Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘You mean that Garland’s presence will stand in the way of the professor’s plans for any gold we might find?’

  The Greek had nodded.

  ‘Perhaps Garland is after the gold himself,’ Adam had suggested. ‘I cannot see how he could know about Euphorion and the lost manuscript, but it is possible.’

  ‘These are all imponderables, my friend.’ Rallis had taken off his hat and run his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘But I must go and join the others.’

  ‘Be on your guard, Rallis.’

  ‘I will, Adam.’

  The lawyer had shaken Adam’s hand. He had turned and made his way towards the camp where Fields, his hand shading his eyes, had been gazing back at them.

  Adam and Quint had then climbed down into the trench once more and continued to dig. Adam, perplexed by the turn events had taken, had been able to think of nothing but the riders from the north and the idea that Emily Maitland might soon arrive at the excavation.

  * * * * *

  A few minutes after examining the coin showing Heracles and the Nemean lion which Quint had unearthed, he nonetheless threw down his spade.

  ‘You are right, Quint,’ he said. ‘We shall dig nothing here but our own graves. Into which, felled by heat and exhaustion, we shall soon tumble.’

  Adam sat down on the floor of the trench, his back to his servant. There was silence apart from the sounds of the birds flying above them.

  ‘Did you not hear what I said, Quint?’ Adam took his hat from his head and wiped away the sweat that was trickling down his brow. ‘It is rare enough that I agree with you. I would have thought you would seize upon such a moment of accord. Cast aside the spade and we shall rest a while.’

  There was still no word from his servant. Adam turned to see what was keeping him silent. Quint was holding up an object he had found between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I reckon this is gold,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  Adam took it from him and let it rest on the outstretched palm of his right hand. It was tiny, less than half an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, but it was quite clearly in the form of a sculptured head. Beneath the soil with which it was coated, he could make out the eyes, the nose and the beard. And Quint was right. Also beneath its covering of dirt, the little head glinted with the unmistakeable shimmer of gold.

  ‘What is it?’ Quint asked, still speaking as quietly as a man in church might.

  Adam tilted his hand slightly and admired the way the object glittered in the sunlight. He brushed some of the dirt from it.

  ‘I’m not sure. It was probably part of some ornament. Is it the head of a god perhaps? Neptune?’

  ‘We planning on telling the others we found it?’

  Adam ignored Quint’s remark and, crouching down close to the upturned soil, reached down to pick up another glinting object from the earth. He held it up for Quint to see.

  ‘A ring,’ he said. ‘A gold ring that once circled the finger of some blueblood Macedonian lady long dead. Who knows what beauty used to own it? It must have fallen from her hand more than twenty-one hundred years ago.’

  The young man stared at the two golden pieces in his hand. His mind drifted back into the Greek history his education had constructed for him. He lost his sense of the present, and the imagined past was briefly more vivid than anything around him. It was only for a moment and then he returned to reality.

  ‘I think Fields and Rallis should be told of what we have found. As soon as possible. They should know before they get back here with Garland. Go after them, Quint. Take one of the mules. See if our friends have met these new visitors. Let them know of our discovery.’

  His servant stared at him in disgust, as if he could scarcely believe what was being demanded of him.

  ‘In this heat? You want me to go riding off into the hills on one of them bleeding mules? When it’s fit to fry eggs in the shade?’

  ‘Just go, Quint, will you?’

  ‘They’re on ’orses. ’Ow am I goin’ to catch them when they’re on ’orses?’

  ‘You will not catch them. I do not expect you to catch them. You will meet them as they return from their rendezvous. I would have thought that it would be a pleasure to be the bearer of glad tidings. For once in your life, why not do something without first listing all the reasons why you can’t?’

  Quint continued to gaze at his master with an air of truculence, but, after a few seconds, he turned and began to climb the short ladder propped against the trench wall. Adam watched him go. For several minutes the sounds of mumbled grousing drifted down to where he was standing. A mule brayed and Quint cursed. Then there was silence. Adam picked up his spade and began once more to dig.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  An hour passed but there was no sign of Adam’s companions returning. He continued to work in the trench. He came upon no more golden objects. Once again he laid down his spade. Quint had left a jacket at the far end of the trench. Adam spread it out on the compacted mud floor and sat on it. He leaned against the side of the deep ditch that they had dug. His eyes closed and within a few minutes he had fallen asleep. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky but Adam, still in the shade the trench offered, continued to sleep. He dreamed of Heracles in the Cremorne Gardens, startling the visitors with his lion skin and his club.

