The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  He turned, hammered in a final piton just above the cliff edge, then clipped the rope to his harness and under his back, abseiling down the first few metres. He stopped and listened. The rivulet down the tunnel leading towards the forum had greatly intensified, and was now a torrent. The rainwater must have pushed the water reservoir from the spring over its threshold, and the tunnel was doing the job Claudius had designed it for. Jack paused, took a deep breath. This was it. He yelled out, as loudly as he could.

  ‘Costas, I’ve found it. I’m coming down.’

  He bounced down another couple of metres, halfway down the cliff, the hammer in his left hand. Suddenly a grip like a vice held his left ankle, and he began spinning wildly. He looked down. A figure in a black wetsuit was staring up at him, wearing a close-fitting diving mask, legs wrapped around the rope just above the step. One hand held Jack’s ankle and the rope, the other held a silenced pistol, aimed at Jack’s head. ‘Give it to me,’ the man said coldly, in a thick Italian accent. Jack looked down, saying nothing. A bullet cracked past his face, followed by the thump of the silencer. It was a warning shot. Jack caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye, a shape. He swung, and aimed the hammer at the man’s head, a killer blow. But the arm holding his ankle was closer, and he brought the hammer down hard against the man’s wrist. There was an explosive sound as the bones snapped, and the pistol spun off into the cavern. Simultaneously Costas launched himself at the man’s legs, bringing him down with a huge crash. The man tried to get up, tripped, tumbled down and hit the channel below with a sickening crack, and then was gone, swept away down the tunnel in the torrent. Jack dropped down to help Costas, who had also removed his respirator and visor. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Costas panted. ‘Only wish you’d put that hammer in the little bastard’s forehead.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be troubling us any more,’ Jack said.

  Costas wiped some blood off his mouth and looked down. ‘Well and truly flushed out.’ He looked back up the cliff face. ‘Right. Hook me up. That’s done it for me. The sooner we get what we’ve come for and get out of here, the better.’

  Twenty minutes later they were in a narrow space above the final flight of rock-cut stairs. Jack squeezed himself as far up the crack as he could go, his arms raised above him into a hollowed-out chamber. He could feel nothing. He wriggled further, but it was no use. His head was jammed sideways against the top of the crack, and all he could see was the side of the jagged fissure inches from his face. He felt blindly with his hands, but there was only empty space. He arched his back, pushing hard, and felt himself move fractionally forward, an inch or two. Suddenly his fingers met resistance. Wet rock, smoothed down, different from the irregular rock of the fissure. He parted his hands and felt around. It was a circular chamber, about two feet wide, sunk into the rock. He felt down as far as he could reach, and touched the base of the chamber. He traced his fingers slowly around the edge. Nothing.

  It was empty.

  Jack slumped slightly, and peered down at Costas’ face, just visible below his feet. ‘I can feel the chamber.’ His voice sounded peculiar, resonating in the chamber but then deadened in the fissure. ‘It’s a cylindrical hole bored into the rock. I can feel all round the base. There’s nothing inside.’

  ‘Try the middle.’ Costas’ voice sounded distant, muffled. ‘Maybe there’s another smaller chamber sunk below it.’

  Jack shifted as far as he could to the right. He slowly drew his left hand across the bottom of the chamber. It was wet, slimy, with small ridges and furrows, as if it had been left roughly finished. He reached the other side. Suddenly he pulled his hand back again. There was a regularity to the furrows. He felt around, his eyes shut, tracing the marks, trying to read what he was feeling. There was no doubt about it. ‘You’re right,’ he said excitedly. ‘I can feel the outline of another circle, an inner circle on the floor of the chamber. I think it’s a lid, a stone lid. I can feel markings on it.’

  ‘Is there a handle?’ Costas said.

  ‘Nothing. It’s flat across the top. I’ve no idea how we’re going to open this.’

  ‘And those markings?’

