The Last Gospel

23

H alf an hour later, Jack stood near the main entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the enclosed courtyard below the facade built almost a thousand years before when the Crusaders took Jerusalem. He had lingered behind talking quietly with Morgan as they made their way down from the Ethiopian monastery on the rooftop, and just before reaching the courtyard had handed him a compact disc from his khaki bag. He had already arranged with Helena for an escort to take Morgan out of the Old City, to the place where he would pass on the disc to Jack’s contact. At the bottom of the steps he and Morgan were met by a man in street clothes carrying an unholstered Glock pistol. The man had looked questioningly at Helena, who pointed to Morgan, and the man ushered him away across the courtyard. Ahead of them two Israeli policemen suddenly rushed by, in full riot gear and carrying M4 carbines at the ready. A burst of gunfire echoed through the streets, followed by screams and exclamations in Arabic. The bodyguard pushed Morgan against the wall on the far side of the courtyard. Morgan looked back, and Jack tapped his watch meaningfully. Morgan nodded, and then the bodyguard pulled him up and they both ran out of sight around the corner.

Jack glanced up at the sky. Everything was now in train. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of grey cloud, and the air had an oppressive quality, humid and heavy. He mouthed a silent prayer for Morgan, and then followed Costas and Helena to the doors of the church. Two men in Arab headdress appeared on either side. Costas stepped back in alarm, but Helena put her hand on him reassuringly. One man passed a ring of ancient keys to the other man, who then proceeded to unlock the doors. They pushed them open, just enough. Helena glanced at the two men, bowing her head slightly, then led Jack and Costas forward. The doors closed behind them. They were inside.

‘There’s been a power cut in the entire Christian quarter of Old Jerusalem,’ Helena said quietly. ‘The authorities sometimes flip the switch. Helps to flush out the bad guys.’ It was dark inside, and they remained standing for a moment, their eyes getting accustomed to the gloom. Ahead of them natural light was filtering through the windows that surrounded the dome over the rotunda, and all round them the shadows were punctuated by flickering pinpricks of orange. ‘Joudeh and Nusseibeh, the two Arab custodians who unlocked the door, came in and lit the candles for us after I told them we’d be coming.’

‘Does anyone else know we’re here?’ Jack asked.

‘Only my friend Yereva. She has the key to the next place we’re going. She’s an Armenian nun.’

‘Armenian?’ Costas said. ‘And you’re Ethiopian? I thought you people didn’t get along.’

‘The men don’t get along. If this place had been run by nuns, we might actually have been able to get somewhere.’

She led them forward to the edge of the rotunda. Jack looked up to where the circle of windows let in the dull light of day, and peered above that to the interior of the dome, restored in modern times to the same position as the dome of the first church built by Constantine the Great in the fourth century. He thought of the other great domes he had stood beneath in the last few days, St Paul’s in London, St Peter’s in Rome, places that suddenly seemed far removed from the reality of the life of Jesus. Even here the momentous significance of the site, the truths embedded in the rock beneath them, seemed obscured by the church itself, by the very structures meant to extol and sanctify the final acts in life of one who millions came here to worship.

‘I see what you mean about the encrustations of history,’ Costas murmured. He was staring at the gaudy structure in the centre of the rotunda. ‘Is that the tomb?’

‘That’s the Holy Sepulchre itself, the Aedicule,’ Helena replied. ‘What you see here was mostly built in the nineteenth century, in place of the structure destroyed in 1009 by the Fatamid caliph al’Hakim when the Muslims ruled Jerusalem. That destruction was the event that precipitated the Crusades, but even before the Crusaders arrived, the Viking Harald Hardrada and his Varangian bodyguard from Constantinople had come here on the orders of the Byzantine emperor, to oversee the rebuilding of the church. But I think you know all about that.’

‘I thought we’d left Harald behind in the Yucatan,’ Costas murmured. ‘Is there anywhere he didn’t go?’

‘The ancient rock-cut tomb inside the Aedicule was identified by Bishop Makarios in AD 326 as the tomb of Christ,’ Helena continued. ‘You have to imagine this whole scene in front of us as a rocky hillside, half as high as the rotunda is now. Just behind us was a small rise known as Golgotha, meaning the place of the skull, where most believe Jesus was crucified. The hill in front of us had been a quarry, dating maybe as early as the city of David and Solomon, but by the time of Jesus it was a place of burial and probably riddled with rock-cut tombs.’

‘How do we know the bishop got the right tomb?’ Costas said.

‘We don’t,’ Helena replied. ‘The Gospels only tell us the tomb was hewn out of the living rock, with a stone rolled in front of it. You had to stoop to look in. There was room inside for at least five people, sitting or squatting. The platform for the body was a raised stone burial couch, possibly an acrosolium, a shelf below a shallow arch.’

