The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  He shut his eyes, then opened them again. He pressed the digital readout display inside his visor, scanning the figures that showed the remaining oxygen in his rebreather, the carbon dioxide toxicity levels. It was a reality check, and it never failed him. He heaved himself up, and realized he had nearly become stuck fast in more than a metre of mud at the bottom of the pool. After extracting himself he floated face down on the surface with his visor underwater, staring into swirling darkness with the dim patch of light from Costas’ headlamp directly below him. Jack arched down, bleeding air from his buoyancy compensator, and sank into blackness. About two metres down he could sense the flow of the underground stream, and he saw a tumult of clearer water where the silt was being swept away. The visibility was still only a matter of inches, but it was better than the black soup at the surface of the pit.

  ‘There’s an obstruction.’ Costas’ voice came over the intercom. ‘I’m nearly around it.’

  Jack could sense Costas’ feet directly in front of him, churning the water as he heaved himself round a bend in the tunnel. Jack stayed back to avoid being kicked, and then as the turbulence subsided he let himself slowly fall forward, his hands splayed out to feel for any obstacle. After about two metres he felt something smooth, metallic, and then his shoulders came to rest on Costas’ legs. He felt a wriggling, then no movement at all, then a dull metallic thumping, then everything was still except the sound of their breathing.

  ‘It’s a Series 17 fuse. Good.’

  ‘What is?’ Jack exclaimed. ‘What’s good?’

  ‘This is.’ There was a clanging noise, then a curse.

  ‘What? I can’t see anything.’

  ‘This bomb.’

  Jack’s heart sank. ‘What bomb?’

  ‘German SC250, general-purpose bomb. Carried by the Stuka, Junkers 88, Heinkel 111. They dropped thousands of them over here during the Blitz. Should be pretty routine.’

  ‘What do you mean, routine?

  ‘I mean, they weren’t delayed-action fuses, so they’re pretty routine.’

  Jack had another sinking feeling. He thought of the tremor again, the vibration of the train. Suddenly this place seemed less solid, less stable, ready for history to have another go. ‘Don’t tell me what you’re about to do.’

  ‘Its okay, I’ve done it already. Done as much as I can.’ Costas’ legs shifted forward, and Jack dropped another metre in the water. ‘The forward fuse pocket was right in front of my nose, and I happened to have just the right socket in my e-suit equipment pouch. The after-pocket’s the problem. I can feel it, but it’s all rusted over. It’s not my style, but we might just have to leave it.’

  ‘Yes, we might,’ Jack said quietly. ‘How dangerous is it?’

  ‘The usual fill for an SC250 bomb was only 280 pounds of Amatol and TNT, sixty-forty mix.’

  ‘Only?’ Jack said incredulously.

  ‘Well, enough for us to be toast, of course, but the financial hub of the world would probably remain intact.’

  ‘I think there’s probably been enough human sacrifice at this spot,’ Jack said. ‘How stable is it?’

  ‘The problem’s that corroded rear pocket fuse,’ Costas murmured. ‘It’s been happily dormant for almost seventy years, but with our arrival, who knows.’

  ‘You mean after you tampered with it, who knows.’ The silt had settled slightly, and Jack could see the bomb casing about three inches from his face. It was corroded, deeply pitted, with no visible markings, and looked about as menacing as Jack could imagine. He was making the usual mental calculations, and this time the odds were not looking good. He sensed Costas shift forward and upward, beyond the bomb. ‘I think it might be time to leave now.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘What do you mean, no? This thing’s still live. We need to get out.’

  ‘No. I don’t mean that. I mean this, in front of me.’ Costas was almost whimpering. ‘It’s another nightmare. It’s just getting worse.’

  ‘Okay. I’m coming.’ Jack eased himself deeper, with the corroded bomb casing just in front of his face, until he saw where it curved down to the nose cone and suspension lug. He turned over on his back and put his hand on the lug to keep his body from jolting against the casing, which seemed to be suspended perilously in mid-water. He slowly pulled himself up until he felt the casing between his legs, and then below his e-suit boots. At the point where he imagined the base plate and tail fins should be, he suddenly broke surface, his face inches from a slimy mud wall. He had been fine in the silt, underwater, with his face pressed close to the bomb casing, but now he suddenly felt unnerved, as if those extra few inches of visibility were just enough to give him a sense of how confined the space was. He knew he had to fight hard now, concentrate entirely on what they were doing. He rolled over slowly, careful not to budge the bomb casing, until he was beside Costas and facing in the same direction. He could feel the compacted gravel of the ancient stream bed below his feet, showing they had come under the archaeological layers. He angled his headlamp upwards, and gasped with astonishment. They were inside some kind of structure, a chamber, with unworked tree trunks lining the roof about two metres above them. He saw massive beams of blackened oak, with bracing timbers around the walls. He looked down, following Costas’ gaze.

  Then he saw it.

  He could hardly breathe. He shut his eyes, forced himself to inhale hard, and looked again.

  It was a skull, a human skull, blackened with age, lying face up with the jaw still in position, slightly ajar. He could see the vertebrae of the neck, the shoulder blades, all cushioned in a red fibrous material. He looked again. The fibrous material seemed to be coming out of the skull. Then he realized what it was. Human hair. Red hair.

