by Gavin Scott
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Gavin Scott and Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1: Conversation on A Sunlit Tower
2: The Curse of the Chaldees
3: This Jam Tastes Fishy
4: The Lions of Ashurnasirpal
5: Arthur and Angela
6: The Great Beast
7: A Cry for Help
8: The Man from Down Under
9: The Man from Palestine
10: Fog on the Atlantic Run
11: New York, New York
12: The Effigy
13: World’s Fair
14: The Listener in the Corner
15: Pier 751
16: President Garfield
17: Sète
18: Dead Man Running
19: Two Writing Desks
20: Sir Edward and Mr. Smith
21: Switzerland
22: Jet Propelled
23: The Summons
24: The Conversation of Angela Shearer
25: Automata
26: The Vote
Author’s Note
About the Author
THE AGE OF EXODUS
ALSO BY GAVIN SCOTT AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
The Age of Treachery
The Age of Olympus
The Age of Exodus
The Age of Exodus
Print edition ISBN: 9781783297849
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297856
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: September 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2018 Gavin Scott
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
TO MARLOWE SKYE JACKSON
1
CONVERSATION ON A SUNLIT TOWER
Dr. Duncan Forrester, Fellow in Archaeology at Barnard College, watched as the trap door in the roof of the Lady Tower inched up, and wondered how best to kill the man coming through. Should he let him get halfway out and then slam the door back onto him, sending him stunned down the winding stone stairs before hurling himself down after him, or should he get behind him, put an armlock around his neck, and snap the spinal cord as his instructors had taught him?
For a long moment he gathered his energies together, ready to unleash them with maximum force in either of these strategies – and then made himself remember that he was not in wartime Prague or Bucharest or Hamburg, but in the midst of his beloved Oxford.
His once beloved Oxford. Shortly before the trap door began to rise Duncan Forrester had been leaning back against the sun-warmed stone balustrade looking out over the dreaming spires and smiling grimly to himself. The beatific vision which had sustained him through five years of war had failed, for the first time, to bring back peace to his soul.
It was not surprising: there were just too many unsatisfying elements in his life at present – chief among them, of course, the fact that he had lost Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig. For this, he knew, he had only himself to blame. The gods had brought him to her in the wilds of Norway and he had robbed himself of her forever in that wretched bar in Salonika.
He had believed he was doing the right thing; well, perhaps he had been doing the right thing, but there was little consolation in that. The act of self-denial had left him bereft, and now that he had reunited Sophie with the shell of a man who was her husband, Forrester looked out on a world that seemed to him bleak and pointless.
Nor was this the end of his self-inflicted troubles.
Take Kretzmer, the half-crazed German soldier who had tried to rob him of the Minoan inscriptions which they both hoped would solve the mystery of Linear B. When Forrester finally caught him, not only had he failed to hand Kretzmer over to the proper authorities, he had succumbed to pity, promised to let him work on the inscriptions as his collaborator, and as a final act of folly, brought him to England.
It was for people like Kretzmer, Forrester had now decided, that the saying “no good deed goes unpunished” had been invented. Kretzmer was now installed in a gamekeeper’s cottage near Woodstock, from which he fired sarcastic rebukes in green ink to every suggestion Forrester made for deciphering the stele’s markings. In the course of the process Forrester had become heartily sick not just of Kretzmer but of Linear B itself.
Worse, his recent sojourn in Greece and Crete, far from renewing his delight in the ancient world, had left him utterly out of sympathy with the civilisation which had once been his main source of spiritual healing. When he thought of Greece now, it was not the great philosophers and statesmen who came to mind, but the twisted egos and warped ideologies which were dragging the country inexorably towards civil war.
He had been briefly cheered by the arrival of an offer to give a lecture at the next Columbia Conference of Archaeology in New York, only to find that as a result of the dollar crisis foreign travel was now effectively forbidden to British citizens. As Britain’s remaining foreign reserves drained away the bread ration had been cut, beer supplies had been halved, and to reduce tobacco imports the government had officially asked people to “smoke your cigarettes down to the butts”. American movies were now too expensive to import, whale meat was being offered as a grim, oily alternative to beef and all over the country there were posters on bombed-out buildings urging people to work harder and longer.
The previous winter had been disastrous, the worst for centuries, blizzards leaving roads blocked by fifteen-foot high snowdrifts, power stations without coal, factories idle, and farmers trying to dig parsnips from the frozen ground with pneumatic drills. And now the weather was mocking the country again, as enervating sunshine dried up the reservoirs and parched the fields and in the sweltering cities, where ice was unobtainable, even the swimming pools were closed because of the polio scare. As tempers frayed, the divorce rate began to soar, and it seemed to Forrester the entire country was on edge.
