by Tobias Hill
The Hidden
A Novel
Tobias Hill
I have hidden something in the inner chamber
And sealed the lid of the sarcophagus
And levered a granite boulder against the door
And the debris has covered it so perfectly
That though you walk over it daily you never suspect.
ANTHONY THWAITE
The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Every thing secret degenerates.
JOHN DALBERG-ACTON
Contents
Epigraph
I
Notes Towards a Thesis
II
Metamorphosis
III
Notes Towards a Thesis
IV
Monsters
V
Notes Towards a Thesis
VI
Lacedaemonia
VII
Shovelmonkey Number Five
VIII
Notes Towards a Thesis
IX
Burials
X
Notes Towards a Thesis
XI
Shoot-’Em-Up
XII
Notes Towards a Thesis
XIII
The Cave
XIV
Notes Towards a Thesis
XV
The Hidden
XVI
The Careful Application of Terror
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Tobias Hill
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
I
Notes Towards a Thesis
It has been said that history is written by the victors. The truism is false in one case. The Spartans were once masters of all they surveyed, prevailing over Greece through fear and war, yet did not trust their prevalence to writing.
The written word is unselfish. It gives up its secrets readily: it speaks to friend and foe alike. For this reason the Spartans entrusted few things to its care. They were a secretive people. They wrote little plainly, and little even of that little has survived. The Spartan writings that have come down to us–Alcman’s joyful Maiden Songs, Lysander’s vainglorious inscriptions–are not the missing pieces of the puzzle so much as the only pieces left of a puzzle which is itself missing, so that the nature of the puzzle–the nature of Sparta–has itself become a riddle.
It is hazardous to assume almost anything of such a reticent people. It might be assumed (for example) that our uncertainty would satisfy the Spartans, but there is no certainty even in this. That they have left no explanations for the world would not concern them unduly, since they had scant concern for the opinions of the world. That they would be judged not by their words but by their actions might have seemed to them fitting, since they were a people who did much but said little. And that their own history should be based on little more than guesswork, such as these guesses of my own–that their secrets should still hold, two and a half thousand years on–that might also have pleased them.
Would it please them to be remembered at all? Those who dealt with them describe a proud people. No one likes to be forgotten. But the curiosity of history is a relentless thing, and the importance of Sparta is such that the good historian cannot pass it by. What remains is endlessly scoured for the gold of the truth. The motives of the generals and kings are examined and re-examined, doubted and picked apart. The rare achievements of archaeology are magnified in importance, sometimes beyond their due. And the known actions of the Spartans assume the prominence of legends, so that the mythology of the city has come to have more influence than its archaeology may ever possess.
For example, there is the legend of the Battle of Thermopylae. It goes like this.
Four hundred and eighty years before Christ, the Persians set out to conquer Greece. Their army was as vast as their empire itself, which stretched from the Nile to the Indus. So inevitable was their victory that the Great King Xerxes travelled with his people to see his conquests with his own eyes. So overwhelming was his power that much of Hellas made peace before the Great King reached Greek lands, offering him earth and water, the Persian tokens of submission.
Those who resisted were led by the Spartans. Few, though, were willing to speak of war against the empire, and fewer to back up words with men. The Persians had reached as far south as the pass of Thermopylae, two hundred miles from Sparta, before any Hellene stood against them.
Thermopylae: The Hot Gates. The pass was named after its springs–which were volcanic and sulphurous–and after its three narrows; its gates. It was a low road, overhung with cliffs to the south and overlooking the sea to the north. Inland there were only interminable mountains, high forest and crags, land good for goats and not much else. At its gates the pass was no more than fifty feet across. The Persians could have found other ways south if they had wished to seek them. But they did not wish. They did not need to wish. They chose to go through Thermopylae, where their enemies had gathered.
Xerxes’ enemies were commanded by Leonidas, King of the Spartans. He led five thousand two hundred Greeks. Among them were three hundred Equals, the men of Sparta, who spent their lives in nothing but the practice and execution of war.
They faced three hundred thousand Persians. Across the Hellespont, and westwards, the Great King had brought an even greater force: in his vanguard’s wake came an army of eight hundred thousand. Xerxes felt no need to bring his full million to bear against the few at Thermopylae. With him were his Immortals, after all, the finest ten thousand soldiers of the empire.
Xerxes was merciful. For three days the Great King waited for the Greeks to give up the pass. But they did not do so. His scouts informed him that the foreigners were rebuilding an old wall that spanned one gate. Against such odds, the Hellenes meant to make a stand at Thermopylae. And there was something else, even more bewildering. Among the Greeks were men in red cloaks. These men were not even readying themselves for battle, as the others were. They were performing exercises. They were seen to be combing their hair. The informers of the Great King told him that these were the Spartans. By making their heads beautiful, the informers said, the Spartans were preparing themselves to die.
