The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘What is it?’ Costas said. ‘Some kind of resin, pitch?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Hiebermeyer’s glasses had slipped down his nose, and he pushed them up with the same finger, leaving a dark streak between his eyes. He looked at Costas, beaming with excitement. ‘When the inferno hit this place, the scrolls must have instantly carbonized, but there must have been something in them, a resinous preservative material, that caused the carbonized mass to form the cast around the body. That sealed off the flesh from oxygen, so it couldn’t incinerate. Instead, it cooked.’

  ‘Cooked alive,’ Maria said.

  ‘He means, this guy melted,’ Jack added, peering at Costas.

  ‘Oh no.’ Costas swayed back against the opposite wall of the tunnel. ‘And you put your finger into it.’

  Hiebermeyer held up his finger again, and peered at it with some reverence. ‘It’s fantastic. Probably some brain in that. Should be perfect for DNA analysis.’

  Maria had edged back to where the man’s feet had been, looking closely, and then sidled up to Hiebermeyer and peered into the ribcage. ‘Look! He’s wearing a gold ring!’ she exclaimed. Hiebermeyer followed her gaze, tracing the finger bones which were contorted under the ribcage as if the man had been clutching at his chest in his death throes. He took out a mini Maglite, and put his face right up to the bones. ‘It’s a signet ring, for impressing into wax sealings on documents. It’s partly melted into the bone, but I can see the design. It’s an eagle impression.’

  ‘An imperial signet ring,’ Jack said. ‘This guy must have been in the service of the emperor.’

  ‘I’m not sure if this was a guy, exactly,’ Hiebermeyer murmured, kneeling up with his hands on his hips. ‘There’s something odd about this skeleton. Distinctly odd. Rounding of the face, areas of bone structure you’d expect to be more developed in a male, unusual widening of the pelvic area. It’s not a woman, exactly, but it’s not far off. Very odd.’

  ‘Didn’t they have eunuchs?’ Costas said.

  ‘An interesting thought,’ Jack murmured. He stared at the skeleton, thinking hard. In the early fourth century AD, the emperor Constantine the Great surrounded himself with eunuchs, and so did the later Byzantine emperors. Eunuchs were thought to be a safer bet as secretaries and state officials, less likely to be hard driven and ambitious. Earlier emperors had them, too. He looked up. ‘Some scholars think that Claudius’ freedman Narcissus was a eunuch.’ He paused for a moment, then spoke again, almost to himself. ‘But it couldn’t be. Narcissus was murdered when Claudius was poisoned, in AD 54. That’s a quarter of a century before Vesuvius erupted. There would have been other eunuchs around. This whole area attracted oddities, freaks who came here for the amusement of the wealthy, as well as cripples and other unfortunates who sought cures in the sulphur vents of the Phlegraean Fields. That’s the other side of life here in the Roman period, not exactly the tourist image.’

  ‘Whoever and whatever this was, he may have ended up as an imperial freedman, but he certainly started off life as a slave.’ Hiebermeyer had shifted to the feet end of the skeleton, and then came back up beside the extractor fan just inside the entranceway ahead of them. ‘His ankles have the characteristic contusions caused by shackles, healed over years before. I think he was an old man when he died, very old for this period, maybe in his eighties or even his nineties. But he’d had a pretty rough time of it a long time before, as a boy.’

  ‘From shackles to castration to this,’ Costas said, his eyes studiously averted from the slick of black goo under the skeleton. ‘Let’s hope the years in between weren’t so bad.’

  ‘The end was probably pretty quick,’ Hiebermeyer said, scraping some of the black material on to his trowel and then into a small specimen phial. ‘The terrible shock of that blast of heat, then one lungful and you’d be gone. There would only have been a few seconds of awareness.’

  ‘He must have known something bad was going down,’ Costas said, forcing himself to look again. ‘I thought the volcano had been erupting for hours.’

  ‘Yes, but the pyroclastic flow that wiped Herculaneum off the map came from nowhere, rushed down that mountain in rings of fire faster than anything any Roman had ever seen. Before that, the eruption would have seemed a terrifying catastrophe, but not necessarily a death sentence. After that it truly was the apocalypse. Nobody would have escaped Herculaneum alive.’

