The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  ‘Agamemnon,’ Gladstone breathed. ‘You speak of Agamemnon.’

  ‘Troy was felled not by a trick of Odysseus, not by a wooden horse,’ Hoar murmured. ‘But by another kind of cunning. By the cunning of Hephaestus. By the cunning of the forge.’

  ‘Perfectly put, Mr Hoar,’ Schliemann said.

  ‘Herr Schliemann? You have a theory?’ Bismarck asked, stomping his cane again. The three men looked at Schliemann expectantly. He pocketed the arrowheads, and took a deep breath. ‘The twenty years since I first set foot on the mound of Troy have been a whirlwind for me. Some would say that I have been restless, unable to concentrate. Within two years of arriving here I announced the discovery of the treasure of King Priam. Then I went to Mycenae, and found the Mask of Agamemnon. Then I travelled around Greece, searching for the other great Bronze Age palaces, at Tiryns, at Ithaka, at Orchomenos. I went to Sicily, on the path of those western Phoenicians, the tin traders. Then I went to Egypt. I told them I was searching for the tomb of Alexander the Great, in Alexandria. The world thought I was on the hunt for yet more gold. Heinrich Schliemann, self-made millionaire, who made his fortune on the back of the California gold rush, had seen the lustre of gold at Troy and Mycenae and had fallen bewitched again, lured by Mammon. My critics shouted with glee. They were vindicated. I was no archaeologist, I was a treasure-hunter. But they were wrong.’

  ‘They were wrong,’ Gladstone murmured, ‘because you were not in search of gold. You were in search of bronze and iron.’

  Schliemann clapped his hands. ‘Mr Gladstone!’ he declared. ‘You do understand me.’ He stared at them intensely, then pointed down the passageway. ‘The very last place where Sophia and I dug all those years ago was right here, where we stand now. We found something extraordinary, something we knew would take weeks more, months more, to dig out. We sealed it up, intending to return. I went to Mycenae seeking confirmation, and seeking a key. And I found it, gentlemen. I found it. We uncovered the shaft graves, the Mask of Agamemnon. But we also found another tomb, the great beehive-shaped structure I called the Treasury of Atreus. I was elated. I went to the other palaces, and I found more of them, more so-called tombs. And then to Egypt. Beneath Alexandria I found not the steps down to the tomb of Alexander, but something infinitely older. And then in a blinding flash I knew what the pyramids were for. Tombs, gentlemen, royal tombs to be sure, like the tombs of the Mycenaeans, but something else. The pyramids were erected at the beginning of the Bronze Age, with the explosion of power and wealth that bronze created. The Bronze Age, gentlemen. Structures meant to safeguard the treasures not just of the dead, but of the living as well.’

  ‘The Treasury of Atreus,’ Hoar murmured, the shadow of a smile on his face. ‘I believe, Mr Schliemann, you have surpassed yourself. You have kept this trail you are on a secret, yet like any good explorer you have left clues, a safeguard, perhaps, against calamity, that some future-day archaeologist might follow. Clues in the names.’

  ‘You chose not to call it the Tomb of Atreus,’ Bismarck exclaimed. ‘You chose to call it the Treasury of Atreus.’

  ‘And not a treasury of gold,’ Gladstone rejoined. ‘But a treasury of bronze.’

  ‘Herr Bismarck asked if I had a theory,’ Schliemann said. ‘So here it is. The advent of bronze technology, two thousand years before the fall of Troy, was the most revolutionary advance in human history. For the first time, people had good agricultural tools, ploughshares and sickles. They had tools for carpentry, and for masonry. And they had superior weapons.’ He delved in his pockets, and produced a clear flint arrowhead in one hand, and a leaf-shaped metal one in the other. ‘Stone points, like this one we found in the oldest Troy layer, little different from chipped tools made by their ancestors of the Stone Age, gave way to bronze weapons like this one. But there was a rub. The tin needed to make bronze was always in short supply. It was hugely prized. The power of chieftains rested on it. The smiths – the bronze-workers – were kept within the walls of palaces, of citadels. Supplies of tin and bronze were closely guarded. Great vaults were built, places that doubled as the burial ground of kings. Vaults such as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. Vaults such as the one that I believe lies before you down this passageway, gentlemen, dug into the limestone deep beneath the citadel of Troy.’

  ‘You have brought us to see the treasury!’ Gladstone exclaimed.

