The Fall of Troy

by Peter Ackroyd

  “It is not trained,” Leonid told her. “It dances quite naturally.” Theodore put down his pipes, and the goat resumed its grazing. “Frau Obermann and I must go back to Troy, Theodore. We thank you.”

  They returned to the main house where Maria was waiting for them. Leonid embraced Maria warmly, kissing her on both cheeks, and she held on to him very tightly. Then he embraced Theodore, and patted him on the back. Sophia remained apart from them, but Maria approached her and kissed her hand. “You are always a friend,” she said.

  “I am glad of it.”

  Theodore brought out her mule, which had been fed and brushed down, and Leonid untethered his horse from a post in the yard. “Khairete!” they cried. “Khairete!”

  They had ridden some two or three hundred yards, savouring the freshness of the morning air, when they heard a scream, abject, hysterical, helpless. It came from the farmhouse. Sophia looked back in alarm, but Leonid gave no response. “It is the goat invading the kitchen,” he said. “After dancing it does that.” Then he added, “Maria always screams.”

  They rode on, and came within sight of the stone hut owned by the watcher of the sea.

  “How long have they known my husband?”

  “Many years.”

  “And they followed him to Troy.”

  “They consider him to be their patron. Their guardian, if you will.”

  “He gives them money.”

  “He supports them. The professor is generous.”

  “And in return?”

  “They do little services for him. Like this one.”

  “They hide certain objects?”

  “That is a way of putting it. They preserve objects that would otherwise be scattered to the winds. The professor wishes to build a great museum of antiquity, where all his discoveries may be seen in one place. He does not want to leave pieces of Troy in Constantinople or in Paris.”

  Sophia had no knowledge of any Obermann museum, but she managed to conceal her surprise. “He has told me of the house in Athens. My father has agreed to help him.”

  “Yes. That is so. It should make you proud, Frau Obermann. The professor wishes to build his museum in the heart of your own city. It will be a tribute to Homer himself.”

  Yet for some reason Sophia felt no comfort in this, as they made their way back across the plain.

  SOPHIA FOUND her husband lying on the floor of their dwelling. He was holding a ceramic bowl and gently stroking it. It seemed to her that he had been whispering to it.

  “Tell me about the Skopeli,” she said.

  “They work for me.”

  “I thought them mysterious.”

  “The Phrygian is secretive by nature. Even when he has no secret worth speaking of.”

  “They have a dancing goat.”

  “A mad animal. I do not approve of madness.” And he said no more upon the subject.

  FOURTEEN

  Obermann was kneeling upon the hard ground. “I thank the gods that I have lived until this day.” Then he bent over and kissed a large grey stone. “The world will now be changed.”

  They had been excavating, in the weeks after the discovery of the golden treasures, in the vicinity of the palace. Some grains and seeds had been found; these were duly collected and registered, as well as some fragments of pottery and a strange row of leaden balls that seemed to form a system of weights. And then one of the workmen noticed the flat grey stones: they were scattered across the layer of ground just excavated, and at first they were ignored or pushed aside as natural debris. But then Sophia noticed a curious nick or cut in the side of one. When she picked it up she realised that it was lighter than any stone and of a different texture; she brushed away the soil with her forefinger and, to her surprise, she uncovered a row of curious markings on the flat upper surface. She put it down very carefully on the side of the trench, and picked up another. A similar row of signs or marks had been incised upon its surface. She had no conception of what these markings might be, so she sat down upon a low stone wall by the edge of the trench and stared at them. As far as she could tell they were not random lines: there were curves and diagonals, dots and parallel bars, but all in apparent sequence. Then, in the first stage of understanding, she almost dropped the tablet. Her hands began to tremble, and she placed it beside her. Her throat became dry. She got up carefully, and walked over to Leonid and her husband, who were standing together near the old palace wall. “Heinrich,” she said, “Heinrich. I have found an object that may interest you.”

