Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  'Over here.' His voice sounded uncomfortably loud among the deadening trees. He wondered who else could hear it.

  Hardly matters, he thought: they'd certainly have heard Jackson.

  The American blundered into the clearing, snapping off three low-hanging branches on his way. He must have been feeling jumpy too: as he emerged from the undergrowth, Grant saw him slip the Colt into his trouser pocket. It bulged suggestively.

  He peered inside the empty shed. 'Looks like someone got here before us.'

  'The villagers probably broke in to get at the tools.'

  'Geez.' Jackson shook his head in disgust. 'No wonder the Reds do so well here.'

  'They're starving,' said Grant bluntly. 'They haven't had food for six years. And now they've become an international football, kicked from one country to the next. They're just desperate to survive. That's why the Communists do so well. They're the only ones who offer them hope.'

  Jackson looked at him incredulously. 'Are you out of your mind? You can't say that kind of thing. After what happened on Lemnos, you gotta think the Reds are already on to us.'

  'They certainly have a knack of turning up…'

  Grant spun round, the Webley suddenly in his hand. But he was too late. Across the clearing, a single eye squinted at him down the sights of a gun.

  * * *

  Reed and Marina sat facing each other at the long table in the library, divided by a rampart of books. Rumpled sheets of paper littered Reed's side of the table: half-filled grids, lists, diagrams, crossings-out and what looked like penmanship exercises. Opposite, Marina contented herself with a solitary book, a jotting pad and a sharp pencil. In contrast to Reed, her paper was almost empty.

  She gave a sigh — the sort that invites an enquiry. Across the table, the white thatch of hair stayed bowed over its work. A nib scratched furiously on paper. 'It's such a mess,' she said, choosing a more direct approach.

  Reed's horn-rimmed spectacles appeared over the books. 'I'm sorry?' He looked startled — though whether by some discovery he'd just made, or simply at being reminded she was still there she couldn't tell.

  'I've been looking at the Odyssey again — to see if I can find any clues about what Odysseus might have done with the shield.'

  'Explorers and philologists have been trying to map Odysseus's wanderings for centuries,' said Reed. 'It can't be done.'

  Her face fell. 'Why not?'

  Reed capped his pen and moved aside a volume of The Palace of Minos that was obstructing the view between them. Absent-mindedly, he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. 'Who do you think wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey?'

  She laughed. 'If you go to school in Greece, you know there's only one answer to that: Homer. Pemberton used to tease me for thinking so. He said it was a trick question, that nobody wrote the poems. He said they were the products of centuries of oral tradition, handed down and adapted from one generation of poets to the next.' A sadness crept into her voice. 'He said that looking for what was original in the final poems was as hopeless as peering at a baby's face and trying to see the features of his great-great-great-great-grandfather.'

  'Pemberton had his opinions. I disagreed. I don't think a committee of poets could have come up with those poems. I think it would have needed a single mind, a single vision, to create something with such cohesive brilliance. But there's no doubt that the poet — or poets: I'm not saying that the Iliad and the Odyssey were necessarily written by the same chap — had a lot to work with. A treasury of myths, genealogies, folk tales, memories and traditions. Some of the elements in the poems are almost uncannily accurate — rivers that Homer could never have seen because they'd silted up by his day; types of arms and armour that had been out of use for half a millennium when he wrote. You've seen the boar's tusk helmet that Schliemann excavated at Mycenae? Perfectly described by Homer.'

  He must have noticed her attention wandering; he shook his head and straightened his tie. 'I'm sorry. The point is, with regard to the Odyssey, that the poet had a number of different traditions to draw on.'

  'Well, he seems to have used them all — and mixed them up completely. In some parts of the Odyssey Odysseus seems to be sailing around the Western Mediterranean; in other parts he's somewhere near Egypt; and books ten to twelve are filled with symbolic elements — clashing rocks, sirens, the islands of the sun — which are usually associated with the Black Sea region. Which is ridiculous! How can he expect us to believe that Odysseus — the cleverest of the Greeks, after all — would sail east into the Black Sea if he was trying to get home to Ithaca?' She sounded personally affronted by the idea.