‘All of which could describe a typical tomb of the period,’ Jack said. ‘According to the Gospels, the tomb wasn’t custom-built for Jesus, but was donated by Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew and member of the Jerusalem council. It was apparently a fresh tomb, and there would have been no further burials, no added niches as you see in so many other rock-cut tombs. It was never used as a family tomb.’

‘Unless…’ Helena hesitated, then spoke very quietly, almost in a whisper. ‘Unless one other was put there.’

‘Who?’ Jack exclaimed.

‘A companion,’ she whispered. ‘A female companion.’

‘You believe that?’

Helena raised her hands and pressed the tips of her fingers together briefly, then gazed at the Aedicule. ‘It’s impossible to tell from what’s there now. Constantine the Great’s engineers hacked away most of the surrounding hill to reveal the tomb, to isolate it. By so doing, they actually destroyed much of the tomb itself, the rock-cut chamber, leaving only the burial shelf intact. It was almost as if Constantine’s bishops wanted to remove all possible reason for doubt, any cause for dispute. From then on, the Holy Sepulchre, the identification of the tomb, would be a matter of faith, unassailable. Remember the historical context, the fourth century. When the Church was first becoming formalized, some things that were inconvenient, contradictory, were concealed or destroyed. Other things were created, spirited out of nowhere. Holy relics were discovered. Behind it all lay Constantine the Great and his bishops. Everything had to be set in stone, a version of what went on here in the first century AD that suited the new order, the Church as a political tool. They were editing the past to make a stronger present.’

‘And behind Constantine lay a secret body of advisers, guardians of the earliest Church,’ Jack said. ‘That’s one thing we haven’t told you yet.’

‘I know,’ Helena replied quietly.

‘You know?’

‘As soon as you told me what you were seeking, I knew you would come up against them. The concilium.’

Jack looked at her in astonishment, then nodded slowly. ‘We had an audience with one of them, in Rome two days ago.’

‘At the tomb? The other tomb?’

Jack stared at her again, stunned, then nodded. ‘You know about that too?’

‘They’re tight, Jack. There are never any chinks. You need to be incredibly careful. Whoever you saw, he may have told you some truths, but he may not be who you think he was. The concilium has been stalled in the past, but never defeated. They’re like a bad dream, endlessly returning. We should know.’

‘We?’

‘The memory of that other tomb, the tomb of St Paul in the secret catacomb under St Peter’s in Rome, was not entirely lost. The truth was passed down by those who were there, and reached the kingdom of Aksum, Ethiopia. Remember, we Ethiopians are one of the earliest Christian communities, derived from the first followers of Jesus. There are others like us, on the periphery of the ancient world. The British Church, in existence since the first century AD, since the word of Jesus first reached the shores of Britain. We share the tradition of an emperor and Christ, the British story that an emperor brought Christianity to their shores, ours that an emperor and a king sought the Messiah in the Holy Land, during the time of the Gospels. And we have always been good at keeping secrets. You know we have the Ark of the Covenant, Jack.’

‘We were going there after we graduated, you remember, but Mengistu refused to lift the ban on your family. Have you actually seen it since then?’

‘Eyes on the prize, Jack,’ Costas murmured. ‘We can plan that one by the pool later.’

‘If there is a later,’ Jack said, peering at Helena. ‘The other thing you said. You’ve never told me that before. An emperor in the Holy Land.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The British tradition must be the one alluded to by Gildas, in the sixth century. Is there any ancient source for yours?’

‘Passed down through my family,’ Helena replied. ‘A tradition, no more, but a cherished one.’

‘So how did you survive the concilium?’ Costas asked.

Helena paused. ‘We were an inconvenience, one of those bits of untidiness that Constantine’s advisers wanted swept away. Ever since the fourth century we have been persecuted by the concilium, hunted down, just as our brethren in Britain were. Always we maintained our link with our sister churches, our strength. We women, followers of Jesus and of Mary Magdalene. In Britain they came to link her with the cult of their high priestess, the warrior queen Andraste.’

‘We’ve met her,’ Costas said.

‘What?’

‘The tomb in London,’ Jack added. ‘Where we found the empty cylinder, left there by Everett’s ancestor. I’ve got a lot more to tell you.’

‘Then it all falls into place,’ Helena whispered.

‘That plague you talked about, the extermination of the Ethiopian monks in 1838?’ Jack said. ‘The destruction of the libraries? Are you saying the concilium was behind all that?’

