The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  He looked at the whole inscription again: O + ME + RO + lyre. He could barely breathe. He thought hard. It was probably an aspirated O, so HO. Homeros. He whispered the word. It had been the most perplexing absence from the Mycenaean Greek lexicon, the one word scholars had sought in vain, not seeing the ideogram for what it was. The word for bard. Images came flooding into Dillen’s mind, images from the Iliad and the Odyssey: Tieresias, blind sage; Thetis, mocker of kings; Calchis, son of Thestor, far-seeing snake-prophet. Dillen suddenly felt a certainty, an intense proximity, sitting up here alone, so close to what he had been seeking all his life. That was who Homer was. That was what Homer meant. The immortal bard. Homer was all of them. All of them were Homer. Homer meant bard. Dillen remembered Jack. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he whispered. ‘ I’ll be damned .’

  After a lifetime, he had finally done it.

  He had found Homer.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath, then picked up the lyre again and leaned it back against his shoulder, the flat of each hand against the strings, sensing the noiseless vibrations, unsure whether it was the movement of his hands or some fugitive wind, perhaps the passing of those birds. He thought of the conversation they had just had, about his old teacher Hugh. Looking at the image of the lyre-player, seeing the shape of the symbol, he had suddenly remembered something else from his school days, from Hugh: he had come across a half-finished drawing in one of Hugh’s notebooks, with the inscription The girl with a harp. It was a notebook with other sketches from the war, and he just knew that it had something to do with the concentration camp, from the hints of the setting, the clothes the girl was wearing, her shaven head. Dillen would ask Hugh about that too, when he went with Rebecca. He pushed the lyre up on his knee, and stared back at the extraordinary inscription on the wall. He felt as if he should stay here as long as he could, utterly still, not taking his eye off it, as if to leave would be to risk the inscription disappearing, those faded symbols vanishing back into the uncertainty of Troy. He looked at his camera, then thought better of it, fearful that the flash itself might extinguish the image. He remembered Auden’s imagery, of the camera in battle and the crow on the crematorium chimney; the bard too was seeing timeless war, recording it like the camera, like the eye of the crow.

  He heard a crunch of footsteps on the path below, the sound of Jack and Hiebermeyer talking, and Rebecca singing quietly to herself. It was inspection time. He put down the lyre and pulled the cover over it, then quickly arranged his tools and laid the torch on the wall beside him, aimed directly at the inscription. He glanced up. The sky was dark now, an ominous storm-darkness from the east. The first drops of rain were falling against the wall, deepening the colour of the inscription, the contrast of the red lines with the dark paint of the background.

  Jack appeared over the revetment, carrying his old khaki bag with the bulge in it. ‘Rebecca and Maurice stopped on the way up. Maurice wanted to show Rebecca how close Schliemann got in his trench to the passageway, where Maurice thinks the chamber at the end should be. It’ll give us a few moments alone.’ He stepped into the excavation, cleared his throat, and put his hand on his bag. ‘James. About the oldest inscription ever found in the Greek alphabet. I’ve got something I want to show you. But first, in readiness.’ He pulled out a bottle of Turkish red wine, uncorked it with his penknife and produced two plastic cups, putting them on the stone revetment and filling them close to the brim. ‘We can’t use what I’ve found. It’s a bit too precious. But it calls for some wine. You’ll see why.’

  Dillen looked at the bag. He had known hours ago that Jack had found something in the wreck and had been itching to tell him, waiting for the right place. He looked intensely at him. ‘Jack. About never finding a Linear B inscription at Troy. I’ve got something to show you .’ He nodded his head in the direction of the lyre-player. Jack gazed at it, put down the wine bottle, and then took a step forward, kneeling, clutching his bag, staring along the beam of the torchlight. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he whispered.

  ‘You remember my tutorials all those years ago? The Linear B syllabary?’

  ‘I remember that one, the stick figure that looked like a horse,’ Jack murmured, pointing. ‘Number 49. I wrote an essay on it in an exam. An ideogram, but not meaning horse. Had everyone stumped.’

