The Fall of Troy

by Peter Ackroyd

  “It is a very impressive story.”

  “Of course, my men considered my mark—my cross—to be a sign of supernatural guidance and hailed me as a man of miracles.”

  “I do not doubt it.”

  “I did not contradict them. That is what I mean by inspiration.”

  Sophia had heard this story before, but she was sure that her husband had spoken of Tiryns rather than of Ithaca. “I expect that Mr. Thornton would like to see his quarters now,” she said.

  “I confess to being tired.”

  “But you may plead my husband in your defence. He has tired whole armies of men with his stories.”

  “Mr. Thornton is inspired, Sophia. He wishes to close his eyes and dream of Troy. We have all done it.”

  “I hardly ever dream.” He looked at Sophia. “But I would be grateful for a bed.”

  She took him toward the small enclosure that held their huts and cottages. “It is surprising,” he said, “to find a female here. If you permit me to say so.”

  “You may say what you like, Mr. Thornton. This is a place of freedom.” She laughed. “But I am not the only female here. We have many Turkish women working beside the men. We find that all work better when they are together.”

  “I am glad to hear of it. I believe that the sexes should be equal in the business of life.”

  She glanced at him for a moment, and noticed his serious—almost determined—expression. “You believe in this equality?”

  “Oh, yes. I have spoken on the subject in Exeter Hall.”

  “I am afraid such theories have not yet reached Greece.”

  “But they have reached your husband surely. He makes you a partner in his labours. He allows you to escort me to my quarters.”

  “He is very good.”

  “No, not good. Enlightened. We have need of more men like him in England. Do you know that they will not employ women in the museum? It is a scandal.”

  Once more she noticed his earnestness. “The divinity of this place is a woman,” she said. “Athene Glaucopis.”

  “I know.”

  “Her epithet means that her eyes lighten through the night. She sees us as we sleep. She watches over us. But you do not need protecting, Mr. Thornton. You say that you do not dream.”

  “Are dreams so dangerous, then?”

  “Of course. A dream can affect your physical health. I have often discussed this with my husband. He loves to dream. He says that dreams give him strength.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, I close my eyes and I see visions. I see streams and rivers and trees. I summon them up. I wish for them. And they appear. It is one of the great comforts of my life.” She wondered if she had become too confiding. “And in dreams come prophecies and warnings.”

  “You believe this?”

  “You will believe it, too. When you have stayed at Troy. Here are your quarters.” His was a stone hut, built from the stones of Troy itself, with a roof of thatch. After the unhappy presence of William Brand, Obermann’s guests were no longer welcome in the village. “You must prepare yourself for the wind. Somehow it will manage to find its way through these stones and sing to you.”

  “This is tremendous. These are the very stones from the excavations, are they not? I feel honoured to be protected by them. They are very reassuring.”

  “They are strong and fierce. The pitcher and basin are there. And what my husband calls the unmentionable is beneath the bed. We go down to the river for our complete ablutions. There is a place for men and a place for women, which are marked very clearly. You know of mealtimes already.”

  He was only half listening. “Do you think I may move the clay tablets here?”

  “You must ask my husband. Do you believe that, beside the old stones themselves, they will speak to you?”

  “No. Not at all. I like to begin my work at the earliest possible time. My mind is clearest at dawn. When the world awakes, so do I.”

  He seemed to Sophia to be the strangest mixture of romance and practicality. With his impossible hopes for women, he was clearly a dreamer; yet he professed not to dream. He was scholarly and thoroughly practical about the tablets, yet he was thrilled to be surrounded by the stones of Troy. He would bear further observation.