Helena looked behind her furtively, and whispered again. ‘I’m only just beginning to get to the bottom of it, and it terrifies me. Something sinister was behind all of the rivalries in this place, all the absurdities. Something that wanted us destroyed, and wanted this place kept in a state of virtual lockdown. Look at the tomb, the Holy Sepulchre. You can hardly see it for the encrustation. The little chapels of the rival denominations, crowding in on it, suffocating it. It’s almost as if they’ve devoured as much as they can of the tomb, right up to the burial platform, and are locked together in a permanent standoff. It’s madness.’

‘It’d serve them right if it wasn’t the actual tomb, wouldn’t it?’ Costas said.

‘Yet keeping you all there, keeping all the denominations in permanent standoff, might also serve the purpose of the concilium,’ Jack murmured. ‘Maybe there is something else here, something they don’t want revealed. Another inconvenience.’

Helena gave Jack a piercing look, and glanced at her watch. ‘Come on. My friend Yereva’s due to meet us any time now.’

She led them back the way they had come, and then past the entrance. A few moments later they stood at the top of a flight of steps that dropped down into total darkness. Jack had been here before, and knew that the steps led to the Chapel of St Helena, an ancient cave and quarry cutting five metres below the level of the church. It was a mysterious, labyrinthine place, filled with walled-off spaces and ancient water cisterns, dug deep into the rock. Jack stood alone as Helena and Costas went off to find candles. For a moment all he could hear was a sound like a distant exhalation, as if the echoes of two millennia of prayers were caught in this place, resonating through history. He thought of all the pilgrims, those who had survived uncharted roads fraught with peril and uncertainty, standing at last inside their holy of holies. He hoped that nothing would ever sour the sanctity of this place, where so many had found strength in the events of one extraordinary life two thousand years ago.

Helena and Costas returned, each carrying several lit candles, and they began to descend. On the damp walls Jack saw hundreds of small crosses, carved deep into the rock by medieval pilgrims. He knew that every inch of the bedrock around them had been shaped by human hands, but as the three of them went deeper he felt as if they were walking away from human fabrication, towards the truth of what had actually happened on this bare rock almost two thousand years ago. He stopped to listen, but heard nothing. He glanced at his watch and thought of Morgan. Less than two hours to go now. It was a gamble, but he knew he had to take it, that it could be their final line of defence. The written word. Now they must do all they could to reach their goal. He was only a few steps from the floor of the chapel, and all he could see ahead were deep shadows and pools of orange cast by the candles. Then they were on the stone floor, walking past columns towards a grated steel door on the far side, beside an altar.

‘Through this door is the Chapel of St Vartan,’ Helena murmured, placing two candles in holders on the wall. ‘The ancient quarry cuttings below us were only excavated in the 1970s, and part of the enclosed space was made into a little Armenian chapel. It’s not open to the public. We have to wait for my friend Yereva to bring the key.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘She’d hoped to be here by now, but she works for her patriarch and often has trouble getting away.’

There was a rustling from the stairway they had just come down and a figure came out of the gloom towards them, wearing a brown robe and the distinctive triangular hood of the Armenians. The hood was swept back to reveal a young woman with olive skin and curly dark hair. She held a candle in one hand, and a large black ring with a single key in the other. She went straight towards the steel door, nodding at Helena. ‘These are your friends?’ she asked quietly, her English heavily accented.

‘The ones I told you about. Jack Howard and Costas Kazantzakis.’

‘I had to tell the patriarch I was coming here.’ The woman spoke in a low voice.

‘You were allowed out in the curfew?’ Jack asked.

‘We have our own private passageway.’

‘Yereva is the unofficial custodian of the chapel,’ Helena said. ‘But being a lowly nun, she’s not even allowed to look after the keys. She has to apply for them every time from the patriarch.’

‘Officially, I’ve just come to light the candles and say a prayer,’ Yereva said. ‘But I’m going to return immediately, just in case there are any suspicions. If I’m back with the patriarch, then nobody will have cause to come looking for me. You should be undisturbed until the curfew is over, which will be at least a couple of hours.’

‘You said nothing else to him?’ Helena asked.

‘Nothing else. Nothing different from our usual routine.’

‘You two have met here before?’ Jack asked.

‘Helena will tell you,’ Yereva said. ‘I would love to go in there now with such a famous archaeologist, but I hope we will meet here again when times are easier.’ She turned the key in the lock, and swung the door open. ‘God be with you.’

‘God be with you too, Yereva,’ Helena murmured. ‘And be careful.’

