by Tom Harper
He was standing on a beaten earth floor, in a low chamber whose dimensions seemed to be the same as the church’s. All around him stone pillars sprouted out of the ground to support the church floor. Some were intact, still crowned with ornate capitals, but others had obviously snapped at some point in the past and been cemented back together, or repaired with crude fieldstones. Strands of straw scattered the ground and a few tools lay resting against the far wall. Grant could make out a masonry trowel, a bucket, a rake and a scythe. Otherwise, it was empty.
“Is there anything down there?” Reed peered in, his face almost completely blocking the light from above. At the same time Grant felt the heat of the flame burning toward his fingers. He dropped the match and was suddenly in darkness.
“Nothing except some gardening tools. There’s a scythe—does that symbolize something? Death?” Grant thought of the weathervane on top of the pavilion at Lord’s. “Time?”
“The caretaker probably uses it for cutting the grass.” Reed disappeared and the blue-tinged daylight filtered back in.
“We’ll have to start digging.”
They fetched the donkey. Muir came too. Grant hung the lanterns between the supporting pillars, while Marina drove a row of stakes into the ground about a yard back from the innermost wall. In the flickering lamplight they crouched on the earth floor under the altar and stared at the walls.
“The church is Byzantine,” Marina explained. “But these foundations are Hellenistic—about 200 BC, when a lot of the mystery cults flourished.” She pointed at the crudely cut stones mortared together. A few of them seemed to be missing and layers of flat bricks filled the gaps. “You can see where they were repaired when the church was built. But it’s possible that the site goes back considerably further than that.”
She indicated the line she had staked out. “This is the north wall of the church. But I think there’s evidence that the sanctuary was reorientated during the Christian period so that its altar would face east.” She swept her arm round, pointing out each of the walls in turn. “Do you notice anything about the south wall?”
Grant stared, trying to probe the shadowy recesses where pillars blocked the lamplight. “The stones look smaller—and they’re not as well put together.”
“Exactly.” Marina looked pleased. “This was probably added later to partition the existing foundations into something small enough to support the church. It’s likely the courtyard gives a more accurate outline of the original temple’s dimensions. In which case the sanctuary would have been somewhere near here.”
“Then let’s get started.”
It was slow, aching labor. Unable to stand upright, they had to stoop low and attack the packed earth with short, ungainly jabs. After a while, once the ground was broken, they evolved a system whereby Marina, Reed and Muir filled the bucket with soil, which Grant then hauled away and tipped out on the hillside. The air in the cellar, stuffy to begin with, grew stifling. Marina knotted the tails of her blouse together round her midriff, while Grant stripped off his shirt and worked bare-chested. Even Reed removed his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.
Grant was just taking out another bucket of earth when something caught his eye at the foot of the hill across the valley.
“What’s that?”
“What?” Reed was lying in the grass, resting while Muir spelled him. He was staring right at it, though he didn’t seem to have noticed. Grant could never quite be sure what he was seeing.
“There.” It came again—a series of sparkling flashes, winking at them from the edge of a ridge, near a blackened pine tree. Grant tried to count them, wondering if it could be some sort of message. But to whom?
“It might be a scrap of cigarette foil, or a piece of broken glass,” Reed suggested.
“Or someone watching us.” Grant pulled on his shirt and buckled the Webley round his waist. He made his way down the slope, picking a cautious path through the tangled scrub and loose stones. He had to watch his footing carefully; when he looked up he couldn’t see the flashes any more.
He crossed a small stream at the foot of the hill and began climbing up the far side. As he got closer to the ridge he slowed. He could see the black branches of the burned pine tree poking over the escarpment above. A breeze stirred—and among the wildflowers and grasses he smelled a wisp of tobacco smoke. Someone must be there. But he heard nothing.
He crept to his left, edging his way round the ridge to try to get round the back. A butterfly flitted across his path; the bushes around him buzzed with the sounds of bees and flies. Anywhere else, it would have been a perfect day to lie back in the grass with a cold beer and a girl. He gripped the Webley tighter.