  SIXTEEN

  On the following morning Alexander Thornton started work upon the clay tablets. He had with him a magnifying glass, a large notebook and a number of pens. “The nibs are shaped differently,” he told Obermann, “so that I can copy the symbols exactly.” He asked if the tablets could be taken to his quarters, and Obermann readily agreed. So he carefully placed twenty or more in a wheelbarrow and took them to his stone hut, repeating the operation until all had been safely removed. Then he put the tablets in rows upon the floor, and began the work of copying each one. He noticed at once that they were a combination of symbols and of pictures. There was a dagger and a bowl, a wheel and a horse’s head; there was an amphora, and a one-handled goblet. He drew these very slowly, exactly imitating the curves and dots of the clay originals. The horse’s head reminded him of the white horse cut into the chalk of the valley at Uffington; it had a similar quality of spirited life. While he was an undergraduate at Oxford he had tramped to that valley, along the banks of the Thames, and could still recall the sensation of wonder at the first sight of the great beast springing out of the earth. He experienced the same wonder now.

  Other pictograms were less easy to decipher. One was of an oval structure placed upon a wheel but, as he drew it, he realised that it was a chariot. Another shape was probably that of a cloth or tunic, and there seemed to be a horned creature resembling an ox. But some signs could only have been words, or letters, or syllables; there were dots and short lines that could only be numbers, as far as Thornton could tell. Some symbols were repeated, and some appeared on several of the clay tablets. Yet who could break their silence now, with the scribes and the city itself long buried under the dust of ages? The tablets were spread over so large an area of the floor that there was scarcely room for him to tread. But he liked to sleep among them; he liked to wake in the morning, when they were the first elements of the world that he saw. The drawings he had made were now hanging by strings from the crude wooden rafters of the roof. He had tried to arrange them in vertical rows, where the same sign or set of signs could be seen; he believed that, if he lived with them long enough, the so far invisible correspondences and associations would become clearer to him. And, on staring at the clay tablets from his bed, immediately after waking, he hoped that he would be able to detect affinities between them.

  His first impression was that they did not represent an Indo-European language at all; the signs seemed to him to be too stark or, as he put it to himself, “too alien.” He had no conclusive proof, of course, but the system of writing seemed closer to that of the Egyptians or the Assyrians. This would confound Obermann’s theory that the inhabitants of Troy spoke an early form of Greek, but he was sure that he could persuade him of the truth of the matter. Truth was above all prejudice and wishful thinking. But he would have to labour harder, and longer, before he could even tentatively suggest such conclusions. He might, in any case, prove to be entirely wrong.

  SOPHIA KNOCKED upon his door, to tell him that lunch was ready; she would have walked away, but Thornton called her in. “Forgive the muddle,” he said. “It is no muddle to me but—”

  “But a woman’s sense of tidiness would consider it so. I agree with you, Mr. Thornton.”

  “Oh, no. Nothing of the kind. To anyone else at all, it would seem like chaos.” He had rearranged the tablets in vertical rather than horizontal fashion, and his pallet bed was covered with slips of paper upon which he had drawn the pictograms. “I wished to show you this, Mrs. Obermann.”

  “You have been here two days, Mr. Thornton. You have earned the right to call me Sophia. We are in Troy, not in London. And, if I may, I will call you Alexander. Shall we make a pact on it?”

  “Of course. Yes
. I would be delighted. I call Leonid by his first name, after all. And I have almost called Lineau Pierre.” Sophia had always judged people by the way in which they laughed, and Thornton had a singularly charming expression. “Except I do not know how he would react. He seems to be of the old fashion.”

  “You mistake him, Alexander. Monsieur Lineau is always talking to me of the new methods of discovery.”

  He had gone over to the bed and snatched up a slip of paper. “This is what I wanted to show you. Do you see these two figures, on separate lines? Do you see a resemblance between them?”

  “A very strong one.”

  “What does each one suggest to you?”

  “A toasting-fork?”

  “Look again. A line with a curve or hook at its top. Then it is bisected with one line on either side. Do you see? Then two lines come down. This is where the difference lies.”

  “In one figure the lower lines cross, and in the other they move apart from each other.”

  “Do you not see it? It is a human figure.”