  Dillen said nothing, but picked up the torch and angled it to the painting of the lyre-player, then back down again. Jack was silent for a moment, staring. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he whispered again. ‘Of course. It’s a lyre.’ He stared at the other three symbols, and Dillen could see him remembering, putting them together. Jack suddenly gasped, then turned to him, his eyes wide with astonishment. He looked like an eighteen year old again. Dillen nodded, and Jack looked back at the wall. ‘ Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘It says Homer. Homer.’ He grinned broadly. ‘Homer, the Bronze Age bard.’

  ‘Homer, who sat here like this lyre-player, who witnessed the fall of Troy,’ Dillen said.

  Jack extended his right hand, still staring at the wall, and shook Dillen’s free hand. ‘Congratulations. Many congratulations. To see you find this is just about the biggest thrill I can imagine. Finding Homer.’

  Dillen followed Jack’s gaze. This was real. And the bard’s secret poem, his greatest work, would not be lost to history. He felt a huge rush of adrenalin, like nothing he had ever felt before. Now he knew what drew Jack back to the quest again and again, the lure of lost treasures, of fantastic discovery. This had been the most exciting day of his life. They both continued staring at the wall, stock still, and then Jack began to undo the straps on his bag. ‘And now this.’

  Dillen put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He could hear Rebecca singing again, coming up the path. ‘I think I know what Costas would say to you now,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think he’d say, “Game on.”

  Jack took a deep breath, then exhaled forcefully. He looked up at the dark clouds overhead, now spattering the site with big raindrops. ‘I wonder what price there is to pay.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what it was that kept Homer from telling the world the truth about what really happened here. What made him write the Ilioupersis, but then hide it away. A truth maybe better left concealed.’

  Dillen shook his head. ‘It’s too late to turn back now. I’m already well into translating the Ilioupersis. Jeremy brought me the final batch of lines today. And we’re doing the same to this site. Peeling away the layers, revealing more and more. We can’t undo it, wherever it’s taking us. And I keep looking across to Gallipoli, thinking of all those young men in 1915. The truth is never best left concealed. And if this is all about the truth of war, so be it. Maybe if Homer had revealed it three thousand years before, then those young men might never have gone to die with dreams of glory in their hearts, or the next generation twenty-five years later on the killing fields of Europe and Asia. I feel we owe it to them.’

  Jack took a deep breath again, and nodded. ‘Of course you’re right. And maybe the price we pay is just more sweat and toil. Maurice has already got that sorted out. Dig a bigger hole. Just like Schliemann did.’ He grinned. They turned to see Maurice and Rebecca appear on the other side of the revetment, and watched them follow the line of the beam of torchlight through the rain to the inscription on the wall. Jack took out two more plastic cups and filled them. The rain spattered into the wine. He passed a cup to Dillen, then reached down and unbuckled his bag, taking out the bubble-wrapped package inside. He carefully unravelled the packaging until one of the beautiful pottery handles of the cup appeared, still wet with seawater. He paused, staring at Dillen, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘I wouldn’t dream of turning my back on Troy. You said it. Game on. And now for what I was going to show you. Maurice? Rebecca?’

  Dillen looked up at the black sky, feeling the rain on his face, relishing it. Jack stood up and stared out over the darkness of the plain, just as Dillen imagined Priam had once done: Priam, peace-lover, guardian of bounteous
prosperity, warmth and love in his heart. Just as Agamemnon, blood-soaked victor, had done. Jack turned round, revealing the pottery cup. Dillen looked at it with astonishment. He saw the inscription on it, the one word, wanax, king. It was incredible. But which king? Was it a cup of peace, or a cup of war? With two hands Jack raised the cup high into the night sky, holding it there, then bringing it down and carefully placing it on the floor of the Bronze Age room, in front of the painting of the lyre-player. He went back to the wine, and passed brimming cups to Maurice and Rebecca, then picked up the last one himself. He held the plastic to his lips, then smiled broadly at them. ‘A plastic cup is not quite the cup of a king. But I think this calls for a toast.’

  PART 2

  10

  16 April 1945, Lower Saxony, Germany

  T he jeep bumped and bounced along the shell-scarred road towards the line of dense pine forest visible a few kilometres ahead. Major Peter Mayne shifted in the front passenger seat and braced his left hand against the windscreen strut, wincing as a braced his left hand against the windscreen strut, wincing as a pothole sent a jolt of pain through the old wound in his shoulder. It had been a long war, and he was dead tired. Nine years before the walls of Troy. Homer had been on his mind for the first time in months, lines of ancient Greek he had loved to read before the war, lounging by the river Isis in Oxford with Hugh, then on the mountainside that glorious final summer in Greece overlooking the ruins of Mycenae, citadel of Agamemnon.