With a sudden roar a motor kicked into life on the ridge above. Forgetting caution, Grant ran the last few yards up the bank and looked down. A cloud of dust was slowly settling on the dirt track that wound away behind the next hill. Grant ran down it and round the corner—just in time to see the blur of a motorbike disappearing out of sight. He stared after it for a moment—but there was nothing he could do.
With a curse, he walked back to the hillside. A little hollow indented the slope, just behind the ridge that looked across to the hooded mountain top. A section of grass had been flattened there and half a dozen white tubes littered the ground. Grant picked one up and sniffed it, then squinted down the cardboard barrel. They were cigarette butts—but a good inch of the cigarette was hollow, as if the manufacturer had only been able to afford to fill half the tube with tobacco. Cheap tobacco at that, Grant thought, smelling it.
There was only one place Grant knew where they made such awful cigarettes. He’d smoked a few himself during his brief stint on the Eastern Front, as much for warmth as for the nicotine. The five men they’d sunk in the bay obviously hadn’t been the only Russians on the island.
“They’ve been watching us.”
“Damn.” Muir threw his cigarette butt into the marble basin. It hissed and fizzled out. “How long were they there for?”
Reed blinked. “I’m afraid I never noticed them.”
“Well, pay more fucking attention from now on.” He turned to Grant. “Do you think they’ll come back?”
“Maybe. After the other night, they’ll be careful about getting too close.”
“Let’s hope so.”
The day grew darker. Clouds rolled in from the west, brooding over the hooded hilltop. On one of his trips to empty the bucket, Grant saw the sun low between the clouds and the sea, a furious crimson mess. The next time he emerged it was gone. Night fell, but the cellar remained in perpetual lamplit twilight. The trench against the wall was almost two feet deep now: when Grant came down the others looked like dwarves toiling in the bowels of the earth.
Work slowed. They had exposed the upper foundations and come down to a lower level, broad slabs laid without mortar. Now the ground was harder, filled with as much rubble as earth. They had to remove it piece by piece. Soon their hands were chafed raw, their nails split and their muscles in agony.
At nine o’clock they paused for supper. They sat in the courtyard, shivering slightly in the cool air, and ate the bread and cheese the hotel owner had given them that morning. There were no stars.
“How far down have we got?” asked Grant.
“Those ashlars—the big stones—are very old.” Marina had Reed’s jacket wrapped round her shoulders and her eyes were glazed. “We must be close.”
“If there’s anything to find,” Reed cautioned. His earlier exuberance had vanished, broken by the sheer effort of their labor. “It might be in another part of the temple—or this might be the wrong place altogether.”
“Only one way to be sure.” Grant took a last swig of water and picked up a spade. “I’ll dig.”
But his effort was short-lived. He had only been working for a quarter of an hour when he felt a jarring impact. He knelt in the trench, scraping away the soil with his fingers to try to find the edges of the rock he had hit. All he felt was ston
e. Soon, working with hands and spade, he had uncovered an unbroken rock surface that ran from one side of the trench to the other.
Marina unhooked one of the lanterns and lowered it into the hole. “Bedrock.” She swore under her breath. “This must have been the floor of the original temple. You can see the marks where they used chisels to level it.”
“At least we don’t have to dig any deeper.” Grant let the spade drop to the ground and rubbed his blistered hands together. “It’s too late to get off the hill now. We’ll have to go back in the morning.”
Grant collected the equipment and passed it out to Reed. Marina ignored them. She stood waist deep in the trench and examined the ashlar wall, occasionally sweeping away the crust of earth with a small brush. When Grant had handed up the last of the tools, he turned. Marina was crouched beside the wall, her face inches from the stone as she traced something with her finger. But it was her face that really stopped him. It shone with a fierce concentration, and her dark eyes were wide with awe.
