Nor had they, despite countless attempts over the centuries since.
That was when Carmen remembered whispers of the family quest that had obsessed the Suraces for three generations or more. And finally she realised why she’d been invited down, and what was likely in the packing case too.
The Straits of Messina – a dive boat
The six of them completed their safety stop together then surfaced close to where Arturo was waiting with the boat. Dieter spat out his regulator and whooped exultantly. ‘Goddammit, what a dive,’ he said. He reached into his pouch for the large earthenware fragment he’d just recovered from the seabed twenty-five metres below. ‘It’s his, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s Alaric’s.’
Cesco Rossi swam across to take it carefully in both hands. He turned it around and held it up to the sunlight. It was the top of a broken oil or wine amphora of some kind, pale brown in colour, the rough size and shape of an upturned soup bowl, but with a spouted mouth and a curved handle large enough to fit a fat finger. There were specks of grit beneath the glaze, its broken edges had been worn smooth by time, and there were faint marks on it that might once have been writing but were more likely simply the result of its age. ‘It’s Roman for sure,’ he said, passing it back. ‘It could easily be late fourth or early fifth century, but coarse ware like this is notoriously difficult to date. We would really need to see if—’
‘Don’t be such a professor, Professor,’ mocked Dieter. ‘It’s his. I know it is.’ He pounded his chest with his fist. ‘I know it in here.’
Cesco let it go, and not just because Dieter and his friends were paying handsomely for this dive. He was wiry, tough and fast, and he’d learned the hard way how to look after himself, but all four of these Germans were steroid gym rats with tree trunks for necks and comic-book physiques. His best punch wouldn’t even register, and the moment any one of them caught him, they’d crush him like a boa with a piglet. And it wasn’t just their builds. Everything about them said ‘fuck you’, from their shaven scalps to their black Harleys and full-body tattoos that included swastikas and a pair of crossed claw hammers, seemingly gang insignia of some kind. Hence their interest in Alaric, a cult figure among German neo-Nazis, a prototype Aryan warrior king. Dieter even had his name written in large Gothic letters across his back, prompting Cesco to a little rash mischief the night before, ruminating on how Alaric’s Romanian birth and nomadic life really made him the world’s first Gypsy. Then he’d noticed the lobster sheen of Dieter’s skin and the banked furnace behind his eyes, and he’d swiftly switched topic.
Standing up for yourself was one thing. Suicide was another.
He swam to the boat to help the rest of the party up. Anna pulled her goggles down around her throat like a clunky necklace so that her green eyes twinkled in the sunlight. She leaned back in the water and lifted up her feet for him to take off her flippers. She turned around for him to take off her scuba tank, then he put his hand on her buttock to propel her up the steps.
‘Hey!’ said Dieter.
‘Sorry,’ said Cesco. ‘I was just trying to help.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘He was just helping.’
He waited until they were all aboard, came up last. He unstrapped his own tank and buoyancy control device, peeled off his booties and wetsuit, took off his diving cap and shook out his ponytail. Dieter and his friends smirked at each other, as they did every time they saw it. As a dark-skinned, bearded, hipster academic with a gold earring and a nose stud, he was pretty much everything they most despised. He fetched his phone from his dive bag, checking messages as he stowed the tanks. Another invitation from Giulia, his third that day and the most pressing yet, this time including directions. Her eagerness puzzled him. They’d had a fun night, sure, talking Visigoths and archaeology into the small hours, all topped off by a boisterous tumble. But he’d not heard a word from her since. Now suddenly she was stuffing his inbox with invitations to join her on some exciting yet unnamed project. But it would take a great deal more than a few mysterious hints and the prospect of another night together to lure him back to Cosenza.
He hauled in the marker buoys, weighed anchor, gave Arturo the thumbs up. They began burbling back towards Scilla. It was a gorgeous afternoon – why hurry? Cesco handed out bottles of beer from the cooler then gathered up the wetsuits. Anna was still in hers, surely aware of how it flattered her curves. She waited until he was standing right in front of her before beginning to peel it from her arms and legs, letting the rubber stretch like liquorice gum, enjoying his admiration. He took it from her then sluiced it and everything else down with fresh water from the barrel, hung it all up to dry. Then he sat on the stern bench to watch the coast go by.
