A Darker God

by Barbara Cleverly

  No one spoke as Letty took the diadem from Gunning’s fingers and very gently shook it. Tiny oak leaves trembled, individually fixed and gathered into natural clumps around a central twisted band. Here and there amongst the thickets of leaves glinted perfectly formed acorns nestling in their striated cups. The whole had the wild exuberance and freshness of a wreath hastily put together by a child playing under forest trees in the autumn. And yet the natural form was inspired and controlled by the delicacy and precision of a master goldsmith.

  “Golly! Eat your heart out, Fabergé!” Gunning murmured. “It’s gold. Thracian gold. So dark it almost has a bronze tinge to it. Are you going to try it on, Letty? I’ll fetch a mirror.”

  “No!” She stopped him with a gesture. “I wouldn’t have the impudence. What queenly head last wore it? I look for but I don’t see a hair trapped amongst the foliage … Besides, on my hair, you wouldn’t even notice it. Same colour. You’d just think I’d been rolling in the hay and offer me a brush. No one should wear this but Demeter herself or … a dark-haired girl. I can imagine it gleaming amongst black tresses …”

  She caught the inspector’s eye and knew without words that he was seeing it around the shining head of Thetis. He took it from her gently and laid it on the velvet cloth.

  The second offering was encased in a red leather jewel box. Letty held up two objects to glimmer in the afternoon sunshine. Pendant earrings, again of dark gold, they trailed from central discs in swags of blossoms, fruit, and berries. Letty held them up on either side of her face, where they dangled from ear down to shoulder, and she smiled. “Lovely! But something else I can’t wear … unless I have my ears pierced.”

  She passed one to each man and they gasped and exclaimed over the stunning workmanship and then put them down alongside the diadem.

  “Percy, your turn, I think,” she invited, and the inspector eagerly chose a package.

  From a plain brown cardboard box he shook two matching medallions into his hand and held them up between finger and thumb. “Exquisite! Do we have any idea of the subjects?” he asked. A kindly schoolmaster who already knows the answer to his question.

  “So that’s where he got them!” Gunning exclaimed. “Andrew was showing me the illustrations for his work on Alexander last winter and these two featured—as line drawings. Perhaps he took a rubbing! I know who they are. The gentleman with the handsome profile and jutting beard is Philip, King of Macedon and Alexander’s redoubtable father. And who knows? The lady with the deceptive simper and aristocratic Greek hairdo may well be his mother, snake-worshipping, murdering Queen Olympias.”

  Gunning placed the two images side by side on the cloth. Ignoring each other, the faces stared out in opposite directions.

  “In life as in art!” he commented. “If this is indeed Olympias, poor old Philip finds himself head to head once again with his killer! With the wife he feared and hated. And who shall blame him! Can’t exactly have been conducive to marital bliss—having to kick the snakes out of the marriage bed every time you wanted to exercise your conjugal rights. I think we can be certain it was she who arranged her husband’s assassination. And who arranged for the tidying up of loose ends afterwards. The killer, having put a dagger into Philip’s ribs, was caught fleeing the scene, according to the ancient sources. He was hacked to death by elements of the pursuing royal bodyguard—conveniently before a confession could be wrung out of him—and his body was ceremonially exhibited in public. The reaction of the bereaved queen to all this was interesting! It was blatantly to place a golden crown on the head of the assassin as he hung dead on his stake of shame. Pausanias, his name was. And he was a royal bodyguard, ironically. The queen gave Pausanias a magnificent send-off: She had him cremated and buried with all honours. Hard to make a clearer statement than that!”

  “‘Thanks, mate. Job well done. So sorry you had to die in the process,’” said Montacute.

  “Oh, good Lord!” Gunning exclaimed, brow furrowed in concentration. “It happened in the arena at Aigai, the ancient capital! Aigai. The king was stabbed to death just before his ceremonial entrance to the theatre. He was standing in the wings, waiting for the trumpet fanfare to sound.”

  “An unsafe place for powerful men, it seems—the theatre,” Letty said quietly.