Jack eyed Helena, and saw for the first time that she looked anxious. Yereva pulled up her hood and left quickly, pattering across the stone floor and up the steps. Helena turned to the doorway. ‘Come on. We may not have much time.’ She led them into a gloomy passageway, lighting candles on the wall with her own candle as she went. Jack could see the rough-hewn bedrock around them, the pickmarks of ancient quarrying. The surface seemed old, much older than the stone in the Chapel of St Helena, and it was pitted like corroded metal. Below a modern metal railing on one side was a dark space, the bottom invisible. Jack had a flashback to the cavern under the Palatine Hill, to the Phlegraean Fields and the Sibyl’s cave, other bottomless places where the underworld seemed visible. He cast the thought aside and followed Helena into a chamber to the right, stooping low through the entranceway. In front of them was a section of ancient wall, three courses high, the blocks thickly mortared together, with retouching that looked recently done. Helena lit more candles, and they could see another wall, different in style, with the rough surface of rock cuttings all round. She knelt down beside the wall and placed her candle in front. The farthest block to the left of the middle course was covered with a hanging blanket, and she lifted it and folded it above. Where the blanket had hung was a frame with a glass window covering the block, and behind that Jack could make out what was on the surface of the rock.

He knew what he was looking at even before she raised the blanket. It was the most extraordinary find made when the quarry was excavated. The St Vartan chapel ship graffito. It was a drawing of a ship, an ancient Roman merchantman, with words below. He knelt down, Costas beside him. He could see the lines of the drawing clearly now, crude but bold, the confident strokes of someone who knew what they were depicting, who got the details right even in this place so far from the sea. An experienced seafarer, a pilgrim, one of the first. Jack’s eyes strayed down from the drawing to the words below. Then he remembered. Suddenly his heart began to pound. He slowly read them out:

‘Of course,’ he whispered.

‘What is it?’ Costas asked.

‘It’s the same words as the inscription from California, from Everett’s painting.’ He glanced excitedly at Helena. ‘This is what you recognized in the photograph.’

‘That’s when I knew,’ she said. ‘It just had to be from here.’

‘Everett must have found this chamber, more than half a century before it was opened up and made into a chapel,’ Jack exclaimed, keeping his voice low. ‘He was here, right here where we are now. These words are the clue in his painting. Somehow, this stone’s the key to the whole thing.’

‘What’s your take on that ship, Jack?’ Helena said.

‘It’s Roman, certainly,’ Jack murmured, trying to control his excitement, narrowing his eyes. ‘High curving stern, reinforced gunwale, distinctive prow. A sailing ship, not an oared galley. The mast has been stepped down, which was done in harbours. It’s got double steering oars, and what looks like an artemon, a raking mast at the bow. All of that suggests a large ship. My guess is we’re looking at the kind of vessel that would have been seen in the harbour of Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Judaea, one of the grain carriers that stopped off there on the way north from Alexandria in Egypt before heading west for Rome. The kind of ship a Christian pilgrim from Rome might have taken back on its return voyage.’

‘Can you date it?’

‘I’d have said early Roman rather than late. If I’d seen this anywhere else, I’d have said first century AD. But in this place, the Holy Sepulchre, there’s hardly anything that’s been dated that early.’

‘The inscription was clearly done at the same time as the ship, the same width and style of line,’ Helena said. ‘But you’re the expert.’

‘Well, it’s Latin, which in this neck of the woods means no earlier than the first century AD, when the Romans arrived in Judaea. Beyond that it’s hard to say. The lettering style certainly could be first century.’

‘It’s usually translated as “Lord we shall go”, or “Let us go to the Lord”,’ Helena said. ‘Some scholars have associated it with the first verse of Psalm 122, one of the Songs of Degrees sung by pilgrims approaching Jerusalem. “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the House of the Lord.”’

‘That doesn’t really help us pin the date down,’ Jack murmured. ‘The Psalms were originally Hebrew, and were probably chanted by the earliest Christians, here at the tomb and in other places where they gathered in the first years after the crucifixion. So they could date to any time from the first century onwards.’

‘I’ve checked, and these two words domine iumius don’t actually appear together in the Latin of the Vulgate, the Roman Bible of the early medieval period,’ Helena said. ‘If they are a translation of Psalm 122, they could be very early, before the Latin translation that appears in the Vulgate was formalized. They could be a translation done by a very early Christian pilgrim, maybe from Rome.’

‘Ships come and go, don’t they?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be a pilgrim arriving here. It could be someone going, leaving Jerusalem. Your first translation, “Lord we shall go”. Maybe it was one of the apostles, practising a bit of Latin before heading out into the big wide world, telling his Lord he was heading off to spread the word.’

Helena remained silent, but her expression was brimming with anticipation. Jack peered at her. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’ he asked.

