by Tom Harper
'But the rest of the tradition survived too: Homer's poems wouldn't make sense if it didn't. There's a vast literature from other poets, authors and playwrights who took the Trojan war as their theme: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil — to say nothing of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Chaucer… The list is literally endless because it's still being written, more than two and a half thousand years after Homer first put pen to paper.'
'So what did happen to Achilles?'
'The tradition records that he was killed by Paris — possibly shot in the leg by an arrow — while fighting at the gates of Troy. According to a precis in the Odyssey, the Greeks then cremated him and buried his ashes in a golden urn, near the mouth of the Dardanelles.'
Now all the sons of warlike Greece surround
Thy destined tomb and cast a mighty mound;
High on the shore the growing hill we raise,
That wide the extended Hellespont surveys;
Where all, from age to age, who pass the coast,
May point Achilles' tomb, and hail the mighty ghost.
Grant looked up. 'Is that true? Is the tomb still there?'
'There are tumuli on the shores of the Bosphorus,' Marina answered. 'Archaeologists have excavated them, but never found anything significant. Certainly not a shield.'
'Besides,' Reed added, 'cremation was an Iron Age practice. The Mycenaeans at Troy would have buried their dead in tombs. It's an anachronism in the poem.'
Muir stood. 'An anachronism? It's all fucking anachronistic. We're trying to find something of vital national urgency, and all you can give me is hocus-pocus and a three-thousand-year-old ghost trail. It doesn't matter a damn if Achilles was shot in the heel or the head, if he was cremated or buried. He didn't fucking exist.'
'Someone existed.' Reed's voice was unyielding. 'He may not have been called Achilles, his heel probably wasn't any more vulnerable than the rest of him and I rather doubt his mother was a sea nymph — but someone existed. If the smiths on Lemnos forged that shield, someone took it. Someone extraordinary, worthy of such a priceless and holy piece of armour. Someone who would inspire stories and legends, however corrupted and confused they became. Someone whose life left an indelible mark on history.'
'History? I thought we were talking about literature. Myth.'
'A hundred years ago everyone thought the Trojan war was pure myth, total invention. Then Schliemann started digging. No trial and error, no years of searching. He went straight to Troy and stuck his spade in. Then he went to Mycenae, Agamemnon's capital, and did exactly the same thing.'
Grant stirred. 'How did he know where to go?'
'Everybody knew.' Reed had wandered into the centre of the chamber. Light from the gas flame seemed to wrap itself round him. 'That's what's so extraordinary. The knowledge was never lost. We still have guidebooks from two thousand years ago describing these places for classical tourists. What we lost was the belief — the faith that there was any truth in the stories. All Schliemann had to do was believe.'
Muir ground out his cigarette on the altar and tossed it into the fire pit. 'All right.' His voice was hard with mocking disbelief. 'So what do you want me to do? Go to Turkey and dig up every mound of earth to see if there's a shield inside?'
'There's no need for that.' Reed's voice was milder now. 'If the stories are true, the shield won't be there.'
'You said Achilles was buried at Troy.'
'He was. But his armour wasn't buried with him. It was too valuable. The Greeks held a contest to see who should inherit it and Odysseus won.'
'Jesus Christ — doesn't this end? What did he do with it?'
'No one knows. That's where the shield of Achilles drops out of legend completely. Odysseus doesn't, of course — his ten-year journey home to Ithaca is the subject of the Odyssey. But as far as I know, there's never any mention of Achilles' armour in the Odyssey except a brief allusion to Odysseus having won it. Now Odysseus was shipwrecked so many times on his voyage that it's inconceivable it made it home with him.'
Muir opened his ivory cigarette case; his fingers scrabbled inside, but it was empty. He looked up and his eyes met Reed's. 'Let's cut through all this crap and mumbo-jumbo. Do you have any idea where we can find this shield, or should I cable London and tell them the hunt's over?'
For a moment, Reed and Muir stared at each other. 'I don't know where the shield is.' The case snapped shut. Muir turned to leave. 'But I know where I'd start looking.'
