by Tom Harper
“The White Island lies in the Black Sea, toward the inhospitable side, which is on the left as you sail into the mouth of that sea. It reaches thirty stadia in length but not more than four in width. Both poplar and elm trees grow on it: some happen to grow wild, but others are planted by design around the temple. The temple is situated near the Sea of Maeotis (which flows into the Black Sea) and the statues in it are Achilles and Helen, crafted by the Fates.”
“Where’s the Maeotis Sea?”
“The Maeotis was the Greek name for what we now call the Sea of Azov.” Reed got up and fetched an atlas from the shelves. But it was like no atlas Grant had ever used. The cartographers seemed to have been drunk: all the familiar outlines were distorted and even the places he recognized had been given unfamiliar names. Italy was no longer the tall, high-heeled thigh-boot he knew, but a stubby, clumsy workboot. It was not the world as it actually was, but the world as men had once seen it.
As Reed turned the pages, the contours slowly resolved. Vague lines became more precise; bays and inlets nibbled into the sweeping coasts and the amoebic continents evolved spines, appendages, limbs. Now the maps were printed, not hand drawn, their shapes recognizable as the modern world. Though the names were still strange and foreign.
“Here we are.”
The map was of the eastern Black Sea, dated 1729. Reed pointed to where the Sea of Azov joined the Black Sea. “The Cimmerian Bosphorus.” He shook his head, berating himself for some error or failing only he knew.
Now sunk the sun from his aerial height,
And o’er the shaded billows rush’d the night;
When lo! we reach’d old Ocean’s utmost bounds,
Where rocks control his waves with ever-during mounds.
There in a lonely land, and gloomy cells,
The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells,
“When Odysseus sails to find the portal to Hades, Cimmeria is the last country he passes before he crosses the Oceanus. Now, the ancient Greeks believed that the Cimmerians had been a real people who lived into historical times. According to Herodotus they lived around the north-east corner of the Black Sea. He says they’d all been slaughtered by subsequent invaders, but that their name lived on in . . .”
“. . . place names,” said Grant, remembering. “Always the last to go.”
“Hence the Cimmerian Bosphorus. The Euxine Bosphorus—nowadays the Bosphorus—led into the Black Sea from the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean; at the opposite end the Cimmerian Bosphorus led out into the Sea of Azov. I believe nowadays it’s called the Kerch Strait.”
“And you think that’s what Marina found: that the White Island is somewhere near there?”
“That’s what Philostratus says—and the Odyssey agrees.”
Grant peered at the map. “But there are no islands there.”
A burst of frustration welled inside him; he slammed the book shut. “Shit.” Searching for whatever Marina had been working on had somehow staved off the feelings of helplessness. Now even that was a dead end. “We have to find her.”
Reed looked at him with tired eyes. “And how will you do that in this city of almost a million inhabitants?”
“The police?”
“They’d be more likely to lock us up. We haven’t even got our passports.” He gave a sad shake of his head and touched Grant’s arm. “I’m sorry. I suppose we’d better tell Jackson.”
“Jesus Christ.” Jackson threw a glass ashtray across the room. It punctured the flimsy wall, bounced off and landed on the carpet. Flakes of ash fluttered down around it. “This is your fault, Grant.”
“Why are you looking at me? I didn’t kidnap her.”
“Get with the program. Nobody kidnapped her.” Jackson paced the room angrily. “She’s been spying on us for her Russian friends since day one. Why else do you think we keep running into them—because we use the same travel agent? How’d they find you on Lemnos? How come they found us in Athens—and ended up at Sourcelles’s house half an hour behind us? How’d they get on to us on Snake Island so quick?”
“I don’t know. The point is it wasn’t Marina. She kept that tablet safe for six years without telling anyone.”
“She probably didn’t know what it was worth. Jesus! We should never have trusted her. Washington’ll have my balls served up for breakfast in an omelette when they find out.”
“And if she was a spy, why would she go now? There’s nothing to go on except that tablet, and Reed’s about to crack it.”
A look of horror crossed Jackson’s face. “Where is the tablet?”
“In my room.” Reed had watched the whole argument from the safety of a corner. He looked embarrassed, a house guest forced to witness his hosts’ marital bickering. “It’s still there. I checked it ten minutes ago.”
“She thought she was coming back—she left her things in the library.”
“Well, gosh. That fucking proves it. You think it wouldn’t have occurred to her to leave a false trail to slow us up, Einstein?”
Something snapped inside Grant. Before Jackson could think to protect himself, Grant had taken three strides across the room and lifted him up by his lapels. He slammed him into the wall, shaking him like a rat.
“Put me down.”
“I’ll put you down when you apologize.”
“Apologize for what? Insulting your little Commie whore?”
There was no telling what Grant might have done next, but at that moment there was a knock at the door. All three men turned to look.
“Not now,” snarled Jackson.
Either his words were too muffled to be clear, or they weren’t understood. The door opened. An elderly porter in a white jacket stood in the corridor. His face went slack as he saw the scene in the room: “Telefon,” he whispered, plainly terrified. He mimed a receiver with his little finger and thumb. “Telefon for Mister Grant.”
Grant dropped Jackson and ran after the porter, almost pushing him down the stairs in his hurry. Jackson came after him. The receptionist stared at the look on Grant’s face and mutely offered him the telephone. Grant was about to take it when Jackson pushed in his way. “The call’s for me.”
“Right. But I want to hear it too.” Jackson turned to the receptionist. “Is there another extension?” He held up both hands and made the same bull’s-horn gesture that the porter had made. “Icki telephone?”
The receptionist pointed to the opposite end of the counter. She rearranged the plugs in her switchboard, then nodded. Grant and Jackson took the handsets.
“This is Grant.”
It was a bad line, full of hisses and electric crackling, but the voice was clear and cold. “My name is Kurchosov. I have your friend.”
Grant’s heart beat faster. He said nothing.
“I will offer her to you in exchange for the tablet.”
At the other end of the counter Jackson covered the mouthpiece with his hand and mouthed, “Play for time.”
“Your friend Belzig stole the tablet.”
“There is a second piece.” A dangerous edge crept into the voice. “The more important piece. You stole it from the Frenchman’s house.”
“We left it in Greece.”
The line hissed. “For your friend’s sake I hope you did not.”
“It’s no use to you anyway. You can’t read it.”
“We will decide that for ourselves—when you give it to us.”
“I can’t.”
A dangerous edge entered Kurchosov’s voice. “You will. We will meet you on the Üsküdar ferry at this time tomorrow. You will bring us the tablet.”
The line went dead.
“Now do you accept Marina’s not working for them?”
Jackson looked as if he was about to say something, then saw the dangerous look in Grant’s eyes and swallowed it. Instead, he turned to Reed. “How are you getting on with the translation?”
Reed looked glum. “I thought I had it this morning. This afternoon I felt I’d as much chance dra
wing words out of a hat.”
“Is there anything we can do to help?” said Grant.
Jackson took a drag on his cigarette. “Like what? If he can’t read it, you sure as shit can’t. And it’s all goddamn Greek to me.”
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.”
CHAPTER 29
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, laboring 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 FAVOR 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 ARMOR: 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 armor.—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 HARBOR 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 BURNED OFFERINGS, THE ARMOR 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 realized 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.�
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“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 when 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.”
