The Last Gospel (25 page)

‘We’re still at about six metres water depth,’ Costas said. ‘By my reckoning, we’re only about thirty metres from the point directly below the House of Augustus and that temple, where we were sitting on top of the Palatine.’

‘Okay. Here goes,’ Jack muttered. He angled down and pulled himself through the crack. He finned hard, but got nowhere. He was beginning to hyperventilate. He closed his eyes, then felt a jostle from behind. ‘Your coil of rope caught on a rock,’ Costas said. Jack felt a hard push, and then was floating free inside the fissure, which had quickly widened to about two metres. He realized that he was dropping, and dropping fast. He looked at his gauge. Fifteen metres depth already. He must have deactivated the automated buoyancy control as he squeezed into the fissure, and he fumbled with the controls on the side of his helmet. There was a hiss of gas into the suit and he slowed down, reaching neutral buoyancy at eighteen metres. For the first time he looked along the length of the fissure ahead of him. The water was still crystal clear, and he could see horizontally at least thirty metres, to a point where the rough volcanic tufa walls on either side seemed to join together again. He looked down. There was nothing, a yawning blackness, an abyss like he had never seen before, deep below the heart of one of the world’s most ancient cities.

He heard grunting and cursing through his intercom, and looked up to see Costas part-way into the fissure. He began to swim back up to help him, and then Costas was through, dropping down until they both came level at twelve metres depth. ‘This place is phenomenal.’ Costas was still panting from his exertion, but was peering down. ‘The crack of doom.’

‘I can’t see the bottom,’ Jack said. ‘It must be at least fifty metres below us, maybe more.’

‘I didn’t wager for a decompression dive under Rome,’ Costas said. ‘We haven’t got the gas for that.’ They both checked the readout inside their helmets, which showed the gas mixture from their rebreathers adjusting for depth. ‘I’d say half an hour, no more, with a twenty-five-metre maximum. Any deeper than that and it’s a bounce dive, then we’re out of here.’

‘We may be lucky,’ Jack said. ‘Look along the top of the fissure.’ He panned his headlamp beam along, and Costas followed it. They could see the glistening reflection of the water surface at their entry point, then nothing but rock for about ten metres, then another wavering patch of white, this one at least three metres long. ‘Looks like it breaks surface again,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s go up.’

They began to swim in the direction of Jack’s beam. Costas rolled on his back, peering up and down the fissure, then looking hard at the rock directly above them. ‘This fissure’s clearly a seismic cleft, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years old. It looks as if it’s always been filled with water, spring-fed. Then right above it there’s that tunnel built by Claudius, buckled by a more recent earthquake. You can see sections of the Roman rock-cut ceiling from the tunnel above us. My guess is, the tunnel was never intended to break into the fissure, but extended above it to that pool we’re heading towards. The tunnel must be a kind of outlet, an overflow conduit for when the water here got too high.’

‘Look at that,’ Jack exclaimed, pointing to the side of the fissure. ‘There’s a flight of four, five rock-cut steps, leading up to the pool.’

‘It looks like a wellhead,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe this was where they accessed the spring. We’re coming up almost directly under the place where those prehistoric huts were found, the House of Romulus on top of the Palatine, about sixty metres above us.’

Jack broke surface first, then cautiously walked up the steps, craning his neck round to ensure there was ample headspace. He looked back to check that Costas was behind him, then reached down and pulled his fins up behind his calves before walking up out of the water on to a flat rock surface. He was inside another tunnel, but it was spectacularly different from the one they had come through. Jack turned around, looking. To the north, about ten metres from him, the tunnel came to an end at what looked like a small chamber, slightly larger than the dimensions of the tunnel. At the other end, about the same distance away, it opened into a rocky cavern, obscured in shadows. The tunnel itself was hewn out of the living rock, about three metres wide and five metres high, with a trapezoidal cross-section like a truncated pyramid. Jack swivelled around and scanned the whole length again, then looked closely at one wall, inspecting the ancient pick-marks. This was old, far older than anything else they had seen. He looked again. It suddenly clicked. ‘My God,’ he whispered.

