‘You know this guy?’
‘A slave of the emperor Claudius. When he was freed he adopted the emperor’s first two names, Tiberius Claudius. He was Claudius’ secretary and became one of his chief ministers, but was murdered by Claudius’ wife Agrippina after she had her husband poisoned.’
‘How does this help us?’
‘Freed slaves were the nouveau riche of the time. They weren’t restricted by aristocratic snobbery about investing in trade and industry. It was just like the nineteenth century. We already know that Narcissus had his fingers in a number of pies in Rome, some of them pretty muddy. This ingot shows what a crafty character he was.’
‘ BR means Britain?’
‘Yes. LVT was Lutudarum, in Derbyshire, one of the main lead-mining centres in Britain. EX ARG means ex argentariis, from the lead-silver works. I guessed it when I scraped that other ingot.’
‘High-quality lead,’ Costas said. ‘Produced from galena, lead sulphide, a by-product of silver production. Fewer impurities, less stuff to oxidize, brighter. Am I right?’
‘Correct. We know that British lead was exported to the Mediterranean, from the analysis of lead pipes at Pompeii. It’s just what you’d expect a wealthy shipowner to have on board his vessel, to repair lead sheathing on the hull. Our sounding lead was pretty pure, not blackened with corrosion, and my guess is it was cast from this metal somewhere along the way.’
‘Fascinating, but I still don’t see where this gets us.’
‘Britain was invaded by the Romans in AD 43, the lead mines were in operation by AD 50. Wily old Narcissus gets straight in on the act and snaps up a lucrative contract, just like a modern mining speculator. These ingots must date to the early fifties. That gets us closer, a whole lot closer, to the magic date for St Paul’s shipwreck.’
‘Got you.’
There was a crackling on the intercom, and then a staccato beep indicating a relay message from Seaquest II: ‘You take it,’ Jack said. ‘I need to concentrate.’ He toned down the external receiver on his helmet and rose a few metres above the wreck site, while Costas sank down beside an amphora as he listened to the message. Jack swept his headlamp over the tumbled rows of amphoras, knowing he and Costas only had a few minutes left. They had found more than he had expected, much more, and with a huge sense of elation he realized that the excavation would now go ahead. Suddenly everything here was sacrosanct, no longer a frontier of discovery but a forensic scene, an interlocking matrix of evidence where every feature, every relationship could contain precious clues. He began to drop down again to pull Costas off the site, just as the three-minute warning flashed inside his helmet.
‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said. ‘It’s your old buddy Maurice Hiebermeyer. Just when you thought he was up to his neck in mummies in Egypt, he pops out of a hole in the ground in Italy.’
‘Maurice?’ Jack said. ‘Not now.’
‘He says it’s urgent. He won’t go away.’
‘He’s been working with Maria at the Roman ruins of Herculaneum,’ Jack said. ‘There was an earthquake, and it’s a kind of rescue excavation. They’ve been having problems with the authorities who control their part of the site, so maybe there’s been some kind of lull. He’s been badgering me for months about a papyrus, something to do with Alexander the Great. Last time he collared me was when we were raising that cannon from the great siege of Constantinople. He really chooses his moments. Tell the radio officer I’ll talk to him while we decompress.’
There was an insistent beeping sound, and Costas looked at his computer. ‘We’re on amber, Jack. Two minutes, max.’
‘Roger that. I’m good to go.’
‘Jack.’
‘What is it?’
‘This amphora in front of me. It’s got some kind of inscription on it.’
Jack was directly above Costas now, and could clearly see the letters painted on the shoulder of the amphora. EGTERRE. ‘It’s a Latin infinitive, means “to go”. Fairly standard export marking.’
‘No. Not that. Below it. Scratched markings.’ Costas wafted his hand gently at the side of the amphora as Jack sank down beside him. ‘It looks like a big asterisk, a star maybe.’
‘Pretty common too,’ Jack murmured. ‘Bored sailors, passengers whiling away their time doodling on the pottery, playing games. If it was a long-haul voyage, we’ll find plenty of that. But I’ll get the remote-operated vehicle guys to photo this on their first run over the site.’
