A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (15 page)

“That was Heracles.”

“Irrelevant. The point is, Truelove, if a woman's got to be married at all, she might as well be married to a chap who's going to treat her to a night on the town once in a while. Who doesn't give a damn if she likes a bit of wine to go with her meat. Who'll laugh along with her when the gods chuck those little thunderbolts their way.”

Our shoes crunched together along the road, which was rutted by cartwheels and illuminated almost to whiteness by the noon sun. We had passed out of town, and the buildings had long given way to elegant columns of native cypress. Silverton held the mule's rope in his left hand and the pipe in his right, and his face, when I glanced his way, seemed to be tilted slightly upward, knit with contemplation.

“But you're forgetting the main point, Lord Silverton,” I said. “The only point. She was in love with Theseus.”

“Ah, well.” He sucked on the pipe. “I can't answer that. But it seems to me that if a fellow hasn't the good sense to return a woman's love, she should the devil find herself another chap who will.”

The air slipped from my lungs. I pressed my lips together and counted my steps,
crunch crunch crunch
, and when the passage of oxygen returned, I said, “It is rarely so straightforward as that, I understand.”

Silverton had left his pipe in his mouth, and his hand swung carelessly by his side as he marched along the road, leading the mule.
“Why, now, Truelove,” he said gently, from the corner of his mouth, “one would almost suspect you've been disappointed in love.”

I waited an instant too long before I replied, “Then one would be quite mistaken,” and I knew by his silence that he did not believe me.

The climb was steady but not steep, and in little more than an hour the scrubby brush gave way to pale quadrangles of excavated earth. A cart rolled out from a beaten path onto the main road, laden with lumps draped in canvas, and Silverton hailed the elderly driver. I sat down on a nearby boulder and gazed back down the hillside, where the square buildings of Heraklion massed together around the mouth of the harbor. The air smelled of dust and a peculiar spicy scent I didn't recognize.

Silverton turned from the driver. “This is the place, all right. Right up that path. How are you holding up?”

I took in a long breath of cool air. “Magnificently.”

“Carry on, then.” He tugged at the mule, and I rose from the boulder to follow him along the path.

I don't quite remember what I was expecting when the ruins of Knossos opened up before us. Naturally I would not have imagined an actual palace gleaming in the sunshine, flags snapping from the turrets, but I thought there ought certainly to be something recognizable as a building, instead of a jumble of haphazard stone walls and staircases that ended in midair.

Silverton removed his pipe from his mouth, knocked away the ash, and said, “I say, where's all the fuss? It looks remarkably somnolent, for the greatest ancient discovery in modern times.”

“Perhaps they're all indoors.”

“Indoors where?”

But we continued toward the gravitational center, a series of dun-colored walls that stretched higher than the others, lined with what might once have been columns. I said to myself,
These are ancient columns, these are the relics of Minos
, but my imagination failed me. The expected tingle failed to gather at the back of my neck.

“Just the sort of place one expects to find Max,” Silverton said. “With any luck he'll emerge from a grotto any moment, covered in dust, wondering what the devil we're doing here.”

“So absorbed in his work, he's neglected to read or reply to his post?”

“It's happened before, I assure you.”

I thought of the ransacked flat and poor dead Mr. Livas, and the intruder in the hotel with his lethal pistol, and I didn't reply. We skirted gingerly around the crumbling walls, and at last, carried on the wind, came the sound of human occupation: a raised voice, speaking in Greek, coming from the central structure.

“There we are,” said Silverton.

“It's Mr. Haywood?”

“It's somebody, at any rate.” He led the mule to a nearby cypress tree and tied the rope to the trunk. I found the spicy scent again, stronger now, and I realized that it came from the cypress itself. I filled my lungs and thought,
This is the same smell that Homer knew.
This is the smell that perhaps filled the lungs of some genuine Theseus, as he approached these palace walls three thousand years ago.

A faint tingle at last.

Silverton turned from the mule and slipped his empty pipe back into the large pocket of his Norfolk jacket. “Right-ho,” he said, a little too cheerfully.

More voices joined the first as we made our way to the
building in the middle. We turned a corner, and a new front appeared to us, covered with ropes and scaffolding and a few hardy figures. A man stood at the bottom of a ladder in a worn brown suit, looking up fiercely at the workmen above. His hands were cupped around his mouth.

“That's not Max,” said Silverton. “Or Evans, come to that.”

“How do you know?”

“Evans is a short little fellow, not five and a half feet. I saw him once at a lecture in Oxford, this museum he directs. The Ashmolean. You can't mistake him.”