  “Now that you say it, I see it.”

  “That is always the way.”

  “The head. The arms. The legs. Yet why the difference in the legs?”

  “The figure with the legs crossed is the man. The other is the woman.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “The figure of the man appears much more often than that of the woman. It is common sense.”

  “But you are an idealist, Alexander.” She enjoyed using his first name. “Can you not imagine a society in which women were predominant?”

  “We have only the legend of the Amazons, I am afraid. I am convinced, too, that crossed legs were a sign of power and authority. It may be that the king or chieftain crossed his legs when he sat upon his throne. So it became a symbol of the male.”

  “And the woman is open. Ready to receive.”

  “Yes.” He seemed embarrassed. “That is so.”

  “The male is closed off. Ready to strike.”

  “You see more than I do, Mrs. Obermann. Sophia.”

  “But now that I have seen it, it is there. What is this symbol here?”

  “This puzzles me. It is like an arrow pushing against an horizontal line. But if that line were the surface of the ground, then the arrow might represent wheat growing out of the earth. You see, here is a shape like barley, coming out of the same horizontal line as if it had grown. But this is a guess.” They were bent over the tablet, their heads almost touching, when they heard the voice of Obermann.

  “Lunch waits for no man, Mr. Thornton.” He was standing in the doorway. “You detain our guest, Sophia.”

  “Alexander was telling me his deductions. They are fascinating.”

  “I look forward to hearing them from Alexander.” He emphasised the name. “Lunch is served.”

  Over the meal Obermann was recollecting a journey to Bosnia he had undertaken three years before in search of antiquities. “I had an English companion with me. Have you heard of Arthur Mackenzie, Mr. Thornton?” Thornton shook his head. “A first-rate geologist. Feeling rather thirsty, after a long walk south from Sarajevo, he called for water in the first village we passed. At once, without more words, a small boy took us over to the village spring. The Slavonic word for ‘water’ is ‘wada.’ Then we discovered that their word for ‘milk’ is ‘mlieke.’ This is no coincidence, Mr. Thornton.” Obermann was addressing all his remarks towards the Englishman; it seemed to Sophia that he was challenging him.

  “It is no coincidence at all, Herr Obermann. The Slav and the Englishman have a common ancestor, many thousands of years before. I believe our forefathers came from the highlands of central Asia. We are all part of the same stock of Indo-Europeans.”

  “Just as my Trojans are.”

  “That is a difficult point to resolve.”

  “No matter. No matter.” He waved it away. “When I was in Bosnia I was often addressed as ‘brat,’ or brother, and the Bosnians are known to call the stranger ‘shija,’ or neighbour. Do you know why they have this egalitarian spirit? I am sorry to say it, Kadri Bey, but they consider their Turkish masters to be despots. They are united in communal spirit.”

  “We are not unjust, Herr Obermann. We have caused less unrest and suffering than the British Empire.”

  “I do not think that Mr. Thornton will agree with you, Kadri Bey.”

  “On the contrary. My country has been guilty of great wrongs.”

  “You are an unusual Englishman,” Kadri Bey replied.

  “I think, sir, that in this place we are all unusual.”

  “Well put.” Obermann laughed and clapped his hands. “We are all beasts in Troy. We are all wooden horses!”

  “The British Empire,” Lineau said, “has produced some fearless men. I worked once with Henry Rawlinson.”

  “You knew him?” Thornton was incredulous. “He is my hero. I revere him.”

  “He still lives, Mr. Thornton.”

  “A hero can be living,” Obermann said.

  “I worked with him in Persia.” Lineau ignored Obermannn’s interruption. “When he was British minister there. He was burdened with political affairs, but he never lost his passion for antiquity.”

  “Who is Rawlinson?” Sophia asked her husband.

  “Have you never heard of him? He introduced the world to Babylon and to Persia. He was a voyager through the seas of thought. Is that not so, Mr. Thornton?” Lineau continued still, taken up by his theme. “When he was a young officer he had the good fortune to be posted to Kermanshah within the Zagros Mountains.”