Fourteen
Paleo Faliro, Athens. Two days later
It was a clear, bright spring morning. The lower slopes of the mountains that circled the city were green from the winter rains, and snow still glistened on their heights like marble. Grant and the others sat out on the hotel terrace by the waterfront — between the mountains and the sparkling sea, between winter and summer, between the past and… who knew what? Just at that moment Grant didn't care. He felt as if he'd spent the last week in darkness — midnight ferries, sea caves, claustrophobic tunnels and caverns. For now, sitting in the sunshine with a cold beer in his hand was enough.
This was a Greece he hadn't seen before — a Greece of money and middle classes, far away from the poor hamlets and fishing villages he was used to. Elegant turn-of-the-century villas lined the foreshore, while fat-trunked palms shaded the tramlines on the esplanade and slim yachts filled the moorings at the marina below the hotel. Here, you could almost forget the civil war that still ravaged the country.
Across the table, Reed sipped his cup of tea.
'We need to go back to the beginning.' He unwrapped the clay tablet and laid it in the middle of the table. After all their adventures, Grant was amazed it was still in one piece. 'It all seems to have started when Pemberton found this. I think the first question has to be: where did it come from?'
Marina put down her drink and picked up the tablet, running her finger over the angular characters like braille. 'He might have found it in Crete, but I think it was here. It was when he returned from his last trip to Athens that he seemed to get excited.'
'Quite so.' There was just a hint of impatience in Reed's voice. 'But where did it come from in the first place? It must have been dug up somewhere. These Linear B tablets have been found all over Crete and at Mycenaean sites on the mainland, but so far as I'm aware they've never turned up in Athens. I think we can discount the possibility that Pemberton stole it from a museum. Either someone must have given it to him, or he stumbled across it in one of the antiquities shops here. Now — '
He broke off with a vexed frown. The roar of propellers drowned out his words as a small floatplane swooped overhead. It dropped towards the sea, bounced once and skidded across the waves in a fountain of spray. Probably some shipowning heir trying to impress a girl, Grant thought.
'Does this really matter?' Muir blew smoke through his nostrils. 'We've got the tablet, that's what counts. If you could read the fucking writing, maybe it would be worth something.'
'If you'd left me alone in Oxford I might have made some progress. Rather than dragging me here to be shot at, almost kidnapped and dragged from one end of the Aegean to the other.' Reed stared over the rim of the teacup. Down in the bay, the floatplane was taxiing towards the dock. 'But the point I was trying to put to you is that even if I had deciphered the Linear B — and even if it does point the way to the shield — it would only take us so far.' He held up the tablet and stroked a finger along the ragged edge where it had been snapped. 'Halfway, give or take.'
'You mean there's more of it?' Muir slammed his cup down on the table. Tea slopped into the saucer. 'How the hell are we going to find that?'
'By finding out where this one came from.' Reed put down the tablet and hid it under his napkin to avoid the stares of the other guests. 'A piece this significant hasn't been lost in someone's attic for a hundred years. My guess is it must have been excavated shortly before Pemberton found it, just before the war. With all the upheaval then, it would hardly be surprising if it had escaped notice — or m
ade its way on to the black market.'
Grant frowned. 'It could still have been found by accident. A farmer ploughing his field or something. Grave robbers, maybe.'
'Unlikely. Of all the Linear B tablets that have come to light, I don't think any were turned up by accident. Whatever the tablets say, they were pretty exclusive playthings. They've only ever been found in palace complexes — and those take some effort to excavate.' Reed turned to Marina. 'I'd be grateful if you would go to the Ministry of Culture. Find out who was issued archaeological permits in 1940 and 1941. Half the world was at war at the time, so there can't have been many.'
He stood, picking up the tablet still wrapped in the napkin.
'Where are you going with that?' Muir asked suspiciously.
'To my room, and then to the library.'