  Schliemann held up his hand. ‘There is another rub. A most extraordinary one. Bronze tools, carefully controlled, doled out by the king, their use supervised, allowed the city-states of the Aegean to flourish. A brilliant civilization emerged. But I know the question you are asking yourselves, gentlemen. You are politicians. You have seen what men will do. At Gettysburg, at Sedan. Give them weapons, and they will make war. And in the Bronze Age Aegean, men did fight. We know about it from Homer. The clashes of arms, the bellows and taunts of the victor, the cries of the vanquished. But these are individual combats, not pitched battles. Why? Because there was never enough bronze to equip a city-state with an army large enough to take on another city, to lay siege to it and conquer it. And sheer force of numbers was never possible, huge numbers like the sweeping tides of men we know fought battles in the ancient Near East. The mountain-girt valleys of the Aegean did not have the population, the surplus manpower. Homer reveals it: individual kings in the Greek forces contributed all they had, but it was often merely a few ships, a few hundred men. He gives us a blood-soaked stage, true, but we watch his heroes just as Romans watched gladiators, or as the masses of our industrial age might view a sporting fixture. This was a world of peace, gentlemen, of peace that spawned a brilliant civilization, a civilization that grew so fast and so strong that it outstripped the ability of men to destroy it with the technology at their disposal.’

  ‘There is a weakness in your theory,’ Bismarck rumbled. ‘A weakness we all know from our own age. Men hungry for power will form alliances, often to prosecute war, not to prevent it. And surely that is what we see in Homer. Agamemnon leads a huge alliance of all the Greeks.’

  Schliemann paused. ‘When I studied at the Sorbonne before embarking on my great quest for Troy, I had a thirst to know what the living world might tell about my long-dead heroes. I travelled to the islands of the Pacific, and observed the native peoples. Where their own limitation of technology and manpower prevented them from defeating each other, they ritualized their standoffs, in an entente cordiale. They exchanged gifts, women, cemented friendships. They held secret ceremonies in which the chieftains would confer, at one place recognized by all as a paramount meeting place. And whenever power was unbalanced, when a new technology was introduced, gunpowder, for example, when one chieftain had a brief ascendancy before the others had the technology as well, his first objective would be to conquer that paramount place where power had always been maintained, a balance of power that had kept the peace.’

  ‘You speak in metaphor of Troy, I believe,’ Gladstone murmured. ‘You speak of Troy, and you speak of this chamber before us. Am I correct?’

  Schliemann stared hard at them. ‘Herr Bismarck spoke of an alliance. What of this? Agamemnon, already power-hungry in his own land, straining at the leashes that keep him in his citadel of Mycenae, learns of a new technology: the technology of iron. It is not yet perfected, but he sets his smiths to work. He knows he has no time to lose before others have it too. He gambles, and embarks on his path to war before the weapons are ready. He uses all his kinship ties and his strength and he summons an alliance, one that casts its net across the Mycenaean world. They are going to the place Agamemnon has gone to before in peace, as a broker of power, as a member of a council that kept war at bay. Yes, Mr Gladstone: they go to Troy. The alliance provides the manpower to lay siege to the citadel, but not yet the weapons. On the island of Tenedos, Agamemnon’s smiths work day and night, experimenting, testing. For nine years, if we are to believe Homer, his army fought in the traditional way, individual duels below the walls of Troy, Achilles and Hector, Patr
oclus and Diomedes. For nine years Agamemnon bided his time, while the forges hissed and burned, while the technology he had secretly acquired was honed and perfected. One day, let us surmise, in that ninth year, some master smith discovered a way to forge a metal that was no longer brittle, iron that could be stronger than bronze. Suddenly the stage was set. The world groaned. Agamemnon unleashed hell. A thousand iron arrows flew into the walls of Troy. Then ten thousand arrows. Then ten thousand more. Forges, gentlemen, forges on the island of Tenedos, forges that once had wrought the finery of heroes, helmets and breastplates and spears of the finest bronze, burned and blasted day and night to produce these new weapons, weapons that overwhelmed Troy like a tidal wave, that unleashed the bonds on what men could do.’

  ‘And all of this because a young Trojan prince kidnapped a Greek queen named Helen?’ Hoar said.

  ‘The spark of war,’ Schliemann said. ‘A spark created by Agamemnon, perhaps. A subterfuge. In a world where high-status women were part of the web of alliances, it could have been enough.’

  ‘Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,’ Bismarck grumbled.

  ‘What did you say?’ Gladstone demanded.

  ‘What I have said to the new kaiser, seemingly to no avail. I said to him that one day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans. That will be our Helen of Troy.’