  'That's probably why Homer is so vague about it. After all, it's not as though he's got no sense of geography. He can be as precise as the Ordnance Survey when he wants to. He's stuck all these different stories together and he's trying to paper over the cracks.'

  Marina sighed. 'As if we needed someone to make things more obscure…'

  They both looked up as the door banged open. Muir strode in. 'Any progress?'

  Reed scratched a bushy eyebrow. 'Marina and I were just discussing the many facets of Homer.'

  'Jesus Christ.' Muir sank into a wooden chair. 'Can't I leave you to get on with things? You're not going to find the answers in fucking poetry. Not unless Homer wrote a long-lost sequel explaining where this shield was buried. Preferably with a map.'

  He pushed back his chair and rested his injured leg on the table. 'I cabled London about our friend Dr Belzig — the German archaeologist — to see if he was known to us. Turned out they've got a file on him as fat as your cock. He was a paid-up member of the master race — one of Hitler's pet boffins, sent out to prove their crackpot theories. Did some work on the Cairo excavations in 1938, sniffed around Sparta the following year, then took himself to Cephalonia in the autumn of 1940. Spent the war on Crete. Numerous allegations of him using slave labour on his excavations there — locals compared him unfavourably to the Gestapo.' He glanced at Marina. 'As you know. Shame we didn't get our hands on him.'

  'What happened?'

  'Saw the writing on the wall in 1944 and fled to Berlin. Perhaps he thought his beloved Fuhrer would save him. Wrongly, it turned out — just meant that the Russians nabbed him instead of us. London says he was last heard of heading east on a very crowded train to Siberia.'

  'Do you think he told the Russians about the tablets?'

  'If they thought to ask him. Based on recent events, I'd say they probably did. Which is why I'd be grateful if you stopped playing around with poetry and concentrated on translating that fucking tablet.'

  He glared at Reed — a wasted effort. All through the conversation Reed had been staring at the page in front of him as if hypnotised by it. Now he blinked twice and looked up, a puzzled smile on his face. 'I'm sorry?' He paused, mistaking Muir's silence for a sign that a question had been asked. 'I was just wondering if this library had a Chrestomathy.'

  * * *

  Grant stared down the barrel of the gun. One eye squinted back, just about all he could see of a face almost completely buried in a thick black beard. In his flat cap, serge trousers and woollen waistcoat, he reminded Grant of the gamekeepers who had patrolled the woods on the local estate during his childhood. Now, once again, he'd been caught poaching.

  'Pios einai?' the man growled. Then, in heavily accented German: 'Wer sind Sie?'

  'Grant.' Moving very slowly and smiling all the way, he holstered the Webley. The rifle followed every movement. In Greek, he said, 'We are looking for the…' He paused. What were they looking for? Watching the man with the gun, he could see that every second's delay only made him twitchier. '… the diggings.'

  Something rustled in the trees. Grant tensed — how many more were there? From the corner of his eye he saw Jackson's hand creeping towards his pocket. But the Greek had noticed it too. The gun swung round and the finger tightened on the trigger. Jackson let his hand drop back against his side.

  The noise in the thicket
grew louder. Something was moving behind the bushes. Grant tensed.

  With a snuffle and a grunt, an enormous pig pushed through the branches, shuffled down the slope and began rootling around the base of one of the hillocks. Grant and Jackson stared in amazement.

  'Eumaios,' said the Greek, pointing to the pig. 'I bring him to eat acorns.'

  'What's he saying?' Jackson demanded. His arm was tensed, as if an invisible piece of elastic was drawing his hand towards his gun.

  'He's just feeding his pig. Pigs,' Grant corrected himself, as four more trotted out of the forest and began combing the earth for treats. He smiled at the swineherd.

  'Kali choiri.'

  'What did you say?'

  'I told him he had nice pigs.'

  The Greek lowered his gun.

  'Kali,' he agreed. 'The acorns make the meat very sweet.'

  'Someone else came to dig in this ground once. A German.' Grant looked him in the eye. 'Was it here?' The swineherd gave him a crooked look. 'You are German?'

  'English.'

