by Tom Harper
With a hint of reluctance, he pulled away from Marina's embrace, stepped forward and smothered the flame again. There was a splashing in the darkness behind him, then a spark. A new light filled the cave as Marina held her lighter aloft. By its glow, they could see a dark tunnel continuing on the far side of the gas vent.
Grant slipped the rope off his ankle and handed the end to Marina. 'Wait here.'
She shook her head. 'You're not going down there alone.'
There was no time. The smell of gas was already beginning to seep into the cave and if it caught the lighter flame they would — literally — be toast. 'You have to. We can't leave the vent shut, and I'll need someone to put it out again if I come back. When I come back,' he corrected himself.
Grant hauled himself out of the water, taking great care not to dislodge the shirt, and pushed forward. A second later he felt the heat on the soles of his feet as Marina whipped the shirt away. He could see the passage now. It was still as low and tight as before, but this time the air was fresher. There was the unmistakable billow of a breeze on his face. He carried on, faster, crawling over the shadow cast by the fire behind him.
The tunnel ended in another rock wall — and this time there was no pool of water at its base. He twisted his head round. The light from the gas vent barely penetrated this far down the passage, but there was still a faint glow in the air. As his eyes balanced with the gloom, he thought he could make out a dim circle of light, a halo hovering over him in the tunnel roof. He reached up a hand and felt nothing except the cool rush of air.
He felt around the rim of the hole above his head. The black basalt had been ground smooth, polished to a sheen that had not faded in thirty centuries of darkness. It was almost perfectly round, but it seemed terribly narrow. Narrower even than the slot he had squeezed through to enter the tunnel.
'Nowhere else to go,' he told himself. He unbuckled his belt and slid off his trousers — if he was going to get through, there wouldn't be a fraction of an inch to spare. He sucked in his stomach and pulled himself up so that he was squatting directly under the hole. He raised his arms over his head and pressed them together, like a diver preparing to take the plunge. Then he stood.
The stone was tight as a noose. He writhed and squirmed against it, squeezing himself through inch by agonising inch. The rock was not quite as perfectly smooth as he'd thought: against his body, each tiny ridge became a razor, scraping his bare skin raw. He gritted his teeth against the pain — at least the blood lubricated the edge of the hole a little. His shoulders were through; then his ribs, though it felt as if the breath had been squashed out of them. Now he could use his hands as well as his feet — and just as well: he needed all his strength to lever his hips through. If they could actually make it. Perhaps he would end up trapped, unable to move up or down, until the flesh rotted from his bones and the noose finally released his skeleton.
Something gave — not within him, thank God, but around him. He was through. With a final heave, he hauled himself out and emerged — naked, bloodied and wet — into the most extraordinary room he had ever seen.
Twelve
After being squeezed in the tunnel so long, the space was vast and dizzying. He was lying on the floor of what looked like an enormous beehive: a round stone chamber whose sides slowly curved in until they met in a point high above him. Directly below it, a few yards away from where he lay, a round hole was sunk in the floor like a well. But there was no water in the bottom: this was a well of fire. Flames licked round the edges, a giant gas ring that illuminated the whole chamber with a murky orange glow. On one side, just in front of the opening Grant had crawled through, a pair of stone horns stood atop a monolithic stone altar.
Grant moved round the walls. The decoration was almost unimaginably intricate, bands of concentric friezes bordered with a menagerie of birds and animals all carved into the stone. They were caked with soot, but the underlying images were still clear enough. On one level Grant could make out the gnomic figures of the Kabyri, bulbous and ludicrously well-hung as they danced and revelled in the firelight. On the level above, armies marched to war and peasants gathered crops in the fields, a lost civilisation immaculately preserved in stone.
'Grant?'
The voice echoed round the domed chamber, quickly overtaken by a gasp of amazement. Marina's head had popped through the hole in the floor and she was staring at her surroundings with wide eyes — that widened still further as her gaze fell on Grant. She gave a short, embarrassed laugh and looked away, blushing in the firelight. Grant realised that he was still stark naked.