  Today, on this bleak spring morning, he had felt for a moment as if he were a warrior in a chariot racing over the plain of Ilion, the vast unseen bulk of the army somewhere behind, and ahead the battlements of lofty-gated Troy itself. Yet he was no hero, and this desolation of fields and ditches was a no-man’s-land where the gods held no sway, and where the power of one man was nothing. By rights this should be the end of the war he was seeing, surely so close now, and he should be shuddering with relief. But there was a baleful presence out there, a horror they had yet to confront, as if flaming Troy might yet consume them all. Homer had come back to him because he believed in it, not just in the reality behind the myth but in the truth those words concealed. The truth of war. He had seen it with his own eyes. He was steeped in blood. He peered ahead, suddenly uneasy, remembering what he had been told about this place before they had set out that morning. The truth of war. He thought he knew.

  He peered past his driver, Corporal Lewes, taking in every ditch, every undulation in the fields around them, every place a sniper might be concealed, looking at the landscape as five years of war had taught him. He glanced at the American M1 carbine slung over the dashboard, and felt the Webley in the holster at his hip. He had reason to feel uneasy. They were almost eight kilometres behind enemy lines. Eight kilometres. The German area commander had arranged a truce, and had assured them of the safety of the road. Behind them the invisible bulk of British 2nd Army was rumbling inexorably forward, village by bloody village, fighting on German soil against men defending their homeland. Soon organized resistance would crumble. That was where the danger lay. Orders from area commanders would become meaningless. The enemy could be out there in the ditches now: old men with Panzerfaust rockets still fighting the First World War, boys of the Hitlerjugende in outsized uniforms who thought they were immortal, a few battle-hardened remnants of the Wehrmacht and the SS who had somehow survived all the carnage since Normandy. Soldiers who would react reflexively, just as he would, who were beyond orders, whose only thought would be to kill their enemy.

  A hand nudged his shoulder. He twisted back, hearing the American accent but not making out the words. ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ he shouted over the roar of the jeep. ‘I’m deaf in my right ear. Shell concussion.’

  ‘I said out here it looks like the war’s over already.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ Mayne shouted. He turned back, peering ahead. They had come up behind a lumbering lorry with Red Cross markings, and were now travelling at an excruciating ten miles an hour. He rapped his fingers impatiently against the door. They were more vulnerable to sniping at low speed. Lewes glanced at him. ‘I’ll overtake in a moment, sir. The road widens a few hundred yards ahead.’

  Mayne grunted, took a deep breath and twisted back again to look at the occupant of the rear seat. They had picked him up at the checkpoint twenty minutes earlier, and he had immediately asked to see the drawing Mayne was carrying, the reason they were here. He had scrutinized it for a few seconds and handed it back without a word. Mayne knew better than to ask questions at this stage. He had done intel ops for long enough to know how to play the game, and he had his own agenda too. Colonel Woolley back at HQ was always drumming it into them. They were all on the same side, all with the same objectives, but all operating in different patches of light and darkness, and sometimes it was best to feel your own way forward before asking others to shine a spotlight for you. He would feel the ground first. The American was an older man, middle-aged, wearing the uniform of a US army lieutenant colonel. Apart from his sidearm he looked as if he had walked straight out of a London tailor’s. ‘You seen much action?’ Mayne asked sceptically.

