by Tom Harper
“Who are they?”
Grant had a fair guess, but he hid it behind a bland shrug. “No one we want to meet.”
He looked back down the hill. The dark figure had vanished. On the far side of the house an engine coughed into life and a few moments later he saw the car pull away down the road toward the village. It squeezed down the narrow lane between the houses and disappeared. Marina started to rise, but in an instant Grant’s hand was on her wrist and dragging her back down, so quick she almost fell on top of him. She rolled away with a growl of fury—as she came back up, Grant saw that a small knife had appeared from nowhere in her hand.
“What are you doing?”
Her tumble had disarranged her dress, dragging down the neckline. She seemed not to notice.
“You can’t go back there,” he said. Very deliberately, he let his gaze drift from the hovering knife to the exposed skin below her collarbone. A bud of white lace peeked out from under the black dress.
She tugged it back into position with a snort of disgust. “Why not? First you come, when I never wanted to see you again, and an hour later there are two malakies tearing apart my house like animals. Am I supposed to think that’s a coincidence?”
“Almost certainly not.”
“Then how in hell can you tell me what to do?”
“Because if you walk through that door, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” Grant pointed. Through the window they could see a mess of splintered wood, smashed china, broken photographs and scattered ornaments littering the floor. The barrel of the gun was almost invisible against the chaotic background. Even if you’d seen it, you might have mistaken it for just another piece of debris lying on the floor. Only when it twitched did some incongruity of light and shadow alert the eye.
Marina, who had spent long hours of reconnaissance looking for exactly those tell-tale signs, saw it at once. “One of them stayed behind.” She lowered herself back into the gully. “Do you think he saw us?”
“If he had, we’d know about it.”
“Then we can surprise him.” Her eyes gleamed with savage delight—the look he knew so well from the war. As the Germans had found to their cost, there was nothing the Cretans loved so much as a blood feud. “You’ve got your gun. I’ll distract him by the door and you can get him through the window.” Doubt flickered into her eyes as she saw Grant shaking his head. “Why not?”
“Because every hour he sits there waiting is an hour we’ve got to get away.”
They walked for most of the day, toward the great massif of mountains that rose across the eastern horizon. Just before dusk they found an empty shepherd’s hut in a high meadow, whose previous occupant had left wood, blankets and two tins of field rations, probably relics of the war. Grant built a fire and they huddled round it in their blankets. Down in the valleys it might be spring, but up on the mountain winter lingered. Patches of snow filled the hollows in the north-facing hillside and the summit still wore its white winter coat. A chill wind whistled around them and Grant pulled his blanket closer. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to wrap it round both of them, as they’d done so often on cold nights during the war, but he didn’t try.
After they’d eaten, Marina took out the book. She held it up to the fire, letting the flames play over the pages. Grant fought back the fear that a stray ember could end their quest before it even began.
“Two months before the invasion, Pemberton went to Athens. I thought it was strange he went then—everybody knew the Germans were coming and he almost couldn’t find space on the ferryboat with all the soldiers going to the front. But he said he had to go. When he came back, something was different. He didn’t say, but I could see he had some new obsession. It was always the same, if he found a new site, or some artifact he couldn’t place. The lights in the villa burned late, and he became distant and tense. Of course, everyone was tense in those last days, so we didn’t notice so much. In April he disappeared for a week on his own. Afterward I found out he had been on the east of the island, toward Siteia. He was looking for something.”
“Which is why you’ve brought us east?”
“Yes.” She stared at the book, her smooth face wrinkled in concentration. “If he found something, he would have written it in here.” She combed her fingers through her loose hair. “But I can’t find it.”
Grant edged round to peer over her shoulder. Row upon row of neatly printed symbols swam in the firelight, as distant and unknowable as the men who had first devised them. The Greek letters he recognized—he could even make out some of the simpler words—but a large portion of the page seemed given over to characters he had never seen in his life. He reached forward, brushing Marina’s shoulder, and pointed. “What are they?”
“Linear B.”
He remembered she had mentioned it earlier, in her house, before the thugs showed up. “What’s that?”
“An alphabet. An ancient system of writing. It was discovered about fifty years ago at Knossos.”
“So it’s Greek?”
She shook her head. “Long before Greek. It comes . . .” She thought for a moment, playing with a strand of hair. “You’ve heard of Theseus and the Minotaur?”
“The myth?”
She laughed. “Where Pemberton worked—where I worked—is the place where history and myth meet each other like a river and a sea.” She dug her fingers into the earth and pried out a small rock. “This stone is nothing. But if I do this . . .” She laid it on the ring of stones that made the fireplace. “Suddenly it has meaning. Somebody will find this in the future, maybe two thousand years from now, and even if they have never seen a fireplace or even imagined one, they will know that a human being made this thing for a reason. And they will try to guess what that reason was. Maybe they will find traces of ash in the middle of the circle and scorch marks on the stones; perhaps a rusted tin can and your cigarette butts. And they will deduce . . .”
“That we ate our supper here?”
