David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Schliemann let out a shuddering sigh, suddenly exhausted. He had said it. He felt an indescribable sense of relief, but also huge urgency. The wheels were now truly in motion. He gave Hoar a tired smile. ‘My dear senator. I am an archaeologist, remember? When I speak of a key, I mean a key.’ He reached into his inside pocket, to the heavy object he had been carrying in the satchel, wrapped up by Sophia. He hesitated, then pointed with his other hand down the passageway. ‘When Sophia and I dug here in secret all those years ago, I found a way through to the end, inside a natural tunnel created where blocks had fallen down from the top of the walls, forming air spaces. I saw inscriptions along the sides of the walls. Inscriptions . I could not make them out, but they seemed to be Bronze Age, pictograms, linear symbols unrecognizable to me, even hieroglyphics. And at the end, far ahead of my reach, I shoved my lantern forward and saw it. A great bronze door, the door to the chamber that must lie beyond. In the centre of the door above a metal crossbar was an angular shaped depression in a circle. A keyhole, gentlemen. And this is the key.’

He took out the package, and unwrapped it. They all gasped as he let the cloth fall away. It was a metal cross, about twenty centimetres wide, equilateral, with bars extending at right angles from each arm. It was gold, lustrous and dazzling in the flickering gaslight, with a silvery metal as the core.

Gladstone reached out and touched it. ‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘ Of course. The symbol you write about with such passion in your books. The symbol you found incised on pots at Troy. The symbol, as I recall, you had painted into the decoration of your house in Athens.’

‘Schliemann the treasure-hunter, again,’ Hoar said. ‘Leaving clues for posterity.’

‘This is the shape of the keyhole in the bronze door ahead of us?’ Gladstone asked.

Schliemann nodded, flushed with excitement. ‘I give you the hakenkreuz, gentlemen. The hook-cross. What in Sanskrit is called the swastika. The symbol of the Aryan peoples, the first Indo-Europeans who came from the east, over the Black Sea, the people I believe were the first settlers at Troy. This was their symbol. The symbol of the first civilization. The symbol of Troy. And this metal is not just gold, but meteoritic. Some ancient sacred discovery, shaped in this way for the kings of Troy.’

Bismarck reached out, then let his hand drop. ‘I know this symbol,’ he growled. ‘The hakenkreuz has new meaning for the nationalists in Germany, the volk -movement. There are secret societies, those who hark back to an Aryan past. It seems,’ he said, looking at it uneasily, ‘to stand for all the possibilities of the past, and all the dangers of the future. Coming events cast their shadows before.’

‘Where did you find this?’ Gladstone asked.

‘It was Sophia, not me,’ Schliemann said. ‘I lifted the mask, but Sophia led me there.’

‘The mask?’ Gladstone said incredulously. ‘You mean the Mask of Agamemnon? At Mycenae? ’

‘Have no fear, my dear Gladstone,’ Schliemann said, touching the other man’s arm. ‘Your eloquent argument in the preface to my book Mycenae still holds truth. I too am convinced that the shaft graves contain Agamemnon and his family. But when I raised the golden mask, it was not a skeleton I saw beneath. In my mind’s eye I saw Agamemnon, yes, a spectral image that flashed before me, so when I told the world I had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon I was telling the truth. But what I found beneath the mask was this. The hakenkreuz, the swastika. I give you the most astonishing find I have ever made. I give you the palladion, gentlemen.’

‘The palladion?’ Gladstone breathed, staring at the cross. ‘But the palladion was a wooden statue, surely, in the temple at Troy? The statue of the goddess Pallas, stolen by Odysseus?’

‘That story may well have been true. There are those who believe that statue found its way to Rome, and then to Constantinople, where it remains concealed to this day. The story would have suited Agamemnon. To steal the statue of the protecting deity was to steal the soul of a city. It meant Troy was doomed. But it would also have suited him that the story concealed the truth, that the palladion was not a wooden statue but this cross, the key to that chamber ahead of us. It may well have been concealed in the temple, in some underground repository, perhaps, a holy of holies, its whereabouts known only to the great kings who came to convene in that chamber to keep the peace.’

‘Agamemnon had been one of those kings,’ Hoar murmured.

Schliemann nodded. ‘Yet years later, he stood here, at this very spot, that fateful night of fire and death, dripping with other men’s blood, slamming down his great sceptre, his bloody sword hanging from his other hand, staring at that door ahead, remembering. All he wanted was that chamber shut for ever, and this entranceway buried. Shutting the door would close off the chamber of power that had thwarted his own ambitions, had prevented his ascendancy above all the others. He had killed Priam, and now he would seal off the chamber that had counselled peace, not war. Those fallen blocks of masonry ahead of us were not the result of some natural convulsion, but were deliberately caused. And having buried the chamber, he would find the key, take it from this place, and conceal it for all time. He stormed up to the temple ahead of his men, the fires raging around him, the cries of women filling the air, and found the palladion, then took it back with him to his citadel at Mycenae. And where better to conceal it than in the hallowed burial ground of his ancestors, behind a mask that showed his own face, the ultimate act of power. Then, standing over the grave of his forefathers, Agamemnon could feel as mighty as a god, could raise his staff to Mount Olympus and shake it with contempt. The age of gods had ended. The age of men had begun. And he is there somewhere, his own burial, I am sure of it. What matters is that we have found the palladion. What matters is that we can turn back history, stand in front of those doors as all those kings before Agamemnon did, and reach up again with this key.’

‘What would we find?’ Hoar asked quietly.

Schliemann paused. ‘I do not know what we will find. I do not know . It may be an empty chamber, a place where treasures of metal were once stored, a council chamber with empty seats. But even that could be enough to prove my theory, so that we may go forth with confidence and proclaim it to the world.’

‘What would you have us do?’ Bismarck said.

‘A year from now, a year to the day, we will reconvene at this spot. The arrangements will be made with the utmost secrecy, and we must not speak a word of this until we are agreed to do so, when the time is right. We must have something to show. I must be believed, not mocked. A grand opening. The press gathered, as they were at Mycenae when I revealed the Mask of Agamemnon. God willing, by a year from now Sophia and I will have dug through to that door, and created a passage wide enough to open it. It will be the greatest moment of all our lives. An incalculable treasure, far richer than all the gold in the world. The key, gentlemen, to the abatement of war. Proof, somewhere, indeed in the very existence of that chamber, that men could once control the urge to self-destruction.’

‘Do we few, so few, old men all of us, have the strength and morality to rise above the tide of technology, the monster of self-destruction humanity has created?’ Hoar asked.

‘The monster is within ourselves,’ Bismarck murmured, still staring at the swastika.

‘The world needs heroes,’ Schliemann said. ‘Not lords of war, not champions like Achilles, but heroes like Atreus, Minos, Priam of Troy, men willing to stand against the stream.’