by Tom Harper
Jackson’s face was hard and lifeless. “I guess you’ll find out now they’ve got their hands on it.”
“Nothing changes,” said Reed. He nodded at the carvings on the wall, the long tableaux of miniature men, horses, chariots and arms. In one of the panels two warriors stood between a mound of heaped-up armor and a pile of naked corpses. In another a man dragged a coffle of women toward the open door of a tent.
“Maybe,” said Muir. “But I doubt there’ll be many heroes in the next war for poets to sing about.”
The guard behind him muttered something. Muir nodded and turned to leave. “I’ll see you later, perhaps. Just wanted to clear things up for you, for old times’ sake. I hope it wasn’t too much of a surprise.”
“Not really,” said Reed, unexpectedly. “You always were a shit.”
Silence settled over the little room like dust. In the main chamber outside they could hear the clank and clatter of the temple’s treasure being swept up, occasional shouts from the soldiers. Jackson shuffled himself into a corner apart from the rest of them and pretended to sleep. Reed stared contemplatively at the carvings on the wall.
Grant wriggled his way closer to Marina. “Did they hurt you?”
“A little. Not much—they didn’t need to. Muir had told them everything.”
“If we ever get out of here I’ll kill him.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was smiling. “The look on Jackson’s face when he found out Muir was one of them . . . It was almost worth it.”
“He’s going to have the last laugh.” Grant twisted round so he could see her. “This isn’t anything to do with you. Maybe you could persuade them—your brother, after all—make them think . . .”
“No.” She tipped her head back against the wall. “Even if I could, I would not leave you.”
“We’ll get out of here somehow.”
“That does not improve your situation, necessarily,” said a voice from the door.
All four of them looked up. Belzig was standing in the doorway. He was no longer the proud Aryan archaeological conqueror he had been in the photograph. His back was stooped and the clumsy tailoring of his suit only emphasized the ragged body underneath. Heavy lines circled his eyes.
“Have you come to gloat?”
Belzig muttered something to the sentry and stepped into the square chamber. He walked across to the far wall and lifted the tarnished helmet from its alcove. He held it in front of him, staring into the bowl as if he could see the ghost of the ancient face inside, and mumbled something.
Grant stiffened. “What?”
“I have come to offer help.”
“Why?”
He jerked his head toward the door. “Do you think I am one of them? They are philistines, monsters. They do not know what they have. They will destroy this shield, this priceless artifact, and only to make a bomb. It was made by gods; now they take its power and make themselves gods.” He stared into the shadows inside the helmet. “Also, now they possess it they send me back to Siberia. Or worse.” He twitched with a shiver that seemed to come from the marrow of his bones. “I cannot go back there.”
Jackson sat up straight. “What are you suggesting?”
“They are few. Your soldiers fought well, killed many. Now there are only four guards, and Colonel Kurchosov and the English spy.” He reached into his suit pockets and pulled out two pistols, the Webley and Jackson’s Colt. “If I free you, you can kill them.”
“Are you doing this out of the kindness of your heart?”
Belzig looked puzzled by the idiom. “If you escape, you take me to America. You give me pardon. You know how they call it in Germany? A Persilschein.”
“Washes whiter,” Grant muttered. He stared at Belzig. He remembered Molho’s missing hand and the horrific corpse they had found in the Piraeus nightclub. He remembered Marina’s stories of Belzig’s activities on Crete. Most of all, he thought of the smirk in the photograph. The monsters which the ancient Greeks had tried to banish to the underworld—the hydras, gorgons, basilisks and Cyclops—still walked the earth. The man in front of him, with the rash on his face and the ill-fitting suit, was one of them.
“Sure,” said Jackson. “Who needs to rake up the past? You get us out of here, I promise you a first-class ticket to the USA. Maybe we’ll even find you a job at the Smithsonian.”
“And the shield—you protect it?”
“On my mother’s grave.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He pulled out a clasp-knife and squatted behind Jackson. In a moment Jackson’s hands were free. He rubbed his wrists, then grabbed the Colt while Belzig cut the others loose. Grant picked up the Webley. It was good to feel its weight back in his hand.
