The Mask of Troy (16 page)

‘You mean she’s your
wife
,’ Rebecca said.

‘This is science, Rebecca.
Science
. I’m talking about assembling the best possible archaeological team. Period.’

‘Dad says archaeology isn’t a science. He says it’s all about emotional understanding of the past. About passion. About your
own
passion, Maurice. Aysha tells me she really wants children. This would be the perfect place to get serious, don’t you think? Professor Dillen and I will be away. You’ve got the excavation house to yourselves. Jeremy can go and camp with his sleeping bag up on the ruins, can’t you, Jeremy? What about it, Hiemy?’

Hiebermeyer was silent for a moment, apparently absorbed in the plan. Then he looked up, narrowing his eyes at Rebecca. ‘Here’s what Hiemy thinks. You remember how Hiemy offered Rebecca the job of site assistant at the mummy necropolis next summer? Hiemy thinks that if Rebecca’s excellent plan comes to fruition, that job brief might just change. It might change to
nanny
.’

Rebecca looked aghast. ‘
Not
,’ she said vehemently.

Jack bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. He cleared his throat, and turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Hieroglyphics,’ he murmured, shaking his head doubtfully. ‘Is that
really
what you saw down there in that tunnel, Maurice?’

Hiebermeyer gave him a defiant look. ‘Did you
really
see the lion-shaped prow of a Mycenaean galley on the sea bed this afternoon?’

Rebecca looked at Dillen. ‘Dad has a bet with Maurice that he’s going to find the Shield of Achilles before Maurice finds the palladion.’

‘An extra team from Egypt,’ Jack murmured, scratching his stubble. ‘That sounds like an unfair advantage. That raises the stakes. It’s a crate of whisky, not a bottle. And James chooses the malt. It’s for him, after all.’

‘Done,’ Hiebermeyer said.

Costas stood up, spun his spanner, checked his watch and looked at Jeremy. ‘That reminds me. I’ve got an Aquapod to fix. The chopper’s waiting. Want to come and help?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

Dillen stood up as well. ‘And I need to go back to my trench. To clean up.’

Hiebermeyer wiped his face, leaving a streak like war paint across his forehead. He looked at Dillen seriously. ‘Of course you do, Professor.’ He grinned. ‘Inspection in half an hour.’

J
ames Dillen walked down from the excavation house to the dirt lane that encircled the site of Troy, on the edge of the rich humic plain that seemed to lap the ancient citadel like a sea. There were plain that seemed to lap the ancient citadel like a sea. There were tomatoes everywhere, rows of lush plants in the fields, ripe red fruit dropped from carts and squashed on the trackway, oozing into the stagnant pools that lined the fields. He remembered what a French soldier had called the plain of Troy:
marais sanglant
, bloody marsh, after the French had fought the Turks to a standstill beside the Dardanelles in 1915. The dark waters of the past always seemed close to the surface here, as if to step off the track would be to risk being swallowed up in it; to navigate this place meant knowing the latticework of dykes and causeways used by the farm workers who dotted the fields, visible here and there like distant scavengers picking their way through the aftermath of battle.

Dillen stopped for a moment, and looked out. The sun was nearly set far out over the Aegean, leaving a fiery orange glow that deepened to dark red from west to east. The ancient stage-set of war was all visible here: the plain of Ilion, the river Scamander behind the low line of trees to the east, in front of the place where the ancient shoreline had been, an arrow-shot away from where he stood now. He could see across the distant waters of the Dardanelles to Cape Helles, the westernmost point of the Gallipoli peninsula, capped by the stark white tower of the memorial to the British dead of 1915. Two nights before, with Jack on
Seaquest II
, they had gone on deck and seen the far-off speckle of phosphorescence in the surf, on the beaches where so many had died. It was as if the ghosts still lingered there, dancing as their corpses had once danced in the lapping waves. Now he saw the same coast rimmed red, where the setting sun reflected off the phosphorescence; above it the ravines and gullies shimmered white, where the shattered bones of men lay too thick to nurture new life, as if the storm of death still reeked and echoed across the years. Behind him the crumbled citadel of Troy was verdant, overgrown, but it too seemed gutted by history, a place that never again would pulse to the sounds of running feet and laughter and children, gone for ever in the whirling vortex of war three thousand years before.

