facing the skeleton.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘But these aren’t gladiators’ helmets. They’re Roman legionary helmets, fairly high ranking by the look of it. Centurions, maybe cohort commanders. And they’ve seen some pretty brutal action.’ He reached over and carefully tipped back the nearest one, which had a deep dent across the top. It was heavier than he had expected, and it stuck to the timber. He pushed harder, and it gave way. He let it drop, and flinched in shock.
They were still in there.
Costas saw it too, and moaned. ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’
Jack looked closely along the row of helmets. They were all the same. Each one held a human skull, leering, several of them grotesquely smashed and splintered. The skulls were white, bleached, from heads that had been exposed and left to rot before they were placed inside the tomb. ‘Battle trophies,’ Jack murmured. ‘Collected from the field, or more likely the heads of executed prisoners, the highest-ranking Romans they captured.’ His mind was racing again. The warrior queen’s last battle. He remembered the accounts of Tacitus, Dio Cassius. Living trophies of war, brought with her for sacrifice at the most sacred place, consigned with her in eternal submission.
Then Jack saw them. Huge, shapeless forms emerging from the far side of the tomb, forms that seemed to struggle and rear out of the earth like the sculpted horses from the Athenian Parthenon, only these were real, the blackened skin and manes still stretched over the skulls, teeth bared and grimacing, caught for ever in the throes of death as they had their throats cut beside the body of their queen. It was a terrifying sight, even more so than the line of Roman skulls, and Jack began to feel unnerved again, aware that he and Costas did not belong in this place.
‘Time to go,’ Costas said, looking apprehensively at the bier. ‘I’m remembering that shrieking again. Your grandmother’s nightmare. Maybe there really is a banshee down here.’
Jack tore himself away from the image. ‘We haven’t found what we’re looking for. There has to be something more here.’ He slithered back towards the bier, and peered down at the skeleton and the array of weapons and armour. Costas took out his compass and aimed it down the bier. ‘It’s aligned exactly north-south,’ he said. ‘It points directly toward the arena of the amphitheatre.’
‘The amphitheatre was built later,’ Jack murmured. ‘If this is who I think it is, she was buried at least a decade before work on the amphitheatre was started.’
‘Maybe the Romans deliberately built the amphitheatre on a site they knew was sacred, this grove to Andraste,’ Costas murmured. ‘A way of stamping their authority on the natives after the revolt.’
‘And the perfect place to conceal a secret cult, right under the noses of your enemy,’ Jack said.
‘Have you seen the chariot axle?’ Costas said. ‘It’s lying under her shoulders. With the chariot pole aligned north-south under her body, it makes a cross.’
Jack grunted, only half listening. ‘In Iron Age chariot burials, the axle was usually placed below the feet.’ Suddenly he gasped, and reached out to the shield. ‘It was staring us right in the face. He placed it right over the shield boss.’
‘Who did?’
‘Someone who was here before us.’ Jack began to reach for the object, a metal cylinder. Then he paused, and drew his hand back.
‘You must be the only archaeologist who has trouble taking artefacts from burials, Jack.’
‘I couldn’t violate her grave.’
‘I’m with you there. I wouldn’t want to raise this lady from the dead. In this place, it’s not as if we have anywhere to run.’ Costas paused. ‘But if you’re right, this cylinder wasn’t part of the original grave goods. I’m willing to take the risk.’ He reached over and picked up the cylinder, then passed it to Jack. ‘There. Spell’s broken.’
Jack took the cylinder and held it carefully, rotating it slowly in his hands, staring at it. A chain dangled off a rivet on one side. The cylinder was made of sheet bronze, hammered at the join to form the tube, and one end had been crimped over a disc of bronze to form the base. On the bottom was a roundel of red enamel, and swirling around the cylinder were incised curvilinear decorations. Jack saw that the decoration was in the shape of a wolf, an abstract beast that wrapped itself round the cylinder until the snout was nearly touching the tail. ‘It’s British metalwork, no doubt about it. There’s a bronze cylinder just like this from a warrior grave in Yorkshire. And the wolf is another symbol of the Iceni, Boudica’s tribe, along with the horse.’
‘What about the lid?’ Costas said.
‘There’s a lot of corrosion, bronze disease,’ Jack replied, peering closely at the other end of the cylinder. ‘But it’s not crimped over like the base. There’s some kind of resinous material around the join, pretty cracked up.’ He pushed a finger cautiously against the crust of built-up corrosion on the top, then flinched as it broke off. ‘Thank God our conservators didn’t see me do that.’ He angled the cylinder so they could both see the surface. Around the edge were the remains of red enamel, from a roundel similar to the one on the base. But here the enamel seemed to have been crudely scraped back to the bronze, which had an incised decoration. The incision was angular, crude, unlike the flowing lines of the wolf on the side of the cylinder, more like scratched graffiti. Jack stared at it. He suddenly froze.
It was a name.
‘Bingo,’ Costas said.
The letters were large, shaky, the name curving round the top, the other word below, like an inscription on a coin: CLAVDIVS DEDIT
‘ “Claudius gave this”,’ Jack said, suddenly ecstatic. ‘Claudius did come here, where we are now, and he placed this in Boudica’s tomb.’ He held the cylinder with sudden reverence, looking at the name and then at the fractured join at the lid, hardly daring to think what might be inside.
‘How come Claudius has a British bronze cylinder?’ Costas asked.
‘Maybe he got it when he first came to Britain, during the conquest,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe Boudica herself gave it to him, and afterwards he used it to hide away his treasured manuscript, what we’re looking for. It might have been less obvious than one of those Egyptian stone jars from his library in Herculaneum.’
‘But the bronze cylinder would have fitted inside one of the smaller stone jars, like the one we found in Rome,’ Costas murmured. ‘Maybe there’s one of those lying around here too.’
‘If this bronze cylinder was inside a stone jar, then it’s been disturbed and opened by someone since Claudius came down here.’
‘Are we going to open it?’
Jack took a deep breath. ‘These aren’t exactly controlled laboratory conditions.’
‘I’ve heard that before.’
Jack looked back at the slurry of water where they had come into the tomb, slopping back and forth and distinctly brown in their torchlight. ‘I’m worried the seal on the lip of the cylinder might have decayed. If we take it back underwater, we might destroy what’s inside for ever. And I don’t want to risk going back to get a waterproof container. This whole place might be atomized.’
‘At any moment,’ Costas said, looking at the tail fin of the bomb rising above the water. ‘Right, let’s do it.’
Jack nodded, and put his hand over the lid. He shut his eyes, and silently mouthed a few words. Everything they had been striving for suddenly seemed to rest on this moment. He opened his eyes, and twisted the lid. It came away easily. Too easily. He tipped the cylinder towards his beam, and stared inside.
It was empty.
17
E arly the next morning, Jack sat in the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, beneath the great dome facing the high altar to the east. The cathedral had opened to the public only a few minutes before and was still almost empty, but Jack had chosen a row of seats well in from the central aisle of the nave where they would be less likely to be overheard. He glanced at his watch. He had arranged to meet Costas at nine o’clock, five minutes from now, and Jeremy would join them as soon as he could after arriving back from Oxford.
Jack and Costas had spent the night in IMU’s flat overlooking the river Thames, a place where Jack often