'Nothing I haven't seen before,' she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and not really succeeding.
'I was waiting for the unspeakable rites to start.'
'I think you're too late.' She reached his bundled trousers out of the hole and tossed them across the room.
'Ela. Cover yourself before the Kabyri get jealous.'
Grant pulled them on. 'I thought I told you to wait by the gas vent.'
'I didn't want you disturbing the site before a proper archaeological investigation.'
'It's quite a sight.' He reached down to pull her through the hole, then hesitated. 'Can you get back down the tunnel?'
'I hope so.'
'Then you'd better fetch the others. They won't want to miss this.'
* * *
To Grant's disappointment, Marina was able to squeeze through the entrance hole without having to undress. As for Reed, he almost leaped through it like a jack-in-the-box. Far from traumatising him, the ordeal of getting through the tunnel seemed to have filled him with energy. He bounded around the chamber like a boy in a toyshop, examining everything and murmuring awed exclamations under his breath. In one corner he found a pair of three-legged iron pots, their legs bent over like stalks.
There lame Hephaestus the goddess found,
Obscure in smoke, his forges flaming round,
While bathed in sweat from fire to fire he flew;
And puffing loud, the roaring billows blew.
That day no common task his labour claim'd:
Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed.
'Just as Homer described it. This must have been the first cult centre, before it moved to the coast.' He shook his head in wonder. 'We've just been inducted into a club that hasn't had a new member in two thousand years.'
'Lucky there was no one here to blackball us.' Muir's head poked through the hole. Grant and Marina hauled him up.
'Obviously there were certain ritual elements missing…' Reed drifted away to peer at a frieze. 'The tunnel we took would certainly have been the path of initiation into the cult. First of all the symbolic death in water…'
'It almost wasn't symbolic at all,' said Grant, remembering the total emptiness in the black pool. 'But I thought water was just supposed to purify you.'
'To the ancients, death and purification were intimately linked. The water that cleanses your body or your soul can also wipe clean your memory. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, was what you crossed to get into Hades. As far as the Greeks were concerned, if you forgot who you were you might as well be dead. Even today, if you think of Christian baptism, the water doesn't just cleanse you. When you're dipped in it you die to sin. Then the fire kindles new life, you squeeze through the birth canal and pop out here, naked as a baby. Pratolaos, reborn into the sacred mysteries of Hephaestus and his sons, the Kabyri.'
'Fascinating,' said Muir. 'Now see if you can solve the mystery of that fucking meteorite.'
They spread out to search the sanctuary. Grant and Marina moved around the edges, poking into every niche and shadow; Muir went the other way. Reed seemed curiously detached from the work. He had managed to bring an electric torch through the tunnel and contented himself with staring at the friezes, picking out the frozen stone figures in the beam.
'Over here.'
Grant joined Muir on the far side of the room, behind the horned altar. What he had taken to be anothe
r niche was in fact a door which led on to a small side chamber.
This was square and much plainer than the main dome, with only a single band of relief carved round the wall. A flat-topped boulder — a hard, blue-tinted stone — rose knee high in the middle of the room; at the back a bowl-shaped impression about a foot wide had been bored out of the floor. Curved fragments of pottery lay all around it.
'What's this?' asked Grant. 'Another shrine?'
'I think it's a primitive furnace.' Marina squeezed past them and knelt beside the impression in the ground and reached in. Her hand came out black.
'I think I can guess where the meteorite went.'
'Where?' Muir spun round, his eyes raking the room. But there had been no triumph in Marina's voice — only weary resignation. Grant's gaze followed hers down, to the dark jaws of the furnace that opened at her feet.
'You said that apart from the Element 61, the tests showed the meteorite was mostly iron.'
A horrible thought began to grow in Grant's mind. 'You said this was the Bronze Age,' he objected. 'I thought the Iron Age came later.'
