The Mask of Troy

Epilogue

James Dillen got out of the taxi, paid the driver and watched the battered old car reverse and speed back the way it had come, belching exhaust into the narrow lane. He waited until the noise had gone, then turned, pulling up the collar of his coat, tucking the folder he was carrying under his arm and shoving his hands into his pockets. It felt cold, like the cold he had felt that morning five months ago when he and Rebecca had gone to visit Hugh in Bristol, only this time it was not tiredness that made him shiver, but the real bitterness of an early November morning, cold enough for snow.

He smeared his foot over the light hoar frost that covered the lane. The air itself seemed to have frozen, reducing visibility to a few hundred yards. He took a deep breath, feeling the sharpness in his lungs, and then exhaled forcibly. He smelled burning, the lingering fumes of car exhaust. He reached out and put his hand on one of the trees that lined the lane, wanting to feel what life felt like in this place. Place of the beeches, they had called it. Birkenau. The bark felt tough and carapaced, yet also strangely yielding and soft. He leaned over, and smelled a mossy smell. Close up, he saw the colours of vegetation beneath the frost, deep browns, dark greens. He watched a leaf detach itself from a branch and fall, spinning slowly down, brushing his leg and coming to rest in the wetness where his foot had smeared the frost. He watched it settle, absorb the moisture, lose its colour, suddenly flat and immaterial.

He straightened up, discomfited. He had expected to be overwhelmed by this place, not absorbed in detail. Perhaps it was the detail that gave definition to the enormity that lay just beyond, in the mist. He looked through the trees and spotted the disused railway track, bisected by the path to the house. He left the lane and walked towards the track, then knelt alongside it, listening. There would always be trains running along this track, lines of boxcars, frozen in time. He wondered if those trees had been saplings back then, whether they held some imprint of what had passed this way: crammed-together faces in boxcar doors of trucks, anxious mothers and exhausted children, moments of sudden fear. He looked up to where he knew the railway line was heading. The track cut across the image like a great tear through a canvas, and for a moment he felt as if he were a crouched figure in a painting, anonymous, insignificant. He stood up. He had come here to see Hugh, and the girl. And he had come to tell the others the final reckoning on Troy, the words of the ancient poet that he and Hugh had so painstakingly translated in the weeks since Rebecca had been freed and the excavation had ended.

‘James!’ He looked over to the house, startled. A figure was hurrying towards him, wearing snow boots, a grey school greatcoat, a multicoloured scarf and an orange hat, her long dark hair streaming behind her. She was rubbing her hands together, and gave him a quick hug when she reached him. ‘Come on inside. You must be freezing.’

‘Is Hugh here yet?’

‘Dad and I flew in with him to Warsaw yesterday.’ Rebecca blew on her hands again. ‘We’ve only been here about an hour. The couple who run this place are really nice. Hugh’s not very well, you know. It was a bit of a shock seeing him away from his room. He’s pretty frail.’

‘I know.’ Dillen paused. ‘But before we go in. How did you work out that this was the place?’

Rebecca shoved her hands in her pockets. ‘After we came back from Troy, Dad decided to see if we could find out what happened to her. To the girl with the harp. He’s been really preoccupied with that awful bunker, did you know?’

‘I know that NATO has agreed to an excavation, and meanwhile the airbase is on complete lockdown. I know there’s great excitement about the works of art and antiquities that might be there, but huge trepidation about what else they might find. It’s going to be the big story next year.’

‘And Saumerre,’ Rebecca said grimly. ‘When Dad had his little chat with him, the arrangement was that Saumerre keeps away from us, and we won’t expose him. Dad said he only spoke to him about underworld dealings, his family business, and in no way hinted that we suspected any fundamentalist terrorist connection. The media already knows about Saumerre’s family background, and if any of this stuff about stolen art and antiquities and the odd murder and kidnapping leaked out, then he could try to shrug it off as a media fantasy, meanwhile doubly securing himself against any personal implication. But if the idea of a fundamentalist backdrop leaks out, that’s another story.’

‘That’s why Raitz’s trial is so important.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘Dad’s hoping it can be stalled at least until the bunker excavation is finished. He thinks Raitz is a weakling and will spill the beans about Saumerre in his trial, even after what Dad said to him. If that happens, then Saumerre will disappear and become another Osama bin Laden. The security services don’t want that. He has to be kept in play as long as possible, until his organization can be infiltrated. But Dad’s worried that even before his trial, Raitz will break and try to plea-bargain. He’s got influential friends in London, lawyers, politicians, who will be encouraging him to do this, and meanwhile painting his detention as a human rights issue. That’s why the Turks are going to want to hold the trial pretty soon. They’re only putting it off because of all the strings we’ve pulled. The security services know what’s going on and why, but as far as public perception goes, it looks bad. Eminent architectural historian held for months without trial by the Turkish military for trespassing on an archaeological site. That’s what it looks like.’

