Lost Temple

Four

Marina led him down to the ground floor, a barn-cum-storeroom under the main house. Well-oiled farm tools hung on the walls, while chaff and straw covered the floor. Kneeling down in the far corner, she brushed it away with her hands until she had exposed a square crack running round one of the flagstones. She took a crowbar from a peg on the wall and levered it in, slowly prising back the stone. Grant didn't offer to help; instead, he stood by the door and scanned the surrounding countryside. Something felt wrong, some intuition that he couldn't place. He could have dismissed the feeling — but he had learned from experience it rarely paid to ignore it.

Iron clattered on stone as Marina put down the pry bar. With one last look out through the door, Grant joined her and peered down into the hole she had opened. It sank about three feet into the ground, two feet square and lined with dusty planks. Inside he could see three bundles wrapped in goatskins leaning against the wall and a battered box of ammunition at the bottom. Marina lay down on her stomach, stretched in and pulled it out. The catches snapped; the lid squeaked and there it was. The cream pages had yellowed and gun oil stained the cover, but there was still enough gold on the monogram to read it: JMHP.

'Well hidden,' said Grant. 'How did you know it was so valuable?'

'There was a man here in forty-three, a Nazi named Belzig. You were on the mainland then. He was an archaeologist — but not like Pemberton. He was a pig. He forced people to work for him like slaves: many died. And he wanted the journal. I heard from my cousin that he ransacked the Villa Ariadne looking for Pemberton's journal. When he did not find it, he rounded up the staff who had worked there and did unspeakable things to them, trying to discover what happened to it.'

'What did he want with it?'

'I never met him to find out — I'd have killed him if I had.'

Grant stared at the book, his mind racing. What was in it that could be so important? He remembered seeing Pemberton die: an old man who had spent his life in the safety of the past, only to be overwhelmed by the violence of a new chapter in history writing itself. What had he discovered that could possibly have mattered in the last three thousand years?

'Did you ever read it?' he asked Marina.

'No.'

'But you worked with Pemberton. Weren't you curious?'

She twitched her head dismissively. 'The war came. I forgot that life. I forgot archaeology; I forgot Pemberton. If you hadn't come back, they'd probably have dug up the book in a thousand years and put it in a museum.' She glared at him. 'I wish you hadn't come back. Then I could have forgotten you also.'

'I'll be off then.' Grant stretched out his hand to take the book. Marina didn't move.

'What will you do with it?'

'Read it. See if…' He broke off as Marina burst into laughter. 'What?'

'Nothing.' Her voice was brisk, but the corner of her mouth twitched. 'Take it. Read it.' She tossed it to him across the barn. Grant caught it one-handed and flipped it open. He looked at the page, then turned through a few more with mounting frustration. 'It's all in Greek.'

'Ancient Greek. Even if you could read Greek as well as you read English, for you it would be like attempting to read Chaucer.'

'I never tried.'

She made a face that told him she wasn't surprised. 'Lots of the words would look the same, but some would not mean what you thought and some you would not recognise at all.'

'Christ. He didn't make it easy for us.'

'He always kept his notes in ancient Greek. He said it made him feel closer to the past.'

'Well, he's close to it now.' Grant wondered if, down the valley, the corpse still lay where he had buried it in the foundations of Knossos. 'How the hell am I supposed to read this?'

'Get a dictionary.' Her face was alight now with the uninhibited passion he remembered so well. 'A dictionary of archaeology, also. And a pile of history books. Even if you could read it, it would take you six months to understand what he was talking about.'

Grant looked down at the book. The neat rows of indecipherable letters seemed to swim in front of his eyes. Marina was taunting him, but she was taunting him with the truth. Of course he could just sell it — track down the bastard from SIS and strike a deal. But how could he get the right price if he didn't know what he was selling? More than that: he couldn't let go of the simple, stubborn desire to find out what someone didn't want him to know.

'I don't suppose…' He shot her a sideways glance. She was standing beside the hole, dust and straw clinging to her dress, her face glistening with sweat from the effort of pushing back the stone. Her lips were slightly parted in a triumphant smile and her dark eyes flashed the challenge. Her mind was already made up — but she would make him ask for it.

He cleared his throat. 'Will you help me work out what Pemberton was up to?'

They took the book inside the house and laid it on the table. Grant wanted to start at the end, reasoning that whatever Pemberton had discovered must have been not long before he died. But Marina insisted on opening the book at the first page and reading through, muttering the words under her breath. Grant lit a cigarette. A few goat bells clanked in the distance, and the leaves of the apricot trees rustled in the wind. In the village below, the locals would be closing their shutters for their afternoon siestas. Otherwise the only sound in the room was an occasional pop from the burning log and the crisp slice of pages being turned.