  Something in her voice arrested Obermann’s attention. He turned towards her slowly. “Yes, my dear?”

  “I have found some inscriptions.”

  “There are no inscriptions in Troy.”

  “Markings, then. Human markings. I am sure of it.”

  “Well, let us see these markings.”

  They walked over to the side of the trench where Sophia had been working. She pointed to the flat tablet that she had left upon the wall. Leonid picked it up very gently, and proceeded to study it. “I do not know what to say, Professor. I have seen nothing like it.”

  Obermann held out his hands, and Leonid placed it carefully within them. He bent his head low over it, as if he were about to smell it or taste it. He was still for a few moments and, when he raised his head, Sophia noticed that tears were welling from his eyes. “Where did you find this, Sophia?”

  “Here. There are many of them, scattered across the ground. But they are not stones, Heinrich.”

  “No. They are not stones. They are tablets of clay. They have been baked in some great fire.” He was talking very slowly and distinctly. “Do you know what they are, Sophia? They are writing tablets. They are pages.”

  “There was no writing in Troy, Professor. The dates—”

  “There was writing in Troy, Telemachus. This is the writing in Troy. Their words. Their language. After three thousand years of silence, they are speaking to us again.”

  They gathered up the clay tablets that afternoon, but Obermann was very quiet. He seemed distracted and uncertain. When Sophia asked him if he was in low spirits, he smiled at her. “Not at all. It is simply that I cannot fathom this as yet. I am at a loss.” Lineau came into the hut where the tablets were being kept. “Ah. Here is the man who sees what we cannot see. Sit, Monsieur Lineau. I will give you a wonderful thing.”

  Lineau ran the fingers of his right hand quickly over the tablet that Obermann had offered to him. “The marks have been cut with a stylus or some other sharp point into the clay,” he said. “They have been incised cleanly and efficiently. There is no hesitation. These are not hieroglyphs, Herr Obermann. They are not pictographs.”

  “Not Egyptian?”

  “Far from it. The symbols go in linear progression. Do you see the straight lines that divide one row of symbols from another? This is a form of linear writing. I have never come upon it before.” He turned his face towards Obermann. “Of all the treasures we have found in Troy this is by far the greatest. You will not be able to hide it from the Turks.”

  “I have no intention of doing so, Monsieur Lineau. I have already informed Kadri Bey. Our overseer has jumped in the air, as if he were a cow in the moon.”

  “A cow over the moon, Heinrich.”

  “And has rushed to telegraph Constantinople. I still cannot believe it myself. And here comes the potentate.”

  Kadri Bey had joined them. “I was not sure how to describe them,” he said. “I have merely said that they are tablets of writing.”

  “Here. Gaze upon them, Kadri Bey, and marvel.” The overseer looked at them, keenly enough, but he did not touch them. “They are the earliest examples of writing in Europe.”

  “We are not in Europe, Herr Obermann. We are in Turkey.”

  “Such is the narrow view, Kadri Bey. But this is Troy. This is the land of the Greeks. Of Hector and of Priam.”

  “It has yet to be proved.”

  “Proved? The poems of Homer prove it beyond any reasonable
doubt!” He took up one of the tablets. “Here are their first words. They are speaking to us across the abysm of time. I see them on the further shore—” He broke off and turned towards his wife. “I must not cry before these gentlemen, Sophia. You will scold me. You will accuse me of acting out some drama.”

  “I will accuse you of nothing, Heinrich, except love for Troy.”

  “I know it. And Kadri Bey shares that love with me, do you not?”

  “As long as Troy remains in Turkey.”

  Lineau was still tracing out the tablet with his fingers. “There is no one in the world who will be able to interpret these signs,” he said. “They are unlike any other.”

  “Do not lose heart at the beginning, Monsieur Lineau. We have an incalculable advantage. We know them to be Greek.”

  “Thousands of years will separate these marks from the words of Homer. I do not know that we can even use the word Greek to describe them.”