  'Ela.'

  He leaned the gun against the tree and reached into the canvas bag slung across his shoulder. His hand emerged with a loaf and a slice of cheese wrapped in cloth. He tore off a hunk of bread and offered it to Grant.

  'Epharisto. Thank you.' Grant undipped the canteen from his belt and offered the man a drink. Together, the three of them sat on the grassy bank and watched the pigs feeding among the heaped-up piles of earth.

  'The German…'

  'Belzig. His name was Belzig.'

  Grant's pulse quickened. He tried not to show it. 'Did you know him?'

  Again that suspicious look. 'Did you?'

  'No.' Grant weighed his options for a second and decided to go for it. 'But we have something that belonged to him. Something he found here.'

  The swineherd pried an acorn out of the ground and tossed it to the nearest pig, who snuffled it up enthusiastically. 'Look at this,' he said, sweeping his arm across the clearing. 'So much history buried underneath. We spend our lives to try to dig it out, but always the present buries it again.'

  'What's he saving?' Jackson asked plaintively.

  'Did you dig here?'

  The Greek nodded. 'Yes. I work for Belzig. Not a Nazi,' he emphasised. He tapped the breech of his rifle. 'I kill many. But before — before the war — I work for Belzig. I dig for him.'

  'What did you find?'

  'Rocks.' The swineherd pointed to the stone foundations poking out of the earth like teeth. 'Old rocks.'

  'Pottery?'

  'Pots, yes.' He tore off another hunk of bread and chewed it noisily.

  'And a tablet? A clay tablet, about…' Grant made the dimensions with his hands. 'So big. With ancient writing on one side and painting on the other?'

  The swineherd put down his bread and stared Grant hard in the face. 'You have seen it?'

  'A picture,' Grant prevaricated.

  'Ela.'

  A faraway look came into his eyes. 'We know it is special when we find it. Belzig's face, it was like a wolf. He says that nothing like it is ever found. He says it is the secret map to hidden treasure. Hah.' He spat. 'He should keep quiet. Socratis hear him.'

  'Who's Socratis?'

  'My cousin. He works for Belzig also. One night he goes into Belzig's tent and steals it. Belzig is very angry — he wants to shoot everyone. But he never finds Socratis.'

  'What happened to Socratis?'

  'I think he takes it to Athens to sell it. Is the war coming, we are very hungry. Stealing from Germans…'He shrugged. 'They steal more from us.'

  'Did Socratis ever come back?'

  'No. My uncle say he joins andartes. Germans kills him.' He tossed an acorn in his hand and gave a sad smile. 'So, Belzig has revenge.'

  'What about Belzig? Did he come back?'

  'No. He takes away what he has found — maybe to Germany, I think. He never comes back to Cephalonia.'

  Grant thought for a second. 'And this piece he found. You're sure there was only one? Not two?'

  'Only one. And Socratis steals it.'

  'What's a fucking Chrestomathy?

  Sounds like a disease you don't want to tell your wife you've got.'

  Reed's face remained open and courteous. Only a small twitch at the corner of his mouth hinted at his disgust. 'It's a book — or was. It only survives in fragments now.'

  'More fucking fragments. How are they going to help?'

  Reed gave a thin, tested smile. 'It may just give you what you want.'

  'A dictionary of Linear B?'

  'The long-lost sequel to Homer.'

  Reed hauled himself out of his chair, rubbed his ink-stained hands on his trousers and pulled a long drawer out of the card catalogue. He flicked through the yellowed index cards, muttering to himself. 'Here we are.' He looked around at the stacked shelves, a man at a station trying to pick out a face in the crowd. His gaze gradually rose higher, until it came to rest on the topmost shelf of a bookcase that must have been twice his height.

  'I'll get it.' Marina wheeled over a ladder. It creaked and wobbled alarmingly as she climbed. Reed stood on the bottom rung to brace it, while Muir tried to look up her dress.

  'If it's the long-lost sequel, why's it in the card catalogue? Don't tell me no one's thought to look there for the last two thousand years?'

