City of the Lost

I

The main rally in Ankara was being held in Güven Park, as close as the public could get to the seat of power these days, now that the government quarter had been enclosed by high perimeter walls and its new ring of steel. But the chanting was all the louder because the protesters knew that the Office of the Prime Minister lay just a hundred metres the other side, and that Deniz Baştürk was there right now, holding a crisis cabinet.

Riot police tried twice to turn Şükrü away, claiming that the Güven Park entrance was closed. But he pointed to the livery of his horse-box and told them he had orders to bring it here. He kept his hand on his horn and the crowd parted with ill grace. A young man with ridiculously hairy eyebrows stood in front of his bonnet and yelled taunts. Someone banged his window with a battered saucepan, making him jump. He revved his engine hard and pressed on until he was through the last of them, into the narrow stretch of no man’s land that separated them from the lines of riot police behind their steel barricades, their helmets on and their Perspex shields held at the ready.

They opened up the barriers for him. He gestured thanks as he drove by. There was a gap of perhaps twenty metres behind them, then the road funnelled through a chicane of concrete blocks to reach a pair of concrete and bullet-proof glass bunkers that squatted either side of the triple-barred security barrier and the two sets of tyre shredders. He pulled up, ratcheted his handbrake, turned off his engine. He wiped his palms on his trousers as he jumped down, throwing a resentful glance at the thugs still yelling back down the street. ‘Idiots,’ he muttered, handing his licence, ID and paperwork to the duty officer. ‘I could have had horses in the back for all they knew.’

‘I’d have paid to see that. A couple of police horses going berserk on their arses.’ He nodded at the horse-box. ‘What’s the story?’

‘It did its rear axle,’ shrugged Şükrü. ‘We put a new one in this morning. They told us to take it to Alparslan Türkeş. Alparslan Türkeş told us to bring it here, to your mounted police barracks.’

‘No one told us.’

‘Can’t you call someone?’ He opened his door and grabbed a form off the passenger seat. ‘They gave me this number for authorization.’

The man took it back inside his booth. But he came out a minute later, shaking his head. ‘Can’t get hold of anyone. Everything’s so fucked up today.’

‘Hell,’ said Şükrü. He looked back at the increasingly rowdy protesters. ‘Then can I at least leave it here? They don’t pay me enough for me to drive back through that mob.’

‘Let me take a look.’ He checked the cab first, then used a mirror on a stick to inspect the undercarriage. Şükrü unbolted the rear of the horse-box and lowered it into a ramp. They went up inside together. Two stalls, both empty. A pungent smell of horses, a few wisps of straw on the floor. Loud cheers from the mob made them glance around just as a first missile was thrown, a plastic bottle of yellowish liquid that smacked into a riot shield then sprayed the police with a golden shower.

‘Shit,’ said the policeman. ‘This is going to get tasty.’

‘What do I do?’ asked Şükrü.

‘You’d better go on in. You know where the barracks is?’

‘Where that school used to be, right?’

‘That’s it.’

Şükrü closed up the horse-box, climbed back into his cab. They raised the barrier for him, removed the shredders. The buildings here had imposing yet drab façades, expressions of the power that lay within. He turned right. The mounted police barracks was along the second road to his right. He drove past it, went instead into a half-empty car park and found a quiet corner in which to park. He took the Thermos flask from his lunch box, uncapped it, then held it down by his side to slop the cold sludge of coffee inside in spatters onto the ground. Asena had told him it was an old wives’ tale that it would fool sniffer dogs, but he was of the firm opinion that those old wives knew a trick or two. He slapped the side of the horse-box then walked south, mingling with the suits leaving work for the day, all seeking to avoid the Güven Park protests. He offered his papers but was waved straight through. He walked a little way down the street before he made the call. ‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘Are they in?’ asked Asena.

‘Yes,’ Şükrü told her. ‘They’re in.’

II

They left Professor Volkan to his house arrest and headed for Famagusta. With Andreas pushing his old Citroën up against the natural limiter of its engine rattle, and the windows rolled down against the fumes, conversation was hard. Karin had opted for the back seats. The road was flat and fast and faintly hypnotic, while the beams of oncoming traffic threatened a mild headache. She folded her arms and stared at the dark ridges of the Five Fingers to her left and fell to brooding.

The last two weeks of his life, Nathan had been like a kid on Christmas Eve. At the time, she’d put it down to general excitement about their upcoming trip. But knowing what she now knew, it had to have been because of what he’d hoped to buy. In which case, surely his behaviour during those two weeks would offer clues as to what that was. The books and articles he’d chosen to read, the topics of the conversations he’d started and steered.

‘A penny for them,’ said Iain, glancing around.

‘I’d be ripping you off,’ she warned.

‘I’ll take that risk.’

‘Fine. Then I guess I was thinking about names.’

‘Names?’