  ‘You see?’ Schliemann exclaimed. ‘We speak of a coming war as if it is inevitable. That is why I have brought you here tonight, gentlemen.’

  ‘What would you have us do?’ Hoar asked.

  Schliemann pulled a little white book from his pocket. ‘In Homer, the gods appear to shape destiny, and men are mere pawns. But that is because, before Agamemnon, the world is presented as an unchanging one, and thus one in which men appear to have no power. I believe the truth was very different. Just as it was an individual, Agamemnon, who brought calamitous war, so it was individuals before him, generation after generation of kings, who kept the balance of power, kept the peace. They were not pawns. It was their free will to shape history. We know some of their names. Atreus, father of Agamemnon. Minos, King of Knossos. Priam, King of Troy, an old king at the time of the siege, who, let us surmise, had seen Agamemnon as a young prince, had nurtured him perhaps, but then had seen something in his eyes, that smouldering fire that makes a prince an Alexander or a Genghis Khan, that only needs an extra spark to ignite and raze all before it.’ He held up the book. ‘Thomas Carlyle, our great political theorist, on how history is shaped by individuals. I have been reading him this very day. I look to our world, gentlemen, and I see a world where the power of the individual is under threat, with calamitous consequences. It is the individual who has morality, not the crowd.’

  Hoar put up his hand. ‘I speak as a citizen of the United States of America, where individual freedom, the rights of the individual, is enshrined in the Constitution. I look to Europe, and I fear greatly for the future. Mass movements, volk movements, begin on a high ideal, on ideals of social justice, but they submerge the individual, and thus the voice of common morality.’

  Schliemann nodded. ‘We live at a time when the voice of the individual is needed as at no other time in history. We stand, gentlemen, we four, in front of history, able to shape it, able to throw off inevitability, to shake off those who would have us believe that fate is not ours to control, to show that men left to their own devices are not foredoomed to destruction and war.’

  ‘And we stand at a time of changing technology,’ Gladstone said. ‘That is your point. That is why that iron arrowhead is so important.’

  ‘The age of bronze ended with Agamemnon. The age of iron is about to end for us. We live in terrifying times. Contemplate the changes in our own lifespans, gentlemen. From muskets to machine guns. From black powder to nitroglycerine. From ships of the line to ironclads. From muzzle-loading cannon to giant breech-loading guns, capable of lobbing a shell fifteen miles. Veritable doomsday weapons. And men will fly, gentlemen. With my own eyes I have seen the “monoplane” of Monsieur Felix du Temple. Powered flight is a certainty. Men will fly. There are fearsome possibilities, gentlemen. Fearsome possibilities. The modern alchemy of science will produce wonders, but also horrors. Human guile may reawaken the oldest nightmare of them all. I speak of the plague. The plague. It may be the black death, or cholera, or a new deadly smallpox, or some frightful dormant virulence. If some necromancer can harness disease as a weapon, then truly, Mr Gladstone, the Christian God will have forsaken us, all of the gods will have forsaken us, and we will find no redemption.’

  ‘Does anything give you hope?’ Hoar asked.

  ‘You three give me hope. In the Bronze Age, in the world of Homer, we are to believe it was the champions who were the heroes, Achilles and Hector and the others. But they were not the true heroes. The heroes were the kings, those who came before Agamemnon. Let us be modern-day kings. Let us be modern-day heroes. Let us ride above the tide of history. Let us prevent another rape of Troy.’

  ‘You spoke, Mr Schliemann, of finding a key,’ Hoar said. ‘You spoke metaphorically, I surmise?’

  Schliemann let out a shuddering sigh, suddenly exhausted. He had said it. He felt an indescribable sense of relief, but also huge urgency. The wheels were now truly in motion. He gave Hoar a tired smile. ‘My dear senator. I am an archaeologist, remember? When I speak of a key, I mean a key.’ He reached into his inside pocket, to the heavy object he had been carrying in the satchel, wrapped up by Sophia. He hesitated, then pointed with his other hand down the passageway. ‘When Sophia and I dug here in secret all those years ago, I found a way through to the end, inside a natural tunnel created where blocks had fallen down from the top of the walls, forming air spaces. I saw inscriptions along the sides of the walls. Inscriptions . I could not make them out, but they seemed to be Bronze Age, pictograms, linear symbols unrecognizable to me, even hieroglyphics. And at the end, far ahead of my reach, I shoved my lantern forward and saw it. A great bronze door, the door to the chamber that must lie beyond. In the centre of the door above a metal crossbar was an angular shaped depression in a circle. A keyhole, gentlemen. And this is the key.’

