a plinth. In front of it was a circular depression in the floor about three metres wide, surrounded by a rock-cut rim and filled with a dark mass, what looked like a black resinous material sealed under calcite accretion. Jack stared at it, and then at the decayed figure behind it. ‘Of course,’ he whispered.
‘What is it?’
‘That statue, it looks as if it might once have been female,’ he said. ‘A seated woman. A cult statue. And this is a hearth, a sacred hearth.’ He was suddenly elated. ‘That’s why the shrines of Vesta in the forum and on the Palatine were never inaugurated, never made into temples. It’s because they were outliers, just the public face of the cult. This chamber was the real Temple of Vesta.’
‘Jack, the statue. It’s got an inscription.’
Jack stepped around the hearth and followed Costas’ beam. At the base of the statue was a thin slab of marble veneer, about thirty centimetres across. Jack squatted down and peered at it. ‘Odd,’ he said. ‘It’s not a dedicatory inscription, not part of the plinth. It’s propped up here loose, or at least was until the calcite glued it in place.’ He bent down as far as he could, then got down on the floor. The Latin was clear in his beam, and he read it out: COELIA CONCORDIA
VESTALIS MAXIMA
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Coelia Concordia, Chief Vestal, AD 394. She was the last one, and that was the year the cult was abandoned. Odd that they used Anno Domini, though. Year of Our Lord. The Empire had been Christian for almost a century by that date, but you’d have thought the Vestals would have resisted Christianity to the end. It’s what sidelined them, along with the other pagan cults of Rome.’
Costas was silent, and Jack peered at him. ‘You still with me?’
‘Jack, this is no statue.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jack struggled to his feet, then slipped on the floor and fell into the statue, holding it close. He winced, and drew back, leaning for a moment while he flexed the knee that had hit the floor, staring at the decayed shape inches from his face. He suddenly froze. It was not limestone at all. It was calcite accretion, a weird, shapeless stalagmite that rose more than a metre from the floor, encasing a stone seat. He looked again at what had startled him. It was a sculpted stone serpent, green, writhing up the back of the chair, staring out at him through a diaphanous mask of accretion.
‘Not that, Jack. Over here. Inside.’
Jack moved a step to the left and followed Costas’ beam. Then he saw it, trapped inside the calcium, lolling off to one side.
A human skull.
He gasped, stepped back, then stared again. There was more. A sternum, ribs, shoulder blades. Costas was right. The statue was no statue at all. It was a skeleton, a human skeleton. Small, almost childlike, but with the jaw of someone old, very old, the teeth all missing. Then Jack saw something else. She wore a necklace, a neck torque, solid gold, an extraordinary sight in the heart of Rome, some ancient booty perhaps from the Celtic world. And above the skull encased in the accretion were sparkling fragments of gold leaf and jewels from an elaborate hairdo, the coiffure of a wealthy Roman woman, a matron.
Then Jack realized. She had come here to die. Coelia Concordia, the last of the Vestals. But a Vestal wreathed in serpents. Not just a Vestal. A Sibyl.
Jack’s mind was in a tumult. So the cult of the Sibyl had not come to an end with the eruption of Vesuvius after all. She had come back here, back to her cave under Rome, to another entrance to Hades. And the oracle had survived, lived on for more than three centuries after Claudius met his end, after the old world of the Cumaean Sibyl had been consumed by fire. This Sibyl had seen out Rome, seen Rome rise and fall to the end, seen out the pagan world and ushered in a new order, one whose beginnings she had watched all those years before, among the outcasts near her cave beside the Fields of Fire.
‘Jack, take a look at her hand.’
Jack peered down, barely able to breathe. He looked again. So that was what had happened to the Sibyls. They had become what they had foreseen. They had fulfilled their own prophecy. She was holding a crude metal forging, two iron spikes joined at right angles. A cross of nails.
Suddenly there was a flash of light, a momentary surge. For a second Jack thought he might be hallucinating. Then he was dragged violently sideways, to the edge of the chamber, down to the floor. A hand slammed the side of his helmet and his light went off. He was in total darkness. The hold relaxed, and Costas came over the intercom, his voice tense. ‘Sorry about that, Jack. But there’s someone else down here.’
13
F or a few moments they remained on the floor of the chamber, in utter darkness. Their intercom was virtually inaudible with the external speaker deactivated, though they instinctively talked in low voices. ‘Jack, I thought you said nothing else would be living in here.’ Costas moved to the edge of the chamber, and peered along the line of the dromos tunnel towards the cave at the other end. Jack crawled up behind him. Their headlamps were still switched off, but they had activated the night-vision goggles inside their e-suit helmets. There was just enough natural light for the sensors to work, not enough to be discernible to the naked eye but enough for Jack to make out Costas’ form in front of him, speckly and green, an eerie apparition that seemed to be constantly forming and re- forming with every movement. It made sense that there would be light coming from cracks and fissures leading outside, where the archeologists’ probe had reached into the cave somewhere ahead of them.
‘You’re sure it was a torch?’
‘Positive. I was looking in the opposite direction, while you were communing with our dead lady. One look at that thing was enough for me. Then I saw the beam. It flashed out from somewhere on the left side of the cave.’
‘That’s where the other tunnel, the one from the House of the Vestals, should enter,’ Jack whispered. ‘But God knows how they got in.’
‘If we could do it, someone else could.’
‘Massimo’s map showed entrances into the Cloaca in the Forum of Nerva and under the Colosseum,’ Jack said. ‘His guys were turned back by a flooded culvert, didn’t have the right equipment. Someone with the right gear could have found a way, but not one of his people. He’d have told us.’
‘Is this a coincidence?’
Jack paused, then stared into the darkness. ‘There’s something that’s been on my mind since yesterday. It wasn’t going to stop us coming to where we are now, and I was waiting to speak to her more, on the phone. You remember Elizabeth at Herculaneum, the superintendency official? My old friend?’
‘What’s she got to do with this?’
‘She caught up with me for a few moments yesterday in Herculaneum before we left the villa.’
‘Maria and I noticed.’
‘She was taking a big risk, with the guards around. Maurice had already warned us about how somebody seemed to be sitting on the superintendency people, keeping them from talking. She wanted to tell me something. About what we’re up against. An organization as deeply rooted in the history of Rome as you can imagine, that goes right back to the time of St Paul. An organization that knew the villa concealed a threat to their very existence, something they had hoped lost for ever in the eruption of AD 79. Elizabeth was whispering, and I didn’t have time to question her. She said they will do anything in their power to keep this threat at bay.’
‘You think we’re being followed?’
‘If it’s who I fear it is, they’ll have tentacles everywhere. And if they know we’re in here, they must assume we’re on to something. And if they somehow have an idea what it is we’re after, it’s a prize they’d die for.’
