Carver's Quest

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Quint stared morosely at the mule. The mule stared back. Quint had a wealth of bitter and unhappy memories of mules from his first journey through Macedonia. He had an unpleasant feeling that one more was about to be added to them. In the early morning sunshine, the mule had uncomplainingly allowed him to load it with an assortment of packs and panniers but, once loaded, it had refused point blank to move forward. No kind of cajolement or threat could make it budge an inch. Now, as Quint watched, a long jet of yellow liquid hissed into the ground between the mule’s back legs. It trickled down the slight slope on which the beast was standing and formed two neat pools around Quint’s boots. He swore beneath his breath and looked across to where another mule was tethered. Beyond that equally obstinate animal, he could see the three horses on which the gentlemen of the party rode.

A dozen yards away, Adam emerged from the blankets in which he had wrapped himself the previous night. He had spent the hours of darkness turning from side to side in the hope that he might chance upon the one posture in which sharp stones did not make their presence felt. He had failed to find it. He had ended by gazing up at the stars. He had wondered whether there were any other creatures up there somewhere in the heavens looking down on the earth and, if there were, whether they were as uncomfortable as he was. He had finally drifted into a fitful doze an hour before sunrise. Now, barely two hours later, a new day was upon him. He yawned and, rising to his feet, trudged towards the small stream beside which they had set up their encampment.

The giant Greek, Andros, as impassive as a cigar-store Indian, was already standing by the water. He was gazing to the north-east in the direction in which they would have to travel that day. He turned as Adam approached.

‘Kakos dromos,’ he said briefly and then walked away.

‘A bad road, eh?’ Adam said to himself. ‘Well, we have little choice but to follow it.’

In the distance, about a quarter of a mile away, he could see Rallis and Fields, the other two members of their little party. The professor, as so often, appeared to be delivering a lecture. Adam could hear the sound of his voice but could not distinguish what he was saying. The lawyer was listening, his head politely inclined towards that of his companion. Adam crouched down by the stream and cupped his hands in it. He poured the water over his head and allowed it to course through his hair and down on to his chest. Refreshed, he stood up and made his way back towards the camp. Quint was still struggling to instil obedience in the mule.

‘This bleedin’ beast is aimin’ to be the death of me,’ he said as Adam approached.

‘You must learn to have faith in the poor creature. It is behaving so wilfully because it is aware that you do not trust it.’

The animal lashed out a back leg and both men leapt sideways to avoid it.

‘That mule has a sly look in its eye,’ Quint said flatly. ‘It ain’t a mule a man can trust. And what’s more, it’s a mule as pisses pretty much where the ’ell it wants.’

‘Mules are intended by nature to be intractable beasts,’ Adam said complacently. ‘The best one can do is cajole them in the direction you wish them to go. There is no point in trying to coerce them, Quint. And there is certainly no point in endeavouring to control their habits of urination.’

‘That’s what you say. But you ain’t the one who’s spent the last half-hour wading about in mule piss.’

‘You have my sympathies, Quint.’ Adam yawned and stretched his arms. He did not seem unduly concerned by his servant’s troubles. ‘However, I cannot think seriously of anything until I have partaken of breakfast. Where is the bread? And the smoked meat?’

‘On that mule’s back,’ the servant said, with noticeable satisfaction. ‘The rest of us ate ours an ’our gone. While you was still snoring like an ’og.’

‘Well, the victuals and viands must be unpacked. I shall have to breakfast alone.’

‘Ain’t no time. The professor wants to be on the move. That’s why I’m lockin’ ’orns with this bleedin’ mule.’

Fields and Rallis had returned to the camp and were saddling their horses. The lawyer’s servant, who had ambled with giant strides beside the horses the previous day, was awaiting his master’s orders to set off once more. Adam looked to where he had left his tangled bedding in order to walk down to the stream. It was no longer there. While he was washing, Quint had folded the bag and blankets and strapped them to one of the mules. Both of these beasts, even the most troublesome of the pair, now appeared anxious to move.

‘Come, Adam,’ the professor shouted, already on horseback. ‘We have many miles to go before noon.’

The young man sighed. There was no help for it. Breakfastless, he mounted his own horse and the expedition headed off towards the north-east.

They had left Athens a week earlier. On the first day, they had travelled by the newly finished railway line from the Greek capital to its port of Piraeus. There they had taken a boat. Sailing southwards, they had rounded the tip of Attica and turned north. With the island of Euboea rising mountainously to starboard, they had continued to sail towards Chalcis, the port on the narrow strait of Euripus. Negotiating the waters around the port, they had emerged into a huge bay with a distant view of Mount Pelion. ‘Where Achilles was taught by Chiron,’ the professor had been eager to tell the others. ‘We are approaching the land of centaurs and lapiths.’

At the port of Volos, nestling beneath the slopes of Pelion, they had disembarked in the clear light of early morning. Turkish officials had hurried to intercept them, apparently intent on causing the maximum amount of inconvenience, but vigorous waving of the papers the professor possessed in front of the officials’ noses, in conjunction with the judicious use of baksheesh, had limited the delay to a few hours. Just as he had promised back in Athens, Rallis had arranged for men to be waiting near Volos with mules and horses. Adam had briefly wondered how the lawyer’s influence could make itself felt across the border with European Turkey, but the proof that it could was in front of his eyes. He had pushed the question to the back of his mind. Within a few hours more, they had climbed clear of the town. They could look back to the bay where they had landed and see its blue waters dotted here and there with the white sails of fishing boats. With the horses and baggage-laden mules, they had travelled nearly twenty miles on the first day before they had decided to make camp.

‘We are well beyond the frontiers of liberated Greece,’ Fields had said with great satisfaction.

Now, on the following morning, as Adam’s empty stomach rumbled and Quint continued to mutter about mules beneath his breath, they made their way further into Thessaly.

Both Adam and Rallis were wearing English shooting jackets and broad-brimmed wide-awake hats. Quint had a shapeless canvas cap thrust onto his head. The professor had purchased in Athens a large white umbrella to shield him from the sun but he was finding it difficult to combine holding his reins in one hand and the umbrella in the other. He often rode bareheaded for an hour or more. Adam worried about the effects the heat might have upon him, but Fields showed no signs that he was troubled by it. As time passed, the younger man found himself marvelling anew at the stamina and endurance of the Cambridge scholar. At least twenty years older than any of his companions, the professor showed few signs that age was slowing him.

For more than an hour that morning they travelled through countryside where the roads were all but effaced. The fields had been left to return to an uncultivated state and the houses and villages were deserted. They saw no one.

‘What has happened here?’ Adam asked, but neither the professor nor the Greek lawyer could give him a conclusive answer.

‘Perhaps the Turkish landlord has driven his peasantry from the land,’ Rallis suggested.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘The Turks are often cruel masters. That is why we Greeks wish to be free.’

‘I am not at all certain that that is the case, my dear Rallis,’ Fields said, prepared as ever for argument. ‘Not unnaturally, you believe that your fellow Greeks on this side of the border are all yearning to join your new nation, but I remain unconvinced. As long as they pay their taxes and commit no open crime, I suspect that the Greek subjects of the Porte are as happy with their government as those of their fellows who are ruled from Athens.’

For a moment, it seemed to Adam as if Rallis might dispute the professor’s statement but he remained silent.

The party stopped for lunch under the shade of a group of plane trees. Horses and mules drank from the stream which ran past it. With the exception of Fields, who settled himself at the foot of one of the planes and opened a book, the men began to unload the saddlebags from the drinking beasts. After half a minute, Andros paused as he reached across the largest of the horses to unfasten its saddle. The huge Greek spoke briefly to Rallis and pointed towards the horizon. Rallis, shading his eyes against the sun, looked in the direction his manservant was indicating.

‘We have visitors, gentlemen. There are men on horseback coming across the plain.’

Adam and Quint both turned from the saddlebags they had lifted to the ground and looked up across the sun-scorched landscape. The professor, either because he was oblivious to any danger the visitors might present or because he had not heard the Greek’s words, continued to read his copy of Thucydides.

‘Who are they?’ Adam asked.

Rallis shrugged. ‘Who can say? I think we are many miles from any village.’

Adam stood and watched the small group of riders. The sharp eyes of Andros had been able to pick them out from the landscape before anyone else, but now they were clear to all the travellers. Even Fields had lifted his eyes from his book and was following the horsemen as they approached in clouds of dust.

‘Are they brigands?’

‘I know no more than you, Adam,’ Rallis said. ‘We must hope not.’

‘Should we make a run for it?’

‘It would be pointless. We have only three horses for five men. And the mules could not move at a pace sufficient to escape. These men, whoever they are, will be with us in ten minutes.’

Rallis’s judgement of time was a good one. Almost exactly ten minutes had passed when the riders, shouting and yelling to one another, pulled up their horses twenty yards from the trees. There were ten in the party, all of them looking like a cross between a pantomime villain and a scarecrow. Each man carried a miniature arsenal of small arms at his waist, a yataghan and a pair of pistols at the least thrust into his belt. All had long black hair which hung down to their shoulders in bedraggled tresses.

A man in a dirty white capote and breeches who appeared to be the leader spurred his horse forward and began to address Rallis in a loud and threatening voice. His followers crowded behind him, bellowing approval of his words and occasionally brandishing their guns in their air.

‘What is the man saying?’ Fields asked impatiently. He had hauled himself to his feet as their visitors clattered into the camp and thrust his volume of Thucydides unwillingly into his jacket pocket. ‘He speaks such a barbarous dialect I can barely catch a word in three.’

The leader, urged on by his comrades, continued to roar his threats at the travellers.

‘Oh, that the language of Homer and Pindar should descend to this!’ the professor remarked to no one in particular. ‘If I am not mistaken, he seems to be talking a great deal about blood and death and the valour of his ancestors.’

‘He is certainly modelling his behaviour on that of a brigand chieftain in a Drury Lane melodrama,’ Adam remarked. ‘He could not have seen one in this desolate spot, could he? Surely no company has come this far on tour?’

The brigand chief was now pointing at the professor and was directing his words at him. Fields looked at the Greek as if he was an exceptionally dim student he was obliged to tutor.

‘No, it is useless. I simply cannot understand enough of this ruffian’s Greek to make sense of it,’ Fields said. He seemed to imply that the ruffian was entirely to blame for this.

‘He has been saying that his family have lived on this land for generations,’ Rallis translated. ‘He has also been saying that foreign dogs should not trespass on his lands. These things are probably not true. It is not his land, I think.’

‘He certainly does not look like a farmer,’ Adam remarked. ‘What else does he say?’

‘Now he says, “You foreign dogs are in our hands. Your money is ours. Your blood is ours.” ’

There was another impassioned burst of Greek from the man in the white capote.

‘ “I am the pasha here. I am a king to rule over English milords.” ’

‘He knows we are English, then,’ Adam remarked.

‘If he knows we are Englishmen, he knows we are not men with whom to trifle.’ Fields sounded exasperated that something as trivial as the arrival of ten heavily armed men should be holding them up. ‘Tell him to be on his way. And to take his ragamuffin band with him.’

The leader of the band now made a gesture, first towards the mules and the horses and then towards the saddlebags.

‘He wishes to inspect the baggage,’ Rallis said.

‘The impudence of the man!’ Fields exclaimed. ‘You will tell this rogue that—’

‘Silence!’ Rallis’s sudden cry was the more surprising because of the studied politeness with which he usually spoke. ‘I will tell him nothing. This is not a game that these men play. It is for us to listen, not to tell. And to obey.’

‘He is right, Professor,’ Adam said, placing a restraining hand on Fields’s arm as the older man made to move towards the bandit chief. For a moment, it seemed as if Fields might continue to protest but he subsided into glowering silence.

The bandit chief shouted abrupt instructions and two of his men dismounted. They walked over to where the bags were lying on the ground and opened them. Within moments, all Quint’s work that morning in packing the bags was undone. Meanwhile, another three men had also stepped down from their mounts and moved to where the horses and mules were tethered. They began to examine the beasts, prodding at legs and slapping flanks.

Rallis called out to the leader of the group. The man jumped down from his horse and strolled over to where the lawyer stood. He laughed and slapped him so heartily on the back that Adam could see Rallis stagger beneath the blow. The Athenian said something else and the man laughed again. Together the two of them walked away towards the shade of one of the plane trees. There they remained while the ransacking of the bags and the assessment of the horses continued. After five minutes, Rallis walked back to his companions, followed a few paces behind by the brigand.

‘Put smiles upon your faces, gentlemen,’ the Athenian said as he approached. ‘I have told our friend here that we bear him nothing but goodwill.’

The travellers now stood, wreathed in smiles, as the brigand and two of his most ruffianly companions came closer. Even the professor twisted his face into a ghastly simulacrum of cheerfulness. The chief of the supposed bandits leered amiably as he approached.

‘His name is Lascarides,’ Rallis went on. ‘He is at pains to assure me that he is an honest man. His colleagues are all honest men.’

‘Damn grinning scoundrels, the lot of them,’ Fields said, although, Adam noticed, he was careful to keep his mask of genial greeting in place.

‘However, they require our horses. They apologise for the inconvenience but they insist that we hand over our mounts.’

‘We appear to have little choice in the matter,’ Adam remarked.

‘None whatsoever,’ Rallis said.

Lascarides, now beaming from ear to ear as if he had just chanced upon a long lost brother, approached Adam and chucked him under the chin. Adam instantly made as if to strike the man a blow but, recalling their situation, he restrained himself and merely widened his mirthless smile. The Greek laughed.

Beneath his fixed grin, Fields was almost beside himself with fury.

‘Are we to allow this to happen?’ he said, forcing out his words like a novice ventriloquist making his first appearance on stage. ‘Are we going to stand by and do nothing while this ridiculous, tatterdemalion villain and his crew of scarecrows walk off with our horses?’

There was a burst of rapid chattering from Lascarides.

‘The wretch really does speak a version of Greek no gentleman could possibly understand,’ Fields dropped his pretence of grinning and spoke out loud. ‘What does he say, Rallis? Something about trees and guns?’

‘He says that he will tie the old man to the tree and get his men to use him for shooting practice unless he shuts up,’ Rallis translated impassively. ‘He is weary of hearing the old man’s voice.’

‘The impertinence!’ Fields exclaimed and then fell silent.

Lascarides and his men now wasted no time in further threats or intimidation. Three of them hitched the horses they had commandeered to their own mounts and they all prepared to depart. Lascarides tipped his hat ironically at the professor. One of his followers yelled and shot his pistol in the air. The bandits wheeled their horses about and cantered away.

The travellers watched as they disappeared into the distance. Shouts and outbursts of raucous laughter drifted back to them as they turned their attention to the ruins of their campsite. No more than half an hour had passed since Andros had first drawn his master’s attention to the riders approaching.

‘At least they did not kill us or kidnap us,’ Adam remarked.

‘They thought we were madmen,’ Rallis said. ‘I told them we came from Athens to look for ancient writings. They decided we were insane. And who would kill lunatics?’

‘Or pay a ransom for them?’

‘Exactly.’ Rallis smiled. ‘They were particularly certain that the professor was one who had lost his mind.’

‘Why did they not steal the mules as well as the horses?’

Rallis shrugged. ‘Too much trouble to take them. Too little profit to sell them. Who knows?’

Andros and Quint repacked the saddlebags and loaded them on the mules. With the horses gone, the beasts that were left were doubly laden. There was no chance now for any of the party to ride. All five men would have to walk. Rallis looked up at the position of the sun and then stretched out his arm.

‘That is the way we must go,’ he said.

As they set off, they disturbed a covey of partridges which flew suddenly upwards with a noisy flapping of wings. Above them an eagle soared in the air currents, looking no doubt for the very prey the men had just put to flight.

Rallis strode out in front. Behind him Andros and Quint guided the mules. Adam followed them and the professor brought up the rear. Soon the group was stretched, Indian file, across the plain. For nearly thirty minutes they travelled in a silence broken only by an occasional bray from one of the mules. Then Fields increased his pace and caught up with Adam.

‘What do you make of our Greek friend?’ he asked, in a conspiratorial whisper.

‘Of Rallis?’

‘Who else? Should we trust him, do you think?’

Adam was taken aback by the question. Was it not the professor who had first argued that he was the ideal person to assist them in organising the expedition to Thessaly and beyond?

‘I can see no reason why we should not.’

‘You do not find the arrival of those thieving wretches today somewhat surprising?’

‘We knew that we risked encountering bandits wherever we went in the countryside. Some of the regions in which we are travelling have an unpleasant celebrity for klephti and thieves and rogues of all kinds. But we made plans to evade them before we left Athens. Rallis made plans for us to evade them. Even so, we ran a risk. You are surely not suggesting that he deliberately arranged for those men to cross our path?’

‘I merely suggest that our Greek friend should be watched. And what he says must be taken cum grano salis.’

‘But you cannot think that he is conspiring against us?’

‘I do not know what to think, Adam. I do know that those rogues appeared to have been informed that we were travelling from the bay of Volos towards Meteora. How else could they have come across us so conveniently in hundreds of square miles of terrain?’

‘But what possible advantage could Rallis gain from the theft of our horses? Like us, he is now stranded miles from the nearest shelter. It makes no sense.’

‘Little does make sense in this benighted country,’ the professor said bitterly. ‘Nothing has made sense in it for the best part of two millennia.’

‘It is true that some of the most notable men of Athens have links with some of the greatest villains in the country. The Dilessi affair earlier this year proved that, if nothing else.’

‘It’s just as you say,’ said Fields with sudden excitement. ‘It’s extraordinary. Politicians in the city are shamelessly and almost openly in league with brigands who roam the country looking for foreigners to kidnap and murder. It’s as if Mr Gladstone were to be in charge of a gang of garrotters and send them out onto the streets of London to steal purses to add to the exchequer.’

‘However,’ Adam continued, striving to soothe the professor, ‘there is not the slightest evidence that Rallis has any connection with brigandage. He is a lawyer and an amateur archaeologist — not a politician.’

Thirty yards ahead, the man of whom they spoke had stopped and turned towards them. He waved his arm at the surrounding countryside.

‘The beauties of Thessaly, gentlemen,’ he shouted.

Adam returned his wave.

‘You will notice,’ the professor said, ‘that our friend seems remarkably cheerful in the circumstances. Our loss does not appear to have hit him as hard as it has the rest of us.’

With this parting shot, Fields increased his walking speed again and caught up with Quint and the mules.

Left alone in the rear, Adam wondered if there could be any basis for the professor’s sudden suspicions of the Greek lawyer. It was true that there had been times in the journey when Rallis had seemed uncertain of the path to take. There had been times when they seemed to be turning their faces in the direction of whichever point of the compass seemed momentarily appealing. There had been times, Adam was obliged to admit to himself, when he had thought that Rallis either did not know where he was leading them or, at the least, did not choose to tell them. And yet what purpose in travelling with them could the lawyer have other than the ones he had acknowledged? His love of his country’s past. His desire to unearth more examples of its former glory. These provided him with his motivation, did they not? There was no evidence to support Fields’s sudden distrust of Rallis.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

For the next two days, they continued to make slow progress. Thessaly, Adam knew, was populous and prosperous. The plain was fertile agricultural land but the travellers came across little evidence of this. Rallis insisted that they keep off frequented roads and travel across rough country instead. They saw few people. On the first afternoon, they happened upon a wagon, with spokeless wheels of solid wood, which had been abandoned by the roadside. As they stood by it, they noticed a distant caravan of horses making its way along the road, laden with sacks and bags. Three tiny figures accompanied it, occasionally chivvying the beasts with sticks. Adam looked enquiringly at Rallis.

‘Small traders carrying goods to the coast, perhaps,’ the Greek said. ‘We travel in a different direction. We will let them pass.’

That night they came near enough to a village to hear the furious barking of dogs in the distance and yet no one troubled them. They slept out under the stars once again.

On the second day, they came across the carcass of a horse with two black vultures circling above it.

‘Those villains have left one of our beasts to die,’ Fields exclaimed upon seeing it.

Rallis approached the dark shape on the ground, a kerchief in front of his face. Flies rose from the decomposing animal.

‘It was dead long before we met Lascarides, Professor. It has been here a week at least.’ The Greek lawyer looked up at the birds wheeling menacingly above their heads. ‘Those are not the first to feast on the poor creature.’

‘Why should it be lying out here?’ Adam asked. ‘We are surely many miles from the village where we heard the dogs last night. Who rode it and left it here to die?’

Rallis shrugged. ‘Perhaps, like us, it had wandered far from home.’

Leaving the rotting beast behind, they moved on. The vultures, which had flown off as they examined the horse, returned. Another night in the open awaited the travellers, but as shadows lengthened and they began to think of stopping, Andros hailed his master. He pointed through the gloom to what seemed to Adam no more than a pile of stones in the distance. As they came nearer, the pile slowly transformed itself into a rude shed, its walls battered by the elements but its roof still intact. There was even a wooden door, hanging at a skewed angle on iron hinges. Rallis pushed it open and all but Andros made their way inside. Adam lit a candle and they watched as the flames flickered on the four walls.

‘What is this place?’ he asked.

‘The hut of a shepherd, perhaps.’ Rallis sounded uncertain. ‘Or an outhouse from an old khan. A lodge for travellers.’

‘There are no signs of any other buildings. The khan must have long gone.’

‘Not only the khan,’ Fields remarked. ‘There is no indication that there is any road beside which it might have stood.’

‘It may have been abandoned a hundred years ago,’ the Greek said. ‘Or more. A road may once have passed this way.’

‘It is of no consequence to us now whether this was part of an old hostelry or the retreat of some lonely herdsman.’ Adam held the candle high so it illuminated as much of the building as it could. Some of its stones had fallen to the ground but the walls were largely undamaged. ‘The place is just about large enough to shelter us all.’

There was a silence, interrupted only by the sound of the mules moving restlessly outside. The men in the hut looked at one another in the dancing light of the candle.

‘Quintus is unpleased by the idea, I see,’ the professor said,

after a moment. ‘He is scowling like Stilicho when he looked upon the Goths.’

‘I ain’t a man to ask for much,’ Quint said, sounding aggrieved. ‘A comfy billet, a pint of pale ale and a twist of bird’s eye baccy and I’m ’appy enough. But look at this bleedin’ place.’ He stretched out his arms as if to knock down the weathered walls of the hut. His shadow leapt against the stones. ‘This ain’t a bunk for a bleeding goat never mind a man.’

‘You are too choosy, Quint,’ Adam remarked. ‘It is not as if you have much difficulty usually in entering the land of Nod. On previous nights, you have no sooner retired than you have been snoring loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.’

‘I ain’t going to get much chance of doing that if we bed down ’ere.’

‘We have no choice, Mr Quint,’ Rallis said, ‘unless you would prefer to spend another night sleeping beneath the stars.’

