by Tom Harper
'Have you got a torch?'
Jackson grabbed one from the pile of equipment and tossed it to him. He and Reed gathered round, peering over Grant's shoulder as he shone the beam into the chasm at the bottom of the shaft. All he saw was earth and darkness.
'Down we go,' he muttered. He sat on the edge of the shaft, dangling his feet down inside. He tapped his hip to make sure the Webley was there and gripped the torch tightly. Then he jumped.
Thirty-one
Grant's feet sank into the soil at the bottom of the hole and kept on going. He threw up his arms to cover his head as he slid under the lip of the shaft. He hadn't stopped; in fact, he seemed to be gathering speed. Rolling and tumbling in the dark, he felt himself sliding helplessly down a slope. Loose earth and tiny pebbles cascaded down all around him: under his collar, down the neck of his shirt, into his ears and mouth. For a moment he felt a flash of weightless terror at the thought that he might fall for ever. Then he landed with a hard bump and lay still. Earth slithered down over him; it piled up round his shoulders as if threatening to bury him.
He spat the dirt out of his mouth and sat there for a moment, rubbing the bruises on his arms and shoulder. A thin, watery light filtered through the shaft above him: as his eyes adjusted he could see rough rock walls on either side of him and stone steps that seemed to lead still further down. He slowly got to his feet.
The light went out. Grant heard a scream, then a thud and a flailing above him. Before he could move, something heavy slid down the mound of earth and slammed into him. His legs were knocked out from under him; he fell forward and rolled down the stairs.
'Grant? Is that you?'
'Reed?' Grant came to rest and risked opening his eyes. One of his ribs felt as if it had cracked, and there was a pain in his ankle that he had no time to think about. 'Christ, next time shout before you jump down a dark hole.'
Clearly shaken, Reed stood and stumbled down the passage towards Grant. He was barely out of the way when another shadow dropped through the shaft and came tumbling to the bottom of the slope.
'My God,' said Jackson's voice in the darkness. 'It's really real.'
Grant flicked the switch on his torch. Nothing happened: he must have broken it when he fell. He threw it aside and pulled out his lighter. The damp walls shone in the light of the naked flame; the shadows rippled over them as he moved slowly forward. He edged his way carefully down the shallow stairs. Ancient as they were, they had none of the round edges or glassy surfaces usually worn into old steps.
'Looks like they haven't had many visitors,' said Jackson behind him.
The tunnel ended in a thick, slanted doorway of dressed stone. A black mouth seemed to yawn open between its pillars, but as Grant reached his lighter into the shadow between the pillars dim shapes swam out of the darkness. He stepped back, holding up the lighter so that its glow reflected off the frame. Heavy bronze doors blocked his way. The metal had faded to a greenish-brown, crusted with age, but the patterns embossed in it were still visible. A pair of giant serpents writhed up the main panels, while four birds sat in the corners and stared out. There were no handles.
Grant put his shoulder to the crack between the two doors and pushed. The metal cracked and flaked away; the doors bowed in but didn't budge.
'Careful,' said Reed. 'If those are as old as we think they are, they're absolutely unique.'
Grant took a step back and eyed the door with an appraising look. Then, before Reed could stop him, he swivelled round and slammed the flat of his boot into it. With the crack of tearing metal and a horrified cry from Reed, the door broke off its ancient hinges and fell in. A cloud of dust coughed up around it, and the whole corridor resounded to the clang of bronze striking stone.
'Geez. You sure know how to make an entrance.' Jackson pushed past Reed and shone his torch through the doorway. 'So this is it.' He turned back and looked at Reed. 'Congratulations, Professor. You've done it.'
Grant stepped through the open door and stared in amazement. For weeks it had been a place glimpsed only in his dreams, a mysterious chamber veiled in shadows. Of all the things he'd imagined, the last thing he'd expected was that it would seem familiar. And yet, following Jackson's torch beam as it circled the room, he had the unreal feeling of having been there before. It was an almost perfect replica of the shrine on Lemnos, a single round room whose masonry walls soared up to form a beehive dome high above their heads. Grant wondered if the ancient builders could possibly have carved the whole sanctuary out of the rock, or if they'd adapted an existing cave. Either way, it was an extraordinary feat of engineering, by men so far beyond the borders of their civilisation.
