‘From shackles to castration to this,’ Costas said, his eyes studiously averted from the slick of black goo under the skeleton. ‘Let’s hope the years in between weren’t so bad.’
‘The end was probably pretty quick,’ Hiebermeyer said, scraping some of the black material on to his trowel and then into a small specimen phial. ‘The terrible shock of that blast of heat, then one lungful and you’d be gone. There would only have been a few seconds of awareness.’
‘He must have known something bad was going down,’ Costas said, forcing himself to look again. ‘I thought the volcano had been erupting for hours.’
‘Yes, but the pyroclastic flow that wiped Herculaneum off the map came from nowhere, rushed down that mountain in rings of fire faster than anything any Roman had ever seen. Before that, the eruption would have seemed a terrifying catastrophe, but not necessarily a death sentence. After that it truly was the apocalypse. Nobody would have escaped Herculaneum alive.’
Jack began to sense the smell of the place, not just the familiar smell of dust and old tombs but the smell of recent death, the rusty smell of blood, the scent of animal fear. For a moment the tunnel lost its solidity and became the whirling vortex of death that had encased this man, a terrifying, claustrophobic place which moments before had been a shrine to beauty, a sumptuous expression of freedom and confidence. The whole place still seemed traumatized, still trembling in the aftershock almost two thousand years on. Jack closed his eyes briefly, then moved up behind Hiebermeyer towards the dark entranceway ahead of them. He glanced back, to where he could still see the snout of Anubis peering sightless out of the side wall, to the glimmer of light just visible beyond. The noise of the drill could be heard where the tunnel entrance was being widened, but there was still nobody to be seen. He turned back to the dark crack in the wall ahead.
‘You ready for this?’ Hiebermeyer said, flicking off the fan. There was now no noise ahead of them, only the silence of a tomb, and even the distant noise of the drill had stopped. Jack looked at the grimy face a few inches away from his, the face of a man which in the blink of an eye could have been a boy. ‘Do you remember when we were at school, when we filled that cellar room with home-made artefacts and then sealed it up, pretending it was King Tut’s tomb? I was Howard Carter, you were Lord Carnarvon.’
‘No.’ Hiebermeyer shook his head decisively. ‘Other way round. You were Carnarvon, I was Carter.’
Jack grinned, then looked ahead at the dark crack in the wall, his face suffused with excitement. ‘Okay. Let’s do it.’
9
J ack peered through into the hidden chamber at the end of the tunnel, trying to make sense of the fragments of clarity revealed by his headlamp in the darkness. The tunnel had felt like an old mine working, which was exactly what it was, the result of Weber’s digging more than two hundred years before, itself part of the extraordinary archaeology of this place. But now there were glimpses that reminded Jack of exactly where they were, deep inside the buried remains of an ancient Roman villa. At first all he could see were shadows, dusty grey forms, darkness. Then he saw a table, possibly a stone table, and some kind of shelf structure on the far wall. Something was not right. Then he realized to his astonishment what it was. There was no ash, no solidified mud.
‘It’s perfectly preserved,’ he whispered.
Hiebermeyer heaved the extractor fan forward a few feet into the chamber, and it showed red again. He cautioned them to stay back. ‘This room is a miracle,’ he replied in hushed tones. ‘I realized it when I first peered in here yesterday, before we backed out and called you. There are other rooms at Herculaneum that escaped the mud, the pyroclastic flow. Nobody really understands it, but the extraordinary thing about this room is that it escaped the furnace effect as well. It could have been something to do with the elevation, perched on the top floor of the villa above the rooftop level of the town, looking down on it. The hot blast certainly ripped through everywhere else right up to the room, over that body at the entrance. But it missed this chamber itself. We always knew something like this was possible at Herculaneum.’
‘Maurice, I can see scrolls,’ Jack said, his voice tight with excitement. ‘Wound-up scrolls. No doubt about it. In jars, under those shelves.’
‘That’s what I saw yesterday,’ Hiebermeyer replied, almost whispering. ‘That’s why I called you here. Now you see what I mean. This really could be it.’
‘Can you imagine what they might contain?’ Jack’s voice was hoarse.
The fan suddenly went dead, and Hiebermeyer cursed in German. ‘Not now. Please God, not now. He bent over the machine, and seemed to be praying. ‘I apologize profusely for everything I have ever said or thought about Naples. Just another five minutes. Please.’
‘This happened before,’ Maria murmured. ‘Dodgy electrical grid in Ercolano. The guards couldn’t be bothered to fire up the backup generator, and we had to come out in a hurry. But right now the superintendency are planning to use electrical drills to widen the cavity in the volcanic rock around the Anubis statue, so there’s a bit more incentive for the guards to get on with it. We just have to back off and wait.’
Jack looked over at the shadowy recess with the scrolls, hardly able to restrain himself. He closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply. He turned and followed the others, crawling back through the entrance to their start point. Costas reached into the shadows by the wall and picked something up. ‘Check this out,’ he said excitedly. He held it up, shaking off the dust. It was a metal disc about an inch across, dark green and mottled. ‘It looks like a medallion.’
‘Not a medallion,’ Hiebermeyer murmured, peering closely. ‘A bronze sestertius, the biggest base metal denomination of the first century AD. A bit like a quarter.’
‘Also the largest type of Roman coin, the best for portraits.’ Jack crouched closer to Costas. ‘Anything visible?’
‘Nero!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘I can read it. The emperor Nero!’ He passed the coin to Jack, who looked at it intently, angling it to and fro in his headlamp. ‘Right about the name, wrong about the emperor,’ Jack murmured. ‘I’m looked at the reverse, the back side. It reads NERO CLAUDIUS DRUSUS GERMANICUS. That’s the full name of Drusus, brother of the emperor Tiberius. Nero was a family name. Drusus was one of the ablest Roman generals, a decent man and a hero of the people. A real beacon at the beginning of the empire, a time of great promise but also great uncertainty, a bit like 1960s America. Charismatic characters like that seem to be typical of those periods. His death by poisoning and then the murder of his son Germanicus were like the Kennedy assassinations, cast a pall over the whole early imperial dynasty.’
‘That was well before the time period we’re dealing with here,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘Drusus was murdered in 10 BC, during the reign of Augustus, almost ninety years before Vesuvius erupted.’
Jack nodded, and peered closely at the coin. The image showed a triumphal arch in Rome, surmounted by an equestrian statue of Drusus galloping between trophies. ‘But this isn’t a coin of Drusus. It’s a coin celebrating him. He was never emperor.’ Jack flipped it over. This was a coin of one who survived all the madness of his uncle Tiberius and his nephew Caligula. It dated more than fifty years after Drusus’ death. ‘This is a coin of Drusus’ other son, younger brother of Germanicus. The inscription reads TI CLAUDIUS CAESAR AUG PM TR P. That’s Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribunicia Potestas. The emperor Claudius.’
‘Poor Claudius,’ Maria murmured. ‘Claudius the cripple.’
‘That’s the caricature,’ Jack said. ‘But it’s a bit like Shakespeare’s take on the English king Richard III, the hunchback. There was a good deal more to Claudius than that.’