Quint stared malevolently at the lawyer for a moment, as if the Greek was wholly responsible for dragging him from his urban comforts and out into this rural wilderness. Then he turned on his heel and marched out of the ruined building to join Andros and the mules outside. In the few short days they had been travelling, some kind of odd friendship had developed between the Londoner and the giant Attican. Andros spoke not a word of English. Indeed, he appeared to speak few words in his native tongue. Quint’s Greek was limited to a small and ill-pronounced vocabulary connected to the supply of food, drink and sex. And yet the two men had discovered some common ground. Now they joined forces in unloading the mules and gathering together the materials for a campfire.

Later that evening, after they had eaten their frugal meal, all five men in the small expedition sat around the fire. The night was surprisingly full of the noises of animals. Snorts and screams and distant baying could be heard in the darkness on all sides.

‘How are they off for wolves in this neighbourhood, do you suppose, Quint?’ Adam asked teasingly. ‘Will they venture into our poor shepherd’s hut? Should we worry about being eaten as we sleep?’

‘There ain’t no wolves in this neck of the woods. Jackals, maybe.’ Quint, reconciled by now to their accommodation, was not to be drawn. He tamped tobacco stolidly into his clay pipe. ‘Anyways, it sounds more like wild hog than anything else. That ain’t going to eat you. More like t’other way about.’

That night, despite the discomforts of their resting place and the sounds from the dark, Adam soon fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed more vividly than he had done for years. Strange, hallucinatory dreams in which he was back in Macedonia, digging up tombs long buried in the desolate hillsides. With his nails, he scrabbled at the soil to reveal cold stone coffins. When he pushed aside the lids of these coffins, faces from his past stared up at him from their depths. His mother, dead when he was a small boy, whom he could scarcely remember. His father, still apparently infuriated by the turns his life had taken. Charles Carver, the railway baron, had not been a happy man, his son now realised. His great successes as an entrepreneur had brought him little in the way of joy; the fraud and peculation which had ruined his company had also driven him to the point where he had believed self-destruction to be his only option. Adam was aware of how little he had known his father. Now, in the dream, Charles Carver’s face was twisted with rage. He seemed to be shouting defiance at the fates which had propelled him first towards great success and wealth and had then plunged him into disgrace and despair.

Adam awoke with a start. He lay for a while, thinking of his father, and then turned his face towards the open door. It was still an hour or more to sunrise, but in the faint light of moon and stars that was drifting into the hut, he could see the shapes of his sleeping companions. Idly, he counted three and was about to fall asleep again when he realised that there should be one more. His eyes squinted in the semi-darkness as he strove to see who was in the hut. One of the party was definitely missing. He rolled out from under the blanket which covered him and began to make his way towards the door of the stone shelter. As he crawled past the other sleepers in the hut he could make out the giant form of Andros stretched beneath one wall. Next to him were Quint, snoring gently, and the professor. There was no sign of Rallis. It was only when he ventured outside that Adam located the missing man. The Greek lawyer was standing alone thirty yards from the hut. He was staring out into the darkness. Adam moved towards him.

‘Rallis?’ he hissed.

The Greek lawyer froze at the sound. Then he turned slowly in Adam’s direction.

‘It is a beautiful night, Mr Carver, is it not?’ he said.

‘What are you doing out here?’

‘I could not sleep.’ Both men were speaking in fierce whispers. ‘I came outside to look at the stars.’

As Adam approached the Greek, he thought he saw, for the briefest moment, a light flicker far out in the night but no sooner did he look more intently in the direction from which it seemed to come than it disappeared.

‘I have been picking out the shapes in the sky,’ Rallis said. ‘I have forgotten what you call them in English.’

‘The constellations.’

‘Con-stell-a-tions.’ The Greek repeated the word, drawing out each syllable, as if this would help him now to remember it. ‘It is from the Latin, of course. “Stars together”, I think. But I have had enough of astronomy for the night and we will be disturbing our companions. Let us return to our beds. There is time yet to enjoy some more sleep.’

‘Maybe he just went outside to water his nags,’ Quint suggested the following morning when Adam told him of his encounter. Breakfast had been the swiftest of meals and the travellers were on their way less than forty minutes after rising. They had now left their resting place many miles behind them. Quint was leading the largest and most temperamental of the mules. His master was walking beside him.

‘He claimed that he could not sleep,’ Adam said. ‘He was tempted outside by the beauty of the night.’

‘Well, he ain’t going to say, “Don’t mind me, Mr Carver, I’m just ’aving a piss,” now, is ’e? He ain’t that kind of a bloke.’

‘No, that is true. We do not all have the obsession with bodily functions that marks you out, Quint. But I did not get the impression that it was either the delights of nature or its demands that had driven him from our humble shelter. There was something else.’

‘What was ’e doing then?’

‘Looking out into the darkness.’

‘What the ’ell for?’

‘I do not know. A sign that someone else was out there?’ The professor’s suspicions about their travelling companion returned to Adam’s thoughts. ‘Do you suppose that our Greek friend has arranged for others to be following us?’

There was no opportunity for Quint to reply. As he opened his mouth, Adam reached out his hand to indicate that his manservant should be silent.

‘Hush, Quint. What is that?’

A rhythmic drumming noise could be heard, echoing across the plain. At first, Adam thought the sound had only the one source but, as he continued to listen, it seemed as if it was travelling towards them from all the points on the compass. He found himself unable to guess what the drumming was or to judge exactly the direction from which it was coming. He turned and looked back at the professor but Fields, equally baffled, shrugged his shoulders.

‘It is the semandron,’ Rallis said, noticing their puzzlement.

‘Ah, the semandron,’ Fields said. ‘Of course. I have read of it but I have never before heard it.’

‘What is it?’ Adam asked. ‘I confess that I have never heard the word before.’

‘The Greek Christians at these monasteries use it in place of bells, which were long forbidden to them by the Mahometans.’ Fields dismounted from the mule he had been riding and stood by its side, listening to the echoing percussion of the semandron. ‘It is a long wooden bar which they strike with hammers. It has something of a barbaric note, I feel.’

‘It means that we are drawing close to the monasteries,’ Rallis said. ‘The sound of the semandron can travel many miles but I think, from its loudness, we must be near to them.’

Andros, pulling the last mule up a slight slope, joined them. All five men stood in the shade cast by a small grove of wild apple trees at its top and listened.

‘Ain’t a cheery sound, if you ask me,’ Quint said. ‘It fair puts the wind up you.’

‘It is calling the faithful to prayer, Quintus.’ Fields was standing almost on tiptoe, straining to locate the source of the drumming.

‘Sounds more like it’s calling ’em to the grave.’

As they spoke, the monk striking the semandron ceased to do so. The percussive noise came to an end and only the booming echoes of the final blow continued to reverberate in the air.

The men began to descend the slight rise. Emerging from the trees, they were thrust once more into the glare of the sun. Eyes dazzled, they could barely see the plains stretching ahead of them. Rallis was the first to recover his sight and his bearings.

‘The monasteries of Meteora, gentlemen,’ he said, throwing out his arm to point to the north-east. ‘The monasteries that float in the air.’

Across the plain, perhaps two miles away, they could see some twenty or thirty outcrops of rock which arose, like giant stalagmites, from the ground and pointed towards the sky. Pyramids, obelisks, columns and monoliths of all shapes and sizes reared up from the ground. At this distance they looked like trees in some gigantic petrified forest. A village rested beneath the rocks, the roofs of its houses just visible amidst the shadows they cast.

‘The monasteries are all in the village?’ Adam was surprised. He raised his hand to his brow to shade his eyes, eager to make out more of their destination.

The Greek laughed.

‘No, Adam. You must cast your eyes further up to heaven. That is just Kalambaka. The holy monasteries are much higher.’

Rallis pointed a finger at the shadowy buildings of the village and then raised it slowly to the sky, as if tracing the passage of a bird from one of the roofs to the pinnacle of one of the giant stalagmites.

‘There,’ he said. ‘There is one of the monasteries we seek. I think it is Agios Stefanos although I cannot be certain from here. The other monasteries may be hidden from our view here.’

Adam stared in disbelief. At first, he could see nothing but the needle of rock itself. Only as his eyes grew accustomed to the distance and to the light could he make out what might have been a building perched precariously on its point. As he continued to look, he realised that there were others clinging to the sides or the summits of these strange stone obelisks.

‘ “Mountains that like giants stand/To sentinel enchanted land”,’ he quoted.

‘Scott had not such prodigies of nature as these in mind,’ said the professor. ‘He was, as usual, singing the praises of his native land, was he not? And the Scotch, for all their boasting, have nothing to match this.’

‘They’re like bloody great skittles in a giant’s bowling alley,’ Quint said.

‘More like the buttresses of some bizarre cathedral.’ Adam continued to gaze in astonishment at the sight before him. How, he wondered, had he never before heard of this phenomenon of nature? ‘Mr Ruskin himself would delight in their Gothic charms. But, surely, there is no mention of these extraordinary rocks in any ancient text.’

‘The Greeks of Plato’s day had little time for the wonders of the natural world, Adam,’ Fields said. ‘Who would know from their literature that in Athens the Lykabettos rises higher than the Acropolis?’

‘The monks must be like the stylites of bygone centuries.’ Adam was still lost in admiration of the rocks. ‘Perched upon their pillars far above the temptations of the world.’

The professor was unimpressed. ‘They are pious fools,’ he said, ‘wasting their lives in such isolation.’

‘There are few of them left in Meteora,’ Rallis said. ‘Once there were hundreds of monks here. Now, I am told, most of the monasteries are deserted. And those that do still have inhabitants have but a handful. Even the Grand Meteoron, the holiest of them all, has only a score and most of them are old men.’ He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘But now we have seen our destination from afar, we must hasten to reach it.’

Hours passed before the travellers came near to the stone pillars, which from a distance had seemed to rise perpendicularly out of a sea of foliage. The sun was now high in the sky and beating down upon them. Closer up, it was clear that a labyrinth of smaller rocks and outcrops of stone had to be negotiated before the party could reach the foot of any of the main pinnacles. They began to clamber amongst the ruined architecture of the rocks, moving in and out of the shade the stone columns offered. Here and there, groves of mulberries and cypresses covered the ground between the pillars. Some small trees had even found a means of twisting their roots into crevices in the near-vertical rock and were growing green against the darker colours of the stone. Often the roots were invisible from the ground and it seemed as if the trees were suspended in the air, floating high above the travellers’ heads.

After a short time, Adam stopped. Shading his eyes with one hand, he pointed with the other towards half a dozen black smudges up on the rock. ‘There are caverns further up there,’ he said. ‘There is a ladder of some kind as well.’

Below one of the dark holes that peppered the cliff, a rickety wooden structure that could only be a ladder stretched down from the cave entrance to a ledge some sixty feet beneath it. It looked like the backbone of some strange creature that had died and rotted on the rock face.

‘It is for a holy man,’ Rallis said. ‘He has turned his back on the world. He lives in the cave with only the eagles above him.’

‘Good Lord, man.’ Adam was shocked. ‘Are you telling us that someone spends his life up there?’

‘He prays there night and day. He beseeches the Lord to grant his soul eternal rest. Many have done so before him.’

‘Much good it must have done them. Living like benighted troglodytes in holes in the rock.’ Fields snorted with disgust, as if to suggest that this was only what he expected from those who adhered to the Greek version of Christianity. ‘These monks are but a few steps away from pagan nature worship. Who knows by what process of reasoning they have persuaded not only themselves but others that they are leading holy lives?’

The travellers moved on, Adam looking back at the cavern entrance and wondering what could possibly drive a man to make his lonely home within it. They fought their way through tangled bushes and past fallen boulders. Eventually they emerged from the maze of rock and vegetation and stepped onto a square stone platform at the foot of what seemed a sheer cliff face.

‘Up there. That is Agios Andreas,’ said Rallis.

The others craned their necks upwards and could just catch a glimpse of a building perched on the top of the cliff.

‘How the devil are we to reach it?’ Fields asked.

The lawyer made no reply but nodded briefly to Andros. The giant Greek took several steps to the side, hauled out the ancient musket he kept strapped to his waist and fired a single shot into the air. The sudden sound of it, reverberating and echoing against the rock, made Adam start with surprise. For a moment, as the echo died away, there was no response. Then, from far above, like the cry of a bird circling in the air, came a voice. As they all strained their necks in peering up at the monastery, they could see what looked like a wooden shed projecting sideways from the rock. Adam could just glimpse a grey-bearded face staring down at them from some kind of door or window in it.

‘He is asking who we are and what we require,’ Rallis said, before shouting back at the monk in Greek. Adam could make out only the words for ‘travellers’ and ‘friends’.

The monk disappeared briefly from view, but within a minute, he had returned and this time he was accompanied by two others, both similarly swathed in grey hair. All three were now calling down to the travellers and, as they did so, the door in the shed opened and a rope was flung out. Adam could see that the rope ran through a pulley, which was itself attached to the roof of the shed. Slowly the rope descended the cliff face until one end reached Adam and his companions below. Attached to it by an iron hook was a net. Rallis moved forward and unclasped the hook.

‘They are fishers of men, these monks,’ he said, spreading the net on the ground.

‘Are we to be their fish?’ Adam asked.

‘It is our only way to the monastery. Each of us must sit in turn in the net. The net closes around. The hook is attached. The monks pull us up. It has been so for many hundreds of years.’

‘Have they lost many fish in those hundreds of years?’

Rallis shrugged. ‘Some, but not many.’ He spoke briefly to Andros. The Greek shrugged off the white capote he wore around his huge shoulders and placed it in the net.

‘Who will be the first to ascend the rock?’ Rallis asked.

‘Here is your chance to demonstrate your daring, Quint.’ Adam gestured at the net. ‘The monks await us.’

‘I ain’t going up in that contraption.’

‘You have heard what Rallis has said. It is the only way we can get to the monastery.’

‘I ain’t being ’auled up in the air in a bleedin’ net. It ain’t natural.’

‘Nor is descending into the bowels of the earth on the new underground railway from Paddington. But back in London I have known you to do it. Not once but several times.’

‘Down in the ground ain’t the same as up in the air.’

‘Come, Quintus,’ Fields said, ‘one of us must be the pioneer in this venture. Why should the honour not be yours?’

Quint scowled at the professor, as if to suggest that the honour was one he would gladly relinquish, but at the same time he seemed to decide that further argument was fruitless. He moved to sit cross-legged on the capote, looking miserable but resigned to whatever fate might throw at him. Rallis took one of the corners and hung it over the large iron hook on the end of the rope. He did the same with each of the other corners until Quint was trussed like a turkey in the netting which dangled from the hook. He clung to the rope with his hands while both feet protruded through the holes. Rallis waved and shouted to the monks above and the net began its ascent. Almost immediately it began to spin and twist but slowly it moved further and further up the grey flank of the rock.

‘Give our greetings to the abbot, Quint,’ Adam called. ‘Tell him we shall all join him for dinner.’

The distance from the ground to the monastery was more than 200 feet and, after only a short while, brief gusts of wind began to send man and net spinning around. There were shouts of alarm from below but Quint maintained a stoical silence. Looking up so far, Adam could not be certain but he thought that, at one point, he saw small plumes of smoke issuing from the tangled bundle. By some acrobatic feat, he decided, his servant had managed to light his pipe. After less than ten minutes, Quint’s ascent was complete and he disappeared from sight.

The monks’ net returned to the ground and Adam was the next to be hooked into it.

‘You may wish to close your eyes,’ Rallis said. ‘It prevents the giddiness.’

‘I think I shall keep them open. I have a fondness for seeing where I am going, even when I am curled up like a hedgehog.’

The monks above began to turn their windlass and Adam was tugged upwards. As he left the ground and was swiftly hauled a hundred feet into the air, he began to reflect on the ridiculousness of the position in which he found himself. There was little time, however, for such thoughts. He reached a point where, through the net, he could just catch a glimpse of his comrades below. At that moment the rope seemed to slip through monastic hands. Abruptly, he fell several feet before control was regained and he came to a halt with a stomach-turning jerk. He was still recovering from this shock when he heard the sound of a gun. His first assumption was that Andros had, for some reason, fired his musket again. It was only when a bullet ricocheted off the rock face that he realised someone was shooting at him. Twisting and spiralling in the monks’ net, he was a more tempting target than a fish in a barrel. He heard the sound of another shot and flinched. The rock above his head shattered and splinters of stone cascaded into his hair and onto the shoulders of his jacket. Spinning in the trap the net had become, he strove to look first up at the monastery and then down to the ground below him. Shouts came from both directions. In his frantic efforts to see what was happening, Adam set the net spinning back and forth.

‘Quickly, Quint,’ he bellowed. ‘Get them to pull me up more quickly.’

The face of the rock was suddenly upon him and he thrust his hands through the reticulations in the net in order to push himself from it. His knuckles grazed painfully against the cliff but he had no time to think anything of it. He spun out again into mid-air and braced himself for the awful possibility of another shot. He could almost feel the bullet hurtling into his soft flesh and the terrible pain it would inflict.

‘Get me moving, Quint,’ he yelled again and, to his intense relief, he felt the net jerk and begin to rise once more. He could hear more noise from the ground and thought he heard Rallis’s voice shouting in Greek. Slowly, so slowly that it seemed to Adam as if the minutes were stretching into hours, he was pulled towards the monastery.

Trussed in the net and half-dazed from the buffeting he had received as he collided with the rockface, Adam was finally brought level with the entrance. Hands reached out to haul him in like a bale of goods at the West India docks and he was deposited on the wooden floor. He looked up. A man was peering down at him. The man was dressed in a long blue serge gown and had a straggling beard and moustache which merged in a wild hedgerow of white facial hair. Out of the hair stared two glinting eyes.

‘I am Brother Demetrios,’ said a voice from the hedgerow, in Greek. ‘Welcome to the monastery of Agios Andreas.’

The monk released the net in which Adam was held and he tumbled out of it. As he got to his feet he saw Quint, dishevelled and anxious, standing amidst a semi-circle of Brother Demetrios’s fellow-monks, all bearded and clad in black. His manservant moved towards him and began to brush down his clothes.

‘Told you travelling in a bleedin’ net weren’t natural,’ he said. ‘And why the ’ell was that lunk of a Greek shooting off ’is musket?’

‘It wasn’t Andros. Somebody was shooting at me. Somebody further down the path we ascended earlier in the day.’

Adam waved Quint away and turned to his hosts. They bowed politely to him, their hands laid upon their hearts. He returned their greeting, conscious that he was shaking with the shock of his journey up to their home.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

But who was taking potshots at me, Rallis?’

Another half-hour had passed and two other members of the party had been hauled up the rock-face and manhandled into the monastery. Andros had been left at the bottom with instructions to find a temporary resting place for the mules and much of the baggage in the village of Kalambaka.

‘He will come up to Agios Andreas later,’ Rallis had announced when he had arrived at the top. ‘The monks will have time to recover from their exertions in bringing us to their home. They will need all their strength to fish Andros up from the foot of the rocks.’

The lawyer, now faced by Adam’s question, shrugged as if the identity of any would-be murderer was of no great significance.

‘One of the rogues who ambushed us, perhaps. Andros saw him and ran after him but the man was too quick. He had a horse waiting for him further down the rocks.’

‘He might have killed me.’ Adam was indignant as much as distressed.

‘He fired his rifle from far away. Only the very best of shots could have hurt you.’

‘That may be true, but two bullets at least struck the rocks not too far away from me.’

‘Perhaps the man was from Kalambaka. He was trying to scare you. To scare us. They do not always like strangers in these villages of European Turkey.’ Rallis waved his hand, his demeanour suggesting that Adam was making altogether too great a fuss about the incident. ‘But he did not harm you. He did not shoot again. And now we are safely delivered to our destination. The monastery of Agios Andreas.’

Adam thought momentarily of pursuing the subject but there seemed little point. He could not very well ask the monks to winch him back to the ground so that he could chase some rifle-wielding will o’ the wisp across the plains of Thessaly. The Greek lawyer, it seemed, did not take the shooting seriously. So why should he? Perhaps Rallis was correct. Perhaps it had been a villager with a dislike of foreigners. Perhaps the intention had only been to frighten him. Adam decided to put the incident from his mind. Instead, he looked around the place which had been the goal of their party since they had left Athens.

Covering just over an acre, the monastery of Agios Andreas stood on the very summit of the pillar of rock. It consisted of a church, side chapels, monks’ cells and other buildings which surrounded a central, irregularly shaped courtyard. The whole monastery looked like a miniature village, its houses huddled around the church.

‘How do the monks live up here, Rallis? How do they get their food? Their water?’

‘The water is in cisterns cut deep in the rock. They fill with rain during the winter.’ The lawyer motioned to a stone structure in the centre of the courtyard which Adam could now see was some kind of well. ‘As for their food, it is hauled up on the ropes as we were hauled up.’

‘And how in heaven’s name did the first monks make their way up here?’

‘The monks believe that Saint Athanasios — the holy man who built the first of the monasteries — did not climb the rock. He was carried to the top by an eagle.’

‘That would be a more convenient means of transport than any other,’ Adam admitted. He made his way across to the stone well and peered into its depths. He could see what might have been the faint glint of light on the water below.

‘They tell another story about Athanasios,’ Rallis went on. ‘That he travelled at first only halfway up the rock. He lived in a cave there. But soon he saw demons flying about the entrance to his cave. So he went to the very top of the mountain, where the demons could not follow him.’

‘They couldn’t fly that high, eh?’ Adam turned away from the well.

‘It would seem not.’

‘So whatever other perils we might face here, we need not worry about demons.’

Rallis laughed.

‘It was another rock on which Athanasios built. Not this one of Agios Andreas. But the principle is probably the same.’

Adam nodded his head politely at the monks, who were still gathered round the winding equipment which had hauled him up the rockface. Bearded and bashful, the inhabitants of Agios Andreas were looking at their visitors as if they had never seen such strange and unaccountable men before. Perhaps, Adam reflected, they had not.

‘We will meet the rest of the population at dinner, I suppose. Minus demons, of course.’

‘This is the population, Adam. Except, I think, for the hegumenos. There are fewer than ten caloyeri, ten holy men, at Agios Andreas,’ Rallis said.

‘So few!’ Although he remembered what Rallis had said about the depopulation of the monasteries, Adam was still surprised. ‘How can they survive?’

‘Perhaps they will not. I doubt there are more than fifty caloyeri in all of the monasteries together. Perhaps when they all die, there will be no more monks at Meteora.’

‘But there are young novices, are there not? When I was bundled from the net I saw one lad standing behind the monks. He looked no more than twelve.’

‘Some of the young boys from the village come up to the monastery to learn to read and write. They are the servants of the caloyeri. He must have been one of those.’