‘Sounds almost as if a stray round should have got Raitz during your little showdown.’

‘Dad says keeping him alive was essential to the game that’s being played now, as Raitz is basically taking the fall for what’s happened. But it’s a pressure cooker and it’s going to blow. Realizing that was what made Dad push for the bunker excavation. If we can find and secure whatever’s in there, then at least that’s one ingredient out of the equation.’

‘Has Jack told Hugh about the excavation?’

‘He’s really torn about whether to tell him – because of Peter, how he might have died, that his body might still be in there. Anyway, Dad really wanted us to do this search for the girl. He said he’d spoken to you about it, and you’d decided we should do it straight-away, for Hugh’s sake. So we started off at the Imperial War Museum in London, where the Belsen material is archived. Eventually we found reference to a satellite camp. Some sign-off forms for supplies by a doctor who’d gone straight out there from medical school at Guy’s Hospital, and a tally form of new arrivals at the hospital the Red Cross set up at Belsen. The date was right. First of all we tried to find the doctor, but after the war he didn’t return to finish his degree and there was no record of him. Then came the real scoop. A few years ago, one of the Red Cross nurses at Belsen recorded her experiences for an audio presentation at the museum, and we found her. She remembered another nurse, a friend of hers, who’d spent her first day out there at this other camp, the satellite camp. Next stop for us, Australia.’

‘ Australia.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘The two women had kept up a correspondence. We found her in a nursing home in Brisbane. A lovely lady, Helen, very no-nonsense. But she wept so much when we spoke. It was like Hugh. It was the first time she’d really talked to anyone about it. She’d been in charge of the children at that camp. She remembered the girl with the harp, and the drawing. She was the one who gave it to Hugh when the SAS patrol came into the camp.’

‘So she knew what had happened to the girl?’

Rebecca paused, staring at the railway line. ‘Apparently the girl never spoke, but others who’d been at Auschwitz told the nurse the story. The girl and her parents were brought to the new Auschwitz camp at Birkenau in a cattle car in 1942, along this very line.’ She faltered, and shivered. ‘Her parents were immediately gassed, but she survived because they told the SS at the railhead that she was a talented musician. The SS put her in the camp orchestra, which played jazz and dance songs to the arriving Jews. Then they took her to the brothel. In early 1945 she was put on the march west, ending up in the camp near Belsen. Shortly before liberation, the SS camp leader, a woman, found out what the girl had been at Auschwitz and paraded her in front of the others, like an animal. Apparently, she screamed at the girl, I will personally see that you suffer. Ich werde personlich dafur sorgen, dass Sie leiden. Helen said she always remembered being told that. It was only a few days before the liberation, and the SS knew the writing was on the wall, yet that woman could still be so cruel. Helen was told that they dragged the girl off into the forest, where she was raped by the guards in that bunker. She was left for dead but escaped into the forest, then went back into the camp when she saw the SAS patrol arrive. She was seventeen years old at liberation.’

‘Have you told any of this to Hugh?’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Dad said Hugh would have a good enough idea. And we didn’t want to upset him.’

‘So the nurse in Australia, Helen, sent you here?’

Rebecca nodded. ‘She’d worked here herself, in the 1950s. This is the last of these special houses, within sight of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. It’s a closely guarded secret. There are benefactors, Jewish organizations, others. They still call them the children, even seventy years on. They’re the ones who could never be rehabilitated. It’s as if their lives ended that moment on the railhead, and the only chance of happiness is to bring them back here, because this was the last place before the train drew up at that ramp.’

‘Hugh said that, when he showed us the drawing in Bristol. He’d spoken to the nurse.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘She remembered him. That’s why she agreed to tell us about this place. At first she wouldn’t, but then Dad went back to her alone, flew all the way to Australia to talk to her again. She said it was for Hugh.’

‘Okay. Let’s go inside,’ Dillen said.

Rebecca mounted the steps, then turned and held Dillen’s arm. ‘You said you knew? When I told you I thought Hugh wasn’t well.’

Dillen paused for a moment, then looked at her. He took her hand in his, and held it. ‘The day after we visited Hugh, just before you were kidnapped, when I went back to Bristol to set him up with the translation, I went with him to the hospital. He wanted me to know. He’d known for some time.’

Rebecca was crying. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I thought there was something wrong when Dad and I picked him up. I just knew it. So Dad knew, too?’

‘He didn’t want to upset you. He thinks you’ve had enough already.’

