‘Go on.’
Jack took a deep breath. ‘Okay. In the Iliad, Achilles lends Patroclus his armour, but then Hector kills Patroclus and strips it off him as a trophy. So Achilles’ mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, goes to Hephaestos, god of the forge, and has him fashion new armour for Achilles. The centrepiece was a magnificent shield, covered with images. Homer devotes almost two hundred lines to it. It’s the first time in literature that an object is described in that way, as a work of art. The shield beguiled later classical authors, from Hesiod to Virgil, as well as modern writers. W.H. Auden wrote a poem about it.’
Costas cleared his throat. ‘You mean this? Auden’s talking about the images Hephaestus is creating on the shield, watched by Thetis. Instead of beautiful cities and flourishing fields, he creates “an artificial wilderness, and a sky like lead”.’
Jack stared at him, stunned. ‘You never cease to amaze me.’
‘My English teacher at school in New York. Dead Poets Society, and all that. It must have sunk in while I was doodling submarines. I liked the “ships on untamed seas” bit.’
‘You were a member of the poetry society at school? You? ’
Costas fidgeted. ‘Never underestimate an engineer.’
‘Does your inseparable buddy Jeremy know this?’ Jack flipped open his phone. ‘He’s over there at Troy now. This is breaking news.’
Costas clamped a hand over Jack’s. ‘Does the world know that the famous marine archaeologist Jack Howard gets seasick?’
Jack stared at the phone, sighed and snapped it shut. ‘Touche. Just no more secrets.’
‘It wasn’t a secret. It was a hidden depth.’
Jack grinned, looked at his watch, and carried on. ‘You’d be surprised by Jeremy’s reaction. But back to Auden. He’d gone as an observer to the Sino-Japanese war in 1938, and worked for the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany in 1945. He’d seen the reality of war. For him, it was an all-encompassing horror that obliterated everything around it, that neutered images of life, of light and colour. A painting of Auden’s poem would be monotone, grey, with none of the gold and silver in Homer’s description. Imagine those black and white photographs of bombed-out cities of Germany, or images of the death camps, all colour sucked out of them.’
‘So what do you think the shield might have looked like?’ Costas asked.
Jack tapped the laptop keyboard. Lanowski’s bathymetric map on the screen transformed into the image of a magnificent circular shield, gold and silver, its surface divided into concentric circles densely populated with figural scenes. Costas whistled. ‘Now that’s more like it. That’s what I call treasure.’
‘Here it is according to the Italian artist Angelo Monticelli,’ Jack said. ‘He followed Homer’s description by showing a figure of divinity in the centre, then five concentric circles – zoomorphic representations of the constellations, then those two registers showing vignettes of people in city and pastoral scenes, some playing music. The figures look classical, too late for the Bronze Age. But Monticelli finished this about 1820, before anyone knew what Mycenaean art looked like. Many people still thought Homer’s world was entirely mythical. It was more than half a century before Schliemann was to discover Troy and Mycenae.’
‘Do you think Schliemann knew of this image?’
‘As a boy in Germany he’d been fascinated by a picture in Georg Ludwig Jerrer’s Universal History for Children, showing Aeneus rescuing his father Anchises from burning Troy. Schliemann knew the lure of treasure. He’d made his fortune in America on the back of the California gold rush, in the early 1850s. But it wasn’t greed that propelled him to Troy and Mycenae, it was a fascination with the power and meaning of artefacts, the people behind them. That’s why the image of the shield would have fascinated him. It’s why I’ve always felt I understood Schliemann. God knows, he had his faults. He mythologized his own past. He dug Troy like a bulldozer. And who knows what happened to his greatest discoveries, what he and his wife Sophia really found when they disappeared at night to dig alone. But look at his achievements. He opened the world to the glories of the Aegean Bronze Age. He changed our perception of myth and history. You can’t knock that. I don’t know any archaeologists today who would have the courage or imagination to make the leaps he did.’
‘I can think of one,’ Costas murmured.
