David Gibbins - The Last Gospel

‘Cool shades, by the way,’ Jack said.

‘Jeremy gave them to me,’ Costas gasped. ‘A parting present when we got back from the Yucatan. I was truly moved.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’m not sure if he was. Anyway, they work.’ Costas passed back the bottle, then slumped down again. ‘Been touching base with your past?’

‘Only the good bits.’

‘Any decent engineers? I mean, on your team back then?’

‘We’re talking Cambridge University, remember. The brightest and the weirdest. One guy took a portable blackboard with him everywhere he went, and would patiently explain the Wankel rotary engine to any passing Sicilian. A real eccentric. But that was before you came along.’

‘With a dose of good old American know-how. At least at MIT they taught us about the real world.’ Costas leaned over, grabbed the bottle again and took another swig of water. ‘Anyway, this shipwreck of yours. The one you excavated here twenty years ago. Any good finds?’

‘It was a typical Roman merchantman,’ Jack replied. ‘About two hundred cylindrical pottery amphoras, filled with olive oil and fish sauce on the edge of the African desert, in Tunisia due south of us. Plus there was a fascinating selection of ceramics from the ship’s galley. We were able to date it all to about AD 200. And we did make one incredible find.’

There was a silence, broken by a stentorian snore. Jack kicked again, and Costas reached out to stop himself from rolling overboard. He pushed his shades up his forehead and peered blearily at Jack. ‘Uh huh?’

‘I know you need your beauty sleep. But it’s almost time.’

Costas grunted again, then raised himself painfully on one elbow and rubbed his hand across his stubble. ‘I don’t think beauty’s an option.’ He heaved himself upright, then took off the sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Jack peered with concern at his friend. ‘You look wasted. You need to take some time off. You’ve been working flat out since we returned from the Yucatan, and that was well over a month ago.’

‘You should stop buying me toys.’

‘What I bought you,’ Jack gently admonished him, ‘was an agreement from the board of directors for an increase in engineering personnel. Hire some more staff. Delegate.’

‘You should talk,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Name me one archaeological project run by IMU over the last decade where you haven’t jumped on board.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Costas stretched and gave a tired grin. ‘Okay, a week by my uncle’s pool in Greece wouldn’t go amiss. Anyway, sorry. Was I dreaming? You mentioned an incredible find.’

‘Buried in a gully directly beneath us now, where Pete and Andy should have anchored the shotline. The remains of an ancient wooden crate, containing sealed tin boxes. Inside the boxes we found more than a hundred small wooden phials, filled with unguents and powders including cinnamon and cumin. That was amazing enough, but then we found a large slab of dark resinous material, about two kilograms in weight. At first we thought it was ship’s stores, spare resin for waterproofing timbers. But the lab analysis came up with an astonishing result.’

‘Go on.’

‘What the ancients called lacrymae papaveris, tears of the poppy, Papaver somniferum. The sticky, milky stuff that comes from the calyx of the black poppy. What we call opium.’

‘No kidding.’

‘The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes about it, in his Natural History.’

‘The guy who died in the eruption of Vesuvius?’

‘Right. When Pliny wasn’t writing, he was in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum, the big naval base on the Bay of Naples. He knew all about the products of the east from his sailors, and from Egyptian and Syrian merchants who put in there. They knew that the best opium came from the distant land of Bactria, high in the mountains beyond the eastern fringe of the empire, beyond Persia. That’s present-day Afghanistan.’

‘You’re kidding me.’ Costas was fully alert now, and looked incredulous. ‘Opium. From Afghanistan. Did I hear you right? We’re talking the first century AD here, not the twenty-first century, right?’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘An ancient drug-runner?’

Jack laughed. ‘Opium wasn’t illegal back then. Some ancient authorities condemned it for making users go blind, but they hadn’t refined it into heroin yet. It was probably mixed with alcohol to make a drink, similar to laudanum, the fashion drug of Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seed was also pounded into tablets. Pliny tells us it could induce sleep and cure headaches, so they knew all about the pain-killing properties of morphine. It was also used for euthanasia. Pliny gives us what may be the first ever account of a deliberate Class A drugs overdose, a guy called Publius Licinius Caecina who was unbearably ill and died of opium poisoning.’

‘So what you found was really a medicine chest,’ Costas said.

‘That’s what we thought at the time. But a very odd find in the chest was a small bronze statue of Apollo.’

‘Apollo?’

Jack nodded. ‘I know. When you find medical equipment it’s more commonly with a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. A few years later I visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, on the edge of the active volcanic zone a few miles north of Misenum, within sight of Vesuvius. Apollo was the god of oracles. Sulphur and herbs were used to ward off evil spirits and maybe opium was added to it. I began to wonder whether all those mystical rites were chemically assisted.’

‘It could have been smoked,’ Costas murmured. ‘Burned like incense. The fumes would have been quicker than a draught.’

‘People went to those places seeking cures, to the Sibyl and other prophets,’ Jack said. ‘Organized religion at the time didn’t provide much personal comfort, often excluding the common people and fixated on cults and rituals that were pretty remote from daily concerns. The Sibyl and her kind provided some kind of emotional reassurance, psychological relief. And the Sibyls must have known it, and played on it. All we hear about from ancient accounts is the message of the oracle, obscure verses written on leaves or issued as prophetic pronouncements, all sound and fury and signifying God knows what. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe some people really did find a cure of sorts, a palliative.’

‘And a highly addictive one. It could have kept the Sibyl in business. Cash offerings from grateful clients would have kept the supply rolling.’

‘So I began to think our little ship wasn’t carrying an apothecary or doctor, but a middleman travelling with his precious supply of opium for one of the oracles in Italy, maybe even procured for the Sibyl at Cumae herself.’

‘A Roman drug-dealer.’ Costas rubbed his stubble. ‘The godfather of all godfathers. The Naples Mafia would love it.’

‘Maybe if they found out, it would teach them a little respect for archaeology,’ Jack said. ‘Organized crime is a huge problem for our friends in the Naples archaeological superintendency.’

‘Doesn’t one of your old girlfriends work there?’ Costas grinned.

‘Elizabeth hasn’t been in contact with me for years. Last I heard she was still an inspector, pretty low down on the food chain. I never really worked out what happened. She finished her doctorate in England before I did and then had to go back, part of her contract with the Italian government. She swore to me that she’d never return to Naples, but then it happened and she completely shut down communication with me. I suppose I moved on too. That was almost fifteen years ago.’

‘Ours is not to reason why, Jack.’ Costas shifted. ‘Back to the opium. Procured from where?’