City of the Lost

I

It made for a long day, wondering whether you’d killed one person, five people, fifty. But, once Asena and Hakan had found themselves caught between police roadblocks, they’d had no alternative but to hole up in a tumbledown farmer’s hut and wait them out.

The roadblock had lasted only a couple of hours beyond nightfall. No stamina, these rural police. They’d got back on her Kawasaki and headed on their way. A first drizzle at the forest fringes quickly turned into a downpour that made the track treacherous with mud and puddles and sodden leaf litter. With Asena’s rear tyre a little bald, and Hakan riding pillion, it kept sliding out of her control, so that they both kept having to thrust out their feet to stay upright. But they arrived at last at the lair of the Grey Wolves, eight large wooden huts hidden from spy planes and satellites by thick camouflage nets. She drove past the armoury, gave the engine a final roar as she pulled up between the horse-box and the other trucks, enough to bring Bulent, Uğur, Şükrü, Oguzhan and various others out of their cabins, most holding waterproofs above their heads. ‘Well?’ she asked, embracing them briskly in turn. ‘What news?’

‘A success,’ nodded Bulent, but soberly.

Asena felt a twinge. Success was such a loaded term for operations like these. ‘How many?’ she asked.

‘Thirty-one so far,’ said Uğur. ‘Thirty-one and counting.’

‘Thirty-one?’ protested Hakan, appalled. ‘But you promised me we’d—’

‘That was a bomb we set off today,’ said Asena sharply, before he could finish. ‘Not a fucking hand-grenade.’

‘I know. But—’

‘One, two, ten, a hundred?’ snapped Asena. ‘What does it really matter? This is a war we’re fighting. A war for the soul of our nation. Or have you forgotten?’ She glared around at them all, daring one of them to challenge her authority. No one did. She stalked into the main cabin, poured two fingers of raki into a glass then splashed in water to turn it cloudy. Lion’s milk, they called it: aslan suku. She held it up as if in a toast then knocked it back and poured herself another. She could hear Hakan muttering with the others outside, but right now she didn’t care. Let them grumble if they must. As long as they obeyed.

The glass casings of the oil lamps, blackened with soot, threw eerie shadows on the wooden walls. These cabins were fitted with electric lights, but they only used their generator once a day, to recharge batteries and put a chill on the deep freeze. She rinsed her plate, poured herself a third glass of lion’s milk. The rain had stopped, but still drip-dripped rhythmically from the eaves. Wolves howled in the distance. They were in good voice tonight. Usually the sound cheered her with its hint of camara-derie, as if some higher power was letting her know the justice of her cause. But tonight it merely made her feel all the more alone.

The Lion and the Wolf.

The milk wasn’t going to be enough. She needed to talk to the man himself. She needed his assurance that those thirty-one lives and counting had been necessary. She went to her room, set up her satellite phone, pinged out an encrypted message. Ten minutes dragged by. Nothing happened. His job kept him absurdly busy and he had to be extravagantly careful about how and when he contacted her. She understood this intellectually yet she resented it all the same. The things she was doing for him, he should find the time. Today, of all days, he should find the—

Her screen blinked. A black box appeared. In the box, his face, grey-lit and jerky and craggy, yet so handsome withal that he still had the power to lift her heart. ‘My love,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ he asked, glancing at his watch.

His brusqueness hurt her. ‘I only wanted to know if today went as you’d hoped,’ she said. ‘And if there were any ramifications we needed to know about.’

‘Today went as hoped. There are no ramifications you need to know about. I’ll notify you through the usual channels if that should change.’

‘Only you never said this morning what it was we—’

‘It had to be done,’ he said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

‘Thirty-one people,’ she said. ‘Thirty-one and counting.’

‘It was necessary.’

‘So you said. But why?’

‘I can’t tell you.’ He looked uncomfortable for the first time. ‘Please trust me.’

She shook her head, but only because she was unhappy. ‘I hate this,’ she said. ‘I want it to be over.’