  ‘I can count twenty so far,’ Jack said. ‘Wait.’ He flinched in pain as he jammed his elbow against the crack, trying to feel every part of the lid surface. He worked his hand round. ‘No, twenty-three. They’re in a circle, around the edge of the lid. They’re letters, raised letters carved on little blocks, set slightly into the stone surface. It’s curious. I can actually press them down slightly.’

  ‘Can you read them?’

  Jack traced his fingers around the letters. He suddenly realized what they were. ‘It’s the Latin alphabet, the alphabet of the later Roman Republic and the early empire. Twenty-three letters. Alpha to zeta.’

  ‘Jack, I think what you’ve got there is a combination lock, Roman style.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We studied these things at MIT. Ancient technology. If there isn’t a handle, the lid must have some kind of spring opener, set underneath to push it up. My guess is a bronze spring, set around the edge of the inner chamber. The letters must be a combination lock, probably attached to stone or metal pivots that secure the lid into the rock. The combination might be adjustable, allowing the person using it to reset it each time with a new code. Press the right combination, and bingo, the lid springs up.’

  ‘Twenty-three letters,’ Jack murmured. ‘And no way of knowing how many we need to press. I don’t even want to begin to calculate the number of possibilities.’

  ‘Let’s start with the obvious,’ Costas said. ‘It was Pliny the Elder who put the scroll here, right? What was his full name?’

  Jack thought for a moment. ‘Caius Plinius Secundus.’

  ‘Okay. Punch in the initials.’

  Jack pictured the Latin alphabet in his mind’s eye, and traced his finger around the circle until he came to each letter. C, P, S. He pressed them in the correct order, and they depressed very slightly, but no more. He tried again, then in a different order. Still nothing.

  ‘No good,’ he said, his teeth gritted.

  ‘Then your guess is as good as mine,’ Costas said. ‘You may as well try random combinations. We shouldn’t be here for more than a week. We really need to get going, Jack. Our friend might not be the only one. We don’t know.’

  ‘Wait.’ Jack’s mind was racing. ‘You might have the right idea. Let’s think about this. Pliny gets the document from Claudius. He promises to hide it away. Pliny keeps his promises, and never puts anything off. He’s got too much else to do, managing the naval base, writing his books. He takes his fast galley up to Rome that night, 23 August AD 79, right up the Tiber, comes straight here to the Admiral’s safety deposit box, returns that same night to Misenum on the Bay of Naples, just in time for the eruption. Whose name is fresh in his mind?’

  ‘You mean Jesus? The Nazarene?’

  ‘Not enough there for a code, and it might be too obvious. No. I mean Claudius himself. His name before he became emperor. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus.’ Jack shut his eyes again, moved his hand over the letters and pressed them in. T, C, D, N, G. Nothing. He repeated it. Again nothing. He exhaled forcibly. ‘No good.’

  ‘Maybe you’ve missed a letter. Emperor?’

  ‘Caesar Augustus.’ Jack found the letters, then punched them. Still nothing. He slumped again, then suddenly drew his breath in sharply. ‘No. Not Caesar Augustus. Claudius was no longer emperor. He would have been at pains to tell Pliny that. Not an emperor. He’d become something else. Something that would have amused them both.’

  ‘Claudius the god,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘Divus.’ Jack reached back around and found the letter D. He pressed it as hard as he could. Something gave way, and the letter depressed at least an inch. Suddenly the lid sprang up, and Jack quickly withdrew his hand to prevent it being trapped. ‘Bingo,’ he said excitedly. He put his hand back where the lid had been. He
could feel the coil of a heavy bronze spring, now holding the lid a foot or more above the opening it had covered. He reached inside and felt a cylindrical shape, loose in the hole. His heart began to pound. He pulled it out, easing it between the metal coils of the spring. The cylinder was heavy for its size, made of stone, about ten inches long and six inches wide. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said, pulling the cylinder out of the chamber and into the fissure, then holding it under his headlamp. ‘It’s Egyptian, a hand-turned Egyptian stone vessel. We’ve hit paydirt, Costas. It’s identical in manufacture to those larger jars in Claudius’ library, the reused canopic jars, the ones holding the papyrus scrolls. The lid’s still sealed in resin. Looks like Pliny didn’t tamper with it. We might be in luck.’ He passed the cylinder down to Costas, who reached up from the tunnel below. Jack eased himself back down the fissure, and the two of them squatted over the cylinder in the darkness, their beams illuminating the mottled marble surface as Costas turned the object over in his hands.