“Here’s what we do.”
Corporal Ivan Serotov gripped his sub-machine gun and leaned against the wall. He was desperate for a cigarette, but he resisted the temptation. He knew what the Colonel would do to him if he saw him smoking on duty. He could hold out. They had almost finished clearing the temple: by the door, his comrades were hauling out the last sack of treasure. Then it would be a short flight to Odessa, the cargo delivered and two weeks on the sandy beach at Yevpatoria. He wondered if all that black junk they had carted out was really gold. Surely it had to be, if the Colonel would spend precious time removing it. There had been so much of it. Surely no one would miss a single cup if it went missing in transit. That would fetch a few roubles in Odessa—which he could convert in turn into vodka or women. The prospect made him smile.
He heard footsteps and half turned to see Belzig walking out of the prisoners’ room. He was carrying what looked like a rusty helmet. Serotov scowled. He hadn’t marched all the way to Berlin just to end up taking orders from this Fascist. At least he wouldn’t be weighing down the plane on the way home. Kurchosov had made it clear what was to happen to him.
Belzig paused and jerked his head back toward the door. “More treasure there,” he said in broken Russian. “You should tell Kurchosov.”
A very un-Marxist notion started to form in Serotov’s mind. He turned round and peered through the open door. Three of the prisoners—the American, the old man and the woman—sat against the back wall with their hands behind their backs. The fourth . . .
Without warning a heavy shove against his back sent him stumbling into the room. He tripped on something and sprawled forward. He dropped his gun and threw out his arms—but the ground wasn’t there. He fell face first into the pit, screaming as he landed on the exposed bones jutting up like spikes from the floor. The last thing he saw was a pair of horns looming in front of his eyes. Then something heavy landed on him, an arm reached round his throat and he knew no more.
Grant stepped out of the pit and wiped the knife on his trousers. His hands were covered in blood. He glanced through the doorway to Belzig. “Is it clear?”
To his consternation, the small, heavy eyes were wide with confusion. “Ja—nein.” He shook his head. “They have gone.”
“What?” Grant picked up the tommy-gun and thrust it into Marina’s hands. “Cover me.” Crouched low, he dived through the door, rolled to his left and swept the Webley around the main chamber.
It was empty. A kerosene lantern sat on a wooden crate in the middle of the room, and the bundled-up shield leaned against the wall beside the entrance, but otherwise there was nobody. He lay there for a second in the dust, checking again, but there were no corners in the room, no shadows. It was empty.
He got to his feet and brushed himself off. Jackson and Marina had followed him out; further back, Reed was peering round the door.
“They’ve gone.”
“But the shield’s still here.” Keeping the tommy-gun trained on the main entrance, Marina edged across the room to where the package lay. “They can’t have abandoned it.”
“Maybe they’re having a cigarette break.”
Nobody knew what to do. There was nowhere to hide—but no one to hide from. They drifted into the middle of th
e room, under the towering dome, guns half raised against a non-existent threat.
A nasty thought crossed Grant’s mind. “You don’t think they’re about to set off . . .”
“Ivan? Bistro poidyon!”
A pale figure had appeared at the main entrance, standing over the door Grant had kicked in. He had a tommy-gun in his hands but it wasn’t raised. He stood there for a moment, staring at them stupidly—and, stupidly, they stared back. Then he turned and ran.
“Nein!” Belzig, who was nearest, dropped the helmet and ran through the door into the passage beyond. Grant heard feet clatter up the stone stairs, then angry shouts and a shot.
“No—wait.”
Grant threw himself to the side of the room a split second before the explosion. From outside, a deep, booming roar shook the dome of the temple; it rolled down the passage and burst into the room like an ocean wave. The bronze door was torn off its hinges and flung across the chamber; the lamp fell over and went out. Darkness swallowed the room. A great cloud of dust and debris blew in through the door, billowing out to fill the high vault. Jackson, who had been standing in front of the door, was snatched up by the blast and hurled against the back wall in a blizzard of stone. Rocks rained down; Grant covered his head with his hands, while Marina hid herself under the shield. Only Reed, safe in the side chamber, was spared.
