by Tom Harper
It wasn't a new joke, nor even very funny, but the effect on Reed was electric. He sat bolt upright, stared at Jackson, then leaped to his feet. 'Excuse me,' he mumbled and ran out of the door.
'What the…'
Jackson and Grant followed him into the room next door. They found him kneeling beside the bed, rifling through the reams of paper scattered on the floor.
'What is it?'
He turned to face them. His pale blue eyes were wide open, yet he barely seemed to see them. 'I think I've got it.'
Twenty-nine
No one slept that night. Grant and Jackson took it in turns to stand guard in the corridor, fighting off sleep's advances with endless cigarettes and cups of coffee. Reed didn't need any stimulants. Every hour they knocked on his door to see if he needed anything; each time he waved them away. Hunched over his desk in a pool of lamplight, wearing his dressing gown over his clothes and scribbling furiously, he reminded Grant of something out of a fairy tale: Rumpelstiltskin, perhaps, labouring through the night to spin gold out of paper and clay.
Even when he wasn't on duty Grant couldn't sleep. He lay awake on his bed, shivering with caffeine and nicotine and fatigue. He tried not to think about Marina; when that failed, he tried to crowd out his fears with happier memories. That didn't work either. At three a.m., after his second spell on watch, he went up to the roof and stood on the terrace, drinking in the night around him. The hotel was in the Sultanahmet district, the heart of the ancient city. On his right he could see the tip of an obelisk in the old hippodrome; further over, the domes of the Blue Mosque tumbling over each other, and the spire on Ayia Sophia. For perhaps the first time in his life he felt the beauty of history.
When he went back downstairs, the corridor was deserted and Reed's door hung open. Grant broke into a run, then slowed again as he heard familiar voices inside the room. Reed was still there, slumped in his chair, while Jackson stared over his shoulder at something on the desk.
Jackson looked up. 'He's cracked it.'
Even allowing for his tiredness, Reed looked shaken — like a man who had peered behind the curtain of some sacred shrine and could not comprehend what he had witnessed.
'Jackson's joke turned out to be no more than the literal truth. The language — Linear B — is Greek. A very primitive, archaic form, but recognisably Greek.'
'I thought you said Greek was suggested years ago.'
'It was. But that was only guesswork: suggesting a key when we hadn't yet found the lock. It would have been like looking at an Enigma intercept, not knowing where it had come from, and saying it might be in German. It's all very well, but it's meaningless until you've dissected the code, learned its grammar and its syntax, and how it represents the language. You have to rebuild it from the bottom up — only then do comparisons with other languages do any good. In this particular instance we've been inconceivably lucky. It might have been a totally new language, or one only distantly related to one we knew. Instead, it's one of the most studied languages on the planet.'
'You've done a great job,' said Jackson warmly. 'But what did you find out?'
Reed scratched the side of his head. 'The implications are staggering. We all assumed the Mycenaeans were a pre-Greek culture, wiped out before the Greeks arrived. Now it seems they were there alongside. This is going utterly to rewrite the history books.'
'Fuck the history books — what about the tablet?'
'Oh, yes.' Reed handed him a piece of paper. 'There's still work to be done — some of the constructions are hard to make out and there are several symbols I've only tentatively identified. But this should give you the gist.' Jackson and Grant leaned in to look. 'You know, we're probably the first people to read this language in almost three thousand years.'
THE KING OF CRETE DEDICATED THE STONE TO THE MISTRESS OF THE LABYRINTH. BUT THE GODDESS DID NOT FAVOUR THE MEN OF CRETE. THE BLACK SHIPS CAME TO ZAKROS AND TOOK THE STONE FROM THE LION'S MOUTH [CAVE?]. THE LEADER OF THE HOST BROUGHT THE STONE TO THE TEMPLE OF THE SMITH ON LEMNOS. IN FIRE AND IN WATER, THE INITIATES SWEATED METAL FROM THE STONE AND FORGED ARMOUR: TWO GREAVES; A HELMET WITH CHEEK PIECES; A BRONZE CORSELET; AND A SHIELD OF BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD AND LEAD. BY THE WILL OF THE GODS, THEY GAVE THIS TO THE HERO WHOSE DEEDS ARE WELL KNOWN…
[next two lines illegible because of the break in the tablet. We may conjecture they relate the death of the Hero (Achilles?) and the inheritance of his armour. — A.R.]
