by Tom Harper
CHAPTER 13
To understand this story, there are certain things you need to be aware of.” Reed turned his torch back to the frieze, to the stone army under the city walls. “The Greeks who went to Troy were the cream of their age. Menelaus, king of Sparta, whose wife was Helen of Troy. Agamemnon, his brother, the high king of Mycenae. Odysseus, the strategic genius, and Ajax, as strong as an ox. But greater than any of them, the one man the Greeks couldn’t do without, was Achilles.
“Now there’s a common belief that the Iliad tells the whole story of the Trojan war: the thousand ships, the ten-year siege, the death of Achilles and the final sack of the city.” Reed pursed his lips, the weary look of a man who had spent his life in a war of attrition with ignorance. “In fact, the Iliad only deals with about a fortnight’s worth of the war, in the last year of the siege. Agamemnon and Achilles fall out over a division of the spoils—in this case a slave woman—and Achilles goes off in a huff to let the Greek army see how well they can cope without him. Not very well, it turns out: led by Prince Hector, the Trojans take advantage of Achilles’ sulk to almost wipe out the Greeks. Achilles refuses to budge, but his companion Patroclus dresses up in Achilles’ armor and goes out to battle. Everyone thinks it’s Achilles; the tide turns and it’s all going splendidly for the Greeks, until Hector turns up and rather spoils the illusion by killing Patroclus and taking the armor for himself.”
The torch beam darted on, moving round the cavern to the next panel. Now the armies opposed each other across a great river, hurling spears across it, while chariots rushed up reinforcements behind.
“This leaves Achilles in a bit of a bind. He’s desperate to get revenge on Hector, but he hasn’t got any armor. So his mother—the sea nymph Thetis—goes to the forge of Hephaestus on Lemnos and commissions him to produce a new set of arms and armor. The shield is undoubtedly the pièce de résistance, but there are also greaves, a breastplate and a helmet to go with it. Suitably attired, Achilles finds Hector on the field of battle, fights him in single combat and kills him. Then he lashes the corpse to his chariot and drags it around the city until the Trojan king Priam, Hector’s father, comes to Achilles’ tent and begs for his son’s body. Achilles is so moved by the old man’s grief that he at last lets go of his anger and hands over the body. End of story, and they all live happily ever after. Except, of course, that most of them don’t.”
“I thought Achilles was killed by a poison arrow in his heel.”
“Actually,” said Reed, “that’s a common misconception. Achilles’ heel is something of a myth.”
“It’s all fucking myth,” said Muir disparagingly.
Reed looked irritated. “I’m coming to that. What I was trying to explain is that Achilles’ heel isn’t part of the original legend. There’s nothing in any of the earliest sources to say he was struck in the heel, or even that he was especially vulnerable there. It doesn’t appear in any written source until the first century AD—seven or eight hundred years after Homer. Homer never tells the story of Achilles’ death. The Iliad ends before he dies and the Odyssey picks up the story some time afterward.”
“Well, if Homer doesn’t talk about it, who does?”
Reed leaned forward. “By the end of the Classical period Homer had become the absolute bedrock of Greek civilization. His poems were like the Bible, Shakespeare and King Arthur all rolled into one. But Homer didn’t invent the stories—he adapted them for his poetry. The tales of Troy already existed, in overlapping and sometimes contradictory versions, oral poems and folk tales, myths and legends. At first, his interpretation would have just been one version of many. Gradually it became the preferred version, then the authoritative one. That was the power of his poetry.
“But the rest of the tradition survived too: Homer’s poems wouldn’t make sense if it didn’t. There’s a vast literature from other poets, authors and playwrights who took the Trojan war as their theme: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil—to say nothing of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Chaucer . . . The list is literally endless because it’s still being written, more than two and a half thousand years after Homer first put pen to paper.”
“So what did happen to Achilles?”
“The tradition records that he was killed by Paris—possibly shot in the leg by an arrow—while fighting at the gates of Troy. According to a précis in the Odyssey, the Greeks then cremated him and buried his ashes in a golden urn, near the mouth of the Dardanelles.”
