Kamila Shamsie: A God in Every Stone

He laughed, and she saw the gentle mockery as a sign that he recognised her as an adult worthy of the light-hearted teasing which he exhibited often with her father and never with her mother.

— Let me tell you the part Herodotus never mentioned, Vivian Rose: Darius so trusted Scylax he gave him a silver circlet fashioned with figs — a mark of the highest honour. But twenty years later when Scylax’ people, the Carians, rebelled against Darius’ Persians, Scylax was on the side of his countrymen, not his emperor.

— But Darius trusted him!

— Oh, English girl, how quickly you side with Empire.

She knew she was being chastised, but couldn’t understand why. The Turk must have seen her expression change to bewilderment, hurt even, because he stood up and his voice lost its sharp edge.

— I’ll tell you a secret, if you promise to tell no one: one day I’ll find it. The Circlet of Scylax.

He swept his arm from side to side, rippling the air with fire.

— Somewhere, beneath a patch of earth, it’s waiting for the man with the will to unearth it.

— Where will you look?

— A place called Labraunda.

— I told you that? I thought I’d never told anyone.

Tahsin Bey sat back on his elbows and looked at her, amazed.

— Well, you did. So — disappointed?

— Disappointed? The impatience of the English! One day, I’ll hold the Circlet in my hands. Why must it be today? And anyway — how can anyone feel disappointment here?

Tahsin Bey unfurled his long limbs and stood up, his arms spread wide to encompass the Temple complex, the plains of Mylasa below, the mountains around, and the Halicarnassus peninsula in the distance.

— Caria! Vivian Rose, if you’re going to give your summers over to excavating one of its most sacred spots you must know the rest of it as well.

There had been no talk until now of Viv’s participation in future digs, no talk of next month, let alone next year. But she stood up beside him, ignoring the annoyed bark of Alice who disliked it when the tininess of her own legs was brought to her attention.

— I want to see all of it before I go. Mylasa, Halicarnassus, Alinda, Caryanda. .

— That English impatience again. Here’s an idea — if you’re willing to cut short your time in Constantinople, why don’t you travel up the coast with us? We’ll see some of Caria, and places beyond. Ephesus. Troy!

— Us? You and Alice?

— No, no. Wilhelm and Gretel and me. You’ve heard us talk about it.

— Yes, of course. I am sorry. Of course you wouldn’t have suggested. .

— Of course I wouldn’t! Your father —!

— He’d never speak to either of us again.

— Either that, or he’d force us to get married to preserve your honour.

She would have thought it a joke if not for his own startled response to the words out of his mouth. He picked up Alice, mumbled something she didn’t catch, and hurried down the slope towards the sound of spades and chisels, leaving Viv in the silence of the plane-tree grove, breathing in the sacred air of Labraunda, trying to understand the rapid staccato of her heart.

The dig ended. The archaeologists disbanded with promises to meet the following summer; the foreman and his team picked up their spades and walked single file down the mountain towards the construction work that awaited them; Alice was sent ahead to Tahsin Bey’s home in Bodrum, along with Nergiz the cook and her family, and the donkey train carrying the season’s finds. Several of the archaeologists including Anna and Mehmet departed for Constantinople. Viv, Tahsin Bey, Wilhelm and Gretal set off on horseback towards the coast of Anatolia.

They rode in single file or two-by-two. The configurations changed at first, but soon a pattern was established: the two Germans together a little way ahead, Tahsin Bey and Viv following. When they stopped to walk around a town or a site, it was the same — the Germans striding away, the other two moving at a slower pace. At first the atmosphere between Tahsin Bey and Viv was strange, due to the absence of the pug. Alice had always been the diverting presence to whom they could turn when the silence between them lengthened and threatened to change shape. But soon they learned to be as comfortable in silence as in conversation, and Viv’s suspicion that no one in the world was more interesting than Tahsin Bey became conviction. In Labraunda they had spoken mainly of the site and its discoveries, but as they rode she saw there was nothing he didn’t hold in his mind — the story of every ancient stone, the call of individual birds, the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare, the overlap and contrasts of the Bible and Qur’an, the history of the tango.

One afternoon, they stood on a low cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea, the salt of it in their mouths and on their skin while the Germans waded in the water below. It was their last day in what-had-once-been-Caria.

With the toe of his shoe Tahsin Bey — almost daintily — drew a shape in the sand on the clifftop. Viv plucked leaves and fruit off the fig tree beside which they were standing and placed them, alternately, within the Circlet’s outline.

— Oh! There it is. You’ve found it for me, Vivian Rose.

There are passages of time a person enters into knowing unshakeably that they will always retain a rare lustre, one that will gleam more brightly as disappointments attach themselves to life. That was once me, Viv thought, anticipating the reminiscences of her future self; that was once me, plucking figs off branches and cramming them into my mouth while watching the sun glitter from the Carian coast to the horizon, across water as blue as ink and clear enough to see all the way to the rocks at the base of the cliffs. Almost driven mad by the purple on my tongue, the blue in my sight — a moment to understand Sirens weren’t creatures of the sea, they were the sea itself. Tahsin Bey laughed as though he’d heard her thoughts and said look, your eyes have changed colour; the Aegean Sea is in them now. Lightly touching her wrist, at the jut of her bone, he added, and the sun is in your skin. The metamorphosis of Vivian Rose Spencer.

— I prefer this version.

— I’ve been thinking. It’s been so long since I saw Christmas in London. I thought I might visit at the end of this year.

— I’d like that very much.

There was nothing further either of them needed to say. For now they would continue on as colleagues, without any word or gesture to indicate what was understood between them so that he could approach her father from a position of honour. Papa would be taken aback at first, but there were few people in the world he regarded with more admiration than this generous, learned man — ‘more English than most Englishmen’ he’d once said — and surprise would soon give way to delight. Next summer Viv and Tahsin Bey would return to Labraunda as husband and wife, and all the summers after that. She had never felt so much at peace in her life.

They reached the south coast of the Sea of Marmara, from where they would take a ferry to Constantinople, and it was there that news of the war in Europe finally reached them. It had started just after they set off from Labraunda, and the Ottoman Empire was still neutral, though that situation wasn’t expected to last long. The Orient Express? said the man at the ferry terminus. Oh no, that had been suspended. The Germans and the Englishwoman would have to find another way home, but not together, of course, now that their nations were at war. But — was the Englishwoman’s name Miss Spencer? Her countrymen had been leaving messages for her all along the coast. Here — he held out a letter.