  The man had shrewd eyes. ‘I’m just an honorary officer. Flew in from England yesterday. Before the war I was at the Courtauld Institute teaching art history, on sabbatical from Yale. But my family background is German and I volunteered to work for the BBC German Service Workers’ Programme, the Psychological Warfare Department. After the Americans joined the war I transferred to the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, the MFAA. They decided we should be commissioned into the army to give us clout. We’ve been preparing for this since before D-Day. The name’s Stein, by the way. David Stein.’ He extended a hand over the front seat, but Howard only nodded. It was too painful to twist his right arm around. And his eyes were fixed on a pair of RAF Typhoon fighter-bombers that had appeared at tree level down the road behind them. For a terrible moment it looked as if they were about to be strafed. The white star on the bonnet of the jeep would be invisible, but he hoped to God the pilots would see the red cross painted on the back door of the lorry. Their operations behind enemy lines were top secret, and Tactical Air Command was never given any information. It was one of the risks. Then the two aircraft roared overhead, the huge air intakes under their engine cowlings gaping like hungry lions, and banked sharply east, their rocket racks still full. Mayne shut his eyes for a moment, and clenched his hands to stop them shaking. It was getting worse each time. He had managed to keep it from Hugh, when he had seen him at HQ. But how much longer could he control it? Stein withdrew his arm and shaded his eyes, following the aircraft as they disappeared towards a distant pall of smoke where the battle was raging. ‘Good to have air cover,’ he shouted. He turned back and leaned forward, pointing at the ribbons on Mayne’s battledress tunic. ‘And you? Don’t often see a boffin with a Military Cross.’

  ‘I’m not a boffin. I’m a soldier.’ Mayne braced himself again as the jeep lurched forward and sped around the lorry, just squeezing past as the road widened. Lewes floored the accelerator and they hurtled down the open road, by now free of bomb damage. ‘I was at Oxford before the war, reading classics,’ he shouted. ‘Joined the infantry, went to France in time for Dunkirk. Then North Africa with 8th Army, El Alamein to Tunis, then Italy. By the time a shell got me at Cassino I was the last surviving officer of my original battalion. Lewes here was my batman. After I was passed fit, we both volunteered for attachment to the Intelligence Corps, Field Security Operations. They needed experienced soldiers, not boffins.’

  ‘Thirty Commando.’ Stein read out Mayne’s shoulder flashes. ‘Sounds like a combat outfit.’

  ‘Thirty Commando Assault Unit. We’re a multi-force unit, army, navy, marines. We operate ahead of the advancing army in search of technical intelligence. It used to be anything of tactical value – codes, ciphers, order books, that kind of thing. Now with the battlefield mostly in Allied hands it’s more general, scientific and technical in
telligence. Basically anything we can get our hands on. Anything the Germans might try to destroy, or which might fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘What’s your brief for this operation?’

  ‘We’re looking for the girl in the camp who made that drawing. The op’s top secret, as usual. All I know about it comes from a chance encounter with an old friend at VIII Corps HQ this morning, an officer in the British Special Air Service. The SAS have been doing forward recon ops as well, and we bump into them. My friend was leaving Intelligence HQ in a hurry just as I was going in, and we only had a minute. He knew I was about to be briefed for the follow-up. He was the one who took the drawing from the girl. He wasn’t supposed to say anything, but he told me there was something in it that might interest me.’ Mayne paused. It was more than that. It was something they had both recognized. Something that set their hearts pounding with excitement. But he was not going to tell this unknown American officer, yet. ‘We’d both been involved in archaeology before the war, and I could only imagine it was something to do with that, maybe stolen antiquities. Once I knew we were going to be joined by an officer from the MFAA, namely yourself, that seemed to clinch it. That’s all I know.’

  ‘I was told we’ve only got a small window. Today, this morning.’

  ‘I was briefed about it at Corps HQ, just before we picked you up. Once the local ceasefire’s over, HQ thinks the remnant German 2nd Marine Division will form up behind the forest and make a last stand. They’re only remustered Kriegsmarine sailors, but they’ve given 11th Armoured Division a few knocks south of Bremen. Shows how good basic infantry training was, even in the navy. They’ll be overrun, but they could give us hell if they get into cover. We don’t want any repeat of what we went through in February in the Reichswald, and what the Americans went through in the Hurtgen Forest. So the plan calls for an RAF heavy bomber raid to smash the whole western sector of the forest. Unless we have very good reason to stall them, Bomber Command have it scheduled for thirty-six hours from now. The camp will be safe, but not the forest. But any new intelligence about German troop movements could alter that. The SAS are keeping an eye out. If German troops have already infiltrated the forest, then everything gets evacuated pronto, the camp included. The RAF will destroy the entire place. We have to be ready for that possibility.’