  Jack began to sense the smell of the place, not just the familiar smell of dust and old tombs but the smell of recent death, the rusty smell of blood, the scent of animal fear. For a moment the tunnel lost its solidity and became the whirling vortex of death that had encased this man, a terrifying, claustrophobic place which moments before had been a shrine to beauty, a sumptuous expression of freedom and confidence. The whole place still seemed traumatized, still trembling in the aftershock almost two thousand years on. Jack closed his eyes briefly, then moved up behind Hiebermeyer towards the dark entranceway ahead of them. He glanced back, to where he could still see the snout of Anubis peering sightless out of the side wall, to the glimmer of light just visible beyond. The noise of the drill could be heard where the tunnel entrance was being widened, but there was still nobody to be seen. He turned back to the dark crack in the wall ahead.

  ‘You ready for this?’ Hiebermeyer said, flicking off the fan. There was now no noise ahead of them, only the silence of a tomb, and even the distant noise of the drill had stopped. Jack looked at the grimy face a few inches away from his, the face of a man which in the blink of an eye could have been a boy. ‘Do you remember when we were at school, when we filled that cellar room with home-made artefacts and then sealed it up, pretending it was King Tut’s tomb? I was Howard Carter, you were Lord Carnarvon.’

  ‘No.’ Hiebermeyer shook his head decisively. ‘Other way round. You were Carnarvon, I was Carter.’

  Jack grinned, then looked ahead at the dark crack in the wall, his face suffused with excitement. ‘Okay. Let’s do it.’

  9

  Jack peered through into the hidden chamber at the end of the tunnel, trying to make sense of the fragments of clarity revealed by his headlamp in the darkness. The tunnel had felt like an old mine working, which was exactly what it was, the result of Weber’s digging more than two hundred years before, itself part of the extraordinary archaeology of this place. But now there were glimpses that reminded Jack of exactly where they were, deep inside the buried remains of an ancient Roman villa. At first all he could see were shadows, dusty grey forms, darkness. Then he saw a table, possibly a stone table, and some kind of shelf structure on the far wall. Something was not right. Then he realized to his astonishment what it was. There was no ash, no solidified mud.

  ‘It’s perfectly preserved,’ he whispered.

  Hiebermeyer heaved the extractor fan forward a few feet into the chamber, and it showed red again. He cautioned them to stay back. ‘This room is a miracle,’ he replied in hushed tones. ‘I realized it when I first peered in here yesterday, before we backed out and called you. There are other rooms at Herculaneum that escaped the mud, the pyroclastic flow. Nobody really understands it, but the extraordinary thing about this room is that it escaped the furnace effect as well. It could have been something to do with the elevation, perched on the top floor of the villa above the rooftop level of the town, looking down on it. The hot blast certainly ripped through everywhere else right up to the room, over that body at the entrance. But it missed this chamber itself. We always knew something like this was possible at Herculaneum.’

  ‘Maurice, I can see scrolls,’ Jack said, his voice tight with excitement. ‘Wound-up scrolls. No doubt about it. In jars, under those shelves.’

  ‘That’s what I saw yesterday,’ Hiebermeyer replied, almost whispering. ‘That’s why I called you here. Now you see what I mean. This really could be it.’

  ‘Can you imagine what they might contain?’ Jack’s voice was hoarse.

  The fan suddenly went dead, and Hiebermeyer cursed in German. ‘N
ot now. Please God, not now. He bent over the machine, and seemed to be praying. ‘I apologize profusely for everything I have ever said or thought about Naples. Just another five minutes. Please.’

  ‘This happened before,’ Maria murmured. ‘Dodgy electrical grid in Ercolano. The guards couldn’t be bothered to fire up the backup generator, and we had to come out in a hurry. But right now the superintendency are planning to use electrical drills to widen the cavity in the volcanic rock around the Anubis statue, so there’s a bit more incentive for the guards to get on with it. We just have to back off and wait.’

  Jack looked over at the shadowy recess with the scrolls, hardly able to restrain himself. He closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply. He turned and followed the others, crawling back through the entrance to their start point. Costas reached into the shadows by the wall and picked something up. ‘Check this out,’ he said excitedly. He held it up, shaking off the dust. It was a metal disc about an inch across, dark green and mottled. ‘It looks like a medallion.’

