David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘James! Professor! Where are you?’ The voice came from somewhere down in the trench dug by Schliemann, on the narrow path they had cleared up the side. Dillen sat back up and peered over the wall. He had recognized the American accent. ‘Jeremy? Is that you?’

‘Coming up.’ A tall young man with a shock of blond hair and glasses came into view, wearing a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. ‘Only just arrived,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Maurice sent me straight up here. Wanted me out of the way, I think. Said you had something to show me.’

‘It’s good to see you, Jeremy. I meant to say how much I enjoyed your paper on the Hereford Mappa Mundi library at the conference last month. Marvellous stuff. What is it now, three years since you discovered it?’

‘Three and a half.’ Jeremy stepped over the wall and sat down, taking a long swig from a water bottle and shaking Dillen’s outstretched hand. ‘And then a year later, the Roman library at Herculaneum, and the reason we’re here. Which reminds me. I’ve got some more lines of the ancient text for you to translate.’ He wiped his mouth and put down the bottle. ‘And I’ve got some great news.’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘Our benefactor. Ephram Jacobovich. He’s made another ton of money, with the transition to wi-fi. Always one step ahead of the game. So much for the recession. The reason I couldn’t come out here earlier was that Maria and I were having a meeting with him. We didn’t even need to make a case. Jack had prepped him completely. We get all the research funding we need for the Herculaneum library, enough to buy in the top specialists from around the world. Which is good, because I’ve decided I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in a manuscripts room staring at ancient texts under a microscope.’

‘But you’re brilliant at it. And you love it.’

‘But there’s a problem. Costas taught me to dive.’

‘Ah.’ Dillen smiled. ‘Your excellent friend Costas.’ He paused. ‘So how is Maria?’

‘Once the funding’s in place, she’s taking a sabbatical in Mexico. She’s got family there. Did you know she was about to be married? I probably shouldn’t tell you. Some professor she met at a conference. It was a bit of a whirlwind. But then when it came to it, she bailed.’

‘It’s because she really wants Jack,’ Dillen murmured.

‘And Jack wants her. But he also wants Katya. And neither of them are women you want to mess with.’

‘Bit of a problem for Jack.’

‘After the last time they nearly hitched up, Maria said Jack was like one of those famous British sea captains of the Napoleonic period, just like one of his revered Howard ancestors. She said it must be in his blood. Brilliant at sea, commanding ships and leading men, but completely useless on land, at managing his affairs, so to speak. Always doing a runner back to his ship.’

‘She told you that?’

‘I’m her protege, remember? I may be fifteen years younger than her, but she tells me everything.’

Dillen smiled. ‘So tell me about your flight here. Good view?’

‘Fantastic,’ Jeremy replied. ‘The Lynx helicopter picked me up at Istanbul airport and we flew right over the Sea of Marmara and down the Dardanelles, along the Gallipoli peninsula and then south over the strait towards Troy. You would have heard us, about mid-morning. The pilot’s a military history buff and gave me a running commentary on the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. Then as we flew over the plain of Troy it was like we were war-gaming Homer. Brilliant. After that we flew west and dropped down on Seaquest II for lunch, before coming here.’

‘What’s the mood on board?’

‘Optimistic. Very optimistic. I didn’t see Jack because he was in the chamber decompressing after a dive, but everyone was upbeat. You know they found a Byzantine shipwreck? Not what Jack wanted, but encouraging. The crew thinks he’s on to something else, he’s seen something more down there he’s not letting on about. He thinks he keeps these things secret, but the crew can tell. Those Napoleonic-period captains Maria talked about? Seaquest II ’s crew have the same kind of faith in Jack that those naval crews had in their captains. They also know him a lot better than he thinks. They even call him Lucky Jack.’

‘He’s been called that as long as I’ve known him.’ Dillen smiled. ‘I was too young to serve in the Second World War, but the schoolmaster who taught me Greek had fought through North Africa and Europe with the SAS. He told me that in a tight unit, a soldier can always tell when their leader’s on to something, a kind of sixth sense, like a hunter knowing his dog has sensed prey before the dog has made a move.’

‘Jack was in the navy, of course.’

‘As a diver, special forces. But it was only a short-service commission, at the end of his undergraduate degree. He always wanted to be an archaeologist, but he had a strong feeling for keeping up his family tradition in the navy. Howards were there all the way, from the Spanish Armada to the Napoleonic Wars and beyond.’

‘Military training has stood him in good stead,’ Jeremy said.

‘He’s a scholar and an adventurer, not a warrior. Too much of a maverick for peacetime soldiering, that’s what my old teacher Hugh said about Jack. Wouldn’t be any good at taking orders from people he doesn’t respect. He’s his own boss. But he’s got a hard edge, and I wouldn’t want to put him in a corner. Or threaten anyone dear to him. I’ve always felt that. And when he makes a decision, he’ll stick to it.’

‘You might want to hear Maria’s views on that.’ Jeremy squatted down, picked up a small sherd of blackened pottery and rubbed a finger over the burnished surface, then looked round him. ‘So you think this room’s late Bronze Age, the time of the Trojan War?’

Dillen nodded enthusiastically, and knelt down beside Jeremy. ‘It’s very similar to houses built just inside the eastern rampart of Troy VII, Homeric Troy. But I think this one was grander. The view over the plain would have been magnificent. It may even have been part of the palace. That’s my pet theory. The only surviving part of the palace that once capped the citadel. What do you think?’

‘King Priam’s palace,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘That’s a hell of a shout line. Distinguished Homeric scholar joins old student’s dig and three days later discovers the lost palace of King Priam of Troy. Maybe this was the very room where his son Paris kept Helen after abducting her from Greece. Maybe we’re standing right in the crucible of the whole legend.’

‘Maybe we are,’ Dillen said quietly. ‘In more ways than you might imagine. You’ll be amazed. I’ve got some incredible stuff to show you. A few more radical theories. But first things first.’

‘Go on.’

‘The house is built in typical Troy fashion, a socle of stone with the upper storey made of flat sun-dried mud brick. A few courses of brick survive, over there, baked red by the fire that left that charred mass. Maurice thinks that’s the remains of a beacon fire. Can you believe it? A beacon fire from the Trojan War. Now look over there. You can see the beam slots in the stone below the bricks that once held the cross-timbers for the floor above. We’re in a basement room, dug into the mass of compacted mud brick that makes up the citadel mound. The earth beyond the bricks contains detritus from the earlier phases of the city, stretching back to the beginning of the Bronze Age two thousand years before.’

‘Phenomenal,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘So what makes you sure this house is late Bronze Age?’ He held up the sherd. ‘Pottery?’

Dillen pursed his lips. ‘We’ve found a few Mycenaean sherds, painted fine-ware. And radiocarbon dating of a charred reed mat has come up with the right time frame. But the main evidence is structural. Did you have a chance to look at the outer wall of the house as you came up? It slopes slightly inward, from bottom to top, probably to give stability against earthquakes. And the wall’s divided by vertical offsets every five metres or so, made of rectangular hewn masonry, each offset providing a strengthened base for a timber frame in the wall of the house above.’ Dillen slapped his hands in excitement. ‘It’s exactly the same technique as the rampart outside, the city wall of Troy VII, the citadel at the time of the destruction, about 1200 BC. The time of the Trojan War.’