The Last Gospel

17

E arly the next morning, Jack sat in the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, beneath the great dome facing the high altar to the east. The cathedral had opened to the public only a few minutes before and was still almost empty, but Jack had chosen a row of seats well in from the central aisle of the nave where they would be less likely to be overheard. He glanced at his watch. He had arranged to meet Costas at nine o’clock, five minutes from now, and Jeremy would join them as soon as he could after arriving back from Oxford.

Jack and Costas had spent the night in IMU’s flat overlooking the river Thames, a place where Jack often stayed between projects when he needed to carry out research in one of London’s libraries or museums. After the exhilaration of the ancient tomb and then the empty cylinder they had been too tired to talk, and too numb to feel disappointed. Jack leaned back, stretched, and closed his eyes. He still felt drained from their extraordinary exploration the day before, and his morning coffee was only just kicking in. He felt strangely discomfited, unsure whether their quest had gone as far as it could, whether he should look back on what they had discovered, begin to relish the extraordinary finds of the past few days for what they were and not see them as clues to something even bigger. He opened his eyes, and peered up at the magnificent dome far above him, so similar to the dome of St Peter’s in the Vatican, to the dome of the Pantheon in Rome built over fifteen hundred years earlier. Yet here Jack felt he was looking not at replication or continuity but at the unique brilliance of one man, the architect Sir Christopher Wren. The interior dome was set below the ovoid dome of the exterior, a way of elevating the cathedral externally yet ensuring that the view of the dome from inside was pleasing to the eye. Jack narrowed his vision. As so often in the best works of human creation, the view was not quite what it seemed.

‘Morning, Jack.’ Costas came sliding along the seats from the central aisle, and Jack eyed him with some concern. He was wearing one of Jack’s fisherman’s guernseys from the IMU flat, slightly too small for him around the middle but about two sizes too long, the sleeves pushed up to reveal his muscular forearms. He looked a little pale and red around the nose, and his eyes were watery. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said, slumping down on the seat beside Jack and looking miserable, sniffing and digging in his pocket for a tissue. ‘Every decongestant I could find. I’m beginning to float. I don’t know how you can breathe when the air’s so damp. And cold.’ He sneezed, sniffed noisily and groaned.

‘I gather the all-clear’s been given in the City,’ Jack said.

‘They’re removing the barriers now. The disposal team dug straight down through the Guildhall pavement, craned out the bomb and choppered it away in the middle of the night for a controlled explosion. It was quite a commotion. I made sure they dug in from the east, so I don’t think there was any damage to the tomb.’

‘I’ve just been speaking to my friends at the London archaeological service,’ Jack said, pointing to his cell phone. ‘They’ve got a real challenge on their hands. They need to make some kind of protective bubble over the site to maintain the atmospheric conditions in the tomb, to keep it from decaying. They’ve got the best conservation people on standby. It’s probably going to take months to excavate, but it should be amazing when it’s revealed. I’ve suggested they leave the tomb in situ, make a museum on the spot. It could be completely underground, entered from the amphitheatre.’

‘They don’t want to be disturbing her.’ Costas sniffed. ‘No way.’

‘Did they let you in on the act?’ Jack enquired. ‘The disposal team?’

‘The CO of the Dive Unit turned out to be an old buddy of mine, a Royal Engineers officer from the Defence Diving School. We met when I did the Mine and Explosive Ordnance Disposal course at Devonport two years ago. I told him the second fuse on the bomb was too corroded to drill into, that they’d have to fill it with chemicals to neutralize it. But he couldn’t let me in to help. Health and safety regulations, you know.’ Costas sniffed again. ‘That’s the trouble with this country. Over regulated.’

‘You’d rather we were based in Italy, let’s say?’

Costas’ eyes lit up. ‘Speaking of which, when are we getting back to the shipwreck of St Paul? A couple of weeks in the Mediterranean would suit me just fine. Might even kill this cold.’