  “Are you suggesting that the god of the place gets bored and likes to stage his own real-life impromptu dramas? Ghastly thought! Better say a few prayers, pour out a jug of bloodred Mavrodaphne to appease him before we go public with the play next week, are we thinking?”

  Montacute grinned. “I leave all that nonsense to the superstitious—as I suspect you do, Gunning. I put my trust in Theotakis and his gun-toting squad.”

  “But who guards the bodyguards?” said Letty. “The men paid to stay close by and carry arms? The trusted ones? I wonder what persuasion she used on poor, silly Pausanias. If it was Olympias at the bottom of it all. Can we believe that? Look at her head! So matronly, so proper. You’d say butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth!”

  Gunning shuddered. “The woman was a raging Maenad! Follower of Dionysus. Adept in the arts of poisoning and other less subtle methods of killing. She’d have made Lucrezia Borgia look like a Girl Guide. She had hundreds of her own people horribly tortured and killed. The death she prescribed for the rival for her husband’s affections, the young girl Eurydice—and her child—is too sickening for words. If this is indeed Olympias, we’re looking at the face of the most wicked woman in history.”

  He picked up the medallion and held it in the palm of his hand, examining it closely, suddenly less certain. “But, I agree, this lady before us does have a certain saintlike innocence about her. I wonder if it can be her? Anyone like to argue that this is the rival who ousted her from the number one position at court? Young Eurydice? So briefly Queen of Macedon? Did Andrew leave us an inventory?”

  “Probably in the promised envelope in the bottom. Do you have a feeling Andrew’s leading us on some sort of a wet-afternoon’s treasure hunt?” Letty poked about in the chest and extracted three small objects of equal size, shape, and hardness. “These would appear to come to hand next.”

  She unwrapped them and set them up in a row.

  Gunning began to laugh. “I think he’s just answered your previous question on identity, Letty! Here we have the family portrait gallery, no less! Exquisite ivory carving!” He took in his hands in turn each of the three ivories, the heads no larger than the average doorknob, yellowed with age and somewhat pitted but clear representations of the subjects in life. “Look at the detail and the liveliness of expression! Some Michelangelo of the ancient world produced these. But they’re not idealised! We’re seeing these characters warts and all, you’d say! And the artist solves the problem of identity. Here is Philip, and no mistake! Impressive, shrewd, a bearded warrior. And do you see the nick in the brow over his right eye? It’s not an accidental chip—it’s his famous old war wound! And the younger man … I was wondering when he’d make an appearance. Handsome, clean-shaven—and that’s very unusual for a man in his early twenties, which this one appears to be. Who in the world wouldn’t know his face? The unruly hair, the arrogant tilt of the head, the eyes gazing always over the horizon, the sensuous lips slightly parted in some emotion—”

  “What a modern face! He could be my brother!” Letty interrupted. “I’ve seen his double many times. Chaps like him tend to row at stroke in the Cambridge boats—humming a little Bach as they swish along.”

  “It’s Alexander,” Montacute said, mesmerised by the little carving. “And look here, if I place the third one right next to him—”

  “Oh, goodness! Yes! That’s where he got his looks! The artist’s seen it … the resemblance. She has the same arrogance, the same wide eyes—though hers are focussed, clever eyes—the same full lips … It could only be his mother, Olympias. And yes—view her in profile and it’s the lady on the medallion,” Letty confirmed.

  Montacute chortled. “I could draw up a suspect i
dentification sheet from these! Monsieur Bertillon could get out his measuring tapes and, citing nose length, distance between eyes, width of brow, pronounce with certainty on identity! A shared identity. Philip, from this evidence, could well not have been the father—but this was certainly his mother!”

  “After all these centuries we’re looking at them again: the world’s wickedest woman and her egomaniac of a son,” murmured Letty. “And they have the faces of angels.”

  More coins—silver tetradrachms and gold staters—and more medallions joined the earlier ones on the velvet and were followed by intact and ravishingly beautiful pieces, all small: a painted funeral vase; a slender lekythos in which Letty could almost persuade herself she could still smell the heady eastern perfume, long diffused; and, the last object to surface, a golden wine cup. It was decorated with the graceful form of the young Dionysus, who, with enigmatic half-closed eyes, was about to take in marriage the hand of Ariadne, princess of Crete, abandoned by her Athenian hero, Theseus, and here modestly hiding her lower face with her veil. Their wedding guests, satyrs and nymphs, posed lasciviously in the background, anticipating the drunken revelry, their limbs entwining with the wandering tentacles of ivy and grapevine as well as with each other’s.

