The Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  “Feels like a mausoleum,” said Jackson, shivering. The only color came from the rich oil paintings that lined the walls between the columns. White-breasted nymphs tempted anxious heroes; alabaster goddesses turned feckless men to stone. A fair-haired woman wreathed in flowers admired herself in a golden mirror. In one, a twisted dwarf pressed an iron corselet against a woman’s chest. Everything in the canvas was dark, except for the woman who shone with an almost ethereal whiteness. A blood-red scarf billowed behind her.

  Reed stopped in front of it. “Van Dyck. The woman is Thetis; the dwarf, Hephaestus. And that”—he waved a finger at the iron breastplate, stopping it an inch short of the canvas—“is the armor of Achilles.”

  “Good to know what it looks like,” muttered Jackson.

  The butler showed them into a drawing room, where an assortment of second-empire furniture clustered round a marble hearth. The deep brocades and chintzes seemed all the richer for their stark setting, poised and elegant in the surrounding emptiness. Tall French windows lined the rear wall, leading on to a terrace. Raindrops spattered the glass, and the gardens below were almost invisible in the gloom.

  A rumble of thunder rolled around the house, as if the whole mountain had turned on its foundation. A moment later came the lightning; for a split second everything in the room was cast in a sorcerous silver light. The fire spat sparks in the air and the dim electric lights flickered like candles. It took a moment for Grant’s eyes to readjust—and to widen in surprise.

  A man stood beside the fire, just in front of a chaise longue. He must have been lying in it before, though Grant hadn’t seen him. His face was pale and lined, with a translucent quality that made the skin shimmer in the firelight. A mane of silver hair was slicked back almost to his shoulders. He wore a velvet smoking jacket and loose trousers. He was barefoot.

  “Mes amis. Welcome.”

  CHAPTER 21

  They seated themselves on the stiff furniture. The butler arranged another log on the fire and withdrew. Sourcelles looked at Reed—as did everyone else. They all felt, instinctively, that it needed an uncommon power to contend with Sourcelles in his domain.

  “Your visit is an honor, Professor Reed. You must know I admire very much your scholarship. But who are your friends?”

  Reed cleared his throat. “Mr. Jackson and Mr. Muir, from the British and American governments respectively. Miss Papagiannopoulou, who was an assistant to John Pemberton, the English archaeologist, on Crete before he died. And . . .” A precise description failed him. “Mr. Grant.”

  Sourcelles flashed Grant an appraising look—not hostile, but careful. “Welcome. You would like some cognac? Some calvados?”

  “No, thank you.” Reed spoke for all of them—though Grant would have been glad of a gulp of something warm.

  “Bien.” Sourcelles leaned back in his chaise longue, arranging himself like a cat. He took a long silver cigarette holder from a box on the side table, slotted in a cigarette and drew a deep draft. A nimbus of smoke gathered round his head. Everyone waited—but he seemed completely preoccupied, almost oblivious to them.

  “Six years ago you bought a Minoan clay tablet from a dealer in Athens called Molho,” said Reed. He spoke tentatively, like a student reading out an under-prepared essay in a tutorial.

  Sourcelles twitched his shoulders, the merest shrug of indifference.

  Reed continued, “The tablet was incomplete. It had been broken.”

  “By the man who sold it to you,” added Grant. Sourcelles’s eyes flickered like a snake’s. “Did he tell you that? Molho sold the other piece to John Pemberton.”

  Sourcelles’s gaze swept on to Marina. “You saw this? You have proof?”

  “We had the tablet, until two days ago. A German stole it—though he’d probably say he was just reclaiming it, as he was the one who dug it up in the first place.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “About this big.” Reed framed the dimensions with his hands. “A dozen lines of Linear B script on the obverse. On the reverse, a faint painting showing the usual iconography associated with Minoan shrines. I imagine your piece looks very similar. Perhaps like this?”

  He took out Pemberton’s photograph, now dog-eared and creased, and passed it to Sourcelles. The Frenchman barely glanced at it. “This could be anything. I have many pieces in my collection. It is the best private collection of Mycenaean artifacts in the world, I think. Private collection,” he repeated. Little puffs of smoke escaped his mouth as he said it. “It is not for public viewing.”