  He awoke with a start. He could see the dark outline of a man standing on the lip of the trench. The man was holding a revolver, aiming it at his heart. As Adam, still half asleep and rubbing his eyes, began to struggle to his feet, the man silhouetted against the sun swivelled the revolver abruptly. He shot into the side of the trench and then swung the gun back towards Adam’s body. The noise of the shot reverberated thunderously around the camp.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ the man shouted. Adam recognised the voice immediately. It was Fields.

  ‘Professor?’ Although the voice was so familiar, Adam could not yet quite believe that the person directing the gun at him was his old tutor and mentor. ‘What is this? What are you doing? Where are Rallis and Quint?’

  Fields shook his head in irritation as if Adam’s questions were pointless distractions from the matter in hand.

  ‘It is all over, Adam. I have thought through the possibilities most carefully. I have no other choice.’ The professor sounded weary. He continued to point the gun at the young man. ‘I regret very much that it should come to this. Rallis forced my hand at first with all his stupid ideas about stealing the legacy of the ancient Greeks. As if the wretched Greeks of today were capable of appreciating their past. The more of their treasures that pass into the hands of Englishmen, the better. At least we are civilised enough to look after them. And now the arrival of this man Garland puts paid to my alternative plans.’

  He gestured with the gun.

  ‘Climb out of the trench, Adam. But do so with the utmost care. If you make any movements that suggest you are planning to dispossess me of my weapon, I shall shoot you.’

  Adam looked to his left to where Quint had cut primitive footholds into the side of the trench. He used them to haul himself out of the grave-like excavation. He pulled himself over the lip of the ditch and struggled to his feet. Fields still had the gun directed at him. Adam looked beyond the professor’s shoulder. The older man noticed the movement of his eyes.

  ‘There is little point lifting your eyes to the hills, Adam, for no help will come from that direction. Rallis is not on his way.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Adam was still confused, still uncertain of what was happening. ‘Where is Quint?’

  ‘The lawyer is out there lying under the Greek sun.’ Without moving his revolver, which was still trained on Adam’s midriff, Fields jerked his head in the direction the men had ridden no more than a few hours ago. ‘It was necessary to shoot him. And his gargantuan servant.’ The professor gave a short and mirthless laugh.

  ‘The fools obliged me by travelling in the vanguard. It was easy enough to make use of the
weapon I had hidden.’ Fields shifted his weight from one foot to another. ‘As for Quintus, I passed him an hour or more ago. Riding one of the mules and looking very sorry for himself. Luckily for him, he did not see me. If he had, he would have been even sorrier for I might have been forced to kill him as well. Which I would have regretted. I have always been fond of Quintus, rogue though he is.’

  ‘I hope you are not planning to kill me, Professor?’

  ‘Of course not, my boy. Whatever gave you that idea?’ Fields laughed again, more amiably than before. He seemed to find Adam’s question genuinely funny. ‘Not unless you do something very foolish and I do not believe that you will.’

  ‘I will do nothing foolish,’ Adam promised. He had recovered from the surprise of the professor’s arrival and was now struggling to make sense of the sudden revelations about Rallis’s murder. Fields, it seemed, had lost his mind. What other explanation could there possibly be for the terrible deeds to which he was cheerfully admitting? ‘But what is to happen next? We cannot stand here for ever like figures from Madame Tussauds.’

  ‘It will be two hours, maybe even three, before Garland arrives.’ The professor appeared curiously calm and rational. He might have been sitting down in his study in Cambridge to conduct a tutorial on pre-Socratic philosophy rather than standing by a half-dug trench in Thessaly, waving a gun at his favourite pupil. ‘Before Rallis and I parted company with the village headman, he told us exactly where Garland and his companions were. However swiftly they travel, they cannot be here sooner. And they may well stumble across the bodies of Rallis and Andros, which will delay them further. There is time for us to talk.’

