The Last Gospel

16

A n hour later, Jack and Costas crouched again inside the small chamber of the crypt, this time behind the glare of two portable tungsten lights. An IMU De Havilland Dash-8 aircraft had freighted all the equipment they needed from the Cornwall campus to London City airport, including a fresh pair of e-suits to replace those they had left with Massimo in Rome. Jeremy had obtained immediate permission from the church authorities for an exploratory reconnaissance beyond the bricked-up wall in the side of the chamber. In a huddled conversation with a cleric in the crypt they had agreed on the need for absolute secrecy, and their equipment had been brought in from a borrowed television van in the guise of a film crew. Above them, the lunchtime concert had ended and they could hear Gregorian chant wafting down from choristers practising in the nave, a sound Jack found strangely reassuring as they contemplated another dark passage into the unknown.

‘Okay. It’s done. There’s definitely a space behind there, but I can’t see much without getting in.’ Jeremy had been creating a hole in the wall, pulling out the bricks and stacking them to either side. The wall turned out to have been poorly constructed with mortar which had not properly set, allowing him to remove the bricks with ease.

‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘Your job now is to hold the fort.’ Jeremy nodded, walked over to check the bolt on the door into the crypt and then sat back against the wall, watching them kit up.

‘We could be going below the water table.’ Costas was staring at an image on a laptop computer as he checked the neck seal on his suit. ‘We’re about three metres below the present level of the Guildhall Yard, about two metres above the Roman layers. Below that, there’s a tributary of the Walbrook stream somewhere just in front of us. With all this rain it’s likely to be pretty wet.’

‘We’re going to need the suits anyway,’ Jack said. ‘Could be pretty toxic down there.’

Costas groaned. ‘Gas leaks?’

Jack gestured around the burial chamber. ‘Two thousand years of human occupation, Costas. I’m not going to spell it out for you.’

‘Don’t.’ Costas leaned over and flipped down Jack’s visor, then adjusted the regulator on the side of his helmet to verify the oxygen flow. He quickly did the same to his own helmet. Suddenly they were sealed off from the outside world, only able to hear each other through their intercom. ‘The oxygen rebreathers should give us four, maybe four and a half hours,’ he said.

‘We could be back here in ten minutes,’ Jack said. ‘It could be a dead end.’

‘If only I had our remote-sensing equipment from Seaquest II, then we could snake in a camera and see what’s behind that wall.’

‘Nothing beats the human eye,’ Jack said. ‘Come on.’ He nodded back at Jeremy, who had taken a laptop out of his bag and spread out his notebooks. Jack crouched down on all fours and made his way through the hole in the brickwork, his headlamp illuminating the darkness in front of him. Once he was through, Costas came alongside. They were perched on a stone landing, and in front of them a dozen steps led down to another entranceway, a low arched doorway about four feet high. Jack squatted on his haunches and began to sidle down the steps, playing the torch in his hand across the stone steps in front of him.

‘Let’s hope the ceiling doesn’t give way,’ Costas muttered.

Jack glanced up. ‘It’s corbelled stone, about as strong as you could hope for. The masonry looks identical to the old part of the burial crypt we’ve just come through. Fourteenth century, maybe earlier. I can see reused Roman tile and ragstone, probably taken from the ruins of the amphitheatre.’ He carried on down the steps, reached the bottom and stood up, his back stooped awkwardly over. In front of him the arched stone entrance was blocked by the partly rotted remains of a wooden door, with a grilled window about ten inches wide directly in front of him. Jack shone his headlamp through as Costas came alongside.

‘Looks like a prison cell,’ Costas said.

‘It’s a crypt,’ Jack murmured. ‘Another burial crypt. Exactly as Sir Christopher Wren’s mason described in his diary. And it looks undisturbed.’

‘What do you mean, undisturbed? I thought Wren’s guys got in here.’

‘I mean it looks full. No parking space.’

‘Oh no.’

Jack pushed cautiously at the door, and it gave way slightly. ‘It’s still solid,’ he said. ‘Damp conditions, ideal for organic survival. We could find some pretty amazing preservation down here.’

‘Oh good,’ Costas said weakly.

Jack pushed again with both hands, and the door came completely ajar. They peered into the space ahead of them. It was a single vaulted chamber, similar in dimensions to the burial crypt they had just come through but about three times as large. Ranged along either side were stone cavities, some of them crudely bricked over, others open and brimming with old wooden coffins, some intact and lidded, others crumbled and decayed. Dark shapeless forms were just visible within. Jack took a few steps forward, while Costas remained glued to the spot, staring straight ahead. ‘This is my worst nightmare, Jack.’

‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry.’