‘ Seaquest II ’s still on station, and the Embraer jet’s on standby,’ Jack replied. ‘I’ve just been on the phone to Maurice about timing the press release on the Herculaneum library. Unless Jeremy’s got something new for us, I don’t see where we go from here with the Claudius connection. It’s already a fabulous addition to history, with the extraordinary finds we’ve made in Rome, and here in London. But the whereabouts of the manuscript might just have to remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time.’ Jack heaved a sigh, then peered up at the dome again. ‘Not my style, but a dead end’s a dead end.’

Costas gestured at the laptop on Jack’s knees. ‘I see you’ve been scrolling through Maria’s images of the Herculaneum library.’ He pointed a soggy tissue at the page of thumbnail images. Jack nodded, then peered back at him with an expectant expression. ‘I know that look,’ Costas said.

‘I was just going through the pictures for the press release, then I suddenly remembered something,’ Jack said. ‘That page of papyrus I found in Herculaneum, lying on the table under the blank sheets. Historia Britannorum. Narcissus Fecit.’ Jack clicked on a thumbnail, and a page of ancient writing appeared on the screen. ‘Thank God Maria took plenty of pictures.’

Costas blew his nose. ‘I knew you’d found something.’

‘I’d put that page from my mind because I’d guessed it was probably part of a treatise on military strategy, the kind of thing Claudius the armchair general would have relished, to show he really knew his stuff and was worthy of his father and brother. Maybe something on the lead-up to the invasion of Britain, on his planning sessions with his legionary commanders, all painstakingly recorded. But then I put myself back into Herculaneum, into that room. I began to think about the last things Claudius would have had on his mind, what he would have been writing. In the weeks leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius, we know Pliny the Elder was visiting him in the villa. Pliny was a military historian too, an experienced veteran himself, but he’d been there, done that, and what really fired him up in his final years was his Natural History, collecting any facts and trivia he could stick in it.’

‘Like that page on Judaea, you mean, his additional notes, that we found on the shelf in the room,’ Costas said.

‘Precisely. And what really would have excited Pliny about Claudius was the Britannia connection. Not the military campaign, the invasion, but anything Claudius could tell him about the natural history, the geography, the people, anything unusual, garish. Pliny would have badgered him about it. I can see him sitting with Claudius in that room, constantly questioning, steering him away from the triumph, the strategy, mining him for any trivia he might have learned about Britain, with wily old Narcissus at the table patiently transcribing everything Claudius said. After all, we know Claudius had seen the place with his own eyes, had visited Britain not just once, for his triumph, but twice, when he came in secret to the tomb as an old man, not long before the eruption. Britain was his great achievement, and he would have loved telling Pliny all about it, playing the old general reminiscing on his conquest for the glory of Rome and his family honour.’

‘Go on.’ Costas sneezed violently.

‘I’ve now read the entire text preserved on that page from the table, Claudius’ History of Britain. It’s clearly part of a preamble, an introductory chapter, setting the stage.’ Jack pointed at the fine handwriting on the screen. ‘The Latin’s easy, clearly written. We have to thank Narcissus for that. It’s about religion and rituals, just the kind of thing Pliny would have loved.’

‘And just what we need.’ Costas sniffed. ‘All that discussion yesterday about the Iron Age, about Boudica, Andraste. There are still some pretty big black holes.’

Jack nodded. ‘The first part really staggered me. It’s the end of the description of a great stone circle Claudius had visited. “I have seen these things with my own eyes,” he says.’

‘A stone circle? Stonehenge?’

‘He tells us that the stones were set up by the British people in honour of a race of giants who came from the east, escaping a great flood,’ Jack said. ‘The stones represent each of the priest-kings and priest-queens, who afterwards ruled the island.’

‘The Black Sea exodus!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘The priests of Atlantis. That shows Claudius wasn’t being fed a pack of lies.’

‘“These giants brought with them a Mother Goddess, who afterwards was worshipped in Britain,”’ Jack translated. ‘“The descendants of these priest-kings and priest-queens were the Druids.”’ He reverted to the original Latin: ‘“ Praesidium posthac inpositum victis excisique luci saevis superstitionibus sacri: nam cruore captivo adolere aras et hominum fibris consulere deos fas habebant.” ’ He paused, then translated. ‘ “Who consider it their sacred duty to cover their altars with the blood of their victims. I myself have watched them at the stone circle, the place they call druidaeque circum, the circle of the Druids.” ’

‘In our last few expeditions, we’ve had Toltecs, Carthaginians and now ancient Britons,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Human sacrifice everywhere.’