One of the monks had approached them and was trying shyly to attract their attention. He spoke to the lawyer, his words a jumble of half-familiar Greek words uttered so swiftly and in such a marked accent that Adam was unable to follow them. Rallis, it seemed, had no such problem.

‘His name is Theophanes,’ he interpreted for Adam. ‘He will show you and Mr Quint and the professor to rooms where you can rest.’

Theophanes beckoned to Adam and his companions, who had both been engaged in peering over the monastery’s perimeter wall at the plain beneath. Leaving the lawyer, the three men followed the monk through an arched opening into one of the buildings off the courtyard. A short flight of stone steps led upwards, which through the centuries had been worn away by the feet of generation after generation of long-departed monks. As they began to climb it, Fields gave a short cry and fell to his knees. Quint, following close behind, nearly tumbled over him. The professor peered downwards in the gloomy light of the stairwell.

‘Most interesting, most interesting,’ he said, removing his glasses and crouching even lower to examine one of the steps.

Brother Theophanes had stopped when Fields did and was looking down at him with polite puzzlement. Adam smiled at the monk as if to suggest that the professor’s action was odd but not entirely unexpected.

Fields struggled to his feet. ‘Fascinating, Adam, simply fascinating. It is a burial stele. I can make out the words “Attyla, daughter of Eurypothus”.’

‘How did it come to be here?’

‘I have no idea. I can only presume that the monks in the Middle Ages, when they were building this place, brought it up from the plain. I must look at the other steps.’

Adam glanced at the monk, who was wearing the bemused expression of a courteous man faced by the inexplicable behaviour of foreigners.

‘I think that task must be postponed a while, Professor. Our host is patient but we cannot keep him waiting for too long.’

‘Ah, of course, you are right.’ Fields was unmistakably disappointed but he waved his hand to Theophanes to indicate that he was ready to move on. ‘Another time, perhaps, another time.’

As midnight passed, Quint and Adam prepared for a nocturnal excursion. Brother Theophanes had led the travellers to the sparely furnished stone cells which were the monastery’s guest rooms. Adam had explained to their host that they were weary and wished to rest. They required no food. They needed only to sleep. The day was drawing to an end and darkness had already fallen. The monk, accustomed to retiring early to bed himself, had seemed to understand. Hand on his heart, he had bowed and left them. After a little conversation, the professor, Quint and Adam had gone their several ways to their own rooms. Some hours later, the manservant, obeying whispered instructions he had been given earlier, had tapped on his master’s door. Now the two of them stood in Adam’s room, ears cocked for the sounds of other people moving about, and prepared to reconnoitre the monastery.

‘We must not spend too long in exploration,’ Adam said. ‘But I cannot resist the temptation to escape the eagle-eyed scrutiny of the monks and look at the place myself.’

‘Ain’t some of these bearded buggers going to be still awake?’

‘They will all rise in the night at least once to perform their devotions. Probably several times. But they will be asleep now. I think we have an hour or two in which to investigate the monastery. Lead on, Quint.’

The manservant opened the door and peered out.

‘What can you see?’ Adam asked.

‘Sod all. It’s as black as Newgate’s knocker out there.’

‘There will be light in the courtyard. Light from the moon. Let us take candles for the corridors.’

Adam crossed the room and took the candles from the two iron sconces attached to the far wall. He handed one to Quint and the two men crept furtively into the passageway outside.

‘Which way?’ Quint hissed.

His master motioned to the left and they began to shuffle in that direction. They passed the doors to other rooms and then came to the top of the flight of stone steps they had ascended earlier in the day. Even with the light from the candles, they found it difficult to see where they were going and Quint, in the lead, nearly stumbled and fell before he realised where he was. He cursed briefly and began to edge down the stairs. At the bottom, the archway opened onto the courtyard, which as Adam had predicted was lit by the moon. Quint cupped his hand protectively round the flame of the candle but the night was so still that he had scarcely need to do so.

‘Through the archway, Quint,’ Adam whispered. ‘Keep moving to the left. Let us see what other buildings face onto the court.’

The servant made his way through the next arched doorway, his master close behind him. They found themselves in what was clearly a chapel. It was tiny, only a few yards square, but its walls and roof were covered in paintings. In the flickering light of the candles, Adam could make out the figure of Christ in majesty, surrounded by what were, he guessed, images of the saints. Peering more closely, he could just see the Greek lettering that identified them all. Even in the poor light, the rich colours the painter had applied three centuries earlier still glowed. One saint had a model of a church in his hand and was holding it out as if inviting the viewer to admire its architecture. As Adam turned to the left, an image of the Virgin and Child swam into view, the pudgy infant grasping the middle finger of its mother’s hand. She stared serenely into the middle distance. Fields would claim these paintings were nothing but primitive daubs, he thought, and yet there was something about them that held the attention. Numinous and otherworldly, they lodged themselves in the imagination.

A smell of incense percolated through the chapel. Adam moved his candle again to look at the next wall. Here the painting appeared to depict the martyrdom of two saints. On the left of the picture, a man hung upside down from a gallows while another, not much more than a boy, was stabbing him in the neck. Blood was dripping to the ground. To the right a gridiron stood over open flames and another saint, recognisable by his halo, was strapped to it. Given his circumstances, he seemed to be remarkably cheerful. There was even the slightest hint of a forgiving smile on his face, as if he pitied his tormentors and wished he could point out to them the uselessness of torturing one of God’s elect.

The last of the paintings the candles revealed before the two men turned and left the chapel was the pièce de résistance. It was a depiction of the Last Judgement. At the bottom a huge and hideous devil was sitting in a pool of fire and gnawing upon the bodies of several unfortunates. Around him capered a troop of merry imps armed with tiny tridents who prodded the damned as they milled aimlessly around the flames of hell. Up above sat the souls of the blessed, appearing unsurprisingly smug.

‘Look at them little bastards with the forks,’ Quint whispered. ‘They’re ’appy as pigs in shit.’

‘They do look as if they are enjoying their work, don’t they?’ Adam agreed. ‘But we cannot stay to admire their devotion to duty. We must move on.’

They left the chapel and entered once again the small, paved courtyard which looked to be the centre of the monastery. In the dim light from the half-moon they could now make out two cypress trees in the far corner. Two more arched stone doorways opened off the courtyard. Quint looked briefly into the first one they approached.

‘Nothing ’ere,’ he said. ‘It’s just another door into the room where we come in. I can see the winding gear as fetched us up.’

The next building had the outward appearance of another chapel. The two men stood outside its door, which appeared to have been designed for exceptionally short monks. For a moment, Adam wondered whether or not it was even worth entering, but the temptation to look at whatever wall paintings it might hold was enough to persuade him to duck his head and go in. Quint followed him. The room they entered was like a prison cell. Once inside, neither man could stand upright without grazing his head on the rough stone that formed its ceiling. As the light from their candles illuminated the darkness, both of them started back in surprise.

‘Sweet Jesus in ’eaven,’ whispered Quint hoarsely. ‘What in ’ell are these doing ’ere?’

At the back of the room, there was a recess in the wall. It was piled high with human skulls. More than a hundred stared sightlessly out of the shadows. Adam had now recovered his composure. He held his candle high and allowed it to throw its flickering light into the empty eye sockets.

‘It is an ossuary, I believe,’ he said. ‘These are the skulls of monks from long ago.’

‘Ain’t they got no decency?’ Quint said, in disgust. ‘Why didn’t they give ’em a proper burial like a Christian should?’

‘They have different beliefs from ours in England. To them it is no disrespect to leave the bones thus.’

Quint shook his head as if in sorrowful acknowledgement that, beyond England’s shores, the world was a bizarre and poorly governed place.

‘Wouldn’t take much to plant ’em in the ground,’ he commented.

‘You forget that we are a long way above it, Quint.’

There was a sudden sound from outside. Both men doused their candles and fell silent. They moved warily to the entrance of the ossuary and peered out. On the far side of the small courtyard, two figures were silhouetted against the dim moonlight. One was instantly recognisable from its enormous height.

‘That’s Andros,’ Quint hissed.

‘And, unless I’m much mistaken, the other is his master.’

Rallis had in his hand a dark lantern. As they watched, he slid back its shutter and its light shone out. Standing by the parapet overlooking the drop, the lawyer waved the lantern from side to side.

‘’E’s signalling to someone,’ Quint whispered, ‘someone down on the plain.’

‘So it would seem.’

‘Where’d ’e get the light from?’

‘The bags, I suppose. The monks hauled up two of our bags after we all made it to the top.’

The Greek continued to move his light from side to side. From where Adam and Quint crouched in the doorway to the ossuary, it was impossible to tell whether or not there was any answering signal from below. Several minutes passed and then Rallis closed the shutter on his lantern for the last time. He turned to his giant companion and spoke a few brief words which the watchers were unable to hear. The two Greeks left the courtyard. For a minute, the silence was broken only by the sound of some night bird cawing among the rocks beneath the monastery.

‘What the ’ell was all that about?’ Quint asked eventually, his voice still a whisper.

‘I have absolutely no notion,’ his master replied. Adam’s mind was racing with possible explanations for the lawyer’s behaviour. None that he could imagine cast Rallis in good light. It seemed as if the professor had been right to suspect the man of treacherous intent. And yet Adam could scarcely bring himself to think badly of the Athenian. Even in the short period of their acquaintance, he had grown to like and admire him. ‘He was making contact with someone in the village below. Or someone camped on the plain. That much was evident. But, for what purpose, I cannot tell.’

‘What would ’e want to be waving ’is bleeding lantern at anybody for?’

‘As I say, Quint, I do not know.’ Adam moved cautiously into the courtyard. He looked from left to right and then beckoned his servant to follow him. ‘Presumably he was not relaying instructions to them about the feeding of the mules.’

‘What we going to do about it? We going to ask ’im what ’e’s been up to?’

‘I cannot believe that he would necessarily tell us.’

‘We got to do something,’ Quint persisted.

‘We will keep an eye on our Athenian friend. And we will not always assume that he is our friend. We will listen out for anything that might be said that will cast some light on his nocturnal prowling.’ ‘That won’t do no good,’ Quint said. ‘Not for me. What with Rallis and the monks gobbling Greek all the time. Even if I do listen out, I ain’t going to make much sense out of anything I ’ear.’

‘Well, if your ears prove useless, keep your eyes open. But, for now, we shall retire. The monks will no doubt be stirring before too long. We would not want them to catch us creeping about their domain like thieves in search of booty.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

In the tiny cell he had been given, Adam awoke to the sounds of birds and to the muffled gong of the semandron summoning the monks to prayer. He had heard it once in the dark hours of the night but it had disturbed his rest only briefly. Now it proved impossible to ignore. He opened the shutters of the unglazed window to the room and allowed the sun to enter. After dressing, he ventured onto the wooden walkway that ran outside the guest chambers and skirted the eastern side of the monastery. A white goat, a bell around its neck, was wandering along the walkway. While Adam watched, the beast disappeared round the corner but he could still hear it jingling on the far side of the building. Looking across the flimsy railings of the walkway which were the only protection against a precipitous drop, Adam shaded his eyes against the rising sun. He could see where another of the pillars of rock thrust its way up from the plain. It too had a monastery on its summit. The building seemed almost like a natural outcrop of the rock. It was difficult to tell where geology ended and architecture began. Adam cast his eyes downwards. At the foot of the rock pillars, he could see the box-like houses of Kalambaka with their red roofs and he could just make out the tiny figures of some of the inhabitants as they emerged to begin their day. In the background, across the valley, the peaks of the Pindos Mountains soared into the sky, their slopes green with the trees that cloaked them.

He heard a sound behind him and turned to find that Fields had emerged from his cell and was standing on the walkway.

‘Good morning, Professor. I trust that you slept well.’

‘I did not, Adam.’ Fields was flapping a hand in front of his face and looked to be in a cantankerous mood. ‘Perhaps you recall the story of Domitian and the flies? Of how he spent days in seclusion doing nothing but catching flies and stabbing them with a sharpened stylus?’

‘I believe I do remember it. From Suetonius, is it not?’

‘I have often thought it a curious occupation for an emperor but, after a night amidst the insects of Agios Andreas, I can only wish that I possessed the same skills Domitian had. Do you suppose it is possible to stab fleas as well as flies?’

‘It is probably an art that requires practice.’

‘We shall undoubtedly have the opportunity for much practice before we leave this wretched abode of penury and superstition. I am bitten half to death and I am filthy. I could see no means of performing my toilet in that dingy stall they gave me.’

‘Cleanliness seems to be a virtue not much admired in monastic circles,’ Adam said.

‘The old bastards stink is what you mean.’ Quint had also left his cell and was standing by the wooden railings, scratching his stubbled chin and hitching up his trousers. ‘I could smell ’em from yards off last night.’

‘These are holy men, Quint,’ Adam said. ‘Their concern is with their souls not with their bodies. Anyway, if truth be told, neither you nor I nor even the professor can lay claim to great fragrance after traipsing the plains of Thessaly for several days.’

‘I can accept the bodily odours of the monks,’ Fields said. ‘Anyone who has spent any time in the Senior Common Room of a Cambridge college has learned to accustom himself to the redolence of his fellow man. It is the insect life that I cannot abide.’

The same monk who had conducted them to their rooms the previous night now appeared to usher them towards their breakfasts. Beckoning the three of them to follow him, he set off along the walkway. He took them down a short flight of stairs and into a stone-flagged corridor which led to a massive wooden door. The monk pushed it open and entered a room larger than any other they had so far seen in Agios Andreas. Three long tables, with benches by them, stood within it. One crossed the room at its far end. The other two were set at right angles to it. In the far left-hand corner was a lectern.

‘The refectory, I assume,’ the professor said, as Theophanes indicated by smiles and gestures that the far table was to be theirs. ‘And we are to be guests at their equivalent of high table. The similarity to colleges by the Cam grows. Although I suspect the food may not be as appetising.’

‘But healthier, perhaps,’ Adam suggested.

An elderly monk with a beard of particular luxuriance was standing by the top table, bowing repeatedly.

‘This will be the hegumen.’ Fields examined the old monk as if he were some curious animal of which no specimen had previously come to his attention. ‘As ignorant as his fellows, I have no doubt.’

The monk, smiling beatifically, continued to bow and nod.

‘The hegumen?’ Adam sounded momentarily puzzled. ‘Ah, the one in charge.’

‘The abbot, in effect.’

‘We must hope that he does not speak English, Professor. Or he might take offence at your words.’

‘He will be a monoglot Greek, I have no doubt.’ Fields, still staring at the hegumen like a visitor encountering one of the odder beasts in the Regent’s Park zoo for the first time, was unabashed. ‘And his Greek will be some barbarous dialect that is barely comprehensible.’

Adam responded to the monk’s politeness with bows of his own and a greeting in Greek. The old man looked delighted to be addressed in his own language. He replied with a volley of swiftly delivered remarks, few of which Adam was able to catch. They all took their seats and watched as the door opened again and the other monks trooped in together. Behind the caloyeri were Rallis and his huge servant. Fields waved at the empty places on the bench and the two Greeks joined the Englishmen in their place of honour. Andros, struggling to accommodate his vast legs beneath the table, made it rock gently on his knees before he was able to settle into his seat. Rallis, taking his place more gracefully, greeted his fellow travellers warmly. He bowed respectfully to the hegumen. There was no trace of embarrassment in his manner, Adam noted, no suggestion that he knew they had witnessed his midnight excursion and his mysterious signalling or that, if he did know, he cared greatly.

The young servant who had been present the previous day when the visitors were hauled up the rock now appeared, placing plates of dry bread and salt cheese in front of them. Another boy set glasses and a tankard of red wine on the table. Adam picked up the tumbler he had been given for the wine and examined it in the dim light. It looked very ancient and bore on it several unmonastic engravings of little cupids wrestling and shooting arrows. Was the tumbler Venetian, he wondered? It certainly looked to be. If it was, what roundabout journey had brought it to this remote spot? As he was pondering this, one of the monks moved away from his companions and stood by the lectern. Opening the large and ancient Bible on it, he began to read aloud. His fellow monks were silent but otherwise seemed to be paying little heed to him. Their attention looked to be more focused on the breakfast to come.

When, after a minute or two, the reader ceased speaking, closed the Bible and returned to his place, the others fell on the bread and cheese like men who had scarcely eaten that week. A slight hum of hushed conversation rose from the monks’ table. From time to time, one of the younger caloyeri raised his head and looked at the visitors, but if Adam caught his eye, he looked down immediately at his plate. The others seemed remarkably uninterested in anything other than their food. The hegumen continued to chatter cheerfully to Adam in Greek which the young man found difficult to follow. The old man, he thought, was asking him about London. He wanted to know about the state of the monasteries there. Were they rich and well-populated? Adam laboured to provide the hegumen with adequate answers to his enquiries. Fields, meanwhile, was taking the opportunity to question Rallis.

‘You have put forward our request to see the objects these monks possess?’ he asked.

‘I did so,’ the Greek replied. ‘But there was no need. The hegumenos assumed that the only reason we travelled so far was that we wished to pay our respects to the relics. He could imagine no other. He has agreed to show them to us later this morning.’

‘And their library?’

‘I believe that will also be included in the tour.’

Once breakfast was finished, the hegumen led his guests from the refectory. He beckoned them into a squat building that stood next to the chapel where Adam and Quint had admired the wall paintings the previous night. The two servants were left outside. The hegumen ushered Adam, Fields and Rallis into a rectangular stone cell where the treasures of the monastery had been laid out on a wooden desk for their inspection. From a cupboard in the corner, he took an embroidered stole and placed it round his neck. He waved his arm at the desk. The three visitors moved closer to examine what was on it.

‘There are beautiful objects here,’ Adam remarked, pointing to a jewel-encrusted box.

The hegumen made encouraging noises as he did so, like a schoolmaster trying to embolden a bright but bashful pupil.

‘That is a very holy relic,’ Rallis said. ‘The monks believe it to be part of the body of Agios Andreas. Saint Andrew.’ He reached his right hand behind his neck and tapped on his own back. ‘I do not know the name of it in English but it is here.’

‘The shoulder blade,’ Adam said.

‘Ah, the shoulder blade. Like the blade of the sword.’ Rallis smiled at the curiosities of the English language. ‘The monks believe they possess the shoulder blade of Agios Andreas in the jewelled box. It is their greatest treasure.’

Fields grunted with distaste. ‘These Eastern Christians are worse than papists,’ he said. ‘All these saints’ bones. What else do they claim to hold here? The right hand of St Thomas? Mary Magdalen’s left foot?’

‘They are not sophisticated, perhaps, Professor,’ Rallis said soothingly, ‘but their religious feelings are sincere.’

‘They are mired in unreason. In thrall to absurd superstitions. Do they seriously expect us to believe that bits and pieces of the body of Saint Andrew, a man who died eighteen hundred years ago, are scattered about the monasteries of Greece and the Levant?’

‘The relic is certainly many centuries old.’ Rallis continued to speak to Fields in a placatory tone of voice. ‘The monks say it belonged once to the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It was brought from Byzantium by the first abbot of the monastery.’

‘Nonsense,’ Fields barked. ‘It is as likely to be my grandmother’s shinbone as it is to be the shoulder blade of an apostle.’

If the hegumen realised, from the professor’s voice, that the relic was not proving a success with one of his visitors at least, he gave no sign. Instead, he pointed to the wall behind the desk where an image of the Madonna, wide-eyed and solemn, looked down on them.

‘Holy Mother,’ he said in English, gesturing towards the icon. They all peered at it, the professor still tutting with irritation.

‘The painting has been damaged, I see,’ Adam remarked, indicating an area on the Virgin’s gown which had clearly been repaired.

Seeing Adam’s gesture, the hegumen launched himself on an excited speech in Greek which only Rallis could follow.

‘It was a very bad man who did that, he is saying. A soldier, many years ago. He struck the icon with his sword. The Holy Mother began to bleed.’

Fields snorted in derision.

‘She bled for many days. Only when the bad man repented and confessed his crimes did she stop. He became a very good man. He threw away his sword and became a monk himself. He died a saint.’

‘Is there no limit to the fatuities these people will believe?’ the professor asked of no one in particular.

‘She does not bleed any more.’

‘I should think not!’

‘But she does weep.’

‘Oh, I will hear no more of this!’

Fields was, by this time, in a paroxysm of exasperation. He turned his back on the icon and moved as far away from it as he could in the confined space of the room. The old monk, apparently baffled by the professor’s behaviour, looked reproachfully at him.

‘She wept in the wars forty years and more ago when the Greeks were defeated,’ Rallis went on. ‘And when the monasteries were obliged to remain within the lands of the Turks. The hegumenos is too young to remember this but the oldest monk, Brother Donatus, saw the lady weep. He can tell you about it.’

‘He need not bother himself,’ the professor said, from his position in the corner of the room. ‘We have no interest in these preposterous superstitions.’

The hegumen had finished his short lecture. He picked up the icon and kissed it reverently before returning it to the table.

‘Do they have no books or manuscripts to show us?’ Fields had returned from his sulk but he was still beside himself with impatience and irritation. ‘Do they think we have come all this way to look at ham-fisted daubs of the Virgin Mary and the scapulae of the long dead?’

‘These monks are not learned men, Professor,’ Rallis said. ‘Mostly they are peasants and artisans. They are ignorant and uneducated. The relics and the icons they love but the books in their library often mean little to them. Some of them can barely read.’

‘But they continue to look after them,’ Adam interrupted.

‘Not with any great efficacy, I would conjecture,’ the professor said. ‘Any volume that we get to see will doubtless be ruined by damp and neglect.’

‘They tend their gardens because they relish the food that comes from them,’ Rallis said. ‘They do not so much relish the food of the mind. They tend their books only because the monks here have always done so. They respect them for their antiquity.’

‘The books and manuscripts should be removed from the monasteries and from the hands of these ignorant men,’ the professor said. ‘Otherwise mice and mildew will destroy them.’

The hegumen, who had been waiting in polite silence, now spoke swiftly to Rallis. He had clearly understood at least something of what had been said.

‘They do not keep their books here,’ the lawyer interpreted.

‘Their library is elsewhere. Perhaps, the hegumenos says, it will be possible to see it later. But now he must return the relics to their places of safe keeping.’

‘The hegumenos was distressed by the lack of respect the professor showed to the relics and to the icon of the Holy Mother.’ Rallis and Adam were talking together in the latter’s room. Fields, still muttering to himself about the childish gullibility of the monks, had retired to read his Thucydides. The two servants, when Adam had last seen them, had been sitting on a stone wall above a precipitous drop, playing cards. Quint had been endeavouring, with little success, to teach Andros the rudiments of three-stake brag. ‘He cannot bring himself to show more treasures to such a disrespectful man.’