‘Another tunnel,’ Costas said, his dripping form appearing beside Jack.

‘Not just another tunnel,’ Jack murmured. ‘
A dromos
.’

‘A what?’

‘Where have you seen this shape before?’

Costas gazed along the tunnel, the rectilinear profile of the walls framed by his beam. ‘Bronze Age,’ he suddenly said, sounding triumphant. ‘The Greek Bronze Age. Those tombs you showed me at Mycenae, in Greece. A
dromos
was a sacred corridor. The time of the Trojan Wars, Aeneas, all that.’

‘And this may finally pin down the origin of Rome, once and for all,’ Jack said, his voice hushed. ‘We’re on the edge of the age of myth again, Costas, just like Atlantis, myth made real. But I’m thinking of somewhere closer to home. This is almost identical to the
dromos
in the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae.’

‘The Sibyl,’ Costas murmured. ‘So she had an apartment in Rome, too.’

‘This is all beginning to make sense,’ Jack said. ‘The Lupercale, the sacred cave of Rome’s origin. I’ll bet that’s what lies ahead of us, that cavern. And we’ve just emerged from the spring, vital for the survival of Rome. A sacred place, sanctified and protected. We know the ritual at Cumae involved lustral waters, rites of purification. The Vestals probably did that too. And then there’s the dark side.’

‘The crack of doom,’ Costas said.

‘The entrance to the underworld.’

‘Just like Cumae, the Phlegraean Fields,’ Costas said.

‘And on top of it all sits a Sibyl.’

‘I wonder if she was here when they arrived, the first Romans, or whether they brought her with them?’ Costas mused. ‘And I wonder how the Vestal Virgins figure in all this?’

‘Maybe there are answers here. We need to get to that cave. Come on.’

‘Before you do that, Jack, you might want to take a look at the other end of this tunnel. There’s something in the middle of that chamber.’

Jack swivelled round to follow Costas’ gaze. With their two beams concentrated together the chamber was more clearly illuminated. They walked along the passageway towards it. The ancient walls were streaked with accretion, calcite deposits that covered the tufa like dirty whitewash. They reached the edge of the chamber. It was a perfect dome, about eight metres in circumference, with small rectangular openings in the ceiling that might once have been air vents, evidently clogged up. On the far side was what looked like the decayed remains of a statue, on a plinth. In front of it was a circular depression in the floor about three metres wide, surrounded by a rock-cut rim and filled with a dark mass, what looked like a black resinous material sealed under calcite accretion. Jack stared at it, and then at the decayed figure behind it. ‘Of course,’ he whispered.

‘What is it?’

‘That statue, it looks as if it might once have been female,’ he said. ‘A seated woman. A cult statue. And this is a hearth, a sacred hearth.’ He was suddenly elated. ‘That’s why the shrines of Vesta in the forum and on the Palatine were never inaugurated, never made into temples. It’s because they were outliers, just the public face of the cult. This chamber was the real Temple of Vesta.’

‘Jack, the statue. It’s got an inscription.’

Jack stepped around the hearth and followed Costas’ beam. At the base of the statue was a thin slab of marble veneer, about thirty centimetres across. Jack squatted down and peered at it. ‘Odd,’ he said. ‘It’s not a dedicatory inscription, not part of the plinth. It’s propped up here loose, or at least was until the calcite glued it in place.’ He bent down as far as he could, then got down on the floor. The Latin was clear in his beam, and he read it out:

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Coelia Concordia, Chief Vestal, AD 394. She was the last one, and that was the year the cult was abandoned. Odd that they used Anno Domini, though. Year of Our Lord. The Empire had been Christian for almost a century by that date, but you’d have thought the Vestals would have resisted Christianity to the end. It’s what sidelined them, along with the other pagan cults of Rome.’