“Then who is this?”

“Let's find out, shall we?”

The man at the bottom of the ladder turned in astonishment at Silverton's halloo. He was about thirty years old, with olive skin and curling dark hair beneath his beaten cap: a native, evidently.

“Hello, there,” said Silverton. “Speak English?”

“Yes, I do.” The man adjusted his cap and placed his hands warily on his hips.

“Good morning, then. My name's Silverton, and this is my colleague, Miss Truelove. We're looking for a man named Haywood. Max Haywood. Friend of ours. I believe he's been working with Mr. Evans this past year.”

One by one, the workers on the wall lowered their tools and gazed down at the three of us. I became conscious of my dusty shoes, my hair slipping untidily from my hat. Next to me, Lord Silverton stood close, in a pose that appeared negligent but wasn't. In fact, the arm that brushed mine was as taut as a magnetic wire, and his position—a quarter step ahead, legs slightly apart—I recognized as protective.

Before us, the foreman took in Silverton's stance with steady
and intelligent eyes. He did not waste his gaze on me; I was quite invisible to such a man, in my plain clothes and serviceable wide hat. The silence widened and took on weight, until someone muttered a few words from the wall above.

“Well?” said Silverton. “Never heard of him? I understand he's been working on Knossos for some time.”

The foreman's hands fell away from his hips. He tilted his head upward and shouted something to the workers on the scaffolding, who picked up their tools in unison and turned back to the stone face of the building, which I now saw was unnaturally perfect.

The foreman looked at us, and though his mouth curled in a welcoming smile, the rest of his face remained grave.

“Come inside, please,” he said. “I will make us some coffee.”

For three days and three nights the Lady remained in the great hall by the sea, in communion with the Hero, until their souls were fully joined and there was no joy left that had not been revealed to them. On the morning of the fourth day, the Lady's handmaid knocked on the door and said that the period of seclusion would soon end, and they must return to the Palace before the Prince's suspicions were raised.

So the Lady prepared to depart from her love, and though she knew he would soon arrive at the Palace and deliver them from the wickedness of the Prince her husband, she felt great fear at the thought of their separation. ‘Remember to do exactly as I have taught you,' she said, ‘and do not forget your promise to me.'

‘My own Lady,' said the Hero, ‘every word you have spoken to me is graven on my heart, and with the blessing of the gods we shall soon be united once more, and I will restore to you the throne you have given up for my sake, and you will bear me children to carry our name into eternity . . .'

T
HE
B
OOK
OF
T
IME
, A. M. H
AYWOOD
(1921)

T
he coffee was of the Turkish variety, the foreman said, the only worthwhile thing left behind by the Ottomans. He did not actually brew it himself; there was a small woman, in a shapeless dress and apron, who lit the small camp stove and measured the grounds in jerky little motions that suggested annoyance. The foreman hoped we liked it strong.

“The stronger the better,” said Silverton. “And you, Miss Truelove?”

I said that I looked forward to drinking Turkish coffee for the first time.

Silverton turned back to the foreman. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.”

Silverton drew out a chair from the table and offered it to me. I sat and watched him take the neighboring chair, settle his long legs, and withdraw his pipe and tobacco pouch from beneath
the wide flap of his pocket. I wondered what else he kept there. The pistol, probably.

The table was long and rectangular and spread with what appeared to be blueprints, which the foreman now stacked hastily into piles at one end. “You will pardon the disorder,” he said, in well-cultivated English. (His name, he had told us, was Vasilakis.) “Mr. Evans is presently away, and I have the entire site to manage.”

“Oh? Where has Evans got to?”

“He has been called back to England and his collections at the museum.” Mr. Vasilakis produced a box of matches from his pocket and bent over the paraffin lantern that rested in the center of the table.

“What a shame. I was hoping he could give us some news of our friend, who has not replied to our recent letters. There's been a death in the family, you see.” Silverton assumed a sorrowful expression.

“My deepest condolences,” said Mr. Vasilakis, also sorrowful. The wick caught slowly. He replaced the globe, shook out the match, and lowered himself into a chair on the opposite side of the table. “I have kept his post in my office. You are welcome to take it with you.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “Has something happened to Mr. Haywood?”

Mr. Vasilakis turned to me, blinking, as if he had quite forgotten I was there. Or perhaps he hadn't even noticed me to begin with. “Happened? Not that I am aware. Mr. Haywood left our company at the beginning of winter, and I am afraid we have not heard from him since.”

“Left? Where to?” said Silverton.