He closed his eyes for a moment, savouring the silence, the preternatural stillness that followed the afternoon wind. Then a diesel tractor coughed to life somewhere away in the fields, and a donkey brayed. He slapped his arm, leaving a bloody smear. Mosquitoes did not seem to live on the citadel, and it was a good enough reason for getting off the plain. He stepped off the path into Schliemann’s trench and made his way towards his excavation, high above the trench on a grassy knoll that marked the northern edge of the ancient city. He scrambled over the makeshift wooden revetment and into the Bronze Age house, pausing, as he always did, to remember where he was, standing on a floor that had been buried for three millennia: a house whose last inhabitants had seen the great beacon burning high above the wall, and had watched the men of Mycenae storm across the plain towards them on a wave of destruction, harbingers of rape and fire and death.

What he had said to Jeremy earlier was too easy, too glib. The Trojan War was not a clash of civilizations, of east and west. Troy was a crucible for all mankind, for men to do their worst. He looked out from his new vantage point high above the plain, to the north-east. Darkness was enveloping the Gallipoli peninsula, blotting out the afterglow of dusk; it was the darkness of an impending storm that had been building up all afternoon. Distant lightning flashed on the horizon, revealing cavernous folds in the clouds. There was a far-off rumble, whether of thunder or the fighter jets that had streaked overhead all day he was not sure. War was never far from this place. He remembered what he had smelled that afternoon, the smell of ancient burning in that pyre against the wall.

He looked up and saw the shadowy shapes of a pair of birds flying west, fleeing the storm, their wings beating the still air. It was going to rain, but he would stay here until it began, wait for Jack. He took off his camera, stowed it in its bag, sat down and nursed his aching knees for a moment, then reached over and rolled up the plastic cover on the wall, revealing the extraordinary fresco of the lyre-player. He stared at it, still astonished at what he had found. The lyre-player seemed to be an observer, looking over the dark plain just as he had been doing, standing apart from history: Auden’s mother earth, remaining immutable as gods and men came and went.

The music of the lyre
. Dillen remembered Jack’s passion for the Shield of Achilles, that evening over whisky on
Seaquest II
. Before they had gone up on deck, Dillen had read out Homer’s description of the pastoral scenes on the shield:
And in their midst a boy made pleasant music with a clear-toned lyre, and to it sang sweetly the Lindos song
. The scene was a tipping point in the
Iliad
: the old order was about to go, the age of heroes about to end. The music of the lyre, the music of the child, changed from pleasant melody to lament, from joy to despair. The shield itself was a metaphor for the book: an ornament, yet concealing within it a reality known to the poet, the grim reality of war, the
pity
of war.

Dillen thought about the
Ilioupersis
, the extraordinary ancient text they had found, the lines that still remained for him to translate. For the first time in three thousand years people would know what had really happened here: a reality the poet had recorded for poetry’s sake but then put away, its message perhaps unbearable, too bleak and pitiless. Dillen looked out over the darkness, over the plain of Ilion towards Gallipoli.
But had the poet been right?
What if his poem
had
been read, a warning from history, a warning of what men might do, unrestrained by gods and honour and nobility? Would the young men of 1914, of 1939, have looked to battle not excited by images of heroic contest, images of Achilles and Hector, but overwhelmed by horror, fearful of impending apocalypse? Would they have looked to battle at all? Would war, total war, war without honour or glory, have been extinguished millennia before, here below the shadow-girt walls of Troy?

Dillen went over to the corner of the excavation and took the cover off his own lyre, then carried it back to where he had been sitting. He balanced it on his right knee, just as the player was doing in the painting, holding it with his right hand and reaching over with his other hand for his flashlight, twisting it on and aiming it at the painting. He wanted to study the angles, the hand positions of the player, to emulate it exactly. He shifted slightly, and in so doing panned the torch down to the plinth where the bronze arrows remained embedded in the floor. Something caught his eye. Earlier he had noticed that the soil remaining against the wall was cracking in the sun, and now he saw that some of it had fallen away. It was his mistake for not covering it over. He peered closer, leaning his lyre aside. For the first time he could see the lower edge of the painting, a plinth for the lyre-player to sit on. He stared at it. There was something else, just below. His heart began to pound.
It was an inscription
. He could see symbols, in red paint on the dark background. He twisted his torch for a more intensive beam, and aimed again.

