The Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  Three long blasts from the ship’s horn underscored his words, as if the gods themselves bellowed out agreement. Grant looked over the rail. Across the water a red beacon winked against the sea; ahead, a straggle of lights rose in the darkness. The flat deck began to come to life: men rubbing their eyes; women wrapping their shawls round them and stroking their children. Conscripts stuffed cigarettes and cards into their pockets. Only the priest sat still, forever whirling his beads.

  “Here we are.” Muir drained the last of his coffee. “Lemnos.”

  “According to Homer, when Zeus got tired of his wife’s meddling, he strung her up from Mount Olympus with a pair of anvils tied to her feet. Her son, Hephaestus, the smithing god, came to rescue her—so Zeus threw him out of heaven. He fell all day and landed, I imagine with something of a crunch, here on Lemnos.”

  Reed waved his arm to embrace the island. They were sitting at a kaphenion on the waterfront, a shallow bay lined by the houses of the island’s capital, Myrina. Once it must have been bright and picturesque, but like everywhere else, the war had drained its color. Faded paint peeled off crumbling plaster; newspapers flapped over broken windows and gulls nested among the shattered roof tiles. Even the island seemed to have turned against its inhabitants: round the sweep of the bay, the line of houses was frequently broken by huge up-thrusts of exposed rock, as if a giant hand had reached out of the earth to crush the town in its fingers.

  Grant sipped his coffee—mercifully they had Nescafé here, so he was spared the usual Greek mud—and kept silent. Like generations of students before him, he was quickly learning that the professor conducted his lectures on his own terms.

  “Hephaestus was nursed back to life and set up his forge here with his two sons. Now—they are very interesting . . .”

  Muir stifled a yawn.

  “They were called the Kabyri. Demigods, or daemons as the Greeks called them: strange creatures who live in that murky space where folk tales, myths, religion and magic blur. In some way they’re not unlike the English ideas of faeries—magical creatures with powers that fall short of full divinity.”

  Muir covered his eyes. “Please tell me we haven’t come to chase fucking pixies.”

  As a man who had spent most of his life in the international flotsam of diamond prospectors, special operations agents and bandits, Grant usually didn’t notice swearing any more than comments about the weather. But somehow, in Reed’s presence, he found himself embarrassed by it—like a schoolboy ambushed on the playground by his mother. It didn’t seem to bother Reed, who simply rolled his eyes as if he were dealing with a particularly stupid pupil.

  “In this case your unimaginative language is unusually apt. The Kabyri were the center of a mystery cult that lasted for centuries.”

  “What was the mystery?”

  Reed gave a weary sigh. “Obviously it’s a mystery. Only members of the cult knew their secrets and they had to undergo all sorts of initiatory rites before they found out. In all probability it began as a sort of guild, a way of passing on the skills of the smithing fraternity. Much like the Freemasons, I shouldn’t wonder. Over time, though, it became a broader cult with all the usual mystery preoccupations: death and the underworld; life and fertility—which no doubt led to certain sexualized rituals. In art the Kabyri are often depicted with implausibly outsized genitalia. Hence your, erm, fornicating pixies.”

  “It seems a bit of leap,” said Grant. “From a Working Men’s Club for blacksmiths to the local cathouse.”

  “Not at all.” Reed leaned forward, his coffee forgotten. “Smithing was one of the most esoteric skills of the ancient world, much more magic than science. The furnace wasn’t just a fireplace where you controlled a chemical reaction. It was a portal, the host of a sacred process whereby simple rock ore was transmuted into the essential tools of life. Using it without adequate preparation would be like walking into a church and just gobbling down the communion bread and wine before it’s been consecrated. There would be rituals to prepare the tools, to purify the smith, to summon up the alchemical powers from the gods. And in their eyes one of the closest parallels was with procreation.”

  “Going at it hammer and tongs?”

  “The sacred union of the elements of life, wrapped in the mysteries of the womb, mirrored the fusion of copper and tin in the crucible. Remember, this was the Bronze Age—they hadn’t yet discovered ironworking. Heat, sweat, blood—and of course, an ever-present risk of death. In legend, Hephaestus married Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to symbolize the union. Even today a lot of primitive cultures use worked metal as a fertility charm.”

