by Tom Harper
“The Minoans often put their shrines on hilltops,” said Marina, breathing hard. It was almost noon and her shirt clung to her skin. “Perhaps we should try the top of the cliffs.”
“It wouldn’t look the same from up there,” said Grant stubbornly. “And in the picture, the temple’s under the summit.”
“I told you, you can’t . . .” Marina broke off with a cry of surprise. She pushed past Grant toward a boulder at the edge of the path. On top of it, almost hidden by the fronds of an oleander, four rocks were arranged in a small cairn. She pulled them apart. A smoothed-out square of thinly beaten silver glittered underneath.
“Minoan treasure?” asked Grant.
“Fry’s Turkish Delight.” She turned over the foil to show him the wrapper. “Pemberton loved it. Every time he went to England he came back with some.”
“Full of eastern promise,” Grant muttered, astonished. “I wonder what other surprises he left for us.”
Marina scrambled over the rock and vanished into the undergrowth. With a rueful shake of his head, Grant followed her through the trees until they gave way to a bare hillside. A few yards away Marina was kneeling beside a rocky overhang.
“Is that the temple?” The rock looked too low for anyone to be able to crawl under it.
“See for yourself.”
Grant crouched down. Laid out on a piece of sacking under the rock were a pickaxe, a spade and a paraffin lantern. All were coated in rust, but he could still read the letters stencilled on the wooden handles: B.S.A.
“The British School at Athens,” Marina explained. “They ran the excavations at Knossos. They were Pemberton’s employer.”
Grant pulled out the spade and banged it against the rock. A few flakes of rust fluttered to the ground and a mournful clang echoed through the valley. Grant looked around guiltily.
“I thought we were trying to be secret,” said Marina, cocking an eyebrow at him.
“We haven’t found anything worth keeping secret yet.”
Marina slipped the coil of rope from her shoulder, lashed one end to the pickaxe’s handle and began clambering up over the fallen boulders. Grant waited long enough to be sure that the stones she loosened wouldn’t come tumbling down on his head, then followed.
At first it was easy enough, scrambling from one boulder to the next. But soon the large rocks gave way to small pebbles, which slid away underfoot the moment Grant trod on them. Climbing the slope became a race, a frantic effort to keep lunging forward faster than the clattering pebbles could drag him back. Then that too ended, in a sheer red cliff face, and Grant had to grab on to an exposed tree root to stop himself sliding all the way back down the hill. Just to his right the rope end dangled down. Grant snatched it and hauled himself up hand over hand until, in a torrent of sweat and curses, he heaved himself over the cliff.
“Is this what you used to do with Pemberton?” he asked, breathing hard.
“No. But he obviously did it himself.”
Grant pushed himself to his feet, raised an arm to brush the dust off his shirt—and stopped in astonishment. They had climbed higher than he thought and arrived on a rock shelf almost halfway up the thousand-foot cliffs. They loomed above, so dizzyingly steep that Grant didn’t dare look up for fear of losing his balance. Below, the green ribbon at the bottom of the gorge wound its way toward the sea sparkling in the distance. But in front of him, where the cliffs met the shelf, a dark crack split open the rock, just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Above it, almost invisible in the shade of an overhang, a stone plaque sat in a recess cut into the rock.
Grant edged toward it. Three thousand years had ground down the carving; what remained was only a faint impression of the original proud design. The claws and teeth had lost their sharpness, the mane wilted, the crouched muscles wasted away. Even so, Grant recognized it at once. He pulled the crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and held it up. “There’s your flying lion.”
Marina shook her head, though Grant couldn’t tell if it was wonder or exasperation. She picked up Pemberton’s lantern and shook it. A few drops of ancient paraffin sloshed inside.
“There’s no wick.”
Marina took a knife from her hip pocket, unclasped it and sliced a thin band of cloth from the sleeve of her blouse. She twisted it between her fingers and threaded it into the lamp.
Grant held out his lighter. “Allow me.”
