The corrugated plastic roofing above the portico had been smashed open by volcanic fallout, allowing streams of rainwater to splash noisily onto the bare stone floor. A string of lights was already on, illuminating a passage into the hillside. Cesco could see a trail of footprints in the dust, all headed in, none coming back out. He followed them up a flight of steps onto a wooden walkway, then down a stone staircase to a low passage ankle-deep in alarmingly warm water and blocked by a fallen slab beneath which a pipe had been dug, and from which more water was bubbling. Two pairs of white overalls were neatly folded atop the slab, along with a pair of safety helmets. They could only be Carmen’s and Lucia’s. He felt sick with anxiety and began at once to strip. ‘Stay here,’ he told Izzo when he arrived behind him, breathing hard. ‘I’ll be five minutes. Ten at the most.’
‘But what if—’
‘Ten minutes,’ he said, trading his phone for Izzo’s torch. ‘Then get the fuck out of here. Your son will need you.’ He ducked his head, crawled into the pipe. More water was pouring in through an opening low down in its side. He could hold his breath for a good three minutes, he knew. That gave him ninety seconds before he had to turn back. He packed his lungs with air, then began the count as he pulled himself through the opening to find himself in a narrow long passage completely flooded with water, murky with sediment and crowded with ancient statues. No time to wonder, only to propel himself along. He’d only been at it for twenty seconds when some space opened up above him. He lifted his head for a fresh breath and shone his torch ahead. The passage cambered slowly upwards. He called out for Carmen and then Lucia. There was no reply. He swam onwards, first in a breaststroke and then, when headroom allowed, in a crawl. He reached a flight of steps. The water became shallow enough to wade. He splashed quickly through it, aware his ten minutes were running out fast, shouting for Carmen and Lucia as he went, dreading to think what their silence might mean.
Lucia added her torchlight to Carmen’s on the papyrus map, making it look like a stage being lit for a grand entrance. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What did drive Alberts mad?’
‘Tertullian,’ said Carmen. ‘More precisely, Marcion as recorded by Tertullian.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Your scroll. It doesn’t map perfectly onto the letters of St Paul in the Novum Testamentum Graece, does it?’
‘You wouldn’t expect it to,’ replied Lucia. ‘We’ve known for ever that St Paul’s letters were patched together and revised a little along the way.’
‘Yes. But that’s the point. The scroll does map perfectly onto the letters of St Paul in Marcion’s canon, as recorded by Tertullian. At least, I’m betting that it does. Alberts was already unnerved by your scroll, by its potential to undermine nearly two thousand years of Church teaching. That was why he was so desperate to stop the excavations, to prevent you from finding anything even worse. But then he read Tertullian yesterday morning and he realised it was already worse. Because your scroll proves Marcion right. Or not right exactly. It proves him honest. It shows that at least one letter included in his canon is effectively identical to one that existed in 79 CE, plausibly written by St Paul himself. Think of the implication. If that carries on, our current letters of St Paul will have to be thrown out and replaced by these earlier, more authentic Marcionite versions. And the thing is, we know exactly where study of those will lead us. We know because that’s what Marcion and his disciples did all those centuries ago. And it led them to reject the Old Testament and the Jewish God, even to deny Christ’s humanity. Three of the great pillars of Catholic teaching knocked down at a stroke.’
‘All this because Alberts looked a bit shell-shocked?’
‘You weren’t there, Lucia. You didn’t see him. He was stricken, as if everything he’d always believed had just been ripped from him and…’ She paused and frowned as she glimpsed something else, something beyond, though the implications were too huge to grasp at once. ‘What else do we know about Marcion?’ she asked rhetorically, thinking it through out loud. ‘We know that he set up a school of Christianity in Rome, the city at the heart not just of the Empire but of the new religion too. We also know that he used his family’s fleet of ships to track down and make copies of all the Christian texts they could find, not just in Italy but around the Mediterranean as well. Those texts formed the curriculum for his school and then became his canon. So how is it possible that there’s no Gospel of Mark in it, if Mark truly had been written in Rome, and had been in circulation for sixty years already? And where are Matthew, Luke and John? Surely the simplest explanation is that they didn’t yet exist. In the second quarter of the second century, Marcion’s gospel was all there was. And we know what it consisted of too, thanks to Tertullian. It was effectively St Luke stripped of the Nativity, the Resurrection and its references to Jewish scripture. If you start from there, everything suddenly gets flipped on its head. Marcion’s gospel is no longer a curious aside. It’s where the story of the synoptic gospels starts.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Think about it. Think what was happening in Judea at this exact time. The Romans had just annihilated Simon Bar Kokhba and his rebels. The Jewish people were being exiled from their homeland. A temple to Jupiter was being built upon their sacred mount. Think what that must have been like. Defeated, lost, landless, desperate for an explanation to salve the blow. And there was Christianity, ready and waiting. Founded by a Galilean Jew, shaped by Jewish scholars in line with Judaic scripture and principles. And it allowed them to believe they’d been right all along. Crucifixion wasn’t defeat. It was victory. Exile wasn’t punishment; it was a test. So there was a kind of merger to be had, one to suit both sides. Yet Marcion threatened it with his categorical rejection of Judaism and its sacred texts. So he had to be countered. It was too late by then to suppress his canon. It had caught fire already and was too widespread to ignore. So they doctored it instead. They tweaked his authentic letters of St Paul to fit better with their vision and made up others out of whole cloth. Then they went to work on his gospel too. Mark was the first attempt. Essentially it was the Gospel of Marcion rewritten with a very earthy Jesus, to counter claims that he hadn’t been human at all, but rather a spirit in human form. But that wasn’t enough, so Luke and Matthew took the gospels of Marcion and Mark respectively, then added nativities and resurrections and all those references to Jewish scriptures to make Jesus seem like their fulfilment rather than their repudiation. Then they did their very best to write Marcion and his gospel out of history altogether, leaving only the other three. And there you have it: the synoptic problem solved!’