  ‘What do we do now?’ he said.

  ‘We open it.’

  ‘So this could be it.’

  Jack nodded silently, and looked at Costas. They had been here before, the knife-edge moment just before a new revelation, but each time the excitement seemed more intense.

  ‘Not exactly controlled laboratory conditions,’ Costas said.

  ‘My call.’ Jack took the cylinder, grasped the lid with one hand and the body of the jar with the other, and twisted. It gave way easily, the ancient resin around the sealing cracking off and falling on the tunnel floor. He prised the lid off and set it down, then peered inside. ‘No papyrus,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘But something else, wedged in.’ He reached inside with his other hand, and withdrew a flat stone object about six inches long and four inches wide, the size of a small cosmetic mirror. It was made up of two leaves joined together, with a hinge on one side and a metal latch on the other. Jack turned it over in his hands and then put his thumb against the latch. ‘It’s a writing tablet,’ he said excitedly. ‘A diptych, two leaves that open up like a book. The inside surface should be covered with wax.’

  ‘Any chance that could have survived?’ Costas said.

  ‘This could be another Agamemnon moment,’ Jack said. ‘It could still be there, but exposure to oxygen could degrade it immediately. I’m going for it. We can’t risk waiting.’

  ‘I’m with you.’ Costas pulled out a waterproof notebook and pencil, and knelt beside Jack, poised to write.

  Jack pressed the latch and felt the stone leaves move. ‘Here goes,’ he whispered. He opened up the tablet. The interior surfaces were hard, glassy. They could see it was wax, smooth and perfectly preserved, but getting darker by the second. It had writing on it. ‘Quick,’ Jack said. He passed the tablet to Costas, and grabbed the notebook, feverishly writing down everything he saw. ‘Done,’ he said after less than a minute. The wax was still there, but the scratchings on the surface had virtually disappeared, gone like a phantasm.

  Costas closed the tablet and immediately folded it in a sheet of bubblewrap and a waterproof bag, then slipped it into his chest pocket. He peered at Jack, who was staring at the notebook. ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s Latin.’ Jack paused, marshalling his thoughts. ‘Whoever wrote this, it wasn’t a Nazarene from Galilee. That could only have been Aramaic, Greek perhaps.’

  ‘So this is not Claudius’ precious document?’

  ‘It could have been written by Claudius, or it could have been Narcissus,’ Jack murmured, shifting his body in the cramped space. ‘Impossible to tell from scratchings on a wax tablet whether it was the same handwriting as that sheet by Narcissus in Claudius’ study. Especially when it disappears before your very eyes.’ He gazed at Costas. ‘No, this is not the document we’re after. But it’s not the end of the trail either.’ He ripped off the page of the notebook and transcribed his scribbled words neatly on to a fresh sheet, then held it in his beam so they could both see:

  Dies irae, dies illa

  Solvet saeclum in favilla

  Teste David cum Sibylla

  Inter monte duorum

  Qua respiciatam Andraste

  Uri vinciri verberari

  Ferroque necari

  ‘Poetry?’ Costas said. ‘Virgil? He wrote about the Sibyl, didn’t he?’

  ‘You wily old devil,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I think Claudius was keeping his word, but he was also playing a game, and I think the Sibyl was playing games with him too.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, the first verse is easy enough. It’s the first stanza of the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, the hymn that used to be central to the Roman Catholic requiem mass. It’s an incredible find, because the earliest version of these lines before this dates from the thirteenth century. Most people think it was a medieval creation, especially with those rhyming words which you never see in ancient Latin verse, in Virgil for example.’ Jack scribbled down an English text beside the Latin. ‘Here’s how it’s usually translated, keeping the metre and the rhyme:

  ‘ “Day of wrath and terror looming!

