‘Not exactly.’ Hiebermeyer’s glasses had slipped down his nose, and he pushed them up with the same finger, leaving a dark streak between his eyes. He looked at Costas, beaming with excitement. ‘When the inferno hit this place, the scrolls must have instantly carbonized, but there must have been something in them, a resinous preservative material, that caused the carbonized mass to form the cast around the body. That sealed off the flesh from oxygen, so it couldn’t incinerate. Instead, it cooked.’
‘Cooked alive,’ Maria said.
‘He means, this guy melted,’ Jack added, peering at Costas.
‘Oh no.’ Costas swayed back against the opposite wall of the tunnel. ‘And you put your finger into it.’
Hiebermeyer held up his finger again, and peered at it with some reverence. ‘It’s fantastic. Probably some brain in that. Should be perfect for DNA analysis.’
Maria had edged back to where the man’s feet had been, looking closely, and then sidled up to Hiebermeyer and peered into the ribcage. ‘Look! He’s wearing a gold ring!’ she exclaimed. Hiebermeyer followed her gaze, tracing the finger bones which were contorted under the ribcage as if the man had been clutching at his chest in his death throes. He took out a mini Maglite, and put his face right up to the bones. ‘It’s a signet ring, for impressing into wax sealings on documents. It’s partly melted into the bone, but I can see the design. It’s an eagle impression.’
‘An imperial signet ring,’ Jack said. ‘This guy must have been in the service of the emperor.’
‘I’m not sure if this was a guy, exactly,’ Hiebermeyer murmured, kneeling up with his hands on his hips. ‘There’s something odd about this skeleton. Distinctly odd. Rounding of the face, areas of bone structure you’d expect to be more developed in a male, unusual widening of the pelvic area. It’s not a woman, exactly, but it’s not far off. Very odd.’
‘Didn’t they have eunuchs?’ Costas said.
‘An interesting thought,’ Jack murmured. He stared at the skeleton, thinking hard. In the early fourth century AD, the emperor Constantine the Great surrounded himself with eunuchs, and so did the later Byzantine emperors. Eunuchs were thought to be a safer bet as secretaries and state officials, less likely to be hard driven and ambitious. Earlier emperors had them, too. He looked up. ‘Some scholars think that Claudius’ freedman Narcissus was a eunuch.’ He paused for a moment, then spoke again, almost to himself. ‘But it couldn’t be. Narcissus was murdered when Claudius was poisoned, in AD 54. That’s a quarter of a century before Vesuvius erupted. There would have been other eunuchs around. This whole area attracted oddities, freaks who came here for the amusement of the wealthy, as well as cripples and other unfortunates who sought cures in the sulphur vents of the Phlegraean Fields. That’s the other side of life here in the Roman period, not exactly the tourist image.’
‘Whoever and whatever this was, he may have ended up as an imperial freedman, but he certainly started off life as a slave.’ Hiebermeyer had shifted to the feet end of the skeleton, and then came back up beside the extractor fan just inside the entranceway ahead of them. ‘His ankles have the characteristic contusions caused by shackles, healed over years before. I think he was an old man when he died, very old for this period, maybe in his eighties or even his nineties. But he’d had a pretty rough time of it a long time before, as a boy.’
‘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.