Jack tapped the keyboard again. Two images came up, one a beautiful golden cup with scenes in relief, the other a group of swords. ‘When Monticelli made that painting, the only available images from antiquity came from the art of Greece and Rome, so that’s what he used. His figures look as if they’ve been lifted from sculptures in Rome. But these two images here are the real thing, actual Mycenaean art. The one on the left is the Vaphaio Cup from Greece, with wonderful relief work in gold, showing scenes of a hunt. And those are swords found by Schliemann at Mycenae, inlaid with gold and niello. These images suggest what we might expect to find on a shield, bronze decorated with inlays and gold relief. But they tell us more than that. Look at the bull on the cup. It’s stretched, powerful, a scene of intense action. The classical figures on Monticelli’s shield are indolent, posed, idealistic. Mycenaean art had an edge to it. The shield may have contained pastoral scenes, images of peaceful life, but there would have been a vibrancy to them, a dynamism, as if everything were tightly wound. In the world of the late Bronze Age, violence may have been ritualized, channelled through the contest of heroes, but it was still violence, a visible part of day-to-day life. It was a world where men at leisure didn’t lounge around in gymnasia or bathhouses as in the classical period, but went outdoors to hunt and play, to engage in bloody combat with boars and bulls and each other.’
‘So what about images of real men?’ Costas said. ‘Are there any Bronze Age portraits? Heroes and kings?’
Jack nodded slowly. ‘One stormy night in 1876 in the royal grave circle at Mycenae, Schliemann found this.’ He tapped, and the image changed to one of the most fabulous archaeological discoveries of all time, a golden mask in the shape of an angular, bearded face, the eyes hooded, elusive. It was the ultimate image of kingly power, aloof, unknowable, but unmistakably human, not the idealized image of a god.
‘The Mask of Agamemnon,’ Costas murmured. ‘When I was home in Greece as a boy, my grandfather took me to see it. It’s virtually a national symbol. It’s the pride of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.’
Jack stared hard at the image, trying as he had done a thousand times before to see beyond those hooded lids, to reach into the soul of the man who lay behind the mask. ‘According to the Iliad, the shield of Achilles was made during the siege of Troy, in the ninth year, close to the end. An expeditionary army in the field for so long would have had its own smiths and forges, its own armourers, probably at their base on the island of Tenedos. When Achilles needs new armour, he sends word back there. Forget about mythical Thetis and the forge on Olympus, but imagine some down-to-earth Hephaestos whose job is to keep the heroes supplied with all their finery, whose workshop does more than fix helmets and churn out spearheads. Our guy’s an artist, used to creating pieces of armour for swagger and display. And look at that mask. Mycenaean artists could do portraits.’
‘So you’re suggesting that the images on the shield, the people, could be real people, actual portraits?’
‘After nine years, everyone knew the faces. The images of generals are etched on the minds of soldiers. Think of Alexander the Great, King Henry V of England, Napoleon, General Ulysses S. Grant. We all know what they looked like. To the soldiers at Troy, the faces of their captains and heroes would have been as familiar as Hollywood actors are to us. These were not distant figures in some headquarters tent, but were there every day in front of the soldiers on the beach, shouting, feuding, drinking, whoring, sulking, just as Homer describes them. So yes, the people on the shield could be real people, real heroes. And a real image of a real king.’
‘ A real king,’ Costas repeated, pointing at th
e image of the golden mask. ‘And that one. Do you think that’s really Agamemnon?’
Jack paused, then spoke quietly. ‘I think he existed. I think we’re on his trail, here and now. Agamemnon, what he did, is where the truth of the Trojan War lies.’
‘And for Jack Howard, the fact that this shield would be one of the most priceless treasures ever discovered is neither here nor there?’
Jack grinned. ‘It would make a pretty good centrepiece in a new archaeological museum at Troy, don’t you think? Along with everything that Hiebermeyer and Dillen and Rebecca and Jeremy are discovering. Finding the shield would repay the Turks for giving us a permit to dig here.’
‘And you think the shield’s somewhere on the sea bed, in a wreck.’