Grant stared out of the window. Away to his left, where the road to the coast snaked down the valley, a car was crawling up the hill. It disappeared behind a bend, reappeared and vanished again, flashing in and out of the sun like a mirror. Grant felt a familiar prickle in his gut.

'How much longer?' he asked, trying to be casual.

'For ever, if you keep interrupting.' Marina's face was set in a scowl of concentration. 'There's a lot of Linear B in here I can't understand. I think Pemberton was trying to decipher it.'

Grant didn't know what Linear B was, but just at that moment he wasn't interested. The car had disappeared into the village's tightly packed streets. Maybe it was just a local bigwig showing off his wealth, or an official from Heraklion come to impress the populace, he told himself.

'Do you get many motor cars around here?'

'Yorgos up the valley has a Ford.'

A few hundred yards away a black snout inched its way through the narrow lane, on to the track between the apple orchards.

Grant touched the Webley tucked into his waistband. 'Were there any bullets in that ammo box?'

'Just the book. I used the bullets on the Germans.' More curious than exasperated now, she looked up. 'Why?'

The car halted outside the front gate. The engine throbbed for a moment, then abruptly died away. Two men in dark hats and overcoats got out; one went round to the boot and pulled out a long, snub-nosed package wrapped in brown paper.

'Because we've got visitors.'

Grant squeezed through the small window at the back of the house and dropped to the ground. Round the corner he could hear the iron clop of hobnailed boots stamping up the path to the front door. Whoever they were, they weren't worried about being heard. Grant wasn't sure if that was good or not.

The footsteps stopped at the door and a fist thudded against it — the clumsy sound, Grant thought, of a heavy man trying to be casual. Another thud, and the tap-tap of the boots shifting impatiently.

'Maybe it's just the man from the Pru,' Grant whispered.

A sharp crack ripped through the garden, followed by the tearing of wood and a bang as the door flew in — probably under the impact of a hobnailed boot, Grant guessed. A few moments later came the rumble of furniture being overturned and the clatter of drawers being tipped out over the floor. Next to Grant, Marina's face was drawn in fury and he grabbed her arm, digging his nails into her wrist.

'Is there a window at the other end of the house?'

She shook her head.

'Good. Let's go.'

Shielded by the house, they ran across the broken ground, vaulted a tumbledown stone wall and slid into a shallow gully in the hillside. Loose stones and gravel crunched underfoot, but the men in the house were making a thorough business of tearing it apart, and their noise drowned out anything Grant and Marina did. He could hear angry shouts from inside, though muffled by the walls he couldn't make out the language. Was it English?

Lying on their bellies, they wriggled up the gully. When Grant judged they'd gone far enough he waved Marina to stop. The noon sun blazed down and his shirt was damp from the effort of crawling up the slope. Gripping the Webley, Grant inched himself up and peered over the lip of the gully.

The house had fallen silent. From where Grant lay, the front door and the car parked beyond were hidden, but through the living-room window, framed in the curtains, he could see a dark figure standing in the middle of the room. From the way he moved and gesticulated, Grant guessed some sort of discussion was under way. He turned to Marina. 'Still got the book?'

She half lifted it to show him. A few more grazes had scuffed the worn leather binding, but otherwise it was unharmed. 'Is that why they came?'

'I don't think it was for the pleasure of your conversation.'

'Who are they?'

Grant had a fair guess, but he hid it behind a bland shrug. 'No one we want to meet.'

He looked back down the hill. The dark figure had vanished. On the far side of the house an engine coughed into life and a few moments later he saw the car pull away down the road towards the village. It squeezed down the narrow lane between the houses and disappeared. Marina started to rise, but in an instant Grant's hand was on her wrist and dragging her back down, so quick she almost fell on top of him. She rolled away with a growl of fury — as she came back up, Grant saw that a small knife had appeared from nowhere in her hand.

'What are you doing?'

Her tumble had disarranged her dress, dragging down the neckline. She seemed not to notice.

'You can't go back there,' he said. Very deliberately, he let his gaze drift from the hovering knife to the exposed skin below her collarbone. A bud of white lace peeked out from under the black dress.

She tugged it back into position with a snort of disgust. 'Why not? First you come, when I never wanted to see you again, and an hour later there are two

malakies

tearing apart my house like animals. Am I supposed to think that's a coincidence?'