  “And what word would you choose?”

  “I have no notion.”

  “So be it. We will call them No Texts from No Town in Nowhere.” He relented his tone. “Forgive me, Lineau. I am overexcited, as you can see. I do not think I will sleep for the rest of my life. We should be brave. Adventurous. Why should we not be able to interpret these symbols? If we assume it to be Greek, as I insist on doing, the words will slowly reveal their meaning to us. The dead will speak.”

  THE MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES in Constantinople, informed of Kadri Bey’s message by telegraph, instructed Obermann to take the utmost care of the tablets, to store them, and to await further instructions. The director of the museum had in the meantime been in contact with his counterpart, Augustus Franks, at the British Museum in London, where an entirely new department devoted to Proto-historical Scripts had recently been established. It was agreed between the two directors that a brilliant young member of the new team, Alexander Thornton, would journey with all speed to Hissarlik.

  “He will be some drone of the museum,” Obermann said to Sophia. “Some pale Englishman. I know the English very well. They are either bullies or cowards. Or they are hypocrites. Like our friend, the Reverend Harding. Is Harding the man to bring Christianity to the Turks? He would turn the people of Oxford into pagans.” He took off his hat and fanned his face with it. “I wonder what kind of Englishman Mr. Thornton will turn out to be.”

  FIFTEEN

  Alexander Thornton arrived three weeks later, after a journey by sea from Tilbury. He did not seem to Sophia to be a museum drone, as her husband had anticipated; he looked to her more like an athlete or a mountaineer. He was tall and very slim, with a distinct tan after his weeks at sea.

  Kadri Bey insisted on welcoming him to the site of Troy with elaborate courtesies. Sophia watched the young man carefully, almost eagerly, as he shook hands and bowed and tasted the little cup of Turkish coffee presented to him. He was not awkward, but he was precise and restrained in manner. “I hope I find you well, sir,” he said to Obermann.

  “I have never been so well in my life, Mr. Thornton. I flourish.”

  “I am glad of it, sir. In England we have all heard of your great work. And now this—”

  “You will see my great work soon, Mr. Thornton. Permit me to introduce you to Frau Obermann.”

  “Delighted.” He gave a small bow before taking her hand, but he could not conceal his surprise at finding a female in the middle of the excavations.

  Obermann laughed, and slapped him on the back. “You do not think this a suitable place for a woman?”

  “On the contrary. I am delighted.”

  “Spoken like an Englishman. What did I tell you, Sophia? They are always fair. Did you know, Mr. Thornton, that you are standing on the precise spot where the wooden horse of the Greeks was once placed?”

  “It is an honour, I am sure. But I always believed that the story of the horse was simply that—a story.”

  “You have been in the British Museum too long, Mr. Thornton. You have lost your sense of wonder.”

  “I joined the museum six months ago, sir. You must not blame my shortcomings upon it. They are all my own.”

  THORNTON WAS INDEED accustomed to making judgements for himself. His mother had died, of a cancer, when he was fifteen years old; from that time forward he had become more thoughtful and self-reliant. He started to question the world. More particularly he had begun to question the society all around him. He had decided to study theology at Oxford because he wished to become a pastor in the East End of London, where he could minister to the poor and outcast of that region. Then, on one of his long walks into the countryside around Oxford, he became uneasy about the principles of the Church in which he had been raised. And, eventually, doubt put out his faith. He abandoned theology, and took up the relatively new study of palaeography in the Department of Archaeology at the university. But he had not lost his concern for social justice. He joined the City Education League, and became an advocate of advanced thinking on workers’ rights and the female cause. He had even given lectures on reform at Exeter Hall.

  “YOU ARE A MAN of spirit,” Obermann was saying. “I applaud you.”

