Crusader Gold
Page 36
“Sorry. I know you need your beauty sleep. But it’s almost time.”
Costas grunted again, then raised himself painfully on one elbow and rubbed his hand across his stubble. “I don’t think beauty’s an option.” He heaved himself upright, then took off the sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Jack peered with concern at his friend. “You look wasted. You need to take some time off. You’ve been working flat out since we returned from the Yucatan last month.”
“You should stop buying me toys.”
“What I bought you,” Jack gently admonished him, “was an agreement from the Board of Directors for an increase in engineering personnel. Hire some more staff. Delegate.”
“You should talk,” Costas grumbled. “Name me one archaeological project run by IMU over the last decade where you haven’t jumped onboard.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Costas stretched, and gave a tired grin. “Okay, a week by my uncle’s pool in Greece wouldn’t go amiss. Anyway, was I dreaming? You mentioned an incredible find?”
“Buried in a gully directly beneath us now, where Ben and Andy should have anchored the shot-line. The remains of an ancient wooden crate, filled with sealed tin boxes. Inside the boxes we found more than a hundred small wooden phials, filled with unguents and powders including cinnamon, cumin and vanilla.
That was amazing enough, but then we found a large slab of dark resinous material, about two kilogrammes in weight. At first we thought it was ship’s stores, spare resin for waterproofing timbers. But the lab analysis came up with an astonishing result.”
“Go on.”
“What the ancients called lacrymae papaveris, tears of the poppy, papaver somniferum. The sticky milky stuff that comes from the calyx of the black poppy.
What we call opium.”
“No kidding.”
“Pliny the Elder writes about it, in his Natural History.”
“The guy who died in the eruption of Vesuvius?”
“Right. When Pliny wasn’t writing he was in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum, the big naval base on the Bay of Naples. He knew all about the products of the east from his sailors, and from Egyptian and Syrian merchants who put in there. They knew the best opium came from the distant land of Bactria, high in the mountains beyond the eastern fringe of the empire, beyond Persia. That’s present-day Afghanistan.”
“You’re kidding me.” Costas was fully alert now, and looked incredulous. “Opium.
From Afghanistan. Did I hear you right? We’re talking the first century A.D. here, not the twenty-first century, right?”
“You’ve got it.”
“An ancient drug runner?”
Jack laughed. “Opium wasn’t illegal back then. Some ancient authorities condemned it for making users go blind, but they hadn’t refined it into heroin yet. It was probably mixed with alcohol to make a drink, similar to laudanum, the fashion drug of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seed was also pounded into tablets. Pliny tells us it could induce sleep, cure headaches, so they knew all about the painkilling properties of morphine. It was also used for euthanasia. Pliny gives us what may be the first-ever account of a deliberate Class A drug overdose: a guy called Publius Licinius Caecina who was unbearably ill and died of opium poisoning.”
“So what you found was a medicine chest,” Costas said.
“That’s what we thought at the time. But a really odd find in the chest was a small bronze statue of Apollo. When you find medical equipment it’s more commonly with a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. A few years later I visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, on the edge of the active volcanic zone a few miles north of Misenum, within sight of Vesuvius. Apollo was the god of oracles. Sulphur and herbs were used to ward off evil spirits and maybe opium was added to it. I began to wonder whether all those mystical rites were chemically assisted.”
“It could have been smoked,” Costas murmured. “Burned like incense. The fumes would have been quicker than a draught.”
“People went to those places seeking cures,” Jack said. “All we hear about is the message of the oracle, obscure verses written on leaves or issued as prophetic pronouncements, all sound and fury and signifying God knows what. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe some people really did find a cure of sorts, a palliative.”
“And a highly addictive one. It would have kept the Sibyl in business. Cash offerings from grateful clients would have kept the supply rolling.”
“So I began to think our little ship wasn’t carrying an apothecary or doctor, but a middleman traveling with his precious supply of opium for one of the oracles in Italy, maybe even procured for the Sibyl at Cumae herself.”
“A Roman drug dealer.” Costas rubbed his stubble. “The godfather of all godfathers. The Naples mafia would love it.”
“Maybe teach them a little respect for archaeology,” Jack said.
“The opium. Procured from where?”