‘That’s a mighty tall tower to build on such a small base,’ observed Lucia.
‘I’m not saying it’s true,’ countered Carmen. ‘I’m saying it’s what Alberts came to fear. He worked for the Holy Inquisition, remember. For an institution whose stated purpose is the defence of Catholic scripture. That’s why they sent him down here. Not to decipher your scroll but rather to protect the Church from it. Because it threatened to reveal that their sacred texts weren’t authentic records of Christ and St Paul but rather the mischievous hijacking of the new faith by people who corrupted the true canon assembled by Marcion, then vilified him as a child rapist in order to…’ She broke off at a distant noise. Not a man shouting so much as the faded echo of it, already gone before she was properly aware of it. She held up a finger. There it was again. And this time she even recognised his voice.
‘Cesco,’ she said.
It was a short but terrifying drive down to Herculaneum’s small port for Valentina and her two passengers. The already vile weather was turned hellish by a first pattering of volcanic fallout, small stones pinging their bodywork like sporadic gunfire. Then they reached it to find a scene of almost apocalyptic chaos, the roads almost completely blocked by cars abandoned with their doors and boots left wide open by occupants who’d lost their nerve at the eruption. She could see them now, hurrying towards the ferry’s boarding ramp as a few deckhands urged them on, while others prepared for departure. And there was no way on earth they could make it there in time, not with Mario and Isabella to think of.
She turned left instead of right, therefore, down to the town’s marina, separated from the port only by a grass strip and a tall wire fence. But its gates were closed and padlocked. ‘Hold tight,’ she said. She put her foot down and smashed into them, shattering the padlock and ripping the gates from their hinges. But almost at once there came a hideous clanking and the Renault began to lose power. She looked for a place to cross over into the port, but the fence went all the way to the sea. She wrenched the steering wheel round and drove straight at it, using the last of her momentum to knock it flat.
‘Out!’ she shouted at Isabella, even as she herself unstrapped Mario from his belt.
The last stragglers were being hustled aboard the ferry by deckhands in readiness to cast off. It was too far away. They’d never make it. Then she saw a supermarket trolley abandoned beside a sky-blue tarpaulin. She grabbed it and hoisted Isabella aboard, ignoring her indignant protests. She gave her Mario to hold, then set off pushing it across the concourse, building up a head of steam as she went, despite the trolley’s front left wheel hiccuping and steering her unwillingly towards the sea, forcing her to slow down every few paces to correct course.
Her breath began coming fast. Her legs were sacks of rice. The ferry’s horn gave a long, decisive blare. Deckhands threw off the mooring ropes. Her yell was drowned out by the rain and the ferry’s throbbing engines. But finally a crewman saw them and shouted to his mates. They beckoned her onwards. Forty metres. Thirty. Her legs were dying beneath her. She had nothing left. The ferry began to pull slowly away, its boarding ramp scraping concrete for a moment or two before it started to lift, turning itself back into the stern gate. Two deckhands lay prone upon it, shouting encouragement and urging her on. Ten metres now, five, her legs completely gone. She stumbled and went sprawling, giving the trolley a final push as she did so, aiming at the point midway between the two men, that they might grab an occupant each. But its treacherous wheel hiccuped at the wrong moment, twisting it to the left. One of the men reached down as it ran out of momentum. Isabella somehow found the strength to lift Mario up to him, timing it to perfection for the man to grab him by his arm and toss him almost disdainfully over his shoulder so that he rolled to safety down the ramp behind him. Then he reached back down to grab Isabella by her fingertips even as the shopping cart twirled slowly to a halt beneath him.
Valentina had by now regained her feet. Without the trolley to push, she found the strength to stagger onwards. The second deckhand reached down for her. She jumped and grabbed his hand, clinging desperately on as the ramp lifted higher, taking her with it, swinging her like a clapper against the rising bow doors, grabbing onto—
A yelp to her left. The other deckhand had lost his tenuous grip on Isabella. She fell backward onto the dock wall, smacking her head on the concrete so hard that it cut short her shriek, leaving her lying there unconscious. Valentina cried out and made to jump back down, but her own deckhand wasn’t having it. He hauled her over and in and they went tumbling together down the other side, crashing into the floor below, winded by their landing; and she glimpsed through the closing gap that they were already a startling distance from the dock and moving briskly further away, leaving Isabella unconscious and alone. And then there was nothing she could do for her any more.
There was nothing she could do.