Grant didn’t hear the noise subside—his ears were still ringing—but he knew the worst was over when the floor stopped shaking. He peered through his fingers, then looked up. Dust and smoke still choked the room, but at least the rocks had stopped falling.
He got to his feet and staggered over to Marina, trying not to twist his ankle on the debris strewn across the floor. By the entrance, a pool of water was spreading across the floor. “Are you OK?”
She couldn’t hear him—he couldn’t hear himself—but she understood. She nodded, then felt her leg and winced. “Maybe not so good.”
“We need to get out of here.” Grant found the tommy gun on the floor where Marina had dropped it. Its barrel was bent like a paperclip. He kicked it aside and ran to the entrance, splashing through the shallow puddle that had formed round it. It was a testament to the ancient builders’ skill that the vast door frame remained intact. The lintel alone must have weighed a hundred tons.
Grant peered round the corner and blinked. The top of the staircase had been blown open: it was no longer a tunnel but a deep trench open to the sky. The roof had fallen in, and huge slabs of rock now formed a steep ramp up to the world above. Water slopped over the edge and trickled down the slope, a new stream flowing between the cracked boulders and rubble into the temple. Somewhere underneath it all, he supposed, was Belzig.
He waited a moment, watching for movement. He saw none—but then, he couldn’t see much. Billowing clouds of dust still filled the air, diffusing the sun into a muddy half-light. He would have to risk it. But not without protection.
He ran back to where Marina lay and ripped the coverings off the shield. Leaned up against the wall, to the side of the door, it had been well protected from the blast. He spun it round. The leather strap, if it had ever had one, had rotted away long ago, but there were two brass rings sticking out of the back. He slid his arm through them and lifted.
The weight was immense. Grant wondered how any man could ever have carried it into battle and still managed to wield a sword or a spear. Perhaps, he admitted, Achilles had been worth his reputation. But it was better than being shot. He walked back to the doorway, resting the shield against his thigh, and checked the passage again. Still nothing but smoke and dust. He edged through the door and began to climb, picking his way over the rubble. It was slow, awkward work: keeping the shield in front of his body as he dragged himself up the broken slope. The rocks grew larger; the cracks between them widened. But the dust was thinning, the light getting brighter. He scrambled up the final incline, his feet slipping and sliding on the wet stone, and staggered into the light.
The first thing he saw was the bodies. Whether it had been a stray bullet or whether the Russians had panicked when they saw Belzig trying to escape, the charges must have gone off too soon. Two Russian soldiers lay sprawled on the ground like abandoned toys, bloodied and battered. Dust gathered in the creases of their uniforms.
He heard a sound behind him and spun round, bringing up the shield to cover his chest. That saved his life. The shield shuddered with the impact, and Grant’s body with it; dirt and corrosion flaked away to reveal gold and bronze underneath. But it didn’t break.
Grant looked over the shield’s rim. Kurchosov was standing a few yards away, beside one of the monolithic statues. The explosion must have surprised him too: his uniform was torn, his face smeared with dirt and blood. His eyepatch had been ripped away to reveal the scar beneath: a puckered contortion of skin that twisted together into a knot where the eye should have been. He looked dazed.
Grant lifted the Webley and shot him through the eye. The .455 caliber bullet went straight in. Afterward, Grant could have sworn he heard the hiss of hot lead sizzling on the eyeball for a fraction of a second. A geyser of blood erupted from the socket, and the rock walls around them echoed with a hideous roar. Grant shot him twice more and the noise stopped.
Beyond the corpse, at the base of the statue, something moved. Grant looked up, just in time to see a shadow disappearing behind it. Muir. He crouched down behind the shield, glad to rest its weight on the ground, and aimed the Webley at the pillar. The barrel fanned from side to side as he wondered whether Muir would come right or left.
“Give up,” he called. After so much noise, his voice sounded stark in the misty silence. “Kurchosov’s dead.”
No answer. Grant slipped his left arm out of the shield’s loops. Balancing it against his knee, he picked up a small rock and threw it toward the pillar. It skittered across the rubble and came to rest at the foot of the statue. Still there was no response.
