The Last Gospel

Prologue

T he old man limped to the brink of the chasm, the firm grasp of his freedman all that prevented him from pitching forward. Tonight was a full moon, a red moon, and the swirl of vapours that filled the crater seemed to glow, as if the fires of Vulcan were burning through the thin cusp of ground that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. The old man peered over the edge, felt the warm blast on his face and tasted the tang of sulphur on his lips. Always he was tempted, but always he held back. He remembered the words of Virgil, the poet whose tomb they had passed on the way to this place. Facilis descensus Averno. It is easy to descend to the underworld. Not so easy to get out again.

He turned away, and drew his hood up to conceal his face. Behind them he glimpsed the dark cone of Vesuvius over the bay, the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii glimmering like sentinels on either side. The great bulk of Vesuvius was reassuring on nights like these, when the earth shuddered and the reek of sulphur was almost overwhelming, when the ground was littered with the bodies of birds which had flown too close to the fumes. And always there were the harbingers of doom, madmen and charlatans who lurked in the shadows ready to prey on the gullible, on those who came to this lookout to gape and gawk, but who never went further. One was here now, a wild-haired Greek who leapt up from an altar beside them, hands cupped forward in supplication, flailing and foaming, babbling about a great plague, that Rome would burn, that the sky would rain blood, that the land below Vesuvius would be consumed by the fires within. The freedman pushed the beggar roughly aside, and the old man muttered in annoyance. This was not a place where anyone needed a soothsayer to interpret the will of the gods.

Moments later they slipped through a fissure in the rock known only to the crippled and the damned, where the old man had first been brought as a boy more than eighty years before. He still remembered his terror, standing here weeping and trembling, his head jerking uncontrollably with the palsy. There was to be no cure, but those who took him in gave him solace, gave him the strength to defy others who wanted him never to be seen in Rome again. Even now he had not shaken off the fear, and he whispered his own name, steeling himself. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus. Remember who you are. Remember why you are here.

Slowly they descended, the old man dragging his bad leg behind him, his hands leaning heavily on his freedman in front. On most nights the heavens were visible through the rent at the top of the fissure, but tonight the rock-cut steps were wreathed in a swirl of vapour that seemed to suck them down. Dark corners were lit by burning torches, and in other places orange light flickered through from outside. They reached a ledge above the floor of the crater, and the old man strained to see what he could not make out from above. Swirling gases seemed to float on a layer of emptiness over the rocky floor, an invisible poison that extinguished flames and suffocated all who fell into it. Somewhere beyond lay the entrance to Hades itself, a burning gash that split the rock, surrounded by the charred skeletons of those who had left their bodies behind on the way to Elysium. For a second he saw slits of red like glowing eyes in the rock, and then he watched a molten mass seep out and solidify, leaving shapes like gigantic limbs and torsos imprisoned in a writhing mass on the crater floor. The old man shuddered, and thought again of Virgil. It was as if those who had chosen to leave the mortal life in this place were straining for renewal, as giants and titans and gods, yet were doomed to eternity as inchoate, Protean forms, forms that nature had begun but would never finish, forms like himself.

The scene vanished in the vapours like a dream, and they pressed on, the old man staggering and panting behind the freedman. His vision tunnelled and blurred, as it did often these days, and he paused to rub his eyes and squint ahead. They reached a causeway, a raised path shrouded in yellow smoke rising from vents in the ground and hemmed in on either side by pools of boiling mud, heaving and juddering. He had been told that these were the tormented souls in purgatory pushing upwards, desperate to escape, that the hissing gas was their exhalations, like the ill humours rising from a charnel pit. The old man had seen that before, when his legionary commanders had brought him to the pits where they had flung the dead Britons, bodies that still shifted under the soil weeks after the slaughter. He grimaced, remembering his nausea, and they pressed on, past the steaming fumaroles into the gloom ahead.