  ‘Perhaps we should wait for Garland to arrive,’ Adam said cautiously. ‘We can travel back to Salonika with him.’

  ‘Oh, I think not, my boy,’ Fields replied amiably. ‘You are assuming, of course, that I have gone mad. You are humouring me in the hope that rescue will arrive sooner than I expect.’

  The professor shook his head from side to side. Adam had seen him do the same a hundred times in the past when confronted by the stupidity of the average undergraduate.

  ‘I can assure you I am not mad. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw, as the gloomy Prince of Denmark said.’

  ‘I have no doubts about your sanity, sir,’ Adam lied, ‘but you have, by your own admission, killed two men. That cannot just be ignored or forgotten. We should wait for Garland. We will convince him that you shot Rallis and Andros in self-defence. That they attacked us when we discovered gold. Which Quint and I did only a short time after you left. We will tell Garland that—’

  Fields did not wait to hear what they would tell Garland. With a sudden twist of his arm, he pointed the revolver upwards and shot into the air. The explosion of the gun sent birds squawking in terror from the nearby trees. Adam, silenced and half-deafened, watched the professor swing his gun back into a position where it was directed once more at him.

  ‘That is enough,’ Fields shouted. The sounds of the birds slowly died away and a strange quiet descended.

  ‘Now, I shall tell you what will happen,’ the professor said. ‘You will submit to being tied and bundled into the trench. I will return to Volos. From there, I will be obliged to travel into exile. I do not think Cambridge will now welcome me back with open arms but I have always had a great fondness for Tuscany. I do not think that many questions will be asked of an Englishman who takes a villa in the hills outside Florence. Most probably I shall enjoy my exile. I have an income from my long-departed father’s estate. I have the fruits of my association with Creech, of which I assume you know. I shall not be like poor Ovid in his banishment by the Black Sea.’

  The professor paused as if to relish the prospect of an enforced sojourn in Florence. Adam could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Did Fields really believe that it was feasible for him not only to ecape from European Turkey but to make his way to Italy and settle in a Tuscan villa? Did he think that no consequences would follow his actions in shooting Rallis? If any further proof were needed that the ageing scholar had taken leave of his senses, here it was. Aware of the revolver pointing towards him, the young man was in no position to argue but he risked throwing a tentative remark into the silence.

  ‘What of our excavations here?’ he asked. ‘The treasure may nearly be ours.’

  Still holding the gun level in one hand, the professor swatted away the words like troublesome flies with the other.

  ‘Thanks to the foolish interference of others, I must abandon our diggings,’ he said. ‘But I can return. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in two years. In five years, if necessary. I can wait. I have the Euphorion manuscript and the rest of the world does not.’

  ‘Garland will know where to dig. He will see where we have been digging.’

  Fields shook his head as if dismissing the idea but otherwise he ignored Adam’s words. The young man wondered whether the professor was capable any longer of thinking clearly on such subjects. He seemed to have reached a point where he almost believed that his wishes alone could transform reality. The Macedonian gold was destined to be his so there could be no chance that Garland or anyone else would dig it up. It would sit here beneath the earth until Fields could return for it.

  ‘Before I take horse for Volos,’ he went on, ‘I must explain myself. I wish you to know the precise reasons why I have acted as I have.’

  Adam risked a glance to his left: perhaps Quint had turned back to the camp soon after Fields had seen him and was even now approaching. But he could discern nothing but one of the mules, tethered to a post and grazing on the grass at its feet.

  ‘I wish you to understand what has been behind all this, my boy,’ the professor said, speaking with sudden feeling. ‘You must appreciate that I have been driven to these terrible but necessary deeds by the idiocy and avarice of others.’

  Fields’s head dropped. For a moment he looked like a man who had reached the end of his road. I can disarm him now, thought Adam, readying himself to rush towards the gun, but it was as if the professor overheard his inner voice. His head jerked up again and he waved the revolver at the young man.