… THEN OUR CAPTAIN, THE GOOD SAILOR, SWORE HE WOULD NOT KEEP THE TROPHIES BUT DEDICATE THEM TO THE HERO. BY THE WILL OF THE PRIESTESS, THE ROWERS TOOK THE CARGO BEYOND THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD. THEY SAILED ALONG THE COAST AND CROSSED THE RIVER. THEN SOON THEY CAME TO THE SACRED HARBOUR WHERE WILLOWS AND POPLARS AND WILD CELERY GROW. THERE, IN THE MOUNTAIN BEYOND THE LAKE, THEY BUILT THE HOUSE OF DEATH. THEY PUT INSIDE IT GIFTS AND BURNT OFFERINGS, THE ARMOUR AND THE SHIELD, AND ALSO MANY CUPS AND VESSELS OF GOLD AND SILVER. THEN THEY SAILED HOME WITH MANY ADVENTURES.
'So all we need to do is work out which river they crossed and then find the nearest mountain.'
'Most of the sources talked about rivers in connection with the White Island,' Grant remembered. 'But none of them could agree which. The Dnieper, the Dniester, the Danube…'
'And they're probably wrong anyway. Remember, it's more likely to be somewhere near the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov.'
Jackson looked surprised. 'Did I miss something?'
'I'll explain,' said Reed. 'In the meantime, I don't suppose we can find a map?'
'I've got the Black Sea Pilot we used to get to Snake Island. It's in my room.'
Grant fetched the book, which came with a chart folded inside the back cover. He spread it out on the bed and stared at it. The lines swam and blurred in front of his exhausted eyes — but one stark fact was clear. 'There aren't any islands. There isn't even a river.'
'There must be,' said Reed stubbornly. 'The one thing all the texts agree on is that there's a river near the White Island. The whole point is that they have to cross the Oceanus to get to the world beyond.'
'I thought they travelled by sea,' Grant objected. 'You can't cross a river at sea. You cross it on land, from one bank to the other. Unless it means they sailed past the mouth of a river. But there isn't one… what?'
He broke off as he realised Reed was staring at him — not with his usual impatience, but with genuine awe in his eyes. 'That's it.'
'What?'
'Try to see it through Odysseus's eyes.' All Reed's age and weariness seemed to lift away as he spoke. 'From the battlefields of Troy, you've brought your precious cargo up the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. You've sailed along the coast — you don't dare risk the open sea in those days — but even that is fraught with danger. Your ships have been attacked by cannibals, almost destroyed by storms. You're like Marlow in Heart of Darkness: you're off the edge of the world, into the white spaces at the edge of the map. You pass the land of the Cimmerians, and there — just where you're expecting to find it — you come into the mouth of a river. Not just any river: a great river nine miles wide and — if they looked upstream as they sailed across — no end in sight. The Oceanus.'
At last Grant began to understand. 'The straits.'
'The current flowing out of the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea would have given the impression of a great flowing river. And they would have seen what they were expecting. They sailed across.' Reed tapped the map on the eastern side of the straits. 'And here, on the far shore of the world, they found the White Island. That has to be it.'
'Has to be?'
Jackson echoed. 'Three days ago, it had to be Snake Island. We almost got ourselves a one-way ticket on the trans-Siberian railway finding out we made a mistake there.'
'That was based on the wrong texts. Philostratus is different — he was a priest of Hephaestus on Lemnos, for heaven's sake. And his account is consistent with Homer.'
'Of course it is,' said Jackson. 'He probably had Homer on his desk w
hen he was writing his own book.'
'The whole conceit of the Heroicus is that it's a self-conscious attempt to "correct" Homer. Philostratus wouldn't agree with him unless he felt he had to — it undermines his literary purpose. Philostratus must have known something to put it where he did.'
'Maybe he didn't know enough,' said Grant. 'It doesn't change the fact that there isn't a single island along the coast east of the Kerch Strait.'
Reed went quiet.
'What about the strait itself?' Jackson waved his hand over the map where two arms of land came together to form the strait. The west side seemed solid enough, but the eastern arm looked like a moth-eaten scrap of cloth, so full of lakes and lagoons that there was more water than land. 'That whole area looks like a chain of islands that got silted up.'