‘Aha, Fields has shot himself in the foot, has he?’ Adam could not help but feel a little amusement that the professor’s bad temper had rebounded upon him. ‘With his inability to stay quiet?’

‘So it would seem. But the hegumenos was impressed by the reverence you showed to the relics. He speaks a little English. He understood that you were asking about the books.’

‘He will let us see them?’

‘Only you and I are to see them. Not the professor. He will send Brother Demetrios to open the library for us.’

‘Demetrios? The monk who helped me to my feet after that wretched journey up the rockface? I shall be almost as pleased to see him again as I was to see him the first time.’

At that very moment there was a tap upon Adam’s door.

‘Come,’ the young man cried. The door opened and the wild-haired Demetrios, looking like a distraught prophet from one of the more obscure books of the Old Testament, bustled into the room. He came to a stop when he saw the two men and bowed his head in greeting.

‘Here is the very man of whom we were speaking,’ Adam said, returning the monk’s salute. ‘And, like the earl in Tennyson’s poem, his beard is a foot before him and his hair a yard behind.’

Demetrios spoke rapidly to the young Englishman, nodding his head up and down with great energy. Adam, able to follow only one word in three, smiled encouragingly.

‘As you have probably surmised,’ Rallis said, when the monk’s brisk torrent of Greek came to an end, ‘he is here to take us to the library.’

Beckoning the two men to follow him, Demetrios left the room and walked into the passage outside. He led them through an arched gateway at its end which took them into the main courtyard. Adam waved his hand in greeting to Quint and Andros, still sitting on the wall a dozen yards away and staring at cards. Both were too engrossed by their game to respond. Looking back to ensure that his visitors were still following him, Demetrios crossed the courtyard and approached a building which Adam had noticed earlier and assumed to be a storehouse for food. The monk stopped in front of its low wooden door and, delving into the inner recesses of his clothing, extracted a rusting key. He waved it in front of Adam’s eyes for a moment or two, like a conductor using a baton to beat time with an orchestra. Then, with a final flourish, he thrust it into the keyhole. The key turned. Demetrios placed his shoulder against the door, shoved vigorously and disappeared into the interior of the building.

Adam and Rallis followed the monk through the door and found him struggling to light a candle. As the flame took hold, its light revealed the contents of the room. An ancient wooden cupboard stood against one wall. In one corner was a heap of rotting monastic robes. Opposite these were fragments of twisted metal that might once have been an iconostasis. The only other piece of furniture was largely hidden by curtaining. Demetrios twitched the fabric aside to display seven shelves of old and decaying books. The musty smell of neglect hung in the air above them. Leather bindings peeled away from cracked spines. Several volumes seemed to have disintegrated altogether and all that was left of them were handfuls of torn and stained pages thrust between their fellows.

‘Bibliotheka,’ the monk said, with a hint of pride in his voice. Silence followed as the two visitors stared in dismay at the shelves Demetrios had revealed. One of the books, disturbed by the monk thrusting aside the curtain, fell sideways on its shelf. Small clouds of dust rose upwards.

‘This is the library we have come so far to see?’ Adam asked eventually. He spoke to Rallis with a hint of reproach as if the Greek was solely responsible for the reputation the monastery had gained. The lawyer looked abashed.

‘Many scholars I know in Athens tell me that Agios Andreas has very interesting books in its possession.’

‘Your Athenian friends must have been misinformed.’

‘Perhaps the books are more valuable than they seem.’

Adam reached out and took a volume at random from the middle shelf.

‘The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.’

He put the book back in its place and extracted another.

‘St Basil on the workings of the Holy Spirit. These are the sort of works we could find in many eastern monasteries, Rallis,’ he said, deeply downcast. ‘I doubt very much there is anything here for us.’

Demetrios had been standing by the library, beaming with pleasure and taking deep breaths, as if intending to inhale an aroma of scholarship that clung to the books. Now he sensed the disappointment of his visitors. He put a hand on Adam’s arm and began to speak to him with great earnestness.

‘Rallis, I cannot understand the Greek our friend here speaks. I would be most grateful if you would translate for me.’

‘He is telling you that you are not the only Englishman to see the library. Another of your countrymen came here last year.’

‘He must have been as disappointed as we have been, then.’

‘No, the other Englishman liked very much what he saw in the library.’

‘Did he, indeed? He is certain the visitor was English?’ Adam asked, his interest now aroused. ‘Perhaps he knew only that he came from the West.’

Rallis conferred with the monk once again.

‘The man was most definitely English. He spoke English. And he behaved all the time as if the monastery belonged to him.’

The Greek’s face was impassive as he translated.

‘Brother Demetrios is also telling me that he was once English himself.’

‘Was he, by Jove?’ Adam said. He looked at the bearded and bedraggled monk who grinned at him, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. ‘But he is no longer?’

The monk spoke rapidly to Rallis. Adam could make out only a handful of Greek words and could not connect them into any meaningful sentence.

‘He was born in Cephalonia, he says. The English ruled there when he was born but they gave the island back to the Greeks. He likes to be Greek now but sometimes he wishes he still was English.’

The monk nodded as if in vigorous approval of the precision of Rallis’s translation and then began to speak again.

‘There is another library which the monks keep hidden,’ Rallis said after Demetrios had finished. ‘But for English travellers he opens it. Because he remembers being English himself. He opened it for the Englishman last year. He is asking if you also would like to see this hidden library.’

Adam could scarcely contain his delight at this information. ‘I rather think I would,’ he said. He bowed his head several times in Brother Demetrios’s direction and was rewarded with another black-toothed grin. The monk moved to the large wooden cupboard in the corner of the room and opened its door. Inside, was a second door which he threw back to reveal a small chamber cut into the thick stone walls. Shelves had been fitted round the chamber and sitting on them were dozens of musty volumes.

‘Holy books,’ said Demetrios in English.

Adam began to examine them. Clouds of dust arose as he picked each book from the shelf. On first inspection, most seemed as commonplace as the ones in the outer room. Gospels and liturgies by the score. Works by long-dead Orthodox theologians. Editions of Greek classics that would have been welcome enough additions to college libraries back in Cambridge but hardly worth the trouble of travelling most of the way across Europe to consult. Adam continued to feel that only disappointment awaited them but he moved on into the dark recesses of the hidden chamber. Demetrios, who had left them briefly, returned with a lantern which lit up the furthest shelves. Beyond the last of the printed books were what looked to be the few bound manuscripts the monastery possessed. As Adam moved his hand to reach for them, the old monk spoke.

‘Those are the ones the English always like,’ Rallis translated. ‘The other Englishman wanted to buy one of them.’

‘Did they sell it to him?’ Adam asked anxiously. The other Englishman, he felt certain, could only be Creech. The man with the crescent scar had been asking in Athens about travelling to the monasteries. He must have succeeded in doing so. He had found the manuscript he had been seeking. If he had been able to buy it, their own journey would be in vain.

Rallis spoke quickly to the monk, who sounded indignant as he replied.

‘No, they did not sell to him. There is not enough gold in the whole of the country to buy any of the holy books.’

‘This one is not very holy,’ Adam said, examining one of the more ancient-looking manuscripts. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, it is a collection of poems by Anacreon. It is probably just as well that the monks choose not to read this.’

‘Some of the caloyeri would not be able to read it, even should they wish to do so. They are very close to illiterate.’

‘Well, that would save their blushes. Anacreon on drinking, they might like. But Anacreon on women might be rather strong meat for them.’

Adam continued to root through the volumes on the innermost shelves, picking up the occasional one and turning the pages swiftly. The smell of long-neglected literature hung in the air. Demetrios’s hidden cubicle was not, he thought, so dissimilar to some of the darker corners of a college library back in Cambridge.

‘Which was the manuscript the other Englishman wanted to buy?’ he asked.

Rallis spoke again to the monk.

‘It is the one by your left hand. The small one bound in black leather.’

Adam took hold of the volume indicated and carefully opened it.

‘It is written on vellum,’ he said.

‘Are they not all written on vellum?’

‘The majority will probably be paper. Vellum manuscripts will, I assume, be the oldest.’

‘Is it the one which we seek?’ The lawyer’s voice was as hushed as if he was in the monastery’s church.

Adam turned the leaves of the manuscript one by one. He blew gently on one of them and a small cloud of dust particles rose into the air.

‘Adam, is it the book we have come for?’ Rallis sounded as if he was struggling to maintain his usual calm.

In reply, Adam held out the manuscript, open at the page on which he had blown. He pointed to the Greek lettering inscribed on it hundreds of years earlier. The ink was fading but the letters were still clear and legible. He indicated one of the words at the top of the page.

‘ “Euphorion”,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘Unless my ability to decipher Greek has deserted me entirely, that word is Euphorion.’

‘It is,’ Rallis replied. ‘And there beneath it is the word “Periegesis”. There can be no doubt about it. This is the missing manuscript of Euphorion’s travels.’

The two men looked at one another with poorly suppressed excitement. For a moment, neither man could think of anything further to say.

‘You have come a long way to find this book,’ Rallis said eventually. Adam was staring once again at the word ‘Euphorion’ on the leaf of vellum. He had indeed travelled far since he had first encountered the name written in the notebook belonging to poor Creech. And now here was the mysterious manuscript, the one in which, if Palavaccini, the editor of the first printed version was to be believed, the Greek writer spoke of “the golden treasure that lies hidden where the ancient kings buried it”.

‘We must show this to the professor,’ he said. ‘He will rejoice in this discovery as much as we do.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I think we must wait until the hegumen sees the logic in our proposal,’ Adam said. ‘To lose one manuscript from a library which they never use and gain in return enough money to feed his monks for months. He must see the sense in it.’

It was no more than an hour since he and Rallis had held the Euphorion manuscript in their hands. They had wished to remove it from the hidden library to show the professor. When they had proposed this, Demetrios had become very agitated. He had released a torrent of barely comprehensible Greek and had tugged at Adam’s sleeve as if intent on hauling him bodily from the library. In the end, they had had to leave the manuscript where it was. The wild-haired monk had led them back across the courtyard to speak to the hegumen. Rallis, exerting all his charm and eloquence, had made the spiritual head of the monastery an offer. The manuscript, he had told him, was of great interest to the Englishmen. The Englishmen would pay the hegumen many piastres for it. The hegumen had listened politely to the lawyer’s lengthy speech and then he had replied.

‘Ochi,’ he had said. The answer was no and always would be no. It was no to the other Englishman who had visited Agios Andreas. It was no to them. The treasures of the monastery were not for sale. Rallis and Adam had no choice but to retire to the professor’s room and inform him of the morning’s developments.

‘If we are obliged to wait for these credulous dunces to learn logic,’ Fields now remarked, ‘we shall wait until the Greek Kalends. It will never happen.’

He was consumed by irritation with what he had been told. He could not keep still and strode about the room, tugging hard at his beard as if it were a false one and he were intent on pulling it off.

‘We must force the abbot, nolens volens, to surrender the manuscript,’ he said eventually.

‘I do not think we can do that, sir,’ Adam said. ‘How do you propose that we dispossess him of it? At gunpoint?’

Fields stopped and stared intently at the younger man. For a moment, it seemed he was about to hail the suggestion as a brilliant means of breaking the deadlock. Then he shook his head.

‘No. As much as we want the manuscript, we can scarcely point our rifles at men of religion. Even men of so debased and superstitious a religion as this Eastern Orthodoxy.’

The professor looked disappointed that his scruples prevented him from the action the situation demanded. He began to patrol the room again. The other two watched him and exchanged glances. Rallis raised his eyebrows. Adam lifted his shoulders in the smallest of shrugs.

‘I shall go and speak to this hegumen myself,’ Fields announced, bringing his restless pacing to an abrupt end. ‘I shall see just how deaf he is to the voice of reason.’

The professor said no more but exited the room immediately. His boots could be heard clumping down the wooden walkway outside. His two companions looked at one another again.

‘Will his intervention alter the hegumen’s decision, do you suppose?’ Adam asked.

‘I doubt it very much.’ Rallis looked as if he could not decide whether to be amused or irritated by Fields’s sudden departure. ‘The hegumenos does not like the professor. He knows very little English but he heard some of what he said at breakfast. And he knew later that his relics were being mocked. I fear that Professor Fields may make the task of acquiring the manuscript more difficult rather than less.’

‘We had best hasten after him. Perhaps we can prevent him from insulting the old man’s religion further.’ Adam did not sound hopeful that they could. He and the Greek lawyer followed the professor from the room. They made their way back through the winding labyrinth of the monastery’s ancient passageways and tiny courtyards to the small cell which its spiritual leader called his own. As they approached, they could hear voices in Greek. One was raised in anger, the other spoke gently but firmly. It was not difficult to guess which belonged to Fields. They entered the chamber, empty save for a ramshackle cot in one corner on which the hegumen slept. An icon of the Madonna and Child and one of Saint Andrew were the only decorations. They found the professor shouting about the significance to classical scholarship of the manuscript in the library while the old hegumen bent his head and examined the stone floor of his cell. He looked up as his new visitors arrived and immediately began to address Rallis. Fields continued to rant for a moment or two before falling sullenly silent. Rallis listened to the monk and then turned to the other two to translate.

‘He says they are poor,’ he began.

‘Yes, yes, we know that already,’ Fields interrupted impatiently. He was almost beside himself. ‘Surely that means all the more reason for them to accept a gift in return for the manuscript.’

‘They are poorer now than they have ever been,’ the lawyer went on. ‘They once had lands in the north. In Wallachia. Many farms and fields and vineyards. But the Prince of Romania confiscated their estates there. Now they are very poor indeed.’

‘Damn him and his lost fields and vineyards!’ Fields was clutching his head in both hands. He reminded Adam of the villain in a melodrama about to tear his hair following the frustration of his wicked plans. ‘Why will he not sell us the manuscript?’

‘But however poor they have been, they have never sold the holy treasures that have been entrusted to them.’

‘Holy treasures!’ the professor screeched. ‘Does this old fool even know what we want? We have no interest in dispossessing him of his saintly shoulder blade. Or his lachrymose icon. We want a single manuscript from his library which probably no one has read since Suleiman the Magnificent was sitting on the Ottoman throne.’

‘Pray, calm yourself, Professor.’ Adam made soothing gestures towards the older man. ‘This is no way to win the hegumen’s agreement.’

‘I am not certain that I can be calm, Adam.’ Fields none the less made a mighty effort to recover his self-possession. ‘When I am faced by this unthinking refusal to accept reasoned argument.’

For a moment, Adam entertained himself with the notion of what the professor might consider unreasoned argument when his reasoned variety seemed to consist of such frothing rage. But the hegumen was now speaking again. His Greek was very different to the classical language that Adam knew but there was no need for Rallis to translate. There was no mistaking the old monk’s meaning. He was asking them, politely but firmly, to leave him alone in his stone cell.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

All negotiations with the hegumen proved fruitless. Despite the offers of cash, despite the charm that Rallis deployed, despite the fury with which the professor raged against his intransigence, the old monk remained adamant. No manuscript was leaving Agios Andreas while it was in his care.

‘Can we not read the manuscript in situ?’ Adam asked. ‘We could return with Demetrios to the hidden library and copy out the passages in Euphorion which are relevant.’

‘I am not certain that we will necessarily know which passages are relevant,’ the professor said gloomily. ‘It may be that the importance of Euphorion’s descriptions will become apparent only when the text and the ground it describes are closely compared. We will need the original when we travel north.’

‘Your suggestion of reading the manuscript here is no longer feasible, Adam.’ Rallis sounded in no doubt. ‘The professor has offended the hegumen deeply. Mortally, is that the word you use? He is unwilling to let any of us enter the library again.’

‘Wretched man that he is,’ Fields said with venom. It was clear that the idea that he might bear any blame in the dispute had not occurred to him.

‘We have only one option left open to us,’ Adam said. ‘We cannot use violence against the monks.’ For a moment, Fields looked willing to dispute this but he contented himself with an angry shake of his head. ‘We will have to go over their heads. The monasteries here at Meteora are under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox authorities at Larissa?’

Rallis nodded.

‘Then we must go there and persuade the bishop to give us written permission to buy the manuscript. He is likely to be a more worldly man than our friend here. He will understand the logic of our arguments better.’ Adam had no great desire to embark on the plan of action he was himself proposing, but he could see no other honourable way of taking possession of the Euphorion manuscript. ‘When he approves our purchase, we can return to Agios Andreas and the hegumen will be obliged to bow before a higher authority.’

‘Weeks will be wasted in this senseless rigmarole,’ Fields protested.

‘There is, alas, no alternative, Professor.’ Rallis spoke with certainty. ‘We will take advantage of the hospitality of the caloyeri for one further night and then we will journey to Larissa.’

And so, on the following morning, after they had breakfasted on bread and olives, the men sat once more in the monks’ net and were lowered down the rockface. They collected the mules from Kalambaka where an amiable farmer, his palm crossed with the silver of several piastres, had stabled them, and took the road east towards Larissa.

For many miles, as they trudged on, they were able still to look behind them and see the strange pinnacles of Meteora on the horizon, like the unearthly architecture of a fevered dream.

They travelled for most of the day in silence. For Andros this seemed to be his natural state. The others were wrapped in their own thoughts. Quint was forced to struggle with the mule he was leading, and what little he said consisted largely of curses directed against its obstinacy. Adam and Rallis, relieved of any duty to guide the mules, had the leisure for conversation but found almost nothing to say to one another. The young Englishman spent his time running through the events of the last few days in his head. The delight he had felt at locating the Euphorion manuscript was fading a little but was still present. The obstinacy of the abbot in refusing to part with it, he thought, had been aggravating but understandable. Their enforced journey to Larissa was a nuisance. Nonetheless,

they would soon return, almost certainly armed with the papers necessary to buy the manuscript. Despite what Fields’s bad temper might suggest, the delay was endurable. And then they could read what perhaps only one other man since the old Venetian scholar Palavaccini had read. The very great secret of which Creech had spoken at the Speke dinner in London might be revealed.

And yet there was still so much of which Adam could make little sense. Where did Rallis fit into the equation? Whose side was he on? What had the Greek lawyer and his servant been doing in the monastery the night before last? To whom had they been signalling? Adam could think of few legitimate reasons to doubt the lawyer. Had Rallis not led them here to the manuscript as he had said he would? Had he not argued their case to the hegumen as eloquently as he could? However, the young man could think of equally few reasons to trust him. What, after all, did they know of him? Little more than what Samways had told them. Perhaps, as Fields had suggested before the party had even reached Agios Andreas, Rallis had some involvement with the brigands who had robbed them of their horses. Adam began to think he should have told the professor of the lantern-waving in the night. He had chosen not to do so because he still retained his belief in Rallis’s essential goodwill towards them. Fields, if informed of what he and Quint had seen, would have had no such belief. Who knew what consequences would have followed?

Adam looked at the professor. Blessed with a more tractable beast than the one at which Quint was swearing, his old mentor was wandering ahead of the group. Earlier in the day, Adam had seen him take a book from his pocket and begin to read it. He was still holding it now. A volume of his beloved Thucydides, the young man assumed. The professor’s mule was travelling towards Larissa with little need of any guidance. Fields had one arm looped through the animal’s halter and his eyes half on the road in front of them and half on his book. Adam noted with surprise that the rage which had possessed the professor so thoroughly the night before seemed to have entirely dissipated. He was now a study in serenity.

That night, they camped once again beneath the stars. Andros took a hatchet from his bag and, hacking at branches of a tree only he could reach, swiftly gathered enough wood for a fire. The travellers sat round it in a circle to eat. They stared morosely at one another through the flames.

‘We shall be in Larissa in little more than a day,’ Adam said eventually, breaking the silence. ‘Is that not so, Rallis?’

‘Perhaps by tomorrow evening. Or the following morning.’

‘With luck we shall quickly win an audience with the bishop. He will see reason in our proposal, Professor.’ Adam was struggling to remain as optimistic as he had been in the morning. He was beginning to wonder whether the bishop might be no more willing to countenance their taking possession of what they wanted than the old hegumen. ‘We will be back at Agios Andreas in no more than a week with permission to take the manuscript. They will not be able to deny us again. The manuscript will be ours.’

The professor was hunched by the fire, looking like a pile of old clothes awaiting a washerwoman. As he listened to what Adam said, his shoulders began to shake and strange sounds emerged from deep within him. For several terrible moments, the young man thought that Fields might be weeping. How, he wondered, was a gentleman supposed to behave in the wilds of a foreign land when a distinguished scholar broke down in tears in front of him? Should one ignore the outburst? Or attempt, however clumsily, to offer comfort? Adam was still pondering these unexpected questions of etiquette when it dawned on him that the professor was not crying, but laughing. The rocking of his body was not the result of sobs and lamentations but of great waves of laughter. Adam looked across the fire at Rallis. The Greek was clearly as puzzled as he was. He turned to Quint, whose face was split by a fiendish grin. The manservant began to make the unearthly wheezings that his master recognised as his own peculiar version of mirth.

‘What is it, Quint? What is going on?’

The servant said nothing but continued to sound like an incompetent piper slowly filling his bag with air. The professor swayed back and forth in front of the fire and then let out one last shout of laughter.

‘The manuscript is already ours, Adam,’ he said. ‘I sent Quintus out last night to take it from that damp hutch those benighted monks call a library.’

There was silence. Adam looked in astonishment from the professor to Quint and back again. Rallis, his face tight with anger, stood and moved away from the fire.

‘You have stolen the Euphorion manuscript?’ Adam was numb with disbelief.

‘I would prefer not to use the verb “to steal” in any of its tenses or moods. I believe that what I have done is liberate Euphorion from the custody of those who did not understand what they possessed.’

‘It remains theft, whatever words you choose to describe it.’

‘Do not be so moralistic, Adam. It ill suits you.’

‘We have taken shameful advantage of the hospitality the caloyeri offered us.’ The young man turned to where the Greek lawyer was staring out into the night. ‘I had no knowledge of this, Rallis, I assure you. I did not know what the professor planned.’

The lawyer, his back turned to the Englishmen huddled around the fire, made no comment.

‘And, what of you, Quint? Damn you!’ Adam rounded on his manservant in a sudden burst of fury. ‘Did you not think to ask me whether or not you should be employed as a thief in the night?’

Quint, still wheezing slightly, was indignant.

‘Don’t get your trumpet out of tune. ’Ow was I to guess you didn’t know all about it?’

‘Do not blame poor Quintus, Adam.’ Fields spoke in conciliatory tones. ‘He was just the delivery boy, you know. What you might call an unlikely Hermes, with winged feet and caduceus in hand, who travelled between one part of the monastery and another, bearing a gift.’

‘A fine choice of god with whom to compare him, Professor. As you know as well as I, Hermes was also the patron of thieves and liars.’