She reached into her robe, and took out a small plastic coin case. She handed it to Jack. ‘Yereva and I found this bronze coin a few days ago. We did a bit of unofficial excavation. There was some loose plaster under the graffito. The coin was embedded in the base of that stone, in a cavity made for it. It’s like those coins I remember you telling me about that the Romans put in the mast steps of ships, to ward off misfortune. A good luck token.’

Jack was peering at the case. ‘Unusual to put an apotropaic coin like that in a building,’ he murmured. ‘Do you mind?’ He clicked open the case and took out the coin. He held it up by the rim, and the candelight reflected off the bronze. He saw an image of a man’s head, crude, thick necked, with a single word underneath. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed.

‘See what I mean?’ Helena replied.

‘Herod Agrippa,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement.

‘Herod Agrippa,’ Costas murmured. ‘Buddy of Claudius?’

‘King of Judaea, AD 41 to 44,’ Helena said, nodding.

Jack touched the wall beside the graffito. ‘So this masonry could be centuries older than the fourth-century church above us.’

‘When that wall was revealed during the 1970s excavations, there was nothing to pin the date down. But it was clearly earlier than the basement wall of the fourth-century Constantinian church, which you can see over there,’ Helena said, pointing off to the side wall of the chapel to her left. ‘The only ancient record of any building at this site before the fourth century comes from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine. Eusebius was a contemporary of the emperor Constantine, so he’s probably pretty reliable on what went on here in the early fourth century. That was when Bishop Macrobius of Jerusalem identified the rock-cut chamber under the Aedicule as the tomb of Christ, and Constantine’s mother Helena had the first church built here. But Eusebius also says that the site had been built on two hundred years before his time, when the emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as Colonia Aelia Capitolina.’

‘Hadrian built a temple of Aphrodite, apparently,’ Costas said, peering in the candlelight at a battered guidebook Jack had given him.

‘That’s what Eusebius claims,’ Helena replied. ‘But we can’t be sure. He was part of that revisionist take on early Christian history under Constantine. Eusebius wanted his readers to think Hadrian had deliberately built on the site of the tomb of Christ to destroy it, to revile it. And Aphrodite, Roman Venus, the goddess of love, was regarded as a particular abomination by the Church fathers in his day, so the identification of the building as a temple of Aphrodite could just have been something Eusebius or his informants dreamed up for their Christian readership.’

‘Bunch of killjoys,’ Costas muttered. ‘What was their problem? I thought Jesus was all about love.’

Helena gave a wry shrug. ‘Eusebius was probably right about the date of the building, though. There are other sections of wall here that are clearly Hadrianic, judging by construction technique. If there was a structure here before that, all memory of it had clearly gone by Eusebius’ day.’

Jack was staring at the wall, his mind in a tumult. ‘That coin,’ he exclaimed. ‘Herod Agrippa. This begins to make sense.’

‘What does?’ Costas said.

‘It’s one of the biggest unanswered questions about the Holy Sepulchre site. I’ve never understood why nobody has properly addressed it. Maybe it’s the resurrection, fear of treading too close to an event so sacrosanct.’

‘This is beginning to sound familiar,’ Costas murmured. ‘Go on.’

‘There is one event soon after the crucifixion that gives us an archaeological possibility. King Herod Agrippa had grandiose schemes for Judaea, for his capital Jerusalem. He fancied himself as Emperor of the East, a kind of co-regent with his friend Claudius. It was Agrippa’s undoing. Before he died in AD 44, probably poisoned, one scheme he did complete was to increase the size of Jerusalem, building an entirely new wall circuit to the north-west. It encompassed the hill of Golgotha and the ancient quarry site, where we’re standing now.’

‘Bringing the old burial ground, the necropolis, within the city limits,’ Helena said.

Jack nodded. ‘When city walls were extended like that, old tombs were often emptied, sometimes even reused as dwellings. In Roman tradition, no burials could exist within the sacred line of the pomerium, the city wall. Herod Agrippa had been brought up in Rome, and may have fancied himself enough of a Roman to observe that.’

‘What date are we talking about?’ Costas said.

‘The wall was built about AD 41 to 43, probably just before Claudius became emperor.’

‘And Jesus died in AD 30, or a few years after,’ Helena said.

‘So about a decade after the crucifixion, the tombs here would probably have been cleared out,’ Costas murmured. ‘Would Herod Agrippa have known about Jesus, about the crucifixion?’