'Of course,' said Reed. 'I should have expected it for the grave of a hero. This is a classic Mycenaean tholos tomb. Those stairs we came down would have been the dromos — the sacred approach road.'
The torch beam played over the walls. There were no carvings in the stone; instead, the lower reaches had been plastered and painted. Some of the plaster had peeled away; in places black mould bloomed across the frescoes, but the rest of it remained, faded and wan. In a daze, Grant walked across and held his lighter up to the wall. Even close up the pictures were so faint that they seemed immeasurably distant, as if he was peering at them through cobwebs. Some of the scenes looked identical to Lemnos: men harvesting corn, sheep on the hills, a bull trussed up beside a poplar grove. There were images of war: elongated chariots rushing into battle; a walled city; a line of ships drawn up on a beach; men with shields as tall as themselves impaling enemies on their spears.
As Grant stepped closer to examine the figures, his foot kicked something. He crouched down and held the lighter flame closer. At the base of the wall, a thick heap of debris littered the floor. It must be fallen plaster or stone — but even as he thought it, Grant felt it couldn't be right. He reached out and picked up a piece. Through the crust of dust and grime he felt the hard chill of metal.
He snapped the lighter shut and put it between his teeth. The pool of light around him vanished. He felt for his shirt-tail, still damp after wading through the lake, took it, and rubbed it vigorously against the object in his hand.
Who do you think you are? he asked himself. Aladdin?
He took the lighter out of his mouth and sparked it with his thumb. No genie had appeared — but from the black lump in his hand, a golden eye stared unblinking out at him.
Grant almost dropped it in his amazement. 'Over here,' he called. He polished it some more while the others ran over, working back the boundaries of the exposed patch of gold so that it spread across the face of the object. It was a cup, he saw, a beaker with a high rounded handle like a teacup, and pictures of deer and lions worked into the metal. He handed it to Reed. 'How much is that worth?'
Reed took the cup with trembling hands, like a father holding his child for the first time. 'I can't imagine.'
Grant took Reed's torch and moved the beam along the wall. The ridge of piled-up treasure ran unbroken all round the room. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he could make out individual shapes among the debris: plates and bowls, cups, crowns, statues and swords. He tried to imagine how it would look all polished up, a hoard of heathen gold. 'There must be half a ton of this.'
'Forget that.' Jackson took the torch back from Reed and aimed it at the walls, moving it in tense, erratic jerks. 'We don't have the time. Where's the goddamn shield?'
They scanned the chamber. Unlike the shrine on Lemnos, there was no altar, no ring of gas flames, no hole in the floor for an initiate to crawl through. The circular walls continued smooth and unbroken. Except…
'There.' On the far side of the room a recessed door interrupted the curve of the wall. They hurried over. Corroded metal pins stuck out of the sides of the frame, but the door they had once hinged had crumbled away long ago. Jackson beamed the torch through the aperture. Grant glimpsed a small chamber with elaborately carved walls; then the view was blocked out as Jackson stepped through the doorway.
Reed grabbed Jackson's sleeve and pulled him back. He pointed to the ground. Just inside the door, right at Jackson's feet, a shallow pit about three feet deep yawned in the floor. Jackson shone the torch in — and recoiled with a sharp hiss of breath. At the bottom of the pit, skeletal prongs of white bone protruded from the patina of dust and dirt that caked the floor.
'Those aren't — human?' Even Jackson's normally bullet-proof confidence sounded shaken.
Reed took the torch and shone it around the pit. 'I think it's a bull.' The beam picked out a dull brown horn sticking up in the corner. 'It must have been sacrificed when they dedicated the temple. In Greek hero cult a pit usually fulfilled the function of an altar.'
'How did they get the bull down the entrance shaft?' Grant wondered.
