THE DOCTOR gave only the most cursory inspection of the body. “There is no life here,” he said. “It is useless to minister to him now. My apologies.” He walked over to Hasad, who was standing by the doorway of the hotel. “My only task is to complete the death certificate. I can do no more.”
“There will be a hearing?”
“No need. These people are witnesses to the accident?” Hasad nodded. “The circumstances are clear enough.” The doctor turned back to look at Sophia, who was still standing beside the body. “So that was the great Obermann. He disappeared in an instant.”
Leonid had been sitting on a small gilt chair in the vestibule, his hands up to his face. He had been weeping, but now he stood up and walked over to Sophia. “He must be taken back to Troy,” he told her. “That is what he wished.”
“How do you know that?”
“He talked of it once. He talked of his funeral pyre in the city. He wished his ashes to be scattered over the Scamander.” He looked at the body of his father. “I cannot bear to see him like this. We must cover him. We must carry him home.” He walked over to Hasad, and spoke to him quietly for a few moments. “It is done,” he said. “Hasad will lend us the coach he reserves for his favoured guests.”
A few minutes later an old-fashioned landau, painted in scarlet and yellow, drew up in front of the hotel; it was pulled by two horses, be-decked in the same colours. But before the body of Obermann could be moved from the divan by Leonid and Thornton, Hasad prevented them. “Wait one moment,” he said to them. He called to his wife, who was standing in the rear office of the hotel, and briefly spoke to her. Within a few minutes she had come back with a female servant. They were carrying armfuls of fresh rushes, which they scattered upon the floor of the landau. Then Leonid and Thornton carried the body into the street. A crowd of townspeople had gathered outside and, when Obermann emerged, the women began wailing a funereal lament. The two men placed him carefully on the rushes, and Hasad’s wife then came forward to place more rushes upon the body itself so that it was covered with a blanket of green.
“Are you coming with me?” Leonid asked Sophia and Thornton.
Sophia was the one who replied. “Of course,” she said. “We will return to Troy.”
ON THEIR ARRIVAL at the excavations, they were met by Lineau and Kadri Bey. The two men had seen the brightly coloured landau crossing the plain, and had known at once that something had happened. They were silent, as Leonid dismounted and helped Sophia out of the carriage. They had glimpsed the body of Obermann beneath the rushes. Kadri Bey murmured a prayer, and put his head into his hands. Lineau turned away.
“There has been an accident,” Sophia said. “Horrible. Terrible.”
Thornton stepped down from the vehicle and walked over to Lineau. He put his arm around the Frenchman, who muttered some words of Greek.
“What was that?”
“From the twentieth book of the Iliad. Heinrich often used to quote it. ‘Achilles will suffer whatever Fate has spun for him, at the time of his birth when his mother bore him.’”
“It was not Fate. It was chance, Lineau.”
“Heinrich would not have thought so. For him it was resistless Fate. You know that Leonid was his son?”
“Yes. Sophia discovered the truth of it. How long have you known?”
“Many years. We never spoke of it, of course. I should have warned Sophia, perhaps. But by the time she arrived here, she had become his wife. It was too late.”
“Not his wife. No. He was already married.”
“He had not divorced Elena?”
“We do not think so.”
“So he wove his own destructive fate. Poor man.” Lineau sighed. “You know that we have found more tablets?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We have found hundreds of the baked-clay tablets, just like those you examined. You have work to do, my friend. You and Sophia.”
SOPHIA WAS STANDING with Leonid as the body was taken from the landau by the Turkish workers.
“It is over,” Leonid said. “Troy without Obermann is not Troy.”
“There is still work to be done.”
“But he knew the heart of Troy. Its life. He held us in its enchantment.”
“That enchantment will return.”
“No. Never more.”
“What will you do?”
“I will go back to Russia. With my mother. I will care for her there. I could not bear to live in this place now. In the presence of my father every stone seemed blessed. Every tree harboured a god.”
“So you believed his stories?”
“Of course. They had the truth of vision. What is the world without vision? Well, I will find out now.”
“And so will I.”
IN THE HEAT and humidity, there could be no delay. And so the ceremony was conducted that same evening before sunset. There was no need for a minister since, as Leonid said, Obermann had not believed in the religion of priests.
The men and women who had worked at the excavations lined up in two processional rows, between which Obermann was carried to a great mound placed in the centre of the palace courtyard. The pyre was constructed of wood and cloths soaked with naphtha, upon which Leonid, Thornton and Kadri Bey placed the body. Thornton then read out the words of the Twenty-seventh Psalm, from the Bible that he had brought with him from England, and Kadri Bey recited part of the fifth chapter of the Koran. Leonid then lit the pyre with a flaming brand. The cloths and the wood burned quickly, and Obermann was enveloped in flame. The constant wind had dropped. The watchers remained silent as a thin column of smoke rose towards the cloudless sky. The ripple of the burning air, above the flames, seemed to Sophia to take the shape of dancers.
“I will miss you,” she whispered. “Memory eternal, Heinrich.”
From the range of Mount Ida, there came a sudden peal of thunder.
Peter Ackroyd
The FALL of TROY
Peter Ackroyd is a master of the historical novel: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde won the Somerset Maugham Award; Hawksmoor was awarded both the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Chatterton was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent historical novel was The Lambs of London. He is also the author of Shakespeare: The Biography and the Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series.
ALSO BY PETER ACKROYD
FICTION
The Great Fire of London
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Hawksmoor
Chatterton
First Light
English Music
The House of Doctor Dee
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Milton in America
The Plato Papers
The Clerkenwell Tales
The Lambs of London
NONFICTION
Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag:
The History of an Obsession
London: The Biography
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
Shakespeare: The Biography
BIOGRAPHY
Ezra Pound and His World
T. S. Eliot
Dickens
Blake
The Life of Thomas More
ACKROYD’S BRIEF LIVES
Chaucer
J. M. W. Turner
POETRY
Ouch!
The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems
CRITICISM
Notes for a New Culture
The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures
edited by Thomas Wright
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2008
Copyright © 2006 by Peter Ackroyd
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 2006. This edition published in hardcover by arrangement with Chatto & Windus in the United States by Nan A. Tale
se, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2007.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese edition as follows:
Ackroyd, Peter.
The fall of Troy: a novel / Peter Ackroyd.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Archaeologists—Fiction. 2. Women archaeologists—Fiction. 3. Troy (Extinct city)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6051.C64F35 2007
823'.914—dc22 2007007208
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-47281-6
v3.0
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