  “We’re not the public,” said Grant. “And we’re not the only ones coming here to look for this tablet. Why don’t you telephone the Athens police and find out what happened to Molho. He already lost a hand protecting you from Belzig. Did you know that?” He looked at Sourcelles’s face, the skin like parchment that had been scraped clean, and decided he probably did. “Now he’s lost his life—only this time he couldn’t protect you. Belzig knows you have this thing. He’ll come here; he’s probably on his way already. Do you want to know what he did to Molho? It wasn’t nice.”

  “And if I show it to you? What will you do with the knowledge you gain? I wonder, do you even know what you are really looking for?” Sourcelles gave Grant a piercing look, saw no answer and dismissed him with a sneer.

  “The White Island,” said Marina. She kept her eyes fixed on Sourcelles, ignoring the suspicious stares she drew from the others. Sourcelles gazed back. His mouth turned up at the corners in a smirk, though Grant couldn’t tell if it was respect or satisfaction at some private victory.

  “The White Island was the last resting place of Achilles, where his mother carried him after his death at Troy. It was also where his hero cult began. The tablet holds the key to finding it.”

  Sourcelles laughed, softly mocking. “Maybe. But how will you unlock it? Have you solved the code of the Minoan script?” He read the answer on their faces. “I think not. Many have tried to break it—I myself have tried, many times. The tablets are comme une femme. You possess her body, but her secrets she keeps to herself.”

  He blew a ring of smoke. “Do you know what the original museum was? It was not some exhibition hall, where the untutored masses could come and stare at relics they could never comprehend. It was a temple to the muses, museion, a sanctuary to the goddesses of memory. The men who worked there were a sacred order of priests and poets—not day trippers paying their two pennies to be entertained.”

  “Well, we’re not tourists,” blurted out Jackson. “Professor Reed is from Oxford University.”

  Sourcelles laughed. “I have been to Oxford. When I was a young man I went to all the capitals of scholarship. To Paris, to Berlin, to Oxford. I sat at the feet of the great men of learning and asked them about the Trojan war. They laughed at me. Even after Schliemann had proved Homer was correct, they could not accept it. They spun lies about him: that he salted his finds with trinkets he bought in the Athens markets; that his accounts of his digs were fiction; that he could not tell apart the different levels of his finds. Slanders. When he went to Troy, they said he would find nothing. When he found not one but half a dozen cities, they said that none of them could be right—they were too old, or too late, or there was no sign of a war. They mocked him, because their imaginations were too small to believe. Those same men, they thought I was another Schliemann, a little rich boy who would use his money to build fantasy castles. They had no time for heroes. They were small, mean-minded people who could not understand the true scope of the heroes. They were not worthy. So I resolved that as much as I could afford, I would collect the relics of the age of heroes and preserve their memory with honor.

  “Besides, the White Island is not hidden, just as Troy and Mycenae were not hidden. If men have lost it, it is only because they do not believe. You know the story of Cassandra, the Trojan priestess whose fate was to speak the truth and never to be believed? She is the true heroine of the story: not Helen or Achilles or Odysseus.
For three thousand years, the truth of the tale of Troy has been known to every generation—and every generation, in its feeble-mindedness, has refused to believe it.”

  “But all the sources contradict each other,” said Marina. “According to whom you believe—Pliny, Pausanias, Lycophron, Strabo or Arrian—it could be at the mouth of the Danube, or the Dnieper, or somewhere in the open sea.”

  Sourcelles nodded. There was something almost paternal in his approval, a father admiring a precocious daughter—but also something voracious, hungry to lure her on. He rose and crossed to the cabinet on the wall. He pulled a slim brown volume from one of the shelves and laid it on the low table in the center of the room. Grant saw Sourcelles’ name in gold on the cover. He opened it to a page that showed a double-spread map, flattening the spine as the others leaned in to look closer.