  Stunned by the glitter and glory of the workmanship crowding the velvet cloth, Letty leaned over the chest and took hold of the last of the packages. Small and light. As she removed the last layer of tissue paper, she almost dropped it in her shock and instinctive shudder of revulsion.

  Chapter 31

  Recovering herself, Letty held it out, cupped in her hand, and managed to speak in a reasonably calm voice. “Ah. If these are what I think they are, then they may be part of the original contents of the chest. ‘Larnax’ was my first thought and I say again: funeral receptacle. Similar in purpose to the ones we encountered in Crete, William. Andrew was telling us: The Macedonians cremated their royal dead and buried them in the mounds that still dot the landscape—perhaps these burnt fragments were what he found in this particular chest?”

  “Looks awfully like the stuff I periodically dig out from the bottom of my toaster.” Montacute looked at it, unimpressed. “But what’s that larger piece?”

  Letty stroked the slender brown object gently with a trembling forefinger and smiled in wonder. “That’s as near as I shall ever get to shaking hands with Macedonian royalty. It’s a finger bone.”

  “Proximal phalanx,” Gunning specified, peering at it. “There are some more quite large fragments but that’s the clearest. I wonder who it belonged to?”

  “I think we can guess who Andrew thought it belonged to!” Letty said. “He’s been leading us through this! Softening us up for a revelation we might just be unprepared to swallow. That would always be his style … catch his audience in a storytelling web. And I think we’ve earned the right to read his explanation, don’t you? The brown foolscap envelope placed so teasingly right at the bottom? Shall we have a look?”

  “By all means. But, Letty, go back to his letter first, will you? I think we ought to obey the stage directions!”

  “So dramatically and meticulously given,” agreed Montacute. “Let’s travel a little further with the professor, shall we? Play his game a little longer?”

  “The smallest and the choicest of the artefacts I came by, I leave for you, Letty. Should you choose to spirit them away to England, you will find them eminently smuggleable. I’m sure you’ll find a way if you wish to. Assigning ownership in these politically troubled times will not be easy. I’ve done my best to supply the paperwork you may need: bills of sale and deeds to the property west of Thessalonike where they originated. All these glorious things and, indeed, the estate where they came to light are yours because you will know how to deal with them. It’s important that you have the house and the acres of farmland surrounding it. It is the most exciting prospect I came across in my months of fossicking about in Macedonia. And, if all continues to go well, you may assume ownership and arrange to dig where you please. I have moved heaven and earth over the years to bring this to a satisfactory conclusion. I’ve wheedled, promised, threatened, bribed, and suborned, and finally, I have the deeds in my hand and am about to slide them into the foolscap envelope.

  “It’s a distressing story and any surge of triumph and pride in my achievement is instantly swamped in a wave of sadness. I met Soulios Gunay (the name will mean nothing to you) in an antiques dealer’s shop in the old city in the centre of Thessalonike in 1917, during the war. He was selling and I was buying Modestly gratified and standing between us was the dealer. Difficult times. Gunay, a local farmer, was experiencing some financial problems and was offering for sale the lekythos you will have admired. I bought it, for a generous amount, and both he and the salesman were pleased with their day. I chased after Gunay when he left and we had a cup of coffee together. You can imagine with no difficulty what we spoke of!

  “The upshot was—he invited me to visit him at his farmhouse west of the city and look over some more of the goods he might have for sale. His family had farmed the land—which was extensive and productive of olives and fruit—for many generations, and had made a habit of collecting together any objects found on the property. He hinted at precious metals and exquisite workmanship. These objects he was holding in reserve, fearing some dreadful turn of events which might make it necessary for him to realise their value in the saleroom in order to finance the farm. In this he was right, except that his fears did not go far enough … Poor chap! He was to lose both his assets and his land by a cruel blow of Fate.