'It did.' Reed had entered the room and was standing in the doorway. A distracted thought creased his brow. 'It's interesting — the idea of an Iron Age originally comes from the poet Hesiod. A near-contemporary of Homer. For him it had nothing to do with technology, but with the lustre of a civilisation. He thought it went the other way: from the gilded accomplishments of a golden age, down through silver and bronze, to the lumpen ugliness of iron. It's only in our scientifically minded times that we've come to see iron as progress. Harder, sharper, cheaper — much better for hammering into guns and engines and barbed wire.'
'I'm sure that's fascinating, Professor.' Impatience strained Muir's voice. 'But could the Mycenaeans work iron?'
Reed looked surprised by the question. 'Of course.'
'But you said it was the Bronze Age.'
'A new age doesn't begin at the stroke of midnight. Iron Age, Bronze Age, Stone Age — they're labels of convenience. The transitions between them would have been gradual and sporadic: a process of decades, perhaps centuries. And then there are the practicalities. It's my understanding that working iron isn't terribly difficult, just a matter of bringing it to the right temperature. Extracting iron from ore, that seems to have been the dicey part.'
'The earliest pieces of ironworking are all meteoritic,' Marina confirmed. 'Axe blades, arrowheads, knives… In fact, the ancient Egyptian word for iron literally translates as "metal of heaven". They didn't know any other source.'
Exhaustion overtook Grant. Outside, in the world where time had not stood still for three millennia, it must be almost midnight. He flopped down on the flat-topped boulder and stared at the ground. 'So the Mycenaeans found this juicy lump of iron — mixed with Element 61 — at the shrine on Crete and brought it here…'
'… to melt it down.' Marina's words rang in the stone chamber.
'Well of course. They'd have had to. You're probably sitting on the anvil where they hammered it out.'
They all stared at Reed, thrown into confusion by his cheerful, almost excited manner.
He in turn looked utterly baffled by their gloom. 'Didn't I tell you? Come and have a look.'
* * *
Back in the main chamber, Reed's torch played over the stone frieze that ringed the room at about head height. The yellow beam only deepened the shadows round the carved figures, so that they seemed to leap out from their stone frames and come alive in the air.
'Each bold figure seemed to live or die. Do you remember the lines from the Iliad in Pemberton's notebook?'
'You said it came from a bit describing Hephaestus's workshop.'
'Did I?' Reed sounded surprised. 'Well, yes. After a fashion. It would have been more accurate to say it describes a piece of metalwork Hephaestus makes in his forge. Are you familiar with the ecphrasis??
'No.'
'An ecphrasis is where the poet breaks his narrative to give a long, minutely detailed description of some precious artefact, usually weapons or armour.'
'Going off on a tangent, in other words,' said Muir.
'Tangential to the story, perhaps, but integral to the poetry. Some of the most dramatic passages in all Homer are these ecphrases. And the longest, most magnificent of them all takes place here on Lemnos, in the workshop of Hephaestus. He forges a shield, inlaid with the most intricate decoration imaginable. A microcosm of the world — scenes of daily life and scenes of war. A cross between a Brueghel painting and the Bayeux tapestry. In the cities, men and women dance and revel, while lawyers and politicians argue in the forum. In the fields, the seasons turn: crops are sown and harvested, grapes pressed to wine. Shepherds drive their sheep to pasture. Armies invade, wars are fought. All depicted on the shield.'
As Reed spoke, Grant had the extraordinary feeling of floating free of reality. The torch beam darted around the room, flashing across the frieze from panel to panel, so that for a split second each one was illuminated. The pictures ran together in his mind like the frames of a film, a panorama of the world. There they were: youths and supple maidens dancing, so lifelike they seemed to sway in the trembling torchlight. Oxen pulled ploughs over fields and the furrows sprouted wheat that the drovers, now armed with sickles, harvested and tied in bundles. A ribbon of men wound its way over distant hills to a great city, where two armies vied beneath the walls. Under a leafy oak tree a placid bull sat hobbled on the ground, while women plaited ribbons through his horns and men sharpened their knives.
The torch beam stopped its whirling dance and came to rest as Reed finished his description. The film was over, the cave was still again.
'I thought it was a fairy tale,' Grant said at last.
'So did I. But this…' Reed spoke tentatively, testing each word as if he couldn't believe it would hold the weight of its implications. 'This is what Homer describes. This is where he describes it.'