“He did not say. If he had, we would have forwarded his post.
I understood he was to return. I presumed he was merely carrying out additional research for his studies.”

The foreman's English was superb, his accent redolent of plum pudding and British public schools, only without the drawl that would have rendered it fully authentic. I glanced at his hands, which were ungloved and heavily calloused.

“His studies,” said Silverton. “I see. Perhaps you had better start from the beginning, old man. I'm afraid I'm all at sea. What studies, precisely, was he carrying out here at Knossos?”

Mr. Vasilakis lifted his eyebrows. He glanced at me, and then returned to Silverton. “You are not aware of Mr. Haywood's area of specialty?”

His lordship's face was perfectly blank. “Are
you
?”

The foreman reached for one of the stacks of papers at the end of the table and thumbed his way rapidly downward. “I presume you are familiar with the history of Knossos,” he began.

“Not at all,” said Silverton, innocent as a babe. “Rather a dunce at history, in fact. Never could stuff another king inside the old noggin without an older one slipping back out the other ear.”

Mr. Vasilakis had just pulled out a sheaf from his stack, and paused to impart an expression of utter disbelief: first at Silverton, who shrugged it away cheerfully, and then at me.

“It's quite true,” I said. “He's perfectly useless.”

Mr. Vasilakis turned to the woman at the stove, who was placing a series of demitasse cups on a battered enamel tray. He said something sharp to her, to which she replied just as sharply before carrying the tray to the table and setting it down in a rattle of angry porcelain.

“You will forgive me,” said Vasilakis. “We do not often have visitors at this time of year.”

The woman poured out the coffee in violent spurts. The air in the room—a tent, really, except for one wall made of ancient stone—reeked of damp canvas and turned earth, along with a faint hint of paraffin from the camp stove and the lantern on the table before us. I settled my nose into the steam rising from my cup and inhaled the nourishment of well-roasted coffee.

“You do not take sugar?” asked Vasilakis, surprised. His own teaspoon hung poised over his drink, having already done its work.

I looked at Silverton, who nodded sagely. “Sugar is much to be recommended in the case of Turkish coffee.”

Mr. Vasilakis pushed the sugar bowl toward me, and I obediently emptied a spoonful into my cup. The drink was thick and black, and the sugar disappeared at once, as if it had never existed. I looked up again and found that the foreman now regarded me with considerably more interest, as if I were an artifact newly pulled from the earth.

I clinked the spoon against the side of my cup. “The history of Knossos, Mr. Vasilakis?”

“Yes, of course.” He set down his cup and picked up the sheaf of paper he had plucked from the stack. “Here we have a map of the site. As you see, we have completed excavation of almost the entirety of the complex, and have now turned our attention to the problem of restoration. Once uncovered, you see, after so many centuries, the features of Knossos stand in very great danger of decay. For one thing, there is the winter rain, which is so often like the deluge of God.”

I drew a tentative sip of the brew before me. The strength and bitterness shocked my tongue, and I reached hastily to retrieve the sugar bowl. “How long has all this taken?”

Mr. Vasilakis smiled in sympathy. “Mr. Evans began the
purchase of the site from the native owners in perhaps 1894 or 1895, I believe, but it was not until the end of the civil war and the establishment of the independent state of Crete that he was able to begin excavation. That was five years ago.”

“I say. Five years?” said Silverton.

Mr. Vasilakis glanced at Silverton with an upward roll of his dark eyes. “The work, as you can perhaps imagine, is painstaking. In that time, we have uncovered an entire complex of political and administrative buildings, which was built and rebuilt several times during the ancient period, and created de novo a chronology of the Minoan and later occupations—”

Silverton held up his hand. “Slow down, old man. Remember the sad state of my brains. Do you mean to say there were separate peoples occupying this place, one after the other?”

“Yes, at least. In the very early days of the excavation, we were fortunate to uncover tablets written in two distinct linear scripts, as well as an older hieroglyph system, none of which we have thus far been unable to decipher, though Mr. Evans finds many points of similarity between the Cretan hieroglyphics and the Phoenician alphabet in his great work,
Scripta Minoa.
Perhaps you have read it?”

Silverton gazed penitently into his coffee. “Afraid not.”

Again, an expression of vague contempt from Mr. Vasilakis. “The two scripts we call Linear A and Linear B, as the former appears more ancient than the second. We have dated some tablets containing Linear B, in very approximate fashion, to the period just before the general collapse of Minoan civilization in the fifteenth century before Christ.”

“How fascinating. Why did their civilization collapse?” I asked.