Costas edged forward, paused, then resolutely stepped over and peered closely at one of the erupted coffins, clearly having decided that scientific inspection was the best therapy. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured, clearing his throat. ‘There’s a pottery pipe emerging from the top of this coffin, blackened at one end. I never realized people made libations in Christian burials.’

‘Nice try, but wrong,’ Jack said. ‘You brought it up, so I’m telling you. Those pipes were for letting off steam.’

‘What?’

‘You see them in Victorian catacombs,’ Jack said. ‘The trouble with a lead-lined coffin is that it can explode, especially if the body’s sealed in it too soon after death. It’s the first stage of decomposition, you know. Off-gassing.’

‘Off-gassing.’ Costas swayed slightly, but remained fixated on the coffin.

‘The pipes were lit to burn it off,’ Jack said. ‘That’s where the blackening comes from.’

Costas swayed backwards, then slipped on the floor, catching himself just in time on the edge of an open niche on the opposite wall. He pulled himself upright again, then lifted his foot from a sticky pool that extended under one of the niches near the entrance. ‘We must be closer to the water level than I thought,’ he murmured. ‘There’s too much here for it just to be condensation.’

‘I’ve got more bad news for you, I’m afraid.’

Costas stared at the pool, then at the dark stain running down the stonework towards it from the burial niche above. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered.

‘Saponification,’ Jack said cheerfully. ‘There’s a wonderful account by Sir Thomas Browne, a kind of seventeenth-century Pliny. He loved digging up old graves. Hiebermeyer and I did a course on mummification with the Home Office forensics people, and I can remember it word for word. “We met with a fat concretion, when the nitre of the Earth, and the soft and lixivious liqueur of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, like the consistency of the hardest candle soap; whereof part remaineth with us.”’

‘Body liqueur,’ Costas whispered, frantically wiping his foot on a fallen brick. ‘Get me out of here, Jack.’

‘Mortuary wax,’ Jack replied. ‘The slow hydrolysis of fats into adipocere. Especially likely in alkaline conditions, where the bodies are sealed off from bacteria, and where it’s damp. Like I said, we’re going to find amazing preservational conditions here.’

‘It couldn’t get any worse than this.’

‘Don’t count on it.’ Jack squatted down to peer at the inscribed stone blocks he could now see in front of each intact niche, built into the centre of the brick facings. He moved along, from one to the next. ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured. ‘Normally, crypts in London churches were used for a few decades, maybe a century or so, stuffed full and then sealed up. But this one’s very strange. The formula on each of these inscriptions is virtually identical, but they range over a huge time span. Each of them has a chi-rho symbol, followed by a Latin name. Look, here. Maria de Kirkpatrick. And there, Bronwyn ap Llewellyn. They’re mostly Latin renditions of British names. And they’ve got dates, in Roman numerals. The one nearest to you, on the lower shelf by the door, is the latest, from 1664, just a few years before the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the medieval church.’

‘That figures.’ Costas was still staring into the middle distance, clearly trying to focus on something other than the physical horror around him. He cleared his throat. ‘The diary. It said the crypt was sealed up by Wren’s men, in the 1680s. It makes sense there shouldn’t be any more burials after that.’

Jack reached the far end of the chamber, having carefully circumvented the sticky slick on the floor. He squatted down again, and shifted a few fallen bricks with his hands. ‘And the earliest of these inscriptions is incredibly early,’ he murmured. ‘The oldest ones at this end have crumbled, but there are two here with Anglo-Saxon names. Aelfrida and Aethelreda. I can’t read the name on this one, but I can read the date. AD 535. My God,’ he said hoarsely. ‘That’s the Dark Age, the time of King Arthur, of Gildas. That’s even before Augustine brought Roman Christianity back to Britain, yet here’s a burial with a Christian symbol.’

‘The names are all women,’ Costas said quietly.

‘This chamber is a lot older than the medieval church,’ Jack continued, peering around. ‘It looks as if it was kept in repair during the medieval period, up to the time of the Great Fire, but the lower courses of brick and stone look Roman.’ He knelt down, and swept his hand under the furthest niche. ‘No doubt about it. We’re inside a catacomb built in the Roman period. The only one ever found in Britain.’

‘Check out the inscription above the doorway.’

Jack peered up, and saw a single register of letters carved into the masonry, covered in blackened accretion. Costas slowly read out the words: ‘Uri vinciri veberari ferroque necari.’

‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed, standing up and staring, his mind in a whirl. ‘It’s the gladiator’s oath. The sacramentum gladiatorium.’

‘The Sibylline prophecy,’ Costas said, his voice hushed. ‘The wax tablet we found under Rome. It’s the same wording, isn’t it?’