Fields shrugged, as if to acknowledge that Adam might have a point but it was now an irrelevant one.

‘The professor asks me to do it so I done it.’ The unlikely Hermes was now eager to defend himself. ‘I thought you was as keen on getting ’old of the bleedin’ book as ’e was. I wasn’t about to say no now, was I?’

‘Apparently not. Although refusing the requests of your superiors is scarcely an act with which you are unfamiliar.’ Adam slapped his hand to the ground in exasperation. He leaned forward and, picking up a burning branch, thrust it further into the fire. Sparks flew upwards into the darkness.

‘We must turn back tomorrow morning and return what we have taken to the hegumen,’ he said decisively.

‘That is out of the question,’ Fields replied with equal firmness. ‘I have not been lowered one morning from a precipitous height with an ancient manuscript strapped beneath my attire, only to return the next day and give it back. What am I to say to the monks? That I had not noticed it was there?’

‘We will admit our crime and make our apologies.’

‘I will not do so. It is ridiculous to suggest that I should.’

‘What is ridiculous is that a gentleman and a scholar of your standing should stoop to such petty theft.’ Adam had rarely, if ever, spoken to his mentor in such a way but he was almost beside himself with anger that Fields should have behaved in so dishonourable a way.

Rallis had walked back to the fire. He sat down once more.

‘I am not certain that any good purpose will be served by going back to Agios Andreas, Adam,’ he said. ‘If the loss of the manuscript has been discovered, they may not wish to see us again. They will fear the theft of further treasures. They will not pull us up in their net.’

‘And if it has not been discovered?’

The lawyer shrugged. ‘Perhaps, for them — what is your English saying? — ignorance is bliss. We can show the manuscript to the bishop in Larissa. Tell him our story and let him be the Solomon who makes a judgement. Whether we should keep it or give it back to the caloyeri.’

‘We shall not be going to Larissa.’ Fields spoke with certainty. ‘Or rather, we shall avoid entering the town. Instead, we shall journey through the mountains to the coast, through the pass at Tempe, and then up the coast towards Salonika.’

‘And why the devil should we do that, sir?’ Adam asked furiously.

‘Ah, Tempe,’ Fields sighed, smiling sweetly as if the young man had not spoken. ‘The place where the peoples of Thessaly once gathered, Adam. For sacrifices, symposia and parties of pleasure. Aelian, you may recall, wrote that sometimes the whole air of the valley was perfumed with incense. I doubt that such aromas will greet us now but there will be much for us to see. And much perhaps for us to discover.’

Adam realised suddenly that it had not been the writings of Thucydides that had held the professor’s attention earlier in the day.

‘You have been reading the Euphorion manuscript as we rode,’ he said.

In reply, the professor held up a small volume which Adam recognised from the hidden library at the monastery. ‘Entirely correct. Here it is. Written some time in the thirteenth century, I believe. But undoubtedly copied from much earlier manuscripts. Who knows? Perhaps the line of transmission goes back another five hundred years. And now we have it — a little volume, bound in black leather by monastic craftsmen in the last century. So small, so simple to hide.’ The professor laughed at the thought of how easy it had proved for him to carry it from the monastery.

‘Your reading of it has suggested this change of plan, I assume.’

Fields ignored Adam’s remark and asked instead, ‘Did you not wonder why that man Creech was asking you about your visit to Koutles in sixty-seven? I assume he did ask you?’

‘Of course I was puzzled by Creech’s interest in that godforsaken spot,’ Adam acknowledged, ‘but what has Koutles to do with the Euphorion manuscript? Is it one of the sites that Euphorion visited?’

‘Fifteen years ago, a French scholar named Heuzey travelled in the hills where you and Quint rode.’ The professor once again took no apparent notice of Adam’s questions. ‘He saw what you no doubt saw — that the region is filled with tumuli. He realised the importance of these burial mounds. He returned to dig in them six years later, with money granted to him by that popinjay emperor who has just lost his throne.’ Fields sniffed contemptuously. ‘One of the few deeds of which Napoléon le Petit can be proud.’

Rallis, who had appeared lost in his own thoughts, suddenly spoke up. ‘Did this Frenchman find anything when he dug in the mounds?’

‘Very little. He abandoned his work because of the fear of malaria.’ The professor’s voice suggested that this was exactly the kind of cowardice to be expected from the French. ‘But he was convinced that there was something there to be found.’

The Greek lawyer nodded as if this merely confirmed what he had already suspected.

‘What was to be found?’ Adam asked. ‘Are you talking of the golden treasure of which the Aldine editor wrote? It truly exists?’

‘Ah, those are questions I shall leave you to ponder yourself.’ Fields stood and stretched. ‘I am growing weary and there may be days of hectic activity ahead of us. I shall unpack my sleeping bag and retire for the night. I recommend that you should do the same. In the morning, you may feel differently. Unless, of course, like Achilles, you choose to remain sulking in your tent.’

As the professor walked towards the tree to which Quint had tethered the mules, Adam exchanged a glance with the Greek lawyer.

‘I trust you understand that this is none of my doing, Rallis. I had no notion that Fields planned to steal the manuscript.’

The Greek made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

‘The deed is done,’ he said. He pointed out into the night. ‘Let us walk for a while. Away from the fire. It will be easier to talk.’

The two men stood. Adam glared at Quint, still crouched by the flames, who stared defiantly back. For a moment, it seemed as if the young man might speak again to his manservant but he turned on his heel and strode into the darkness. Rallis followed him. When he had gone a hundred yards from the campfire, Adam stopped and allowed the Greek to draw level with him. In the moonlight, each of them waited for the other to speak.

‘The time has come for us both to place our cards on the table, Rallis,’ Adam said eventually. ‘If we are to deal with this new turn of events, we should both be honest with one another.’

Although it had been his suggestion to talk, the Greek made no reply.

‘I had no prior knowledge that the professor was planning to rob the monks of their manuscript. And I do not condone the taking of it.’

‘So you have said.’

‘And I was speaking the truth. But you have been hiding the truth from me. You have been signalling to someone following us. You have been doing so since we first crossed into European Turkey.’

The Greek continued to stare across the plain at the distant mountains. For the briefest of moments, Adam wondered if he had not heard him.

‘You are right, Adam. I have not been honest with you,’ Rallis said after a further pause, turning towards the young Englishman. ‘I have been obliged to mislead you. The work I am doing has forced me into this — what is the word you English would use? — this subterfuge.’

‘The work? What work? I was under the impression that Fields and I had invited you to join us on our travels in search of the Euphorion manuscript. That is the only “work” of which I know.’

‘That is the impression I wished you to have,’ the Greek said, with the smallest hint of complacency in his voice.

‘What other work could there be?’

Rallis moved closer to Adam, so close the young Englishman could feel the lawyer’s breath on his face when he spoke.

‘Have you any idea how many antiquities, how many treasures of the past, leave my country each year?’ the Greek asked in an almost menacing whisper. ‘How many are lost to the country that produced them and end up in museums and the collections of rich men all across the rest of Europe?’

‘Of course not.’ Adam was surprised by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘No one does. The number is incalculable.’

‘Exactly. Every visitor takes away with him a part of our nation’s past. I have no doubt that you yourself have transported objects to London. Coins, a vase, a small statue perhaps?’ Rallis’s voice had grown louder but was still little more than a hissing in the darkness. ‘Trophies to adorn your rooms. To remind you of Greece and its former greatness.’ The Greek made a gesture of obvious contempt for those who needed such spoils.

‘I have a few mementoes of my travels, yes,’ Adam said uncomfortably, thinking of a statuette of Artemis that was one of his most prized possessions. ‘But, as you say, so does everyone who has ever visited Greece.’

‘It cannot continue.’ Rallis spoke with ferocity, suddenly and unexpectedly near to shouting. ‘This looting of our past. Not so much the petty pocketing of objects that you describe’ — he waved his hand to dismiss this — ‘but the wholesale ransacking of sites. The despatching of hundreds and hundreds of objects from Athens to the four corners of Europe for financial gain. That must stop. Otherwise there will be nothing left that we can pass on to future generations of Greeks. Our history will be scattered to the winds.’

The cool and collected lawyer now spoke with an animation and a vehemence that Adam had never before heard in his voice. Silence fell between the two men when Rallis finished speaking. Adam could hear only the sound of bats flitting through the darkness above their heads. He was left with his own, far from gratifying reflections on what his companion had said.

‘I agree with you,’ he said, after a long pause. In truth, he had never given the matter a moment’s thought, but faced by the Greek’s passion, he was now certain that Rallis was correct. ‘What happens is nothing but licensed piracy. But what has it to do with our own journey? Despite what Fields and Quint have done, we are not ransackers or looters. We have taken one old manuscript from a library where, until last year, no one had consulted it in decades. Centuries, possibly.’

‘The manuscript is nothing.’ The lawyer almost laughed. ‘It is your precious Professor Fields. Have you really no notion of what the man has been doing?’

It was clear from the look of puzzlement on Adam’s face that he had not.

‘The professor and the man with the crescent moon scar, Samuel Creech. For many years they have been taking the treasures of my country and selling them. Creech lived in Athens until recently. He sent boxes and boxes of objects to Fields in Cambridge. And Fields sold them. To collectors around England.’

‘Fields was working with Creech!’ Adam could not contain his astonishment.

The lawyer nodded.

‘But he has never spoken to me of knowing the man.’ Adam was bewildered. ‘He has not once suggested that he had even heard Creech’s name before I mentioned it to him. Indeed, he denied knowing him.’

Rallis made a movement that was halfway between a shrug and a bow. Its implication was clear. Why, it said, would Fields do anything other than keep quiet?

‘He needed you, Adam. Creech was dead. He needed a new partner to travel with him in search of the manuscript.’

‘He knew about the Euphorion manuscript long before my visit to Cambridge.’

‘Almost certainly. Creech would have told him of its existence. Although I think perhaps that the man with the scar had not said where it could be found.’

Adam thought for a minute. Was this Greek lawyer to be trusted? Could all of what he said be true? If it was, then most of what he believed about Fields’s character would be wrong. Perhaps it was Rallis himself he should doubt. It was Rallis who had been signalling to unknown confederates from the monastery heights. It was Rallis who had already fallen under suspicion during their journey. Why should Adam believe him now?

‘Even assuming that what you tell me is true,’ he said eventually, ‘Creech and the professor were doing nothing illegal. You have no laws in Greece to prevent this.’

‘For the present, no,’ Rallis acknowledged. ‘But that will change. That is my work. To gather the evidence to persuade my government that laws must be enacted. To prevent the trade in our past by people like Fields.’

Adam stood for a long time, struggling to assimilate all that the Greek lawyer had told him. It was painful to do so. From the very beginning, it would seem, he had been a dupe. The professor had apparently gulled Adam into believing that he knew nothing of Euphorion when, all along, he had been aware of the manuscript and what it might contain. Fields had wanted a companion to assist him in finding it and he had tricked his young friend into playing that role. Adam could now do nothing but contemplate his own foolishness. He was angry with Fields but even more with himself.

‘The people to whom you have been signalling,’ he said, after a minute or two had passed. ‘They are in your employ?’

‘In a manner of speaking. They are what you English would call brigands. But they have been following my instructions and I have been paying them.’

‘You have been paying brigands to follow us?’

‘You are shocked, Adam.’ Rallis smiled. ‘The thought of employing thieves and cut-throats offends your delicate sensibilities. But the reality of life here in Greece is more complicated than you English believe. The politicians in Athens say that brigandage no longer flourishes. Everyone knows that is a lie. Many of the greatest brigands are paid money by those very politicians. Are they paid money to give up their robberies and their murders? No — they are paid money to threaten and to scare the opponents of those politicians. I have merely chosen to pay some of those same men for more peaceful purposes.’

‘But why the charade when we first arrived in Thessaly? Why did that man Lascarides and his men search our baggage and leave us without horses?’

Rallis shrugged. ‘I believed — I still believe — that Fields has records of his transactions with Creech. Of at least some of the antiquities they stole and transported from my country. If I had these records, they would assist me greatly in my campaign. I looked for them in Athens.’

‘It was you who turned the professor’s room at the Angleterre upside down?’

‘While you were waiting for me at the Oraia Ellas.’ Rallis nodded in acknowledgement of his responsibility. ‘I found nothing.’

‘So you decided that you would try again when our journey had begun.’

‘Yes, but I could not very easily search his bags myself. And, if I found anything, I could not take it. Fields would have known immediately that I was the thief. I decided that the most convenient method was to use Lascarides. If he searched and found, he could take. What else would a brigand do? He was instructed to take the horses. I needed to persuade you that his ambush was a genuine one.’

‘But he did not find the documents you wanted in the professor’s belongings?’

‘No, he did not. Either Fields has left them in Athens or they are on his person. Together with Euphorion.’

Adam was silent again as he thought through the lawyer’s words. Rallis might be telling him the truth, but in the absence of the documents which the Athenian had sought, he could not prove it. Was Adam to believe him or to trust instead in the honesty of his old teacher? Once, the answer to the question would have been easy, but after the revelation about the theft of the Euphorion manuscript, he was no longer so certain of Fields’s integrity.

‘The rifle shots as I was being hauled up to the monastery in that confounded net,’ he said at last. ‘That was Lascarides as well, I presume.’

‘I can only apologise once more, Adam. He was acting on his own initiative. I instructed him to continue to follow us. He chose to fire on you. To scare you, I think, no more. It was probably his idea of a joke. I am assuming that you saw Andros and myself in the courtyard on the first night we stayed at the monastery?’

Adam nodded.

‘I was ordering him to shoot no more. Under any circumstances.’

‘By lantern?’ the young Englishman asked sceptically. ‘A difficult message to convey, surely?’

‘Over the years, these brigand bands have developed a means of communicating across the hills by lights alone. You would be surprised by its sophistication.’

‘Are Lascarides and his men still close by us?’ Adam peered into the night, half expecting to see shadowy figures on horseback riding through the trees. The Greek shook his head.

‘Alas, they are on their way back to their homes. Men such as they — they do not much respect the borders that politicians and diplomats impose, but they were growing nervous of travelling so far into European Turkey. They wished to return and I decided that I had no further use for them. I am now regretting that I did so.’

‘What does all this mean, Rallis?’ Adam sounded almost plaintive. ‘Fields knows more than he has told me. You know more than you have told me. Sometimes, damn it, I believe that Quint and Andros know more than they have told me. What is this golden treasure of which Euphorion wrote?’

‘Do you recall anything of the tombs of the ancient Macedonian kings, my friend?’

Adam looked at the Greek in surprise.

‘The tomb of Alexander? It was in Alexandria. Destroyed by the Mahometans centuries ago, was it not?’

‘Not Alexander’s tomb. Those of his ancestors. Of his father Philip and of even earlier kings.’

‘They are lost as well, surely? No one now can know where they lie buried. They went to their graves centuries before the birth of Christ.’

‘But what if someone did know where those graves lie? Would that not be a secret worth having?’ Rallis seized Adam by the arm. ‘And would that not be a “golden treasure” worth possessing?’

‘You are telling me that the manuscript contains information about the whereabouts of Philip of Macedon’s tomb?’

‘I believe so. The man Creech believed so. Your friend the professor believes so.’

Rallis released Adam’s arm from his grasp and stepped back, satisfied with the effect of his words on the young man. His head whirling, Adam walked a few steps further into the night. Could Creech and Fields be right? Could the Macedonian kings be buried close to the villages he and Quint had visited three years ago? Could a manuscript lead them to the tombs? Philip of Mace-don had died in the fourth century before Christ. Euphorion had visited the region nearly five hundred years later but perhaps some folk memory of the burial sites had survived the centuries for him to record. Adam turned to face the Greek again.

‘And Fields plans to exacavate the tomb?’ he asked.

‘And ship its contents back to England. I cannot allow this to happen.’

‘What are we to do? Does he suspect that you are watching him?’ As soon as he spoke, Adam remembered the earlier conversation with Fields in which the professor had hinted at doubts about the lawyer. He wondered whether or not to report this to Rallis but decided against it.

‘Perhaps, but I do not think so. Luckily, it was you who saw me in the monastery courtyard. And your man Quint. Can we trust Quint to say nothing to the professor?’

Adam paused a moment before replying.

‘An hour ago, I would have vouched for Quint’s silence immediately,’ he said. ‘But his part in the theft of the manuscript gives me reason to doubt him.’

‘I do not think that you should do so. I think that he took the Euphorion because he thought it was what you wanted as well as the professor. But you must speak to him at the first opportunity. Insist to him that he says nothing of seeing me signalling to Lascarides.’

Adam wondered whether or not his insisting upon anything would significantly influence Quint’s behaviour but he nodded in agreement.

‘We have, I think, few options but to travel northwards with Fields,’ Rallis said. ‘It is what he is assuming we will do.’

‘Can we not force him to go with us to Larissa? Or dispossess him of the manuscript? He is but one man against four. The Euphorion manuscript could be ours before we all retire to our beds tonight.’ Even as he spoke, Adam wondered how circumstances could have so much changed that he was talking seriously of acting in such a way towards the professor.

‘That is true but then what would we do? Retrace our steps to Meteora? Bury the secret of the treasure in Agios Andreas once more?’ Rallis waved his hand dismissively at the thought. ‘Euphorion is telling us where the tomb of Philip of Macedon is to be found. I believe that we should listen to him. If we do not, then others eventually will.’

Behind them came the sudden sound of voices and shouting. The professor had returned to the campfire and was calling to Adam.

‘We should go back,’ Rallis said. ‘The professor has allowed us these moments of discussion, I think, but he is anxious to know what we propose to do. Shall we tell him that we travel with him?’

Adam needed little time to make a decision. As the Greek said, and as Fields had known, there were few alternatives.

‘Onward to Macedonia then,’ he said, and strode back towards the fire.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Much more of this digging and they’ll be measuring me up for a wooden suit,’ Quint said bitterly, throwing aside his spade.

‘Fear not, Quint. Those bones of yours will never be laid to rest so far from London.’

Adam’s manservant was not listening to him. He had crouched to the ground and was scrabbling amidst the earth he had just upturned. He pulled something from the soil and held it up.

‘What’s this, do you reckon?’ He sounded momentarily excited, as if he had chanced upon something new, but his voice soon fell. ‘It’s just another coin of some sort, ain’t it?’

‘We have found enough of those, have we not? And the villagers probably dig them up by the thousands when they plough.’ Adam took the dirt-encrusted object out of Quint’s hands and held it up to the light, angling it so that the sun would fall on its face. He brushed some of the soil from it. ‘It has a figure on it. Heracles, I think.’

‘He’s ’itting something,’ Quint said, standing and peering at the coin.

‘Heracles spent much of his career hitting things. It was his special skill.’

‘It’s a lion. ’E’s ’itting a lion.’

‘The Nemean lion. The first of his labours. Heracles was forced to club the lion to death when his arrows failed to kill it. He stunned it and then strangled it.’

Quint whistled. ‘’E must ’ave been stronger than the Great Sam-soni,’ he said, with a note of respect in his voice.

‘The Great Samsoni?’

‘Cove I saw in a circus once down Lambeth way. ’E lifted an ’orse above his ’ead.’

‘A horse? Are you sure, Quint?’

‘A small ’orse,’ Quint admitted.

‘Well, there are no records of Heracles juggling horses above his head. At least none of which I am aware. But lions he could slaughter with ease. Once the Nemean lion was dead, he used its own claws to strip it of its pelt.’

Adam pocketed the coin. For a moment, it seemed as if Quint might protest as his master took possession of an object he had found but he decided against it. Instead, he picked up the spade from where he had thrown it. The two men began to dig again.

Two weeks had passed since the night by the campfire when Professor Fields had revealed the theft of the Euphorion manuscript. Adam still felt very angry over the deception Fields had practised upon him. Indeed, in his darker moments, he regarded the professor’s behaviour as tantamount to a betrayal of their friendship. Yet he had reined in his feelings. He had deemed it politic not to take issue with Fields. He had not even informed him that he now knew of his apparent association with Creech. What, he told himself, were the choices before him? They were either going to find the treasure of which Euphorion had written or they were not. Either way, it would be best to wait upon developments. Fields clearly had some agenda of his own, and he would no doubt pursue it regardless of Adam’s opinions on the ethics of doing so. And the young man was still unsure of Rallis. Were the Greek lawyer’s revelations about Fields and Creech and their role in smuggling works of art out of the country entirely to be trusted? Adam remained unconvinced that his former tutor would involve himself in such basely mercantile transactions. The man was, first and foremost, a scholar. Although nothing, of course, was certain: the more he saw of Fields on this expedition, Adam had to admit, the more he felt that he did not really know the professor and never had done.

As for Quint’s involvement in the theft of the manuscript, this matter was at least more straightforward. Adam’s initial anger and outrage towards his manservant had soon dissipated. Quint had explained at great, even tedious, length that he had only done what he had done because he had thought it the best course of action. No servant, he had maintained with a look of injured innocence, had ever been more attentive to his master’s needs than he and look at the thanks he got. Adam had taken his protestations of good faith with a pinch of salt but he had come to accept Quint’s blunt arguments about the Euphorion manuscript: the theft of the book, however injurious to the monks of Agios Andreas and however ungrateful in the light of their hospitality, was a fait accompli.

They had made their way northwards by a circuitous route. In the first week, they had circled the city of Larissa, admiring from afar its minarets glittering in the noonday sun. They had moved on and, a day later, entered the Vale of Tempe. Cliffs had towered above them on either side of the ravine, surmounted by the ruins of two ancient fortresses which had once commanded the pass. For a further day they had journeyed through the valley. As they rode, Fields had explained what he had discovered in the pages of the volume he had stolen from Agios Andreas. On two occasions, he had even allowed Adam and Rallis to take the manuscript from him and read it themselves. The ancient Greek geographer had not only known that a treasure existed in the Macedonian hills. He had travelled in those same hills a few centuries after it had been buried there with the remains of the Macedonian kings. He had spoken to the peasants who lived there and listened to their legends of what lay beneath the tumuli in their native land. He had noted with remarkable precision the site which they claimed held the gold of the ancients.

‘How can we know that he was writing the truth?’ Adam had wanted to know, as the travellers had emerged from the Vale of Tempe and led the mules over a stone bridge across a meandering stream. ‘How can we know that his informants had any real idea of what was buried? Perhaps the treasure was dug up long ago and long since disappeared? Although can we even be certain that Philip was able to get his hands on gold?’

Fields had handed the reins of his mule to Quint and crouched by the little bridge, peering closely at its stones.

‘Probably a work of the ancient Macedonians,’ he had said, making no immediate response to Adam’s remarks. ‘We have just ridden over stones that were in place when Alexander departed for Asia.’