'On a shield?'
'The shield of Achilles.' He spoke the name in wonder. 'I suppose it makes sense. In the Bronze Age, iron was the rarest metal there was — forty times more valuable than silver. Finding a piece as big as that meteorite would have been like finding the Koh-i-Noor diamond. They wouldn't have melted it down for pocket knives and axe heads. They would have turned it into something extraordinary — something legendary. Something the poets would sing about for generations, that even three thousand years couldn't obliterate.'
Reed leaned against the altar. The stone horns that decorated it curved round him like wings.
'So where do we find it?' asked Grant.
Thirteen
'To understand this story, there are certain things you need to be aware of.' Reed turned his torch back to the frieze, to the stone army under the city walls. 'The Greeks who went to Troy were the cream of their age. Menelaus, king of Sparta, whose wife was Helen of Troy. Agamemnon, his brother, the high king of Mycenae. Odysseus, the strategic genius, and Ajax, as strong as an ox. But greater than any of them, the one man the Greeks couldn't do without, was Achilles.
'Now there's a common belief that the Iliad tells the whole story of the Trojan war: the thousand ships, the ten-year siege, the death of Achilles and the final sack of the city.' Reed pursed his lips, the weary look of a man who had spent his life in a war of attrition with ignorance. 'In fact, the Iliad only deals with about a fortnight's worth of the war, in the last year of the siege. Agamemnon and Achilles fall out over a division of the spoils — in this case a slave woman — and Achilles goes off in a huff to let the Greek army see how well they can cope without him. Not very well, it turns out: led by Prince Hector, the Trojans take advantage of Achilles' sulk to almost wipe out the Greeks. Achilles refuses to budge, but his companion Patroclus dresses up in Achilles' armour and goes out to battle. Everyone thinks it's Achilles; the tide turns and it's all going splendidly for the Greeks, until Hector turns up and rather spoils the illusion by killing Patroclus and taking the armour for himself.'
The torch beam darted on, moving round the cavern to the next panel. Now the armies opposed each other across a great river, hurling spears across it, while chariots rushed up reinforcements behind.
'This leaves Achilles in a bit of a bind. He's desperate to get revenge on Hector, but he hasn't got any armour. So his mother — the sea nymph Thetis — goes to the forge of Hephaestus on Lemnos and commissions him to produce a new set of arms and armour. The shield is undoubtedly the piece de resistance, but there are also greaves, a breastplate and a helmet to go with it. Suitably attired, Achilles finds Hector on the field of battle, fights him in single combat and kills him. Then he lashes the corpse to his chariot and drags it around the city until the Trojan king Priam, Hector's father, comes to Achilles' tent and begs for his son's body. Achilles is so moved by the old man's grief that he at last lets go of his anger and hands over the body. End of story, and they all live happily ever after. Except, of course, that most of them don't.'
'I thought Achilles was killed by a poison arrow in his heel.'
'Actually,' said Reed, 'that's a common misconception. Achilles' heel is something of a myth.'
'It's all fucking myth,' said Muir disparagingly.
Reed looked irritated. 'I'm coming to that. What I was trying to explain is that Achilles' heel isn't part of the original legend. There's nothing in any of the earliest sources to say he was struck in the heel, or even that he was especially vulnerable there. It doesn't appear in any written source until the first century AD — seven or eight hundred years after Homer. Homer never tells the story of Achilles' death. The Iliad ends before he dies and the Odyssey picks up the story some time afterwards.'
'Well, if Homer doesn't talk about it, who does?'
Reed leaned forward. 'By the end of the Classical period Homer had become the absolute bedrock of Greek civilisation. His poems were like the Bible, Shakespeare and King Arthur all rolled into one. But Homer didn't invent the stories — he adapted them for his poetry. The tales of Troy already existed, in overlapping and sometimes contradictory versions, oral poems and folk tales, myths and legends. At first, his interpretation would have just been one version of many. Gradually it became the preferred version, then the authoritative one. That was the power of his poetry.