‘Identical. To die in fire, to be bound, to be beaten, to die by the sword. Good old Claudius,’ Jack murmured. ‘I think we’re exactly where he wanted us to be.’

‘And where the Sibyl wanted him to be.’

‘This must originally have been the gladiators’ mortuary, the death chamber, where the mutilated corpses from the arena next to us were laid out before being taken away and burned,’ Jack murmured. ‘And then it was used as a Christian burial crypt, for over a thousand years. A burial crypt for women, for women who were somehow bound together, over all that time.’

‘Maybe they were a secret society, a guild,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe they wanted to be buried close to whatever lies beyond that wall.’

‘According to the diary, this is where the Roman amphoras were found by Wren’s men,’ Jack said. ‘And this must be the wall, where we are now.’

Costas placed both hands on the brick face in front of them, and cautiously pushed. He flinched as several of the bricks shifted. ‘It’s not mortared,’ he said. ‘It looks like they just stacked up the bricks.’

‘That makes sense,’ Jack said. ‘The diary says they decided to seal up the entire crypt back in the first chamber, where we’ve left Jeremy, so they must have abandoned sealing up this deeper chamber part-way through. We’ll have to take it down from the top, brick by brick.’

Costas experimentally pushed a little further, and one of the bricks that had shifted fell out behind. Suddenly the whole edifice collapsed inwards, and they both leapt backwards as the air filled with red dust. Costas narrowly avoided the sticky pool on the floor.

‘I was going to say, we don’t have time for finesse,’ Jack said, wiping the front of his visor.

‘Check it out,’ Costas said, picking himself up and moving forward.

Jack aimed his hand torch to where Costas was gesturing. Where the brick wall had been was now a gaping hole, but just inside to the left was a row of what looked like sections of old ceramic drainpipe, arranged in a row pointing upwards. Jack edged forward over the pile of fallen bricks and beckoned excitedly. ‘Recognize those?’

‘Amphoras. Roman amphoras. Just what we’re looking for.’

‘Right. And they’re exactly the same type of wine amphora we found on St Paul’s shipwreck, the ones made in Campania near Pompeii and Herculaneum. Remember the date of the wreck?’

‘AD 58, give or take a bit.’

‘Right. These were the typical wine amphoras of that period. What was the date of Boudica’s rebellion? AD 60, 61. If wine amphoras were being left as an offering here, these are exactly the type you’d expect to find at that date.’

Costas squeezed in beside Jack and peered into the darkness beyond. ‘Not sure where we go from here. Seems to be some kind of shaft.’

Jack looked intently around. To his left was a precarious mass of rubble, much of it old brick but including charred and blackened timbers, all jumbled and compressed into a tight mass. It protruded into a timber-lined shaft about two metres wide and three metres deep, with water at the bottom. ‘What we’ve got here is destruction debris from the Great Fire of 1666, probably dumped during Wren’s rebuilding of the church. If any of his men went beyond this crypt, that’s the way they must have gone. We’ll never get through all that without a major excavation. It’s out of the question. Our only hope now is going down this shaft.’

‘What is it?’

‘Looks like a well. There were fresh springs in the gravels beside the Thames. London water was remarkably healthy until it was swamped by sewage. Wells were often timber lined like this.’ Jack leaned in and peered at the wood. ‘Fascinating. Reused ship’s timbers. These are overlapping, clinker-built, Viking. Remember our Viking longship in the iceberg off Greenland?’

‘I never thought I’d say this, but I’d much rather be there now.’

‘I’m going in.’ Jack swung his legs over the edge of the hole, pivoting on his arms until he was facing backwards. He grasped Costas’ arm as he hung over the edge, his feet dangling a metre or so over the black pool below. ‘Let’s hope it’s not a bottomless pit.’ He let go and fell with a huge splash, coming to rest on his knees in mud, his upper body out of the water. ‘You next.’ He reached his foot experimentally around. ‘I think it’s a safe landing.’

Costas grunted, then lowered himself gingerly over the edge, his visor pressed up against the damp wood of the well lining. He shifted slightly to avoid falling on Jack. He had moved in front of a small section of wood in the well lining that had partly rotted away, and he suddenly froze.

‘What is it?’ Jack said.

Costas’ voice sounded distant, hoarse. ‘About this well, Jack. It wasn’t dug through gravel.’

‘What?’

‘It was dug through bones, Jack,’ Costas said, his voice sounding beyond emotion. ‘Human bones, thousands of them, packed in around us. It’s all I can see.’

‘It could be a plague pit,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘But more probably an ossuary, bones cleared from a crypt or a grave-yard. Still, a good thing we’ve got the e-suits on, just in case.’

