been staring at the man and the woman walking off in the distance by the shoreline.
‘Did you know Mark Twain was here?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Come again?’ Costas said, turning to him.
‘Mark Twain, the writer. In 1867, one of the first American tourists in the Holy Land.’
‘I memorized his words,’ Helena said. ‘I read them last time I was here, and they made a real impression on me. “Night is the time to see Galilee, when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings.”’
‘There were others like him,’ Jack said, clearing his throat and taking a deep breath. He was still reeling from Jeremy’s news, and had been unable to suppress the bleakness he felt about Elizabeth’s disappearance, a feeling of culpability he knew was irrational. What had happened to her had been set in train the day she was born. He had seen it in her eyes when they were together all those years ago, only he had seen it then as something else. And yet, as he had watched the shoreline, the boats on the horizon, he had suddenly felt the weight lifted from him, a sense of peace he had never known before. Part of him seemed to accept Jeremy’s news as if he had known it all along. He wiped his hand over his eyes, then looked at Costas, who had been watching him closely. He clutched the slip of paper from Jeremy tight in his hand. In the face of despair, there was huge yearning, and an overwhelming responsibility. And he still had to hope that Elizabeth was alive after all, that they had stopped Ritter and his henchmen in time.
‘There were others who believed the stories in the Bible were not just allegory and fable,’ Jack said. ‘It was the time when archaeology came of age, when Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans proved the reality of the Trojan Wars and the Greek Bronze Age. Ten years after Mark Twain, Lieutenant Horatio Kitchener, Royal Engineers, cut his teeth in Galilee with the Survey of Palestine, before becoming Britain’s greatest war leader. And then T. E. Lawrence came here studying Crusader castles, before returning as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the Arab legion over those hills towards Damascus. Great movements of history sweep past this place, and the biggest fracture line between the eastern and western worlds runs through here along the Jordan valley. But Galilee has so often been an eddy pool of history, a place where the individual can stand out.’
‘People who came here with the future ahead of them, on the cusp of greatness,’ Maria murmured.
Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small snap-lid box. He opened it and took out two coins. He held them up, one in each hand, letting the fading sunlight catch the portraits, the features accentuated by shadow as he slowly moved them from side to side.
‘It looks to me as if you’ve been borrowing again, Jack,’ Costas said quietly, still peering intently at his friend. ‘It’s a slippery slope to becoming a treasure-hunter, you know. I always wondered when you’d cross the line.’
Jack flashed him a smile, but kept silent, staring at the faces on the coins. He had needed to view them one last time, to reach out and touch them before opening up his bag and revealing what they had all come here to see. The coin on the left was a tetradrachm of Herod Agrippa, the one that Helena and Yereva had found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The portrait was worn, but it showed a thick-set, bullish face, the image of a fighter more than a thinker, but with large, sensitive eyes. It was idealized in the eastern tradition, a Hercules or an Alexander more than Herod Agrippa. He wore a laurel diadem, normally only seen on coins of Roman emperors. The man on the other coin was wearing a diadem too, but this time rightly so. It was the sestertius of Claudius they had found in Herculaneum. Jack saw Claudius as he had imagined him sitting at his table in the villa, working with Narcissus and Pliny on his history of Britain, then standing before the tomb under London. He saw the full head of hair, the high forehead, the eyes set back and thoughtful, the pursed mouth. Not Claudius the cripple, not Claudius the fool, but Claudius the emperor at the height of his powers, an emperor who built aqueducts and harbours and brought the Roman world back from the brink of catastrophe, paving the way for the Christian west in centuries to come. Both coins showed men who had reached the pinnacle of their lives, a future they could scarcely have foreseen that day in AD 23 when they came here together as young men, beside the Sea of Galilee. Herod Agrippa, prince of the East. Claudius the god.
‘I wonder if they sensed the darkness ahead,’ Helena murmured.
‘What do you mean?’ Costas said.
Jack put away the coins, slipped the box back into his pocket, and then took out a swaddled package from his bag. The others watched him intently. ‘Herod Agrippa came from one of the most volatile dynasties of the east, and had grown up in Rome,’ he said. ‘He knew all about the fickle nature of power. Claudius was intimate with that too, and was also a historian. Even as early as AD 23 he would have seen the seeds of decay in the reign of Tiberius. And the one they met here, the fisherman from Nazareth, may have lived his life in Galilee away from the momentous events of history, but he may have known what lay ahead. When Claudius made his final visit to Britain to hide his treasure, he was doing it to last beyond Rome. And when Everett came to Jerusalem in 1917, he was doing the same. His world was one of terrible darkness, closer to apocalypse than Claudius could ever have imagined. And both men knew how the fickle winds of history might snatch away their prize.’
Jack removed the bubblewrap from the object in his hands and revealed a small stone cylinder. There was a murmur of excitement from the others, and both Helena and Morgan held their hands together as if in prayer. Jack held the cylinder out for Helena. ‘Will you break the seal?’
Helena made the sign of the cross and took the cylinder from Jack’s hands. Slowly, carefully, she twisted the lid. It came away easily, breaking the blackened resinous material that had sealed the join. She handed it back to Jack, who finished removing the lid. The others crowded round, Maria and Jeremy kneeling in front and Costas and Morgan peering over Jack’s shoulder. There was another gasp as they saw what was inside. It was a scroll, brown with age but apparently intact, still wound round a wooden rod.
‘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