‘Aristarchos,’ Costas said slowly. ‘Greek letters. I can read it.’
‘Probably a sailor,’ Jack said distractedly, his tone now urgent as he looked at his computer. ‘Plenty of Greek sailors then. Probably an ancestor of yours.’ He suddenly caught his breath. ‘What did you say?’
‘Aristarchos. Look for yourself.’
Jack sank down and peered at the pottery. A common name. The letters were confident, bold, not the crude scratches of a sailor. Yet could it be? He hardly dared think it. Aristarchos of Thessaloniki?
‘There’s another,’ Costas said, excited. ‘The same hand, by the looks of it. Loukas, I think. Jack, I’m remembering the Acts of the Apostles. Paul’s two companions.’
Jack’s mind reeled. Loukas. Luke. He looked back at the symbol scratched above the names, the star shape. ‘I was wrong,’ he said hoarsely. ‘We were all wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That symbol. It’s not a star. Look, the vertical line has a little loop at the top. It’s the Greek letter R, and the X is the Greek letter Ch. It’s the chi-rho symbol. So they did use it in the first century.’ Jack could hardly believe what he was saying. ‘The first two letters of the word Christos, the Greek for Messiah,’ he whispered.
‘I think it’s about to get better. A whole lot better.’ Costas had been wafting sediment off the amphora below the word Loukas, and a third scratching appeared. The letters were as clear as day. They both stared speechless.
Paulos.
Paul of Tarsus, St Paul the Evangelist, the man who had scratched his name and those of his companions on this pot almost two thousand years before, below the symbol of the one they already revered as the Anointed, the Son of God.
Jack and Costas pushed off and rose together, towards the opaque shimmer of light where the sun shone on the surface almost one hundred metres above. Jack seemed to be in a trance, looking at Costas but not seeing him, his mind’s eye on the foredeck of a great grain ship plying the Mediterranean two thousand years before, in the age of the Caesars, taking its passengers inexorably into the annals of history.
‘I take it,’ Costas said bemusedly, ‘we’re in business?’
5
J ack lifted his helmet briefly to ease the ache in his neck, his senses suddenly overwhelmed by the roar of the Rolls-Royce turbine just behind him, then pulled the helmet back into place and pressed in the ear protectors until the noise was dampened and the microphone repositioned. He was physically exhausted but too excited to rest, elated by their discovery of the shipwreck the day before, itching to get back, but now full of anticipation for a new prize that lay ahead. Hiebermeyer had been able to say little, but it had been enough for Jack to know that this was real. He checked his watch again. They had been flying due north in the Lynx helicopter for just over an hour from the position where they had left Seaquest II before dawn, in the Strait of Messina off Sicily, and Jack had set the autopilot to keep them low over the waves. Monitoring the altimeter was critical, and it was keeping him awake. It had been less than twelve hours since they had surfaced from their dive, and their bloodstreams were still saturated with excess nitrogen which could expand dangerously if they gained any more altitude.
He checked again, then switched off the autopilot and engaged the hand controls and pedals of the helicopter, bringing the Lynx round thirty degrees to the north-east so that it was angled towards the coastline. He reactivated the autopilot, then settled back and looked again at the image he had been contemplating on the computer screen between the seats. It was an image he had grown up with, a centrepiece of the Howard Gallery, the art collection Jack’s grandfather had accumulated and which was now housed in a building on the IMU campus in Cornwall. It was a miniature watercolour by Goethe, painted during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1787. In the background was a flat grey sky, and in the foreground a luminous yellow sea. In the centre was the dark mass of the volcano, the shoreline beneath it fronted by flat-roofed buildings similar to the ancient Roman towns below Vesuvius then being unearthed for the first time. The image seemed whimsical, almost abstract, yet the streaks of red and yellow above the volcano betrayed the violent reality of the event that Goethe had witnessed. Jack gazed out of the cockpit windscreen towards the bay ahead of them. It was as if he were seeing a version of the watercolour, pastel shades drifting across the horizon in the sunrise, the details melded and obscured by the layer of smog in the atmosphere just below their altitude.