“That’s what worried me.” Jack rolled out a laminated small-scale Admiralty chart of the Mediterranean over the equipment on the floor of the boat, pinning its corners under loose diving weights. He jabbed his finger at the center of the chart. “Here we are. The island of Sicily. Bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the apex of ancient trade. Right?”
“Go on.”
“Our little Roman merchantman, wrecked against this cliff with its cargo of north African olive oil and fishsauce. It does the trip to Rome three, maybe four times a year, during the summer sailing season. Up and down, up and down. Almost always within sight of land, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, Italy.”
“Not a long-distance sailor.”
“Right.” Jack stabbed his finger at the far corner of the chart. “And here’s Egypt, the port of Alexandria. Fifteen hundred miles away across open sea. Everything points to the drug chest coming from there. The wood’s Egyptian acacia. Some of the phials had Coptic letters on them. And the opium was almost certainly shipped to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea ports of Egypt, a trade in exotic eastern spices and drugs that reached its height in the first century A.D.”
“The time of St. Paul,” Costas murmured. “Why we’re here.”
“Right.” Jack traced his finger along the coastline of north Africa, between Egypt and Tunisia. “Now it’s possible, just possible, that the opium chest reached Carthage or another Africa port direct from Egypt, and then was shipped out on our little merchantman.”
Costas shook his head. “I remember my Mediterranean Pilot from my stint in the navy. Prevailing onshore winds. That desert coastline has always been a deathtrap for sailors, avoided at all costs.”
“Precisely. The ships leaving Alexandria for Rome were generally large-grain carriers, and sailed north to Turkey or Crete and then west across the Ionian Sea to Sicily and the Strait of Messina. The most likely scenario for a cargo from Alexandria being wrecked at this spot where we are now would be one of these ships, blown southwest from the Ionian Sea towards eastern Sicily.”
Costas looked perplexed, then suddenly his eyes lit up. “I’ve got you! We’re looking at two overlapping shipwrecks!”
“It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve dived on ship’s graveyards with dozens of wrecks jumbled together, smashed against the same reef or headland. And once that idea clicked, I began to see other clues. Take a look at this.” Jack reached down into a crate beside him and picked up a heavy item swaddled in a towel.
He handed it across to Costas, who sat up on the pontoon and took the item into his lap, then began carefully lifting the folds of toweling away. ‘Let me guess.’
He stopped and gave Jack a hopeful look. ‘A golden disk covered with ancient symbols, leading us to another fabulous lost ancient city?”
Jack grinned. “Not quite, but just as precious in its own way.”
Costas raised the last fold and held the object up. It was about ten inches high, shaped like a truncated cone, and weighed heavily in his hands. The surface was mottled white
with patches of dull metallic sheen, and at the top was a short extension with a hole through it like a retaining loop. He eyed Jack. “A sounding lead?”
“You’ve got it. Check out the base.”
Costas carefully held the lead upside down. In the base was a depression about an inch deep, as if the lead had been partly hollowed out like a bell, and below that was a further depression in a distinctive shape. Costas raised his eyes again at Jack. “A cross?”
“Don’t get too excited. That was filled with pitch or resin, and was used to pick up a sample of seabed sediment. If you were heading for a big river estuary, the first appearance of sand would act as a navigational aid.”
“This came from the wreck below us?”
Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. “My first ever discovery of real significance from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.”
“And now?”
“Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow seabed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.”
“You mean like the Nile.”
Jack nodded enthusiastically. “I have no doubt about it. What we’re looking at here is the equipment of a large Alexandrian grain ship, not a humble amphora carrier.” He carefully placed the lead back in the crate, then pulled out an old black-bound book from a plastic bag. “Now listen to this.” He opened the book to a marked page, scanned up and down for a moment and then began to read.
“But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven to and fro in the sea of Adria, about midnight the sailors surmised that they were drawing near to some country; and they sounded, and found twenty fathoms; and after a little space, they sounded again, and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing lest haply we should be cast ashore on rocky ground, they let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for the day.”
Costas whistled. “The Gospels!”
“The Acts of St. Paul, chapter 27, to be precise.” Jack’s eyes were ablaze now.
“And it gets even better.”
ALSO BY DAVID GIBBINS
Atlantis
AND COMING SOON
The Last Gospel
CRUSADER GOLD
A Bantam Book / October 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2007 by David Gibbins
Map by TK
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33719-5
www.bantamdell.com
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 22