Then there was his relationship with the newly elected Master of Barnard College.
Dr. Andrew Stephenson was one of Britain’s most distinguished metallurgists, a man of the left who had considerable influence with the new Labour government. He had got to know many of the key ministers during the war, when he had helped the novelist C. P. Snow to mobilise Britain’s scientific expertise against Hitler.
All these factors had played into the college’s decision to elect him, and Forrester knew that politically, and in many ways intellectually, it was the right decision; but he had not been able to establish a real relationship with Stephenson – and Stephenson, perhaps not surprisingly in view of what had happened to his predecessor, seemed reluctant to get close to him.
But it was the stultifying heat that was affecting Forrester the most, even up here on
the Lady Tower, and he cast his mind back nostalgically to the pale cool summers of his Humberside childhood.
It was in the midst of this thought that the trapdoor had begun to open and for a brief moment he was no longer a respectable academic in an Oxford college, but his old self, an agent of the Special Operations Executive in occupied Europe.
He forced himself to relax, to remember it was peacetime and assume this was not an enemy but simply a chance intruder on his sun-drugged solitude. And when the man emerged, silhouetted against the sky, Forrester let out a sigh of relief, because the newcomer had a distinctive army ammunition satchel over his shoulder.
“I thought I’d find you up here,” said Ken Harrison, cheerfully.
“Dammit,” said Forrester. “I forgot again, didn’t I?”
“Don’t mention it,” said Harrison, settling down on the roof beside him and leaning back comfortably against the balustrade. “I’d rather take my tutorial up here instead of your rooms anyway. If you’re up for it, of course. If not I can always just leave my essay behind.”
“I’m not so far gone as that,” said Forrester. “The Eleusinian Mysteries, if I recall rightly.”
The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most sacred initiation rites in ancient Greece, assuring devotees of a place in the afterlife through dramatic re-enactments of the abduction of Persephone by the King of the Underworld, mirroring the annual progress of the seasons. Forrester was fairly certain that these rituals had involved significant quantities of hallucinogenic drugs.
“Yes, the Mysteries,” said Harrison, and removed a sheaf of much-amended papers from his ammunition bag. But instead of reading them, he glanced through the contents, pulled a face and hesitated. After a moment Forrester realised that Harrison was embarrassed about something, and given Harrison’s general insouciance about his lack of academic brilliance, it probably wasn’t the essay.
“Something on your mind?” asked Forrester. Visibly relieved, Harrison put the papers aside.
“Yes,” he said. “Frankly, we’re worried about you. All of us.”
“All of who?”
“All the people you tutor. You’re one of the most brilliant people any of us have ever encountered. You’re a fantastic teacher and we’re enormously lucky to have you. But you haven’t been the same since you got back from Greece, and I want to know if there’s anything we can do to help.”
Forrester stared at him, both touched and appalled at the intrusion; but it was impossible to be angry with as openhearted a soul as Harrison.
“Sadly, no,” he said decisively. “There is nothing you can do. I enormously appreciate your concern and take on board the fact that I haven’t been showing much enthusiasm lately, which I will strive to correct. But I’m feeling flat, and there is nothing you, I, or anybody else can do about it.”
“Flat,” said Harrison. “Yes, that’s the word. I think half the chaps who’ve come back from the war are feeling about as lively as a bottle of week-old orangeade. I suppose it’s only to be expected. All that saving the world tends to wind the nerves up a bit. And then when it all stops – well, you know as well as I do.”
“I do,” said Forrester. “It was probably just the Lyall case and what happened in Greece that postponed my reaction.”
Shortly after returning to Oxford from the war, Forrester had tried to save a colleague from a conviction for murder after a killing in the college grounds; then, during an archaeological expedition to Greece, he had become embroiled in the run-up to its current civil war.
“There is that,” said Harrison, “yes.” He paused, uncertainly, and Forrester began to realise that Harrison’s expressions of concern about his mental state were actually just his way of working round to what was really on his mind. Forrester waited for a moment before speaking.
“You believe I need something to prevent me sinking further into the Slough of Despond?”
“Well, possibly,” said Harrison, reluctantly. “Since you seem to thrive on challenges. But this one may not be entirely inappropriate.”
“What may not be entirely inappropriate?”
“What I’m about to tell you. Ask you about. Draw to your attention. It has nothing to do with the Eleusinian Mysteries.”
“I’d guessed that,” said Forrester.
“On the other hand, like the Mysteries, it does involve the supernatural. Or appears to. Probably not, of course.”
“Caveats noted,” said Forrester. “Now spit it out, before I throw you off the bloody roof.”
“Of course,” said Harrison, and proceeded in his customary leisurely way to light his pipe. When it was finally sending out puffs of not unpleasantly scented tobacco, he said, “Have you ever heard of a Sumerian demon called Asag?”
