The Last Gospel

12

T he manhole cover above Jack slid into place with a resounding clang, sealing him and Costas off from the rumble of traffic through Rome outside. They had given their final okay signal to Massimo and the two IMU crewmen moments before, and Jack felt reassured that the others would be above the manhole for the duration, awaiting their return. But now that they were entombed in the Cloaca Maxima he found himself weighing up the odds once more. There was no safety backup, no diver poised ready to assist in a rescue. It was another calculated risk, like their dive on St Paul’s shipwreck. But Jack knew from hard experience that safety backup was often more psychological than practical, that problems were most often solved on the spot or not at all, that his ability to pull off a dangerous dive often depended on himself and his buddy alone. And any more equipment and personnel would make their operation more visible, and take precious time they could ill afford. He peered at Costas squatting beside him, then angled his headlamp down the spiral staircase into the darkness. This was it. They were on their own again.

‘I’ll go first,’ Costas said over the intercom, peering at Jack through his helmet visor.

‘I thought this wasn’t exactly your cup of tea.’

‘Decision made. Always ready to try a new brew. You okay?’

‘Lead on.’

Costas heaved himself up and clunked down the stairs in front of Jack, the halogen beam from his headlamp wavering along the ancient masonry walls. They were wearing the same IMU e-suits they had used on the wreck, all-environment Kevlar-reinforced drysuits that had served them well from the Arctic to the Black Sea, with integrated buoyancy and air-conditioning systems. The yellow helmets with full face masks contained a call-up digital display showing life-support data, including the computerized gas mix fed from the compact closed-circuit rebreathers on their backs. Their only concession to the unusual circumstances were the climbers’ harnesses that Massimo had insisted they take along, fitted and tested before they had donned their rebreathers a few minutes before.

‘This reminds me of going into that sunken submarine in the Black Sea, hunting for Atlantis,’ Costas said as he stomped around the stairs. ‘I feel as if I could cut the air with a knife here too.’

Jack swallowed hard. Just before sealing his helmet he had caught a waft of fetid air from below, and he still had the cloying taste in his mouth. The last thing he needed now was to throw up inside his helmet. That was one human reality the IMU engineers had failed to consider. He swallowed again. ‘You know, you might want to get the design guys to fit these with a sick bag.’

‘I was just thinking the same thing.’

After about thirty steps, the spiral staircase ended at a small platform in front of an arched door, blackened and dripping with slime. Jack came up behind Costas and they both aimed their headlamps through. ‘There it is,’ Jack said, trying to sound cheery. ‘The Great Drain.’ Ahead of them a straight flight of steps led down into a wide tunnel, at least eight metres across and five metres high, built of stone and brick dripping with algae. Half filling the tunnel was a surging mass of dark liquid, rushing towards them from the darkness ahead and disappearing out of sight below. Jack turned up his external audio sensor, and his head was filled with the sound of the torrent, almost deafening. He turned it down again and pointed to the fluorescent orange line that began ahead of them where the stairs disappeared underwater. ‘That must be Massimo’s line,’ he said. ‘It’s pitoned in, and we can haul ourselves along it. There’s a ledge about a metre and a half below it that’s usually above water, but it looks as if we’ll be wading. The entrance to the Velabrum is only about twenty metres ahead of us.’

‘That’d be a hell of a waterpark ride if we fell in.’

‘It disgorges into the Tiber, but Massimo says there’s a big metal grid in the way. Might not be a happy ending.’

Costas walked gingerly on to the first step in the tunnel. Something large and dark scurried off at enormous speed along a narrow ridge in front of him. ‘Looks like Massimo left one of his friends down here,’ Costas said distastefully.

‘At least we shouldn’t be seeing any of those where we’re going,’ Jack said from behind. ‘According to Massimo, the conduit leading under the Palatine is pure, doesn’t have enough in it to sustain many higher life forms.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ Costas said. They carried on slowly down until they reached the fluorescent line. Costas played his headlamp over the rushing torrent just below them. ‘It looks like espresso,’ he murmured. ‘That foam on top.’

‘ Schiuma, you mean,’ Jack said. ‘That’s exactly what Massimo called it.’

Costas put a foot into the torrent, holding tight with both hands to the rope. His foot created a wide wake, with foam streaming off to either side. He lifted it out, and what seemed to have been brown foam but was actually a stringy mass came out with it. He thrust his foot back in, shaking it violently. ‘Jack, that was just about the worst thing that has ever happened to me,’ he said, panting. ‘Why this? We could be in the crystal-clear waters off Sicily. Lying by a pool, having a long-overdue holiday. But no, we go diving in a sewer.’

‘Fascinating.’ Jack was squatting on the step behind Costas, peering at a pile of washed-up debris just above the torrent. Costas twisted around, his foot still in the water. ‘Have you found it? Can we go now?’