  For once, Grant looked interested. “They have the same idea in Africa. In Rhodesia we found furnaces decorated with pictures of a woman giving birth.”

  “Life-giving creation,” Reed agreed. “Metal tools were the foundation of all agriculture and civilization. The man who knew the magic of metalworking wasn’t just a technician or a craftsman—he was a priest, a shaman who could commune with the gods. No wonder he kept himself wrapped in ritual and mystery.” With his eyes wide, his thatch of white hair blown awry in the harbor breeze, Reed’s demure donnishness had all but vanished. Instead, it seemed he might himself be a shaman, his blue eyes staring into an ancient, magical past to commune with its ghosts.

  “Fascinating,” said Muir. He lit a cigarette. “But what about the bloody meteorite?”

  For a moment Reed seemed not to have heard him. Then, abruptly, he shook himself, looked around in mild surprise and smoothed down his hair. “Well, obviously they’d have brought it here.”

  “Obviously.”

  “The meteorite would have been almost pure metal. Where else to bring it but the sanctuary of the Kabyri?”

  Muir’s eyes narrowed. “Please tell me there’s more to go on than that.”

  Reed pulled out his handkerchief, then unwrapped it to reveal a triangular fragment of pottery inside. Its yellow glaze was chipped and cracked, but the decoration was clear enough. Framed by burning tapers against a background of stars two figures stood out in red. One was tall and bearded, the other short and clean-shaven, but each carried a hammer in one hand and a cup in the other. As Reed had warned them, each had an enormous penis dangling between his legs. “Meet the brothers Kabyri,” said Reed. “Pleasant little chaps.”

  “Why are they holding cups?” asked Grant.

  “Probably pouring sacred offerings—though in Greek literature the Kabyri are notorious drunks.” Reed handed the fragment to Marina. “This came from the cave shrine in the Valley of the Dead—but it isn’t Minoan. This is a Mycenaean piece and I’d wager enough claret to sozzle the Kabyri that it was brought there by the men who took the baetyl away.”

  “But the cult of the Kabyri spread all over the Aegean,” objected Marina, who had eaten her breakfast in silence until then. “Further—to the shores of the Bosphorus, even the Black Sea. Lemnos was the origin of the cult, but not the only center. Why not Samothraki, or Thessaloniki, or Thebes?”

  Reed waved away her suggestions. “The cult only spread much later. We’re still deep in prehistory here—1200 BC or thereabouts. Lemnos was one of the earliest inhabited islands in the Aegean. Even the Greeks couldn’t trace their ancestry back far enough: they recorded that it was settled by Pelasgians, a quasi-mythic race of people who were there before the Greeks. Probably Mycenaeans. Besides, Pemberton thought so too.” Reed opened the journal to the last page and pointed at the Homeric quotation Pemberton had scrawled. “This isn’t a description of one of the Trojan battles. It comes from book eighteen, when Hephaestus forges new armor for Achilles in his workshop on Lemnos.” He looked around, beaming triumphantly. “The workshop we can safely equate to the sanctuary of the Kabyri.”

  Muir stubbed out his cigarette in the remains of his coffee and waved at the waiter to bring them the bill. “Is it signposted?”

  “It shouldn’t be too hard to find. According to Eustathius of Thessalonica, a commentator on Homer, the s
anctuary of the Kabyri is right next to the volcano.” He caught sight of Marina’s surprised stare. “What?”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Professor.” Grant thought he detected the edges of a smirk on Marina’s lips. “There is no volcano on Lemnos.”

  Reed blinked twice, while Muir’s match hovered unstruck against the matchbox. It was left to Grant to ask, reasonably, “What about all these?” He nodded at the plugs of rock rising up around the town—and the huge outcrop topped by a castle at the mouth of the bay. “Those are volcanic.”

  “Lemnos is certainly a volcanic island,” Marina allowed.