'Almost certainly not.'

'Then how in hell can you tell me what to do?'

'Because if you walk through that door, it'll be the last thing you ever do.' Grant pointed. Through the window they could see a mess of splintered wood, smashed china, broken photographs and scattered ornaments littering the floor. The barrel of the gun was almost invisible against the chaotic background. Even if you'd seen it, you might have mistaken it for just another piece of debris lying on the floor. Only when it twitched did some incongruity of light and shadow alert the eye.

Marina, who had spent long hours of reconnaissance looking for exactly those tell-tale signs, saw it at once. 'One of them stayed behind.' She lowered herself back into the gully. 'Do you think he saw us?'

'If he had, we'd know about it.'

'Then we can surprise him.' Her eyes gleamed with savage delight — the look he knew so well from the war. As the Germans had found to their cost, there was nothing the Cretans loved so much as a blood feud. 'You've got your gun. I'll distract him by the door and you can get him through the window.' Doubt flickered into her eyes as she saw Grant shaking his head. 'Why not?'

'Because every hour he sits there waiting is an hour we've got to get away.'

They walked for most of the day, towards the great massif of mountains that rose across the eastern horizon. Just before dusk they found an empty shepherd's hut in a high meadow, whose previous occupant had left wood, blankets and two tins of field rations, probably relics of the war. Grant built a fire and they huddled round it in their blankets. Down in the valleys it might be spring, but up on the mountain winter lingered. Patches of snow filled the hollows in the north-facing hillside and the summit still wore its white winter coat. A chill wind whistled around them and Grant pulled his blanket closer. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to wrap it round both of them, as they'd done so often on cold nights during the war, but he didn't try.

After they'd eaten, Marina took out the book. She held it up to the fire, letting the flames play over the pages. Grant fought back the fear that a stray ember could end their quest before it even began.

'Two months before the invasion, Pemberton went to Athens. I thought it was strange he went then — everybody knew the Germans were coming and he almost couldn't find space on the ferryboat with all the soldiers going to the front. But he said he had to go. When he came back, something was different. He didn't say, but I could see he had some new obsession. It was always the same, if he found a new site, or some artefact he couldn't place. The lights in the villa burned late, and he became distant and tense. Of course, everyone was tense in those last days, so we didn't notice so much. In April he disappeared for a week on his own. Afterwards I found out he had been on the east of the island, towards Siteia. He was looking for something.'

'Which is why you've brought us east?'

'Yes.' She stared at the book, her smooth face wrinkled in concentration. 'If he found something, he would have written it in here.' She combed her fingers through her loose hair. 'But I can't find it.'

Grant edged round to peer over her shoulder. Row upon row of neatly printed symbols swam in the firelight, as distant and unknowable as the men who had first devised them. The Greek letters he recognised — he could even make out some of the simpler words — but a large portion of the page seemed given over to characters he had never seen in his life. He reached forward, brushing Marina's shoulder, and pointed. 'What are they?'

'Linear B.'

He remembered she had mentioned it earlier, in her house, before the thugs showed up. 'What's that?'

'An alphabet. An ancient system of writing. It was discovered about fifty years ago at Knossos.'

'So it's Greek?'

She shook her head. 'Long before Greek. It comes…' She thought for a moment, playing with a strand of hair. 'You've heard of Theseus and the Minotaur?'

'The myth?'

She laughed. 'Where Pemberton worked — where I worked — is the place where history and myth meet each other like a river and a sea.' She dug her fingers into the earth and pried out a small rock. 'This stone is nothing.

But if I do this…' She laid it on the ring of stones that made the fireplace. 'Suddenly it has meaning. Somebody will find this in the future, maybe two thousand years from now, and even if they have never seen a fireplace or even imagined one, they will know that a human being made this thing for a reason. And they will try to guess what that reason was. Maybe they will find traces of ash in the middle of the circle and scorch marks on the stones; perhaps a rusted tin can and your cigarette butts. And they will deduce…'

'That we ate our supper here?'

'That this was the site of a primitive pillar cult, no doubt with phallic implications. That the stone circle was the foundation of a wooden column which we, in our primitive ignorance, worshipped. That we brought food offerings in metal containers and smoked this mildly psychotomimetic substance to induce a state of divine ecstasy. They will think that the ashes and the scorch marks come from a fire, possibly linked to invasion or war, when the sacred pillar was burned down. They will publish this in their learned journals and then they will argue as to whether the similar sites they find all across the island constituted an official religion, or simply parallel local traditions. And they will be completely wrong.'