Now all the sons of warlike Greece surround
Thy destined tomb and cast a mighty mound;
High on the shore the growing hill we raise,
That wide the extended Hellespont surveys;
Where all, from age to age, who pass the coast,
May point Achilles’ tomb, and hail the mighty ghost.
Grant looked up. “Is that true? Is the tomb still there?”
“There are tumuli on the shores of the Bosphorus,” Marina answered. “Archaeologists have excavated them, but never found anything significant. Certainly not a shield.”
“Besides,” Reed added, “cremation was an Iron Age practice. The Mycenaeans at Troy would have buried their dead in tombs. It’s an anachronism in the poem.”
Muir stood. “An anachronism? It’s all fucking anachronistic. We’re trying to find something of vital national urgency, and all you can give me is hocus-pocus and a three-thousand-year-old ghost trail. It doesn’t matter a damn if Achilles was shot in the heel or the head, if he was cremated or buried. He didn’t fucking exist.”
“Someone existed.” Reed’s voice was unyielding. “He may not have been called Achilles, his heel probably wasn’t any more vulnerable than the rest of him and I rather doubt his mother was a sea nymph—but someone existed. If the smiths on Lemnos forged that shield, someone took it. Someone extraordinary, worthy of such a priceless and holy piece of armor. Someone who would inspire stories and legends, however corrupted and confused they became. Someone whose life left an indelible mark on history.”
“History? I thought we were talking about literature. Myth.”
“A hundred years ago everyone thought the Trojan war was pure myth, total invention. Then Schliemann started digging. No trial and error, no years of searching. He went straight to Troy and stuck his spade in. Then he went to Mycenae, Agamemnon’s capital, and did exactly the same thing.”
Grant stirred. “How did he know where to go?”
“Everybody knew.” Reed had wandered into the center of the chamber. Light from the gas flame seemed to wrap itself round him. “That’s what’s so extraordinary. The knowledge was never lost. We still have guidebooks from two thousand years ago describing these places for classical tourists. What we lost was the belief—the faith that there was any truth in the stories. All Schliemann had to do was believe.”
Muir ground out his cigarette on the altar and tossed it into the fire pit. “All right.” His voice was hard with mocking disbelief. “So what do you want me to do? Go to Turkey and dig up every mound of earth to see if there’s a shield inside?”
“There’s no need for that.” Reed’s voice was milder now. “If the stories are true, the shield won’t be there.”
“You said Achilles was buried at Troy.”
“He was. But his armor wasn’t buried with him. It was too valuable. The Greeks held a contest to see who should inherit it and Odysseus won.”
“Jesus Christ—doesn’t this end? What did he do with it?”
“No one knows. That’s where the shield of Achilles drops out of legend completely. Odysseus doesn’t, of course—his ten-year journey home to Ithaca is the subject of the Odyssey. But as far as I know, there’s never any mention of Achilles’ armor in the Odyssey except a brief allusion to Odysseus having won it. Now Odysseus was shipwrecked so many times on his voyage that it’s inconceivable it made it home with him.”
Muir opened his ivory cigarette case; his fingers scrabbled inside, but it was empty. He looked up and his eyes met Reed’s. “L
et’s cut through all this crap and mumbo-jumbo. Do you have any idea where we can find this shield, or should I cable London and tell them the hunt’s over?”
For a moment, Reed and Muir stared at each other.
“I don’t know where the shield is.”
The case snapped shut. Muir turned to leave.
“But I know where I’d start looking.”
CHAPTER 14
Paleo Faliro, Athens. Two days later
It was a clear, bright spring morning. The lower slopes of the mountains that circled the city were green from the winter rains, and snow still glistened on their heights like marble. Grant and the others sat out on the hotel terrace by the waterfront—between the mountains and the sparkling sea, between winter and summer, between the past and . . . who knew what? Just at that moment Grant didn’t care. He felt as if he’d spent the last week in darkness—midnight ferries, sea caves, claustrophobic tunnels and caverns. For now, sitting in the sunshine with a cold beer in his hand was enough.