‘In the funeral games of Achilles, Homer has the armour going to the champion who won the contest for it, the outstanding hero. But by the final chapters of the war, all of the heroes were dead, and their treasure had reverted to Agamemnon. The age of heroes was over, the age that saw chivalric contests to claim the armour of a slain warrior. Agamemnon was no longer merely coalition leader, the first among many; he was now mighty ruler of them all, king of kings. Achilles’ armour would have become part of his prestige display. All the treasures of the heroes would have been stashed away in his personal war galley. Remember Dillen’s translation? The ship, booty-laden, weighted down with gold.’
‘Holy cow,’ Costas said quietly. ‘Now I’ve got you.’
‘Treasure. Big time.’
‘Bring back the age of pirates,’ Costas sighed, shaking his head. ‘Treasure like that could set me up for life.’
‘That’s exactly why I want this kept under wraps,’ Jack said. ‘If word slipped out, every treasure-hunter in the world would be hovering around us, the good, the bad and the ugly.’
‘The whereabouts of Schliemann’s stolen treasure has attracted some pretty rough customers. The Nazis were after it.’
‘What do you know about that?’
‘Dillen told me. It was when Rebecca was involved with returning that painting in the Howard Gallery, the one Goring had pilfered. Dillen was at the IMU campus at the time and we got to talking. A great-uncle of mine was a Monuments Man, with the US army, responsible for recovering art stolen from Jewish families in Greece. Dillen mentioned a schoolteacher of his who had some connection with the search for the lost treasures from Troy.’
‘That’d be Hugh Frazer,’ Jack murmured. ‘I knew Frazer had been in special forces during the war, but I didn’t know anything about that. Intriguing. I’ll have to plug Dillen on it.’
‘It was something he had just remembered. Something this guy, Frazer, knew about some other guy, a British officer friend of his, who went missing. Something to do with one of the death camps.’
‘It was a more hazardous job than you’d think. And there was a lethal subtext, that the places where treasures were hidden could also conceal other secrets, weapons ready for use to execute the so-called Nero Decree.’
‘I know about that. Hitler’s order to destroy the Reich.’
‘And take the world with it, if at all possible.’
Costas checked his watch. ‘So, the shield of Achilles. Mum’s the word on your dream find?’
‘Radio silence until we find out what’s actually down there.’
Costas nodded. ‘Okay. For now, soggy timbers it is. But between you and me?’
‘What?’
‘This really is a treasure hunt, isn’t it? I mean, you owe me. It’s why you convinced me to get into this game in the first place. You promised, fifteen years ago at Troy.’
‘I thought that was submersibles. Getting your own shed full of gadgets.’
‘Means to an end. It was seeing those pictures just now, the shield, the golden mask. I think I’ve finally got the fever.’
Jack sighed. ‘Okay. Just to keep my old dive buddy happy. Treasure it is.’
‘Right on.’
‘I want to give Dillen and Hiebermeyer a call. See how they’re getting on. I’m due to be choppered over there after the dive. And see Rebecca.’
‘Tell her Uncle Costas expects her to be able to strip a dive regulator the next time we meet.’
‘Uncle Costas,’ Jack muttered. ‘ Uncle Costas.’ He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Speaking of regulators, time you went below to prep our gear.’
Costas broke into a huge smile. ‘Now you’re talking.’ He got up, collected his things and walked towards the door, rolling from side to side. Jack stood up to follow, glanced at the image of the shield of Achilles on the screen, then clicked it off and picked up the laptop. He remembered waking up on the deck little more than an hour ago, those images from his dream still fresh in his mind, the light shining dazzlingly through the depths, the greatest treasure always just beyond his grasp. He remembered the other treasure Dillen had dreamed of finding, the most sacred artefact of Troy, the palladion. Had Agamemnon, the king behind the golden mask, the bearer of the shield of Achilles, once held that aloft too, borne it away from burning Troy to his mountain fastness at Mycenae, snatched a prize won at the cost of darkness and death, of civilization torn asunder? Had that prize been what Schliemann had sought? He watched Costas disappear down the stairs towards the equipment bay, then took a deep breath. His heart was suddenly pounding with excitement, the huge adrenalin rush he always felt before diving on a new site, the possibility of making a discovery that might change history. And this time it was not a dream. This time it was real.
