‘The cylinder was airtight,’ Jack breathed. ‘Thank God for that.’ He reached in and held the edge of the scroll between two fingers, gently feeling it. ‘It’s still supple. There’s some kind of preservative on it, a waxy material.’
‘Clever old Claudius,’ Maria murmured.
‘Clever old Pliny, you mean,’ Jeremy said. ‘I bet that’s who Claudius learned it from.’
They were silent, and all Jack could hear was a distant knocking sound, and a faint whisper of breeze from the west. He held his breath. He drew out the scroll, and put the cylinder on his lap. There was no writing to be seen, just the brown surface of the papyrus. He held the scroll up so it was caught in the remaining sunlight that shone over the hills behind them. Carefully, without a word, he unrolled a few centimetres, peering closely at the surface as it was revealed.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he murmured.
‘Got something?’ Costas said.
‘Look at the cross-layering, where the strips of papyrus have been laid. You can see it where the light shines through. This is first-grade paper, exactly the same as the papyrus sheet we found on Claudius’ desk in Herculaneum. And there it is.’ His voice was hushed. ‘I can see it.’
‘What?’
‘Writing. There. Look.’ Jack slowly unrolled the papyrus. First one line was revealed, then another. He unravelled the entire scroll, and they could see about twenty lines. Jack’s heart was racing. The ink was black, almost jet-black, sealed in by the preservative wax. The writing was continuous, without word breaks or punctuation, in the ancient fashion. ‘It’s Greek,’ he whispered. ‘It’s written in Greek.’
‘There’s a cross beside the first word,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘You see that in medieval religious manuscripts too.’
‘There’s some scrubbed-out writing underneath it, older writing,’ Costas said, squinting at the paper from behind Jack. ‘Just the first few lines. You can barely make it out, but it looks like a different hand, a different script.’
‘Probably some older writing by Claudius,’ Jack murmured. ‘If so, it’d be in Latin. Maybe something he’d started then erased, notes he’d made on the journey out to Judaea. That’d be fascinating. We don’t have anything yet in Claudius’ own handwriting.’
‘Mass spectrometry,’ Costas said. ‘That’d sort it out. Hard science.’
Jack was not listening. He had read the first lines of the visible text, the lines that overlaid the scrubbed-out words. He felt light headed, and the scroll seemed to waver in his hands, whether from his own extraordinary emotion or from a waft of breeze he could not tell. He let his hands slowly drop, and held the scroll open over his knees. He turned to Helena. ‘ Kyriakon,’ he said. ‘Am I correct in using the literal translation, House of the Lord?’
Helena nodded. ‘It could mean congregation as a whole, Church in the broad sense.’
‘And naos? The Greek word for temple?’
‘Probably used to mean church as a physical entity, as a structure.’
‘Are you ready for this?’
‘If these are his words, Jack, then I have nothing to fear.’
‘No, you do not.’ Jack paused, and for an extraordinary moment he felt as if he were looking down from a great height, not at their gathering on the mudflat but at a pinprick of light on a vast sea, on two shadowy forms hunched across from each other in a little boat, barely discernible in the darkness. He closed his eyes, then looked at the scroll and began to translate.
‘ “Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, these are his words…” ’
Epilogue
The eager young man in the white tunic stopped, and sniffed the breeze. He had never been to the east before, and the sights and smells of the last few days had been strange, startling. But now the breeze that wafted over the hills from the west came from the Mediterranean Sea, bringing with it the familiar smell of salt and herbs and faint decay, a smell which had been purged the day before by a sharp wind from the heights of Gaulantis on the opposite shore. He looked again, shielding his eyes against the glare. The mudflats extended far out to the edge of the lake, a wide shimmering foreshore where the water had evaporated in the long dry summer. The distant surface of the lake was glassy smooth, like a mirror. On the edge he spied a wavering shape, a fishing boat perhaps, with movement around it. He listened, and heard the far-off screech of a gull, then a tinkering sound, a distant knocking like rainwater dripping off a roof. It was becoming hot, suddenly too hot to keep up the pace he had set for himself. He turned towards the mountain they called Arbel, raised his face and yearned for that breeze again, for the cool air from the west to waft over and envelop him.
‘Claudius!’ It was a girl’s voice. ‘Slow down! You need water.’
He turned awkwardly, dragging his bad leg behind him, and waited for his companions to catch up. It was only ten days since they had landed at Caesarea on the coast, and five days since they had set off from Jerusalem, up the valley of the river Jordan to the inland sea they called Gennesareth, in the land of Galilee. They had spent the night in the new town of Tiberias, built by Herod’s uncle Antipas and named after Claudius’ own uncle Tiberius, emperor in Rome now for almost ten years. Claudius had been astonished to find images of Tiberius everywhere in Judaea, in temples and statues and on coins, as if the living emperor were already worshipped as a god. It seemed to Claudius that he could never escape them, his benighted family, but that morning as they had walked away from the bustle of construction in the town he had felt an extraordinary contentment, a sense of liberation in the simplicity of the coastal flats and the shimmering shore of the lake with the hills of Gaulantis beyond.
Afterwards, after this day, they planned to go over those hills to Antioch, to give offerings at the place where his beloved brother Germanicus had been poisoned four years before. Claudius still felt the pain, the stab of anguish in the pit of his stomach. He tried to push it away, and turned to watch as those dearest to him came up the dusty road from the south. His beloved Calpurnia, with her flaming red hair and freckled skin, not yet out of her teens but as sensuous a woman as he had ever beheld. She was wearing the red of her profession, the oldest one, but now only out of habit, not necessity. And beside her Cypros, wife of Herod, veiled and bejewelled as befitted a princess of Arabia, gliding along like a goddess beside her wild-haired companion. And striding behind them was Herod himself, black bearded, his long hair braided like an ancient king of Assyria, his cloak hemmed with real Tyrean purple, his big, booming voice regaling them with songs and bawdy jokes all the way. Herod always seemed larger than life, always the centre of attention, yet he was Claudius’ oldest and dearest companion, the only one among all the boys in the palace who had befriended him, who had seen past the stutter and the awkwardness and the withered limb.
Claudius took the skin of water offered to him by Calpurnia, and drained it. Herod pointed towards the distant speckle of movement on the shoreline, and they left the road and began to pick their way across the mudflats. Claudius had seen the tower of Migdal, the next town along the coast in a hollow in the hills, but now it was lost in the haze that rose up and obscured the shoreline like a shimmering veil. Then the sun broke through and reflected off a myriad shallow pools across the flats. To Claudius the view seemed to fragment, like a shattering pane of glass, the sunlight reflecting blindingly off each pool, and then regain its whole again in the haze. A hint of a rainbow hung in the air, a suspension of colour that never quite materialized, that stayed just beyond reality. Soon all he could see was the movement around the boat ahead of them, and even that seemed to waver and recede as they walked further on. Claudius wondered if it was real after all, or a mere trick of the eye, like one of the phantasms that Herod said he had seen in the desert, a reflection of some distant, unattainable reality.