Jack took a deep breath, and reached out to touch the wall. ‘Helena’s probably one step ahead of me on this, but yes, I do believe Herod Agrippa would have known about Jesus. There was a time earlier in Herod’s life when contact between the two men was possible. And from the crucifixion onwards, I have no doubt that this place would have been venerated by Jesus’ family and followers, become a place of pilgrimage. When Herod built his walls, he himself in the Roman guise of pontifex maximus, chief priest, would have ordered all the tombs within the walls to be emptied. But at the same time, this coin and the wall here suggest that he ordered a masonry structure built above or very close to the tomb. Why? Was he reviling Christ, trying to eradicate the memory?’

‘Or trying to protect it,’ Helena murmured.

‘I don’t understand,’ Costas said. ‘Herod Agrippa?’

‘It’s not necessarily what you might think,’ Jack replied. ‘He could have been genuinely sympathetic to the Christians, or there could have been some other factor at play. An augury that led him to believe he had to protect the site, a chance encounter with a Christian that swayed him, some early experience. Or politics. He could have been at loggerheads with the Jewish authorities, and done it to spite them. We may never know. The fact remains, we seem to have a structure built at the likely site of Christ’s tomb only a few years after the crucifixion, at a time when this hill was probably already sacred ground to early Christians.’

‘Then there’s another thing I don’t get,’ Costas said. ‘The tomb of Christ, the Holy Sepulchre, is behind us in the rotunda, at least eighty metres west of here by my reckoning. Let’s imagine this wall in front of us was built by Herod Agrippa as some kind of shrine over the tomb. If that’s the case, then the ship graffito must be on the inside, painted by someone who was actually within the structure. That just doesn’t make sense to me. You’d expect the interior of the tomb to be sealed up, hallowed ground, and any graffito to be on the outside wall. And looking at the lie and wear of the masonry around that graffito, I’d say we’re actually more likely on the outside of a structure. Something’s not quite right.’

Jack nodded, and squatted back. ‘We need some hard archaeology. The ball’s in your court now, Helena,’ he said, passing her back the coin of Herod Agrippa. ‘Have you got anything more, anything at all?’

‘Keep hold of the coin,’ she murmured. ‘There are others here who may suspect I have something, and it’s safest with you until this is over.’ She pointed to his khaki bag, and Jack replaced the coin in its case and slid it deep into the bag. She turned to face the ancient wall again, then reached out to either side of the glass pane over the graffito, lifting it up and out. She placed the pane carefully on the floor, then knelt down and began to work her fingers into a section of mortar beneath the stone block with the graffito. ‘There is something I haven’t shown you yet,’ she said, flinching as she scraped her hand. ‘I want an objective assessment.’

‘About the graffito?’ Jack said.

Helena winced again, and then gripped two points under the mortar. She pulled, and there was a slight movement. ‘Done,’ she said. She jiggled a broken section of mortar out, and laid it carefully beside the glass pane. The base of the block was now revealed, with a dark crack beneath where the mortar had been. She knelt down and blew at the lower face of the block, pulling back quickly to avoid a small cloud of dust. ‘There it is,’ she said, moving back further.

Jack and Costas knelt down where she had been. Jack could see more markings, inscriptions. There was a chi-rho symbol, crudely incised into the rock. Beside it was another inscription, a painted word, clearly by the same hand as the ship graffito and the Domine Iumius inscription, the same-shaped letters and stroke of the brush. Costas was closest, and peered down further to get a better angle. He sat back, and looked at Jack. They both stared back at the rock, speechless for a moment.

‘Jack, I’m getting that strange sense of deja vu again.’

Jack felt faint. He suddenly realized where he had seen that style of letter before. The serifs on the V, the square-sided S.

The ancient shipwreck off Sicily.

The shipwreck of St Paul.

‘My God,’ he whispered. ‘ Paulus.’ He swallowed hard, and slumped back. St Paul the Apostle. St Paul, whose name they had seen only a week before, a hundred metres beneath the sea, scratched on an amphora in an ancient shipwreck. Impossible. Jack closed his eyes for a moment, then stared again. No. Not impossible. It made perfect sense. He sat back, and stared at Helena.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said quietly.

‘You asked for an objective assessment,’ Jack replied. ‘And here it is. That graffito was carved by St Paul. That’s his ship. Domine Iumius. Lord we go. Costas, you were right. The man who drew this was going, not coming. He came here to tell his Lord that he was about to set out on his great mission, to spread the word beyond Judaea. Paul was here, sitting on the hillside at the very spot where we are now, beside the wall built by Herod Agrippa only a few years before.’

‘At the place of pilgrimage,’ Helena murmured. ‘At the tomb of Christ.’

‘At the tomb of Christ,’ Jack repeated.