This was a Greece he hadn’t seen before—a Greece of money and middle classes, far away from the poor hamlets and fishing villages he was used to. Elegant turn-of-the-century villas lined the foreshore, while fat-trunked palms shaded the tramlines on the esplanade and slim yachts filled the moorings at the marina below the hotel. Here, you could almost forget the civil war that still ravaged the country.
Across the table, Reed sipped his cup of tea.
“We need to go back to the beginning.” He unwrapped the clay tablet and laid it in the middle of the table. After all their adventures, Grant was amazed it was still in one piece. “It all seems to have started when Pemberton found this. I think the first question has to be: where did it come from?”
Marina put down her drink and picked up the tablet, running her finger over the angular characters like Braille. “He might have found it in Crete, but I think it was here. It was when he returned from his last trip to Athens that he seemed to get excited.”
“Quite so.” There was just a hint of impatience in Reed’s voice. “But where did it come from in the first place? It must have been dug up somewhere. These Linear B tablets have been found all over Crete and at Mycenaean sites on the mainland, but so far as I’m aware they’ve never turned up in Athens. I think we can discount the possibility that Pemberton stole it from a museum. Either someone must have given it to him, or he stumbled across it in one of the antiquities shops here. Now—”
He broke off with a vexed frown. The roar of propellers drowned out his words as a small floatplane swooped overhead. It dropped toward the sea, bounced once and skidded across the waves in a fountain of spray. Probably some ship-owning heir trying to impress a girl, Grant thought.
“Does this really matter?” Muir blew smoke through his nostrils. “We’ve got the tablet, that’s what counts. If you could read the fucking writing, maybe it would be worth something.”
“If you’d left me alone in Oxford I might have made some progress. Rather than dragging me here to be shot at, almost kidnapped and dragged from one end of the Aegean to the other.” Reed stared over the rim of the teacup. Down in the bay, the floatplane was taxiing toward the dock. “But the point I was trying to put to you is that even if I had deciphered the Linear B—and even if it does point the way to the shield—it would only take us so far.” He held up the tablet and stroked a finger along the ragged edge where it had been snapped. “Halfway, give or take.”
“You mean there’s more of it?” Muir slammed his cup down on the table. Tea slopped into the saucer. “How the hell are we going to find that?”
“By finding out where this one came from.” Reed put down the tablet and hid it under his napkin to avoid the stares of the other guests. “A piece this significant hasn’t been lost in someone’s attic for a hundred years. My guess is it must have been excavated shortly before Pemberton found it, just before the war. With all the upheaval then, it would hardly be surprising if it had escaped notice—or made its way on to the black market.”
Grant frowned. “It could still have been found by accident. A farmer plowing his field or something. Grave robbers, maybe.”
“Unlikely. Of all the Linear B tablets that have come to light, I don’t think any were turned up by accident. Whatever the tablets say, they were pretty exclusive playthings. They’ve only ever been found in palace complexes—and those take some effort to excavate.” Reed turned to Marina. “I’d be grateful if you would go to the Ministry of Culture. Find out who was issued archaeological permits in 1940 and 1941. Half the world was at war at the time, so there can’t have been many.”
He stood, picking up the tablet still wrapped in the napkin.
“Where are you going with that?” Muir asked suspiciously.
“To my room, and then to the library.”
“I’ll go with you.” Marina jumped up, and she and Reed disappeared into the hotel. Grant swilled the last of his beer round the glass and drained it. Across the table, Muir was peering over his shoulder, watching the floatplane moor at the dock. A tall man in white trousers and a white open-necked shirt jumped down from the cabin and started talking animatedly with the marina attendants.
“You’d better go with Reed.” Muir turned back. “Athens must be crawling with Reds. Don’t want our professor falling into the wrong hands. And buy yourself a suit. You look like bloody Gunga Din at the moment.”
Grant ignored the insult. “Do you really think he’s up to it? Breaking the Linear B?”