Mr. Vasilakis shrugged. “This is not known, I am afraid. There
is evidence of earthquakes, fires. This was also the time of the spread of the Mycenaean culture, quite clearly evident in the stratigraphical record across the entire Mediterranean, so it is possible our Minoans were simply usurped, perhaps by force. Though, to be sure, the palace remains show no sign of armament or fortification.” He smiled at me, showing his teeth, until I was compelled to smile in return. There was a bang of metal from the direction of the camp stove in the corner.

“All very well,” said Silverton, “but where does my friend Haywood come into everything? I don't recall that he was ever particularly interested in Cretan comings and goings.”

A small gust of wind shivered the canvas above us. Mr. Vasilakis folded his hands atop the map of Knossos while the light from the lantern stroked his face. He could not have been much more than thirty, and yet, despite his rough work clothes and careless appearance—hair grown out, black mustache a trifle ragged as it arched luxuriously over his upper lip—he exuded an air of polished responsibility. I could well imagine why Mr. Evans had seen fit to leave his beloved Knossos in Mr. Vasilakis's hands through the inhospitable winter.

“Mr. Evans called your friend to the site about a year ago, I believe,” said the foreman, “because of his expertise in studying artifacts that—how shall I put this?—make no sense, from the archeological perspective.”

“Make no sense? But from what you've just told us, very little of
any
of this makes proper sense.” Silverton waved an arm to indicate the entirety of Knossos, and perhaps even the world.

“I mean from the perspective of chronology. Objects that do not fit—most profoundly do not fit—in the context in which they were discovered.”

I had set down my satchel at the edge of my chair, and it rested now on the beaten dirt floor of the primitive room, slumped against one leg.
To be kept strictly confidential
, the duchess had written on the overleaf note to the photographs. But what about those who already knew about the frescoes? What about Vasilakis, who was intimately involved in the excavation and restoration of Knossos?

A quiet cough came from the corner of the tent, against the ancient stones, and I turned my head to the right and saw my father, sitting atop a camp stool, one leg crossed over the other. He was looking not at the men, nor the map Mr. Vasilakis held to the table with his fingers, but at me.

I pressed my thumbs into the curve of the porcelain cup before me, now nearly empty. The taste of the Turkish coffee filled my mouth, bitter and sweet and exotic.

“Don't fit?” said Silverton. “In what way?”

“I mean they are anachronistic. An object from one period is found where it should not—cannot—have existed.”

“Oh, right-ho. I catch your meaning. But surely there's some logical explanation? Some native worker dropping his pocket watch into an ancient pit?”

“Usually there is,” said Vasilakis. “But not always.”

He lifted his hands from the map and pushed it toward us again. We bent forward eagerly, like a pair of schoolchildren. “We had already found a few such objects, which we duly recorded and set aside. But it was not until we began the restoration of the frescoes that we discovered something for which, it seemed, no possible explanation could exist.” He tapped his finger on a small space on the map, indicating a room of some kind. “Right here, near the queen's bedchamber.”

“The queen's bedchamber, eh?”

“Yes. It is a fresco depicting three figures in transit, of which the lead figure was holding an object that can only be described as a device of wholly modern invention.”

“By God. Extraordinary,” said Silverton, as if he had never seen the photographs in my possession. “And you called in my friend Max to sort it all out?”

“He arrived here last winter, and began immediately his work. He consulted the stone tablets, the other frescoes and mosaics, the objects we had found earlier. He conducted some additional excavation. I am afraid I am unfamiliar with the details of his investigation, as it was kept under the utmost secrecy. He consulted only with Mr. Evans. And his assistant, of course.”

“His assistant?” said Silverton, and there was something about the way he asked the question that made me suspect, for the first time, he did not already know the answer. I glanced, from the corner of my eye, at the camp stool in the corner, and I thought I saw my father leaning forward, his finger pads pressed intently against each other.

“Yes, his assistant. A young Turkish student by the name of Anserrat, who I understand accompanies him in all his investigations.”

His lordship lifted the coffee cup to his lips. If I believed in such things, I would say that a kind of electromagnetic ether had begun to gather around his figure, scintillating with invisible purpose. He bent his head back over the map.

“I see. And what did the two of them conclude?”

“I'm afraid I cannot answer that question. As I said, this particular investigation took place independently of our own work.” He hesitated and pulled back the map. “They departed altogether at the end of December, and we have not heard from them since.”

“And you have not made any inquiries?” I said.

Mr. Vasilakis stood and began shuffling the papers to his right. He slipped the map somewhere in the middle and said, “No, of course not. Why should I? It was not my business.”