'According to this, they're all low-lying and marshy,' said Grant, consulting the Pilot.
'The tablet talks about a mountain.'
'And it says they sailed past the river. If that spit was ever broken into islands, they would have seemed to be islands in the Oceanus — the strait. We need to look further east.'
'There aren't any islands there,' Grant repeated.
'Perhaps it isn't an island.'
They both stared at Reed as if he had gone mad. With his wild hair and haggard eyes, it wasn't hard to imagine.
Jackson spoke very slowly. 'Are you trying to tell me that after all this the White Island isn't actually an island?'
Reed had the decency to look embarrassed — though Grant could see it was just a mask, thrown up automatically while his mind churned behind it. He flipped through his notebook. 'Here we are. You remember the Chrestotnathy, in Athens?'
'The lost poem. The sequel to Homer.'
'Well, Proclus's summary of it, yes. After Achilles' death, "They lay out Achilles' corpse. His mother, the sea nymph Thetis, arrives with the Muses and mourns her son. Then she snatches him up from the pyre and carries his body to the White Island"?'
'Not exactly tearing holes in the island theory, is it?'
Reed ignored him. 'Now, the Greek words Proclus uses for the White Island are Λευκην νησον — Leukin nison.'
'What does that mean?'
'"Leukin" is "white" and "nison" is "island".'
Jackson rolled his eyes. 'Is there a point to this?'
'In certain circumstances nison can also mean peninsula. Elsewhere in the epic cycle, for example, the Peloponnesian peninsula is referred to as nison.'
'Why would they do that? Didn't they have a word for peninsula?'
'Greek poetry is metrical — that is, you have to fit the words into a certain syllabic rhythm. There are some words that will never fit the rhythm and chersonesos — the correct term for peninsula — is one of them. So while a prose writer would use chersonesos, a poet couldn't possibly. He'd have to find a synonym that fitted the metre.'
'But is the Chrestomathy a poem? The bit you read out didn't sound very poetic'
'It's a prose summary, but of an epic poem. It's entirely possible Proclus just copied down phrasing from the original poem when he abbreviated it.'
'So you're saying the White Island is actually the White Peninsula?' Despite everything, Jackson had to laugh. 'Doesn't sound so poetic, I'll give you that.'
'And nobody's ever thought of this before?'
'Not as far as I'm aware.' Reed shrugged. 'It's like water flowing down a hill. Once the first drop finds its way down, the rest follows its course. With every drop the stream flows faster, the channel gets gouged deeper, the way becomes more certain. Nobody even thinks to question the direction.'
'Sure, whatever.' Jackson wasn't interested in metaphors. He looked back to the chart, smoothing it out to keep it from curling up at the ends. 'So we want a peninsula with cliffs, somewhere east of the strait.' He traced the shoreline with his finger. 'There's a bit of a promontory here.'
'Doesn't look like much,' said Grant doubtfully.
'It shouldn't. It's not supposed to be particularly large.'
Reed consulted the Pilot.
His eyes darted over the page — then, abruptly went very still. 'What's the name of that point?'
'Cape Rusyaeva.'
'"Cape Rusyaeva",' Reed repeated. '"Bold, lofty cliffs at the foot of a range of weathered mountains, divided by numerous narrow valleys. Shingle beaches below; fish cannery on western shore, possibly deserted. The colour of the cliffs is a remarkable white.'" He closed the book with a bang. '"Appears from distance like an island."'
A silence gripped the room as they digested it.
'It does fit,' Grant said at last.
'The White Peninsula.' Jackson shook his head in wonder. 'I've got to hand it to you, Professor, you've come up with the goods this time.'
'It doesn't mean anything,' Grant warned. But he himself didn't completely believe that. 'Even if it's the right part of the map, we're still looking at an area of miles, perhaps dozens of miles. An area that also happens to be part of the Soviet Union,' he added drily.
'All the more reason we've got to get there fast.'
'What about Marina? Now that we know where the temple is, we can trade the tablet.'
Reed nodded, but Jackson was watching him with a strange, unsettling gaze. A cold look came over his face. 'We're not giving the Commies anything — not until that shield's safe in Tennessee. Sure as hell not while it's lying in a cave somewhere in Soviet territory.'