  “The Black Sea.” On the thick cream paper it looked like some sort of bodily organ, with the various rivers, straits and tributaries straggling from it like veins. “Here”—the northwest corner—“the Danube estuary, and here”—the northernmost point—“the Dnieper. In between, halfway, the Dniester. Between each is one hundred kilometers. Alors . . .”

  He took a wooden compass from a tin and gave it to Marina. “Mademoiselle. You can show where is five hundred stadia from the estuary of the Dniester.”

  Marina calibrated the compasses against the map scale, then centered it on the narrow bay at the mouth of the Dniester and twisted. The faint circle she inscribed touched the mouths of both the Danube and the Dnieper.

  “I don’t see that that gets us any further,” said Reed.

  Sourcelles ignored him. “Pliny is a fausse piste—how do you say, a red herring. Here”—he tapped the mouth of the Dnieper with a silver pencil—“was the Greek colony of Olbia. It was founded in the sixth century before Christ by settlers from Miletus, who came to trade for furs and precious stones with the Scythians. Achilles was the local hero—the patron saint, you understand? They built a temple to him on a little island where the river joins the sea. But they did this because the story of the White Island was known, because already Achilles was associated with this place. Centuries later, writers and geographers remembered the story of the White Island; they remembered there was a temple of Achilles on an island near Olbia and they thought they must be the same thing.”

  “So if it’s not there, it must be in the mouth of the Danube.”

  “C’est possible. That is what Pausanias and Lycophron believed, and there are many islands in the mouth of the Danube. But Pausanias never visited the Black Sea. He repeated what he had read in a much older source. And he mistranslated. The correct reading is not in the mouth of the Danube, but opposite.”

  With her finger, Marina traced the pencil arc she had drawn: out from the Danube estuary, through the open sea and back toward the north shore. Her finger glided across the map—then, at the circle’s furthest point, hovered for a moment. At the tip of her nail, almost crossed out by the pencil line running through it, a dark spot blotted the paper. It could have been an ink stain, or a squashed fly, but when Marina peered closely she could see . . . “It’s an island.” She blinked as her eyes adjusted back to the room. “What is it?”

  “In Russian it is called Zmeiny, in Turkish they say Yilonda.” Sourcelles smiled at their incomprehension. “They have all the same meaning. The Greek name is Ophidonis.”

  “Snake Island,” said Marina and Reed almost simultaneously.

  Sourcelles nodded. “You know the symbolism of the serpent. It crawls into dark holes in the earth, down into the darkest recesses where no man goes. It has the power of death—but also of life.”

  “Life?” said Grant skeptically.

  Sourcelles drew a sinuous wave in the corner of the page, then bisected it with a straight line. “You know the pharmacists’ symbol? The serpent curled round the staff. It is an ancient Greek symbol, the Rod of Asclepius. The snake is one of the earliest symbols of primitive life—sexless, timeless, able to regenerate itself by shaking off the old skin and leaving it behind. They were also associated with the gift of prophecy. The prophetess Cassandra had her eyes and ears licked by serpents when she was left alone by her parents, and this gave her her powers. And Apollo’s priestess at Delphi was the Pythia, a pythoness in human form who entered a trance to deliver the oracle.”

  “Like the Minoan snake woman,” said Grant. The image, the serpents writhing round her hips and breasts, had lodged unsettlingly in his mind.

  Sourcelles raised an ironic eyebrow, the teacher surprised by the boy at the back of the classroom. “Très bien. According to Arrian, there was an oracle in the temple of Achilles on the White Island. So where is better to have it, this temple of the undying hero, this door to the underworld, than on Snake Island?”

  “But that’s in the fucking USSR!” Jackson exploded. He jabbed a finger on to the book. “Are you telling me that the Soviets have been sitting on this thing the whole time?”

  Outside, lightning forked in the valley and rain drummed on the window like bullets. The sound of water flowed all around them, running off the roofs and gutters, and down the mountainside.

  “Has anyone ever been there?” asked Muir more calmly.

  Sourcelles waved the cigarette holder like a wand. “In 1823 a Russian officer in the Black Sea Fleet, Captain-Lieutenant Kritskii, put ashore. He passed his account to an academician at the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres in Saint Petersburg.”