  Heaven and earth to ash consuming,

  David’s word and Sibyl’s truth foredooming!” ’

  Costas whistled. ‘Sounds like a premonition of the eruption of Vesuvius.’

  Jack nodded. ‘I think what we’ve got here is a Sibylline prophecy, given to Claudius at Cumae. She must have spoken these first lines to others, who remembered them, and preserved them secretly until they resurfaced in the medieval Catholic liturgy.’

  ‘Who’s David?’ Costas asked.

  ‘That’s the fascinating thing about discovering that this verse is so old, from the early Christian period. David in the Dies Irae is usually thought of as a reference to Jesus, who was believed to be a descendant of King David of the Jews. If that’s true, then this may confirm that the Sibyl knew of Jesus, that the association of the Sibyl with early Christianity is based on fact.’

  ‘And the second verse?’

  ‘That’s our clue. It has all the hallmarks of a Sibylline utterance, a riddle written on the leaves in front of the cave at Cumae. Here’s how I translate it:

  ‘ “Between two hills,

  Where Andraste lies,

  To be burned by fire, to be bound in chains,

  To be beaten, to die by the sword.” ’

  ‘Meaning?’ Costas said.

  ‘The second part’s easy. Extraordinary, but easy. It’s the sacramentum gladiatorum, the gladiators’ oath. Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari. I swear to be burned by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten, to die by the sword.’

  ‘Okay,’ Costas said quietly. ‘You can’t spring anything new on me. Gladiators. I’m cool with that. And the first part?’

  ‘Andraste was a British goddess, from before the Romans. We know about her from the Roman historian Dio Cassius, who says that Andraste was invoked by Boudica before a battle. You know about Boudica?’

  ‘Boudica? Sure. The redhead queen.’

  ‘She led the revolt against the Roman occupation in AD 60. The biggest bloodbath in British history.’ Jack looked at the word again, then suddenly had a moment of utter clarity, as if he were just waking up. ‘Of course,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘That’s what the Sibyl means.’ He quickly scanned the final lines again. ‘The gladiators’ oath. Ad gladium, by the sword. We’re being directed to a gladiators’ arena, an amphitheatre.’

  ‘The Colosseum? Here in Rome?’

  ‘There were many others.’ Jack looked at the verse again. A place built between two hills, a place where a British goddess lies. He suddenly peered at Costas, grinning broadly.

  ‘I know that look.’ Costas said.

  ‘And I know exactly where we’re going,’ Jack said triumphantly. ‘Come on. You might not want to hear this until we reach sunlight.’

  Costas narrowed his eyes and looked at him suspiciously. ‘Roger that.’ He heaved himself up, and they both cro
uched around and made their way down the steps to the cliff face, abseiling down one by one and kitting up again with their rebreathers at the bottom. They both kept an eye on the tunnel exit where their assailant had disappeared, but the flow of water had increased further and there was clearly no chance of a repeat entrance from that direction. They continued heavily down the remainder of the steps to the cavern floor and the water’s edge, where they checked their breathing equipment before closing down their helmets. Costas studiously avoided looking down the passageway to the macabre seated figure in the sacred cave, but Jack was transfixed by it for a moment, suddenly aware of the momentous discovery they had made. The pool of water leading back towards the Cloaca Maxima seemed less forbidding now, a way out of the underworld rather than a portal into the unknown. Costas put both hands up, ready to shut his visor, then peered at Jack. ‘We’re getting to know old Claudius pretty well now, aren’t we?’

  ‘He’s become a friend,’ Jack said. ‘We seem to be following his life’s works, his achievements. He seems to be standing over my shoulder. Back there I really felt he was with us, egging us on.’

  ‘So he didn’t trust Pliny after all.’

  ‘I think he trusted him as a friend, but he knew that curiosity might get the better of him. If Pliny had survived Vesuvius, I’ve little doubt he would have come back here one day and opened that container. So Claudius gave him a riddle. A Sibylline prophecy. What neither of them knew was that Vesuvius would cut the whole story short. That wax tablet’s been sitting there unread since the day Pliny deposited it almost two thousand years ago.’