Costas let go of the edge of the wall and dropped with an enormous splash, disappearing completely under the water down a hole beside Jack before rebounding in a tumult of mud. The water settled, and he raised his hands, looking at the dark glutinous streaks on his gloves. ‘Good old-fashioned dirt,’ he muttered. ‘I think I’ve had enough of human remains.’

‘What you said set me thinking,’ Jack said. ‘About a well, dug through an old ossuary. Pretty unlikely. I think I may have got it wrong. I think what we’ve actually got here is a cesspit.’

Costas wiped his visor, streaking it with brown, and stared speechless at Jack.

‘Actually, cesspits were quite hygienic,’ Jack said. ‘Each dwelling usually had one. It was only when they flooded that raw sewage was a problem, and then after people started using sewers that weren’t up to the job.’

‘Is that supposed to be reassuring?’ Costas sounded close to tears. ‘Come diving with Jack Howard. No latrine too deep.’ He tried to struggle upwards, and suddenly disappeared out of sight, then bobbed up again. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘There’s water flowing below us. This shaft has broken through into an underground stream.’

‘The tributary of the Walbrook stream, where they found the skulls,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe we’ve got a chance after all. If we can get into it and find another opening upwards, we might be able to get beyond that rubble obstruction to the edge of the Roman amphitheatre.’

‘Or we might join the city of the dead down here. Permanently.’

‘Always a possibility.’

‘Okay.’ Costas pulled out his waterproof GPS computer unit, and called up a 3D topographical outline he had programmed into it while they were waiting for the equipment to arrive in the church. ‘The flow of the stream is easterly, towards the Walbrook, which then flows south into the Thames. The outer edge of the amphitheatre is only five metres to the north of us. If we somehow get beyond that point, then we may as well turn back. We’ll be into the area that was dug up in the recent excavations.’

‘I’ll be right behind you,’ Jack said.

‘See you on the other side.’ Costas dropped below the water out of view. For a few moments there was a commotion as his feet broke the surface, then it settled down and the pool became a glistening sheen of darkness. Jack squatted in the water up to his chest, and listened to Costas’ breathing through the intercom. He thought for a moment of his own secret fear, the claustrophobia he fought so hard to control, and realized that his mind sensed a lifeline to this place, an exit route through the ancient crypt and the burial chamber to the church above. What lay beyond this pool was that crucial extra step beyond the escape route that could unnerve him, and he took a few deep breaths as he stared at the limpid surface. He felt vibrations, a slight tremor through his body, and watched the surface of the water shimmer. He guessed it was an underground train, passing through a tunnel somewhere far below. The sensation drew him back to the reality of the twenty-first century, and in his mind’s eye all of the tumultuous events of the past, the dark rituals of prehistory, the blood of the Roman amphitheatre, the Great Fire of 1666, the 1940 Blitz, all seemed to speed past him like a fast-motion film, leaving their imprint blasted into the cloying sediment around him.

He shut his eyes, then opened them again. He pressed the digital readout display inside his visor, scanning the figures that showed the remaining oxygen in his rebreather, the carbon dioxide toxicity levels. It was a reality check, and it never failed him. He heaved himself up, and realized he had nearly become stuck fast in more than a metre of mud at the bottom of the pool. After extracting himself he floated face down on the surface with his visor underwater, staring into swirling darkness with the dim patch of light from Costas’ headlamp directly below him. Jack arched down, bleeding air from his buoyancy compensator, and sank into blackness. About two metres down he could sense the flow of the underground stream, and he saw a tumult of clearer water where the silt was being swept away. The visibility was still only a matter of inches, but it was better than the black soup at the surface of the pit.

‘There’s an obstruction.’ Costas’ voice came over the intercom. ‘I’m nearly around it.’

Jack could sense Costas’ feet directly in front of him, churning the water as he heaved himself round a bend in the tunnel. Jack stayed back to avoid being kicked, and then as the turbulence subsided he let himself slowly fall forward, his hands splayed out to feel for any obstacle. After about two metres he felt something smooth, metallic, and then his shoulders came to rest on Costas’ legs. He felt a wriggling, then no movement at all, then a dull metallic thumping, then everything was still except the sound of their breathing.

‘It’s a Series 17 fuse. Good.’

‘What is?’ Jack exclaimed. ‘What’s good?’

‘This is.’ There was a clanging noise, then a curse.

‘What? I can’t see anything.’

‘This bomb.’

Jack’s heart sank. ‘What bomb?’

‘German SC250, general-purpose bomb. Carried by the Stuka, Junkers 88, Heinkel 111. They dropped thousands of them over here during the Blitz. Should be pretty routine.’