Rebecca took off her glove and wiped her eyes. ‘So that’s what he went back to tell Helen in Australia. That Hugh was dying.’

‘We don’t know that. For sure.’

‘He’s ninety-three.’

‘Come on.’ Dillen took Rebecca in his arms, and gave her a hug. ‘Chin up, as Hugh used to say.’

Rebecca sniffed, nodded and opened the screen door and then the heavier wooden door behind. It was very warm, and Dillen quickly shut the door behind him. His glasses steamed up and he took them off to wipe them. There was a fire in the room to the right, a warm orange glow, and at the end of the stone-flagged floor ahead he could see a kitchen with someone moving around, a kettle on the boil. Rebecca gestured to a doorway to the left. ‘Keep your jacket on,’ she said. Dillen followed her into a dining room with a partition wall and an open veranda. On the patio beyond he could see several rocking chairs facing a garden, partly obscured in the mist.

Jack was there, standing quietly at the entrance to the veranda, arms folded, looking out. He turned as he heard them, then put his finger to his lips and beckoned them over. Rebecca let Dillen go first. He nodded at Jack, and then peered round the open door on to the patio. Hugh was sitting outside in a wicker chair, swathed in a blanket, facing away from them. His thick white hair was carefully combed back. Dillen looked beyond, where Hugh was facing. The garden was long, narrow, shrouded in mist, enclosed on either side by high hedgerows. It was facing in the same direction as the railway line, which was visible through a break in the hedge to the left.

Dillen peered down the garden, straining his eyes for what he knew must be there.

Then he saw her.

She was sitting like Hugh with her back to them, bundled up in a thick coat and scarf. He could tell it was a woman, from her shape, from the long hair that tumbled down her back beneath her scarf, wavy and thick. It was white, but it could have been fair. He knew it was an old woman, but it could have been a girl. The image came in and out of view in the mist, sometimes sharply delineated, sometimes barely visible. Suddenly he saw her very clearly. She was sitting behind a musical instrument, large, unmistakable.

The girl with the harp.

Dillen couldn’t see Hugh’s face, or hers. He remembered his vision at the railway line, the image of himself crouched beside it. Here, it was two figures, but the image was the same, torn through by the line of the hedgerow, with the railway track beyond. He shivered, and took a step back. His breath crystallized, but he saw barely any breath in front of Hugh. He looked at Hugh’s hands. They were white-knuckled, clutching at the arms of the chair, trembling.

There was a whinny and a stomp, and a white horse appeared, its head peering over the hedge, shaking its long mane, and then it snorted and cantered off out of sight. It had been the only sound he had heard outside, and it was startling. Jack put his hand on Dillen’s shoulder, and then reached over and pulled the door to, leaving it slightly ajar. There was a sound of tinkling, and Dillen turned to see a woman place a tray of drinks and biscuits on the table. She was small, elderly, and was followed by a man of similar appearance. Dillen stepped forward and shook hands with them. The woman spoke English with an east European accent. ‘Welcome to our home. Can I offer you tea? Coffee?’

‘Thank you. Tea, please.’ Dillen gestured to the patio. ‘What about Hugh?’

‘He’s already had his hot chocolate,’ Rebecca said, smiling sadly. ‘Said it was the best he’d had since the war.’

‘Did you tell him that she was here?’

‘You can’t keep anything from Hugh,’ Jack said quietly, smiling. ‘Former intelligence officer, you know. Had to have the full operational briefing before we flew out. But it’s been a very big thing for him. He’s been like that since we sat him out there half an hour ago.’

‘And the… girl?’ Dillen said. ‘How long has she been there?’

‘Every day,’ the Polish man said. ‘Every day, for as long as we have cared for her. She is the last of the children. Now that winter is drawing in, we’ll bring her back in before too long. She has a hot-water bottle. She’s warm.’

‘Does she ever play?’ Dillen asked. ‘I mean, the harp?’

‘We think she plays for her parents, in her mind, all the time. We think they loved to hear her play. We never hear it, but sometimes when you get close you can hear her humming quietly to herself, and you can see her fingers playing, nearly touching the strings. Children’s songs, learning songs. The horse can hear it too, we’re sure. It’s got a beautiful mane, don’t you think? It rises in the wind like the waves on the sea. We think she must have had a horse as a child. That horse is descended from the white horse that the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, liked to ride, when he played with his own children by the river here.’

‘How…’ Rebecca said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘How could he do that?’

The woman shook her head, and continued organizing the tray. Dillen thought of what Rebecca had just said. Apollodorus of Rhodes knew it. There is no mighty bulwark against evil war. Once total war was unleashed, once Troy had fallen, it was there always, tempting, beckoning. All that was left to hold it back was the will of the individual. And maybe Schliemann had known. It may have been his fervent hope. Individuals have the power to shape history.