'I'll go with you.' Marina jumped up, and she and Reed disappeared into the hotel. Grant swilled the last of his beer round the glass and drained it. Across the table, Muir was peering over his shoulder, watching the floatplane moor at the dock. A tall man in white trousers and a white open-necked shirt jumped down from the cabin and started talking animatedly with the marina attendants.
'You'd better go with Reed.' Muir turned back. 'Athens must be crawling with Reds. Don't want our professor falling into the wrong hands. And buy yourself a suit. You look like bloody Gunga Din at the moment.'
Grant ignored the insult. 'Do you really think he's up to it? Breaking the Linear B?'
Muir shot Grant a crooked look, weighing his words carefully. 'He did some work on codes for us during the war. That's where I came across him. That's confidential, by the way. He may seem as though he's wandered out of Gilbert and Sullivan, but he's absolutely fucking brilliant. He broke the Hungarian foreign office cipher in three days flat.'
'Was that a difficult code?'
Muir gave a sardonic laugh. 'I've no idea. The point is he doesn't speak Hungarian.'
* * *
Grant caught up with Reed and Marina outside the hotel, and together they took the tram into the centre of Athens. Marina had swapped her army fatigues for a simple blue dress, drawn in at the waist. She sat primly with her knees pressed together, her hair pinned back and her bag in her lap: just another young woman on her way to the shops or the pictures. Reed stared out of the window at the passing city. An open lorry full of armed soldiers pulled past them; grim-faced women pulled their children back from the road. In the rest of Europe the war might be over, but in Greece the quiet savagery of a civil war smouldered on.
'Who was Schliemann?' Grant asked, remembering something Reed had said in the cave.
Reed looked up, surprised. 'Schliemann? An archaeologist. The archaeologist, really. He practically invented the discipline — made it up as he went along.'
Marina pursed her lips. 'That's not all he made up.'
'I think what Marina is referring to is his, um, enthusiasm. Schliemann, as I said, was a great believer in the truth of Homer. A romantic. He was also a compulsive showman. It's possible that he occasionally let his preconceptions and his sense of theatre dictate the presentation of what he discovered.'
'There were rumours that half the treasures he found he'd planted himself,' Marina sniffed.
Reed waved a hand airily. 'Details. He didn't plant the Cyclopean walls of Troy, or the Lion Gate at Mycenae. You can disapprove of his methods and dispute his interpretation, but you can't deny his achievement. He rescued the Trojan war from the realm of myth and planted it firmly in the real world.'
Grant stared at him. 'But if Schliemann proved the stories were true, why did you keep insisting they were fairy tales?'
Reed gave an embarrassed smile. 'My faith wasn't as strong as Schliemann's. Or rather, I was an apostate.' A faraway look came into his eyes. 'I saw him once. I was ten years old. He gave a public lecture at the Royal Geographic Society; my father took me. We went up on the train and he bought me a lemon ice at Paddington. Funny what you remember. Anyway, Schliemann made an extraordinary impression. Bounded in wearing his frock coat and German accent like some combination of Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo. The hour passed like a dream, like a summer afternoon leafing through your favourite books and reading all the most exciting bits. Except this time, it was all true. That night, I decided I wanted to be like Schliemann.'
'What happened?'
'I grew up.' A wistful sigh. 'I went to Oxford — and stayed there. It seemed the best place for a young man with a passion for the Classics. Instead, it slowly leeched the passion out of me. You can't spend a lifetime just basking in the magnificent glow you get from Homer. You have to study, analyse, explain. And the closer you look, the further away you get. That first emotional burst gets broken down into eminently rational components, which get broken down again and again. It's like dissecting the family dog to find out why you love him so much. By the time you're finished, it's gone.' Reed wiped his face with his handkerchief. The crowded tram was warm and sweat beaded on his forehead. 'Besides, even with everything Schliemann found, it's still an enormous leap from a couple of ruined hill forts, however evocative, to saying that Homer got it all right. Respectable academics don't stand for that sort of thing. We're professional sceptics. If you do believe, you keep it a rather guilty secret. In time, it becomes an embarrassment, then a joke. Eventually you can't remember what it was you ever saw in it.'