Helena pointed at the space under the block. ‘Jack, take a look in there. Is hasn’t been mortared. You remember I told you I knew of some areas of masonry down here with spaces behind them? Most of the mortar you can see around the block is modern, dating from after the 1970s excavations when the graffito was revealed. But there’s another sealing layer beneath that that’s also relatively recent, dating within the last hundred years or so.’

‘Let me guess,’ Jack murmured. ‘Nineteen eighteen?’

‘I’m convinced of it.’

‘You’re talking about Everett,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘You’re saying he found this, and removed the block. Can we do it too?’

‘That’s why I needed both of you here,’ Helena said. ‘When Yereva and I first found the Paul inscription, we realized there was a space beyond. You can see it through the crack. It could just be a dead space beyond the wall, or another water cistern. There are at least eleven cisterns under the Holy Sepulchre for collecting rainwater, most of them disused and sealed over. Or it could be something else. There was no way we could move this block, and if we’d been caught trying there would have been a couple more crucifixions at this spot.’

‘Have you told anyone else about the Paul inscription?’ Jack asked.

‘You’re the first. But we’re certain others know, and have kept it secret. The mortar over the inscription was recent, from the 1970s excavation. They found it, then concealed it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Costas said. ‘Surely a discovery like that would give the Armenians huge extra clout, really put them on the map?’

‘It’s all about keeping the status quo in this place,’ Helena murmured. ‘Whoever made the decision might have feared jealousy from the other denominations in the Holy Sepulchre. It could have pulled the rug out from all the checks and balances, threatened rights and privileges they’d worked so hard to maintain over the centuries. Better to keep a discovery like this as their own secret, to bolster their own private sense of superiority, to save as ammunition should it be needed in the future.’

‘And there could have been other factors at play,’ Jack added.

‘The concilium?’ Costas said.

‘A fear of bringing dark forces down upon themselves, forces that would do anything to suppress them simply for what they knew, just as so nearly happened to the Ethiopians.’

‘Come on,’ Helena said, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘Let’s get going.’ She began to prise away more sections of ancient mortar around the block with her fingers. It came away surprisingly easily, in chunks which had clearly been removed before and then sealed back into place. After a few minutes the entire block was clear, leaving a crack around the edge a few centimetres wide, enough to slot in a hand to palm depth. Jack rummaged in his bag and took out a climber’s headlamp, flicking it on and pushing it through the crack at the widest point on the right-hand side. ‘I see what you mean,’ he murmured, his face close to the crack. ‘With the block removed we’d be looking at a space about a metre by half a metre wide, just big enough for a crawlway.’

‘Do you think you can do it?’ Helena said. ‘Move it, I mean? Yereva and I couldn’t.’

‘Only one way to find out.’ Jack passed her the headlamp, then motioned to Costas. They each put their hands under a corner of the block. ‘We’ll have to try to rock it out,’ Jack said. ‘Gently does it. Towards you first.’ They heaved, and the block budged. Costas yelped in pain. ‘You okay?’ Jack said. Costas drew out one hand, shaking and blowing on it, and grimaced. He slid it back in under the block, which was now a few centimetres out of the wall. ‘Again,’ he said. They pushed back and forth another half a dozen times, each time pulling it out further. It came surprisingly easily. They shifted position so they were facing each other, both hands under the stone. ‘Heave,’ Jack said. With one hand under the outer edge of the block they each moved their other hand back fractionally every time the stone came forward, keeping close to the wall. Helena pulled up a pair of short wooden planks she had found beside the railing outside the chapel, positioning them under the stone. ‘Okay. This is it,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s try to take it out a good metre. Careful of your back.’ They both straightened up as much as they could, looking each other in the eye, and nodded. In one swift movement they heaved the block out from the wall and placed it on the planks. They withdrew their hands, shaking them and exhaling forcefully. ‘Right,’ Jack panted, looking at the hole where the block had been. ‘What have we got?’

Helena was already peering into the space, holding Jack’s headlamp as far in as she could reach. ‘It goes in about five metres, then there’s another wall, rock-cut by the look of it,’ she said. ‘Then the tunnel seems to veer down, to the right.’ She knelt back up, and passed the light to Jack. ‘If it’s a cistern in there, it could be underwater,’ she said. ‘We’re in the deepest accessible place under the Holy Sepulchre, and it’s been raining a lot over the past few days. What now?’

Jack looked at Costas, who looked back at him, his face expressionless.

‘Jack, we had a deal,’ Costas said. ‘No more underground places.’

‘You’re off the hook this time. Too narrow for you.’

‘Are you okay with this?’ Costas said, looking hard at Jack. ‘I mean, going in alone?’

Jack peered into the space. ‘I don’t think I’m walking away from this one.’

‘No, you’re not.’