‘The early antiquarians of Sir Christopher Wren’s day actually thought Stonehenge had been a druid circle, and they were right after all,’ Jack said. ‘It’s amazing. But this is the clincher. Listen to this. “They choose the high priestess from among the noble families of the Britons. I myself have met the chosen one, the girl they call Andraste, who also calls herself Boudica, princess of the tribe of the Iceni, who was brought before me as a slave but who the Sibyl ordered me to set free. For the Sibyl of Cumae says that the high priestess of these Druids is the thirteenth of the Sibyls, and the oracle for all the tribes of Britannia.” ’

‘Stop right there,’ Costas said.

‘End of page. That’s it.’

‘You’re saying Boudica, the warrior queen, she was the high priestess? That Boudica was a kind of arch-druid?’

‘I’m not saying it, Claudius is.’

‘And this druidess was one of the Sibyls?’

‘That’s what he says. And Claudius should know. We know he was a visitor to the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae.’

‘That’s because the Sibyl was his drug-dealer.’

‘There’s something extraordinary going on here, something people have guessed at but never been able to prove,’ Jack murmured, putting the computer on the seat beside him and staring up towards the altar. ‘Let’s backtrack for a moment. Begin at the beginning. Claudius gets a document from a Galilean, a Nazarene.’

‘We know who we’re talking about, Jack.’

‘Do we? There were plenty of would-be messiahs floating round the Sea of Galilee at that time. John the Baptist, for a start. Let’s not leap to conclusions.’

‘Come on, Jack. You’re playing devil’s advocate.’

‘Let’s keep the devil out of this. We’ve got enough to contend with as it is.’ Jack paused. ‘Then, as an old man, Claudius makes a secret trip to Britain, to London. He has the manuscript with him, inside a metal container given to him during a previous visit to Britain, perhaps by a princess of the Iceni.’ Jack patted a bulge in his bag. Costas looked at the bulge, then at Jack.

‘That’s called looting,’ he said solemnly. ‘It’s becoming a habit.’

‘Just a precaution. In case that bomb cooked off. We had to have some evidence we’d really seen the tomb.’

‘No need to explain it to me, Jack.’

‘And like all good treasure-hiders, Claudius leaves a clue,’ Jack continued. ‘Or rather a series of clues. Some of them are by way of his friend Pliny.’

‘I think Claudius was having fun with us,’ Costas said, sniffing.

‘He’s addicted to riddles, to reading the leaves, has done it all his life, all those visits to the Sibyl. She has him wrapped round her shrivelled fingers, of course. Claudius becomes like a crossword freak, a cryptologist. And leaving clues seems to be part of the treasure-hiding psychology,’ Jack continued. ‘If you have to hide something, you hide it ingeniously, but you have to feel that somewhere along the line someone else might find it. If you leave clues, you’re in control of that process of discovery too. A way of assuring your own immortality.’

‘So he comes back to Britain and finds her tomb, and here we are too,’ Costas said. ‘Always hide things in the most unlikely places.’ He sneezed. ‘The word of the Messiah clutched in the dead hands of a pagan priestess.’

‘That’s one thread in our story,’ Jack said. ‘Claudius, his motivations, what drove him. But there’s another thread that’s been fascinating me. It’s about women.’

‘Katya, Maria, Elizabeth? Careful, Jack. That’s one thing you don’t seem to be able to control.’

‘I mean women in the past. The distant past.’

‘The mother goddess?’ Costas said.

‘If the priesthood that Claudius writes about did survive from Neolithic times, then there’s every reason for thinking that the cult of the mother goddess did as well,’ Jack said. ‘She’s there in the Graeco-Roman pantheon, Magna Mater, the Great Mother, Vesta, whose temple we found in Rome, and among the Celtic gods too. But I’m not just thinking about female goddesses. I’m thinking about the earthly practitioners of religion, the priests, the oracles.’