Out of nowhere hands reached towards him, and he could sense ghostly forms lining either side of the causeway, some hauling themselves up on withered limbs from the edge of the crater. His freedman walked ahead with arms outstretched, his palms facing outwards and touching theirs, creating a space behind for the old man to follow. He heard low chanting, a soloist and then many voices responding, a rustling noise like fallen autumn leaves lifted on a gust of wind. They were singing the same words, over and over again. Domine Iumius. Lord, we shall come. There was a time when Claudius would have walked among them, been one of them. But now they made the sign with their hands as they reached towards him, fingers crossed, and they whispered his name, then the name of the one they knew he had touched. His friend Pliny had seen it too, had gone in disguise among his sailors at the naval base at the head of the bay, had seen knots of men and women listening in dark alleyways and the back rooms of taverns, had heard talk of a new priesthood, of those they called apostoles. The great poet Virgil had foretold it, Virgil who had trodden this very path a hundred years before, who had sought his wisdom too in the message of the leaves. A boy’s birth. A golden race arising. A world at peace, freed from never-ceasing fear. Yet a world where temptation lurked, where men would once again arise to place themselves between the people and the word of God, where terror and strife might rule again.

The old man kept his gaze steadfastly down, and limped on. For twenty-five years now he had lived in his villa beneath the mountain, a humble historian with a lifetime’s work to complete. Twenty-five years since he, ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever known, had supposedly died by poison in his palace in Rome, spirited away one night never to return. An emperor who lived on not as a god, but as a man. An emperor with a secret, with a treasure so precious it had kept him alive all these years, watching, waiting. Few others knew of it. His friend Pliny. His trusted freedman Narcissus, here today. Yet now these others treated him with a strange reverence, hung on his every word as if he were a soothsayer, as if he were the oracle herself. The old man muttered to himself. Tonight he would fulfil a promise he had made beside a lake long ago, to one who had entrusted him with his word, his written word. It was the old man’s final chance to shape history, to achieve more than he ever could as emperor, to leave a legacy that he knew could outlast even Rome itself.

Suddenly he was alone. Ahead of him the causeway disappeared into a cavernous darkness, a place where the rising heat of the pit met a chill exhalation from within, to form a shimmering mirage. He reached for the dice he always kept in his pocket, turning them round and round, trying to calm his tremor. It was said that the cave had a hundred entrances, each one with a voice. Beside him was a low basin, and he dipped his hand in the lustral waters, splashing his face. In front of him was a low stone table, wisps of brown smoke rising from a smouldering mass spread over the surface. Eagerly he lurched over, grasping the smoothed edges of the table, his eyes tightly shut, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, coughing and retching, holding it there. Pliny called it the opium bactrium, the extract of poppy brought from the far-off kingdom of Bactria in the east, from the bleak mountain valleys conquered by Alexander the Great. But here they called it the gift of Morpheus, god of dreams. He sucked in again, feeling the heady rush that reached into his limbs, bringing feeling back where it had almost gone, dulling the pain. He needed it more now, needed it every night. He leaned back, and felt as if he were floating, face upwards and arms outstretched. For a fleeting moment he was back again in the other place where he had sought healing, long ago beside the lake in Galilee, laughing and drinking with his friends Herod and Cypros and his beloved Calpurnia, with the Nazarene and his woman, where he had been touched by one who had known his destiny, who had foreseen this very day itself.

He opened his eyes. Something was coming from the cave, a writhing, undulating form that seemed to press against the mirage like a phoenix rising. It broke through, and he saw a huge serpent, standing upright as tall as he was, its flat head lowered and its tongue flicking in and out, swaying from side to side. Pliny had told him these were hallucinations brought on by the morpheum, but as the snake drooped down and slithered round his legs the old man felt the silky sheen of its skin, and smelled its musty, acrid odour. Then it slid away, slithering into a crack at the side of the cave, and there was another smell, overpowering the sulphur and the morpheum and the snake, a smell like a chill wind wafting through a rotting tomb, a smell of ancient decay. Something flickered, a shape barely visible in the darkness. She was here.

‘ Clau-Clau-Claudius.’

There was a low moan, then a sound like a mocking laugh, and then a sigh that echoed through all the different passageways in the rock, before it died away. Claudius peered into the darkness, waiting, his head spinning. It was said that she had lived for seven hundred ages of men, that Apollo had granted her as many years as the grains of sand she could hold in her hands, but that the god had refused her eternal youth after she had spurned his advances. All Apollo had allowed was the voice of a young woman, so that as she shrank and decayed the voice of her youth remained to torment her, to remind her of the immortality she had forsaken. And now she was the last of them, the last of the oracles of the earth goddess Gaia, last of the thirteen. She who had held sway in her lair since before Rome was founded, bewitching all who came before her, whose riddles had brought emperors to their knees.