  “Of course it is,” said Reed peevishly. “Eustathius, Heraclitus, all the ancient commentators agree that the temple of the Kabyri is next to the volcano.”

  “Then perhaps they should have visited the place before they wrote about it. There hasn’t been a volcano on Lemnos for millions of years. That’s before the Minoans,” she added for Grant’s benefit.

  “Christ. Is there anything left? A crater or something?” Muir threw a few coins on to the table.

  “We can do better than that. The sanctuary of the Kabyri—the Kabyrion—was discovered and excavated ten years ago by Italian archaeologists.” Marina smiled at Reed. “Nowhere near the volcano.”

  “Wonderful. How the hell do we get there?”

  Muir’s manners might be crude, but his talent for taking hold of a problem and battering it into submission was undeniable. Although it was Good Friday, when most of the townspeople had retreated to their homes to prepare for the weekend’s celebrations—Muir was relentless, banging on doors and shouting through windows. Eventually, slumped over a backgammon board in a taverna they had all assumed was shut, they found what they wanted. At first the fisherman looked frightened at the strange quartet of foreigners asking about his boat, then profoundly suspicious, but the wad of banknotes Muir pressed into his hand seemed to dispel his fears. He grinned, and led them down to a broad-beamed caïque moored against the jetty. The wooden hull was scratched and scarred, and there seemed to be almost as much water inside the boat as outside it.

  Reed looked around nervously, trying to find a place to sit that wasn’t stained with oil or fish blood. “Is there really no alternative?”

  “During the war the Germans didn’t trust the fishermen. Thought they might use their boats to carry intelligence and spies.” Grant gave a slightly shamefaced grin. “They weren’t wrong about that. But it destroyed the islands. Without fish they couldn’t work and they couldn’t eat. Lots of the fishermen were forced to sell their boats, or had them smashed by the Nazis.”

  “What’s that?” Muir, bored, was staring at the high end post that rose almost vertically from the bow, a cutlass ready to slice through any headwind. Wide blue eyes were painted on either side, and nailed below them was a small copper amulet in the shape of a bulbous, apelike man.

  Marina laughed. She had untied her hair, letting it whip loose round her shoulders, and as the boat gathered speed the wind pressed her blouse close against her skin. “Do you believe in omens, Mr. Muir? That’s one of the Kabyri. They were often associated with sailors: they appeared in storms to guide ships to safety. The islanders still use them as charms today.”

  Grant looked up at the sky, wondering if the ship that had sailed from Crete three thousand years ago had been protected by a similar charm—and if it had worked. On that Good Friday there was not a cloud in sight: the air was so clear they could see the white cone of Mount Athos, the holy mountain, rising out of the horizon. They rounded the headland under the castle and the fisherman opened the throttle, leaving a wake of diesel smoke billowing behind him. Even so, Grant made his way to the bow when the others weren’t looking and touched the amulet. Just for luck, he told himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was mid afternoon before they nosed into the sandy cove—too late to return to Myrina that day. They unloaded blankets and tinned food from the caïque, then arranged for the fisherman to come back the next morning. He disappeared round the point in a cloud of smoke and they were left alone on the beach.

  “In classical times there was an annual festival where all flames on the island were extinguished for eight days. On the ninth, a ship came to the sanctuary of the Kabyri bringing new fire—sacred fire—from the temple of Apollo on Delos. It must have put ashore here.” Reed looked around and again Grant felt that unsettling feeling that the professor saw things he didn’t.

  “So where’s the sanctuary now?”

  They followed a goat track up the slope that rose out of the cove. A riot of wildflowers blanketed the hillside—poppies, buttercups, mayflowers and more—but thornbushes lurked among the flowers and their trousers were soon scratched to threads. Straight ahead an artificial terrace had been cut into the hillside, hanging out over the foaming sea below. It was about the size of a tennis court, and flat except where a few column pedestals and foundation stones broke the surface. A forlorn skeleton of wooden poles, with a few strands of thatch blowing in the breeze, was the only relic of the archaeologists who had discovered it.