Jack pushed aside some rodent bones, and held up a slimy chunk of pottery. ‘Roman amphora sherd. Dressel 2 to 4, unless I’m mistaken. The same type we found on the shipwreck, and in Herculaneum. The wine Claudius would have drunk. This stuff got everywhere.’ He put his other hand deep into the sludge, and grunted. ‘There’s more.’

‘Leave it, Jack.’

Jack paused, then pulled out his arm and stood up. ‘Okay. Just being an archaeologist.’

‘Save it for this secret chamber. If we ever get there.’ Costas took the coil of rope from his shoulder. He clipped one end to the piton holding the fluorescent line, and the other end to his harness. ‘I think we can sacrifice one rope here, for safety,’ he said. ‘I refuse to end my days in a torrent of shit. Clip on behind me.’ He turned back and stepped down until the liquid was nearly chest-high, flecking his visor with foam. ‘I’m on the ledge,’ he said. ‘Moving ahead now.’ Jack followed him, feeling the pressure of the water push hard against his legs and then his waist. They began to progress along, painfully slowly, a few inches at a time. The water felt heavy, cloying, and Jack could see iridescent streams of oily matter on the surface, then shifting blotches of brown and grey, a camouflage colour. He tried to focus on the walls, the ceiling, on stonework which had been built well before the Roman Empire, when the Velabrum was first covered over. He arched his head back, and realized the tunnel had taken a slight curve to the right. The steps they had come down from the spiral staircase were now out of view. He turned forward and slogged on, beginning to pant hard with the exertion. He looked down to check his carabiner on the line and then looked up. Costas had vanished. He blinked hard, and wiped his mask. He was still gone. For a horrified moment he thought Costas must have fallen in, and he braced himself for the whip of the rope as he was swept past. Then he saw a dull glow coming from the wall about five metres in front of him, and a yellow helmet appeared.

‘This is the side tunnel,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve clipped the other end of the rope to a piton inside.’ Jack heaved himself against the current for the final few steps, then Costas reached out and hauled him in. Both men sat for a moment slumped against the side of the tunnel, panting. Jack sucked at the hydrating energy drink stored inside his suit, sluicing it round his mouth to get rid of the unpleasant taste. He looked around. They were in a smaller tunnel, but it was still a good three metres high and three metres across, with an arched barrel-vaulted roof and a flat bottom, a channel filled with water flowing down the centre. The flow was exiting into the Cloaca Maxima, and the water was clear.

‘Time for a final reality check,’ Costas said, peering at his wrist gauge. ‘This must be it. The Velabrum. It’s orientated straight into the Palatine Hill, and I can see Massimo’s line running ahead along the right side as far as I can make out, to wherever they stopped.’

Jack put his hand on the side of the tunnel. ‘This is an impressive piece of engineering,’ he said. ‘The Cloaca Maxima has masonry and brickwork from lots of periods, from when it was first covered over in the sixth century BC. But this is different, a single-period construction. Regular, rectilinear blocks of stone at the entrance. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were walking into one of the great aqueduct channels made by the emperors.’

Costas looked at Jack through his visor. ‘About this Lupercale place, Jack. The cave of Romulus and Remus. I didn’t have a clue what you were on about.’

‘Sorry to spring that on you. Massimo and I did talk about it at that conference where we met him in London, shortly after the discovery of the cave under the House of Augustus was announced. I told him I’d love to come and take a look, to join his urban speleology group. When I realized yesterday we were coming to Rome, it was the perfect pretext. Once I guessed that Pliny must have hidden the scroll under the Palatine Shrine of Vesta, right next door to the House of Augustus, I also realized it was the site where the Lupercale was found. At the moment we just can’t risk bringing anyone else in on this quest. I hate keeping Massimo in the dark, but maybe he’ll forgive us once we tell him the role he played.’

Costas grunted, got up and started forward again, the rivulet of clear water from the darkness ahead rising over his ankles.

‘I hate to say this, Costas, but you’re trailing something.’ Costas turned round, stared, and made a strangulated noise. A mess of stringy brown tendrils extended back from his left foot towards the Cloaca, and caught in their midst was a writhing form with a long black tail. Costas shook his foot frantically, and the whole mass slithered off out of sight into the drain. ‘Never again, Jack,’ he muttered. ‘I swear to God, you’re never doing this to me again.’

‘I promise I’ll make it up to you. Next dive will be pure heaven.’

‘We’ve got to get out of this version of hell first.’ Costas resumed his slog up the tunnel, and Jack followed close behind. He still felt connected to the world outside, only a quick abseil along the rope back to the base of the spiral staircase, but with every step now the underworld seemed to be closing in on him, with darkness ahead and behind and only the immediate walls of the tunnel visible in their headlamps. He forced himself to concentrate, to push aside the claustrophobia, counting his steps, estimating how close they were getting to the foot of the Palatine Hill. After thirty paces he sensed that the angle had changed, that they were going down. The walls appeared buckled, fractured. The fluorescent line ended abruptly at a piton in front of a dark pool, and he could see where the ceiling sloped down into the water about five metres ahead.