  He took out the package, and unwrapped it. They all gasped as he let the cloth fall away. It was a metal cross, about twenty centimetres wide, equilateral, with bars extending at right angles from each arm. It was gold, lustrous and dazzling in the flickering gaslight, with a silvery metal as the core.

  Gladstone reached out and touched it. ‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘ Of course. The symbol you write about with such passion in your books. The symbol you found incised on pots at Troy. The symbol, as I recall, you had painted into the decoration of your house in Athens.’

  ‘Schliemann the treasure-hunter, again,’ Hoar said. ‘Leaving clues for posterity.’

  ‘This is the shape of the keyhole in the bronze door ahead of us?’ Gladstone asked.

  Schliemann nodded, flushed with excitement. ‘I give you the hakenkreuz, gentlemen. The hook-cross. What in Sanskrit is called the swastika. The symbol of the Aryan peoples, the first Indo-Europeans who came from the east, over the Black Sea, the people I believe were the first settlers at Troy. This was their symbol. The symbol of the first civilization. The symbol of Troy. And this metal is not just gold, but meteoritic. Some ancient sacred discovery, shaped in this way for the kings of Troy.’

  Bismarck reached out, then let his hand drop. ‘I know this symbol,’ he growled. ‘The hakenkreuz has new meaning for the nationalists in Germany, the volk -movement. There are secret societies, those who hark back to an Aryan past. It seems,’ he said, looking at it uneasily, ‘to stand for all the possibilities of the past, and all the dangers of the future. Coming events cast their shadows before.’

  ‘Where did you find this?’ Gladstone asked.

  ‘It was Sophia, not me,’ Schliemann said. ‘I lifted the mask, but Sophia led me there.’

  ‘The mask?’ Gladstone said incredulously. ‘You mean the Ma
sk of Agamemnon? At Mycenae? ’

  ‘Have no fear, my dear Gladstone,’ Schliemann said, touching the other man’s arm. ‘Your eloquent argument in the preface to my book Mycenae still holds truth. I too am convinced that the shaft graves contain Agamemnon and his family. But when I raised the golden mask, it was not a skeleton I saw beneath. In my mind’s eye I saw Agamemnon, yes, a spectral image that flashed before me, so when I told the world I had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon I was telling the truth. But what I found beneath the mask was this. The hakenkreuz, the swastika. I give you the most astonishing find I have ever made. I give you the palladion, gentlemen.’

  ‘The palladion?’ Gladstone breathed, staring at the cross. ‘But the palladion was a wooden statue, surely, in the temple at Troy? The statue of the goddess Pallas, stolen by Odysseus?’

  ‘That story may well have been true. There are those who believe that statue found its way to Rome, and then to Constantinople, where it remains concealed to this day. The story would have suited Agamemnon. To steal the statue of the protecting deity was to steal the soul of a city. It meant Troy was doomed. But it would also have suited him that the story concealed the truth, that the palladion was not a wooden statue but this cross, the key to that chamber ahead of us. It may well have been concealed in the temple, in some underground repository, perhaps, a holy of holies, its whereabouts known only to the great kings who came to convene in that chamber to keep the peace.’

  ‘Agamemnon had been one of those kings,’ Hoar murmured.

  Schliemann nodded. ‘Yet years later, he stood here, at this very spot, that fateful night of fire and death, dripping with other men’s blood, slamming down his great sceptre, his bloody sword hanging from his other hand, staring at that door ahead, remembering. All he wanted was that chamber shut for ever, and this entranceway buried. Shutting the door would close off the chamber of power that had thwarted his own ambitions, had prevented his ascendancy above all the others. He had killed Priam, and now he would seal off the chamber that had counselled peace, not war. Those fallen blocks of masonry ahead of us were not the result of some natural convulsion, but were deliberately caused. And having buried the chamber, he would find the key, take it from this place, and conceal it for all time. He stormed up to the temple ahead of his men, the fires raging around him, the cries of women filling the air, and found the palladion, then took it back with him to his citadel at Mycenae. And where better to conceal it than in the hallowed burial ground of his ancestors, behind a mask that showed his own face, the ultimate act of power. Then, standing over the grave of his forefathers, Agamemnon could feel as mighty as a god, could raise his staff to Mount Olympus and shake it with contempt. The age of gods had ended. The age of men had begun. And he is there somewhere, his own burial, I am sure of it. What matters is that we have found the palladion. What matters is that we can turn back history, stand in front of those doors as all those kings before Agamemnon did, and reach up again with this key.’