Muir shot Grant a crooked look, weighing his words carefully. “He did some work on codes for us during the war. That’s where I came across him. That’s confidential, by the way. He may seem as though he’s wandered out of Gilbert and Sullivan, but he’s absolutely fucking brilliant. He broke the Hungarian foreign office cipher in three days flat.”
“Was that a difficult code?”
Muir gave a sardonic laugh. “I’ve no idea. The point is he doesn’t speak Hungarian.”
Grant caught up with Reed and Marina outside the hotel, and together they took the tram into the center of Athens. Marina had swapped her army fatigues for a simple blue dress, drawn in at the waist. She sat primly with her knees pressed together, her hair pinned back and her bag in her lap: just another young woman on her way to the shops or the pictures. Reed stared out of the window at the passing city. An open lorry full of armed soldiers pulled past them; grim-faced women pulled their children back from the road. In the rest of Europe the war might be over, but in Greece the quiet savagery of a civil war smoldered on.
“Who was Schliemann?” Grant asked, remembering something Reed had said in the cave.
Reed looked up, surprised. “Schliemann? An archaeologist. The archaeologist, really. He practically invented the discipline—made it up as he went along.”
Marina pursed her lips. “That’s not all he made up.”
“I think what Marina is referring to is his, um, enthusiasm. Schliemann, as I said, was a great believer in the truth of Homer. A romantic. He was also a compulsive showman. It’s possible that he occasionally let his preconceptions and his sense of theater dictate the presentation of what he discovered.”
“There were rumors that half the treasures he found he’d planted himself,” Marina sniffed.
Reed waved a hand airily. “Details. He didn’t plant the Cyclopean walls of Troy, or the Lion Gate at Mycenae. You can disapprove of his methods and dispute his interpretation, but you can’t deny his achievement. He rescued the Trojan war from the realm of myth and planted it firmly in the real world.”
Grant stared at him. “But if Schliemann proved the stories were true, why did you keep insisting they were fairy tales?”
Reed gave an embarrassed smile. “My faith wasn’t as strong as Schliemann’s. Or rather, I was an apostate.” A faraway look came into his eyes. “I saw him once. I was ten years old. He gave a public lecture at the Royal Geographic Society; my father took me. We went up on the train and he bought me a lemon ice at
Paddington. Funny what you remember. Anyway, Schliemann made an extraordinary impression. Bounded in wearing his frock coat and German accent like some combination of Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo. The hour passed like a dream, like a summer afternoon leafing through your favorite books and reading all the most exciting bits. Except this time, it was all true. That night, I decided I wanted to be like Schliemann.”
“What happened?”
“I grew up.” A wistful sigh. “I went to Oxford—and stayed there. It seemed the best place for a young man with a passion for the Classics. Instead, it slowly leeched the passion out of me. You can’t spend a lifetime just basking in the magnificent glow you get from Homer. You have to study, analyze, explain. And the closer you look, the further away you get. That first emotional burst gets broken down into eminently rational components, which get broken down again and again. It’s like dissecting the family dog to find out why you love him so much. By the time you’re finished, it’s gone.” Reed wiped his face with his handkerchief. The crowded tram was warm and sweat beaded on his forehead. “Besides, even with everything Schliemann found, it’s still an enormous leap from a couple of ruined hill forts, however evocative, to saying that Homer got it all right. Respectable academics don’t stand for that sort of thing. We’re professional skeptics. If you do believe, you keep it a rather guilty secret. In time, it becomes an embarrassment, then a joke. Eventually you can’t remember what it was you ever saw in it.”
“But you changed your mind.”
“In the cave. Seeing all those carvings, exactly as Homer described them . . .” Reed shook his head in wonder. “I remembered what inspired me that night in Kensington. It wasn’t the poetry—that came later. It wasn’t even the stories, exciting though they were. It was the possibility, the hope, that buried under all that scholarship and legend there might be something real. Something true.” He gave a bashful smile. “I started to believe again. Just like Schliemann—or Evans. Speaking of whom . . .”