'But you changed your mind.'
'In the cave. Seeing all those carvings, exactly as Homer described them…' Reed shook his head in wonder. 'I remembered what inspired me that night in Kensington. It wasn't the poetry — that came later. It wasn't even the stories, exciting though they were. It was the possibility, the hope, that buried under all that scholarship and legend there might be something real. Something true.' He gave a bashful smile. 'I started to believe again. Just like Schliemann — or Evans. Speaking of whom
He jumped up and pulled the bell cord. The tram lumbered to a standstill. Grant rose, but Marina stayed seated.
'Not my stop. I'll see you back at the hotel.'
'Keep your eyes open.'
She lifted her handbag a little. It looked surprisingly heavy — more than the usual lipstick and powder. 'I can take care of myself.'
* * *
Grant and Reed stepped off and found themselves at the gates of a large white neoclassical building, set back from the street in spacious grounds and surrounded by a high stone wall. A brass plate on the gatepost announced THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS.
'The place looks half asleep. They might as well have hung out a Do Not Disturb sign.'
'Most of the staff are probably away for the Easter holidays. But with any luck…' Reed pumped the doorbell enthusiastically, until a young woman in a grey jersey dress emerged from the house. She eyed them with suspicion — Reed in his outmoded suit and floppy sunhat, Grant in his boots and shirtsleeves — but Reed's name seemed to have some talismanic power. The mere sound of it turned her hostility into something more like star-struck awe. She led them through the gate and up a hill, through a garden of olive trees, pines, cypresses and oleanders, into the cool of a high-ceilinged hallway.
'I'm afraid the Director is away today, or he would have come to meet you himself. He'd be so honoured by your visit, Professor Reed. If you could just sign in the visitors' book.' She slid the book across the table and held out a pen. Reed signed with a flourish and passed the pen to Grant.
'Do all visitors have to sign in here?' Grant scribbled something meaningless and illegible under Reed's name, a small piece of subterfuge that had become habit.
'Of course. Even our most esteemed guests.' She flashed Reed an apologetic smile.
'Do you mind if I have a look?'
Grant leafed back through the book. It looked like an artefact in its own right, a relic of the past that had been dusted off and propped back on its shelf. Page after page, row after row of names and dates whose regular spacing gave no hint of the erratic passages of time they represented. Sometimes there were a doz
en or more on the same date; more often days or even whole weeks passed without the book being disturbed. Then, just once, something different: two neat ruled lines like a scar across the page, dividing April 1941 from January 1945.
Four years, Grant thought. Four years when the world had done its best to tear itself apart. All in the white space between two parallel lines.
On the page before the divide, Grant found what he was looking for. He turned the book to show Reed. 'Pemberton was here: 21 March 1941.'
'You knew John Pemberton?'
'We met once. Were you here then?'
She shook her head. 'Most of us have only been here since the war.'
Grant thought for a moment. 'You said this place funded Pemberton's digs on Crete. Would you have records of his expenses?'
The girl looked taken aback at the request. She glanced uncertainly at Reed, who gave a reassuring nod. 'I can look for you. It may take a little time. If the records are anywhere, they're probably in the cellar.'
'We'll be in the library.'
* * *
Grant had never been much of a man for libraries; Reed was in his element. While Grant sat by the window and skimmed through a three-week-old copy of The Times, Reed flitted among the shelves, gathering books and piling them on the table like a bird making its nest. Grant glanced at the gold lettering on the spines: Through Basque to Minoan; A Clue to the Cretan Scripts; The Palace of Minos by A. E. Evans, in four table-bending volumes. Grant's heart sank. There were more books there than you could get through in a year.
'Are you really going to read all of them?'
Reed's head popped up from behind a particularly forbidding volume. 'Maybe. People have been trying for fifty years to crack this particular riddle. In some respects, it makes Ultra look like a Bank Holiday crossword.'