Grant could only stare at him. 'You're not going to abandon Marina. Not after everything she's done for us.' Grant took a step towards him.
Jackson held up his hands in mock surrender. 'OK, OK. All I'm saying is we need to be smart about this. Not throw away our aces to pick up a queen.'
'She's not a card, Jackson. Anything the Russians do to her, you'd better believe I'll do the same to you.'
'Right.' Jackson took a deep breath and sat down on a wooden chair. 'Let's just remember we're all on the same side — and we all want the same thing.'
'Do we?'
'Yes. I want to get Marina back, I honestly do. She's a good girl. But believe me, if the Russians get their hands on that shield you're going to know about it in the worst way you can imagine. So we'll get both. What time is it?'
Grant checked his watch again. 'Just past four in the morning.'
'And we're due to meet Kurchosov at six tonight, right?' He leaned over the map and measured the distance with his thumb and forefinger. 'Four hundred and fifty miles. We've still got Kurchosov's plane here. If we leave now, we can be there by dawn. If the shield's there, the Bismatron should get us on to it. We'll whisk it out from under their noses and be gone before they know it. Then we'll hightail it back, and be here in time to trade Kurchosov the tablet for Marina.'
'And if we don't make it back in time?'
Jackson shrugged. 'Then meeting Kurchosov's going to be the least of anyone's problems.'
Thirty
Black Sea, east of Kerch Strait. 7.58 a.m.
The plane touched down with a puff of spray, racing in under the slate-grey sky. The cliffs reared up out of the sea, stark white, with the higher walls of the mountains looming behind them. It all felt strangely familiar to Grant, rushing in to a hostile shore. But whereas in the war — or even a month ago when he had landed the guns at that fateful beach in Palestine — he would have felt a keen edge of excitement, this time he couldn't summon the energy. An unsettling lethargy had him in its grip; even the bucking boat felt dead beneath him. He hoped it wasn't an omen.
They came in under the cliffs and throttled back the engine, scanning the shore for a place to land. Seabirds circled above them, launching themselves off the cliffs with haunting cries and plunging down into the sea. Grant saw one swoop out with a fish wriggling in its beak; water showered off as it flapped its wings to gain height. He remembered the story Sourcelles had told them about birds cleaning the temple with the spray from their wings, and shivered.
* * *
Three hours earlier, still be
fore dawn, they had assembled on a dock in front of an unmarked warehouse on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. A light rain had been falling, coating the rusted metal and cracked concrete with a fresh sheen that gleamed orange in the sodium lamps. With ships' engines throbbing in the background, the air thick with coal smoke and engine oil, it had felt like a fitting beginning to a journey to the underworld. Just before they were due to depart a lorry had pulled up next to the gangway. Grant remembered the hiss of its tyres on the wet dock. Three men in combat fatigues had jumped out. Two of them quickly transferred half a dozen duffel bags from the lorry to the Soviet flying boat, while the third came across to greet them.
'Lieutenant Kowalski, US Marines.' He'd started to lift his hand in a salute, then remembered his orders and diverted it into an awkward handshake.
'Jackson. This is Grant.'
He'd shaken Grant's hand and looked at Reed. 'Who's he, Lincoln?'
'I borrowed them from the embassy,' Jackson explained. 'They were all they could give me, this time of night. Just because Kurchosov's holding out for the tablet, I figure he's not going to give up looking himself. If he shows up again I want some cavalry with us this time.'
Grant had checked around the deserted dock, wondering what lurked in the shadows beyond the chain-link fence. 'With luck, he won't know where to go.'
'He's got Marina and she'd already figured out the whole Philostratus angle.'
'She won't talk.'
Jackson had looked as though he'd have liked to say something, but thought better of it. 'Let's hope so.'
* * *
'There.'
Round the end of the promontory the cliffs split apart. Grant looked for willows or poplars, but saw nothing but a field of reeds waving gently behind a shingle beach. A small lagoon lay behind that, cradled inside the arm of the beach — but open at one end, where a shallow channel spilled into the sea. They taxied the plane towards it. The white cliffs towered over them; the pulse of the propeller echoed back off the high walls, drumming into their skulls. The channel was so narrow Grant feared they would surely snap a wing against the cliff, or be dashed into it by a rogue wave.