When he heard this, the Great King ordered his army on. His pavilion was pitched on the highlands above Thermopylae. There he sat to witness the demise of his enemies.
The Battle of Thermopylae lasted three days. On the first morning the Great King sent out his Medes and Cissians. His orders were that the Greeks be taken alive: but the Greeks drove back the Persians. In the afternoon the Great King withdrew his common troops and sent forward his Immortals. They too were repulsed. Three times the Great King was seen to leap from his chair as he watched. As night fell the Greeks still held their wall.
The second day began as the first had ended. The Great King sat and watched his men die. The Hot Gates were a killing ground. In their narrows the Persians could not bring their numbers to bear. Their archers carried bows as long as they themselves were tall, but when they came up the Greeks lay low behind their makeshift wall. The Persian infantry were deft, but their spears were over-reached by those of the Hellenes. Sometimes the men in red cloaks would take their turn in the fighting. Sometimes their lines would seem to break, their men scattering away in the terror of battle only to suddenly reform, their shields coming together with a sound like a rolling of drums, the onrushing Persians impaled on their spears.
It was the season of summer storms. The days were hot, unbearably close. At night the moon shone near full through the rain. The Persi
ans were far from home. The mud matted their skin and hair. Their eyes stared white from their darkened faces. The air smelled of urine and brimstone and ozone.
On the afternoon of the second day a local man was brought before the Great King. He knew, he said, of a path through the mountains. If the Great King so wished, he could send men along the path to the far end of Thermopylae. The Greeks would be trapped like quail in a net.
At nightfall on the second day, at the hour when the lamps are lit, the Great King ordered his Immortals to take the mountain path. Leonidas had known of the path and, fearing its discovery, had put a thousand men to guard it. They could not stand against ten times their number. They fell back through the forests, sending word to the allies that Thermopylae was lost.
Leonidas dismissed all those who wished to go home. Most wanted no more than that, and left under cover of darkness before the enemy could surround them. But the Spartans did not abandon the pass. Nor did they remain alone. Fourteen hundred Greeks stayed to fight under the Spartan king.
As dawn broke on the third day the Persians came down again from the west. The Greeks had been fighting for some time when the Immortals were sighted to the east. With nowhere left to shelter, the Greeks drew back to a small rise. Most of their spears were already broken. They fought until their swords were clubbed out of their hands. King Leonidas fell dying. They dragged his body back three times. They fought with their daggers, hands, and teeth. The barbarians buried them in missiles. They were massacred to the last man.
When the battle was over Xerxes ordered a search of the carnage. He wanted the body of the Spartan king. When it was recovered he had it mutilated. The head of Leonidas was cut off and put up on a pole. Unburied in such a way, his soul would never pass on to the world of the dead. Then the Great King went on with his armies, his eighty thousand horsemen, his twenty thousand charioteers, into the heartlands of Greece.
The battle for which Sparta is best remembered is not a grand victory, but a splendid defeat. It is one of the earliest illustrations of the potency of martyrdom. As the story of the sacrifice at Thermopylae spread, the Greeks took heart. Few sent new envoys to Xerxes with earth and water. Instead the Hellenes drew together. The invasion went on, and was terrible–Athens was razed to the ground–but in the same year that Thermopylae fell the Persian navy was destroyed, and one year after the death of Leonidas the Greek armies that remained met under the leadership of the Spartans. At the Battle of Plataea they faced the Persians together, and obliterated them.
Thermopylae. It is a good story. But it is only a story. Did five thousand men stand for three days against three hundred thousand? Did the Great King start three times from his seat? Did the Spartans drive back the Persians three times from the body of their fallen king? There is truth in all this somewhere, but it is remote. The chronicler of Thermopylae, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, was as much a storyteller as a historian. His account bears all the hallmarks of fable. It does not give us the answers that history demands. Why did the Spartans choose to die so far from the home they cherished? Why would their own king give his life? What is the meaning, the political meaning, the human sense, of the inscription they left behind?
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their words, we lie.
The Sparta of Thermopylae comes down to us through a story, not a history. The good historian is a sceptic. He cannot be content with stories. As the audience to a story he must suspend his disbelief; but as the student of history it is belief he must suspend. In the story of Thermopylae, King Leonidas dies for the freedom of Greece. In history, no one comes off so clean. The pure and simple truth, it has been said, is rarely pure and never simple.
Would the Spartans be pleased to have become fictions? The Spartans of Herodotus are so fierce and inscrutable that they lose all human proportion; they become a single monolithic entity, fearless and hopeless: Sparta.
Herodotus leaves so many questions unanswered. But then the Spartans did not like to answer for their actions. They answered to no one. They knew the value of fiction. They would be content.
Transcript, public lecture,
Cherwell Historical Society,
Ben Mercer, Oxford, 2003
II
Metamorphosis
He left at night and arrived before morning.
