David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘Dad.’ Rebecca looked at Jack defiantly. ‘It’s not like I’m a little girl any more. I’m seventeen. I don’t need a chaperone.’

Jack paused. ‘Remember Ben’s reaction when you marched off alone to organize the repatriation of a work of art stolen by the Nazis? There are a lot of shady characters out there. Art and antiquities are big business on the black market.’

‘Dad. I’m going to see a lonely old man in a flat in Bristol. And James will be with me.’

Jack looked at her, shaking his head, then at Dillen. ‘We’ll talk about it.’

‘Good. That’s a yes, then. We’re going. Thanks, Dad. And I’ll look after Professor Dillen, don’t worry.’

Hiebermeyer came out of the excavation room carrying a large perspex board with a plan of Troy taped to it. He was still streaked with dirt, and his eyes were gleaming with excitement.

‘You got a result?’ Jack asked.

‘Better than you could have imagined. Wundervoll.’ He turned to the others. ‘When Jack and I nipped back to that sculpture during dinner, it was because I wanted to take photographs. I e-mailed them through to the institute in Alexandria. I’ve got a brilliant student there who specializes in Egyptian New Kingdom portrait sculpture. She can spot an individual sculptor’s hand. She knew this one immediately. She calls him Seth IV. She knows him from Thebes. It’s incredibly exciting, because three of his four other known sculptures show officials of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the later thirteenth century BC. And the fourth is even better. It’s a recently revealed statue of Usermaatre-setpenre, otherwise known as Rameses the Great, died 1213

‘ Perfect,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Priam would have been about contemporary with Rameses, wouldn’t he? So this sculptor, Seth IV, takes a commission to sculpt the greatest king of Troy, and comes up here with his stone. That clinches it for me.’

‘We’ll do a laser scan and compare the data from the other statues. It’s like fingerprint analysis. But she can tell by eye. You can completely trust it.’

‘Another small step closer to the Trojan War,’ Dillen murmured, shaking his head. ‘I never thought I’d see anything like this in my lifetime.’

Jack pointed at the board. ‘What have you got there?’

Hiebermeyer put it on the ground between them and knelt in front. ‘Look at this. We’ve dug out enough of the passageway walls to project the walls inward to their apex. I’m convinced it’ll be a circular chamber or a tomb.’ He stabbed a finger at the centre of the plan. ‘I’m putting the ground-penetrating radar over that spot first thing tomorrow morning. And I’ve worked out what we need to get through the remaining rubble. I’ve got a crack team coming up from the institute in Egypt. Experienced at digging out pyramids, monumental tombs. Real archaeologists. And Aysha’s coming. She’s my top hieroglyphics expert.’

‘You mean she’s your wife,’ Rebecca said.

‘This is science, Rebecca. Science. I’m talking about assembling the best possible archaeological team. Period.’

‘Dad says archaeology isn’t a science. He says it’s all about emotional understanding of the past. About passion. About your own passion, Maurice. Aysha tells me she really wants children. This would be the perfect place to get serious, don’t you think? Professor Dillen and I will be away. You’ve got the excavation house to yourselves. Jeremy can go and camp with his sleeping bag up on the ruins, can’t you, Jeremy? What about it, Hiemy?’

Hiebermeyer was silent for a moment, apparently absorbed in the plan. Then he looked up, narrowing his eyes at Rebecca. ‘Here’s what Hiemy thinks. You remember how Hiemy offered Rebecca the job of site assistant at the mummy necropolis next summer? Hiemy thinks that if Rebecca’s excellent plan comes to fruition, that job brief might just change. It might change to nanny.’

Rebecca looked aghast. ‘ Not,’ she said vehemently.

Jack bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. He cleared his throat, and turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Hieroglyphics,’ he murmured, shaking his head doubtfully. ‘Is that really what you saw down there in that tunnel, Maurice?’

Hiebermeyer gave him a defiant look. ‘Did you really see the lion-shaped prow of a Mycenaean galley on the sea bed this afternoon?’

Rebecca looked at Dillen. ‘Dad has a bet with Maurice that he’s going to find the Shield of Achilles before Maurice finds the palladion.’

‘An extra team from Egypt,’ Jack murmured, scratching his stubble. ‘That sounds like an unfair advantage. That raises the stakes. It’s a crate of whisky, not a bottle. And James chooses the malt. It’s for him, after all.’

‘Done,’ Hiebermeyer said.

Costas stood up, spun his spanner, checked his watch and looked at Jeremy. ‘That reminds me. I’ve got an Aquapod to fix. The chopper’s waiting. Want to come and help?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

Dillen stood up as well. ‘And I need to go back to my trench. To clean up.’

Hiebermeyer wiped his face, leaving a streak like war paint across his forehead. He looked at Dillen seriously. ‘Of course you do, Professor.’ He grinned. ‘Inspection in half an hour.’

J ames Dillen walked down from the excavation house to the dirt lane that encircled the site of Troy, on the edge of the rich humic plain that seemed to lap the ancient citadel like a sea. There were plain that seemed to lap the ancient citadel like a sea. There were tomatoes everywhere, rows of lush plants in the fields, ripe red fruit dropped from carts and squashed on the trackway, oozing into the stagnant pools that lined the fields. He remembered what a French soldier had called the plain of Troy: marais sanglant, bloody marsh, after the French had fought the Turks to a standstill beside the Dardanelles in 1915. The dark waters of the past always seemed close to the surface here, as if to step off the track would be to risk being swallowed up in it; to navigate this place meant knowing the latticework of dykes and causeways used by the farm workers who dotted the fields, visible here and there like distant scavengers picking their way through the aftermath of battle.

Dillen stopped for a moment, and looked out. The sun was nearly set far out over the Aegean, leaving a fiery orange glow that deepened to dark red from west to east. The ancient stage-set of war was all visible here: the plain of Ilion, the river Scamander behind the low line of trees to the east, in front of the place where the ancient shoreline had been, an arrow-shot away from where he stood now. He could see across the distant waters of the Dardanelles to Cape Helles, the westernmost point of the Gallipoli peninsula, capped by the stark white tower of the memorial to the British dead of 1915. Two nights before, with Jack on Seaquest II, they had gone on deck and seen the far-off speckle of phosphorescence in the surf, on the beaches where so many had died. It was as if the ghosts still lingered there, dancing as their corpses had once danced in the lapping waves. Now he saw the same coast rimmed red, where the setting sun reflected off the phosphorescence; above it the ravines and gullies shimmered white, where the shattered bones of men lay too thick to nurture new life, as if the storm of death still reeked and echoed across the years. Behind him the crumbled citadel of Troy was verdant, overgrown, but it too seemed gutted by history, a place that never again would pulse to the sounds of running feet and laughter and children, gone for ever in the whirling vortex of war three thousand years before.

He closed his eyes for a moment, savouring the silence, the preternatural stillness that followed the afternoon wind. Then a diesel tractor coughed to life somewhere away in the fields, and a donkey brayed. He slapped his arm, leaving a bloody smear. Mosquitoes did not seem to live on the citadel, and it was a good enough reason for getting off the plain. He stepped off the path into Schliemann’s trench and made his way towards his excavation, high above the trench on a grassy knoll that marked the northern edge of the ancient city. He scrambled over the makeshift wooden revetment and into the Bronze Age house, pausing, as he always did, to remember where he was, standing on a floor that had been buried for three millennia: a house whose last inhabitants had seen the great beacon burning high above the wall, and had watched the men of Mycenae storm across the plain towards them on a wave of destruction, harbingers of rape and fire and death.