  “Lovely spot,” said Muir. “But as excavations go, I’ve seen latrines that were more spectacular.”

  “There’s more over there.” At the far corner of the terrace a crumbling path led round the shoulder of the hill to a second terrace above the next cove. Exposed foundations showed the clear outlines of a rectangular building, a columned hall and a screened-off sanctuary at one end. Even so, none of the walls survived much more than a foot high.

  “This is more promising,” said Marina optimistically. “The first courtyard held a Classical temple. This is Archaic.”

  “It all looks fucking archaic to me.”

  Marina gave Muir a withering stare. “Historically speaking, the Archaic period began in about 750 BC. The Classical period follows around three hundred years later with the rise of the great Greek city states.”

  “That’s still too late.” Grant’s brain was slowly getting used to the deep depths of the past that these academics inhabited—a period that until recently he would have dismissed as all once upon a time. “You said the Mycenaeans died out in 1200 BC.”

  Reed looked at him with the benevolent approval of a schoolmaster. “Quite right. But we are getting closer.”

  Grant looked out to sea, wondering if it was too late to signal the fisherman to come back. But there was no sign of him: only a smudge of smoke further out where a trawler was lying off the coast. It didn’t seem to be moving.

  All afternoon they picked their way through the ruins, examining every last scratch in hope of finding writing or carvings. There was nothing. When they’d exhausted the site, Grant clambered down to examine the shoreline. A rock shelf ran along the bottom of the cliffs, slanting into the water, and he followed it back toward the bay where they had landed. Out at sea the trawler still wasn’t moving. From Grant’s height it was little more than a blur on the horizon.

  “Hello.” In front of him the shelf split open and a square-cut channel of water lapped deep into the rock. He lay down on his stomach and leaned over the edge, wincing at the touch of the hot stone through his shirt. If he hung his head almost upside down, he could see the channel continuing back under the overhang, into what looked like a shallow cave. The ripple of waves breaking over the beach inside drifted out, soft and haunting.

  The water didn’t look too deep. Grant untied his boots, slipped off the Webley and removed his wallet from his trousers. Then he braced himself against the sides of the narrow inlet and lowered himself into the water. The current was stronger than he’d expected—the waves almost lapped his chest as they swelled into the channel—but by pressing his arms against the rock walls he managed to keep his footing and work his way forward. He ducked under the overhang, pushed off and half stumbled, half swam on to the beach inside. He wiped the water from his eyes and looked around.

  The cave was almost tall enough for Grant to stand, a rough dome about twenty feet round, d
ivided almost evenly between a shallow pool of water and a pebble beach rising gently to the rear wall. The opening to the sea allowed in plenty of light: it played off the water, reflecting soft silver tangles on the ceiling, but all it revealed were a few pieces of driftwood washed up at the back of the cave.

  Shit. Grant gave a rueful smile. In the near corner, almost parallel to the sea channel, a narrow passage led through the rock into a thin cleft of sunlight. He looked down at his sodden clothes. Waste of bloody effort. With a final look around he squeezed through the passage, almost on his hands and knees, then twisted round so that his head emerged blinking in the open air. From above, it just looked like a fissure in the rock. He must have stepped right over it.

  “Ah. Pratolaos emerges.”

  Trapped in the fissure, Grant squinted up. A floppy white sunhat was peering over the cliff above. “It’s only me.”

  “Pratolaos,” Reed repeated. “One of the central rites of the Kabyri cult was a rebirth ritual—the first man, Pratolaos, reborn in a cave and emerging whole from the earth. The sources say his emergence was accompanied by ‘unspeakable rites.’ ” He sounded as though he relished the prospect.

  “There’s nothing unspeakable down here. Just a pile of driftwood.”

  “Well, we may need that too.” Reed pointed to the west. The sun had disappeared behind the headland and a red haze colored the sky. “Muir says we should make camp for the night.”

  “I’ll come up.”

  They laid out their blankets on the terrace and built a fire. It was all a far cry from the unspeakable rituals and sacred knowledge that had once happened there, Grant thought, as he sat on a foundation stone and ate stew from the can.