‘What do you mean, routine?

‘I mean, they weren’t delayed-action fuses, so they’re pretty routine.’

Jack had another sinking feeling. He thought of the tremor again, the vibration of the train. Suddenly this place seemed less solid, less stable, ready for history to have another go. ‘Don’t tell me what you’re about to do.’

‘Its okay, I’ve done it already. Done as much as I can.’ Costas’ legs shifted forward, and Jack dropped another metre in the water. ‘The forward fuse pocket was right in front of my nose, and I happened to have just the right socket in my e-suit equipment pouch. The after-pocket’s the problem. I can feel it, but it’s all rusted over. It’s not my style, but we might just have to leave it.’

‘Yes, we might,’ Jack said quietly. ‘How dangerous is it?’

‘The usual fill for an SC250 bomb was only 280 pounds of Amatol and TNT, sixty-forty mix.’

‘Only?’ Jack said incredulously.

‘Well, enough for us to be toast, of course, but the financial hub of the world would probably remain intact.’

‘I think there’s probably been enough human sacrifice at this spot,’ Jack said. ‘How stable is it?’

‘The problem’s that corroded rear pocket fuse,’ Costas murmured. ‘It’s been happily dormant for almost seventy years, but with our arrival, who knows.’

‘You mean after you tampered with it, who knows.’ The silt had settled slightly, and Jack could see the bomb casing about three inches from his face. It was corroded, deeply pitted, with no visible markings, and looked about as menacing as Jack could imagine. He was making the usual mental calculations, and this time the odds were not looking good. He sensed Costas shift forward and upward, beyond the bomb. ‘I think it might be time to leave now.’

‘Oh no.’

‘What do you mean, no? This thing’s still live. We need to get out.’

‘No. I don’t mean that. I mean this, in front of me.’ Costas was almost whimpering. ‘It’s another nightmare. It’s just getting worse.’

‘Okay. I’m coming.’ Jack eased himself deeper, with the corroded bomb casing just in front of his face, until he saw where it curved down to the nose cone and suspension lug. He turned over on his back and put his hand on the lug to keep his body from jolting against the casing, which seemed to be suspended perilously in mid-water. He slowly pulled himself up until he felt the casing between his legs, and then below his e-suit boots. At the point where he imagined the base plate and tail fins should be, he suddenly broke surface, his face inches from a slimy mud wall. He had been fine in the silt, underwater, with his face pressed close to the bomb casing, but now he suddenly felt unnerved, as if those extra few inches of visibility were just enough to give him a sense of how confined the space was. He knew he had to fight hard now, concentrate entirely on what they were doing. He rolled over slowly, careful not to budge the bomb casing, until he was beside Costas and facing in the same direction. He could feel the compacted gravel of the ancient stream bed below his feet, showing they had come under the archaeological layers. He angled his headlamp upwards, and gasped with astonishment. They were inside some kind of structure, a chamber, with unworked tree trunks lining the roof about two metres above them. He saw massive beams of blackened oak, with bracing timbers around the walls. He looked down, following Costas’ gaze.

Then he saw it.

He could hardly breathe. He shut his eyes, forced himself to inhale hard, and looked again.

It was a skull, a human skull, blackened with age, lying face up with the jaw still in position, slightly ajar. He could see the vertebrae of the neck, the shoulder blades, all cushioned in a red fibrous material. He looked again. The fibrous material seemed to be coming out of the skull. Then he realized what it was. Human hair. Red hair.

He panned his beam down again, to something he had seen lying on the neck bones. He put his hands on a wet timber beside the water’s edge, tested it, and heaved himself up slightly. He was only inches away now, and gasped in disbelief. It was gold, lustrous, a solid gold neck ring. Just like one they had seen on another body, deep under Rome. A torque. Then Jack realized. This was no medieval crypt burial.

‘Looks like we might have found our goddess,’ Costas whispered.

‘Andraste,’ Jack said, scarcely believing what he was saying.

‘Not exactly immortal,’ Costas murmured.

‘Everything looks right,’ Jack said. ‘That neck torque is Celtic, the amphoras at the entrance are the right date. Some kind of high priestess, buried about the time of the Boudican revolt.’

‘Maybe the revolt signalled the end of the old order,’ Costas murmured. ‘The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Like the eruption of Vesuvius, the disappearance of the Sibyls.’

Jack looked at the skull again. He leaned over, and peered more closely, right over the empty eye sockets. The black accretion covering the skull was not black at all. It was blue, dark blue. He gasped as he realized. ‘ Isatis tintoria,’ he murmured. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

‘Huh?’