‘S-Sibyl.’ Claudius broke the silence, his voice tremulous, harsh with the sulphur. ‘I have d-done as you instructed. I did what you ordered me to do for the Vestals, in Rome. And now I have been to the thirteenth, to Andraste. I have been to her tomb. I have taken it to her. The prophecy is fulfilled.’

He dropped a bag of coins he had been carrying, and they clunked out, dull gold and silver, the last batch he had saved for this night, coins bearing his portrait. A shaft of light fell in front of the table, revealing the worn stone surface of the passageway beneath the swirls of vapour. On the floor were leaves, oak leaves arranged like words, the inked Greek letter on each leaf just visible. Claudius lurched forward, falling on his hands and knees and peering at the leaves, desperate to read the message. Suddenly there was a gust and they were gone. He cried out, then slowly bowed his head, his words rent with despair. ‘You took my ancestor Aeneas to see his dead father Anchises. He came here after Troy, seeking the underworld on his way to found Rome. All I asked was to see my father Drusus. My dear brother Germanicus. My son Britannicus. To glimpse them in Elysium, before Charon takes me where he will.’

There was another moan, thinner this time, then a shriek that seemed to come from everywhere at once, as if all hundred mouths of the cave were turning inwards on him.

‘ Day of wrath and terror looming!

Heaven and earth to ash consuming,

Clau-Clau-Claudius’ words and Sibyl’s truth foredooming! ’

Claudius staggered to his feet, his body shaking and jerking, convulsed with fear. He peered again at the pool of light. Where the leaves had been was now a pile of sand, the grains trickling down the sides. He watched as a final sprinkle fell from somewhere high above, a shimmer that dropped like a translucent curtain. Then everything was still. He looked around, and realized that the snake had gone, had sloughed off its skin and left it empty in front of him, had slithered down into the poison above the crater floor. He remembered the words of Virgil again, the coming of the Golden Age. And the serpents too shall die.

Claudius felt his head clear, and saw the mirage in front of the cave drop away. He was suddenly desperate to leave, to cast aside the yearning that had bound him to this place and to the Sibyl for so long, to return to his villa beneath Vesuvius to finish the work that he and Pliny had planned for that evening, to fulfil the promise he had made by that lake so long ago. He turned to go, then felt something on the back of his neck, a touch of cold that made his hairs stand on end. He thought he heard his name again, softly whispered, but this time they were the words of an old woman, impossibly old, and were followed by a rustling like a death rattle coming closer. He dared not turn around. He began pressing forward, limping and slipping over the rock, looking around frantically for Narcissus. Over the lip of the crater he could see the dark form of the mountain, its summit wreathed in flickering lightning like a burning crown of thorns. The clouds were rushing overhead, tumbling and darkening, glowing orange and red as if they were on fire. He felt a terrible fear, then a sudden lucidity, as if all his memories and dreams had been sucked out of him by the vortex ahead. It was as if history itself had sped up, history which he had kept at bay since vanishing from Rome half a lifetime ago, history which had waited for him like a coiled spring that could no longer be held back.

He staggered on. Behind him he felt a baleful presence pushing him forward, onward through the sulphurous haze towards the floor of the crater. He grasped the dice again, pulled them out of his pocket then dropped them, heard them rattle on the rocks then stop. He looked despairingly, but saw nothing. On either side spectral forms emerged from the pit, no longer in supplication but joining him like a silent army, shrouded in hot flecks of ash which had begun to fall from the sky like snow. He felt his mouth go dry, a desperate thirst. On the top of Vesuvius he saw a burning ring of fire, racing down the slopes towards the towns, fields of flames in its wake. Then the scene was obliterated by blackness, a swirling funnel that descended into the crater and blotted out all but the narrowing void ahead. He heard screams, a muffled roar, saw bodies ignite like torches in the darkness, one after the other. He was getting closer. Now he knew, with dread certainty. The Sibyl had kept her promise. He would follow in the footsteps of Aeneas.

But this time there would be no return.