There was no doubt about it. It was incredible. It was Mycenaean Linear B, the script used to write Greek in the Bronze Age, the language of the Greeks who came to Troy. The language of Achilles.
The language of Agamemnon
.

He could make out four symbols, simple linear signs. He knew the Linear B syllabary by heart. He had been studying it all his life. The first symbol was a simple vertical slash, with a serif above. That meant the sound O. The second, number 13 in his syllabary, was like a V with serifs, meaning ME. The third looked like a lower-case letter t, meaning RO. The fourth, number 49, was untranslated. He knew it was not a syllable, but an ideogram: a stick figure that looked like a horse, but was not, with four long legs, a stubby tail and a high curving neck. He pursed his lips, annoyed.
Why did it have to be that one?
Number 49 had frustrated him for years. He knew it did
not
mean horse, as that was represented by another ideogram. He stared at it, and then his eyes wandered up to the shadowy form of the lyre in the painting above. Something caught his eye, and he quickly picked up the torch and panned it over the painting and the inscription, comparing. The painted lyre had four strings, and a small protrusion at the top of the bridge close to the player’s face, perhaps for tuning. At the front was a curved extension, like the prow of a Bronze Age ship. Dillen shut his eyes tight, then opened them again.
Of course
. How could he have been so blind?
Number 49 was the ideogram for lyre
.

He looked at the whole inscription again: O + ME + RO + lyre. He could barely breathe. He thought hard. It was probably an aspirated O, so HO.
Homeros
. He whispered the word. It had been the most perplexing absence from the Mycenaean Greek lexicon, the one word scholars had sought in vain, not seeing the ideogram for what it was.
The word for bard
. Images came flooding into Dillen’s mind, images from the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
: Tieresias, blind sage; Thetis, mocker of kings; Calchis, son of Thestor, far-seeing snake-prophet. Dillen suddenly felt a certainty, an intense proximity, sitting up here alone, so close to what he had been seeking all his life. That was who Homer was. That was what Homer meant.
The immortal bard
. Homer was all of them. All of them were Homer.
Homer meant bard
. Dillen remembered Jack. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he whispered. ‘
I’ll be damned
.’

After a lifetime, he had finally done it.

He had found Homer
.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, then picked up the lyre again and leaned it back against his shoulder, the flat of each hand against the strings, sensing the noiseless vibrations, unsure whether it was the movement of his hands or some fugitive wind, perhaps the passing of those birds. He thought of the conversation they had just had, about his old teacher Hugh. Looking at the image of the lyre-player, seeing the shape of the symbol, he had suddenly remembered something else from his school days, from Hugh: he had come across a half-finished drawing in one of Hugh’s notebooks, with the inscription
The girl with a harp
. It was a notebook with other sketches from the war, and he just knew that it had something to do with the concentration camp, from the hints of the setting, the clothes the girl was wearing, her shaven head. Dillen would ask Hugh about that too, when he went with Rebecca. He pushed the lyre up on his knee, and stared back at the extraordinary inscription on the wall. He felt as if he should stay here as long as he could, utterly still, not taking his eye off it, as if to leave would be to risk the inscription disappearing, those faded symbols vanishing back into the uncertainty of Troy. He looked at his camera, then thought better of it, fearful that the flash itself might extinguish the image. He remembered Auden’s imagery, of the camera in battle and the crow on the crematorium chimney; the bard too was seeing timeless war, recording it like the camera, like the eye of the crow.

He heard a crunch of footsteps on the path below, the sound of Jack and Hiebermeyer talking, and Rebecca singing quietly to herself. It was inspection time. He put down the lyre and pulled the cover over it, then quickly arranged his tools and laid the torch on the wall beside him, aimed directly at the inscription. He glanced up. The sky was dark now, an ominous storm-darkness from the east. The first drops of rain were falling against the wall, deepening the colour of the inscription, the contrast of the red lines with the dark paint of the background.