“Muir?”
Something grated on the stone behind him. He turned; the shield overbalanced and fell on the ground with a resounding clang. He lifted the Webley—and stopped himself just in time. It was Jackson—but not the Jackson who had breezed into the hotel in Athens in his white tennis shoes, all sunshine and pomade. His hair was wild, his clothes torn. His face, under the blood and bruises, was pale as a ghost. He clambered out of the hole and stared numbly at the gun pointing at him.
“Shit.” The voice was dead, past caring. “Not you too.”
“I thought you were Muir. He’s . . .”
Grant’s head whipped round as he heard rapid footsteps beyond the pillar. He sprang to his feet. Through the haze of dust he saw a dim figure sprinting away. He loosed a shot—then, when the figure kept going, he started to run.
The air cleared as he descended the valley. Now he could see Muir plainly, his coat-tails flapping behind him and his wiry arms jerking spasmodically as he scuttled toward the top of the cliff and the waterfall. He still had a gun. Grant saw him start to turn and immediately fired the Webley. It was a wild shot: he had little chance of hitting him while running at full tilt, but it changed Muir’s mind. He put his head back down and carried on.
But he could not go far. He came to the top of the cliff and stopped. Grant slowed to a walk. Muir turned. If he’d raised his pistol even an inch, Grant would have shot him right there. Instead, Muir held it away from his body and let it drop over the edge of the cliff. The two men stood there for a moment, face to face, breathing hard.
“Mind if I smoke?”
Grant nodded.
Muir reached into his jacket and carefully took out the ivory cigarette case. He snapped it open. When he’d lit the cigarette, he threw the match into the stream. The current caught it and propelled it over the waterfall. Muir watched it go. “You’ve chosen the wrong side,” he said without bitterness. “You’ll see. The Yanks’ll ruin everything.”
“I didn’t choose any side. You chose me.”
Muir took a long drag o
n his cigarette. The smoke seemed to inflate him somehow: he stood up taller, lifted his chin. “I suppose they’ll hang me when we get back.”
Grant shrugged. “We’re not at war—not officially.”
“Better if we were. Then they might shoot me. At least I’d die with a fucking cigarette . . .”
“You Red traitor asshole son-of-a-bitch.”
A blur of movement rushed past Grant and flew at Muir. Muir lifted his fists to defend himself but it was only a gesture, without strength. Jackson’s momentum carried him straight into Muir’s body. They wrestled for a moment on the edge of the cliff; then, locked together, they fell.
Grant rushed to the edge and looked down. He was just in time to see the splash—then nothing. The black water closed over them. A few minutes later he saw their corpses bob to the surface by the spout where the pool poured into the stream. The bodies teetered for a moment on the lip of the weir, then vanished.
Grant turned back. As he did, he felt his foot kick something. It slithered across the damp rock and came to rest on a patch of moss. Muir’s cigarette case. The dull ivory stared at him like an eyeball on the black moss, white as death.
CHAPTER 33
Oxford. Trinity Term 1947
Homer never intended that the shield of Achilles should be considered as an actual, literal object. The shield, as described in the Iliad, is meant as a metaphor for the world—a flat disc, made by a god, surrounded by the Ocean river, in whose compass lie all the stars, sun and moon; war and peace, commerce and agriculture; work and leisure; gods, men and animals.”
The undergraduate looked up nervously. He’d padded this paragraph out a bit in a slightly desperate attempt to eat up tutorial time. So far, his tutor didn’t seem to have noticed. It didn’t occur to him that his tutor might be quite as eager as he was to let the tutorial slip by painlessly.
“But, in reality, this glittering artifact is forged from words, not metal. Clearly, the poet expects his readers to suspend their disbelief during the ecphrasis. Such a cumbersome weapon would have been wholly impractical on the field of battle. For all its poetic depth and power to dazzle, we must—with regret—dismiss the shield as fiction, a triumph of Homer’s imagination, written at a time when the technical practice of Bronze Age warfare was merely legend.”