The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  He looked up, and saw Costas ten metres or so above him, silhouetted against the smudge of light from the surface of the sea far above. He glanced at his computer. Only three minutes left. He rose a metre or so, and looked down again. His wafting had revealed something resting on the planking where the timbers protruded from under the rusting hull of the warship. He dropped down and wafted again, strong, quick strokes. This was no time for finesse. What he discovered in these moments could determine the future course of the excavation. He stopped to let the sediment clear, and there it was, intact, lying half embedded in the sea bed in front of him.

  His heart pounded. It was unbelievable. It was an ancient pottery cup, beautifully preserved, a kylix, a distinctive Greek form, raised on a stem with a broad, wide bowl that tapered down, like a large champagne glass but with small vertical handles on either side of the bowl. Jack stared at it, his mind racing back to Troy, to the finds he had seen in the Canakkale archaeological museum that day with Macalister. This was Mycenaean. The shape, the details of the stem and the handles were absolutely distinctive. The part of the bowl he could see exposed above the sand was decorated with a marine pattern, a beautifully painted octopus that wrapped round the cup, the red paint still radiant. He knew the Mycenaean kylix dated to the late Bronze Age, between the fifteenth and the twelfth century BC. The style of decoration tightened the date even further, to the thirteenth, perhaps early twelfth century BC. He hardly dared believe it. The time of the Trojan War.

  He needed to think fast. Mycenaean pottery had been found at Troy, but it was rare, probably highly prized. This cup could have been cargo, brought by a trader some time in the lead-up to the war, when Troy was a hub of commerce. But that must be wrong. These timbers were not those of a merchantman, but a galley. A war galley. The cup must have been the possession of someone on board. A crew member seemed unlikely, even the captain. They would have used bowls, ladles, to dip into the water vats, drinking their wine crudely, as sailors did. A cup like this would have been far too delicate for shipboard use. So it must have been a passenger. A Mycenaean noble, taking a galley to Troy? The Iliad showed that nobles, princes bent on war, took their prized possessions with them, the accoutrements for lavish feasting and wealth display. Princes bent on war. Jack knew where his thoughts were leading him, but he hardly dared go there. He wafted his hand over the bowl to reveal the rim, to see whether he could raise it in one piece. He waited for the sediment to settle.

  Then he saw it.

  First one letter, then another. A word, painted below the rim of the cup. A word in ancient Greek. He stared, transfixed, at the letter A toppled over on its side, the early Phoenician form of the letter, just as Dillen had shown him in the Ilioupersis. He could barely believe it. Letters in ancient Greek, on a Mycenaean cup from the thirteenth century BC. This proved it, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This showed that the Greeks of the late Bronze Age, of the age of heroes, had started to use the alphabet several centuries before anyone had previously thought, just as Dillen had argued. Jack’s mind was reeling. Dillen had been right about the Ilioupersis. It could have been written by a bard who actually witnessed the events of Troy. Jack was suddenly bursting to tell him. But there was more. As he deciphered the word, he gasped into his mouthpiece in astonishment. His mind raced back to all those hours spent with Dillen as a student. The Linear B syllabary – the script used by the Mycenaeans, the other script – had several words for leader, for king. One, basileus, the term used by Greeks of the classical period, was rarely encountered. Another, lawagetas, the most common term, meant chieftain, prince of one citadel, one city-state. In Homer’s Iliad, the men who led the contingent from their home territory, men like Achilles, Ajax, Nestor, would have been called that. But there was another word, a rarer one, the one staring Jack in the face now: wanax. That meant the ruler of many city-states, a paramount ruler, one elected in times of peril. The wanax was the biggest of them all, bigger than the greatest hero, a man whose power might rival that of the gods. A mighty wielder of the sceptre. A king of kings.