Grant’s weariness fell away in an instant. He scrambled across the low room and joined her in the trench. She didn’t say anything, but grabbed his hand and pressed it against the wall. Her skin was warm against his, the stone beneath it cold. She moved his hand down the wall in a slow, sinuous arc. “Do you feel it?”
He did—a curve of tiny ridges carved into the rock. He took his hand away and stared closely. Three thousand years had worn it down to almost nothing, little more than a shadow, but his hand had told him what to look for. He traced it again, a crescent moon turned on its side. A pair of bull’s horns.
“We need to pull it out.” Marina took her pocket knife and tried to work her blade into the hairline crack along the edge of the slab.
“It must weigh a ton,” said Grant doubtfully. The stone was about a yard wide, a foot high and looked to be almost as deep. “You’d need dynamite to get that out.”
“The Mycenaeans didn’t have dynamite.” Marina kept prying away with the knife. Worried that the blade might snap, Grant stepped back out of the trench.
Muir popped his head through the hole in the church floor. “Are you going to spend all night down there?”
“Marina thinks . . .”
Grant whipped round as a huge bang echoed round the cellar. Marina was in the trench holding her knife and even in the lamplight he could see her face was white as dust. A stone slab lay at her feet, shattered into three pieces by the impact on the bedrock. Above it, a dark chasm had opened in the wall.
“It was a panel.” She was trembling—she must barely have avoided being crushed by the falling slab. “A door.”
“Someone forgot to oil the hinges.” Grant jumped down into the trench. The aperture was about the same size as the slab that had disguised it, barely high enough for a man to squeeze through. He stuck in his arm and felt around.
“It opens out a bit once you get through the wall. Not a lot, but perhaps enough to give you some wriggle room.”
He took the lantern from the edge of the trench and pushed it through the hole. The fire shone on smooth-cut stone walls, but beyond it all was darkness.
“Let’s see what’s inside.”
CHAPTER 11
It was like posting himself through a mail slot. Grant had been in some tight spaces before—chasing diamonds in Rhodesia in the thirties—but never anything like this. He twisted his head flush with his body and sucked in his stomach; he wriggled and squirmed into the stone mouth, while Reed and Marina pushed from behind. Then he was through. He lay flat on his belly, breathing hard.
Something touched his ankle, still sticking out into the cellar, and he kicked instinctively.
“I’ve tied a rope to your foot.” Marina’s voice was already frighteningly distant. “If you find something, jerk it twice. If you get stuck, jerk it three times and we’ll pull you out.”
Grant didn’t bother to reply. He was in a tunnel, taller than the hole he had squeezed through but no wider. If he got on to his hands and knees, his back scraped the roof. There were no stones or mortar to be seen: it must be cut into the rock itself.
“At least there’s no danger of it collapsing,” he consoled himself.
He crawled forward. The tunnel wasn’t high enough to hold the lamp; he had to push it along the ground in front of him, then crawl after it. The air was thick—surely no one had breathed it for three thousand years. More worrying was the sour tinge of gas he smelled. Where’s a canary when you want one? he thought.
He crawled on. The only sounds now were the scrape of the lantern as he slid it forward and the dead rustle of his clothes against the rock walls. Whoever had cut the tunnel had done a remarkable job: it never deviated, but thrust straight into the heart of the hill. He tried to imagine the men who had made it. How long had it taken them, with their stone hammers and copper chisels?
“And what were you trying to get to?” he wondered aloud. Had it been worth it?
He shook his head. Ahead, something was gleaming in the lamplight. He hauled himself closer, pushed the lantern forward again, then snatched it back just in time to keep it from toppling over. A shiny-faced pool of water stretched out in front of him, cut into the floor of the tunnel. Grant extended an arm and held the lantern above the surface. The water was clear; ripples of lamplight touched the rocky bottom, about three feet down. It would have been easy enough to splash through, Grant thought. Except that on the far side, rising sheer and impossible out of the water, the tunnel and the pool ended together in a rock face.