‘Do you know how history worked back in Homer’s time?’ She had to talk loudly to make herself heard over the engine and passing traffic. ‘I mean the Greeks didn’t have the kind of established framework we take for granted: no chronologies or history books, nothing like that. Writing had been lost; there weren’t any inscribed monuments to speak of. They had oral history, that was all, and little way to test the accuracy of their stories.’ She lurched forwards suddenly, as Andreas hit the brakes for a speed-camera on the junction ahead, then rocked back again. ‘A lot of those stories were wrong in some way. They got exaggerated for propaganda purposes. They became garbled from being passed on too often. Or maybe the world simply changed around them, so that they didn’t make sense any more. So they got tweaked an awful lot to make them more fun or satisfying or coherent.’

‘What’s this got to do with names?’

‘Names were a leading source of confusion,’ she told him. ‘That’s largely because the Greeks pretty much took it for granted that people and places with similar names were connected to each other. Take Salamis, for instance. The old city up on the coast ahead, where your pollen came from. It shares its name with an island near Athens off which a famous sea-battle was fought. So the ancients would have expected the two places to be connected somehow. And indeed they are. A prince from the island of Salamis went to Troy with the Greeks; but his brother was killed during the fighting and he couldn’t face returning home alone. So he came to Cyprus instead, and founded a new Salamis.’

‘Sounds plausible.’

‘The prince’s name was Teucer. Which is where it starts getting really tangled, because the original founder of Troy was also called Teucer. So clearly the Teucer from Salamis had a connection to the Trojans. And yes, it turns out that his mother was the sister of the Trojan King, Priam. So in effect, he was half-Trojan himself, fighting against his cousins. And there’s another connection too: his followers — the ones who settled here in Cyprus — were known as Teukrians because of him. But the Trojans were also called Teukrians, after their own founder Teucer.’

‘Okay,’ said Iain doubtfully.

‘Take our old friend Aeneas, for example. Virgil calls him Aeneas of the Teukrians. Aeneas, as you know, was the legendary founder of Rome. By a curious coincidence, a number of historians believe the Cypriot Teukrians to be the ancestors of the Etruscans, who we know actually did found Rome. They have remarkable cultural similarities; and their DNA seems a fairly close match.’

‘Huh.’

‘Carthage is another interesting name. It’s a corruption of Qart Hadasht, Phoenician for “new city”. Yet the Phoenicians built new cities all over the Mediterranean. It was what they did. The place we know today as Carthage, the one in Tunisia, is simply the one that prospered. But we know for sure from ancient records that there was at least one other Carthage. And it was here in Cyprus. Most people think it was probably a place called Kition on the south coast, near where you flew in today, because that was the most prominent Phoenician settlement on the island. But actually there’s no proof of that, and there are traces of Phoenicians all over the island, including at Salamis.’

‘I still don’t see—’

‘According to legend, Dido didn’t sail straight from Tyre to Tunisia. She stopped off along the way. In Cyprus. Some sources say it was to pick up wives for her crew. Others say that she settled here for a while, maybe even founded a new city here. A new city that, almost by definition, would have been called Carthage.’

Iain squinted at her. ‘Are you saying Dido’s Carthage is here?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Karin. ‘I’m thinking out loud is all. But what I do know is that if Dido did indeed found her new city here, and it was other Phoenicians who went on to found the new city in Tunisia, then when this Carthage failed, all of the stories initially associated with it would later have been re-attributed to Tunisian Carthage instead, because that’s how it worked back then. And get this: According to legend, one of the reasons Dido fell so hard for Aeneas was that she was obsessed by the Trojan War. She even commissioned a marble frieze of it for her palace, depicting its great battles and heroes. But guess how she first got so fascinated by it? It was because she’d met a Trojan War veteran when she was a young girl, and he’d beguiled her with his stories. A veteran who’d been in Tyre to ask permission to start a new settlement on Cyprus. A new settlement he wanted to call Salamis.’

‘Teucer,’ murmured Iain.

‘Teucer,’ agreed Karin. ‘So when Dido went on the run from her brother, what better sanctuary than here with her old friend Teucer?’

Iain nodded. ‘You think that’s how it happened?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘The dates don’t work. I’m thinking out loud, is all. But you have to admit it’s a curious coincidence of names. And here’s another, while I’m at it. I think I told you that Dido was a folklore name. So we’ve always thought that maybe she was really known as Elissa, because she was sometimes called that too. But guess what: Cyprus wasn’t called Cyprus back then either. It was known as Alashiya or Alisa, after its most prominent region. And if Dido settled in that region, couldn’t that be how she got the name? As queen of Alashiya.’

‘And that region was where?’

Karin tapped Andreas on his shoulder. ‘Have you ever heard of a region of ancient Cyprus called Alashiya?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ he frowned.

‘Where is it?’

He waved his hand at the night-time lights of the city of Famagusta that lay scattered like embers before them. ‘Here,’ he said.