‘The Sibyls?’

‘Something’s beginning to fall into place,’ Jack murmured. ‘It’s been staring at us for centuries, the Sibylline prophecy in Virgil, the Dies Irae. And now we’ve found the extra ingredient that suddenly makes it all plausible, that tips the balance into reality.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s about early Christianity.’ Jack suddenly felt a surge of excitement as he realized where his thoughts were leading him. ‘About women in early Christianity.’

‘Huh?’

‘What does that mean to you? First thought?’

‘The Virgin Mary?’

‘The cult of the Virgin probably incorporated pagan beliefs in a mother goddess,’ Jack said. ‘But I’m thinking about the early believers, the first followers of Jesus, who they were.’ He reached into his bag, and pulled out a red hardback book. ‘Remember I told you how elusive the written evidence is for early Christianity, how virtually nothing survives apart from the Gospels? Well, one of the rare exceptions is Pliny. Not our old friend Pliny the Elder, but his nephew, Pliny the Younger.’

‘The one who wrote about the eruption of Vesuvius,’ Costas said slowly. ‘And the Vestal Virgins.’

Jack nodded. ‘The account of Vesuvius was in a letter to the historian Tacitus, written about twenty-five years after the event. Well, here’s the younger Pliny again, in a letter written shortly before he died in AD 113. By that time he was Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia, the area of Turkey beside the Black Sea, and he’s writing to the emperor Trajan about the activities of Christians in his province. Pliny wasn’t exactly a fan of Christianity, but then he was echoing the official line. What had started out at the time of Claudius as an obscure cult, yet another mystery religion from the east, fifty years on had become a real concern to the emperors. Unlike the other big eastern cults, Mithraism or Isis worship, the Christians had become political. That was what really put Christianity at centre stage. Far-sighted Romans could see the Church becoming a focus for dissent, especially as Christianity attracted slaves, the great underclass in Roman society. The Romans were always frightened of another slave uprising, ever since Spartacus. They were also thrown off balance by the fanaticism of the Christians, the willingness to die for their beliefs. You just didn’t see that in any of the other cults. And there was something else that really terrified them.’

‘These Romans you’re talking about,’ Costas said, sneezing. ‘They’re all men. We were talking about women.’

Jack nodded, and opened the book. ‘Listen to this. A letter from Pliny the Younger to the emperor Trajan. Pliny’s seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians, as he’s never done it before. He calls it a degenerate cult, carried to extravagant lengths. He tells Trajan he has unrepentant Christians executed, though he generously spares those who make offerings of wine and incense to the statue of the emperor, the living god. But then listen to this. In order to extract the truth about their political activities, he orders the torture of “ duabus ancillis, quae ministrae dicebantur ”. Both the words ancillis and ministrae mean female attendants, but ministra is often equated with the Greek word diakonos. ’

‘Deaconesses,’ Costas mused. ‘Priestesses?’

‘That’s what really terrified the Romans,’ Jack said. ‘It’s what terrified them about the British, too, about Boudica. She fascinated them, excited them, but also terrified them. Women could be the true power behind the scenes in Rome, women like the emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, or Claudius’ scheming wives, but it was a male-dominated system. The cursus honorum, the rite of passage through military and public offices followed by upper-class Romans like Pliny the Younger and his uncle, would never have admitted a woman. Just like the image of the wild barbarian warrior queen, the idea of this new cult having priestesses on a par with men would have been horrifying, worse still if they were slaves.’

‘But I thought the Christian Church was male dominated.’

‘That’s the really fascinating thing about Pliny the Younger’s letter. That one word, deaconesses. It implies the Church didn’t start out male dominated. Somewhere along the line, perhaps soon after the time of Pliny the Younger, the more politically minded leaders among the Christians must have realized they’d never defeat Rome head-on, that they stood a good chance of being extinguished completely. Instead, you confront the system from within. You make converts of Roman men who can see how the Church fits with their own personal ambitions, with their political careers. Ultimately you catch the emperor himself, as happened two hundred years after Pliny with Constantine the Great. The power of the Roman Church, its political power, was all about men. But in the earliest period of Christianity, before the Church developed as a political force, the word of Jesus was carried equally by men and women.’