The three men skirted the pit and edged into the chamber. It was a small room, but almost every inch of its walls was covered with carvings: hunts, sacrifices, battles — even after three thousand years the life in the stone had lost none of its savage intensity. In the far wall two niches flanked a huge sculpted roundel that seemed to bulge out of the stone. Inside them…
'The armour!' With a cry of delight Reed ran to the alcove and lifted out the object inside. He held it above his head as if he was about to crown himself. In that position it was easy to see that it was, or had been, a helmet. The dome tapered to a strange, key-shaped spike, while rounded cheek pieces projected down like rabbit ears. Grant, no historian, thought it looked more like Kaiser Bill's Prussian cavalry helmet than the angular, slit-faced headpieces he had always imagined in ancient Greece.
'And the greaves.' Reed crossed to the other alcove and pulled out two lumps of metal that looked like hollowed-out split logs. 'These would have protected his legs. Achilles' legs,' he added in absolute wonder.
'Maybe if he'd worn them backwards he could have protected his heel.'
'But where's the goddamn shield?' With the flame from Grant's lighter, and Jackson's torch, there was plenty of light to see by in the small room. Apart from the two pieces of armour, and the bones in the pit, it was empty.
'Maybe in the pit?'
Jackson jumped down and began scraping away the grime that caked the floor with an ox bone. Grant scanned the walls, looking for a chink or crevice that might betray a hidden door or secret chamber. Nothing. Inevitably, his eyes returned to the massive round carving between the two alcoves. The workmanship on it was much finer than the rest of the room. The figures were smaller and the designs seemed more intricate — though it was hard to tell with all the black age that covered them. In fact, the closer he looked, the more he realised it had a different texture to the surrounding walls.
'That's not a carving.'
He stood in front of it. That close to, he could see each individual figure: men and women, shepherds and ploughmen, lawyers and merchants, soldiers and gods — a microcosm of the world. He rubbed it with his arm and felt cold metal through the sleeve of his shirt. It came away black — but on the surface in front of him a golden smear illuminated the dirty metal.
No one spoke. Jackson scrambled out of the pit, opened his pocket knife and worked the blade into the thin crack between the shield and the surrounding stone. It fitted its carved socket almost perfectly, but gradually — carefully — he and Grant managed to prise it free. They lowered it to the floor and leaned it up against the wall — even with two of them its weight was immense. Then they stepped away, almost pushed back by its power, and stared at the shield of Achilles.
Thirty-two
'Is that it?'
After so much effort, so much struggle, there was something inadequate about finally seeing the shield. It was perfectly round, though chewed at the edges, about three feet across and curved like a lens. Under the coat of grime the embossed designs gave its surface a mottled, almost organic look, like tree bark. Grant wondered if it had ever been used in battle.
'How are we going to get it out of here? We won't fit it through that shaft we came down.'
Jackson stared at him, then back at the shield. 'We have to. It must have come down there once upon a time, right?'
'Perhaps we shouldn't move it.'
'What?' Jackson swung round towards Reed. 'Have you been asleep in class for the last three weeks? We didn't come here just to prove a theory, snap some pictures for the folks back home and go. The whole reason we're here is to take this thing back to get the metal out of it.'
'And Marina,' Grant reminded him.
Jackson looked confused for a second. 'Right — Marina.' He grasped the shield in both hands and strained to lift it. Half carrying, half dragging, he moved towards the door.
'In modern ages not the strongest swain, could heave the unwieldy burden from the plain,' Reed murmured. He looked at Grant. 'Do you have your pistol with you?'
Grant pulled out the Webley and showed it to Reed. 'Why?'
'If Mr Jackson takes another step, please shoot him.'
Grant couldn't believe he'd heard him right. 'Excuse me.'
'Ask him what he intends to do with the metal from the shield — if we manage to get it out of here.'
Jackson glared at them with a look of pure fury. 'Are you crazy? Put that gun down.'
The Webley wavered in Grant's hand. 'What the hell are you on about, Professor?'
'He's wasting time,' hissed Jackson. 'He's in league with the Russians.'
Reed looked calmly between the two of them. 'This mysterious Element 61 has a name now, I believe. They called it Prometheum.'
