have been revealed in the seismic aftershock last night, and we must be the first to see it. But others have been this far in the tunnel before us, before it was sealed up to get it ready for our arrival. The local site security people will have been in here as soon as that first earthquake opened it up. If they found anything it’s probably on the black market already. I doubt whether we’ll find anything else.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re so cynical.’ Maria seemed genuinely affronted. ‘They’d never have allowed it. Have you forgotten where we are? The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Site of the only known library of papyrus scrolls to survive from antiquity, yet everyone knows that more of it must remain here to be found, sealed up behind these walls. You don’t just let anyone walk in here and pilfer it.’

  ‘Also one of the greatest disappointments in archaeology,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘Almost all the excavated scrolls are by Philodemus, a third-rate philosopher of no lasting significance. No great works of literature, hardly anything in Latin.’ He replaced his glasses. ‘Ever wonder why the villa was never fully excavated?’

  ‘Lots of reasons. Structural issues. Undermining the modern buildings above. Resources needed for maintaining the existing excavation, the main part of Herculaneum already revealed. Bureaucracy. Lack of funds. Corruption. You name it.’

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘Well, there are huge problems working out the best way of conserving and reading the carbonized papyri. You remember our visit to the Officina dei Papyri in Naples? They’re still working on the stuff found in the eighteenth century. And they need to determine the best way of excavating new material, of recovering any more scrolls that may exist. This place demands the best. It’s a sacred site.’

  ‘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 patc
h 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.’

  3

  23 August AD 79

  Claudius 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.