  Jack reached down with his left hand and gently pushed his fingers into the sand around the stem of the cup, touching the pottery for the first time, feeling that wave of excitement that always coursed through him when he touched an artefact undisturbed by human hands for millennia. He remembered the sanctity of this place, the probability that the site was a war grave. A grave from two wars. But this cup deserved to be raised into the sunlight once again, to complete the voyage that was thwarted by catastrophe over three thousand years before, to be held aloft over the walls of Troy just as the great king would have done. Jack wanted to take it to where Dillen was excavating, to the highest bastion of the citadel overlooking the Plain of Ilion, so that they could share in the triumph of archaeology, revel in a find that not only gave Dillen proof that the Greek of the Ilioupersis was the Greek of Agamemnon, but also put them one huge step closer to the reality of the great king and his war to end all wars.

  ‘Jack.’ Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Zero hour. Time to go home. Now.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Jack eased the ancient cup out of the sand and held it up, watching the sediment fall away in a silvery shower. It was intact, one of the most beautiful finds he had ever made. He blasted air into his buoyancy compensator and rose slowly above the sea bed, wreathed in a sheen of bubbles. His e-suit automatically bled air as the external pressure decreased, the computerized sensor maintaining his buoyancy just above neutral. He knew that the same was happening to the gas bubbles in his bloodstream, and he glanced at his wrist computer to double-check his ascent rate. He looked up at Costas, then back down at the wreck. The beam from his headlamp reflected off the particles stirred up where he had left the sea bed, and he switched it off, closing his eyes to help them adjust to the gloom. When he opened them a few moments later, he saw the clear outline of the minelayer, but now he imagined another wreck, the ancient ship underneath, twenty, maybe twenty-five metres in length, lying diagonally below the minelayer’s hull, its stern protruding through the smaller scour trench along the port side of the minelayer, its fore a few metres beyond where he had found the cup.

  He stared at where he had been, straining his eyes. There was something else down there. Something was visible ahead of the spot where he had seen the planking, where he imagined the timbers tapering towards the galley’s bow. It would have been out of his line of vision from the scour trench, and on the sonar readout it would have looked like some broken-off structure from the minelayer. He pressed the buoyancy button on his suit to override the computer and manually expel air, and stopped dead in the water, staring downwards. There was no doubt about it. It was on exactly the right alignment, in exactly the right place, rising from the sand just beyond the outside edge of the scour trench. The prow of the ancient ship. It was a curved timber, but there was more shape to it than that. Was he seeing things? He was more than twenty metres above the sea bed now, and everything was receding. Suddenly he had a flashback to the famous stone gate of Mycenae, Agamemnon’s capital. Two lions, paws raised, facing a column. He stared again. Was that the shape? Was it the shape of a lion? A lion-prowed ship of Agamemnon? Or was his mind imprinting desire on to reality, playing the trick that had led so many before him up a blind alley in their search for the Trojan War?

  ‘Jack. You’re still at seventy metres. We’ll need to do a safety stop at thirty.’

  Jack shut his eyes tightly, then opened them and reactivated the ascent programme. ‘Roger that. Just taking one last look.’

  ‘ Seaquest II ’s standing off, but Macalister’s sending a Zodiac. I can hear the outboard engines. I’m popping a buoy.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Jack watched the sea bed recede into dark blue, the jagged mass of the shipwreck disappearing into the gloom. He looked up, holding the cup now in both hands as a king might once have done, a great king toasting his heroes, Achilles and Ajax and Patroclus and the others. The shape of the cup was framed by a halo of
light on the surface of the sea, just as Jack imagined it once being backlit by the sunshine of a brooding sky, etched in the eye of a king who was to lead a thousand ships to Troy. Could it really be? He felt a tremble go through him, and the cup suddenly seemed impossibly delicate, a phantasm from history, like a floating leaf that would disintegrate on touch. He remembered his dream, on the deck of Seaquest II that morning. Then, it had been a sword. But that was just a dream. Now he was no longer the archaeologist, but holding it as Agamemnon might have done. This was real. He saw Costas a few metres above him, staring, and pressed his intercom. ‘You’re not going to believe what I’ve found.’