'How do you know that?' Jackson demanded. 'It's classified.'
'You shouldn't leave your ciphered messages lying around your hotel room. Have you come across Prometheus, Grant? He was a Titan; he stole fire from heaven and put it in the hands of men.'
Grant stared at Reed, then at Jackson. His legs were hidden behind the shield and his face was in shadow. 'Are you saying
A noise outside the door interrupted him. Forgetting Jackson, Grant turned and ran back into the main chamber. It was much brighter than before — a mustard-yellow light filled the dome, illuminating the painted warriors and the treasure at their feet. Grant barely noticed them.
She was standing a few feet in front of the entrance, holding up the lantern so he could see her face. It was scratched and stained with mud; a purple bruise ringed her right eye where they must have hit her and her hair was tangled. She still wore the same clothes he had last seen her in: a white blouse and a black skirt that hugged her hips, now torn and filthy.
'Marina!' He ran towards her. She lifted her head and gave a tired smile — but there was no joy in it.
'Halt there.'
The voice, harsh and cold, rang out of the passage behind her. Halfway across the room Grant stopped as if he'd been kicked in the guts.
'Drop your guns. Drop them or I will terminate her now.'
A tall, lean figure stepped through the doorway. His boots rang on the stone floor. He wore a green uniform with the gold bars of a full colonel on the epaulettes. His cheeks were hollow, his thin grey hair slicked back to his skull, his one eye sunk in darkness. A triangular black patch covered the other. In his arms he cradled a tommy-gun, which he aimed at Marina. 'Put them down,' he said, jerking the gun. 'You and the American.'
'Forget it,' said Jackson. 'She's one of them.'
Grant ignored him. He looked at Marina and saw the defiance in her eyes.
'You know what we said in the war,' she said in Greek. 'No compromises; no sentiments.'
'That was our war. This…' Grant was numb. His muscles refused to move. More men ran down behind Kurchosov and fanned out around the room — too many, now. All of them carried guns.
'OK,' Grant said flatly. 'You win.' He bent down and laid the Webley on the floor.
Behind him Jackson was still hesitating. Kurchosov swung the gun round and pointed it straight at him. 'I will count to three, Mr Jackson. Then I will kill you. Odeen… dva…'
Grant heard the Col
t clatter on to the ground.
He looked back — and paused. At the back of the chamber he could see someone moving in the darkness to the right of the door. He stared in disbelief. 'Muir?'
Muir stepped out of the shadows. An unpleasant leer played across his face. He took out a cigarette and lit it. 'If you're waiting for me to rescue you, you're in for a nasty fucking disappointment.'
Kurchosov turned to Muir and shook his hand. 'Well done, Comrade. Comrade Stalin will be a happy man.'
'We'll break out the Beluga when we've got the shield in Moscow.'
'Christ, Muir.' Jackson ground his heel against the floor. 'There's a word for men like you.'
Muir gave a wicked grin. 'I always was a hopeless romantic'
'Do you have any idea what they're going to do with that shield?'
'Do with it? Why the hell do you think we went to all this fucking trouble?'
Muir turned as another man came striding out of the passage. As he stepped into the lamplight, Grant recognised Belzig's stocky frame and straw-blond hair. He seemed to be wearing the same brown suit he had worn that day at the library in Athens. But then, he was a prisoner too, Grant supposed.
'Is it here?' Even his ugly voice was touched with a childlike awe as he stared around the great domed chamber.
'Mein Gott, ist das schon. Have you found the shield?'
'It's in there.' Muir pointed to the side chamber. Between them the Russian, the German and the Scot seemed to have settled on English as their common language. 'Mind your step when you go in.'
Belzig hurried across, snatching the lamp from Marina's hand as he ran past. He ducked under the doorway. The gasp of astonishment from inside the little chamber echoed around the dome.
'That's not all.' Muir took a lamp from one of the Russian soldiers and beamed it at the black hoard on the floor. He picked up a cup and tossed it in his hands. 'It may look like junk, but there's more gold in this room than in the Bank of England. A nice bonus for the party.'