Anna came to join him, the roll of the boat putting sway into her hips. ‘So, Professor,’ she said. ‘A question, if I may?’
‘Cesco, please.’
She sat beside him, their thighs lightly brushing. ‘Cesco, then. A triumph, yes?’
‘If my customers are happy…’
‘Then, like I say, a triumph.’ She put a hand on his shoulder and lowered her voice to a whisper, her breath a tickle on his ear. ‘But between you and me… That old pot didn’t really belong to this king of Dieter’s, did it?’
‘To Alaric himself, no,’ said Cesco. ‘To his army…?’ He gave a shrug. ‘It’s the right date and location. We’ve found distinctly Visigothic artefacts in that spot before. Yes, it’s Roman, but then, that’s what you’d expect. The Visigoths had been in Italy for many years, living by plunder. So of course their storage jars would have been Roman.’
‘But…?’
Cesco grinned. Anna had taken him aside the night before to confide to him that she was actually a high-end escort hired by Dieter for the week; because she’d rather have him know that than have him think her his girlfriend. ‘This is Italy,’ he said. ‘Finding Roman pottery is hardly earth-shattering, is it? Especially here, among all the wrecks left by our monsters.’
She frowned. ‘Monsters?’
He pointed north along the mainland coast. ‘There was a six-headed sea serpent called Scylla living up where we’re headed. That’s where our town gets her name. And there was a whirlpool called Charybdis on the Sicily side. It sucked in whole boats and spat out their timbers.’
She laughed and swept back her hair with both hands, making her chest jut. ‘And of course it really happened just like that.’
‘Myths are pearls. Each one has its own grain of truth. Hundreds of ships really have sunk in these straits over the centuries. Alaric’s fleet among them.’
She looked from Calabria out to Sicily and back again. Her scepticism was easy both to see and understand. The Straits of Messina were a lake right now. And not a particularly wide one. A strong swimmer could cross them easily in less than an hour. He’d done so himself at the age of just thirteen, and four times more since moving here last year – out to Sicily in the morning for lunch, then back again in the afternoon. But he’d also witnessed the fierce autumnal storms that could spring up out of nowhere. Heaven help you if you were caught out in one of those. ‘We know precious little about Alaric in southern Italy,’ he told her. ‘Our sources are wretchedly thin. But after sacking Rome, he led his army down here. We think he planned to sail to Sicily then on to Carthage, because northern Africa was where all the grain was back then, and he and his men were sick of going hungry. But we know he turned back instead. To Cosenza, where he died. We have two main accounts for what happened here. There was a monk called Tyrannius Rufinus living in Sicily at the time, working on biblical translations.’ He leaned across her a little way to point out the island’s northern tip, his thigh pressing warmly against hers as he did so. She could have given way, but she pressed back just as firmly. ‘See that hill right there? We think that’s where his monastery was. Every night, he watched from his window as the mainland burned. He wrote fearful letters about what the Goths would do to him when they arrived. But they never did. Our second s
ource is a Spanish priest called Orosius, who heard from some Gothic soldiers how they’d watched helplessly from the shore as their comrades drowned.’
She looked again at the placid, narrow sea. ‘Then they must have been the worst sailors ever.’
‘Maybe. But Alaric and his men had been plundering Italy for years before they got here. They’d just sacked Rome. Imagine it’s you living on this coast. One day you learn that a barbarian horde is on its way. What would you do?’
‘I’d get the hell out.’
‘Exactly. Anyone with a boat would have sailed across the straits while they still could, so by definition there’d have been no boats left. Building new ones took time and skills the Visigoths didn’t have. Winter was coming and they were already low on food.’
‘So?’