Grant stared at it for a moment, then drew his right leg up and twitched it twice. It was an awkward maneuver in the tight space—for a moment, he wondered if they’d felt it. Then he heard a noise behind him—far away, it seemed. The grunts and groans of someone trying to squeeze into the tunnel.
While he waited, he turned his attention back to the pool. It must be fed from an underground spring: it couldn’t have stayed like this for so many centuries otherwise. Was it the same source that fed the fountain in the church compound? He leaned out over the water as far as he dared. It certainly had the same sulfurous smell. And if there was a way for the water to come in . . .
He lowered the lamp so that its bowl almost touched the water. It was hard to see at that angle, but it looked as though the far wall didn’t reach all the way to the bottom. Instead, there seemed to be the dark shadow of an opening at its base.
The shuffling noise that had been growing louder in the tunnel behind him stopped. A hand squeezed his foot and he craned his head round. Dark eyes watched him from the black midnight behind.
“Here we are. Theseus and Ariadne in the labyrinth.”
“Let’s hope there’s no Minotaur.”
Grant rolled on to his side, pressing himself against the wall so that Marina could see past him. Her eyes widened.
“What do we do now?”
“I don’t think they cut their way down here just because they were thirsty. Untie my boots.” Grant pointed to the yawning shadow at the foot of the rock face, though it was invisible to Marina. “There’s an opening. I’m going to see where it goes.”
Marina unlaced his boots and tugged them off, leaving the rope still fastened round his ankle. He didn’t take off his clothes: there was no room.
“Be careful.” Her voice was small and hollow in the gloom.
Grant pulled himself forward and slid face first into the water. It was surprisingly warm—almost like a hot bath. He immersed himself in it, enjoying the rare feeling of space. He could even spin himself round to look at Marina. She had crawled forward to the water’s edge and for a second their faces almost touched.
“Give me two minutes,” he said. “Then pull like hell.”
The water closed over his head like a coffin. He duck-dived to the bottom, pawing out with his hands until he felt the opening in the far wall. It seemed to be about the same size as the tunnel above—wide enough to move forward, too narrow to turn round. He kicked himself through, banging
his knee on the rocky floor. The minerals in the water stung his eyes, so he closed them—there was nothing to see anyway. All he could do was press his palms against the sides of the tunnel, washed smooth by the ages, and kick on.
Two minutes. How long was that? In a place without light, without sound, without up or down, how could you measure time? Grant didn’t know how long he had been there—nor how far he had come. Did it matter if you didn’t know how far you had to go? At first he tried to keep count of his kicks, but he soon lost track. A slow ache crept into his lungs and his thrusts weakened. He would have to turn back soon. Two minutes.
The tunnel widened. The walls pulled away from Grant’s reach and his last contact with the solid world disappeared. He was suspended in space—weightless, senseless, timeless. He forgot everything and became nothing. He was alone with the gods, a little fish wriggling forward, driven on by a destiny it could not understand.
A flash of pain cracked through his skull. He must have floated up and banged his head on the rock ceiling. His lungs were burning now, but when he parted his lips it was only to get a mouthful of water. There were no air pockets here. Did he even have enough in his lungs to get back?
He opened his eyes—and stared despite the stinging pain. Ahead of him the water seemed to shimmer with a golden light: the warmest, kindest light he had ever seen. He wanted to be near it; he knew that if he could only reach it everything would be all right. The pain disappeared; his body relaxed. He kicked out again, almost in a dream. The golden light was nearer now, all around him, and he was rising, rising . . .
His head broke the surface with a splash and a gasp of relief. Pain flooded back, but this time when he opened his mouth he tasted air. He gulped it down, screwing his eyes shut against the water cascading off his face. Only when his lungs were satisfied, when they no longer felt as if they were about to split apart inside him, did he wipe his eyes and open them.