  “There were brigands there,” Obermann told his wife. “It was wild and trackless. It had lost its past.”

  “Not quite,” Lineau said. “Rawlinson was stationed a few miles from a place called Bisitun. It is a great stone rock, hundreds of feet in height, in the foothills of the Zagros range. It is on the broad highway between Ecbatana and Babylon. The King of Persia, Darius, the King of Kings, ordered that a vast image of himself be carved high upon the face of the rock, with his enemies at his feet. At the foot of this rock is a clear spring, very cold to the touch. There is a pool here where the local people bring their offerings. It is considered to be a place of God.” Lineau’s blind eyes were moving rapidly from side to side. “Together with the image of the king is a long inscription written in three different tongues. Then Darius ordered that his workmen should smooth the face of the rock so that no one might climb up and deface the great work. And so it was.”

  “Rawlinson was an adventurer,” Obermann said. “He climbed.”

  “He copied the inscriptions,” Lineau went on. “Then, little by little, he began to decipher them. They were in Babylonian, in Old Persian and in a strange tongue known as Elamite. Their writing is known as cuneiform. Wedge-shaped letters. The earliest of all human words.”

  “It was a wonderful feat of decipherment,” Thornton said. “It rivals Champollion and the Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

  “Such energy. Such agility.” Obermann was silent for a moment. “But that is not enough for us. Now that Mr. Thornton speaks of rivalry, we must rival Rawlinson. We must decipher the language of Troy. Surely that will be the greatest feat of all!”

  “It is interesting,” Thornton said, “that the language of the Persians and the Babylonians was Semitic.”

  “The Trojans were not Semites. They were part of Indo-European stock. I know it.”

  “What do you know, Herr Obermann?” Thornton asked. “I mean, what do you truly know?”

  “I know myself, as the Greeks have it. I know when I am correct.”

  “That is a great gift.”

  “The Semites come from Mesopotamia. What has Troy to do with the sons of Shem? The Trojans belong to western Asia and the Indo-European languages. That is why we are so close to them.”

  “But what if we were not so close?” Thornton asked Obermann. “What if they were more mysterious and alien than we realise?”

  “I cit
e you the evidence of Homer.”

  “What if Homer had nothing to do with them?”

  “Nonsense, Mr. Thornton. Alexander.” He may have suggested the slightest mockery, but he turned at once to Sophia. “Mr. Thornton is becoming a heretic, Sophia. You must convert him before he is burned.”

  “He must speculate on all possibilities, Heinrich. That is why you value him so highly.”

  “Of course. I forget. But tell me this. How is it that this landscape around us thoroughly agrees with the descriptions in Homer’s poem?”

  “I have no explanation, sir. Except that—” He hesitated. “I have often observed that the universe seems naturally to adapt to our beliefs and descriptions. When astronomers looked for a new planet, they found Neptune.”

  “It was discovered by a German. In my lifetime.”

  “The universe is a chameleon?” Sophia had understood the point instantly.

  “So you think all of this is a figment of the imagination?” Obermann waved his arm towards the excavations. They were seated outside, close to the outlines of the stone walls.

  “Not at all. But perhaps it is unknowable.”

  “Nonsense again. If that were so, then no progress in human understanding would ever be made.”

  “It is a theory.”

  “And one theory is as good as another?” He seemed to relent his anger. “Sophia, are you listening to Alexander?” He gave once more a peculiar emphasis to the name. “I have drawn back the curtain, and revealed the dawn. Now he tells me that it is a false dawn.”

  “He did not say that, Heinrich.”

  “My wife is defending you, Mr. Thornton. You have impressed her with your wisdom. I have solved the greatest riddle in history, and she neglects me shamefully.” He put his arm around her, with an almost proprietorial air, and kissed her on the cheek.