  ‘Jack goes silent at the end of the first dive on a new wreck, and disappears into a hole in the sea bed? I guessed something was up. I can see what you’ve got. Looks pretty incredible.’

  ‘What if I told you we’re on the trail of the greatest treasure ever found underwater?’

  ‘You found gold?’

  Jack came level with Costas and held the cup in front of him. ‘Not gold. Something more precious. A word. A word in an ancient language. One word. One word that opens the door on the reality of the Trojan War. On the reality of the wreck below us. Not one wreck, but two.’

  ‘The ship of Agamemnon? The wreck in Dillen’s text?’

  Jack’s heart pounded with excitement. The lion-prowed ship of Agamemnon. ‘I saw timbers, Costas. Not just shapes in the darkness. Real timbers. I touched them. And this cup is Mycenaean.’

  ‘So we’re going back down there? To defuse mines? I mean, to hunt for the greatest treasure? For the Shield of Achilles?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Costas punched the water. ‘ Yes.’

  8

  ‘ W hat the hell is that?’ Jeremy Haverstock stood in the middle of the ancient passageway leading beneath Troy, staring in wide-eyed astonishment at the crumbling wall of rubble and earth he had been excavating. He could barely believe it. Hiebermeyer had led him and Rebecca straight from Dillen’s excavation to this passageway – a deep trench open to the sky – and set them to work. He had been at Troy less than three hours, and now this. He was literally reeling. The trowel slipped from his hand and hit the ground, but he remained standing, swaying slightly, staring. Rebecca stopped brushing and stood up beside him, then gasped. The shadows created by the late-afternoon sun made strange illusions of shapes along the walls, but there was no doubt about this one. Jeremy reached out and put the flat of his hand on it. ‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘That shape. It looks Egyptian.’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ Rebecca murmured, putting her hand out but not quite touching it. She shivered, in spite of the heat. ‘A little spooky.’

  A bobbing light from a headlamp appeared and Dillen came up from the unexcavated end of the passageway, some ten metres ahead of them, where the sloping walls narrowed as it led into the side of the ancient mound of the citadel.

  ‘Where’s Maurice?’ Jeremy said hoarsely, still staring at the wall.

  ‘Having his Schliemann moment,’ Dillen replied, oblivious to their discovery, stopping to glance at a pair of crows flying overhead. ‘Digging all by himself at the end of the passageway. Jack went straight from the helicopter to find him. Did you see when he passed you, Jack’s got his trusty old khaki bag with him, and it’s got a big bulge in it? He says he’s got something incredible to show me. All he said is that an hour ago it was on the sea bed. He says it has to be the right place, the right time. I told him two can play at that game. I’ve got something to show him. We’ve got a rendezvous at my excavation up on the walls after supper. Showdown time.’

  ‘Maurice needs to come and see this. And Jack. Like right now.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Be careful, James,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’re being watched.’

  Dillen gave her a startled glance. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In front of Jeremy.’

  Dillen followed their gaze towards the wall of rubble, perplexed. He stood back, then caught his breath. ‘Good Lord.’

  A huge sculpted eye was staring out at them. It was almond-shaped, like the eye of an eagle. Jeremy snapped out of his trance and reached up to pull away a lump of compacted earth beside the eye, and suddenly the entire remaining conglomerate fell away, revealing a massive stone face. They stared in astonishment. The face was about two metres high and a metre across, and was topped by a conical helmet, cracked and broken off at the top. ‘This has got to be the image of a king,’ Jeremy exclaimed.

  ‘Which one?’ Rebecca said with bated breath.

  ‘Not a Greek one,’ Dillen murmured, staring. ‘This is an eastern king, with that conical helmet, those eyes. The Mycenaean Greek kings, kings like Agamemnon, were mortals, first among men. We don’t even have any statues of them. But this one is different. He’s a god-king, larger than life, in the eastern fashion.’ He stared more closely. ‘All-powerful, perhaps once a warrior, but this is the image of a benign king, I’d say. Not someone who flayed his enemies alive. Someone who was confident in peace, at least when this statue was made.’