Costas was silent, and Jack peered at him. ‘You still with me?’

‘Jack, this is no statue.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jack struggled to his feet, then slipped on the floor and fell into the statue, holding it close. He winced, and drew back, leaning for a moment while he flexed the knee that had hit the floor, staring at the decayed shape inches from his face. He suddenly froze. It was not limestone at all. It was calcite accretion, a weird, shapeless stalagmite that rose more than a metre from the floor, encasing a stone seat. He looked again at what had startled him. It was a sculpted stone serpent, green, writhing up the back of the chair, staring out at him through a diaphanous mask of accretion.

‘Not that, Jack. Over here. Inside.’

Jack moved a step to the left and followed Costas’ beam. Then he saw it, trapped inside the calcium, lolling off to one side.

He gasped, stepped back, then stared again. There was more. A sternum, ribs, shoulder blades. Costas was right. The statue was no statue at all. It was a skeleton, a human skeleton. Small, almost childlike, but with the jaw of someone old, very old, the teeth all missing. Then Jack saw something else. She wore a necklace, a neck torque, solid gold, an extraordinary sight in the heart of Rome, some ancient booty perhaps from the Celtic world. And above the skull encased in the accretion were sparkling fragments of gold leaf and jewels from an elaborate hairdo, the coiffure of a wealthy Roman woman, a matron.

Then Jack realized.
She had come here to die
. Coelia Concordia, the last of the Vestals. But a Vestal wreathed in serpents. Not just a Vestal.
A Sibyl
.

Jack’s mind was in a tumult. So the cult of the Sibyl had not come to an end with the eruption of Vesuvius after all. She had come back here, back to her cave under Rome, to another entrance to Hades. And the oracle had survived, lived on for more than three centuries after Claudius met his end, after the old world of the Cumaean Sibyl had been consumed by fire. This Sibyl had seen out Rome, seen Rome rise and fall to the end, seen out the pagan world and ushered in a new order, one whose beginnings she had watched all those years before, among the outcasts near her cave beside the Fields of Fire.

‘Jack, take a look at her hand.’

Jack peered down, barely able to breathe. He looked again. So that was what had happened to the Sibyls. They had become what they had foreseen. They had fulfilled their own prophecy. She was holding a crude metal forging, two iron spikes joined at right angles.
A cross of nails
.

Suddenly there was a flash of light, a momentary surge. For a second Jack thought he might be hallucinating. Then he was dragged violently sideways, to the edge of the chamber, down to the floor. A hand slammed the side of his helmet and his light went off. He was in total darkness. The hold relaxed, and Costas came over the intercom, his voice tense. ‘Sorry about that, Jack. But there’s someone else down here.’

F
or a few moments they remained on the floor of the chamber, in utter darkness. Their intercom was virtually inaudible with the external speaker deactivated, though they instinctively talked in low voices. ‘Jack, I thought you said nothing else would be living in here.’ Costas moved to the edge of the chamber, and peered along the line of the
dromos
tunnel towards the cave at the other end. Jack crawled up behind him. Their headlamps were still switched off, but they had activated the night-vision goggles inside their e-suit helmets. There was just enough natural light for the sensors to work, not enough to be discernible to the naked eye but enough for Jack to make out Costas’ form in front of him, speckly and green, an eerie apparition that seemed to be constantly forming and re-forming with every movement. It made sense that there would be light coming from cracks and fissures leading outside, where the archeologists’ probe had reached into the cave somewhere ahead of them.

‘You’re sure it was a torch?’

‘Positive. I was looking in the opposite direction, while you were communing with our dead lady. One look at that thing was enough for me. Then I saw the beam. It flashed out from somewhere on the left side of the cave.’

‘That’s where the other tunnel, the one from the House of the Vestals, should enter,’ Jack whispered. ‘But God knows how they got in.’