  All five of them were tensed, leaning forward in their chairs. The fire crackled and spat out sparks that eddied and flurried up the chimney.

  “Did he find anything?”

  “He found the island lived up to its reputation.” Sourcelles lit a fresh cigarette and tucked it in his holder. “It was crawling with snakes. Many birds, also. He could not move more than two paces without stepping on them. You have read the story in Arrian?” he said, suddenly turning back to Marina. She nodded slowly. “He said the White Island was filled with seabirds. Each morning they would dive down to the water and wet their wings in the waves, then fly up and sprinkle the water over the temple. Then they landed and mopped the temple courtyard clean with their wings.”

  Jackson shifted in his chair. “Can we skip the fairy tales? We haven’t got time—not if Uncle Joe’s got this thing in his goddamn backyard. Did this Krisski or Russki or whatever the hell his name was find anything important?”

  Sourcelles eyed him with the sort of look that only a Frenchman could give an American. Then, turning deliberately to face the others: “He found an ancient temple.”

  Nobody knew what to say. They all gazed at Sourcelles, stupefied by hope, by greed, by the fear of what he might say next.

  “Did he find anything else? Anything, uh . . . valuable?”

  Sourcelles’s eyes narrowed and he fixed Jackson with a raking stare. “A strange question. I wonder, Mr. Jackson—I have answered your tiresome questions as best as is possible; I have welcomed you into my house although you offered me only danger—but now I wonder, why is it you want to know so much about the White Island? Are you an archaeologist? What brings five such different and—excuse me—strange persons to my doorstep in these dangerous times? Have you been honest with me? I do not think so.” He stared around the room: Muir defiant, Jackson plainly annoyed, Reed looking at his shoes. No one met his gaze.

  “Legend says there was a great treasure on the island.” Marina said it calmly, but her words electrified the room. Muir made a strangled, gurgling sound, as if he was suffering some sort of seizure. Jackson’s hand edged inside the lapel of his jacket, toward the Colt under his arm; Grant reached for the Webley just in case. Only Reed and Sourcelles kept still, attentive. Sourcelles motioned for Marina to continue.

  “According to Arrian, the temple on the White Island attracted lavish offerings from sailors who put in there. He describes mountains of silver bowls and golden rings, and hoards of precious stones. A treasure trove.”

&nb
sp; Muir’s heart restarted; Jackson’s hand eased back into view. Grant kept his fingers wrapped round the Webley.

  “According to the text, they also offered many goats.” A conspiratorial smile passed between Sourcelles and Marina. Grant didn’t like it. “But no, as far as I am aware, Captain Kritskii found only stones. No treasure. Perhaps it was hidden in the bowels of the island. More probably it was looted long ago. The Black Sea has always been a haven for pirates and thieves.” He inclined his head toward them with a chill smile. “If you go there, be careful of what you find. There was a reason the ancient Greeks feared the Black Sea as a place beyond the confines of the world, a liminal region peopled by savages. Wild Amazons, flesh-eating Laestrygonians, Sirens and serpents.

  “You should not be fooled by the White Island’s chaste name. Too much Christianity has made us think of the afterlife as a happy place of harps and choirs and soft clouds. The Greeks knew better. Even for heroes it was an angry, torturous place. There is a story about the White Island in Philostratus that the ghost of Achilles instructs a passing merchant to bring him a certain slave girl from Asia Minor. When the merchant does so, Achilles feasts him royally in his temple, then sends him on. But as the merchant sails away he hears screams, horrible screams of impossible agony, coming from the island. It is Achilles, tearing off the girl’s limbs one by one.”

  Jackson got to his feet. “Well, thank you very much Mr. Sourcelles. I guess we’d better be going. You’ve been, uh, very helpful to us.”

  The others stayed seated. “What about the tablet?” said Muir. “That’s what we came for.”

  “What you came for?” Dark anger clouded Sourcelles’s voice. He stood. The fire cast a long shadow back over the room. “You do not come to my house to demand something. My collection is my own. I do not share it with anyone. Unless you have some quid pro quo to offer me in return?”