‘Talk me through the Sibyl again, Jack. The link to early Christianity.’

‘Okay.’ Jack closed the book, looked up again at the dome, then narrowed his eyes. ‘Speculation, and a few facts.’

‘Fire away.’ Costas sneezed violently.

‘By the end of the first century BC, at the beginning of the Roman Empire, the power of the Sibyls was on the wane,’ Jack said. ‘To the Sibyl at Cumae, the Romans who had come to occupy the old Greek settlements of the Bay of Naples, places like Pompeii, Herculaneum, Neapolis, were a double-sided coin. On the one hand, they kept her in business. Romans came to the Phlegraean Fields seeking cures and prophecies, or as tourists, gawping at the fire and spectacle at the entrance to the underworld. On the other hand, to many Romans the music of the Sibyl had become ersatz, a contrivance, a Greek embellishment like those statues in the Villa of the Papyri or those phoney philosophers kept for after-dinner entertainment. And, as we now suspect, the Sibyl began to depend more and more for her livelihood on dishing out narcotics than selling divine prophecies that people took at all seriously.’

‘But surely the poet Virgil believed in her,’ Costas said. ‘The Sybilline prophecy in his poem, about the coming Golden Age.’

‘It’s hard to know whether he took her seriously, or just fancied embellishing his poetry with a Sybilline utterance,’ Jack said. ‘But the Sibyl may have seen a man whose word would outlast him, a man destined for supreme achievement, just as she saw Claudius a generation later. She may have given Virgil words she wanted to see survive, immortalized in his writing. The Sibyls were shrewd operators. Like most successful mystics, she would always have tried to keep one step ahead of her clients, profess to know more about them than could seem plausible. The Sibyls probably had an extensive network of spies and informants, keeping them abreast of everything going on. Remember the cave of the Vestal Virgins we found under the Palatine, right under the heart of Rome. And remember Claudius’ extraordinary statement about the priestesses in Britain, chosen from the families of tribal chieftains, of kings. Maybe the Sibyls at Cumae were also chosen from the wealthiest families of Rome, like the Vestals, even from the imperial family. Maybe the cave under the Palatine was where they were nurtured. And the schooling of a Sibyl was probably all about how to tease private information out of people, without them realizing it.’

‘Easy if your client’s all drugged up,’ Costas said.

‘That may be how Claudius revealed his secret to her,’ Jack murmured.

‘And the Christianity connection?’

‘That’s where speculation takes over,’ Jack said intently. ‘But try this. By the time Virgil visits Cumae, by the time of the first emperor, Augustus, the Sibyls already know their days are numbered. Rome has come to rule the world, and the Sibyls see the pantheon of Roman gods solidifying around them like the temples and palaces of the great city itself, built to last a thousand years. But the Sibyls also look east, beyond Greece, and they see new forces which could engulf the Roman world, forces kept at bay while Rome fought within itself and then strove to conquer the ancient lands once ruled by Alexander the Great. The Sibyls foresee the eastern cult of the divine ruler coming to Rome, the emperor becoming a living god. And they see something else. They see it in the slaves and outcasts who hide in the Phlegraean Fields near the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. They see it in the easterners who flock to the Bay of Naples after the Augustan peace, just as Pliny the Elder must have seen it in his sailors at Misenum. New religious ideas from the east, new prophets, a Messiah. A world where the Sibyls will no longer be able to hold sway, where people need no longer be enslaved to oracles and priests in order to know the word of God.’

‘Virgil’s coming Golden Age,’ Costas murmured.

‘By the time of Virgil, the Sibyl at Cumae must have guessed it would come to pass. By the time of Claudius, she knew it. Christianity had arrived.’

‘And she heard the rumblings underground,’ Costas said. ‘Literally.’