Forrester closed his eyes: he did not claim to have a photographic memory but with a moment’s thought he could usually bring to mind any name or concept he had ever read about. He didn’t see the page on which he had originally read it, but he could reconstruct the context; it felt like doing a jigsaw puzzle inside his head.
“I think he’s mentioned in a Sumerian mythological poem. ‘Lugal-e’ or something. He was supposed to be a demon so monstrous that if he walked alongside a river the fish swimming in it would be boiled alive. If I recall rightly he was usually accompanied by a troop of rock demons which he had created by making love to a mountain, which sounds like a very uncomfortable thing to do. All in all a fairly disagreeable-sounding fellow.”
“Very much so,” said Harrison. “And he seems to have it in for a friend of mine.”
Forrester raised an eyebrow.
“All right, you’ve hooked me,” he said. “Tell me who your friend is and what a Sumerian demon has got against him.”
“His name is Templar,” said Harrison, drawing happily on the pipe now. “Charles Templar. We went through Signals school together and then lost touch. I ended up, as you know, at Arnhem; Templar was at El Alamein with Monty. Got blown up by a German landmine, which I think between ourselves affected his nerves somewhat. One day, when he was recovering in Cairo, he came across some chap in a market selling antiquarian bits and pieces, including a cylinder seal the dealer claimed came from Ur of the Chaldees.”
Forrester smiled: the phrase took him back to the Hull pier on the edge of the Humber, where he had sat one Saturday afternoon, lulled by the hooting of the ferry and the cries of the seagulls, hypnotised by a book he had just taken out from the Central Library. Ur of the Chaldees by Sir Leonard Woolley, which was an account of the seven years the archaeologist had just spent excavating Tell el-Muqayyar, the Mound of Pitch, halfway between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, to prove that it was indeed the city described in Genesis as the birthplace of Abraham, founding father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Now the Lord had said unto Abram,
Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,
and from thy father’s house,
unto a land that I will shew thee:
And I will make of thee a great nation,
and I will bless thee, and make thy name great;
and thou shalt be a blessing.
He heard the words in his mother’s flat Yorkshire voice, as she had read them aloud from the Bible on Sunday evenings, and they still resonated.
“Very shrewd of the dealer,” said Forrester. “I’m sure he found Ur of the Chaldees a very good sales pitch.”
“It certainly worked on Templar,” said Harrison. “He bought the seal and managed to keep it with him all through the war as a sort of talisman.”
“Good for him,” said Forrester. “And now?”
“Now he’s back with the Foreign Office and he’s been getting threatening messages about it.”
“Threatening messages?”
“In cuneiform.”
“Cuneiform?” said Forrester. “Don’t tell me somebody’s been sending him clay tablets?”
“Not quite,” said Harrison. “Photographs of clay tablets, inscribed with cu
rses in ancient Sumerian, all demanding that he gives up the seal.”
“And has Asag explained exactly how your friend is supposed to get the seal back to him?”
“Not yet,” said Harrison. “I told Templar he should talk to you.”
“Well, he certainly needs to talk to somebody, starting with the police,” said Forrester. “But what on earth made you feel I could be of the slightest use to him?”
“Instinct,” said Harrison. He puffed his pipe again for a moment. “And the fact that you did pretty well when your friend Gordon Clark was up against it.”
Forrester inclined his head in acknowledgement. Both men knew perfectly well that Harrison had volunteered his help when Gordon Clark was accused of murder, and that without him Forrester might never have saved him from the gallows. Now one of Harrison’s friends was in trouble there was no way Forrester could refuse to at least discuss the case.
“Of course, I’d be perfectly happy to talk to Templar,” he said. “But I meant what I said about the police. Has he already been to them?”
“Oh, yes,” said Harrison, “and got the kind of dusty answer you might expect. Scotland Yard has many virtues, but an open mind about the supernatural isn’t one of them.”
“I don’t have an open mind about the supernatural either,” said Forrester, “and I’m damn sure neither Asag nor any other utukku is behind this.”
“Utukku?” said Harrison.
“Asag was an utukku,” said Forrester as the facts reassembled themselves, unbidden in his mind. “Utukkus were a kind of spirit that had escaped from the Sumerian underworld. They’re mentioned in the epic of Gilgamesh.”
“You do see, don’t you,” said Harrison, “why I felt you’re exactly the chap Charles needs to talk to?”
“Except there must be at least twenty people in Oxford who know vastly more than I do about Ur. And cylinder seals for that matter.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Harrison, “but few of them have your record in dealing with murderers.”
Forrester grinned: it was a fair cop.
“All right, I’ll talk to him. But I won’t be going up to London until next week.”
