David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘What if I told you we’re on the trail of the greatest treasure ever found underwater?’

‘You found gold?’

Jack came level with Costas and held the cup in front of him. ‘Not gold. Something more precious. A word. A word in an ancient language. One word. One word that opens the door on the reality of the Trojan War. On the reality of the wreck below us. Not one wreck, but two.’

‘The ship of Agamemnon? The wreck in Dillen’s text?’

Jack’s heart pounded with excitement. The lion-prowed ship of Agamemnon. ‘I saw timbers, Costas. Not just shapes in the darkness. Real timbers. I touched them. And this cup is Mycenaean.’

‘So we’re going back down there? To defuse mines? I mean, to hunt for the greatest treasure? For the Shield of Achilles?’

‘You bet.’

Costas punched the water. ‘ Yes.’

‘ W hat the hell is that?’ Jeremy Haverstock stood in the middle of the ancient passageway leading beneath Troy, staring in wide-eyed astonishment at the crumbling wall of rubble and earth he had been excavating. He could barely believe it. Hiebermeyer had led him and Rebecca straight from Dillen’s excavation to this passageway – a deep trench open to the sky – and set them to work. He had been at Troy less than three hours, and now this. He was literally reeling. The trowel slipped from his hand and hit the ground, but he remained standing, swaying slightly, staring. Rebecca stopped brushing and stood up beside him, then gasped. The shadows created by the late-afternoon sun made strange illusions of shapes along the walls, but there was no doubt about this one. Jeremy reached out and put the flat of his hand on it. ‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘That shape. It looks Egyptian.’

‘It’s fantastic,’ Rebecca murmured, putting her hand out but not quite touching it. She shivered, in spite of the heat. ‘A little spooky.’

A bobbing light from a headlamp appeared and Dillen came up from the unexcavated end of the passageway, some ten metres ahead of them, where the sloping walls narrowed as it led into the side of the ancient mound of the citadel.

‘Where’s Maurice?’ Jeremy said hoarsely, still staring at the wall.

‘Having his Schliemann moment,’ Dillen replied, oblivious to their discovery, stopping to glance at a pair of crows flying overhead. ‘Digging all by himself at the end of the passageway. Jack went straight from the helicopter to find him. Did you see when he passed you, Jack’s got his trusty old khaki bag with him, and it’s got a big bulge in it? He says he’s got something incredible to show me. All he said is that an hour ago it was on the sea bed. He says it has to be the right place, the right time. I told him two can play at that game. I’ve got something to show him. We’ve got a rendezvous at my excavation up on the walls after supper. Showdown time.’

‘Maurice needs to come and see this. And Jack. Like right now.’

‘See what?’

‘Be careful, James,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’re being watched.’

Dillen gave her a startled glance. ‘What do you mean?’

‘In front of Jeremy.’

Dillen followed their gaze towards the wall of rubble, perplexed. He stood back, then caught his breath. ‘Good Lord.’

A huge sculpted eye was staring out at them. It was almond-shaped, like the eye of an eagle. Jeremy snapped out of his trance and reached up to pull away a lump of compacted earth beside the eye, and suddenly the entire remaining conglomerate fell away, revealing a massive stone face. They stared in astonishment. The face was about two metres high and a metre across, and was topped by a conical helmet, cracked and broken off at the top. ‘This has got to be the image of a king,’ Jeremy exclaimed.

‘Which one?’ Rebecca said with bated breath.

‘Not a Greek one,’ Dillen murmured, staring. ‘This is an eastern king, with that conical helmet, those eyes. The Mycenaean Greek kings, kings like Agamemnon, were mortals, first among men. We don’t even have any statues of them. But this one is different. He’s a god-king, larger than life, in the eastern fashion.’ He stared more closely. ‘All-powerful, perhaps once a warrior, but this is the image of a benign king, I’d say. Not someone who flayed his enemies alive. Someone who was confident in peace, at least when this statue was made.’

‘What about Agamemnon’s adversary?’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Priam, King of Troy?’

Dillen’s voice was tense with excitement. ‘It’s possible. Just possible. Priam is one of the few characters in the Iliad who might be known from other contemporary records. The clay tablets of the Hittites – the powerful empire to the east of Troy – mention a Piyamaradu operating in this area. That name could easily be rendered as Priam. The Hittites saw Piyamaradu as a renegade, establishing his own independent kingdom, aligning himself more with the Ahhiyawa, the Achaeans, the Hittite term for the Mycenaeans. To me, this all fits very convincingly. Homer’s Priam is powerful, an old warrior, but he’s a king of peace, not a king of war. He’d enjoyed good relations with the Mycenaeans before Agamemnon came along. He’d found a way of breaking away from the warlike tradition of the Hittites and becoming part of the great civilization of the Aegean; his sons had even become heroes, champions, in the Greek tradition. Somehow I can see all that in this face.’ Dillen stared pensively at the statue. ‘But we’d need an inscription to be sure. And some way of dating this sculpture with certainty to about the later thirteenth century BC.’

Rebecca gently brushed the huge stone nose, waited a moment for the dust to settle, and then peered closely. ‘I can tell you one thing. In my lightning tour this morning, Maurice gave me a five-minute tutorial about building materials. Said it was the first thing you have to know about when you look at a new site. This isn’t the local limestone, the stuff used in the city walls. Look at the surface. It’s granite. I’ve seen that in the British Museum. All those statues of the pharaohs. That has to be Egyptian granite.’

Dillen peered closely. ‘Good Lord. You’re absolutely right. Egyptian red granite, at Troy.’

‘So how on earth does that get here?’ Jeremy asked.

‘We know the Egyptians shipped obelisks and huge stone blocks down the Nile,’ Dillen replied, thinking hard. ‘So why not overseas too? The Egyptians traded with Troy. For a people who had built the pyramids, offloading a few blocks of granite at Besik Bay and dragging them a couple of kilometres over the plain of Troy would not have been a big problem.’

‘But this isn’t the image of a pharaoh,’ Jeremy said.

Dillen shook his head. ‘No. It’s Egyptian stone, and very probably an Egyptian sculptor. The Trojans didn’t do this kind of thing. There was no tradition of monumental sculpture here. So they import the stone, and they import the sculptor too. The details, the style of those eyes, look Egyptian. But this is a local king. I’ll stake my career on it. A king of Troy.’

‘And I think we may just be one step closer to who he was,’ Jeremy said, squatting down. ‘Check this out. The sculpture’s integral to the wall, not earlier or later. The limestone blocks of the wall have been shaped around it. And look at the cut of the blocks, the slope of the wall, those vertical offsets. It’s what excited Maurice so much about this passageway. It’s the same as your excavation on the citadel, James. It’s all contemporaneous. Exactly the same construction techniques as the ramparts of Troy VII. If ever there was a Troy of the Trojan War, then this is it. And if there ever was a King Priam, then that’s him. I just know it.’

‘ Whoa,’ Rebecca said slowly. ‘We need to tell Maurice about this. Big time.’