Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

Gaille sat up a little straighter, intrigued by the idea. 'You're not suggesting that Eleusis is a celebration of Thera erupting?'

'Why not? According to the myth, after Persephone was abducted, her mother Demeter cursed the earth and made it infertile. And this wasn't some unusually long winter: it was a famine that clearly lasted years. But when Persephone was finally restored to Demeter, she made the earth richer than ever.' He dropped one of his stones again, couldn't find it this time, so tossed the other irritably away. 'Volcanic ash is incredibly rich with nitrates. That's why people live near volcanoes, even though they're so dangerous. Visit Bali some time, if you don't believe me. You'll never have seen such greens. So each time Thera had one of its minor eruptions, it would have covered the surrounding islands with ash, devastating at least one year's crops, maybe even two or three. But when the fields finally started producing again, the harvests would have been magnificent. Just like in the Eleusinian myth. Until the big one, at least.'

'Can you imagine what that would have been like?' smiled Gaille, leaning her head back against the stone parapet, its edge pressing like stress against her nape. 'To have been in Crete when it went off?'

'A front-row seat on the most spectacular event in human history,' nodded Iain. 'An explosion that would literally have shaken the world. One hundred cubic kilometres of rock raining down over the next few days. Tsunamis destroying your fleets and coasts. The sun blacked out for months. The seas thick with ash. And the survivors knowing that even if they won their personal battle against starvation, their empire was doomed. It took years for the Mycenaeans to take over, but surely that was only because they'd been ravaged by Thera as well.'

'And traumatised. Think how much courage it would have taken to go back into the water after that.'

'Exactly. The whole of eastern Mediterranean civilisation smashed apart by a single catastrophic event. And though we've managed to find a great number of the jigsaw pieces it left behind, we're still not sure that they all belong to the same puzzle, or how to fit them together, basically because the picture on our box is wrong, because it's been drawn by Greek specialists, and by Egyptian specialists, and by Asia Minor specialists, not by Mediterranean specialists. But throw that box away, start out with a new picture of Crete and Santorini at the hub of a great and sophisticated empire, then everything suddenly fits. And thanks to Plato, we already have a wonderful idea of how this new picture should look.'

'The Atlantis Connection,' suggested caille.

'The Atlantis Connection,' smiled Iain.

It was still too early for Knox to call it a night, so he played around on the Internet for a while. He forwarded the photos Gaille had sent to his email, opened them on his screen. Agia Georgio, her message had said, near the southern coast. He tracked it down on a map of Crete, then brought up Google Earth. The connection was light-speed compared to the treacle of Egypt. He zeroed in on the Mediterranean, Crete, its southern coast. He found the port of Hora Sfakion, the town of Anapoli, then Agia Georgio.

Seen from above, the terrain looked mountainous and bleak, grey limestone covered in thin scrub, dotted with the green circles of trees. He zoomed in on remote buildings, but none of them matched Petitier's house. He broadened his search, looking for that distinctive amphitheatre of rock. It was amazingly, disturbingly voyeuristic: nowhere was private any longer. At last he found a plausible candidate, zoomed in until he was certain: a house with two polythene greenhouses nearby.

He stared at it a while, thinking fondly of Gaille, wondering how mad she still was at him, how much grovelling he'd have to do. The prospect made him smile. He wondered if she'd learn much about Petitier. If anyone could, she would. It bugged the hell out of him that so many people insisted on giving him all the credit for their Alexander and Akhenaten adventures, because the plain truth was that she deserved most of it.

He closed Google Earth, ran a search on Roland Petitier instead, not expecting much other than a few news reports about his murder. He'd dropped out of sight twenty years before, after all, well before the Internet age. But to Knox's surprise, he got a number of hits linking to the on-line index of one of the more obscure archaeological journals. Petitier, it seemed, had published an article in it, and it had evidently provoked quite a vibrant discussion. But it wasn't Petitier's name that most struck Knox, nor even the title of the piece, though that was intriguing too.

No, what really caught his eye was the name of the man who'd co-authored it.

Gaille was beat from her long day. She called it a night early, grabbed her wash-bag and a bottle of water then went to the edge of the roof and squeezed a worm of toothpaste onto her brush.

Iain came to stand alongside her, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, holding out his own brush for water. She poured it for him, the spill splashing against their feet. They stood side by side by the edge of the roof, their brisk brushing joining the sawing of the crickets. They spat in unison, toothpaste bombs making faint pale spatters on the dark ground below.

He held the flap of the tent open for her, shone in his torch. There was room enough for two, but just the one sleeping bag. She looked uncertainly around.

'All yours,' he smiled.

'Are you sure?'

'Absolutely. I've got jerseys and a jacket.'

The ground was hard and she was too tired to protest. She kicked off her shoes and socks, slipped inside the bag, unhooked her bra and removed it from beneath her T-shirt, then stripped off and folded up her trousers for a pillow. The torch went out. She could hear him fumbling around, laying out clothing to lie on, pulling on a T-shirt. She'd almost drifted to sleep when she heard him muttering, then he tapped her shoulder. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't realise it would be this uncomfortable.'

'What?' she asked.

'Shift up. I'm coming in.'

She didn't know what to say. It was his sleeping-bag, after all. He tugged the mouth open. She felt his knee in her back, his cold foot brushing her calf, reminding her of Knox. Had it really only been last night? 'I don't know about this,' she said.

'Please,' he said. 'I won't try anything, I swear. What kind of man do you think I am?' He turned onto his side, his front against her back, pleasantly warm where they touched. She wondered what Knox would make of this; but Iain was his friend, after all. 'Good night, then,' said Iain, snuggling close, putting his arm around her waist.

She hesitated a moment longer, and then her opportunity to object was gone. She rested her head back upon her folded trousers. 'Good night,' she said.

It was past midnight when finally a taxi pulled up outside Franklin's house, and the man himself emerged in his dinner jacket, and then his wife, elegant in a pale green gown and woollen shawl. They must have been at Nico's closing banquet. Knox walked towards them, slowing deliberately as he drew close, so that they'd know he had business with them. Franklin's expression clouded when he saw him. 'You!' he said. 'What are you doing here?'

'You know what I'm doing here.'

He licked his lips but said nothing. 'What is it, Claude?' asked his wife, in the nasal tone of deafness taught to speak. 'What's going on?'

Franklin turned to her with a calm smile. 'Nothing, my love,' he assured her, signing the words as well as speaking them. 'Please go inside.'

'But I-'

'Please,' he repeated. 'Go inside. Go to bed. Everything's fine. This gentleman and I just have some matters to discuss.' He watched her go in, the lights coming on downstairs and then up. 'Well?' he asked.