  ‘Not a medallion,’ Hiebermeyer murmured, peering closely. ‘A bronze sestertius, the biggest base metal denomination of the first century AD. A bit like a quarter.’

  ‘Also the largest type of Roman coin, the best for portraits.’ Jack crouched closer to Costas. ‘Anything visible?’

  ‘Nero!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘I can read it. The emperor Nero!’ He passed the coin to Jack, who looked at it intently, angling it to and fro in his headlamp. ‘Right about the name, wrong about the emperor,’ Jack murmured. ‘I’m looked at the reverse, the back side. It reads NERO CLAUDIUS DRUSUS GERMANICUS. That’s the full name of Drusus, brother of the emperor Tiberius. Nero was a family name. Drusus was one of the ablest Roman generals, a decent man and a hero of the people. A real beacon at the beginning of the empire, a time of great promise but also great uncertainty, a bit like 1960s America. Charismatic characters like that seem to be typical of those periods. His death by poisoning and then the murder of his son Germanicus were like the Kennedy assassinations, cast a pall over the whole early imperial dynasty.’

  ‘That was well before the time period we’re dealing with here,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘Drusus was murdered in 10 BC, during the reign of Augustus, almost ninety years before Vesuvius erupted.’

  Jack nodded, and peered closely at the coin. The image showed a triumphal arch in Rome, surmounted by an equestrian statue of Drusus galloping between trophies. ‘But this isn’t a coin of Drusus. It’s a coin celebrating him. He was never emperor.’ Jack flipped it over. This was a coin of one who survived all the madness of his uncle Tiberius and his nephew Caligula. It dated more than fifty years after Drusus’ death. ‘This is a coin of Drusus’ other son, younger brother of Germanicus. The inscription reads TI CLAUDIUS CAESAR AUG PM TR P. That’s Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribunicia Potestas. The emperor Claudius.’

  ‘Poor Claudius,’ Maria murmured. ‘Claudius the cripple.’

  ‘That’s the caricature,’ Jack said. ‘But it’s a bit like Shakespeare’s take on the English king Richard III, the hunchback. There was a good deal more to Claudius than that.’

  ‘He was emperor from AD 41 to 54,’ Hiebermeyer said, looking again at the extractor fan and seeing the backup sensor still showing red while it cooled. ‘Died in Rome a quarter of a century before Vesuvius erupted, probably poisoned by his wife Agrippina.’

  ‘He had bad luck with his wives,’ Jack said. ‘His one real love seems to have been the prostitute Calpurnia, but she’d also been murdered by then.’ Jack paused, entranced by the coin image again. ‘This has always been my favourite issue of Claudius, one of my favourite Roman coins of all. It’s a rare coin, a very compelling portrait. Look at that face, the expression. He’s no cripple here, it’s a handsome face, but there’s no glorification, no idealization. You can see the features of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the forehead, the ears, features that hark back to his great-uncle Augustus, to Julius Caesar before that. Claudius would have known the portraits of his ancestors intimately, and would have been proud to look at this portrait of himself, to see the dignity in it. To see beyond his deformities, to know that he shared his revered ancestors’ features. There’s intelligence in that face too, a yearning, but also sadness and pain. A young man’s face clouded by disappointment, eyes older than his years.’

  ‘His illness was probably a palsy,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘Cerebral palsy, with some element of spasticity. No cure, hardly any palliative treatment back then except copious quantities of wine.’

  ‘What about opium?’ Costas suddenly cut in. ‘Morphine?’

  Hiebermeyer turned and gave Costas a look verging on pity. ‘We’re talking about the first century AD. Let’s keep modern Naples out of this.’

  ‘I’m not kidding. Have you heard about our shipwreck find?’

  ‘Later.’ Jack glanced at Costas, and at that moment the extractor fan buzzed to life.

  ‘Speaking of modern Naples,’ Hiebermeyer muttered. ‘Looks like someone bribed the grid operator to give us some electricity. Or the guards outside finally got off their backsides. Whatever it was, we’re good to go. As you would say.’ The words sounded slightly absurd in his clipped German accent, and Jack stifled a smile. Hiebermeyer pushed up his glasses and gave Costas another look, this time more quizzical than pitying.