  ‘Move a yard or two back, Adam. You must not think of running at me. I am very fond of you but I will certainly shoot you. I have not come this far to fall victim to idle scruples about another death.’

  The young man did as he was ordered, shuffling several paces backwards.

  ‘That is far enough,’ Fields said. ‘I would not have you falling into the trench. Now, where were we?’

  ‘You were about to explain to me why you have done this,’ Adam said quietly.

  ‘Ah, yes, so I was. I would not have you think entirely ill of me, Adam.’

  For a moment, the eyes of the two men met. The young man was appalled by what he glimpsed in the red-rimmed and bloodshot gaze of his mentor. Here was someone who had stared at the abyss and then tumbled into it. Adam saw that there would be no return to reason for the professor.

  * * * * *

  Several miles further north, Quint and the mule were making slow progress. It would have been hard for any observer, had there been one close to hand, to decide whether man or beast was the more disgruntled. The mule had been aggravated by its removal from the area near the camp where it had been happily and idly grazing. It had retaliated by refusing to move at anything other than a snail’s pace, no matter how hard its rider had dug his heels into its flanks and made encouraging noises. On a number of occasions, Quint had been obliged to dismount and pull the reluctant creature by its reins. The sound of its outraged braying echoed along the valley through which they were travelling so slowly.

  Quint himself was sweating and cursing as he tugged and chivvied the mule into motion. He was a man who was rarely at a loss for a grievance and this unwanted journey, he felt, was an injustice that even the most saintly of individuals would have found difficult to bear without complaint. He grumbled incessantly beneath his breath as he remounted the mule
yet again. One minute he had been happily digging in the trench. Well, maybe not happily, he admitted to himself. Digging was almost as much of a bleeding pain in the arse as dragging this mule halfway across Thessaly. But he’d been resigned to it. That was the word, resigned. And then Adam had got it into his head that a message had to be sent to the others. When they could have just given themselves a slap on the back for finding the gold ornament and settled down for a kip in the shade until the others got back.

  ‘There’s some as wouldn’t reckernise a good thing if it came up and kicked ’em in the cods,’ Quint said bitterly to himself. He sometimes wondered if his master wasn’t as daft as a sheep before the shearers. How Adam had managed before he’d happened along to take him under his wing, he didn’t know. ‘Of course,’ he acknowledged, struggling to be fair-minded, ‘I got me a nice crib out of it.’ But it was Adam, Quint felt, who had got the best of the bargain. And now here the young sprig was, sending him out into the heat of the day with a brute that wouldn’t listen to a bleeding word you said.

  ‘Giddyup, you long-eared bastard,’ he shouted, digging his heels into the mule’s sides once again.

  To Quint’s great surprise, the animal responded. It began to trot along the path they were following by the side of a meandering stream. As he clung to its reins, the beast increased its pace until it was travelling at a speed of which Quint had not imagined it capable. Bumping uncomfortably up and down on the saddle and watching the Greek countryside race past him, he began to wish that he had not given the mule any encouragement. This was worse – much worse – than pulling and wrenching at the beast to force it forwards a few yards.

  ‘Whoa, you hee-hawing devil, or I’ll see you in a bleedin’ stew-pan.’ Quint had now abandoned his faith in the reins and stretched himself full-length along the mule’s back, both his hands clasped around the creature’s neck. ‘This ain’t Derby Day and you ain’t Blue Gown.’

  The mule took no notice of its rider. If anything, it upped its trot towards a gallop. Perhaps, Quint thought miserably, it did believe it was the famous thoroughbred that had won at Epsom two years earlier. He continued to wrap himself around the mule’s neck and hope that it would soon tire of its exertions. For a minute, he closed his eyes, figuring that it might be better not to know exactly where they were going. After a hundred yards, he decided he was wrong and opened them again. The stream to the left, he noted, had widened considerably. He struggled to twist his head forward so that he could look ahead of him. All he could see was a blur of green and, far in the distance, the grey stones of the mountains. He felt the dry, hard skin of the mule’s neck against his cheek. One of the hairs from its mane began to work its way up his nose, tickling him to the point where he wanted to sneeze. When he did so, his startled mount picked up pace even more.