‘Woad. Blue woad. She was painted with blue woad. Must have looked terrifying in life.’

‘Couldn’t be worse than in death,’ Costas croaked.

Jack stared again. It was something Costas had said. The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Had they found something people had been seeking for hundreds of years, in the heart of the City of London, in a tiny wedge of undisturbed ground in one of the most dug-up, excavated and bombed-out places in the world? He turned to Costas, who seemed numb, rooted to the spot, splayed out on the edge of the pool of sludgy water, staring through his visor at the skull.

‘Another Agamemnon moment?’ Jack said.

‘That thing’s no ghost. It’s real,’ Costas whispered. ‘After the body liqueur and everything. I’ll never sleep again.’

‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Remember we’ve got a rusty bomb on slow broil for company.’ He crawled over the soggy timber clear of the hole, and Costas heaved himself out. They both slowly stood up, dripping profusely, with their helmets and breathing gear still on, mud slicked over their e-suits like brown paint. Jack flicked his headlamp to wide beam, and took out a halogen torch. They stared in awe at the scene revealed in front of them.

It was a breathtaking sight. Jack instantly saw images that were familiar to him, artefact types, the layout of the grave goods, but nothing this intact had ever been found in Britain before. It looked like one of the tombs he had visited of ancient Scythian nobility on the Russian steppes, girt in massive timbers and miraculously preserved in the permafrost, yet this was the heart of London. Somehow the waterlogged atmosphere and the thick clay that surrounded the tomb had kept the timbers from rotting and the tomb from imploding.

And it had not just preserved the skeleton. Jack could see that the red-haired woman had been laid on a bier, a square wooden platform about three metres across, a metre or so short of the edges of the chamber. There were strange shapes, curved shapes, on either side of the skeleton. Jack drew his breath in as he realized what they were. ‘It’s a chariot burial,’ he exclaimed. ‘Those are the two wheels, tilted up towards the body. You can see the spokes on each wheel, the iron rim and the hubcaps.’

‘Take a look at this.’ Costas was peering closely at the base of the bier, at the legs of the skeleton, and then between the wheels. ‘There are cut marks on the bones, slash marks, a couple of healed fractures. Looks like she’s been through the wars. This was some lady. And she’s lying in some kind of canoe, a wooden dugout.’

Jack shifted over, slipping on the mud. ‘Fantastic,’ he exclaimed, as he came alongside. ‘There are boat burials from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, Viking ship burials, but I’ve never seen one like this from the late Iron Age.’

‘Maybe this was what they used to get her to this place on her final journey, to her sanctuary up the river. To the heart of darkness.’

Jack stood up as far as he could, and stared for the first time properly at the torso of the skeleton. It was one of the most incredible things he had ever seen, like a computer-generated image of a perfect Iron Age burial. He edged up the side of the bier, then slipped and fell heavily on one knee beside the chariot wheel.

‘Watch out,’ Costas exclaimed from behind. ‘The hub of the wheel’s got a metal spike sticking out of it.’

Jack looked at the corroded iron protrusion that had just missed skewering him, and felt his chest tighten as he realized how close he had been. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked again. It was a vicious spike, one of three that stuck out from the hub about half a metre, twisted like aircraft propeller blades. This was no ordinary chariot. Jack heaved himself up and moved alongside Costas, who had gone round him and was crouching over the torso of the skeleton. ‘I think this lady was preparing to do battle with the gods, in the afterlife,’ Costas murmured. ‘And I think she was going to win.’ They stared in awe at the accoutrements laid over the skeleton. There were leaf-shaped iron spear-points, their shafts snapped where the spears had been broken over the grave. Strewn everywhere were numerous pine cones, charred where they had been burned for incense. Parallel to the body on the left side, from the neck to the hip, was a great iron sword, unsheathed, with a decorated bronze scabbard lying alongside. The incised pattern on the scabbard matched the shape of the inlaid wire decoration on the bronze handle of the sword, gold lines that swirled up towards a great green jewel embedded in the pommel. On the other side of the skeleton was a wooden staff, like a wizard’s wand. But the most extraordinary treasure was lying across the torso of the skeleton, covering the ribcage and pelvis. It was a great bronze shield, in a figure-of-eight shape, its central boss surrounded by swirling curvilinear forms in enamel and raised repousee decoration.

‘Amazing,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse. ‘It’s virtually identical to the Battersea Shield, found in the river Thames in the nineteenth century.’

‘It’s made of thin sheet bronze,’ Costas said, peering closely at the edge. ‘Not very practical in battle.’

‘It was probably ceremonial,’ Jack said. ‘But that sword looks pretty real. And so do those scythes on the chariot wheels.’