  ‘Hey. He’s one of us after all.’ Costas returned the look deadpan, then glanced at Jack, then back at Hiebermeyer, grinning. ‘Roger that.’

  Jack pressed his back against the jagged side of the tunnel to let Maria through. ‘I think it’s time for our resident manuscripts expert to take the lead.’

  ‘I’m good with that.’ Hiebermeyer peered inquisitively at Costas, who gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up, then he pushed up his glasses again and spoke seriously. ‘From now on in, we touch only what we have to. The papyrus scrolls in there may be unusually well preserved but they may also be extremely fragile. Even in the driest tombs in Egypt, papyrus with no resin preservative can crumble to dust at a touch.’ He kept his gaze fixed on Costas. ‘Remember the body at the entrance. The body that disappeared in a puff of smoke. After all the effort we’ve been through to get the authorities to allow us in here, I don’t want to be the latest in a long line of investigators to destroy more than they recover from this place. Okay. The fan shows green. Let’s move.’

  Jack crouched down and made his way behind Maria over a pile of rubble that had evidently fallen when the earthquake damaged the wall, clogging up the lower part of the crack leading into the chamber. A few moments later they cautiously stood up inside. Jack felt sure that he was now beyond the eighteenth-century tunnelling, that they were the first to stand here since the time of the Roman Empire. It was an extraordinary feeling, and took him straight back to that time as a schoolboy when he had sat alone in the ancient bath building in the main site of Herculaneum, only a stone’s throw from where he was now, willing himself to pass back into antiquity and become one of the living, breathing inhabitants of the place almost two thousand years before, in the fateful hours leading up to the eruption. He shut his eyes tight, opened them again, unclipped his dust mask, and took a cautious breath. The air had a slightly sickly tang to it, but there was little dust. For the first time he looked at the room properly, sweeping his headlamp around all four walls, then methodically working his way back through everything he had seen.

  ‘Can we have the fan off now, Maurice?’ he murmured. ‘I’m worried our voices might travel, be heard by the guards and superintendency people outside, at the outlet of the extractor exhaust.’

  ‘Done.’ Hiebermeyer flicked the switch, and suddenly it was eerily quiet. Then they heard the sound of clinking and distant voices down the tunnel, and the whining of electric drills. ‘Good. That noise should cover us.’

  Hiebermeyer came through behind Jack and Maria, followed by Costas. ‘This room seems pretty austere,’ Costas said, standing up behind Jack and looking around. ‘I mean, not much here.
’

  ‘That’s the Roman way,’ Jack said. ‘They often liked to have their floors and walls covered in colour and decoration, but usually had very few furnishings by our standards.’

  ‘No mosaics or wall paintings here,’ Maria murmured. ‘This room’s all stone, white marble by the look of it.’

  Jack peered around again, absorbing everything he could, trying to get a sense of it all. To the right, on the south side, the wall was pierced by two entrances, both blocked up with solid volcanic material. He guessed they led to a balcony, overlooking the town of Herculaneum below. It would have been a spectacular view, with Vesuvius rearing up to the left and the broad sweep of the Bay of Naples to the right, the coastline visible as far out as Misenum and Cumae. Jack shifted, and his headlamp beam illuminated a long marble table, perhaps three metres long and a metre wide, with two stone chairs backing against the balcony. On the table were two pottery pitchers, three pottery cups, and what looked like ink pots. Just visible against one leg of the table was a small wine amphora. Jack looked at the tabletop again. Ink pots. His heart raced with excitement. He saw dusty shapes that could have been paper, papyrus. He narrowed his eyes. He was sure of it. He forced himself to remain rooted, to remain calm and detached for a few moments longer, and swept his beam to the left. He saw the shelves they had seen from the entrance, that Hiebermeyer had told him he had seen through the crack in the wall the day before. Bookshelves, piled high with scrolls. It was incredible. More scrolls were strewn on the floor, just as Weber had found elsewhere in the villa in the eighteenth century. Jack pivoted further left, to the place where they had come in. Beside the entrance were scrolls in some kind of wicker basket, different from the scrolls on the floor, wound round wooden sticks with distinctive smoothed finials poking out of the ends of each one, labels protruding. There was no doubt about it. Not just blank rolls of papyrus. Finished books.