It was February, and Athens was wet as any northern city. Those first days he revelled in the rain. He found a boarding house by the Hill of Wolves and walked up to the summit each day, his heart hammering at the gradient, the groves of wet cypress and pine soaking him when the wind caught them head on, the air under them awash with the smell of retsina.
And then, all at once, the weather began to weigh on him. It reminded him of Oxford and all that Oxford entailed. It became a burden of water he carried from place to place with his head bent, as if the rain chastened him.
He had told those he had left that there was work waiting for him. Three months of private college teaching. A lie to put their minds at rest, or to quell unwanted questions; it depended who he had been telling. Only Emine had not believed him.
As often as he could he lost himself in walking. The city did not embrace him. In Athens, in winter, there were too few tourists and not enough work for anyone. The papers were full of bad and worsening news. In Istanbul, the Great Eastern Raiders’ Front insisted on the privilege of having killed the British Consul-General. Contractors for the Athens Olympics were running eight months behind schedule and four times over budget, and who would pay in the end but the man in the street? Three boys had died on Symi celebrating a wedding with dynamite, the charges stolen from a road crew’s hut, the explosion leaving nothing behind, the bodies vaporised. A retired general had been kidnapped from his yacht at Laurium, the vessel found drifting like a ghost ship in a seaman’s tale. Anarchists had firebombed a ferry company in Piraeus, and the Association of Kiosk Vendors were threatening to strike over the licensing of Albanians, the concessions having always gone to disabled war veterans; and their popular cause, more than anything, soured the general mood. The city was neither welcoming nor unwelcoming, but unnoticing, with a gleaming, hurrying coldness that reminded him of the worst of England. He sat alone under the rafterless eaves of the temple of Athena Parthenos, rain dripping onto the steps, and remembered what he had left behind.
He needed work. He needed to be with others, working, and there was nothing. Already his money was short, but it was not the living he needed so much as the life. There was always that hurry in him. To be with someone; to be a part of something. He was not a man who was happy alone.
The boarding house manageress saved him the local jobs pages. He found two positions he might have filled, both menial by his standards, one in the harbour subcity of Piraeus and the other miles out in the industrial conurbations of Mégara; but both were taken when he telephoned, with no expectation of further vacancies.
The days were insubstantial, fast-changing, always threatened by rain, but with bursts of sunshine that lit up the avenues and squares with spells of sudden clarity, so that he would stop dead in a street of lock-up shops, or under the dusty orange trees, trying to understand how the place could have become glorious, even as the clouds moved on and the moment passed.
He dreamed of the women in his life. They were on the plane with him. Somehow–he did not know how or why–they had come away with him.
Emine was in the window seat, looking at the stars outside. Her eyes were not hers, were not human at all. They were wide and ferocious as those of a bird. Vanessa slept in her arms. He wanted it to be true, at first, despite that inhuman gaze, despite knowing in some fold of his brain that it was not. Then a wave of claustrophobia washed over him.
–You’re not here, he said to them. –You shouldn’t be with me. Go home. Go home!
But Emine only smiled and shook her head, and Nessie woke and began crying. Her lips were sewn together. The loose ends of the thread were crusted with old bloo
d.
On Monday, as he tried to buy roast chestnuts in his antiquated Greek, two students from Corinth came to his aid. Over coffee and cigarettes they asked him about England, showed him pictures of London as they knew it–a college bar, a kebab shop hoarding dimmed by rain–and were eager to help when he mentioned employment.
On one of the girls’ jewel-like mobiles they called their uncle, the owner of a meat grill in the suburb of Metamorphosis. He agreed terms without a second thought: yes, he would wait tables and wash up (could he wash up? Yes, he thought he could) in exchange for tips and something on top, plus meals and a room. Could he cook a steak? All the better. It was Ben, was it? A good bible name. The clients were a little rough that winter, construction workers down from the North, he shouldn’t expect them to be a gold mine. At least they would find his Greek amusing, the uncle said, and with that settled he told Ben to put his pretty nieces on again.
The boarding house manageress was disappointed in him.
–Such hard work for soft hands, she said, leaning close across the counter, raising her pencilled brows, and he told her that it was good work, that it was nothing to be ashamed of.
By way of a parting gift she drew him a map on the back of an election flyer. An X marked the meat grill like buried treasure. He walked to Constitution Square and took the bus to Metamorphosis.
He had been to Athens before, twice to speak and once to dig, but had never ventured out to the suburbs. They seemed to be built entirely of postwar concrete and plate glass, as if the city were nothing but an invention of the twentieth century. The bus soon threatened to overheat, the driver getting out to hammer the hot bonnet open with his shoe while the passengers shifted and muttered. The windows were gummed shut with eluvium, and when they got going again the heat built up, pleasant at first, then uncomfortable and finally alarming, the metal frames of the seats too hot to touch. No one got out unless they had reached their destination. In Metamorphosis, it seemed, even a bus half on fire was better than no bus at all.