He had then risen to his feet. ‘There can be no doubt that the ancient rulers of this land had access to gold,’ he had continued. ‘There were rivers in Macedonia from which alluvial gold could be obtained. And Diodorus Siculus, for one, speaks about the mines Philip controlled. His mints were striking gold coins by the thousands, probably. The coins were even known as philippeioi.’

‘So the Macedonians had gold in plenty,’ Adam had acknowledged. ‘But we cannot know that it is buried where Euphorion says it is. The villagers were reporting their myths to him, not what we would recognise as their history.’

‘Perhaps,’ the professor had conceded. ‘As you say, we cannot know for certain. But it is a risk worth taking, is it not? To believe Euphorion? The worst that can happen is that we waste a few weeks of our life in fruitless digging. But, if the man was right, we will make the greatest discovery of the century. Layard and his exacavations at Nineveh will seem like little more than idle scrabblings in the dust of Mesopotamia.’

‘When the villagers learn we are digging,’ Rallis had said, ‘they will assume we are looking for treasure.’ The Athenian had seemed uncharacteristically anxious. ‘They will either chase us from the land or they will rob us of what we find.’

‘We have our papers,’ Fields had said. ‘I made certain of them before we left Athens. They will not dare touch us when we have a letter from a minister of the Porte.’

‘Maybe so.’ The Greek had looked unreassured. ‘Maybe not so. This is a long way from Constantinople.’

But the professor had proved correct. A week later, they had arrived at a site near Koutles. The ground was uncultivated and was covered in tumuli for hundreds of yards in all direction. Fields had pointed with confidence towards the largest of these and announced that this was the spot that Euphorion had identified as the place to dig.

‘His Greek is, for once, blessedly clear and correct on the point,’ Fields had said. ‘Many of the rest of his geographical descriptions are marred by the infelicities of his prose but of this one there can be no doubt. He writes quite unambiguously of the largest amongst a hundred mounds.’

The party had wasted no time before setting up their camp. The headman of the village, with whom Adam had been acquainted on his previous visit, had come to inspect the excavation the day they had begun digging, surrounded by a band of villainous-looking supporters. At first, they had shouted and raged at the travellers but they had regarded the firman Fields bore with an almost religious awe. Only the headman had proved literate but he had read the letter aloud to his comrades and all had been impressed. The document had been returned to the professor with much bowing of the head and the deputation had soon departed. From that first day, they had been little troubled by the villagers. Occasionally, small grubby boys had appeared on the crest of the hill overlooking the mound in which Fields had chosen to dig. They would stand and stare until their presence was noted. Then they would turn tail and disappear. Now the presence of the foreigners in the vicinity seemed scarcely to be acknowledged.

All the digging the foreigners had undertaken, however, had as yet unearthed little of interest. On the seventh morning, all of the party had stripped to their shirtsleeves and laboured in the earth with spade and pick. They had been standing in one of the deep trenches they had dug on the sloping bank of the largest tumulus for miles around. This, Fields had announced, was undoubtedly the one that Euphorion had singled out in his ancient text. Dig deep enough, he had said, and they would inevitably strike the vast stone slabs which made up the vaults of the Macedonian tombs. Inside these, indescribable treasures would lie. So far, they had come across little of any value at all. The digging had become a routine, a monotonous toil in the heat that all of them had grown to dislike.

This morning, however, the routine had been broken by the arrival of three visitors. They had not approached the trench but had stood close to where the travellers had pitched camp and shouted. They had sounded angry. Rallis, who had just climbed out of the diggings to fetch water, had been the only one who could see them.

‘What is all the noise, Rallis?’ Adam had asked, looking up from the earthwork. ‘Whose voices can we hear?’

‘It appears to be men from the village. The headman, I think.’

‘What the devil do they want?’

‘I do not know. They are waving their arms,’ the lawyer had reported. ‘They wave them towards the north.’

‘Go talk to them, Rallis,’ Fields had said. ‘Point out to them that they cannot come here whenever they choose to do so. Tell them that our work is too important to be disturbed. Speak to them again of the firman, if necessary.’

The Athenian had looked down at Fields as if he was minded to disobey his instructions. Then he had turned and begun to walk back towards the camp. The others, scrambling out of the trench, had watched him as he neared the villagers. As he had come closer, the headman and his companions had increased the volume of their cries and the energy of their gestures. Rallis had made soothing movements with his hands as he approached. The men from the village had however refused to be soothed and an animated conversation ensued. After several minutes had passed, the lawyer had begun to make his way back to the group now standing awkwardly by the trench.

‘What is it?’ Adam had called when Rallis was still twenty yards from them.

‘They have news that disturbs them,’ the lawyer had replied, quickening his pace to join his fellow diggers. ‘There is another party of strangers riding towards their village. From the north.’

‘Are they so unused to outsiders that they panic at the very thought of more arriving?’ Fields had asked, his voice thick with contempt for the Greek villagers. ‘Perhaps they believe that the visitors are tax collectors come to squeeze more from them.’

‘No, that is not what they fear, Professor.’

‘I find it difficult to care greatly what they fear.’ Fields had shrugged and made as if to turn back to the diggings. ‘And I cannot believe that it is any of our concern. You have told them to depart and leave us in peace, I presume.’

‘They will not do so. The riders, they say, are like you and Adam. They are Franks. They are your friends, they think.’

Fields sighed in exasperation.

‘Do they believe that every European in the land is our friend? Who are these riders?’

‘I do not know. But the headman has had word from his uncle who lives in a village further to the north. The party rested there last night. One of the Franks calls himself Garland.’

‘Garland!’ Adam was astonished. ‘What on earth is Garland doing out here in the wilds?’

‘That is not all, Adam. The headman says that one of the riders is a woman.’

‘Emily!’

‘Nonsense!’ Fields had said sharply. ‘That young woman will be safely home with her mother in Salonika. I cannot understand why Garland, if it is he, should be here. But, assuming that he is, he must be travelling with some doxy he picked up in Athens. He has a reputation, I believe.’

‘We must make our way to meet them.’

‘That is what the headman wishes,’ Rallis had said. ‘He will allow us the use of the only horses in the village. He wants us to confront the visitors. And tell them to turn back.’

‘I will set out immediately,’ Adam had said.

‘Not you, Adam. The headman is of the opinion that only the old man, as he calls the professor, will have the authority to persuade Mr Garland to return to Salonika. Ever since he saw the writing from the minister in Constantinople, the headman has been of the opinion that the professor is a man of power and reputation.’

‘One of that idle scoundrel’s few opinions of any worth,’ Fields had said complacently. ‘But I cannot drop what I am doing here on a mere whim of his. Someone else must go to meet Garland and his party.’

‘I tell you, Rallis,’ Adam had declared, ‘I shall set off northwards. Perhaps it is Emily.’

Adam had felt his heart leap at the prospect of seeing the young woman again. He had begun to make his way towards the camp where the three men from the village had still been standing. As he had moved past Rallis, the Greek lawyer had held out an arm to halt him.

‘The villagers will not allow you to go, Adam, I can assure you. I have already spoken to them about it. They have two horses only. One is for the professor. On that point they are adamant.’

‘I will take the other.’ Adam had made as if to brush aside the Greek’s arm but Rallis had still held him.

‘No, I must go with the professor. That is what they wish. They know that I can understand both English and the Greek spoken here. That I will be able to assist Fields in conveying their message.’

‘Garland will not listen to either of you,’ Adam had said, wresting his arm from the lawyer’s grasp. ‘If he wishes to visit us here, he will do so.’

Rallis had shrugged. ‘I suspect that you are right, Adam, but I think that we must do as the village headman asks. We must do all we can to remain on terms with him.’

Adam had looked towards the villagers and then back towards the trench. He had thought of continuing the argument. He had wanted very much to ride out of the camp, to see if it was, in truth, Emily who approached from the north. But he had known that Rallis was correct. They depended on the goodwill of the men of Koutles. He could not force the headman to provide him with a horse. He must contain his impatience and stay by the diggings.

‘But if you meet Garland and he insists on coming back with you?’ he had asked eventually.

The Greek had shrugged again. ‘That is a bridge to cross only when we must.’

Rallis had then turned to his servant and spoken a few words. The giant Greek had nodded and strode towards the headman and his two companions. Rallis had turned back to the others.

‘Come, Professor,’ he had said. ‘Andros will accompany us. He can move as fast on foot as a trotting horse.’

Fields had been staring unblinkingly into the middle distance during the debate between Adam and Rallis. Like a man emerging from a trance at the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, he had jolted into life.

‘It is confoundedly inconvenient,’ he had snapped, ‘but I can see no viable course of action save to do what this wretched head man demands.’

He had begun to follow Andros. After he had gone a dozen yards, he had turned and called back to the others.

‘I will speak to this man Garland. I will persuade him to leave us in peace. We cannot be disturbed by anyone at so crucial a moment in our digging.’

Adam had watched as the professor had made his way to join the Greek villagers. There had been a good deal of shouting and gesticulating as he did so. The young man had looked at Rallis.

‘Well,’ he had said, ‘this is an unexpected turn of events. I do not think anyone, least of all the professor, will prevent Mr Garland joining us here if he decides to do so. He is a determined man.’

‘Perhaps his arrival will benefit us, Adam.’

‘You mean that Garland’s presence will stand in the way of the professor’s plans for any gold we might find?’

The Greek had nodded.

‘Perhaps Garland is after the gold himself,’ Adam had suggested. ‘I cannot see how he could know about Euphorion and the lost manuscript, but it is possible.’

‘These are all imponderables, my friend.’ Rallis had taken off his hat and run his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘But I must go and join the others.’

‘Be on your guard, Rallis.’

‘I will, Adam.’

The lawyer had shaken Adam’s hand. He had turned and made his way towards the camp where Fields, his hand shading his eyes, had been gazing back at them.

Adam and Quint had then climbed down into the trench once more and continued to dig. Adam, perplexed by the turn events had taken, had been able to think of nothing but the riders from the north and the idea that Emily Maitland might soon arrive at the excavation.

A few minutes after examining the coin showing Heracles and the Nemean lion which Quint had unearthed, he nonetheless threw down his spade.

‘You are right, Quint,’ he said. ‘We shall dig nothing here but our own graves. Into which, felled by heat and exhaustion, we shall soon tumble.’

Adam sat down on the floor of the trench, his back to his servant. There was silence apart from the sounds of the birds flying above them.

‘Did you not hear what I said, Quint?’ Adam took his hat from his head and wiped away the sweat that was trickling down his brow. ‘It is rare enough that I agree with you. I would have thought you would seize upon such a moment of accord. Cast aside the spade and we shall rest a while.’

There was still no word from his servant. Adam turned to see what was keeping him silent. Quint was holding up an object he had found between his thumb and forefinger.

‘I reckon this is gold,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Adam took it from him and let it rest on the outstretched palm of his right hand. It was tiny, less than half an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, but it was quite clearly in the form of a sculptured head. Beneath the soil with which it was coated, he could make out the eyes, the nose and the beard. And Quint was right. Also beneath its covering of dirt, the little head glinted with the unmistakeable shimmer of gold.

‘What is it?’ Quint asked, still speaking as quietly as a man in church might.

Adam tilted his hand slightly and admired the way the object glittered in the sunlight. He brushed some of the dirt from it.

‘I’m not sure. It was probably part of some ornament. Is it the head of a god perhaps? Neptune?’

‘We planning on telling the others we found it?’

Adam ignored Quint’s remark and, crouching down close to the upturned soil, reached down to pick up another glinting object from the earth. He held it up for Quint to see.

‘A ring,’ he said. ‘A gold ring that once circled the finger of some blueblood Macedonian lady long dead. Who knows what beauty used to own it? It must have fallen from her hand more than twenty-one hundred years ago.’

The young man stared at the two golden pieces in his hand. His mind drifted back into the Greek history his education had constructed for him. He lost his sense of the present, and the imagined past was briefly more vivid than anything around him. It was only for a moment and then he returned to reality.

‘I think Fields and Rallis should be told of what we have found. As soon as possible. They should know before they get back here with Garland. Go after them, Quint. Take one of the mules. See if our friends have met these new visitors. Let them know of our discovery.’

His servant stared at him in disgust, as if he could scarcely believe what was being demanded of him.

‘In this heat? You want me to go riding off into the hills on one of them bleeding mules? When it’s fit to fry eggs in the shade?’

‘Just go, Quint, will you?’

‘They’re on ’orses. ’Ow am I goin’ to catch them when they’re on ’orses?’

‘You will not catch them. I do not expect you to catch them. You will meet them as they return from their rendezvous. I would have thought that it would be a pleasure to be the bearer of glad tidings. For once in your life, why not do something without first listing all the reasons why you can’t?’

Quint continued to gaze at his master with an air of truculence, but, after a few seconds, he turned and began to climb the short ladder propped against the trench wall. Adam watched him go. For several minutes the sounds of mumbled grousing drifted down to where he was standing. A mule brayed and Quint cursed. Then there was silence. Adam picked up his spade and began once more to dig.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

An hour passed but there was no sign of Adam’s companions returning. He continued to work in the trench. He came upon no more golden objects. Once again he laid down his spade. Quint had left a jacket at the far end of the trench. Adam spread it out on the compacted mud floor and sat on it. He leaned against the side of the deep ditch that they had dug. His eyes closed and within a few minutes he had fallen asleep. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky but Adam, still in the shade the trench offered, continued to sleep. He dreamed of Heracles in the Cremorne Gardens, startling the visitors with his lion skin and his club.

He awoke with a start. He could see the dark outline of a man standing on the lip of the trench. The man was holding a revolver, aiming it at his heart. As Adam, still half asleep and rubbing his eyes, began to struggle to his feet, the man silhouetted against the sun swivelled the revolver abruptly. He shot into the side of the trench and then swung the gun back towards Adam’s body. The noise of the shot reverberated thunderously around the camp.

‘Stay where you are!’ the man shouted. Adam recognised the voice immediately. It was Fields.

‘Professor?’ Although the voice was so familiar, Adam could not yet quite believe that the person directing the gun at him was his old tutor and mentor. ‘What is this? What are you doing? Where are Rallis and Quint?’

Fields shook his head in irritation as if Adam’s questions were pointless distractions from the matter in hand.

‘It is all over, Adam. I have thought through the possibilities most carefully. I have no other choice.’ The professor sounded weary. He continued to point the gun at the young man. ‘I regret very much that it should come to this. Rallis forced my hand at first with all his stupid ideas about stealing the legacy of the ancient Greeks. As if the wretched Greeks of today were capable of appreciating their past. The more of their treasures that pass into the hands of Englishmen, the better. At least we are civilised enough to look after them. And now the arrival of this man Garland puts paid to my alternative plans.’

He gestured with the gun.

‘Climb out of the trench, Adam. But do so with the utmost care. If you make any movements that suggest you are planning to dispossess me of my weapon, I shall shoot you.’

Adam looked to his left to where Quint had cut primitive footholds into the side of the trench. He used them to haul himself out of the grave-like excavation. He pulled himself over the lip of the ditch and struggled to his feet. Fields still had the gun directed at him. Adam looked beyond the professor’s shoulder. The older man noticed the movement of his eyes.

‘There is little point lifting your eyes to the hills, Adam, for no help will come from that direction. Rallis is not on his way.’

‘Where is he?’ Adam was still confused, still uncertain of what was happening. ‘Where is Quint?’

‘The lawyer is out there lying under the Greek sun.’ Without moving his revolver, which was still trained on Adam’s midriff, Fields jerked his head in the direction the men had ridden no more than a few hours ago. ‘It was necessary to shoot him. And his gargantuan servant.’ The professor gave a short and mirthless laugh.

‘The fools obliged me by travelling in the vanguard. It was easy enough to make use of the weapon I had hidden.’ Fields shifted his weight from one foot to another. ‘As for Quintus, I passed him an hour or more ago. Riding one of the mules and looking very sorry for himself. Luckily for him, he did not see me. If he had, he would have been even sorrier for I might have been forced to kill him as well. Which I would have regretted. I have always been fond of Quintus, rogue though he is.’

‘I hope you are not planning to kill me, Professor?’

‘Of course not, my boy. Whatever gave you that idea?’ Fields laughed again, more amiably than before. He seemed to find Adam’s question genuinely funny. ‘Not unless you do something very foolish and I do not believe that you will.’

‘I will do nothing foolish,’ Adam promised. He had recovered from the surprise of the professor’s arrival and was now struggling to make sense of the sudden revelations about Rallis’s murder. Fields, it seemed, had lost his mind. What other explanation could there possibly be for the terrible deeds to which he was cheerfully admitting? ‘But what is to happen next? We cannot stand here for ever like figures from Madame Tussauds.’

‘It will be two hours, maybe even three, before Garland arrives.’ The professor appeared curiously calm and rational. He might have been sitting down in his study in Cambridge to conduct a tutorial on pre-Socratic philosophy rather than standing by a half-dug trench in Thessaly, waving a gun at his favourite pupil. ‘Before Rallis and I parted company with the village headman, he told us exactly where Garland and his companions were. However swiftly they travel, they cannot be here sooner. And they may well stumble across the bodies of Rallis and Andros, which will delay them further. There is time for us to talk.’

‘Perhaps we should wait for Garland to arrive,’ Adam said cautiously. ‘We can travel back to Salonika with him.’

‘Oh, I think not, my boy,’ Fields replied amiably. ‘You are assuming, of course, that I have gone mad. You are humouring me in the hope that rescue will arrive sooner than I expect.’

The professor shook his head from side to side. Adam had seen him do the same a hundred times in the past when confronted by the stupidity of the average undergraduate.

‘I can assure you I am not mad. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw, as the gloomy Prince of Denmark said.’

‘I have no doubts about your sanity, sir,’ Adam lied, ‘but you have, by your own admission, killed two men. That cannot just be ignored or forgotten. We should wait for Garland. We will convince him that you shot Rallis and Andros in self-defence. That they attacked us when we discovered gold. Which Quint and I did only a short time after you left. We will tell Garland that—’

Fields did not wait to hear what they would tell Garland. With a sudden twist of his arm, he pointed the revolver upwards and shot into the air. The explosion of the gun sent birds squawking in terror from the nearby trees. Adam, silenced and half-deafened, watched the professor swing his gun back into a position where it was directed once more at him.

‘That is enough,’ Fields shouted. The sounds of the birds slowly died away and a strange quiet descended.

‘Now, I shall tell you what will happen,’ the professor said. ‘You will submit to being tied and bundled into the trench. I will return to Volos. From there, I will be obliged to travel into exile. I do not think Cambridge will now welcome me back with open arms but I have always had a great fondness for Tuscany. I do not think that many questions will be asked of an Englishman who takes a villa in the hills outside Florence. Most probably I shall enjoy my exile. I have an income from my long-departed father’s estate. I have the fruits of my association with Creech, of which I assume you know. I shall not be like poor Ovid in his banishment by the Black Sea.’

The professor paused as if to relish the prospect of an enforced sojourn in Florence. Adam could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Did Fields really believe that it was feasible for him not only to ecape from European Turkey but to make his way to Italy and settle in a Tuscan villa? Did he think that no consequences would follow his actions in shooting Rallis? If any further proof were needed that the ageing scholar had taken leave of his senses, here it was. Aware of the revolver pointing towards him, the young man was in no position to argue but he risked throwing a tentative remark into the silence.

‘What of our excavations here?’ he asked. ‘The treasure may nearly be ours.’

Still holding the gun level in one hand, the professor swatted away the words like troublesome flies with the other.

‘Thanks to the foolish interference of others, I must abandon our diggings,’ he said. ‘But I can return. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in two years. In five years, if necessary. I can wait. I have the Euphorion manuscript and the rest of the world does not.’

‘Garland will know where to dig. He will see where we have been digging.’

Fields shook his head as if dismissing the idea but otherwise he ignored Adam’s words. The young man wondered whether the professor was capable any longer of thinking clearly on such subjects. He seemed to have reached a point where he almost believed that his wishes alone could transform reality. The Macedonian gold was destined to be his so there could be no chance that Garland or anyone else would dig it up. It would sit here beneath the earth until Fields could return for it.

‘Before I take horse for Volos,’ he went on, ‘I must explain myself. I wish you to know the precise reasons why I have acted as I have.’

Adam risked a glance to his left: perhaps Quint had turned back to the camp soon after Fields had seen him and was even now approaching. But he could discern nothing but one of the mules, tethered to a post and grazing on the grass at its feet.

‘I wish you to understand what has been behind all this, my boy,’ the professor said, speaking with sudden feeling. ‘You must appreciate that I have been driven to these terrible but necessary deeds by the idiocy and avarice of others.’

Fields’s head dropped. For a moment he looked like a man who had reached the end of his road. I can disarm him now, thought Adam, readying himself to rush towards the gun, but it was as if the professor overheard his inner voice. His head jerked up again and he waved the revolver at the young man.

‘Move a yard or two back, Adam. You must not think of running at me. I am very fond of you but I will certainly shoot you. I have not come this far to fall victim to idle scruples about another death.’

The young man did as he was ordered, shuffling several paces backwards.

‘That is far enough,’ Fields said. ‘I would not have you falling into the trench. Now, where were we?’

‘You were about to explain to me why you have done this,’ Adam said quietly.

‘Ah, yes, so I was. I would not have you think entirely ill of me, Adam.’

For a moment, the eyes of the two men met. The young man was appalled by what he glimpsed in the red-rimmed and bloodshot gaze of his mentor. Here was someone who had stared at the abyss and then tumbled into it. Adam saw that there would be no return to reason for the professor.

Several miles further north, Quint and the mule were making slow progress. It would have been hard for any observer, had there been one close to hand, to decide whether man or beast was the more disgruntled. The mule had been aggravated by its removal from the area near the camp where it had been happily and idly grazing. It had retaliated by refusing to move at anything other than a snail’s pace, no matter how hard its rider had dug his heels into its flanks and made encouraging noises. On a number of occasions, Quint had been obliged to dismount and pull the reluctant creature by its reins. The sound of its outraged braying echoed along the valley through which they were travelling so slowly.

Quint himself was sweating and cursing as he tugged and chivvied the mule into motion. He was a man who was rarely at a loss for a grievance and this unwanted journey, he felt, was an injustice that even the most saintly of individuals would have found difficult to bear without complaint. He grumbled incessantly beneath his breath as he remounted the mule yet again. One minute he had been happily digging in the trench. Well, maybe not happily, he admitted to himself. Digging was almost as much of a bleeding pain in the arse as dragging this mule halfway across Thessaly. But he’d been resigned to it. That was the word, resigned. And then Adam had got it into his head that a message had to be sent to the others. When they could have just given themselves a slap on the back for finding the gold ornament and settled down for a kip in the shade until the others got back.

