‘I can hear the others, coming up the tunnel behind us,’ Maria said quietly.
‘Ah yes. The mysterious lady from the superintendency. You know she’s an old friend of Jack’s? I mean, close friend. It was after you’d left, when he was finishing his doctorate and I was already in Egypt. For some reason they don’t talk. I can see the torch light now. Best behaviour.’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ Maria said quietly, then looked up at the snout. ‘Anyway, Anubis should stall them.’
‘Anubis will probably halt the whole project,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘It’ll be hailed as a great discovery, vindication of their decision to explore the tunnel. It’ll be enough for them to withdraw our permit and seal this up. The only reason we’re here is that someone leaked the discovery of the tunnel to the press after the earthquake, and the archaeological authorities had no choice but to put up a show.’
‘You’re being cynical again.’
‘Trust me. I’ve been in this game a long time. There are much bigger forces at play here. There are those who are fearful of the ancient past, who would do all they can to close it off. They fear anything that might shake the established order, the institutions they serve. Old ideas, ancient truths sometimes obscured by those very institutions which sprang up to protect them.’
‘Ideas that might be found in a long-lost library,’ Maria murmured.
‘We’re talking the first century AD here,’ Maurice whispered. ‘The first decades anno domini in the year of our Lord. Think about it.’
‘I have.’
‘It’s your call whether or not we continue down the tunnel to see what else we can find before they shut us down. I’ve got an excavation in Egypt waiting for me. You need a rest.’
‘Try me.’
‘I take it we’re in agreement.’
‘Let’s take the chance now while we’ve got it,’ Maria said. ‘You’ve found your treasure, now I need mine.’
Hiebermeyer stowed the oscillator in his front overall pocket, sneezed noisily then peered at Maria. ‘I can see what Jack saw in you. He always said you might make something of yourself, if you got out of the Institute of Medieval Studies at Oxford and took a job with him.’
Maria gave him a withering look, then crawled forward until she was just beyond the statue. The dust was settling, and ahead of them they could just make out a white patch where another fragment of the tunnel wall had been dislodged by the tremor. As the beams of their headlamps concentrated on the fracture, they could see something dark at the centre. Hiebermeyer pulled himself forward and turned to Maria, his face ablaze with excitement. ‘Okay, we’ve passed Anubis, and we’re still in one piece.’
‘Superstitious, Maurice?’
‘Let’s go for it.’
3
Claudius gulped at the wine, holding the cup with trembling hands, then shut his eyes and grasped the pillar until the worst of the fit was over. Tonight he would go to the Phlegraean Fields, stand before the Sibyl’s cave for the last time. But there was work to do before then. He lurched sideways on to the marble bench, lunging wildly at his toga to stop it from slipping off, then tripped and fell heavily on his elbows. His face twisted in pain and frustration, willing on tears that no longer came, retching on empty. In truth he was going through the motions. He barely felt anything any more.
He raised himself and peered rheumily at the moonlight that was now shimmering across the great expanse of the bay, past the statues of Greek and Egyptian gods that lined the portico of the villa. The nearest to him, the dog-headed one, seemed to frame the mountain, its ears and snout glowing in the moonlight. From his vantage point on the belvedere of the villa he could see the rooftops of the town he knew intimately but had never visited, Herculaneum. He could hear the clinking and low sounds of evening activity, the rising and falling of conversation, peals of laughter and soft music, the lapping of waves on the seashore.
He had all he had needed. Wine from the slopes of Vesuvius, rich red wine that flowed like syrup, always his favourite. And girls, brought for him from the back alleys below, girls who still gave him fleeting pleasure, years after he had stopped pondering what it did for them.
And he had the poppy.
He sniffed and wrinkled his nose, and then looked up. The soothsayers had been right. There was something about the sky tonight.
He looked across the bay to the west, past the old Greek colony of Neapolis towards the naval base at Misenum, on the far promontory beside the open sea. The shadow of the mountain darkened the bay, and all he could make out were a few merchantmen anchored close inshore. He was used to looking out for the phosphorescence left in the wake of the fast galleys, but tonight he could see nothing. Where was Pliny? Had Pliny got his message? It was hardly as if he was away on naval manoeuvres. Claudius knew exactly what the commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum did. The fleet had not put out for action since Claudius’ grandfather Mark Antony had been defeated at Actium, over a century before. Pax Romana. Claudius nodded to himself. He, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, Imperator, had helped to keep that peace. He looked back towards the half-empty pitcher on the table. Pliny had better get here soon. What he had to say tonight demanded a clear head. It was getting late.
He reached out to pour himself another cup, letting the wine overflow and trickle down the table to join the wide red stain that had permeated the marble floor over the years. He could see back into his little room and the line of wax images ranged along the wall, caught in the moonlight. Ancestral images, the only things he had saved from his past. His father Drusus, cherished in memory. His beloved brother Germanicus. With his waxen skin, Claudius felt he was already one with them. He was old, old enough to have lived through the Age of Augustus, the Golden Age tarnished for ever by the debauchery of Tiberius and Caligula and then Claudius’ successor, Nero. Sometimes, in his bleaker moments, usually after the wine, he felt that time had made a monster of him just as it had ruined Rome, not by some hideous malformity but through a slow and inexorable wasting, as if the gods who had inflicted the ailment on him, the palsy, were making him endure the full extremity of torment in this life before they pitched him into the fires below.
He shook himself out of his trance, coughed painfully and looked over the balcony of the villa again, over the rooftops of Herculaneum. When he had faked his own poisoning and escaped Rome, when his work there was done and he craved his former life as a writer and a scholar, his old friend Calpurnius Piso had blocked off an annex to his villa and made a home for him here, his hideaway now for almost a quarter of a century, overlooking the sea and the mountain. He missed nothing in Rome that was not already gone, and had all that a scholar could need. He knew he should be more grateful, but there were irritations. Calpurnius’ grandfather had been a patron of the Greek philosopher Philodemus, whose library of unreadable nonsense was always in the way. And then poor Calpurnius Piso had been forced to commit suicide, here, in front of Claudius’ very eyes, after his failed plot against Nero, leaving the villa to a grudging nephew who did not even know who Claudius was, who thought he was just another one of the Greek charlatans who seemed to beg their way into every aristocratic household around here. It was exactly the anonymity that Claudius sought, but it was also the ultimate humiliation.
But he had the memories, one above all others. The fisherman by the inland sea, that afternoon all those years ago. The promise Claudius had made him. Everything the fisherman had predicted had come to pass. Now forces beyond Claudius’ control were closing in on him. Claudius would not let him down.