‘A different Goth general called Gainas faced a very similar problem at the Bosphorus. He had his men build rafts instead of boats. Quick to assemble, simple to paddle and safe enough over a short distance, as long as the water’s placid. Unfortunately, they become death traps in a storm. Worse, they’re easy to harry, too, if your enemy has proper ships. Gainas found that out the hard way. The Romans turned up when he was halfway across and sank the lot of them.’
‘You think that happened here?’
‘It’s certainly possible. The Goths were great at hand-to-hand, but they were useless at any distance. No bows, no javelins, only throwing axes and short spears. A handful of well-crewed ships with skilful archers could have stayed out of range and showered them with—’
‘Hey!’
Cesco looked around and up. Dieter and his mates were advancing towards him, dressed again in their dirty jeans and leather jackets. He relaxed his leg and shifted a fraction away from Anna. ‘Yes?’ he asked, with a pleasant smile. ‘How may I help?’
Dieter had his earthenware shard in one hand, his phone in the other. ‘This piece of pottery,’ he said. ‘This piece of pottery I found in the sand below just half an hour back.’
‘What about it?’
Dieter now held out his phone. ‘How come there’s a photograph of it on your fucking website?’
Maximum Security Prison Number 4, near Jerusalem, Israel
It was with some trepidation that Zara Gold got out of the taxi and looked up at the prison’s high slab walls. Was Daniel Kaufman playing some kind of practical joke on her? Was it some ham-fisted attempt at intimidation or even retribution for her recent review? Except that he famously had no sense of humour, and surely even his skin wasn’t that thin. But why else would he have her meet him here, outside one of Israel’s highest-security prisons?
He was waiting for her by the booth, wearing his trademark panama hat and rumpled tan suit. He’d been her mentor once. She still looked up to him in many ways. But progress in history and archaeology too often came only funeral by funeral; and if she had to bury him to make it, then so be it. ‘Professor,’ she said.
‘Miss Gold.’
Her toes clenched. The petty denial of her own status was just like him. But her smile didn’t falter. ‘All this cloak and dagger. Whatever is it for?’
‘You’ll see.’
The guard in the booth gestured for her ID. Kaufman took it from her then slipped it beneath the security glass himself, as though she were incapable. There was a glitch with the scanner. The guard had to type her details in manually. Kaufman sighed as though it were her fault. Her card was returned, along with a two-page form to sign. She read every word of it, to get her own back. The heavy steel gate opened. Kaufman had broken his leg in a car crash the year before and it had left him with a slightly sliding gait, as though he was trying to get his left shoe on properly; yet he still walked deliberately quickly, to force her to hurry to keep up. Professors both, yet children too.
They were patted down at a second security point, then escorted along a corridor of flickering lights and peeling paint. ‘Not even a hint?’ she asked.
‘If I tell you, it will influence you.’ He looked her up and down. ‘It’s best you see this… unsullied.’
They reached more doors then passed out into the huge internal exercise yard. It had cell blocks on three sides and a wall of monstrous grey concrete slabs at its far end, topped by coils of barbed wire, searchlights and guard towers. Kaufman set off briskly towards its far right-hand corner, where a dozen or so young people in loose clothes and wide-brimmed headgear were working with trowels and sieves. And finally she got a glimmer of what was going on.
‘They needed new latrines,’ said Kaufman. ‘They had the prisoners clear the ground.’
‘What did they find?’
‘You’ll see.’
Sunshine reflected in shards from cell-block windows. Faces pressed against the glass. Many of Israel’s most dangerous prisoners were housed here, including a good number of Islamist jihadis. She could feel their loathing pouring down upon her, Israeli as she was, female and uncovered. A man shouted out and then suddenly there was yelling on all sides, a cacophony of cups banging against bars. But Kaufman ignored it so she did too.