Flame licked along the cotton wick, almost invisible in the harsh sunlight. Marina moved toward the crack in the cliff, but Grant was faster. He twisted the lantern out of her hands and stepped in front of her, then pulled the Webley from its holster. “I’ll go first.”
Grant pushed through the crack. After about ten yards the passage widened. He paused, holding up the lamp to guard against nasty surprises—and barely had time to adjust his eyes when a sharp elbow dug into his back, pitching him forward. He stumbled into the room, flailing the lamp so as not to dash it to pieces on the floor. When he had managed to stop himself he turned round.
Marina stood in the doorway, a half-guilty expression spreading across her face. “Sorry. I didn’t see you stop.”
“Lucky there wasn’t a bottomless pit waiting to swallow me.”
But Grant had no time to nurse his anger. The cleft had opened into a chamber, whose walls were still pocked with the millennia-old scars of the copper chisels that had carved it out of the rock. A stone bench ran across the far end, above which an upturned vase sat in a deep niche. A wood-framed sieve leaned against the bench, together with a trowel, a plumb line, a brush and another chocolate wrapper. On top, laid out almost as if in a museum, sat a row of figurines and artifacts. Grant and Marina crouched in front of them—perhaps in the same way as worshippers had knelt there all those thousands of years ago.
“This must be some kind of lustral bowl,” said Marina, picking up a shallow dish carved from purple stone. Her voice was low with awe. She put the piece down reverently and picked up another. This was a painted figurine, wasp-waisted, with ruffled skirts and its arms held aloft like wings. It looked almost like an angel. Except, Grant noticed, that the cropped jacket it wore had been pulled apart to reveal a pair of breasts thrusting out, squeezed almost perpendicular to the body.
“Nice tits.”
Marina scowled. “It’s a Minoan goddess figure. She was their principal deity—the source of all fertility and power. These sorts of idols are quite common.”
Grant leaned closer, affecting to examine it. “What are those wavy lines on her arms?”
“Snakes.” Marina held it up to the lamp. Close to, Grant could see it clearly: a writhing serpent running up one arm, across her bare shoulders and down to the other wrist. The lines on her chest that he had taken to be the hem of the jacket turned out to be two more snakes, one coiled round her breasts, the other hanging down over her hips and between her skirts.
“A dangerous woman,” said Marina tartly. “You wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“Goddesses aren’t my type.”
Marina put down the figurine and surveyed the rest of the hoard. Most of it was in fragments, which Pemberton had sorted according to type: pieces of ivory, half a dozen seal stones with miniature engravings; two doubleheaded axes and lots of pottery shards arranged in different piles.
“This is interesting.” Marina took two of the pieces from the furthermost pile and held them together. “Most of the finds are mid-period Minoan—say three and a half thousand years ago—but these are much more recent. It’s almost as though the shrine was abandoned, then rediscovered later.”
“How much later?”
“Say three thousand years ago.”
Grant yawned. “It’s all old news to me, sweetheart.” He cast his eye over the assorted artifacts laid out on the bench. “How much is this lot worth, anyway?”
“From an archaeological point of view, this could be quite significant. The goddess statue is hardly unique, but it’s a very fine example. The pottery’s probabl
y most valuable—if we can get a good chronology it will tell us a lot about settlement patterns in this part of the island.” She frowned. “It would be useful to know its stratification. I’m surprised Pemberton didn’t . . .” She trailed off as she noticed the bored scowl on Grant’s face. “What?”
“I don’t give a damn how fascinating it is to archaeologists. I want to know how much it’s worth.”
“Is that all you care about?” Her voice was bitter. “Half the world is lying in ruins and the other half can’t even afford to feed itself. You won’t get rich peddling the crumbs of a civilization most people have never heard of. If you want to make your fortune, go back to your guns. Men always find money for killing.”
She turned away, but Grant reached out and spun her round. “Do you really think I’m interested in carting this junk down to some pawnshop to get my sixpence for it? Think. That nice man from Secret Intelligence came all the way to Palestine to see if I had Pemberton’s book and I don’t think it was because he’s collecting for the British Museum. They think there’s something valuable in the book—valuable to the sort of men who deal in steel and oil and guns and lives. So I’m asking you: is this valuable? Because if it isn’t, either they’ve got the wrong end of the stick, or we’ve come to the wrong place.”
