David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

He heard a crunch of footsteps on the path below, the sound of Jack and Hiebermeyer talking, and Rebecca singing quietly to herself. It was inspection time. He put down the lyre and pulled the cover over it, then quickly arranged his tools and laid the torch on the wall beside him, aimed directly at the inscription. He glanced up. The sky was dark now, an ominous storm-darkness from the east. The first drops of rain were falling against the wall, deepening the colour of the inscription, the contrast of the red lines with the dark paint of the background.

Jack appeared over the revetment, carrying his old khaki bag with the bulge in it. ‘Rebecca and Maurice stopped on the way up. Maurice wanted to show Rebecca how close Schliemann got in his trench to the passageway, where Maurice thinks the chamber at the end should be. It’ll give us a few moments alone.’ He stepped into the excavation, cleared his throat, and put his hand on his bag. ‘James. About the oldest inscription ever found in the Greek alphabet. I’ve got something I want to show you. But first, in readiness.’ He pulled out a bottle of Turkish red wine, uncorked it with his penknife and produced two plastic cups, putting them on the stone revetment and filling them close to the brim. ‘We can’t use what I’ve found. It’s a bit too precious. But it calls for some wine. You’ll see why.’

Dillen looked at the bag. He had known hours ago that Jack had found something in the wreck and had been itching to tell him, waiting for the right place. He looked intensely at him. ‘Jack. About never finding a Linear B inscription at Troy. I’ve got something to show you .’ He nodded his head in the direction of the lyre-player. Jack gazed at it, put down the wine bottle, and then took a step forward, kneeling, clutching his bag, staring along the beam of the torchlight. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he whispered.

‘You remember my tutorials all those years ago? The Linear B syllabary?’

‘I remember that one, the stick figure that looked like a horse,’ Jack murmured, pointing. ‘Number 49. I wrote an essay on it in an exam. An ideogram, but not meaning horse. Had everyone stumped.’

Dillen said nothing, but picked up the torch and angled it to the painting of the lyre-player, then back down again. Jack was silent for a moment, staring. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he whispered again. ‘Of course. It’s a lyre.’ He stared at the other three symbols, and Dillen could see him remembering, putting them together. Jack suddenly gasped, then turned to him, his eyes wide with astonishment. He looked like an eighteen year old again. Dillen nodded, and Jack looked back at the wall. ‘ Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘It says Homer. Homer.’ He grinned broadly. ‘Homer, the Bronze Age bard.’

‘Homer, who sat here like this lyre-player, who witnessed the fall of Troy,’ Dillen said.

Jack extended his right hand, still staring at the wall, and shook Dillen’s free hand. ‘Congratulations. Many congratulations. To see you find this is just about the biggest thrill I can imagine. Finding Homer.’

Dillen followed Jack’s gaze. This was real. And the bard’s secret poem, his greatest work, would not be lost to history. He felt a huge rush of adrenalin, like nothing he had ever felt before. Now he knew what drew Jack back to the quest again and again, the lure of lost treasures, of fantastic discovery. This had been the most exciting day of his life. They both continued staring at the wall, stock still, and then Jack began to undo the straps on his bag. ‘And now this.’

Dillen put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He could hear Rebecca singing again, coming up the path. ‘I think I know what Costas would say to you now,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think he’d say, “Game on.”

Jack took a deep breath, then exhaled forcefully. He looked up at the dark clouds overhead, now spattering the site with big raindrops. ‘I wonder what price there is to pay.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what it was that kept Homer from telling the world the truth about what really happened here. What made him write the Ilioupersis, but then hide it away. A truth maybe better left concealed.’

Dillen shook his head. ‘It’s too late to turn back now. I’m already well into translating the Ilioupersis. Jeremy brought me the final batch of lines today. And we’re doing the same to this site. Peeling away the layers, revealing more and more. We can’t undo it, wherever it’s taking us. And I keep looking across to Gallipoli, thinking of all those young men in 1915. The truth is never best left concealed. And if this is all about the truth of war, so be it. Maybe if Homer had revealed it three thousand years before, then those young men might never have gone to die with dreams of glory in their hearts, or the next generation twenty-five years later on the killing fields of Europe and Asia. I feel we owe it to them.’

Jack took a deep breath again, and nodded. ‘Of course you’re right. And maybe the price we pay is just more sweat and toil. Maurice has already got that sorted out. Dig a bigger hole. Just like Schliemann did.’ He grinned. They turned to see Maurice and Rebecca appear on the other side of the revetment, and watched them follow the line of the beam of torchlight through the rain to the inscription on the wall. Jack took out two more plastic cups and filled them. The rain spattered into the wine. He passed a cup to Dillen, then reached down and unbuckled his bag, taking out the bubble-wrapped package inside. He carefully unravelled the packaging until one of the beautiful pottery handles of the cup appeared, still wet with seawater. He paused, staring at Dillen, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘I wouldn’t dream of turning my back on Troy. You said it. Game on. And now for what I was going to show you. Maurice? Rebecca?’

Dillen looked up at the black sky, feeling the rain on his face, relishing it. Jack stood up and stared out over the darkness of the plain, just as Dillen imagined Priam had once done: Priam, peace-lover, guardian of bounteous prosperity, warmth and love in his heart. Just as Agamemnon, blood-soaked victor, had done. Jack turned round, revealing the pottery cup. Dillen looked at it with astonishment. He saw the inscription on it, the one word, wanax, king. It was incredible. But which king? Was it a cup of peace, or a cup of war? With two hands Jack raised the cup high into the night sky, holding it there, then bringing it down and carefully placing it on the floor of the Bronze Age room, in front of the painting of the lyre-player. He went back to the wine, and passed brimming cups to Maurice and Rebecca, then picked up the last one himself. He held the plastic to his lips, then smiled broadly at them. ‘A plastic cup is not quite the cup of a king. But I think this calls for a toast.’

T he jeep bumped and bounced along the shell-scarred road towards the line of dense pine forest visible a few kilometres ahead. Major Peter Mayne shifted in the front passenger seat and braced his left hand against the windscreen strut, wincing as a braced his left hand against the windscreen strut, wincing as a pothole sent a jolt of pain through the old wound in his shoulder. It had been a long war, and he was dead tired. Nine years before the walls of Troy. Homer had been on his mind for the first time in months, lines of ancient Greek he had loved to read before the war, lounging by the river Isis in Oxford with Hugh, then on the mountainside that glorious final summer in Greece overlooking the ruins of Mycenae, citadel of Agamemnon.

Today, on this bleak spring morning, he had felt for a moment as if he were a warrior in a chariot racing over the plain of Ilion, the vast unseen bulk of the army somewhere behind, and ahead the battlements of lofty-gated Troy itself. Yet he was no hero, and this desolation of fields and ditches was a no-man’s-land where the gods held no sway, and where the power of one man was nothing. By rights this should be the end of the war he was seeing, surely so close now, and he should be shuddering with relief. But there was a baleful presence out there, a horror they had yet to confront, as if flaming Troy might yet consume them all. Homer had come back to him because he believed in it, not just in the reality behind the myth but in the truth those words concealed. The truth of war. He had seen it with his own eyes. He was steeped in blood. He peered ahead, suddenly uneasy, remembering what he had been told about this place before they had set out that morning. The truth of war. He thought he knew.