Jack looked again, and suddenly it sprang out at him, imagery that had not registered at first but now seemed to knit together all the artefacts in front of him. There were horses, horses everywhere, swirling through the curvilinear patterns on the shield, racing along the sword scabbard, carved into the timbers of the bier. His mind was racing, daring to believe the unbelievable. Horses, the symbol of the tribe of the Iceni, the tribe of a great warrior queen. He saw a scatter of coins below the shield, and reached down to pick one up. On one side was a horse, highly abstract with a flowing mane, and mysterious symbols above. On the other side was a head, just recognizable as human, with long wild hair. An image from a people who left no portraits, who hardly ever depicted the human form in their art, yet here he was standing in front of her, one who had been revered as a goddess, whose true likeness none of her followers had dared capture. Jack carefully replaced the coin, then looked around again, appraising, cataloguing, allowing himself to see the unexpected. ‘The dovetail joints in the timbers show this tomb was made after the Romans arrived, by carpenters who knew Roman techniques,’ he murmured. ‘But there are no Roman artefacts here. She wouldn’t have allowed it. Those amphoras must have been outside the tomb, offerings made after her burial.’

‘She? Her? You’re talking about this woman, Andraste?’

Jack paused, then spoke quietly, his voice tense with excitement. ‘Nobody has ever been able to find the location of her last battle. The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that forty thousand Britons died, that she survived but went off and poisoned herself. Dio Cassius tells us her surviving followers gave her a lavish burial, somewhere in secret. For centuries scholars have wondered whether her tomb lies under London. It would have been the perfect place, the city laid waste and uninhabited, returned to the state it was in before the Romans arrived. Site of the sacred grove of the goddess Andraste.’

‘You still haven’t answered my question, Jack.’

‘It all fits perfectly,’ Jack murmured. ‘She would have been a teenager when Claudius arrived in Britain as emperor in AD 43, in the wake of his victorious army. She would have been brought before him when her tribe submitted to the Romans, a princess offering her fealty, probably a dose of defiance too.’

‘You’re talking about the warrior queen Boudica.’

‘A queen who was herself a high priestess, a goddess, and had some connection with the Sibyls,’ Jack murmured. ‘Something that made the Sibyl order Claudius to come here in secret as an old man, to seek her tomb.’

‘Jack, you’re wrong about there being no Roman artefacts here. Looks like our lady had a gladiator fixation.’ Costas had moved back to the foot of the bier, and now gestured down. Jack slithered over and confronted another astonishing sight. It was a row of helmets, five elaborate helmets arranged in a row just below the level of the bier, facing the skeleton.

‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘But these aren’t gladiators’ helmets. They’re Roman legionary helmets, fairly high ranking by the look of it. Centurions, maybe cohort commanders. And they’ve seen some pretty brutal action.’ He reached over and carefully tipped back the nearest one, which had a deep dent across the top. It was heavier than he had expected, and it stuck to the timber. He pushed harder, and it gave way. He let it drop, and flinched in shock.

They were still in there.

Costas saw it too, and moaned. ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’

Jack looked closely along the row of helmets. They were all the same. Each one held a human skull, leering, several of them grotesquely smashed and splintered. The skulls were white, bleached, from heads that had been exposed and left to rot before they were placed inside the tomb. ‘Battle trophies,’ Jack murmured. ‘Collected from the field, or more likely the heads of executed prisoners, the highest-ranking Romans they captured.’ His mind was racing again. The warrior queen’s last battle. He remembered the accounts of Tacitus, Dio Cassius. Living trophies of war, brought with her for sacrifice at the most sacred place, consigned with her in eternal submission.

Then Jack saw them. Huge, shapeless forms emerging from the far side of the tomb, forms that seemed to struggle and rear out of the earth like the sculpted horses from the Athenian Parthenon, only these were real, the blackened skin and manes still stretched over the skulls, teeth bared and grimacing, caught for ever in the throes of death as they had their throats cut beside the body of their queen. It was a terrifying sight, even more so than the line of Roman skulls, and Jack began to feel unnerved again, aware that he and Costas did not belong in this place.

‘Time to go,’ Costas said, looking apprehensively at the bier. ‘I’m remembering that shrieking again. Your grandmother’s nightmare. Maybe there really is a banshee down here.’

Jack tore himself away from the image. ‘We haven’t found what we’re looking for. There has to be something more here.’ He slithered back towards the bier, and peered down at the skeleton and the array of weapons and armour. Costas took out his compass and aimed it down the bier. ‘It’s aligned exactly north-south,’ he said. ‘It points directly toward the arena of the amphitheatre.’