  “No! Why blame Fate? It was by the hand of Man that he lost his belongings, his livelihood, and eventually his life. He lost everything at the stroke of a pen, the signature of a fellow countryman he trusted, on a document drawn up far away on the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne. The Exchange of Populations Treaty of 1923.

  “Swept on by my army life—I was needed back in Athens—it was more than five years before I saw Gunay again. I rode up to his farm and found him in despair. His papers had come through. He and his family—he had a beautiful wife and two charming children—had received their marching orders. Since they were registered as Muslim, it had been decreed that they were to set off at short notice, load whatever possessions they could onto a cart, and get themselves to the port, where they would board a Turkish boat bound for a homeland which was not their homeland. They were assured that a similar property and life would be provided on the other side of the Aegean Sea. Their own farm would be taken up by refugees of Greek origin who were performing the same manoeuvre in the opposite direction.

  “There was no arguing with the authorities. Two armed Cretan gendarmes were standing about looking threatening, to make sure the family obeyed the decree. I had to act quickly. I don’t think I gave it a minute’s thought. I made him an offer for whatever artefacts remained to him and for the estate itself. I agreed to pay him at the port in gold coinage before he sailed. He trusted me. He handed over—for what they were worth—the title deeds to his land. I was as good as my word. Don’t ask how I came by the sum of money. I’ll just say the British presence still in the area had large reserves at its disposal and my credit with the Government has always been good. Shh! If the words ‘cloak and dagger’ come to mind, then your mind is a very suspicious one! But if events have put this letter in your hands, it doesn’t matter much anymore, so I’ll say: Suspect all you wish, double your suspicions, and you’ll be in the target area …”

  “What is Andrew suggesting?” Letty broke off to ask. “That he was some sort of a … spy?”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Montacute. “An agent of the British Government. Political? Military? High up, I’d guess, judging by his free-ranging ability to go about the place under cover of archaeology, buying up property, defying the Lausanne convention, and borrowing army resources. I don’t like to think of the favours Merriman must have called in … the arms he must have twisted to get what he wanted …”

  “No
t high enough, it seems from what he says next!” Letty read on, skimming down the page. “Problems … sticks poked into wheels … applications delayed in Embassy in-trays … I can imagine the sort of stuff. It must have driven him mad! No wonder he was spending so much time in Greece. But perseverance, or whatever else it was he was using, seems to have paid off. Listen!”

  “And the upshot is: The house and land are now officially recognised as mine. I don’t feel too badly about this because I bought with honest intent. Many properties were the subjects of deals of a clandestine nature at this time, and many unfortunates did not do so well as Gunay—though his luck was to run out. Sadly, the family died on the journey to Turkey. There was a report that the boat on which they travelled was ravaged by disease and all the passengers died of it—those who had survived the appalling crossing. Gunay’s land has not suffered. Assuming ownership as I did, I arranged with the local placement bureau for Turkish refugees—a farming family—to be installed for a reasonable rent, and there they still are.

  “And the point of all this … and the part which gives me a twinge of guilt … is the answer to the questions I’m sure you’ve been asking yourself as you unpacked these pretty things. There are at least four tumuli on Gunay’s land, possibly more. Indeed, I have, through the years, imposed on the tenant farmer the task of preserving the mounds untouched (on pain of eviction). And I have checked periodically that he has performed in accordance with my instruction. One tumulus I believe to be in its original state, undisturbed by man. I want you, Letty, to disturb it!

  “You will have guessed that I have identified this site as the burial place of the Kings and Queens of Macedon. Its excavation could be as thrilling to the world as the revelations from Mycaenae. And as rich in gold! It was the custom of the royal family to be buried near their capital of Aigai (some few miles distant from the site) and in a particular way. The bodies would be cremated, the burnt remains gathered up and placed in a ceremonial box—a larnax—and placed along with sumptuous grave goods in a space built and decorated as a room. I have caught glimpses of the most wonderful wall paintings in other tombs of Macedonian nobles, but sadly raided and defaced. In the middle of a battlefield, all I could do was pop the lid back on and mark them down for further and better investigation at a later date! Heartrending!