‘There’s some as wouldn’t reckernise a good thing if it came up and kicked ’em in the cods,’ Quint said bitterly to himself. He sometimes wondered if his master wasn’t as daft as a sheep before the shearers. How Adam had managed before he’d happened along to take him under his wing, he didn’t know. ‘Of course,’ he acknowledged, struggling to be fair-minded, ‘I got me a nice crib out of it.’ But it was Adam, Quint felt, who had got the best of the bargain. And now here the young sprig was, sending him out into the heat of the day with a brute that wouldn’t listen to a bleeding word you said.

‘Giddyup, you long-eared bastard,’ he shouted, digging his heels into the mule’s sides once again.

To Quint’s great surprise, the animal responded. It began to trot along the path they were following by the side of a meandering stream. As he clung to its reins, the beast increased its pace until it was travelling at a speed of which Quint had not imagined it capable. Bumping uncomfortably up and down on the saddle and watching the Greek countryside race past him, he began to wish that he had not given the mule any encouragement. This was worse — much worse — than pulling and wrenching at the beast to force it forwards a few yards.

‘Whoa, you hee-hawing devil, or I’ll see you in a bleedin’ stew-pan.’ Quint had now abandoned his faith in the reins and stretched himself full-length along the mule’s back, both his hands clasped around the creature’s neck. ‘This ain’t Derby Day and you ain’t Blue Gown.’

The mule took no notice of its rider. If anything, it upped its trot towards a gallop. Perhaps, Quint thought miserably, it did believe it was the famous thoroughbred that had won at Epsom two years earlier. He continued to wrap himself around the mule’s neck and hope that it would soon tire of its exertions. For a minute, he closed his eyes, figuring that it might be better not to know exactly where they were going. After a hundred yards, he decided he was wrong and opened them again. The stream to the left, he noted, had widened considerably. He struggled to twist his head forward so that he could look ahead of him. All he could see was a blur of green and, far in the distance, the grey stones of the mountains. He felt the dry, hard skin of the mule’s neck against his cheek. One of the hairs from its mane began to work its way up his nose, tickling him to the point where he wanted to sneeze. When he did so, his startled mount picked up pace even more.

‘Christ in heaven,’ Quint moaned. ‘Ain’t it jiggered yet?’ He risked raising his head slightly and was astonished by what he saw. A quarter of a mile ahead was a group of horses and riders. They had stopped by a small grove of trees and were all gazing towards Quint and his mule as the pair raced towards them. One of the riders was standing in his stirrups to get a better view.

Quint and his mount bore down on the group. At the speed they were travelling, the distance between them shortened rapidly. The man was yelling incoherently, the beast was braying at full volume. The horses and their riders scattered as the mule charged into their midst. It dug its hooves into the ground beneath it and came to a sudden stop. Quint did not. He hurtled over the mule’s head and crashed to earth. Stunned and winded, he lay in the grass as confused thoughts drifted through his mind. Briefly, he was back in Doughty Street, ushering a young woman into the sitting room. She was looking at him in a strange way. He was, of course, used to people looking at him in a strange way. Usually he didn’t mind but he felt a strong urge to explain himself to this young woman. He knew her name, he was sure of it, but he just couldn’t recall it. She leaned forward and stared into his eyes.

‘Mr Quint,’ she said. ‘Is that you? Are you all right?’

Emily, he thought, Emily something. Then he lost consciousness.

‘It was that contemptible man Creech who began all this,’ Fields said to Adam, his face screwing up with anger as he remembered the man with the crescent moon scar. ‘He sought to cheat me. He sought to make use of my scholarship and knowledge for his own sordid ends. And yet, when our plans to travel to Koutles and unearth the treasure were already well advanced, he wanted to cast me aside. He approached you, one of the few other Englishmen who had travelled in the region recently. He sent his daughter to discover more about you.’

Adam started with surprise. ‘His daughter?’

‘Did you not realise the identity of your mysterious visitor in London, Adam? The chit of a girl who has followed us to Greece? Perhaps you believed that it was your charms that attracted Emily to your company?’ The professor laughed. ‘She was working on her father’s behalf. At her father’s behest. He assumed that you would be more forthcoming when questioned by a pretty girl than you would be if he came to you in person. He was correct, of course.’

Adam’s face fell. He recalled the occasions on which he had met Emily Maitland. In Doughty Street. At Cremorne. Her questioning of him, he was forced to admit, had seemed odd. But not so odd that he had not wished to continue their conversations as long as possible. Not so odd that they had outweighed the power of her beauty and vivacity to stir him. He could not think what to say but that seemed to matter very little. Fields was in full flow. He wanted to talk.

‘Emily is not English, of course,’ the professor went on. ‘Not in the sense that you and I are English. Or even in the sense that Quintus is English. Where the name of Maitland has come from, I do not know. Plucked from the air or borrowed from one of her mother’s grubby cavaliers, I suppose. You must have noticed that although she speaks our language so well, she does not speak it as if it were her mother tongue. Her mother tongue — indeed, her mother — is Greek. She is the daughter Creech fathered on some Peloponnesian trollop when he was in Athens twenty years ago.’

‘But why has she not spent her life with her father?’ The young man knew the answer to his own question as soon as he voiced it aloud.

‘Do not be so naive, Adam. Why should Creech have acknowledged a child who was merely the unfortunate end result of an indiscretion? He proved surprisingly honourable in his own way. He paid a yearly allowance to her but no more. I doubt he saw her more than half a dozen times in twenty years.’

‘So she lived with her mother.’

‘The trollop has been mistress to a Jewish merchant for the last decade. She and Emily have trailed after him as he has moved from city to city. Constantinople to Salonika. Salonika to Aleppo. Aleppo to Athens. Athens back to Salonika.’

‘But what was she doing in London?’

‘The merchant — Margolis, I believe, is his name — had come to England on business. He was travelling in the north and he arranged for his supposed wife and supposed stepdaughter to stay at Brown’s while he was gone. Under the name of Maitland. The good Lord alone knows why the people at the hotel allowed it. They must have been aware that all was not as it appeared. Their moral standards have clearly plunged in recent years.’ Fields sniffed with disapproval. For a moment, he seemed genuinely concerned that Brown’s was not maintaining its reputation. ‘Emily had long wished to know more of her real father,’ he continued. ‘Somehow she had learned that he was also then in London and she contacted him. He saw a means of making use of her and she was happy to oblige him.’

‘I cannot see that I could have told her anything that would have been of interest to him.’

‘Perhaps not. But he learned enough to confirm what he already suspected: that you might also be of use to him. He went to visit that idle dauber Jardine and asked him a whole series of questions about you — and about myself and my whereabouts — which that young idiot answered. Then Creech contrived to meet you himself at the Marco Polo. I found out about the dinner and I guessed that he had probably dropped hints about Philip’s gold. But I did not know how much he had told you. I went to see him at Herne Hill Villa.’

‘And murdered him,’ Adam said, in little more than a whisper. Suddenly the young man could see the truth of what had happened and he was appalled by it. Somehow the killing of Creech in his own suburban London home seemed even worse than the shooting of Rallis and Andros here in Greece.

‘I did not intend to kill him. Why should I? He and I had been partners in a very profitable venture for years, despatching antiquities from this benighted country to England for safe-keeping. Rallis has doubtless told you all this already, putting the worst possible interpretation on my actions, I have no doubt. No, I went to remonstrate with Creech.’

‘With a pistol in your pocket.’

‘Samuel Creech was a dangerous man, Adam. He was not only an importer of Greek statues and Attic vases. In London, you discovered much about his activities as a blackmailer. Do you suppose that a man can spend half a lifetime extorting money from the wealthy and the powerful and still thrive unless he is prepared to act ruthlessly? I knew Creech’s temperament. I took the pistol with me for protection.’

Adam eyed the gun that the professor now had trained on him. He tried to judge the distance between them. Six yards, perhaps. Too far for him to run at Fields without being brought down. He could only hope that he could keep the professor talking until Quint returned and then, together, they might overpower him.

‘So you were obliged to shoot him in self-defence?’

‘He laughed at me, the wretch. He said he had no more need of me. That he was about to recruit another “assistant”. Can you believe it? He referred to me as an “assistant”. The arrogance of the man. But that was not the reason he had to die.’

The professor paused and shifted the revolver in his hands.

‘He had been foolish as well as treacherous. In endeavouring to blackmail his old friend Garland, he had made a dangerous enemy. The man was making enquiries of his own. Sooner or later my name would have emerged. I could not allow that to happen.’

‘So you pointed your pistol at him and warned him that he must stop his attempts to extort money from Garland.’

‘Yes. And the rogue laughed again. He refused to listen to reason. He said that his dealings with Garland were his affair only.’

‘But I cannot understand why you felt obliged to kill the man.’

‘For God’s sake, Adam, he attacked me. He threw himself upon me and we struggled. The pistol fired as we fought.’ Fields had raised his voice close to screaming pitch. He seemed on the verge of losing all self-control. ‘Do you suppose I wanted to kill him? Do you suppose I want to kill you? Or Quintus? I did not even wish to kill that interfering Greek lawyer. I am a man of peace and scholarship. But events have conspired to drag me into blood and destruction. It sometimes feels as if I have faced a fate as inevitable as the doom of the House of Pelops.’

The professor looked to be on the verge of tears of self-pity. Adam wondered if the man’s mind had collapsed completely. His account of Creech’s killing could not be correct. There had been no signs of a struggle in his library. Fields had shot him quite cold-bloodedly as he sat at the table. The young man eyed once more the ground between him and the gun. Fields again guessed what he was thinking.

‘Do not imagine for one moment that I will not shoot you if necessary, Adam,’ he said. ‘I am fond enough of you but nothing and no one must stand between me and the gold.’

A silence fell on the two men, frozen as they were like a stage tableau in the afternoon sun. To Adam, it seemed as if the professor could not decide what he should do next. Could he keep him talking for a while longer? Would Quint not be returning soon to camp? And what of Garland? His party might surely arrive at any moment.

‘And you did not pass Professor Fields or Mr Rallis and his man as you made your way here? You saw no sign of them?’

Quint shook his head and then winced. Twenty minutes after his tumble from the runaway mule, it hurt still. He was sitting in the shade of a tree, a wet handkerchief across his brow. Lewis Garland stood over him.

‘Ain’t seen a soul,’ the servant said. ‘Not since a mile out of Koutles.’

‘But you were travelling in their tracks?’

‘So the Greek cove said. The one I met beyond the village. Leastways I think he did.’

‘You understand the language?’

‘A few words. But ’e waved his hands around a lot as well. As clear as I could make out, ’e was saying that the professor and the others had passed ’im a bit before. So I keeps on going.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘And then that black devil of a mule took it into its ’ead to run away with me.’

‘Never mind the wretched mule. Before it bolted with you, you saw nothing and no one on the trail. Is that correct?’

‘Ain’t I just said that? ’Ow many more times do you want me to say it? There was nobody between ’ere and Koutles save the Greek I told you about.’

Quint was getting very exasperated. When he had returned to consciousness after his fall, he had found himself to be the centre of attention. It was an unaccustomed position for him and he had begun to enjoy it. Emily Maitland had fussed over him, despatching a servant to the stream to wet one of her handkerchiefs and place it on his forehead. She had ordered two of the other Greek servants in the group to pick him up from where the mule had deposited him and carry him to a grassy knoll beneath a tall tree. He had told his story to her and to Garland. He had described to them all that had happened since he and Adam and the others had left Athens. It had been a novel experience to find a beautiful young woman and a man of Garland’s importance hanging on his every word and he had relished it. He had been eloquent and, he reckoned, comprehensive in his answers. He had said all that he wanted to say. Now Emily had retired to the shade of another tree further along the bank of the stream where a servant had set up a folding chair for her. Garland, however, was still leaning over him and badgering him with more questions. The enjoyment had disappeared. Quint just wanted to go to sleep.

‘I give you the lowdown, didn’t I? Can’t you leave a man to get some shut-eye?’

He stretched back on the grass and half closed his eyes. Garland stared down at him for a moment before turning abruptly and walking away. Quint rolled over on his side and watched him go. The MP joined Emily and there was a brief but animated discussion between them. Quint could see the girl gesturing in the direction of the path along which the mule had so lately carried him. She seemed to want the party to take it immediately but her companion looked less enthusiastic about the idea. After two or three minutes, Garland began to walk back to where Quint was lying beneath the tree. The servant saw Emily start to follow him. He rolled hastily onto his back and shut his eyes again. He experimented with a few feigned snores as they approached.

‘Wake up, Devlin.’ The MP prodded Quint with his toe. ‘If, indeed, you are asleep. We have one more question that needs to be answered.’

The servant made a great performance of yawning and stretching his arms.

‘When you took the manuscript at Fields’s promptings,’ Garland went on, ‘was your master pleased that you had obeyed the professor?’

Quint looked warily from the MP to the young woman and back again.

‘Not exackly,’ he said, after a brief pause. ‘’E give me a bit of a wigging, if truth be told.’

‘So Adam is not implicated in this thievery, my dear.’ Garland turned to Emily, who smiled at him. ‘But I fear for the safety of our Greek friend.’

‘He had his servant with him, had he not?’

‘He could send Big Ben Caunt to grass with one ’and tied behind his back, that ’un,’ Quint remarked encouragingly. ‘’E’s the size of an ’ouse.’

‘It matters little what size a man is,’ Garland said. ‘If he is not on his guard, he can be brought low. As I say, I grow anxious for Rallis.’

‘That is why we must hurry on our way,’ Emily said. ‘We are wasting precious time here.’

‘We may hasten into a trap, my dear.’

Quint was bewildered. ‘Trap? What trap?’ he asked.

Neither Garland nor the young woman answered him.

‘We must be off immediately,’ Emily said.

‘What’s up?’ Quint looked at her and then swung his head round towards the MP. Both of them ignored him. ‘’Oo’s going to set a bleedin’ trap?’

‘Be quiet, Devlin,’ Garland snapped. ‘And mind your language when ladies are present.’

The MP stared at the distant mountains, lost in thought.

‘Very well, my dear,’ he said, after a long minute had passed. ‘After consideration, I believe that you are right. Let us be on our way. Devlin, you can ride with Giorgios. His horse will take two. You can leave the mule behind.’

‘What of poor Jinkinson?’ Adam asked, curious as to how much more the professor might tell him. ‘Was it you in the darkness at Wapping? Did you kill him?’

‘Do you recall that German braggart Schliemann we met once in Athens? In the summer of sixty-seven, I think it was.’ Fields seemed not to hear Adam’s questions. He made no attempt to deny responsibility for Jinkinson’s death. He had set off on a digression of his own. ‘I came across him again the following year. I was riding with two of the servants in the mountains south of Salonika when we saw a group of horsemen in the distance. At first, we feared they were brigands, but in the event it turned out to be Schliemann and a band of potential cut-throats who had taken his money to guide him on a long and pointless tour of the region. I was obliged to join him in his encampment for dinner and to listen to his interminable rantings about Troy and the Homeric epics. About the discoveries he is destined to make. Of how his name will for ever be in the annals of archaeology. The man is impossible — a noisy megalomaniac who listens to no one but himself.’

‘Why should anyone else listen to him? The plain of Troy has long been a battleground for scholars as well as for heroes. Schliemann will not be the first to fall upon it nor the last. Why should you concern yourself with him?’

‘Because I fear that he may be correct. That he will unearth the secrets of Priam’s city as he claims he will. It is so often the Schliemanns of this world who gain the glory.’

Suddenly the professor sounded so weary, like an ageing Atlas longing to take the weight of the world from his shoulders. His posture slumped and the barrel of his revolver began to point closer to the ground than to Adam’s chest. The young man wondered yet again if he could make the six-yard dash to Fields that he had earlier dismissed. Before he could steel himself to do it, the professor seemed to gain a new energy. He jerked upright once more.

‘The golden treasure hoard of the Macedonian kings! Can you imagine what it would be to unearth it, Adam?’ Fields was excited now, and sweating profusely. ‘It would be the archaeological sensation of the age! The discoveries of Layard and Rawlinson would pale into insignificance beside it. Even the discoveries Schliemann boasts he will make in Asia Minor. Would even the ruins of Troy match Philip of Macedon’s gold?’

‘Layard and Rawlinson did not murder men in pursuit of their discoveries. Nor, I assume, will Schliemann.’

‘Do you think I wished lives to be sacrificed?’ Fields sounded indignant. ‘Of course I did not. But what choice did those fools leave me? That grasping devil Creech cared only for the money he thought he would make from Philip’s gold. The history, the romance meant nothing to him. As for that sot of an investigator, he did not even realise what he had stumbled across.’

Adam could not yet see clearly in his mind the connection between Fields and Jinkinson. ‘How did you know of the man’s existence?’ he asked.

‘He approached me. He must have come across my name during his dealings with Creech. Perhaps Creech even confided in him, although I doubt that.’

‘He came to visit you in Cambridge?’

‘He arrived one evening just before dinner.’ The professor laughed bitterly. ‘The good Lord alone knows what my servant made of him. The man was half-drunk. He babbled to me of how we might work together to make our fortunes.’

‘Jinkinson was aware of the treasure?’

‘In some limited sense, I believe. He had succeeded in gathering little snippets of information from here and there. He knew of the Euphorion manuscript. He knew that it held the key to something of immense value.’

‘But a London enquiry agent with a fondness for the bottle was unlikely to have the means to travel to Greece in search of the treasure, if you refused to help him. Why was it necessary to kill him?’

‘He knew my name, Adam,’ Fields said, as if explaining some elementary proposition in logic to a singularly dense student. ‘He knew of the existence of the Euphorion manuscript and of my interest in it. And he was in contact with that man Garland. I feared that he would tell him of the gold.’

‘His only interest in Garland was as a victim to be blackmailed. He had carried on with the extortion that Creech had begun.’

‘Is that so?’ The professor looked surprised. ‘Ah, well, no matter. He knew enough that he could not live.’

‘How did you trail him to that wretched tavern by the river?’

‘It was not so difficult a task. You also found him, did you not? I had made an earlier attempt to dispose of him which had failed. He took fright and ran to his hiding-hole. I spoke to that ragged hetaira of his. What is her name?’

‘Ada.’

‘Ada was most forthcoming. I had taken it upon myself to offer money to the Polyphemus who guards the entrance to her place of work. Again, I have forgotten his name. If, indeed, I ever knew it.’

‘Fadge, you must mean Fadge.’

‘Well, whatever the one-eyed Cyclops is called, he proved very effective in persuading Ada that she should tell me where her ageing inamarato was lodged.’

‘You did not allow Fadge to hurt the poor girl?’

‘A little,’ Fields acknowledged. ‘She was surprisingly loyal to Jinkinson. But she was eventally persuaded that he was not worth the breaking of her arm.’

‘You scoundrel!’ Adam could contain his outrage no longer. How could he have been so mistaken in his judgement of the professor? Here was a man he had admired for his knowledge and his scholarship now revealed as little better than a common or garden brute.

‘It was unfortunately necessary to employ such methods. I had to find Jinkinson.’

‘So you went in search of him at the Cat and Salutation.’

‘By happy chance, I travelled to Wapping on the very night that you went there yourself. I arrived an hour earlier than you and was in time to see the man leave that dismal alehouse for the first time. I followed him for some time but he walked along busy streets. I could not make use of the pistol in my pocket. Then he returned to the pub. I thought I had lost my opportunity. I had not reckoned on your presence in the place driving him out into the night once more. And onto the darkest path by the river.’

Fields ceased speaking, as if expecting Adam to make some contribution to the conversation. The young man was silent, contemplating the terrible truth that he had been indirectly responsible for the deaths of both Creech and Jinkinson. He had long realised that had Creech not sought him out, the man would have still been alive. Now it was clear that, in arriving at the Cat and Salutation in search of Jinkinson, he had inadvertently impelled the private investigator towards his nemesis.

‘I thought that the figure in the shadows was familiar,’ he said, after a pause. ‘It was you.’

‘For a while, I thought that you had recognised me,’ Fields admitted. ‘I returned to Cambridge on an early morning train, half-convinced that the police would soon be calling at the college to question me. When you wrote to me the following day, suggesting that you visit, I wondered whether it was part of a stratagem to unmask me. But, after your arrival in Cambridge, it was clear that you knew nothing. That you had not recognised me.’

‘And so you decided to use me.’

‘Creech had thought to recruit you. Why should not I? I knew from our travels in sixty-seven that you would make a good companion on any expedition to Greece. So I pretended to know nothing about Euphorion.’

Throughout the time he had been speaking, Fields had continued to keep the revolver trained on Adam’s heart. The gun was still pointing there as he finished. Adam let out a long sigh of disillusion and disappointment.

‘But what of the deaths, Professor? How could you bring yourself to murder in pursuit of your goal?’

‘I have already explained,’ Fields said, almost complacently. ‘Creech and the sot were not worthy of the knowledge upon which they had stumbled.’

‘And what of yourself?’ Adam demanded. ‘Have your motives for action been so pure?’

‘I care for knowledge!’ Fields screamed, his face suddenly contorted with fury. ‘I care for scholarship! Why should my name not go down to posterity as one of the great archaeologists of the age? The chance had been offered to me. Why should I not take it? Why should a blackmailer and a drunk stand in my way?’

The professor had stepped forwards in his agitation, the gun shaking in his hands. His face had reddened and blue veins in his temple stood out like rivers on a map. He made a heroic effort to regain his self-control. His breathing came in short, sharp pants.

‘You have nothing to fear from me, Adam,’ he said eventually, his voice now eerily calm. ‘I have long had your interests at heart. Since you were a schoolboy in Shrewsbury, I have seen you as, in some way, my successor. The son I have never had, perhaps. Is that too sentimental a thought? I would not harm you. Besides, I have not forgotten you saved my life that day in Athens. Had it not been for you, I would have been a mangled carcass beneath the wheels of that runaway cart.’

‘An unfortunate accident.’ Despite the professor’s words, Adam had no confidence that he would not shoot him if necessary. Had he not said as much only minutes before? Fields seemed so deranged by recent events and by his own demonic urge to gain the Macedonian gold that he could not be trusted.

‘I thought for a while it was no accident,’ the professor continued. ‘That some enemy in the city had attempted to kill me. Later, when my rooms at the Angleterre were rifled, I was sure of it. But I have since understood that the person responsible for upending my belongings was Rallis. And Rallis, whatever his other faults, was not a man to take another’s life. No, you are right. The cart crashing into the café was no more than chance.’