‘The amphitheatre was built later,’ Jack murmured. ‘If this is who I think it is, she was buried at least a decade before work on the amphitheatre was started.’

‘Maybe the Romans deliberately built the amphitheatre on a site they knew was sacred, this grove to Andraste,’ Costas murmured. ‘A way of stamping their authority on the natives after the revolt.’

‘And the perfect place to conceal a secret cult, right under the noses of your enemy,’ Jack said.

‘Have you seen the chariot axle?’ Costas said. ‘It’s lying under her shoulders. With the chariot pole aligned north-south under her body, it makes a cross.’

Jack grunted, only half listening. ‘In Iron Age chariot burials, the axle was usually placed below the feet.’ Suddenly he gasped, and reached out to the shield. ‘It was staring us right in the face. He placed it right over the shield boss.’

‘Who did?’

‘Someone who was here before us.’ Jack began to reach for the object, a metal cylinder. Then he paused, and drew his hand back.

‘You must be the only archaeologist who has trouble taking artefacts from burials, Jack.’

‘I couldn’t violate her grave.’

‘I’m with you there. I wouldn’t want to raise this lady from the dead. In this place, it’s not as if we have anywhere to run.’ Costas paused. ‘But if you’re right, this cylinder wasn’t part of the original grave goods. I’m willing to take the risk.’ He reached over and picked up the cylinder, then passed it to Jack. ‘There. Spell’s broken.’

Jack took the cylinder and held it carefully, rotating it slowly in his hands, staring at it. A chain dangled off a rivet on one side. The cylinder was made of sheet bronze, hammered at the join to form the tube, and one end had been crimped over a disc of bronze to form the base. On the bottom was a roundel of red enamel, and swirling around the cylinder were incised curvilinear decorations. Jack saw that the decoration was in the shape of a wolf, an abstract beast that wrapped itself round the cylinder until the snout was nearly touching the tail. ‘It’s British metalwork, no doubt about it. There’s a bronze cylinder just like this from a warrior grave in Yorkshire. And the wolf is another symbol of the Iceni, Boudica’s tribe, along with the horse.’

‘What about the lid?’ Costas said.

‘There’s a lot of corrosion, bronze disease,’ Jack replied, peering closely at the other end of the cylinder. ‘But it’s not crimped over like the base. There’s some kind of resinous material around the join, pretty cracked up.’ He pushed a finger cautiously against the crust of built-up corrosion on the top, then flinched as it broke off. ‘Thank God our conservators didn’t see me do that.’ He angled the cylinder so they could both see the surface. Around the edge were the remains of red enamel, from a roundel similar to the one on the base. But here the enamel seemed to have been crudely scraped back to the bronze, which had an incised decoration. The incision was angular, crude, unlike the flowing lines of the wolf on the side of the cylinder, more like scratched graffiti. Jack stared at it. He suddenly froze.

It was a name.

‘Bingo,’ Costas said.

The letters were large, shaky, the name curving round the top, the other word below, like an inscription on a coin: CLAVDIVS DEDIT

‘ “Claudius gave this”,’ Jack said, suddenly ecstatic. ‘Claudius did come here, where we are now, and he placed this in Boudica’s tomb.’ He held the cylinder with sudden reverence, looking at the name and then at the fractured join at the lid, hardly daring to think what might be inside.

‘How come Claudius has a British bronze cylinder?’ Costas asked.

‘Maybe he got it when he first came to Britain, during the conquest,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe Boudica herself gave it to him, and afterwards he used it to hide away his treasured manuscript, what we’re looking for. It might have been less obvious than one of those Egyptian stone jars from his library in Herculaneum.’

‘But the bronze cylinder would have fitted inside one of the smaller stone jars, like the one we found in Rome,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe there’s one of those lying around here too.’

‘If this bronze cylinder was inside a stone jar, then it’s been disturbed and opened by someone since Claudius came down here.’

‘Are we going to open it?’

Jack took a deep breath. ‘These aren’t exactly controlled laboratory conditions.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

Jack looked back at the slurry of water where they had come into the tomb, slopping back and forth and distinctly brown in their torchlight. ‘I’m worried the seal on the lip of the cylinder might have decayed. If we take it back underwater, we might destroy what’s inside for ever. And I don’t want to risk going back to get a waterproof container. This whole place might be atomized.’

‘At any moment,’ Costas said, looking at the tail fin of the bomb rising above the water. ‘Right, let’s do it.’

Jack nodded, and put his hand over the lid. He shut his eyes, and silently mouthed a few words. Everything they had been striving for suddenly seemed to rest on this moment. He opened his eyes, and twisted the lid. It came away easily. Too easily. He tipped the cylinder towards his beam, and stared inside.

It was empty.