He stepped back. Despite the stifling air in the cave, Marina was shivering.
“There are a few things here that would be interesting to scholars,” she said flatly. “Otherwise . . . I don’t see anything.”
“How about that?”
Grant turned the lantern toward the alcove in the back wall. At first he had taken the object inside for an upturned vase, but looking closer he could see it was a piece of stone, about two feet high and vaguely bullet-shaped, with a web of criss-crossed lines carved in relief out of its sides. A shallow impression dented its top.
“This . . .” Marina stared. “This is very unusual. Not valuable, of course,” she added acidly, “but very rare. I think it must be a baetyl.”
“A beetle?” asked Grant, confused.
“A baetyl. A sacred stone. Possibly a meteorite originally, though this is obviously a copy. Perhaps that indentation in the top held a fragment of the original rock—or maybe some sort of cult idol.” She ran her hands over the cold stone, almost caressing it. “Have you been to the oracle at Delphi?”
“I blew up a train near there once. Didn’t have time to see the sights.”
“There’s something similar there. The omphalos, they call it—the navel of the world. As far as Crete goes, there are frescoes that show equivalent objects, but no one’s ever found anything like this.”
“But I still don’t see why . . . What was that?”
Grant swung around. The Webley gleamed in his hand—until, with a deft movement, he reached inside the lantern and pinched out the wick. Instantly the room was plunged in darkness.
“Stay back.” Grant swept out an arm and pushed Marina into the corner of the chamber, taking two silent steps to his left so as to be out of the line of the door.
“What is it?”
Grant didn’t need to answer. From outside, drifting down the passage, came the clatter of falling rocks—then the unmistakable sound of a voice cursing in English. Grant trained the Webley on the door. He heard scrapes and muffled curses as someone tried to squeeze through the narrow aperture, then soft footsteps. His finger curled round the trigger.
The wan beam of a flashlight pierced the darkness in the room, flitted like a moth from floor to wall to ceiling and came to rest on the barrel of Grant’s revolver.
“I hope you’re not fucking thinking of shooting me.”
CHAPTER 6
Grant’s gun never wavered. Undeterred, the new arrival ducked into the small chamber and stood in the door, little more than a silhouette against the dim daylight that filtered through behind.
“Who is this?” asked Marina.
“I don’t think I introduced myself last time.” The man shone the torch on his own face, revealing tightly cropped red hair, a spare moustache and a narrow, pointed face. “Muir.” He didn’t offer his hand. “Grant and I have met. And you must be Marina Papagiannopoulou. Better known to us—and to the Germans, when they were in business here—as Athena.”
“You seem very well informed.”
“I’ve followed your exploits with interest. And for the last three days I’ve followed you with even more interest.” He chuckled. “You didn’t make it easy for us. We almost lost you when you snuck away from Archanes.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have sent in your goons.”
Muir held up his hands in innocence. “Nothing to do with me.”
“Who were they, then?”
“Competitors. They . . .”
An almighty sneeze exploded down the passage behind Muir. He threw himself to the side of the room—just in time, as the thunderous roar of the Webley filled the chamber.
“Jesus and fucking Mary,” said Muir. “You’ll have someone’s eye out.”
With the gun still ringing in his ears, Grant heard a quavering voice calling in terror from down the passage, “Don’t shoot.”
Grant swung the gun back toward Muir. “Take one step closer and we’ll have Mr. Muir’s brains all over these walls,” he called down the corridor. Then, to Muir: “Who did you bring with you?”
Muir’s torch had fallen to the floor, but in the tiny room it still cast enough light to see the paleness of his face. “No one you need to worry about.”
Grant hesitated for a moment, then made up his mind. “Drop your gun and walk slowly toward me.”
“I don’t have a gun,” protested the panicked voice. “Shall I . . .”
