Lost Temple

Thirteen

'To understand this story, there are certain things you need to be aware of.' Reed turned his torch back to the frieze, to the stone army under the city walls. 'The Greeks who went to Troy were the cream of their age. Menelaus, king of Sparta, whose wife was Helen of Troy. Agamemnon, his brother, the high king of Mycenae. Odysseus, the strategic genius, and Ajax, as strong as an ox. But greater than any of them, the one man the Greeks couldn't do without, was Achilles.

'Now there's a common belief that the Iliad tells the whole story of the Trojan war: the thousand ships, the ten-year siege, the death of Achilles and the final sack of the city.' Reed pursed his lips, the weary look of a man who had spent his life in a war of attrition with ignorance. 'In fact, the Iliad only deals with about a fortnight's worth of the war, in the last year of the siege. Agamemnon and Achilles fall out over a division of the spoils — in this case a slave woman — and Achilles goes off in a huff to let the Greek army see how well they can cope without him. Not very well, it turns out: led by Prince Hector, the Trojans take advantage of Achilles' sulk to almost wipe out the Greeks. Achilles refuses to budge, but his companion Patroclus dresses up in Achilles' armour and goes out to battle. Everyone thinks it's Achilles; the tide turns and it's all going splendidly for the Greeks, until Hector turns up and rather spoils the illusion by killing Patroclus and taking the armour for himself.'

The torch beam darted on, moving round the cavern to the next panel. Now the armies opposed each other across a great river, hurling spears across it, while chariots rushed up reinforcements behind.

'This leaves Achilles in a bit of a bind. He's desperate to get revenge on Hector, but he hasn't got any armour. So his mother — the sea nymph Thetis — goes to the forge of Hephaestus on Lemnos and commissions him to produce a new set of arms and armour. The shield is undoubtedly the piece de resistance, but there are also greaves, a breastplate and a helmet to go with it. Suitably attired, Achilles finds Hector on the field of battle, fights him in single combat and kills him. Then he lashes the corpse to his chariot and drags it around the city until the Trojan king Priam, Hector's father, comes to Achilles' tent and begs for his son's body. Achilles is so moved by the old man's grief that he at last lets go of his anger and hands over the body. End of story, and they all live happily ever after. Except, of course, that most of them don't.'

'I thought Achilles was killed by a poison arrow in his heel.'

'Actually,' said Reed, 'that's a common misconception. Achilles' heel is something of a myth.'

'It's all fucking myth,' said Muir disparagingly.

Reed looked irritated. 'I'm coming to that. What I was trying to explain is that Achilles' heel isn't part of the original legend. There's nothing in any of the earliest sources to say he was struck in the heel, or even that he was especially vulnerable there. It doesn't appear in any written source until the first century AD — seven or eight hundred years after Homer. Homer never tells the story of Achilles' death. The Iliad ends before he dies and the Odyssey picks up the story some time afterwards.'

'Well, if Homer doesn't talk about it, who does?'

Reed leaned forward. 'By the end of the Classical period Homer had become the absolute bedrock of Greek civilisation. His poems were like the Bible, Shakespeare and King Arthur all rolled into one. But Homer didn't invent the stories — he adapted them for his poetry. The tales of Troy already existed, in overlapping and sometimes contradictory versions, oral poems and folk tales, myths and legends. At first, his interpretation would have just been one version of many. Gradually it became the preferred version, then the authoritative one. That was the power of his poetry.

'But the rest of the tradition survived too: Homer's poems wouldn't make sense if it didn't. There's a vast literature from other poets, authors and playwrights who took the Trojan war as their theme: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil — to say nothing of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Chaucer… The list is literally endless because it's still being written, more than two and a half thousand years after Homer first put pen to paper.'

'So what did happen to Achilles?'

'The tradition records that he was killed by Paris — possibly shot in the leg by an arrow — while fighting at the gates of Troy. According to a precis in the Odyssey, the Greeks then cremated him and buried his ashes in a golden urn, near the mouth of the Dardanelles.'

Grant looked up. 'Is that true? Is the tomb still there?'

'There are tumuli on the shores of the Bosphorus,' Marina answered. 'Archaeologists have excavated them, but never found anything significant. Certainly not a shield.'

'Besides,' Reed added, 'cremation was an Iron Age practice. The Mycenaeans at Troy would have buried their dead in tombs. It's an anachronism in the poem.'

Muir stood. 'An anachronism? It's all fucking anachronistic. We're trying to find something of vital national urgency, and all you can give me is hocus-pocus and a three-thousand-year-old ghost trail. It doesn't matter a damn if Achilles was shot in the heel or the head, if he was cremated or buried. He didn't fucking exist.'

'Someone existed.' Reed's voice was unyielding. 'He may not have been called Achilles, his heel probably wasn't any more vulnerable than the rest of him and I rather doubt his mother was a sea nymph — but someone existed. If the smiths on Lemnos forged that shield, someone took it. Someone extraordinary, worthy of such a priceless and holy piece of armour. Someone who would inspire stories and legends, however corrupted and confused they became. Someone whose life left an indelible mark on history.'

'History? I thought we were talking about literature. Myth.'

'A hundred years ago everyone thought the Trojan war was pure myth, total invention. Then Schliemann started digging. No trial and error, no years of searching. He went straight to Troy and stuck his spade in. Then he went to Mycenae, Agamemnon's capital, and did exactly the same thing.'

Grant stirred. 'How did he know where to go?'

'Everybody knew.' Reed had wandered into the centre of the chamber. Light from the gas flame seemed to wrap itself round him. 'That's what's so extraordinary. The knowledge was never lost. We still have guidebooks from two thousand years ago describing these places for classical tourists. What we lost was the belief — the faith that there was any truth in the stories. All Schliemann had to do was believe.'

Muir ground out his cigarette on the altar and tossed it into the fire pit. 'All right.' His voice was hard with mocking disbelief. 'So what do you want me to do? Go to Turkey and dig up every mound of earth to see if there's a shield inside?'

'There's no need for that.' Reed's voice was milder now. 'If the stories are true, the shield won't be there.'

'You said Achilles was buried at Troy.'

'He was. But his armour wasn't buried with him. It was too valuable. The Greeks held a contest to see who should inherit it and Odysseus won.'

'Jesus Christ — doesn't this end? What did he do with it?'

'No one knows. That's where the shield of Achilles drops out of legend completely. Odysseus doesn't, of course — his ten-year journey home to Ithaca is the subject of the Odyssey. But as far as I know, there's never any mention of Achilles' armour in the Odyssey except a brief allusion to Odysseus having won it. Now Odysseus was shipwrecked so many times on his voyage that it's inconceivable it made it home with him.'

Muir opened his ivory cigarette case; his fingers scrabbled inside, but it was empty. He looked up and his eyes met Reed's. 'Let's cut through all this crap and mumbo-jumbo. Do you have any idea where we can find this shield, or should I cable London and tell them the hunt's over?'

For a moment, Reed and Muir stared at each other. 'I don't know where the shield is.' The case snapped shut. Muir turned to leave. 'But I know where I'd start looking.'