Atlantis
Page 40
He remembered the charred fragments of Bronze Age timbers he and Costas had discovered on the beach near Troy fifteen years before, a small section of planking with pieces of three frames still attached. He remembered the distance between the frames, about eight inches. He put his left hand against the timber where it protruded from the seafloor, and put his right hand about that distance away. Where it touched the sediment he wafted, and seconds later the blackened end of another timber appeared. His pulse quickened. Two frames, the same distance apart as those he and Costas had found. He wafted between the frames, using both hands, kicking up a small storm of sediment that took a few moments to settle. He pushed his face into the suspended silt. Bingo. Not just frames, but planking. He reached over the upper edge of the nearest plank, then felt the join with the next plank. He moved his fingers along until he felt two bumps, one on each plank, an equal distance apart from the join. There was no doubt about it. They were treenails, hardwood tenons hammered through each plank. His heart was pounding with excitement. He had to control his breathing. He had found an ancient hull. The planks were edge-joined with mortise and tenon, a technique used by shipwrights from the Bronze Age. But how could he be sure these timbers were that old? Could he even think that they dated to the time of the Trojan War?
He looked up and saw Costas ten yards or so above him, silhouetted against the smudge of light from the surface of the sea far above. He glanced at his computer. Only three minutes left. He rose a few feet, and looked down again. His wafting had revealed something resting on the planking where the timbers protruded from under the rusting hull of the warship. He dropped down and wafted again, strong, quick strokes. This was no time for finesse. What he discovered in these moments could determine the future course of the excavation. He stopped to let the sediment clear, and there it was, intact, lying half embedded in the seabed in front of him.
His heart pounded. It was unbelievable. It was an ancient pottery cup, beautifully preserved: a kylix, a distinctive Greek form, raised on a stem with a broad, wide bowl that tapered down, like a large champagne glass but with small vertical handles on either side of the bowl. Jack stared at it, his mind racing back to Troy, to the finds he had seen in the Çanakkale archaeological museum that day with Macalister. This was Mycenaean. The shape, the details of the stem and the handles were absolutely distinctive. The part of the bowl he could see exposed above the sand was decorated with a marine pattern, a beautifully painted octopus that wrapped round the cup, the red paint still radiant. He knew the Mycenaean kylix dated to the late Bronze Age, between the fifteenth and the twelfth century BC. The style of decoration tightened the date even further, to the thirteenth, perhaps early twelfth century BC. He hardly dared believe it. The time of the Trojan War.
He needed to think fast. Mycenaean pottery had been found at Troy, but it was rare, probably highly prized. This cup could have been cargo, brought by a trader sometime in the lead-up to the war, when Troy was a hub of commerce. But that must be wrong. These timbers were not those of a merchantman, but a galley. A war galley. The cup must have been the possession of someone on board. A crew member seemed unlikely, even the captain. They would have used bowls, ladles, to dip into the water vats, drinking their wine crudely, as sailors did. A cup like this would have been far too delicate for shipboard use. So it must have been a passenger. A Mycenaean noble, taking a galley to Troy? The Iliad showed that nobles, princes bent on war, took their prized possessions with them, the accoutrements for lavish feasting and wealth display. Princes bent on war. Jack knew where his thoughts were leading him, but he hardly dared go there. He wafted his hand over the bowl to reveal the rim, to see whether he could raise it in one piece. He waited for the sediment to settle.
Then he saw it.
First one letter, then another. A word, painted below the rim of the cup. A word in ancient Greek. He stared, transfixed, at the letter A toppled over on its side, the early Phoenician form of the letter, just as Dillen had shown him in the Ilioupersis. He could barely believe it. Letters in ancient Greek, on a Mycenaean cup from the thirteenth century BC. This proved it, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This showed that the Greeks of the late Bronze Age, of the Age of Heroes, had started to use the alphabet several centuries before anyone had previously thought, just as Dillen had argued. Jack’s mind was reeling. Dillen had been right about the Ilioupersis. It could have been written by a bard who actually witnessed the events of Troy. Jack was suddenly bursting to tell him. But there was more. As he deciphered, he gasped into his mouthpiece in astonishment. His mind raced back to all those hours spent with Dillen as a student. The Linear B syllabary—the script used by the Mycenaeans, the other script—had several words for “leader,” for “king.” One, basileus, the term used by Greeks of the classical period, was rarely encountered. Another, lawagetas, the most common term, meant “chieftain, prince of one citadel, one city-state.” In Homer’s Iliad, the men who led the contingent from their home territory, men like Achilles, Ajax, Nestor, would have been called that. But there was another word, a rarer one, the one staring Jack in the face now: wanax. That meant “ruler of many city-states”—a paramount ruler, one elected in times of peril. The wanax was the biggest of them all, bigger than the greatest hero, a man whose power might rival that of the gods. A mighty wielder of the scepter. A king of kings.
Jack reached down with his left hand and gently pushed his fingers into the sand around the stem of the cup, touching the pottery for the first time, feeling that wave of excitement that always coursed through him when he touched an artifact undisturbed by human hands for millennia. He remembered the sanctity of this place, the probability that the site was a war grave. A grave from two wars. But this cup deserved to be raised into the sunlight once again, to complete a voyage thwarted by catastrophe more than three thousand years before, to be held aloft over the walls of Troy just as the great king would have. Jack wanted to take it to where Dillen was excavating, to the highest bastion of the citadel overlooking the plain of Ilion, so that they could share in the triumph of archaeology, revel in a find that not only gave Dillen proof that the Greek of the Ilioupersis was the Greek of Agamemnon, but also put them one huge step closer to the reality of the great king and his war to end all wars.
“Jack.” Costas’s voice crackled on the intercom. “Zero hour. Time to go home. Now.”
“Roger that.” Jack eased the ancient cup out of the sand and held it up, watching the sediment fall away in a silvery shower. It was intact, one of the most beautiful finds he had ever made. He blasted air into his buoyancy compensator and rose slowly above the seabed, wreathed in a sheen of bubbles. His e-suit automatically bled air as the external pressure decreased, the computerized sensor maintaining his buoyancy just above neutral. He knew that the same was happening to the gas bubbles in his bloodstream, and he glanced at his wrist computer to double-check his ascent rate. He looked up at Costas, then back down at the wreck. The beam from his headlamp reflected off the particles stirred up where he had left the seabed, and he switched it off, closing his eyes to help them adjust to the gloom. When he opened them a few moments later, he saw the clear outline of the minelayer, but now he imagined another wreck, the ancient ship underneath, twenty, maybe twenty-five yards in length, lying diagonally below the minelayer’s hull, its stern protruding through the smaller scour trench along the port side of the minelayer, its fore a few yards beyond where he had found the cup.
He stared at where he had been, straining his eyes. There was something else down there.
ATLANTIS
A Dell Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Headline Book Publishing (UK) edition published 2005
Dell mass market edition / October 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitio
usly.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by David Gibbins
Excerpt from The Mask of Troy copyright © 2011 by David Gibbins.
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Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33576-4
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