‘It won’t be much longer,’ he said. ‘A few months at the very most and then we’ll be together forever, with everything we’ve worked for. Our nation will be free again. And your father too, don’t forget.’ He checked his watch again. ‘But right now I have to go.’ He softened the message with a smile. ‘You may have heard that a bomb went off today.’

‘Call me tomorrow,’ she said.

‘If I can.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Call me tomorrow.’

He nodded seriously. ‘As you wish.’

She reached out and touched his cheek upon her screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ she said.

He nodded and touched his own screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf.’

II

Somehow, during the course of their meal, sharing a room with Karin had become an issue for Iain to manage. They fell into a slightly awkward silence on their way back to the hotel. Their footsteps synchronized on the pavement, that heel-and-toe cadence that sounds weirdly like heartbeats. The receptionist gave a curious frown as she wished them good night, and the lift seemed a bit more cramped than it had while coming down earlier.

He let Karin into the room ahead of him, the better to follow her cues. She invited him to use the bathroom first. He did so. When it came to her turn, he heard the toilet flushing, the running of a tap, the vigorous brushing of her teeth. She came out wearing his olive T-shirt, its hem hanging loose around her thighs like some skimpy miniskirt. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Never looks like that on me.’

‘The lights,’ she said.

He switched them off. She slipped beneath her duvet. The room was on the hotel’s top floor and had a sloped skylight in place of a window. The weak moonlight and the white net curtain that drooped across it meant that all he could see was various gradations of darkness. He turned onto his side to face her, propped himself up on an elbow. ‘So you were telling me about earthquakes,’ he said. ‘How they don’t cause fires like you’d expect.’

‘Wasn’t I boring you?’

‘Are you kidding? I’ll never get to sleep until I know.’

He heard her laughter, then rustling as she too turned onto her side. Strange to think that they were facing each other a few feet apart, yet blind. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘These places were mostly built of stone. Their citadels, at least. Even if an oil lamp tipped over, there was nothing to catch fire, certainly not enough to spread. Sometimes a conquering army would want to burn a city as punishment, or to send out a message, but actually it was a real production. They had to cut down nearby forests and drag the trees into the city then spread them around the houses before it would catch. A lot of work, especially when you consider a city was a valuable thing. Even if you didn’t want to live there yourself, you could squeeze the citizens for tribute. So why burn it? Yet we have numerous examples.’

‘A game of tit for tat?’ he suggested. ‘Only it got out of hand.’

‘That’s one theory,’ she agreed. ‘But these places are scattered all over the place, so it’s hard to fit them to a pattern. Usually, in history, you can build a narrative that makes some kind of sense. It may be wrong, but it helps you think about it until something better comes along. Not with this. And, even if it did, it still wouldn’t explain how brutal the Dark Ages were. Everything collapsed. Cities were abandoned, and not only the burned ones. There was a massive depopulation. In some places, the lack of archaeological remains suggest that populations fell by ninety per cent or more. Ninety per cent! And this lasted twenty generations, give or take. Think about that: How much do you know about your family twenty generations ago? Especially as this wasn’t normal, settled life, but nomadic scavenging and hard-scrabble farming under constant threat of raiders stealing your winter stores. Yet somehow, at the end of it, Homer managed to depict the Trojan War almost as though he’d been there.’

‘I thought you said the Trojan War may not even have happened.’

‘Yes. But the world in which it was set existed. He knows the names of Mycenaean kingdoms that no longer existed. He depicts their armour and weaponry, their ships, tactics, gods, rituals, terrain and burial customs. He’s not perfect, sure, and there’s plenty of later stuff mixed in, but he’s still far more accurate than he had any right to be. How?’

The room was as dark as before, yet suddenly he glimpsed something like movement in the darkness, almost as if Karin were reaching out her hand to him across the narrow aisle. He reached out, curious, to check; but it proved a mirage. Nothing but empty space. ‘And that’s the Homeric Question?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the Homeric Question.’