Jack opened the straps on the lamp and slipped it over his head, then picked up his khaki bag and pushed it as far ahead as he could into the hole.

‘His lucky bag,’ Costas said to Helena. ‘He never goes anywhere without it.’

Helena glanced back nervously at the entrance to the chapel. ‘Make it quick,’ she said. ‘We need to get out of here soon.’ She looked at Jack, then touched his arm. ‘ Domine iumius,’ she murmured. ‘Godspeed.’

Moments later Jack was inside the space where the stone block had been, inching his way forward on his stomach, stretched out with his bag ahead of him. The entrance into the wall lay only a few metres back, but already he felt completely isolated, away from the chapel behind him, part of another space he could see ahead in the beam from his headlamp. He remembered Herculaneum, the extraordinary feeling of stepping back in time as they entered the lost library. He felt it here too, part of the same continuum, as if he had edged back further, close to the beginning of the story that had led Claudius to be in that villa. He felt strangely comforted by the old stone, cocooned by it, his usual anxieties gone. Helena’s last words kept running through his head, the two words of Latin, and he found himself murmuring them, a low chant that helped to keep him focused. He pulled himself forward, trying to keep his elbows from scraping on the rock. There was now no light at all visible from the entrance behind his feet. He paused, sweeping his headlamp around the walls. To his right was masonry, clearly a continuation of the first-century wall with the graffito, at right angles to it. To his left and above him was bedrock, scored and cut by quarry marks, so old that they seemed almost part of the natural geology, as if the ancient imprint of man had become just another process of erosion and transformation that had gone into shaping this place.

Ahead of him the tunnel ended abruptly where Helena had spotted the quarry wall, and he could see where it joined a space to the right. He pushed his bag into the corner and angled his body around, squeezing into the opening. It was tight, and the sharp edges of the rock ripped his shirt. He pulled himself through, wincing where the rock caught him. He was in a larger space now, enough to crouch on his hands and knees. To his right, the masonry wall of the entrance tunnel continued at right angles, at least five courses of large stone blocks. His face was only inches from it, and he saw that it was the same stone as the wall outside with the ship graffito, only here the surface was unworn, fresh. He realized that the crawlspace had taken him along the sides of a rectilinear structure built up against the quarry face, and that he was now behind it, inside a cavity that the structure concealed. He turned to the left, towards the quarry face. The rest of the stone was natural, bedrock. Above him were large rectilinear cuttings, where blocks had been chiselled out. Below that he saw a narrow opening into a rock-cut chamber, its ceiling and the upper few feet of the sides visible. Inside he could see that it was filled with water, a black pool that glistened in his headlamp. He crawled over to the edge and peered in. It looked bottomless, like the cistern he had seen beyond the railing on the way into the Chapel of St Vartan.

There was just enough room to maneouvre, and he struggled on to his back, kicking off his boots and stripping off his clothes. He crawled back to the edge of the pool, his headlamp still on, and slipped into the water. It was icy cold, but felt instantly cleansing. For a moment he floated motionless on the surface, face down, eyes shut. Then he looked. Without a mask the image was blurry, and his eyes smarted with the cold. But the water was crystal clear, and he could see the beam from his headlamp dancing off rock, revealing walls and corners. He was floating above a deep cutting, at least four metres deep, rectilinear. He twisted sideways for more air, then put his face under again. As the beam swept down he saw a wide opening in the side of the chamber, cut into the rock in the direction of the quarry face. The opening was arched above and flat below, forming a shelf, wide enough for two to lie side by side. He ducked his head down and stared into the cutting, but was blinded by a dazzling sheen of light that reflected off the polished surface of the shelf. He remained there, staring into the speckly radiance, registering nothing, his mind frozen.

This was no water cistern.

He came up for air, then quickly looked down again. Out of nowhere he had an image of Elizabeth, then of Helena, and for a split second he thought he saw something, a trick of the light perhaps, a reflection of his own form floating over the edge of the shelf. He jerked his head upwards, gasping for air, and his headlamp slipped off, spiralling down out of reach through the water. He blinked hard, then looked down again. The shelf was lost in darkness, and all he could see was the bottom of the pool where the light had fallen, a blurry image of shadows and light. He took another breath, then arched his back and dived, pulling himself down with strong strokes, relishing the freedom of being underwater again, where he belonged.

Then he saw it.

A stone cylinder resting on the bottom, white, just like ones he had seen before, in an ancient library under a volcano, a library once owned by a Roman emperor who had come here to the Holy Land to seek salvation in the words of one who had dwelt beside the Sea of Galilee.

Then he realized.

Everett had found the tomb.

He reached down.