  ‘What about Agamemnon’s adversary?’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Priam, King of Troy?’

  Dillen’s voice was tense with excitement. ‘It’s possible. Just possible. Priam is one of the few characters in the Iliad who might be known from other contemporary records. The clay tablets of the Hittites – the powerful empire to the east of Troy – mention a Piyamaradu operating in this area. That name could easily be rendered as Priam. The Hittites saw Piyamaradu as a renegade, establishing his own independent kingdom, aligning himself more with the Ahhiyawa, the Achaeans, the Hittite term for the Mycenaeans. To me, this all fits very convincingly. Homer’s Priam is powerful, an old warrior, but he’s a king of peace, not a king of war. He’d enjoyed good relations with the Mycenaeans before Agamemnon came along. He’d found a way of breaking away from the warlike tradition of the Hittites and becoming part of the great civilization of the Aegean; his sons had even become heroes, champions, in the Greek tradition. Somehow I can see all that in this face.’ Dillen stared pensively at the statue. ‘But we’d need an inscription to be sure. And some way of dating this sculpture with certainty to about the later thirteenth century BC.’

  Rebecca gently brushed the huge stone nose, waited a moment for the dust to settle, and then peered closely. ‘I can tell you one thing. In my lightning tour this morning, Maurice gave me a five-minute tutorial about building materials. Said it was the first thing you have to know about when you look at a new site. This isn’t the local limestone, the stuff used in the city walls. Look at the surface. It’s granite. I’ve seen that in the British Museum. All those statues of the pharaohs. That has to be Egyptian granite.’

  Dillen peered closely. ‘Good Lord. You’re absolutely right. Egyptian red granite, at Troy.’

  ‘So how on earth does that get here?’ Jeremy asked.

  ‘We know the Egyptians shipped obelisks and huge stone blocks down the Nile,’ Dillen replied, thinking hard. ‘So why not overseas too? The Egyptians traded with Troy. For a people who had built the pyramids, offloading a few blocks of granite at Besik Bay and dragging them a couple of kilometres over the plain of Troy would not have been a big problem.’

  ‘But this isn’t the image of a pharaoh,’ Jeremy said.

  Dillen shook his head. ‘No. It’s Egyptian stone, and very probably an Egyptian sculptor. The Trojans didn’t do this kind of thing. There was no tradition of monumental sculpture here. So they import the stone, and they import the sculptor too. The details, the style of those eyes, look Egyptian. But this is a local king. I’ll stake my career on it. A king of Troy.’

  ‘And I think we may just be one step closer to who he was,’ Jeremy said, squatting down. ‘Check this out. The sculpture’s integral to the wall, not earlier or later. The limestone blocks of the wall have been shaped around it. And look at the cut of the blocks, the slope of the wall, those vertical offsets. It’s what excited Maurice so much about this passageway
. It’s the same as your excavation on the citadel, James. It’s all contemporaneous. Exactly the same construction techniques as the ramparts of Troy VII. If ever there was a Troy of the Trojan War, then this is it. And if there ever was a King Priam, then that’s him. I just know it.’

  ‘ Whoa,’ Rebecca said slowly. ‘We need to tell Maurice about this. Big time.’

  ‘James!’ The shout came from down the passageway ahead, where the side walls were still largely concealed beneath earth and rubble. Rebecca and Jeremy glanced at each other, then followed Dillen back down the way he had come. Jack was squatting down panning a torch over the unexcavated face of rubble at the end of the passageway. He glanced up at Jeremy and Rebecca. ‘You two finished for the day?’

  Jeremy cleared his throat. ‘You need to come and see what we’ve found. You and Maurice, together. Something sticking out of the wall.’