“That this was the site of a primitive pillar cult, no doubt with phallic implications. That the stone circle was the foundation of a wooden column which we, in our primitive ignorance, worshipped. That we brought food offerings in metal containers and smoked this mildly psychotomimetic substance to induce a state of divine ecstasy. They will think that the ashes and the scorch marks come from a fire, possibly linked to invasion or war, when the sacred pillar was burned down. They will publish this in their learned journals and then they will argue as to whether the similar sites they find all across the island constituted an official religion, or simply parallel local traditions. And they will be completely wrong.”
She picked up the rock and tossed it away into the darkness. Grant waited, watching the firelight dance over her face. “What’s that got to do with the Minotaur?”
“Only to say that the myths survive when everything else has been forgotten. And that sometimes the myths, for all their slippery deceptions, tell us more about the past than ruined walls and broken pots. For three thousand years no one believed that there had ever been a great prehistoric civilization on Crete—but in all that time they never forgot the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Even children knew it. Then, fifty years ago, Evans came here and went to the place the legends said. He found everything. A palace like a labyrinth. Drinking vessels shaped like bulls, figurines of bulls, stone horns—even paintings of young men performing acrobatics on bulls.”
“Not a human skeleton with a pair of bulls’ horns sticking out of the skull and a ball of string next to it?”
“No.” She pulled her knees close to her chest. “Of course, myth distorts the past. But here on Crete you had the very first civilization in Europe—more than a thousand years before the golden age of Greece and fifteen hundred years before the Caesars—and for three millennia afterward the only place it was recorded was in the myths. Without them the palace at Knossos would just be piles of stones. And when Evans finally brought it to light, he named its civiliz
ation ‘Minoans’ after the legendary King Minos.”
Her face shone in the golden firelight as if—like some ancient sibyl—she could see back through thirty centuries of history. She didn’t even seem to notice Grant’s frank gaze fixed on her until, with a discreet cough, he asked, “What’s this got to do with the writing in the journal?”
“The Minoans left more than just ruins and artifacts. They left us their writing. There were two forms—a primitive one, which Evans named Linear A, and a later development he named Linear B. Most of the examples were found scratched into clay tablets, which baked when the palace burned down.”
“And what do they say?”
“No one knows—no one’s ever been able to decipher them. It’s one of the greatest mysteries of archaeology.”
Grant looked back at the book. “Did Pemberton ever try to crack it?”
“You couldn’t work in this field and not try. To the archaeologists it was like a crossword or a riddle, something to puzzle over on winter evenings by the fire. As far as I know, Pemberton never made any breakthrough.”
“What about in the book?”
“No.” She turned through a few pages. “It’s too neat. He’s copied some inscriptions, but there’s no attempt to translate them.”
“What about that?” Grant stabbed a finger into the book and held down the page. Above a few lines of the angular Linear B script, the page was filled by a simple line drawing. It looked almost like something a child might have drawn: two triangles flanked a small spiked box, with two rows of jagged lines running below. At the top, in the center of the page, some sort of stylized animal seemed to float above a rounded dome, with birds on either side.
“It must be Minoan,” murmured Marina. “But I’ve never seen it before. It wasn’t in the collection at Knossos.” She turned to the next page. It was empty, except for four lines of Greek. After that, the book was blank.
“What does the Greek say?” asked Grant.
“Now here, now there, the carcasses they tore:
Fate stalk’d amidst them, grim with human gore.
And the whole war came out, and met the eye;
And each bold figure seem’d to live or die.”
Perhaps it was the smoke blowing from the fire, but Marina’s voice was hoarse and tears rimmed her eyes. “It’s Homer. The Iliad. Pemberton must have been reading it when the Nazis came. It was the last thing he ever wrote. Nothing to do with the picture.” She turned back to the previous page and stared hard at the sketch, as if by the effort she could burn away her tears. “The iconography . . .” She took a deep breath. “The iconography seems to date it as middle to late Minoan. The zigzag lines are probably purely decorative, though some might see them as denoting water. The animal at the top . . .” She squinted, holding the book out to the fire. “Maybe a lion or a sphinx—either way, it would symbolize a protector or guardian. Possible royal connections as well. The birds are doves, which usually signifies place sanctity. In this case the identification is supported by the shrine in the center of the image.”
“How do you know it’s a shrine?”
“The bull horns on top. It’s a standard depiction of a Minoan shrine. Like how a cross on top of a building tells you it’s a church.”
Marina stared into the flames. Whether she was puzzling over the image or thinking of Pemberton, Grant didn’t know, but he pulled the book away before she dropped it in the fire. He looked at the picture—then rested the book on his knee and forced the pages flat. The spine cracked in protest and Marina looked up.
“Be careful.”
“What does . . .” Grant licked his lips as he picked out the unfamiliar letters. “Pha . . . raggi . . . ton . . . nekron mean?”
“Pharangi ton nekron? Where do you see that?”
Grant held it up to show her. On the inside of the page, almost buried in the crease of the binding, three Greek words were written vertically down the side of the picture. Marina snatched the book from him and stared.
“Of course,” she murmured. “Pharangi ton Nekron.”
“Who’s he?”