‘This isn’t natural,’ Costas murmured. ‘I mean, the tunnel wasn’t designed this way. It looks like damage from seismic activity, like some of those fracture lines at Herculaneum.’

‘They get earthquakes here too,’ Jack said.

‘A pretty big one, but some years ago, centuries probably. And this might be a dead end for us, though there’s still plenty of flow getting through.’

‘Time for a swim,’ Jack said.

Costas sloshed into the pool, then disappeared in a mass of bubbles. Jack followed close behind, dropping to his knees and flopping forward, hearing the air in his suit expel as his computerized system automatically adjusted to neutral buoyancy. The water was extraordinarily clear, cleansing, like the underground cenote they had dived through in the Yucatan, and even here Jack felt the exhilaration he always felt as he went underwater, the excitement of the unknown. He reached back and slipped his fins down from where they had been tucked up behind his calves, and powered forward after Costas. His depth gauge showed three metres, then six. The earthquake had created a sump in the tunnel, and they were coming back up again. He saw in front of him that Costas had surfaced, and that the floor of the tunnel rose up to less than a metre depth. He swam up as far as he could, pulled his fins up again and rose out of the water beside Costas, who was staring ahead down the tunnel.

‘I’ve got that feeling again,’ Costas said.

‘What feeling?’

‘That feeling of walking into the past. I had it at Herculaneum, even had it diving down on to the shipwreck of St Paul. It’s weird, like deja vu.’

‘So you get it, too,’ Jack murmured.

‘Maybe it’s the force.’

‘I had it explained to me once,’ Jack said. ‘It’s that you’ve had exactly the identical emotional response before, in very similar circumstances. Your brain’s playing tricks on you. It’s a short circuit.’

‘No, Jack. I’ve seen it in you. It’s the force.’

‘Okay. It’s the force. You’re right. Maybe you can use some of it to get us through the next sump.’ Jack pointed ahead to another dip in the tunnel, to more cracked and fragmented masonry, another pool. He knew they must now be on the very edge of the Palatine Hill, under at least eighty metres of fractured tufa. Costas splashed in again and Jack followed him. This time the tunnel regained its former shape and continued underwater, but about ten metres ahead it constricted. As Jack swam closer he realized that the point of constriction was two ancient columns on either side. Beyond them the tunnel narrowed into a culvert like an aqueduct channel, taller than it was wide, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The dimensions would have allowed them to stand upright and walk through it, single file, were it not for the water. He reached out and touched the right-hand column. It was grey granite, with white and black flecks, a stone seen all over the ruins of Rome, in the columns of the Pantheon, in Trajan’s basilica next to the old forum. Jack had been with Hiebermeyer to the source, Mons Claudianus in Egypt, the great quarry first opened under the emperor Claudius, another of his distinctive stamps on the architecture of the city.

‘Maurice would love this,’ he murmured. ‘His doctoral project was Claudius’ quarries in Egypt, and that’s where this stone came from.’

‘Jack, take a look at this.’

Jack rolled over and looked up, and realized that Costas had broken surface about three metres above him, bobbing in a wavering sheen of water that reflected his headlamp in shifting patterns of white. Jack rose up slowly, pressing his buoyancy control to inject air, remembering to exhale as the ambient pressure decreased. His head emerged out of the water, and he gasped in astonishment. Costas’ beam was shining at a rock face that rose directly above the columns and the conduit entrance. It extended high above them, at least four metres high and five wide, carved out of the living rock. Above them Jack could see the triangular gable of a pediment, projecting half a metre out of the rock. He looked down into the water again, saw the columns. He realized that the entire structure was a monumental entranceway, carved and decorated as a work of art in its own right. He gazed at it, awestruck. It was like the great rock-cut facades at Petra in Jordan, yet deep under the Palatine, a curious mixture of ostentation and secrecy, the creation of someone who cared about his own achievements but not what other people thought of them.

‘Check this out,’ Costas said. ‘Take a look at the stone face under that gable.’

Jack raised his head again above the surface. An eddy effect from the current below had pushed them closer to the rock face, and he was now within touching distance. He reached out and put his hand on it. What looked like mould and slime was rock-hard, and he realized it was calcite accretion, the seepage from groundwater that Massimo had talked about. He saw tiny rivulets of wet running down the rock, evidently from rainwater far above. Then he saw the regular incisions in the rock. He pushed off, and aimed his headlamp up. Of course. It was an imperial monument, and there had to be a monumental inscription. The calcite lay over the inscription like icing, but instead of smudging it seemed to clarify it, crystallize it. There were four registers, the letters only about three inches high, scarcely big enough to be seen from the floor of the chamber. Whoever had made this dedication did it for propriety, for his own private satisfaction and to sanctify the place, not to impress the masses. TI.