They reached the far corner. An area the size of a tennis court had been roped off, the top half-metre or so of hard-packed earth removed down to a blackened stratum of charred limestone and plaster. A honeycomb of smaller pits had been dug into this larger one, each a metre square. A young woman in a straw hat, baggy cotton trousers and a long-sleeved shirt was kneeling on a mat beside the closest, cleaning what lay at the bottom with a cloth and a spray bottle of distilled water. She paused at their arrival, brushed her nose wearily with the back of her hand, then moved aside to let them see. Zara gazed down. It was a mosaic in the Byzantine style, made from tesserae of coloured glass. It depicted two vibrantly coloured birds frolicking joyfully against a bright-blue backdrop, the first sipping dew from petals of sunset orange, the second with a stalk of golden grain in its beak. She crouched for a closer look at the stalk. The Byzantines had made tesserae of that particular colour by embedding gold leaf in clear glass. Along with the quality of the workmanship, it made it instantly clear that this was a very expensive commission. Almost perfectly preserved too, and gleaming from its sheen of distilled water.
‘My God,’ she said.
Kaufman gave a tight smile. ‘Wait till you see this next one,’ he said.
He was right. It was even more skilfully realised. More telling too. It showed a pair of spiny-backed fish circling the symbols chi and rho arranged into a cross. Christian, then. A church. An early and important one. Mid to late sixth century, to judge from both the style and its pristine condition, suggesting that it had been destroyed not long after its completion – either during the Persian seizure of Jerusalem in CE 614 or the Islamic conquest some twenty-odd years later.
‘The warden is an old friend of mine,’ remarked Kaufman. ‘At least, my college girlfriend went on to become his wife. He keeps in touch with me, from time to time, to gloat over this fact. So when his prisoners uncovered the mosaic, it was me he called. He thought I would be amused.’ The wry smile he gave at this was so out of character that Zara found herself staring. ‘I told him that it was of such great historical importance that we needed both to excavate and protect it. He wasn’t happy. His job here is to keep some of Israel’s most dangerous prisoners locked up, not to curate Byzantine mosaics. But he did allow me two days.’
Zara looked around in amazement. ‘All this? In two days?’
‘That was a week and a half ago. We kept finding more. As you can see. It is now a major headache for him. This is his exercise yard. While we’re here, his prisoners can’t be. They house all kinds of fanatics here, the kind who can hardly be trusted to respect the artefacts of other religions. So they haven’t been allowed out since we arrived. They’re growing restive. My friend fears a riot.’
She nodded distractedly. Prison riots didn’t interest her. Mosaics did. She knelt for a closer look. This particular panel was a little worn towards its left edge, presumably where congregants had onc
e walked or gathered. Yet elsewhere it was perfect, protected initially by the carapace of hardened ash from the fire that had destroyed the church above it, then by the sandy soil that had accumulated above it over the centuries and become packed hard. It was a magnificent find, a privilege to see. Yet it still didn’t explain her summons. ‘Do you know which church?’
He shrugged expressively. The Byzantines had built dozens of churches in and around Jerusalem, to show off their piety and wealth. And their surviving sources were so patchy that some of those churches barely got a mention – while others, presumably, got none at all. ‘We have a date range,’ he said. ‘Let me show you.’ He led her to a larger pit, three metres by two. The mosaic beneath was covered by a dust sheet to protect it from the sunlight, so that she could only see its edges. Kaufman squatted down. Then, like a dignitary unveiling a statue, he pulled the sheet aside.
Zara stared at it, puzzled rather than amazed. It had been cleared but not yet cleaned, making it harder to work out. At first sight, it looked almost like a flag: a blue rectangle hemmed by a sandy-brown border. But what flag would have ships sailing across it, or a line of caravans running down its side? Nor did flags typically have cities at each corner, their Greek names written in clumsy block capitals. Not a flag, then, but rather a map. Specifically, a stylised map of the eastern Mediterranean of late antiquity, with Rome at its top left, then passing clockwise through Constantinople, Jerusalem and Carthage. There was more Greek writing around the perimeter too. With no breaks between the words to help her, and aware of Kaufman watching, it took the most intense concentration for her to work out and translate in her mind. But finally she had it.
The Sacred Spoils Page 2