  Reed ignored him — so completely that Muir began to wonder if he'd actually spoken out loud. Stretching precariously on the top rung, Marina prised out a thick hard-bound book. A cloud of dust rose off the shelf; she sneezed, lost her balance and flailed around desperately. That didn't help. The ladder swayed like a pendulum, creaking so loudly Reed was sure it must collapse in splinters. With a small shriek, Marina let go of the book and grabbed on to the frame.

  The book dropped like a stone and landed in Reed's arms with a thud. He winced, set it aside and held the ladder until Marina had got down safely. She tugged down her dress, which had risen up over her slip in the commotion.

  Reed laid the book on the table and cracked open the cover. Two dead flies fell out of the title page.

  'Maybe it hasn't been borrowed for two thousand years,' quipped Muir.

  'The Chrestomathy is a literary anthology: a sort of classical Reader's Digest. It was put together by a scholar named Proclus — about whom we know almost nothing — around the fifth century AD.'

  As Reed turned the pages, the others saw that it was no ordinary book. It was more like a scrapbook, made up entirely of small squares of typed paper cut out with scissors and pasted on to the blank pages. Often they had peeled away and been stuck back down with tape. It seemed to be a work in progress: many of the clippings had been scored out or amended in ink, or had new excerpts painted over them. Some were no longer than single sentences; others ran to complete paragraphs. All were in Greek.

  'This is a collection of the fragments that survive.' Reed ran his finger down the page.

  'Fragments — you mean scraps of parchment or paper or whatever they were written on?'

  Reed shook his head. 'Very occasionally. Far more often they're small pieces of the text that come down to us through quotations in other works that have survived more or less intact. Think of Shakespeare. Even if we didn't have complete texts of any of his plays, we could still reconstruct them — partially — from all the subsequent scholars who've quoted them. Some of the quotations would overlap, in which case you could piece them together; for others you could guess their approximate position in the play by knowing something about its plot. Time and history try their best to erase our human endeavours, but they're hard to get rid of completely. They endure, like pottery shards embedded in the soil. Here we are.'

  His finger came to rest on a long excerpt that almost filled the page. 'The Aethiopis, by Arctinus of Miletus.'

  'I thought you said it was by this fellow Proclus,' said Muir.

  'Proclus wrote the Chrestomathy, ' Reed explained patiently. 'But he was only summarising other authors — in
this case, Arctinus of Miletus. Later, some of the scribes who copied out the Iliad added excerpts from Proclus as supplementary material.'

  'It's so tenacious,' Marina marvelled. 'Almost like a virus, copying itself from one host to the next until it finds one that survives.'

  'Never mind that,' barked Muir. 'What does it say?'

  * * *

  'We should call the cops.'

  Grant stared at Jackson. They were walking back down the hill, their boots crunching on the twigs and acorns.

  'His cousin stole this thing, right? So he probably knows more than he's saying. The way I figure it, we get the local boys in blue to bring him in for questioning. They're probably chumps, but who cares? Maybe they can soften him up a little. Either way, it puts him just where we want him.' He caught Grant's incredulous gaze. 'What? I read your file. I know what you did in the war. The girl, too. Is that shit true? She must've been some piece of work.'

  'We shouldn't get the police involved, not if we don't have to,' Grant insisted. He shook his head angrily. Something didn't make sense, but he couldn't work out what it was. It was like trying to finish a jigsaw: there was only one piece missing — but the box was empty.

  He realised Jackson had been saying something. 'What?'

  'I was saying we could bring in a team to dig up the hill. We're trying to find the other half of this tablet, right? If pig-man says they only found the one piece, then the other one's probably still up there. That's what the professor said.'

  'The second piece.' Grant stopped in his tracks. 'Belzig knew what that tablet was worth. If he only found half of it, why did he never come back to look for the other half?'

  Jackson looked confused. 'Why?'

  But Grant had already forgotten him. He sprinted up the slope, pushing pell-mell through the branches. Haste made him careless. His foot turned over on a loose stone, pitching him forward; he stumbled, flailed out his arms and had almost regained his balance when an exposed tree-root caught him square on the shin. He toppled over, crashed through a bush and planted himself face first in the dirt.