another boulder from the top of the pile. As it fell away he stared in disbelief at the rock behind it.
“Angela,” he called, his voice slightly strained.
“What?”
“Forget the water,” he said, “but bring the camera right away. We’ve found it.”
Carved into the rock directly behind the boulder he’d just moved were three capital letters, protected from weathering by the stones that had covered them for centuries, and as clear and crisp as the day they were carved. “H•V•L.”
“
In the ten minutes that followed he shifted all the boulders except for three large rocks at the base that were simply too big for him to move without using the Toyota to drag them, and he’d probably need a chain or steel cable to do so. Behind them, a flat and almost circular stone, clearly worked and with chisel marks still visible, rested against the rock face. Around its edge a kind of mortar had been used in an attempt to seal the gap.
“This is just amazing,” Angela breathed. “It looks as if Jeremy got it wrong. Nobody would go to all this trouble just to hide a few books. This looks more like a tomb.”
“They even tried to seal the entrance,” Bronson said.
“That was probably as a precaution against scavengers, just in case Nero needed to retrieve the bodies he’d buried. He wouldn’t have wanted to dig them up again only to find foxes or other animals had eaten the remains.”
“And why the hell would he have needed to recover a corpse?”
“Oh, several reasons,” Angela said. “The most obvious was a form of legalized robbery.”
“You could rob a dead man?” Bronson asked, using a hammer and chisel to shift the sealing mortar from around the edge of the rock.
“It was rather more subtle than that. In the past, several crimes, notably treason and witchcraft, carried more severe penalties than just death. If an individual was found guilty, their entire assets could be seized by the king. There are quite a few recorded cases where corpses were dug up, dressed in fresh clothes and sat down in a courtroom to be tried for crimes like these, just because the reigning monarch wanted their lands. And, for obvious reasons, the accused couldn’t speak in his own defense, so the verdict was usually a foregone conclusion.”
“Bizarre.”
“That’s one word for it. How are you doing?”
“I’ve shifted the mortar,” Bronson said, “so now I should be able to move it.”
He slid the point of the crowbar behind the top of the stone and levered upward.
There was a cracking sound and the top of the flattened rock moved an inch or two away from the face of the cliff.
“That’s broken the seal,” Bronson said, “but I’m going to have to use the Toyota to move it out of the way. It’s too heavy for me to shift by myself.”
He walked over to the Toyota and returned in a few moments with the heavy-duty towrope. He used the crowbar to lever the rock farther away from the cliff, so that he could drop the rope down behind it, secured the clip and then attached the other end to the towing hitch of the jeep.
“Keep well clear,” he instructed Angela, “in case the rope snaps. In fact, you’d better get in the car with me.”
He started the Toyota and moved it slowly forward until he’d taken up the slack in the rope, then began increasing the tension steadily. For a few seconds nothing happened, except that the noise of the Toyota’s big diesel rose to a roar, and then the vehicle lurched forward.
“That should have done it,” Bronson said. He turned off the engine and climbed out.
But when they looked behind the jeep, it was immediately obvious that it hadn’t.
The towrope had snapped cleanly in two just behind the tow hitch, and when they walked back to the rock face they saw that the round stone had barely moved.
“Shit. I should have brought a steel cable. I don’t see how we’re going to shift that.”
“Maybe we should have rented a Toyota fitted with a winch,” Angela said, staring at the stone. “Hang on a second, Marcellus wouldn’t have had steel cables and turbo-charged diesels up here, would he? But he would still have had to be able to get back inside the tomb.”
“Yes, presumably. So what?”
“So that’s why the sealing stone is round. You’ve been trying to drag it away bodily.
We should be able to roll it sideways.”
“Genius,” Bronson said. He crouched down at the side of the stone and began clearing away the earth and debris. Then he stood back.
“Bingo,” he said. “There’s a kind of channel cut in the rock here, like a track for the stone to roll along.”
Bronson climbed over the rocks, to the other side of the stone, rammed the crowbar down at its base and levered. With surprising ease, the stone moved slightly, rolling an inch or two down the channel.
“Keep going,” Angela urged.
Bronson heaved again and the stone rolled about a yard, so that they could both see exactly what lay behind it. Now visible was the entrance to a small cave, the opening too smooth and regular to be natural. Though they’d successfully removed the sealing stone, the three large rocks still partially obstructed the entrance.
“You can’t move those big boulders,” Angela stated.
“Not easily, and maybe not at all,” Bronson agreed, “but I reckon I can crawl in through the gap.”
“Suppose the roof caves in when you get inside?”
“Angela, that cave’s stood here for the last two thousand years without collapsing, so as long as it can hold itself together for another ten minutes I should be fine.”
“Well, just be careful.”
“I’m always careful. Now pass me the flashlight and the camera, please.”
Bronson slid the camera into his pocket and shone the flashlight inside the opening.
“Can you see anything?” Angela asked.
“Not much. I’ll have to get right inside.”
Bronson lay flat on his stomach, held the flashlight out in front of him, and crawled slowly inside the cave.
II
The small cavern was around ten feet long, seven feet wide with a curved roof about four feet in height at the center, tapering to a little more than half that at the sides.
Bronson crouched down and looked around him, the beam of the flashlight dancing over the rough-hewn stone walls and the dusty floor.
It was immediately clear that Angela was right: the “liars” weren’t books or documents. Lying along each side of the cave were two skeletons, both of them obviously very old and tremendously fragile. Tiny scraps of coarsely woven cloth still clung to some of the bones. The skull of one skeleton was lying about a foot from the neck vertebrae.
“What is it?” Angela called.
“Hang on,” Bronson said, for a moment hardly trusting himself to speak. He was overwhelmed by an incredible sense of age, of time standing still. He reached out and touched the chisel marks on the stone walls. They were as sharp and clear as if they’d been made yesterday, though he knew the mason had died two thousand years earlier.
He sniffed the air. Faintly reminiscent of a church or cathedral, the cave had a dry, musty smell, overlaid with a faint hint of mushrooms. Really, really old mushrooms.
And then he looked down at the two pathetic piles of bones, feeling the hairs begin to rise on the back of his neck.
“There are two skeletons in here,” he called, looking carefully at the detached skull.
“Just dust and bones, and really old. But I don’t think either of them died of old age.”
“You mean they were murdered? How can you tell?”
“Hang on while I take some pictures. I daren’t touch them—they’d probably crumble away to nothing if I did.”
Bronson placed the flashlight on a rock so that its beam shone down the long axis of the cave and began to