7
J ack floated motionless ten metres below the surface of the Aegean Sea, just outside the huge shadow created by the hull of Seaquest II. He and Costas had exited from the ship’s internal docking bay, so had avoided struggling in the choppy afternoon swell that Jack could see above him pulsing in the direction of the shoreline to the east, towards Troy. He looked up at the hull, and saw the wavering faces of the support team peering down through the calm water inside the docking bay. He raised his arm to Costas and held his thumb and forefinger together in the ‘okay’ sign, then watched Costas repeat the signal. He glanced again at Costas’ gear. They were wearing e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced dry suits with a computerized temperature and buoyancy control system, and full-face helmets that incorporated an intercom. They had toyed with using the Aquapods, the one-man submersibles that were Costas’ pride and joy, but had opted instead for SCUBA with oxygen rebreathers mounted on their backs in streamlined yellow cases. The rebreathers would give them twenty minutes at ninety metres’ depth, ample time for the job in hand, and diving would allow them close-up exploration impossible from the Aquapods. Jack disliked the constraints of a submersible and was always more happy diving. He felt supremely relaxed, perfectly in his element, but coursing with excitement at the prospect of what they might find in the inky depths below.
He finned over to Costas and gave his equipment a closer check, reading the tank pressure. Costas had grumbled at the decision not to use Aquapods, but then had brought out his tattered old boiler suit and was as happy as a child with a toy box. The suit was barely recognizable after years of use, a torn and faded grey layer that Costas wore over his e-suit, but the multiple pockets contained his precious collection of tools and gadgets ready for any eventuality. Jack glanced at his dive computer, and then up at the line on the surface that extended from the ship to a buoy, nearly above him now. It marked the spot where they had to descend to avoid the current from the Dardanelles sweeping them beyond the wreck. He made the ‘okay’ sign to Costas, then extended his arm with his thumb down. ‘Good to go?’
‘Good to go. Twenty minutes no-stop time, starting now.’
Costas flipped upside down and barrelled into the depths. Jack expelled air from his suit and dropped behind him, spreadeagled like a sky-diver. The water was sparklingly clear for the first thirty metres or so, but on the landward side it had a haze to it, red-tinged, an algae bloom perhaps, as if the Trojan shore were still seeping blood. Somewhere below them
lay the ugly residue of conflict, the raw, unsanitized legacy of the sea bed, a legacy that always brought home more vividly to Jack the reality of war than immaculate cemeteries and carefully tended battlefields.
He remembered what they had seen in the operations room when Seaquest II had first pulled the sidescan sonar ‘fish’ over the site an hour before. The wind had been less severe than anticipated and Captain Macalister had decided there was time for a sonar sweep before the dive. As the fish moved beyond the Byzantine wreck, the screen had shown a featureless sea bed, the sand ruffled like waves where the current had swept over it. Then the room had erupted in excitement as they saw the unmistakable lines of another shipwreck, exactly where Jack had thought he had seen something during their earlier dive. The scour channels in the sand on either side of the new wreck accentuated the lines of the hull: thirty-five, maybe forty metres long, narrow of beam – perhaps seven metres wide – with parallel lines running athwartships that looked like frames. There were none of the telltale signs of an ancient wreck, the rows of amphoras and stone blocks they had seen on the Byzantine wreck, a much wider-beamed hull as befitted an ancient merchantman. But Jack had seen a shadowy globular shape in the centre of the hull and had become excited. Could it have been an ancient pithos, a huge pottery vat? The citadel of Troy was littered with fragments of pithoi; they were what Jack had always imagined ancient galleys must have held, to carry the large quantities of water needed for a crew of rowers. Could this be an ancient galley? Could it be a galley of the Bronze Age, the ship of the Trojan War mentioned in the poem? Could it be the ship of Agamemnon?
Jack had hoped against hope, but despite the initial euphoria, his final instinct was against it. He had stared at the image for fifteen minutes while the ship turned round for a high-resolution scan. The first lines of the more detailed sonar image clinched it. They showed the decayed remains of a metal vessel, a hundred years old, no more. The lines athwartships that had looked like wooden beams were the skeletal remains of a metal hull, left after the wooden deck planking had decayed. The globular form was still partly concealed, covered by a collapsed mass of metalwork, but seemed to be in the right position for a boiler, part of the engine machinery.
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