The Last Gospel

VESTALIS MAXIMA

‘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.

A human skull.

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.’