“It’s a place—a valley. On the east coast, near a village called Zakros. It means . . .” She thought for a second. “It means the Valley of the Dead.”
“Sounds promising.”
CHAPTER 5
Valley of the Dead, Crete
Red rock walls rose stark above them, glowing in the sun, but in the cleft of the gorge a tangle of plane trees and oleanders shaded the valley floor. Grant peered up through the leaves, shading his eyes against the brightness. They were in a vast canyon, curving gradually toward the sea. High above, a series of dark holes riddled the cliffs.
“Those are tombs.” Marina’s black dress was gone, traded in a village they’d passed for a pair of surplus green military trousers and a short-sleeved blouse, unbuttoned just far enough to draw Grant’s eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking. Her dark hair was tied back in a loose ponytail and, though she wore no make-up, three days walking across the mountains had burnished her skin to a lustrous brown. A coil of rope was looped over her shoulder.
“People have been buried in those caves since Minoan times,” she continued. “So, the Valley of the Dead.”
“Doesn’t look too frightening to me. Sun’s shining, wild-flowers are out, birds are singing.”
“Actually, to the Greeks, birds were often seen as harbingers of death, messengers to and from the underworld.”
“Oh.” A sinister note suddenly crept into the trill chirruping around them. “Has anyone ever explored the caves?”
“Always.” She wrinkled her nose. “It doesn’t take long for the sacred relics of one generation to become pickings for another. Archaeologists have found a few ancient burials, but most of them disappeared a long time ago.”
“Then why . . .”
“We’re not here for the tombs.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, a copy she had sketched of Pemberton’s drawing. “You see the horns? We’re looking for a shrine.”
“Not the same thing?”
“The Minoans didn’t bury their dead in their temples. No one did until the Christians came along. The ancients would have been shocked by the idea of bringing the dead into the places of the living. They put them in the cities of the dead—necropolises. Like those caves.”
“So where do we look for the temple?”
Marina considered it for a moment. “Hogarth—another archaeologist—excavated at the mouth of the gorge in 1901. He found a few Minoan houses, but no shrine.”
“Maybe Pemberton found something he missed.” Grant took the drawing from Marina and squinted at it. “You said these zigzag lines might represent water?”
“Or they might be purely decorative. There’s no way . . .”
“Look.” Grant held the paper upright, looking straight down the valley. “These two triangles on each side—those are the sides of the gorge. You’ve got the sea in front of them. And here”—he jabbed a finger in the center of the picture—“the temple.”
Marina looked doubtful. “I don’t think you can assume that the Minoans used spatial relationships in their art like that.”
“Bollocks. They drew it as they saw it.”
“Really?” Her tone hardened. “And how do you know how they saw the world, so many thousand years ago? For that matter, how do you explain the lion floating in mid air? Did they draw that as they saw it?”
“Perhaps it’s a cloud.”
“And the dome underneath it? A rainbow, perhaps?”
“Well, have you got a better idea?”
She sighed. “No.”
But Grant’s victory was short-lived. The canyon ended almost half a mile from the coast, spilling out into a few dusty farm fields.
“The ruins Hogarth found must be somewhere here,” said Marina, exasperated. She looked at the sketch again. “What did Pemberton see here that made him think of the Valley of the Dead?”
In one of the fields
a gaunt ox was dragging a plow through the dry earth. A farmer in a tweed jacket stood beside it, swatting its flank with a cane, while a stout woman in a headscarf looked on. They watched silently as Grant and Marina approached.
“Kalimera sas,” Marina called.
“Kalimera.” The farmer leaned on his stick and stared at her. Beside him, his wife looked at Marina as if she’d stepped off the stage of a Paris revue.
Stammering slightly, Marina launched into her question. Grant’s Greek was probably good enough for him to have followed it if he’d paid attention, but he didn’t bother. Something was troubling him. Pemberton had written “Valley of the Dead” in the margin of his notebook, but this wasn’t the valley. He turned and looked back up into the gorge. It curved away to the left, so that from where Grant stood it looked as though the valley ended abruptly in a sheer rock face where the wall swept round. And there, seeming to rise straight over the middle of the gorge, stood a domed hill.
“He says they never saw anyone.”
“What?”
Snatched out of his thoughts, Grant turned back. Across the field the farmer still stood impassively and watched them. His wife had turned away and was ostentatiously driving the ox forward.
“The farmer. He says they never saw a British archaeologist. He might be lying—the British aren’t so popular here since you started propping up the puppet government in Athens.”
“Nothing to do with me,” demurred Grant. “But look behind you.”
Marina looked round. “What?”
“That’s the view.” The paper flapped in the breeze as Grant held it up, transposing it over the landscape. “The cliffs on either side, the sea at this end and the hill in the middle of the valley.” High above the domed summit a hawk hovered lazily in the sky. “You’ve even got the birds.”
“And the flying lion?”
“Sleeping.” Grant grinned. “Let’s see if we can wake him up.”
They threaded their way through the trees and fallen boulders that littered the dry stream bed. Inside the gorge, with the cliffs looming over them, they quickly lost sight of the summit, but they pushed on, trying to keep as straight a path as possible.