She picked up the rock and tossed it away into the darkness. Grant waited, watching the firelight dance over her face. 'What's that got to do with the Minotaur?'

'Only to say that the myths survive when everything else has been forgotten. And that sometimes the myths, for all their slippery deceptions, tell us more about the past than ruined walls and broken pots. For three thousand years no one believed that there had ever been a great prehistoric civilisation on Crete — but in all that time they never forgot the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Even children knew it. Then, fifty years ago, Evans came here and went to the place the legends said. He found everything. A palace like a labyrinth. Drinking vessels shaped like bulls, figurines of bulls, stone horns — even paintings of young men performing acrobatics on bulls.'

'Not a human skeleton with a pair of bulls' horns sticking out of the skull and a ball of string next to it?'

'No.' She pulled her knees close to her chest. 'Of course, myth distorts the past. But here on Crete you had the very first civilisation in Europe — more than a thousand years before the golden age of Greece and fifteen hundred years before the Caesars — and for three millennia afterwards the only place it was recorded was in the myths. Without them the palace at Knossos would just be piles of stones. And when Evans finally brought it to light, he named its civilisation "Minoans" after the legendary King Minos.'

Her face shone in the golden firelight as if — like some ancient sibyl — she could see back through thirty centuries of history. She didn't even seem to notice Grant's frank gaze fixed on her until, with a discreet cough, he asked, 'What's this got to do with the writing in the journal?'

'The Minoans left more than just ruins and artefacts. They left us their writing. There were two forms — a primitive one, which Evans named Linear A, and a later development he named Linear B. Most of the examples were found scratched into clay tablets, which baked when the palace burned down.'

'And what do they say?'

'No one knows — no one's ever been able to decipher them. It's one of the greatest mysteries of archaeology.'

Grant looked back at the book. 'Did Pemberton ever try to crack it?'

'You couldn't work in this field and not try. To the archaeologists it was like a crossword or a riddle, something to puzzle over on winter evenings by the fire. As far as I know, Pemberton never made any breakthrough.'

'What about in the book?'

'No.' She turned through a few pages. 'It's too neat. He's copied some inscriptions, but there's no attempt to translate them.'

'What about that?' Grant stabbed a finger into the book and held down the page. Above a few lines of the angular Linear B script, the page was filled by a simple line drawing. It looked almost like something a child might have drawn: two triangles flanked a small spiked box, with two rows of jagged lines running below. At the top, in the centre of the page, some sort of stylised animal seemed to float above a rounded dome, with birds on either side.

'It must be Minoan,' murmured Marina. 'But I've never seen it before. It wasn't in the collection at Knossos.' She turned to the next page. It was empty, except for four lines of Greek. After that, the book was blank.

'What does the Greek say?' asked Grant.

Perhaps it was the smoke blowing from the fire, but Marina's voice was hoarse and tears rimmed her eyes. 'It's Homer. The Iliad.

Pemberton must have been reading it when the Nazis came. It was the last thing he ever wrote. Nothing to do with the picture.' She turned back to the previous page and stared hard at the sketch, as if by the effort she could burn away her tears. 'The iconography…' She took a deep breath. 'The iconography seems to date it as middle to late Minoan. The zigzag lines are probably purely decorative, though some might see them as denoting water. The animal at the top…' She squinted, holding the book out to the fire. 'Maybe a lion or a sphinx — either way, it would symbolise a protector or guardian. Possible royal connections as well. The birds are doves, which usually signifies place sanctity. In this case the identification is supported by the shrine in the centre of the image.'

'How do you know it's a shrine?'

'The bull horns on top. It's a standard depiction of a Minoan shrine. Like how a cross on top of a building tells you it's a church.'

Marina stared into the flames. Whether she was puzzling over the image or thinking of Pemberton, Grant didn't know, but he pulled the book away before she dropped it in the fire. He looked at the picture — then rested the book on his knee and forced the pages flat. The spine cracked in protest and Marina looked up.

'Be careful.'

'What does…' Grant licked his lips as he picked out the unfamiliar letters.

'Pha… raggi… ton… nekron mean?'

Pharangi ton nekron?

Where do you see that?'

Grant held it up to show her. On the inside of the page, almost buried in the crease of the binding, three Greek words were written vertically down the side of the picture. Marina snatched the book from him and stared.

Of course,' she murmured.

'Pharangi ton Nekron.'

'Who's he?'

'It's a place — a valley. On the east coast, near a village called Zakros. It means…' She thought for a second. 'It means the Valley of the Dead.'

'Sounds promising.'