“Just get in here.”
Marina picked up the torch and shone it down the passage. There was a cough, the shuffle of leather on stone. Blinking hard, his arms raised as high as the low ceiling would allow, he stepped into the light. A thatch of snowy white hair framed a round face, lined but still oddly youthful, its cheeks and nose crimson with sunburn. A pair of pale-blue eyes peered out beneath the eminences of two magnificent white eyebrows—anxious, but turning to wonder as he slowly took in the surroundings. “Remarkable,” he breathed.
A change had come over the room—a calm. Grant felt his control slipping away from him. “Who’s this?” he asked, jabbing the Webley at Muir.
“His name’s Arthur Reed. Professor of Classical Philology at Oxford.”
“May I?” Reed reached toward Marina. Utterly disarmed, she let him take the torch from her hand.
“Remarkable,” he said again, gazing at the artifacts ranged along the back wall. “This, I presume, must be some sort of baetyl.”
“That’s what we thought,” said Grant. Suddenly, he didn’t know why, he felt as if he had to be on his best behavior—like a boy dragged out of his tree house and forced to have tea with a distant aunt.
Muir reached for his pocket, froze as he saw Grant’s hand tighten round the Webley, then laughed. “Don’t worry.” He fished out the ivory cigarette case. “Want one?”
Grant would almost have killed for a cigarette, but he wasn’t ready to accept Muir’s generosity yet. “How about you tell me what in hell’s going on here?”
Muir struck a match, adding the warmth of flame to the torch’s electric glow. “I suppose you think I owe you an explanation?”
Stone grated at the back of the chamber and all three of them spun round. Reed was kneeling on the bench by the niche in the wall. He seemed to have lifted the stone baetyl off its perch, or at least managed to tip it back, revealing a shadowy hollow within.
“Could somebody help me, please?”
Grant and Muir stared at each other across the barrel of the Webley. With an exasperated huff, Marina stepped toward Reed.
“There’s something underneath,” he explained. “Can you reach it?”
Marina leaned in. After a couple of seconds her hand emerged clutching something small and flat and hard. Sh
e examined it, turned it over and almost gasped with surprise. Wordlessly, she handed it to Reed.
“Remarkable,” he whispered.
Grant flipped up the safety catch on the Webley. “Now,” he said, “would someone please tell me what this is about?”
They sat on the ledge outside the cave, blinking and squinting to be out in the sunlight again. Reed had put on a broad-brimmed sunhat; he sat on a rock and peeled an orange. Marina held the Webley, still trained on Muir, while Grant turned over the object in his hands. It was a clay tablet, a quarter of an inch thick and about the size of his palm, with rounded corners and smooth surfaces—except at the bottom, where a jagged edge suggested part had been broken off. Age, earth and fire had mottled the clay, but the designs wrought in it were clear enough. One side was covered with strange, miniature symbols—row after row, carved into the clay when it was wet, then baked into eternity.
“Is this Linear B?”
“Yes.” Reed and Marina answered in unison, then looked at each other with the delighted surprise of shared understanding.
Grant ran a finger over the symbols, tracing the rough edges and deep whorls, as if by touching he could somehow feel the pulse of its ancient secrets. What did they say? He turned the tablet over. There was no writing on the underside: the clay was flat and smooth, still showing the impression of the hands that had kneaded it out. But it was not empty. Grant balanced Pemberton’s notebook on his knee, using the tablet to weigh down the page, and looked between the two. One was drawn in Pemberton’s strong ink strokes, the other in paint that was badly chipped and faded, but there was no mistaking the similarity. They were the same. Two mountains, the sides of the valley; a domed hill, a horned shrine and a pair of doves. And hovering above them all a lion, the same animal that still watched them from its perch above the crack in the rock.
“Pemberton must have hidden it in the cave when he left,” said Reed. He took the diary and the tablet from Grant and examined them again, turning through some of the pages until he came to the final Homeric quotation. He grimaced. “Each bold figure seemed to live or die. That was John Pemberton. A bold man.”