  Sophia had been watching Thornton throughout their exchange. He seemed wary, thoughtful, but she sensed some hidden amusement on his part at her husband’s manner. She was not sure if she liked this or not. “Mr. Thornton would like to see his quarters, Heinrich,” she said. “He has travelled far.”

  “I am afraid, Mr. Thornton, we do not have golden bowls of water or serving maidens. We are not yet Homeric here. We try our hardest, but we fall short of the poet’s standards.”

  “I would really wish to see the subject as soon as possible.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The subject. The tablets. That is why I have come.”

  “You are in a great hurry, Mr. Thornton. But I admire that. I revere it. In every situation of my life I have always proved how much a person can accomplish with iron will. I myself was secretly circumcised in Mecca so that I might better escape detection!” Sophia looked at her husband strangely. Why did he lie about so private a matter? “So. We will take you to your subject.” He led him to the hut where the tablets were kept. “They are stored here,” he said. “It is a good dry place. They are snug, as you say in England.”

  When Thornton came into the room he was very alert. “I had not expected so great a number,” he said.

  “We have one hundred and seventy-eight separate objects. They are of approximately the same size and appearance, as you can see. But, of course, the markings are quite different on each of them.”

  “There will be patterns and repeated motifs,” Thornton replied. “May I?” He picked up one of the tablets, and scrutinised it with a look of surprise and abstraction. Sophia wondered if he were not short-sighted, so closely did he hold it to his face; she also noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. “May I ask you this, Herr Obermann? What is your guess about the languages spoken in this region of the world? I have heard various opinions.”

  “They belonged to the Indo-European stock, but they were as different from one another as Latin is from Greek. I doubt whether Albanian can be classified as an Aryan language at all.”

  “But they were not Semitic?”

  “It is very doubtful. It is my belief that the language spoken in this city was ancient Illyrian or Thracian.”

  “Is that not the same as Pelasgian?”

  “I am amazed at your knowledge, sir.”

  “It is my profession. But then Homer uses the term to describe the Achaean Greeks, not the Thracians themselves.” He was still looking very closely at the tablets. “They are a kind of baked clay bar but rather like a stone chisel in shape.” It was as if he were talking to himself. “They are broken at one end. There is a script and what appear to be numerals. They were engraved on the wet clay and are evidently the work of practised scribes. No doubt you have reached the same conclusions, sir.”

  “Precisely the same, Mr. Thornto
n.”

  “And do you have an estimate of the date?”

  “They were found at the level of the burned city of Troy, and so I estimate that they were produced around 1800 B.C.”

  “You are very precise.”

  “That is my profession.”

  “It is an early date for writing of this nature. Assuming it to be Indo-European.”

  “The date will be universally adopted. I feel sure of it.” Thornton looked at him with the veiled air of amusement that Sophia had already noticed. “My first impressions are never wrong, Mr. Thornton. Do you know what an archaeologist must possess?”

  “A knowledge of geometry?”

  “You are a Pythagorean! No. The archaeologist must have inspiration. Vision. Imagination. May I tell you a story? When we were digging in Ithaca we found no source of water. The palace of Odysseus must have contained wells, but what had become of them? Covered with the silt of the centuries. My men wished to sink a new well in a corner of the courtyard, but I knew them to be mistaken. Acting on an inference from the contour of the hillside above—are you following me, Mr. Thornton?—I drew a cross in the earth beside a large block that happened to be standing at that spot and ordered them to dig there. Then I went off on a journey. When I came back, the world was agog!”

  “What had happened, sir?”

  “My workmen had taken off no more than fifteen inches of the top soil before they uncovered the choked opening of an ancient well, some three feet in diameter. It is the same well of which Homer writes, with its clear spring! At the bottom, thirty feet down, there was an abundant spring of water that proved to be of better quality than any for miles around. It is still in use among the people of Ithaca, who bless me every morning in their prayers. And that was not the end of it. Beside the well we unearthed a pair of two-handled pitchers, for which we found a use immediately. That is archaeology, Mr. Thornton.”