‘There was a huge earthquake in the Bay of Naples in AD 62,’ Jack said. ‘You can see the damaged buildings at Pompeii today, still under repair seventeen years later when Vesuvius erupted. And dangling in her cave in the Phlegraean Fields, the Sibyl must have had her ear to the ground in more ways than one, guessed that something catastrophic was imminent. We’re talking empirical observations here, not mysticism. Everything was hotting up. The sulphurous smell was getting worse. And maybe the memory of past volcanic catastrophe was part of the ancient lore passed down to the Sibyls, the eruption of Thera in the Aegean in the Bronze Age, earlier eruptions at the dawn of civilization. And perhaps she truly did believe in some divine power behind it all, behind her utterances. She saw signs, auguries, that her age was ended. With the eruption of Vesuvius, her god Apollo would be gone, extinguished for ever.’

‘Time for a fast exit left,’ Costas murmured.

‘Time for the final ingredient, the biggest twist,’ Jack said. ‘Several decades earlier, in the time of Claudius the emperor, the Sibyl would have seen her prophecy to Virgil come true. The birth of a boy, the imminent Golden Age. She would have seen Christians appearing in the Phlegraean Fields. She would have heard of Jesus, and of Mary Magdalene. She would have known that the Christians included both men and women. She would have seen that there were no priests.’

‘We’re talking women here again, aren’t we, Jack? That’s what you’re driving at. Girl power.’

‘Girl power.’ Jack grinned. ‘Not goddesses, but real flesh-and-blood women. That’s what the Sibyl saw. In Rome, the power of women was on the wane. The Vestal Virgins were virtually imprisoned within the palace walls, almost a despotic male fantasy of female submission. The imperial cult, the cult of the emperor, was male dominated, with an exclusively male priesthood. To the Sibyls, their own vocation was perhaps not really about Apollo or any earlier gods they might have served. It was about matriarchy, about continuation of the female line that extended far back to the Stone Age, to the time when women ruled the family and the clan. In Christianity, the Sibyl may have seen hope for the future, for the continuation of the matriarchy.’

‘Why the focus on Britain?’ Costas asked.

‘Because it’s often at the periphery that the biggest changes take place,’ Jack said. ‘In Rome itself, civilization had become corrupt, decayed. Christianity had come from the periphery, from the eastern boundary of the empire, and it was at the other periphery, far to the north-west, that some saw greatest hope for its success. Britain would have seemed like the New World did to the religious dissenters of seventeenth-century Europe, a place where they could pursue their beliefs without persecution. The Britons themselves, the natives, were fiercely independent, truculent, with a mysterious religion that would never be fully captured and manipulated by the Romans, where the Roman gods would never truly hold sway. The tribes of Britain had been ruled by great warrior queens, by Boudica and those before her. And as we now know from Claudius, their own priesthood, the druids, was ruled by a high priestess. If the druids were dominated by women, then it was women who knit together the warrior tribes of the Celtic world, just as women had done for thousands of years before that, back through prehistory.’

‘And how much would Boudica have known about Christianity?’

‘Claudius himself may even have talked to her about it, when she was brought before him as a teenager on his first visit to Britain, after the Roman invasion. Something about her, about what he saw and felt in Britain, may even have influenced him to tell her his best story, of his visit to Judaea as a young man. Then remember the reference in Gildas, the monk writing after the Roman period. The memory of a Roman emperor himself secretly bringing Christianity to Britain may have become part of the folklore of the first Christians in Britain. And Claudius may have known about the connection of the Sibyl with the druids, as he was already under the sway of the Sibyl at Cumae. The Sibyl herself may have influenced his decision to invade in the first place, perhaps a way of knitting Britain more closely within her world. She may have given him a message in the leaves.’

‘Amazing what people will do for their drug-dealers,’ Costas murmured.