  He panned his beam down again, to something he had seen lying on the neck bones. He put his hands on a wet timber beside the water’s edge, tested it, and heaved himself up slightly. He was only inches away now, and gasped in disbelief. It was gold, lustrous, a solid gold neck ring. Just like one they had seen on another body, deep under Rome. A torque. Then Jack realized. This was no medieval crypt burial.

  ‘Looks like we might have found our goddess,’ Costas whispered.

  ‘Andraste,’ Jack said, scarcely believing what he was saying.

  ‘Not exactly immortal,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘Everything looks right,’ Jack said. ‘That neck torque is Celtic, the amphoras at the entrance are the right date. Some kind of high priestess, buried about the time of the Boudican revolt.’

  ‘Maybe the revolt signalled the end of the old order,’ Costas murmured. ‘The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Like the eruption of Vesuvius, the disappearance of the Sibyls.’

  Jack looked at the skull again. He leaned over, and peered more closely, right over the empty eye sockets. The black accretion covering the skull was not black at all. It was blue, dark blue. He gasped as he realized. ‘Isatis tintoria,’ he murmured. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Woad. Blue woad. She was painted with blue woad. Must have looked terrifying in life.’

  ‘Couldn’t be worse than in death,’ Costas croaked.

  Jack stared again. It was something Costas had said. The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Had they found something people had been seeking for hundreds of years, in the heart of the City of London, in a tiny wedge of undisturbed ground in one of the most dug-up, excavated and bombed-out places in the world? He turned to Costas, who seemed numb, rooted to the spot, splayed out on the edge of the pool of sludgy water, staring through his visor at the skull.

  ‘Another Agamemnon moment?’ Jack said.

  ‘That thing’s no ghost. It’s real,’ Costas whispered. ‘After the body liqueur and everything. I’ll never sleep again.’

  ‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Remember we’ve got a rusty bomb on slow broil for company.’ He crawled over the soggy timber clear of the hole, and Costas heaved himsel
f out. They both slowly stood up, dripping profusely, with their helmets and breathing gear still on, mud slicked over their e-suits like brown paint. Jack flicked his headlamp to wide beam, and took out a halogen torch. They stared in awe at the scene revealed in front of them.

  It was a breathtaking sight. Jack instantly saw images that were familiar to him, artefact types, the layout of the grave goods, but nothing this intact had ever been found in Britain before. It looked like one of the tombs he had visited of ancient Scythian nobility on the Russian steppes, girt in massive timbers and miraculously preserved in the permafrost, yet this was the heart of London. Somehow the waterlogged atmosphere and the thick clay that surrounded the tomb had kept the timbers from rotting and the tomb from imploding.

  And it had not just preserved the skeleton. Jack could see that the red-haired woman had been laid on a bier, a square wooden platform about three metres across, a metre or so short of the edges of the chamber. There were strange shapes, curved shapes, on either side of the skeleton. Jack drew his breath in as he realized what they were. ‘It’s a chariot burial,’ he exclaimed. ‘Those are the two wheels, tilted up towards the body. You can see the spokes on each wheel, the iron rim and the hubcaps.’

  ‘Take a look at this.’ Costas was peering closely at the base of the bier, at the legs of the skeleton, and then between the wheels. ‘There are cut marks on the bones, slash marks, a couple of healed fractures. Looks like she’s been through the wars. This was some lady. And she’s lying in some kind of canoe, a wooden dugout.’

  Jack shifted over, slipping on the mud. ‘Fantastic,’ he exclaimed, as he came alongside. ‘There are boat burials from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, Viking ship burials, but I’ve never seen one like this from the late Iron Age.’

  ‘Maybe this was what they used to get her to this place on her final journey, to her sanctuary up the river. To the heart of darkness.’

  Jack stood up as far as he could, and stared for the first time properly at the torso of the skeleton. It was one of the most incredible things he had ever seen, like a computer-generated image of a perfect Iron Age burial. He edged up the side of the bier, then slipped and fell heavily on one knee beside the chariot wheel.

  ‘Watch out,’ Costas exclaimed from behind. ‘The hub of the wheel’s got a metal spike sticking out of it.’

  Jack looked at the corroded iron protrusion that had just missed skewering him, and felt his chest tighten as he realized how close he had been. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked again. It was a vicious spike, one of three that stuck out from the hub about half a metre, twisted like aircraft propeller blades. This was no ordinary chariot. Jack heaved himself up and moved alongside Costas, who had gone round him and was crouching over the torso of the skeleton. ‘I think this lady was preparing to do battle with the gods, in the afterlife,’ Costas murmured. ‘And I think she was going to win.’ They stared in awe at the accoutrements laid over the skeleton. There were leaf-shaped iron spear-points, their shafts snapped where the spears had been broken over the grave. Strewn everywhere were numerous pine cones, charred where they had been burned for incense. Parallel to the body on the left side, from the neck to the hip, was a great iron sword, unsheathed, with a decorated bronze scabbard lying alongside. The incised pattern on the scabbard matched the shape of the inlaid wire decoration on the bronze handle of the sword, gold lines that swirled up towards a great green jewel embedded in the pommel. On the other side of the skeleton was a wooden staff, like a wizard’s wand. But the most extraordinary treasure was lying across the torso of the skeleton, covering the ribcage and pelvis. It was a great bronze shield, in a figure-of-eight shape, its central boss surrounded by swirling curvilinear forms in enamel and raised repousée decoration.

  ‘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.’