Then he saw it.
He could hardly breathe. He shut his eyes, forced himself to inhale hard, and looked again.
It was a skull, a human skull, blackened with age, lying face up with the jaw still in position, slightly ajar. He could see the vertebrae of the neck, the shoulder blades, all cushioned in a red fibrous material. He looked again. The fibrous material seemed to be coming out of the skull. Then he realized what it was. Human hair. Red hair.
He panned his beam down again, to something he had seen lying on the neck bones. He put his hands on a wet timber beside the water’s edge, tested it, and heaved himself up slightly. He was only inches away now, and gasped in disbelief. It was gold, lustrous, a solid gold neck ring. Just like one they had seen on another body, deep under Rome. A torque. Then Jack realized. This was no medieval crypt burial.
‘Looks like we might have found our goddess,’ Costas whispered.
‘Andraste,’ Jack said, scarcely believing what he was saying.
‘Not exactly immortal,’ Costas murmured.
‘Everything looks right,’ Jack said. ‘That neck torque is Celtic, the amphoras at the entrance are the right date. Some kind of high priestess, buried about the time of the Boudican revolt.’
‘Maybe the revolt signalled the end of the old order,’ Costas murmured. ‘The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Like the eruption of Vesuvius, the disappearance of the Sibyls.’
Jack looked at the skull again. He leaned over, and peered more closely, right over the empty eye sockets. The black accretion covering the skull was not black at all. It was blue, dark blue. He gasped as he realized. ‘ Isatis tintoria,’ he murmured. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’
‘Huh?’
‘Woad. Blue woad. She was painted with blue woad. Must have looked terrifying in life.’
‘Couldn’t be worse than in death,’ Costas croaked.
Jack stared again. It was something Costas had said. The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Had they found something people had been seeking for hundreds of years, in the heart of the City of London, in a tiny wedge of undisturbed ground in one of the most dug-up, excavated and bombed-out places in the world? He turned to Costas, who seemed numb, rooted to the spot, splayed out on the edge of the pool of sludgy water, staring through his visor at the skull.
‘Another Agamemnon moment?’ Jack said.
‘That thing’s no ghost. It’s real,’ Costas whispered. ‘After the body liqueur and everything. I’ll never sleep again.’
‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Remember we’ve got a rusty bomb on slow broil for company.’ He crawled over the soggy timber clear of the hole, and Costas heaved himself out. They both slowly stood up, dripping profusely, with their helmets and breathing gear still on, mud slicked over their e-suits like brown paint. Jack flicked his headlamp to wide beam, and took out a halogen torch. They stared in awe at the scene revealed in front of them.
It was a breathtaking sight. Jack instantly saw images that were familiar to him, artefact types, the layout of the grave goods, but nothing this intact had ever been found in Britain before. It looked like one of the tombs he had visited of ancient Scythian nobility on the Russian steppes, girt in massive timbers and miraculously preserved in the permafrost, yet this was the heart of London. Somehow the waterlogged atmosphere and the thick clay that surrounded the tomb had kept the timbers from rotting and the tomb from imploding.
And it had not just preserved the skeleton. Jack could see that the red-haired woman had been laid on a bier, a square wooden platform about three metres across, a metre or so short of the edges of the chamber. There were strange shapes, curved shapes, on either side of the skeleton. Jack drew his breath in as he realized what they were. ‘It’s a chariot burial,’ he exclaimed. ‘Those are the two wheels, tilted up towards the body. You can see the spokes on each wheel, the iron rim and the hubcaps.’
‘Take a look at this.’ Costas was peering closely at the base of the bier, at the legs of the skeleton, and then between the wheels. ‘There are cut marks on the bones, slash marks, a couple of healed fractures. Looks like she’s been through the wars. This was some lady. And she’s lying in some kind of canoe, a wooden dugout.’
Jack shifted over, slipping on the mud. ‘Fantastic,’ he exclaimed, as he came alongside. ‘There are boat burials from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, Viking ship burials, but I’ve never seen one like this from the late Iron Age.’
‘Maybe this was what they used to get her to this place on her final journey, to her sanctuary up the river. To the heart of darkness.’
Jack stood up as far as he could, and stared for the first time properly at the torso of the skeleton. It was one of the most incredible things he had ever seen, like a computer-generated image of a perfect Iron Age burial. He edged up the side of the bier, then slipped and fell heavily on one knee beside the chariot wheel.
‘Watch out,’ Costas exclaimed from behind. ‘The hub of the wheel’s got a metal spike sticking out of it.’
Jack looked at the corroded iron protrusion that had just missed skewering him, and felt his chest tighten as he realized how close he had been. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked again. It was a vicious spike, one of three that stuck out from the hub about half a metre, twisted like aircraft propeller blades. This was no ordinary chariot. Jack heaved himself up and moved alongside Costas, who had gone round him and was crouching over the torso of the skeleton. ‘I think this lady was preparing to do battle with the gods, in the afterlife,’ Costas murmured. ‘And I think she was going to win.’ They stared in awe at the accoutrements laid over the skeleton. There were leaf-shaped iron spear-points, their shafts snapped where the spears had been broken over the grave. Strewn everywhere were numerous pine cones, charred where they had been burned for incense. Parallel to the body on the left side, from the neck to the hip, was a great iron sword, unsheathed, with a decorated bronze scabbard lying alongside. The incised pattern on the scabbard matched the shape of the inlaid wire decoration on the bronze handle of the sword, gold lines that swirled up towards a great green jewel embedded in the pommel. On the other side of the skeleton was a wooden staff, like a wizard’s wand. But the most extraordinary treasure was lying across the torso of the skeleton, covering the ribcage and pelvis. It was a great bronze shield, in a figure-of-eight shape, its central boss surrounded by swirling curvilinear forms in enamel and raised repousee decoration.
‘Amazing,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse. ‘It’s virtually identical to the Battersea Shield, found in the river Thames in the nineteenth century.’
‘It’s made of thin sheet bronze,’ Costas said, peering closely at the edge. ‘Not very practical in battle.’
‘It was probably ceremonial,’ Jack said. ‘But that sword looks pretty real. And so do those scythes on the chariot wheels.’
Jack looked again, and suddenly it sprang out at him, imagery that had not registered at first but now seemed to knit together all the artefacts in front of him. There were horses, horses everywhere, swirling through the curvilinear patterns on the shield, racing along the sword scabbard, carved into the timbers of the bier. His mind was racing, daring to believe the unbelievable. Horses, the symbol of the tribe of the Iceni, the tribe of a great warrior queen. He saw a scatter of coins below the shield, and reached down to pick one up. On one side was a horse, highly abstract with a flowing mane, and mysterious symbols above. On the other side was a head, just recognizable as human, with long wild hair. An image from a people who left no portraits, who hardly ever depicted the human form in their art, yet here he was standing in front of her, one who had been revered as a goddess, whose true likeness none of her followers had dared capture. Jack carefully replaced the coin, then looked around again, appraising, cataloguing, allowing himself to see the unexpected. ‘The dovetail joints in the timbers show this tomb was made after the Romans arrived, by carpenters who knew Roman techniques,’ he murmured. ‘But there are no Roman artefacts here. She wouldn’t have allowed it. Those amphoras must have been outside the tomb, offerings made after her burial.’