‘In the years that followed Claudius’ visit, Boudica would have learned more about Christianity,’ Jack continued. ‘Like the children of most vanquished princes, she would have been brought up in the Roman way, learning Latin and perhaps even travelling to Rome, maybe even to the Bay of Naples and the cave at Cumae. Back home in London, she would have heard of sailors and soldiers bringing ideas from the east, Mithraism, Isis worship, Christianity. Then, as she was inducted into the priesthood, preparing for her role as high priestess, as the British Sibyl, she would have become part of the secret network of knowledge that tied together all the Sibyls across the Roman world, the thirteen. And she may have seen the same thing that the Sibyl at Cumae saw in Christianity, something that drew her even closer to its followers after she rebelled against the Romans. A religion on a collision course with Rome, with the Rome which had abused her and raped her daughters, a religion of defiance. And the ideas she heard, the quest for a heaven on earth, may have come easily to the Britons, people whose beliefs were attuned to the natural world and not fossilized in temples and priests. She may not have shown any outward signs of it, but she may have decided that those ideas could work for her, and for the survival of the matriarchy.’

‘You’re talking about Christianity before the Roman Church,’ Costas murmured. ‘What you and Jeremy were telling me about in the amphitheatre. The Celtic Church, the Church of the Britons. The Pelagian heresy.’

‘I believe that’s the reason why the Sibyl at Cumae made Claudius bring his precious document here,’ Jack said. ‘To provide a secret gift for the early Christians in Britain, something which might strengthen them against what she saw happening before her eyes in the Phlegraean Fields, in the years after St Paul’s arrival there.’

‘You mean the beginnings of what would become the Roman state religion,’ Costas said, blowing his nose.

‘There was something in Claudius’ document from Judaea, something we can only guess at, that gave the Sibyl hope. Something Claudius must have said when he was in a stupor before her cave. Something that made her realize that what he had was extraordinarily precious, and needed to be secreted away in a place where it might survive, and further her cause. And something she knew some of those around Claudius would do anything to get their hands on, to destroy.’

‘She saw the first priests among the Christians. Male priests. And it frightened her. She saw Christianity going the same way as all the other cults in Rome.’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘So she threatens to withdraw Claudius’ drugs unless he does her bidding.’

Jack grinned. ‘She knew exactly why he kept coming back for more, what it was that dulled his pain. Claudius himself might not have been so sure. All he knew was that if he did her bidding, every time he stood in that smoky cavern he felt good again. Probably she offered him something tangible, something else that drew him back to that place at the entrance to the underworld. Maybe like Aeneas in Virgil’s story she offered to take him down below, to see his father and brother again. That’s what he would have yearned for most. Like any good fortune-teller, she knew her client’s psychology.’

‘And she knew he loved a good riddle.’

Jack nodded. ‘She gives him a prophecy. A message in the leaves. Claudius laps it up, relishes the challenge. It was the one we found in Rome, the Dies Irae. A prophecy of doom, but also of hope. Claudius knows who Andraste was, and knows where to find her tomb. The Sibyl knows that he knows. He writes it down, seals it in that stone cylinder, the one he gave Pliny to take to Rome. All Claudius had to do was fulfil the prophecy, take the manuscript and put it with Andraste, and he would get what he had begged the Sibyl for, his visit to the underworld.’

‘Big time,’ Costas murmured.

‘When it came down to it, in those last moments of hell in front of the crack of doom in the Phlegraean Fields, it may have felt right. Claudius may have shut his eyes, and in his mind seen only those statues we found in his room in the villa in Herculaneum, those images of his father and brother which must have been seared into his mind.’

‘Jack, I think you’ve found another soulmate,’ Costas said. ‘Move over Harald Hardrada, King of the Vikings, here comes Claudius, Emperor of Rome.’

‘I feel like I did on that little island north of Newfoundland, on our search for the Jewish menorah,’ Jack said, closing the book. ‘Harald had taken us on an extraordinary adventure in search of his treasure, farther than we could ever have dared imagine. I feel the same way now, but I feel Claudius has left us, has taken us as far as he can. I owe it to him to find the clues, to go where he wanted me to go. But I just can’t see a way ahead.’

‘Speaking of soulmates, here’s one of mine,’ Costas said, sniffing and gesturing blearily at the figure making his way along the row of seats towards them. ‘And maybe he’s got what you need.’