‘Which way should we travel, Devlin?’ Lewis Garland, turning in his saddle, called back to Quint. Adam’s manservant was perched behind Giorgios on the latter’s bay horse as the party retraced the journey he had so recently made. The road before them divided. One fork of it continued to follow the bank of the small stream; the other headed into the hills. Quint waved an arm to indicate that the horses should begin to climb. Garland led the way as the small group of riders turned off the main path and made its way uphill. For an hour they climbed steadily if not steeply, the path rising ahead of them and the distant view of Mount Olympus permanently before them. The ground hereabouts was uncultivated and rough. On several occasions, the horses came close to stumbling on the rocks and loose stones that were strewn across the path. At one point, they heard the sounds of what might have been a shot coming from the countryside far ahead of them. They all turned to look at one another.

‘That was a gunshot, Lewis, was it not?’ Emily asked.

‘I cannot tell,’ Garland replied. ‘It is difficult to be certain in this terrain. Sounds carry for many miles. And they can be distorted in their journey.’

‘We must hasten on our way. Adam may be in danger.’

‘The shot — if it was a shot — could be from the gun of a villager out hunting, my dear. We should not risk the horses by riding at too great a speed amongst these rocks.’

The MP had reined in his horse and dropped back to join Emily. Quint and Giorgios were immediately behind them. Bringing up the rear were half a dozen young men hired by Garland in Salonika, all now looking as if they wished they were back in that city. In the vanguard, fifty yards beyond his master, was another of the Englishman’s servants. As he came to the top of a gentle rise in the land, the man cried out. Garland and Emily spurred their horses forward to join him. The young woman gasped and raised her hand to her mouth as she saw what had attracted the servant’s attention. On the path ahead was a body. Sprawled in the dirt was the huge form of Andros. He looked like one of the giants felled by Zeus in his battle with them.

‘Stay where you are, Emily,’ Garland ordered. He dismounted and approached the vast figure, its back reddened with blood. He knelt by its side and held his fingers to the side of Andros’s neck.

‘He is dead,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘He has been shot in the back.’

‘The sound we heard?’

‘No, he has been dead for some time. We shall have to carry him with us. We must give him a decent burial when we can.’

Garland shouted instructions to his hired men, who reluctantly climbed down from their mounts.

‘Ain’t the only one we might have to bury,’ remarked Quint, who had slid down from behind Giorgios and was standing in the middle of the path, arms akimbo.

‘What the blazes do you mean, Devlin?’

Quint pointed to a small knoll of earth a hundred yards away. Beneath the inadequate shade of a stunted tree was another figure. It was clearly that of a man.

Garland began to walk rapidly towards it, followed at a more leisurely pace by Quint. As they did so, the figure suddenly raised itself on its arms.

‘He is still alive,’ Emily cried.

The two men broke into a trot. As they did so, the figure sank into the earth again and remained motionless.

‘It’s Rallis,’ Garland called, as he neared the crumpled shape. He squatted on his haunches by the side of the Greek lawyer. ‘He has been shot in the back as well, but he is breathing.’

The rock was lying inches from Adam’s left foot. It was a tempting weapon if only he could reach down to pick it up. But how was he to do that with Fields’s revolver trained upon him?

‘Now I have told you all I wish to tell you, Adam,’ the professor said. ‘And I must leave you. Garland, I think, is within a few miles of us. Unlike Prometheus, you will not have to remain in your chains for long. Nor will an eagle devour your liver. Although it will be uncomfortable down there in the mud we have dug.’

Fields nodded in the direction of the trench. Still pointing the gun at his young protégé’s heart, he motioned towards his horse.

‘There is strong rope enough to bind you, I believe. It is looped around the pommel of the saddle on this beast behind me.’

‘I can see it,’ Adam acknowledged.

‘I think it would be best if you took it off yourself. Then drop it at your feet.’

Fields began to back and wheel slowly to his left, allowing Adam a path to walk towards the horse. The young man was about to move forward when he saw that the professor was edging in the direction of two mounds of earth, upturned from the trench earlier in the day. He chose to wait for a moment.

‘Come, Adam. We have not all day.’ Fields gestured impatiently. As he did so, his foot caught on one of the piles of earth and he stumbled slightly. Involuntarily, he swung the gun away from the young man’s body. Adam saw his chance. In one swift movement, he ducked to the ground, seized the rock and threw it at the professor. It struck the older man a glancing blow on the forehead and he stumbled still further. Adam, pushing up from his crouching position, hurled himself towards Fields and the gun. He collided with him just as the professor was recovering his balance and both men crashed to the ground. Winded, Adam still managed to seize the barrel of the revolver with one hand. Fields, spread-eagled beneath him, was clinging desperately to the gun as well. With a strength that belied his years, he succeeded in pushing Adam off him but the young man, realising that his life depended upon it, refused to let go of the gun barrel. The two of them rolled over one another, the weapon trapped between them. Both had their hands upon it but neither could claim possession of it.

As they continued to grapple near the edge of the trench, clouds of dust rose about them. Both men began to cough. The revolver was still caught between their bodies. Adam felt his head and shoulders being forced over the lip of the trench and fought back as best he could but his opponent seemed to possess the vigour of a man decades younger than he was. The young man could sense that Fields was gaining the upper hand. He himself was slipping further and further into the earthwork they had dug. He clung desperately to the barrel of the gun as his feet scrabbled to keep a purchase on the upturned soil. Fields continued to push his upper body over the edge. Adam could feel his balance slowly going but he would not let go of the revolver. That was the only thought that still possessed him. Keep hold of the gun. For what seemed like long minutes, the two men swayed on the rim, spluttering and struggling.

Then the professor, in his effort to hurl Adam into the pit, momentarily lost his own balance and involuntarily reached out a hand to steady himself. It was enough. The younger man was able to snatch the revolver wholly from the professor’s grasp, but as he did so, the world gave way beneath him. He tumbled backwards into the trench. His fall was accompanied by a deafening roar as the gun went off. There was a scream from Fields. Adam, plummeting backwards into the earthwork, struck his head against its solid floor. A black pool appeared before him and he dove gratefully into its depths.

When he came round, Adam was still sprawled in the trench like an upturned beetle. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. He stared up at the cloudless blue sky. He attempted gingerly to move his arms and legs and found, to his relief, that he could do so. He reached a hand around to the back of his head and winced as he felt an egg-shaped lump on his scalp. Hearing a voice, he froze. Could Fields still be up there on the surface? Surely he would have fled the camp by now? Unless Adam was dead, and this was a poor version of the afterlife, the professor had clearly shown him mercy after his fall into the pit. But he would not have lingered long before departing, would he? The voice could be heard again. Certainly it sounded familiar. What was it shouting? Adam sought to sit up in the trench but he found that many of his muscles refused to obey him. He was obliged to remain where he was. The voice echoed in his head, evoking memories which he could not quite place. He knew the rhythms and timbre of it so well. It must be Fields. As he strove to gather his scattered wits, a dark figure appeared over the edge of the trench and looked down at him. Silhouetted against the light, it spoke.

‘You planning on being down there all day?’ the figure asked.

It was Quint.

Adam found that he could now move. He hauled himself to his feet and reached up his hand to his manservant.

‘Get me out of here, Quint. I feel like Hades in the Underworld.’

Quint seized hold of him and, with his assistance, Adam was able to hoist himself out of the earthwork. Once again on the surface, he brushed as much of the soil from his clothing as he could and shook his hair free of the earth lodged in it.

‘We been shouting for the last five minutes,’ Quint said, in a tone of voice that suggested Adam had been deliberately concealing himself, like a child playing hide-and-seek.

‘We?’

Quint nodded in the direction of the camp. Adam could see horses tethered to posts. Two figures were making their way towards them. Blinking in the fierce sunlight, he could just recognise Garland and Emily.

‘Where’s the professor?’ he asked. ‘Was he still here when you returned?’

‘You could say that,’ his servant said.

‘Well, where is he now? He must be apprehended. His mind is overthrown. He is a danger to us all.’

By way of reply, Quint inclined his head again, this time towards a pile of earth they had upturned when they had all first arrived at Koutles. Lying across it was what Adam at first thought was a pile of old clothes. He moved a step towards it and realised that it was Fields. His body lolled back across the ground as if it had been dropped from on high. The whole of his front was stained red with blood and innards. Adam could imagine only too well what had happened. In falling into the trench, while still clinging to the gun, he had inadvertently pulled the trigger. The full force of the shot had taken Fields in the midriff, virtually eviscerating him. He had staggered backwards to collapse and die on a mound of newly turned Greek earth.

‘He tried to kill me,’ Adam said, still scarcely believing the truth.

‘Tried to kill Rallis as well,’ Quint replied. ‘’E did kill the tall bugger. Poor old Andros.’

‘Where is Rallis?’

‘On the road back to Salonika. Garland told two of his men to get him to the Catholic sisters there. Fast as possible.’

‘Will he live?’

Quint shrugged.

‘’E’s got an ’ole in him ’alf the size of an Essex Pippin. But ’e probably will. The professor here didn’t catch him full on like the tall cove.’

Adam walked away from the sorry sight of Fields’s body. His manservant followed him, a pace behind.

‘ ’E ’ad you fooled as much as me,’ he said, managing to sound both truculent and plaintive at the same time.

Adam made no reply.

‘ ’E’d ’ave got ’old of that Euphorion book with or without me.’

‘I have no doubt that he would.’

‘I don’t do what any old swaggering Bob tells me to do. But I thought ’e was the boss.’

It was as near to an apology as Quint was ever likely to offer.

‘I do not blame you, Quint,’ Adam said. ‘The responsibility for all this lies with Fields. Let us bury all that has happened with him.’

‘I cannot say how happy I am to see you unharmed, Mr Carver. Such terrible pictures filled my imagination as we approached the camp. Of you wounded. Or dead.’

Emily, who had left Garland to supervise the care of the horses, approached Adam as if unsure of the greeting she might receive. Quint, showing unwonted tact, immediately retired.

‘As you can see, Miss Maitland, I have survived my ordeal.’ Adam looked to catch Emily’s eye but she turned away.

‘I rejoice to know that we arrived in good time and that you are unhurt.’

A silence fell between the two.

‘Oh, Emily,’ Adam said, after a long pause, ‘how long ago it seems since you came to Doughty Street for the first time. When Quint broke the plates.’

‘That was not my first visit. I came to your rooms several days earlier. When neither you nor Mr Quint were present.’

‘Of course,’ Adam said, smiling wrily. ‘I had forgotten. My landlady — a formidable termagant named Gaffery — saw you as you left. I am surprised that she did not attempt to detain you. Or have you arrested.’

‘I was convinced that she would.’ Emily laughed. ‘She watched me descend the stairs with the door to her own rooms ajar. But she did not show herself any further.’

‘I think perhaps she must have feared that the respectability of her house would have been compromised had she confronted you. But she spoke to me. She berated me fiercely.’

‘I am sorry to cause you such trouble.’

‘It was nothing. Her bark is worse than her bite. But how did you breach the Gaffery fortress in the first place?’

‘There is another lodger on the floors above you.’

‘Dupont? The Frenchman?’

‘Is he French? I knew only that he was not English. I approached him as he was leaving the house. I told him that I was your lady friend and that I needed to leave you a message.’

‘And he believed you.’ Adam could easily envisage the delight with which Dupont, an engaging and chatty salesman for a French furrier in Mayfair, would have responded to Emily’s approach. He would have been only too pleased to assist a beautiful woman in any scheme he thought might further a romantic dalliance.

‘He let me in. I thought perhaps you would not have locked your doors. But I could find no way to enter your rooms.’

‘So you returned a few days later.’

‘On the Tuesday, yes.’

‘But why did you leave us so abruptly? Was Quint’s clumsiness with the plates so terrifying?’

Emily paused. For a moment it seemed as if she might not reply.

‘You were so kind to me. Such a gentleman. I grew ashamed of what my father had asked me to do. When Mr Quint provided the distraction, I decided to leave.’

‘Ah, your father. I had not realised that Creech was your father until Fields informed me of the fact. I am sorry that he met his death so cruelly.’

Emily bowed her head.

‘We should not have plotted to deceive you. But my father was eager to learn as much of you as he could. That is why he wished me to make your acquaintance.’

‘And Garland? When did you meet Garland?’

‘As you must surely be aware, my father and Lewis Garland were boys together at school. We have known one another for a long time.’

‘Of course, he is your godfather.’

There was another pause as Emily turned her head towards Garland, thirty yards away, who was pointing to the horses and delivering instructions to two of the servants.

‘Mr Garland is not my godfather.’

Adam waited for her to say more.

‘He is my fiancé.’

‘That cannot be,’ the young man blurted out and would have spoken further, but Emily held up her hand to stop him.

‘There is no more to be said, Adam. I am engaged to Lewis Garland and that is all that you need to know.’

‘But the difference in your ages.’

‘Many a happy marriage has been contracted between a man of mature years and a younger woman.’ Emily spoke with a confidence that Adam was certain she did not feel. He stared miserably at the distant mountains. The highest peak of Mount Olympus, where the gods of the ancient Greeks held court, glittered in the afternoon sunshine. They would be looking down and laughing at this latest unexpected twist of fate, he thought.

‘I can think little of a man who would place the woman he loved in such danger,’ he said eventually. ‘Garland should never have allowed you to leave Salonika with him.’

‘It was at my insistence, Adam.’

‘She was really most persuasive, Mr Carver.’ Unseen by either of the young couple, Lewis Garland had left the horses by the camp. He was now standing six feet from them. Adam noticed once again the deep black of his hair and beard, so dark that it must be dyed. He felt he should hate this older man, engaged to marry the woman he now recognised he loved himself, but he found that he could not. ‘I defy any man to resist the arguments she used to carry her case.’

‘I am still uncertain why you travelled out here from Salonika in the first place. Although I am glad, of course, that you did.’

Garland took two paces closer to them and rested his hand on his fiancée’s arm. Was it Adam’s imagination, or did Emily move ever so slightly away from him as he did so?

‘I was curious as to why my old and — forgive me, my dear — wicked friend Sam Creech was interested in this place Koutles. He had told Emily that he was. Although he had told her little else. We were spending time in Salonika anyway. As you know, Emily and her mother live here. I thought it would be easy enough to satisfy my curiosity by an excursion out here.’

‘He was blackmailing you, was he not?’ Adam could see no reason now to beat about the bush or indulge in the evasions of polite conversation. Garland looked startled at first by his directness but he rapidly recovered what little composure he had lost.

‘Yes — the ties of old friendship meant little to Sam where money was involved. And then, after he was killed, the canary man came calling. Also intent on extorting money from me.’

‘Jinkinson was also killed.’

‘I am sorry to hear that. In a strange way, I rather liked the man, garrulous and greedy as he was. But I hope you now understand that I was not responsible for his death.’

‘No. It was the professor who killed him. He killed Creech as well. And Andros. He thought he had killed Rallis. He was planning, I think, to kill me, although he denied it. Once he had unburdened himself to me as much as he did, I do not think he could have allowed me to stay alive.’

‘You must tell us all that Professor Fields confessed,’ Emily said.

‘It will be a long story.’

‘We have the time,’ Garland said, gesturing towards the camp. ‘My men have prepared the horses for departure, I believe. It will take us several days to return to Salonika.’

‘What of the professor’s body?’ Adam asked.

‘We shall bury it here. Where his dreams turned to ashes.’

CHAPTER FORTY

Like distilled mud, the fog swirled in filthy and foul-smelling clouds around Adam’s head as he stepped out into Doughty Street. Although it was still the afternoon, the city was given over to the gaslights as he made his way to the Marco Polo. The smoking room was empty save for Mr Moorhouse, sitting in his favourite chair, lost in thought. Adam joined him.

It was nearly two months since his struggle with Fields on the edge of the pit in Macedonia. Together with Emily and Garland and Quint, he had left the camp near Koutles and ridden back towards Salonika. On the way, they had overtaken Rallis and the two men deputed to look after him. Perhaps it was as well for his own comfort that the Greek lawyer had remained more or less unconscious for most of their journey. Once in Salonika, in the care of Roman Catholic nuns there, he had made a surprisingly swift recovery from his wounds. When it came to the time to make their farewells, Rallis was once again on his feet.

‘Goodbye, Alexander,’ Adam said as he stood by the dock, awaiting the moment to step on board Garland’s private yacht. ‘If you ever visit London again, I shall insist that you see the sights in my company.’

‘I shall accompany you to the British Museum, my friend,’ Rallis replied with a smile, holding out his hand. And I shall point out all the treasures there that one day will be returned to Greece.’

Adam laughed and took the lawyer’s hand. ‘I might even help you to smuggle some of them out of the museum,’ he said.

The journey back from Salonika to Athens had proved uneventful. After a few restorative days enjoying Polly’s hospitality at the Angleterre, Adam and Quint had taken ship for Malta. From there, another steamer had transported them to Marseille. The French railways had taken them to the Channel coast and the end of October had seen the pair settled once again in Doughty Street.

To Adam’s misery, Athens had been the scene of a parting from Emily and her husband-to-be. Looking, in Quint’s words, ‘as sad as a sick monkey’, the young man had been a poor companion on the journey back to London. Once back in his rooms, he had been unable to find the enthusiasm to return to any of his former pursuits. His photographic equipment had remained untouched. His friends had seen nothing of him. He had spent his days locked away in the sitting room in Doughty Street, idly reading novels and brooding over the events of the summer. There had been times when he had thought that he would never be able to reconcile himself either to Fields’s treachery or to Emily’s preference for Garland. Quint, his spirits oppressed by the atmosphere in the rooms, had spent long periods away from them. On many occasions, Adam had called for his manservant only to find that he was alone in the flat. He had been too melancholy to complain when Quint, often smelling strongly of brown ale, had returned to Doughty Street long after night had fallen.

One afternoon, more than a fortnight after they had arrived back in England, Quint had strode into the sitting room from his own reeking little den at the rear of the flat. Adam had looked up from his copy of Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife, the latest book to fail to hold his attention. His manservant had thrown down a newspaper on the table.

‘Thought you might want to cast your peepers on that,’ he had said.

‘What is it, Quint?’ Adam had asked irritably. ‘I am busy.’

‘Reynolds’s News from last Sunday.’

‘Since when did you become a follower of the press?’

‘I likes to keep myself informed,’ Quint had said indignantly. ‘Anyways, there’s word in it of someone we know.’ He had opened the newspaper and pressed a grubby finger on the centre of one of its pages. ‘Here.’

Curious, Adam had stood and walked across to the table. He had looked to where Quint had been pointing. It had been an item in what seemed to be a kind of gossip column.

‘Word has reached your correspondent,’ it had read, ‘of the return of a distinguished parliamentarian from a long sojourn abroad…’

After months spent travelling in Greece, Mr L-w-s G-rl-nd is once more a resident of our noble city. Rumours of his impending marriage to a beautiful maiden from fair Hellas have proved to be unfounded. Your correspondent understands that the lady in question, a Miss Em-l- M-tl-nd, has brought the engagement to an end and that the heartbroken Mr G-rl-nd is, and is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, one of the city’s most eligible bachelors.

Adam had read it through and read it through again. He had looked at Quint, who was visibly smirking.

‘But this is splendid news,’ the young man had said.

‘Reckoned you might see it that way.’

‘Emily is free.’

‘’Alfway across bleedin’ Europe, of course.’

‘But she is free. She is no longer engaged to that man.’

‘’Ard to bill and coo between ’ere and Salonika, mind.’

‘This calls for a celebration.’ Adam had ignored his servant’s remarks. ‘I shall go to the Marco Polo. I have not been there since we returned home.’

And so Adam now found himself in the smoking room of his club, puffing cheerfully on a cigar from Philip Morris’s shop in New Bond Street and gazing companionably at Mr Moorhouse.

‘Bit of a fog out there, I gather,’ the old man said.

‘A London pea-souper, Mr Moorhouse. The strangest atmospheric compound known to science.’

‘Quite like the fog myself. Damned inconvenient, of course, if you’re a man of business. But the city always looks rather beautiful in it, I think. Shapes looming out of the dark and all that.’

The two men fell silent. The smoke from their cigars drifted towards the ceiling.

‘I do like a play with a good murder in it, don’t you?’ Mr Moor-house said suddenly. He had a faraway look in his eye, as if he was recalling happy theatrical experiences from his youth. ‘Blood and gore. Murder in the Red Barn. That kind of thing.’

‘With the murderer brought to book at the end, of course,’ Adam suggested. Did Mr Moorhouse, he wondered, know something of the dramatic events that had overtaken Adam while he had been abroad? Perhaps the old man was not quite the innocent he usually appeared. He looked across at his companion but Mr Moorhouse’s face revealed nothing more than bland contentment.

‘Absolutely,’ the old man agreed. ‘All topped off with repentance in the condemned cell. And a speech warning younger members of the audience not to follow his example. Educational and moral. Not enough plays like that any more.’

Silence descended again on the room. All that Adam could hear were the distant sounds of voices in another part of the building. Probably the Marco Polo’s servants, he thought, preparing for the influx of members in the evening.

‘Haven’t seen you around for a while, Carver,’ Mr Moorhouse said. ‘Been up to anything interesting?’

Adam thought for a moment or two, then decided there could be no harm in satisfying Mr Moorhouse’s curiosity, regardless of how much, or how little, the old clubman already knew. His decision was vindicated, since Mr Moorhouse proved a good listener as Adam related the salient points of his adventures in European Turkey. He said little himself but he made the right noises of encouragement at the right points in the narrative. When all was told, he sank back in his chair and stared upwards at the stucco decoration on the ceiling.

‘So this Euphorion chap was wrong, then, was he?’ he said, after thinking the matter over for a while. ‘No gold to be found?’

‘On the contrary, Mr Moorhouse. Euphorion was entirely correct, I think. We were the ones who went astray. We failed to find the right place in which to dig. Garland arranged further excavations but nothing was found. As a consequence, all we have are a few beautiful objects like this.’

Adam held up the gold ring to the gas lamp and, for a minute, both he and Moorhouse admired its twinkling in the light. Then the young man folded his hand round it and slipped it back into his pocket.

‘But the tomb of Philip is out there somewhere in those hills,’ he said. ‘Someday it will be found. And when it is, the treasures it holds will make that poor ring look like a trifle indeed.’

The young man drew deeply on his cigar and allowed himself a brief reverie of future triumphs. One day, he would return to the Macedonian hills himself. He would follow the trail to Philip’s tomb and he would unearth its hidden riches. It would, as Fields had predicted, be the archaeological sensation of the era. He would be a famous man. And — who knew? — perhaps Emily would be there to share his success. Despite what Quint said, Salonika was not so distant.

Adam Carver blew out the smoke of his cigar and watched it spiral and disperse into the already fuggy air of the room. It was now early evening and other members of the Marco Polo were conversing in the corridor outside. He felt himself called back to the present and so turned to speak once more to Mr Moorhouse. But there was little point. The old clubman had fallen fast asleep.