Dillen opened his folder and took out a few sheets of paper. ‘I’ve brought the Ilioupersis, the fall of Troy. It’s a hundred and twenty-six lines, the entire text that Jeremy and Maria found in the lost library at Herculaneum,’ he said. ‘I want to read it to you.’

‘Have you kept the Greek metre?’ Jack asked.

Dillen shook his head. ‘It wasn’t written that way. It retains some of the imagery, the familiar epithets of the Iliad, but it’s in a kind of free verse. Hugh and I found it disconcerting, at first. How could this be Homer, if it wasn’t written in his famous iambic pentameter? But then we realized why. The pentameter of the Iliad was suited to the heroic cycle, to the story of men powerless to shape their fate, acting on a stage created by the gods, relentless, repetitive. And it was suited to memorization, to the beat of the bard, to the accompaniment of the lyre. But the Ilioupersis is different. The heroes are all dead. The gods are gone. Man is ascendant.’

‘You mean the course of the story is no longer predictable, no longer familiar to the audience, time-honoured,’ Jack murmured.

Dillen nodded. ‘In the Ilioupersis, the poet describes what he sees, not a cycle according to some bardic formula. The Ilioupersis is shorn of ornament. For Homer, finishing the story of Troy that way, showing what he actually saw, was his poetic responsibility, just as it was three thousand years later for the poets of the First World War, for Graves and Sassoon and Owen and the others. The bardic tradition of the Iliad was for fireside stories of heroes, of clashes and contest, of strutting and shouting. Maybe Homer was afraid of this final truth he had written in the Ilioupersis, and put it away. Maybe his world crumbled around him as he watched and wrote, and the text was lost in the darkness at the end of the age of heroes.’

There was a low rushing sound outside, something flying overhead out of sight in the mist, the beating of wings. Jack peered out. ‘We heard that before you came, and I asked our host. It’s migrating birds, flying south from the Baltic towards Africa. Blackbirds, ravens, geese. It’s a strange coincidence, but from here they fly south-east to Gallipoli, over the Dardanelles and into Asia. In a day or two’s time, those birds will fly over Troy.’

Dillen listened, but they had gone. It was as if the birds were following a fault line, not a geographical fault but a rent in the fabric of civilization, between places that had become a terrifying crucible of death. He wondered whether Schliemann had looked up at Troy and seen those birds too, black ravens flying south, whether they had somehow brought to him a vision from the future, something so terrible it drove him to try to alter the course of history.

‘So,’ Rebecca said, cocking an eye at Dillen. ‘You said Homer actually watched the fall of Troy. Do you really think the Ilioupersis is an eyewitness account?’

‘The evidence is all there, in the radiocarbon analysis of the papyrus, the textual analysis, the early form of the alphabet. If Troy fell in 1200 BC, this couldn’t be much later than that.’

‘You’re not really answering my question.’

‘Tell me what you think after I’ve read it out. It’s for you to judge.’

‘Archaeology can’t tell the whole story of Troy, can it?’

Jack smiled. ‘The pottery only sings if you know how to make it sing.’

‘The immortal bard,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘That’s what Alexander Pope called Homer.’ She reached into her pocket and took out the copy of Pope’s Iliad that Dillen had given her. She opened it, and Dillen saw the inscription. To Hugh, with love and affection from Peter. Remembering our summer at Mycenae, 1938. Rebecca looked towards Hugh, then suddenly cocked her head, listening. ‘I think I can hear music. From the garden.’ She listened again. ‘ The harp.’ Dillen craned his neck. All he could hear was an echo of beating wings. ‘Don’t go to Hugh yet,’ she said. ‘In case he can hear it too.’

‘What music is it?’ Jack said.

Rebecca turned to him, her face flushed. ‘I thought I heard James play it, on his lyre at Troy.’ She turned to Dillen. ‘It was that last evening, when you went back up to your trench and thought nobody else was listening. I was on the path in Schliemann’s trench, coming up to see you. It was a children’s song. It was beautiful.’

‘We should get cracking with the text,’ Jack said. ‘And Hugh shouldn’t be out there much longer.’

Dillen smiled at Rebecca, then stepped forward to the doorway. Hugh was motionless, facing ahead. Dillen looked for the girl with the harp, barely seeing her through a shroud of mist, in utter stillness. It was as if they all were caught in the moment the girl was in. Then he saw flakes of snow falling, like ash. He remembered what else he had brought with him, and reached into his pocket, taking out the piece of pottery, black, crude, like a charred fragment, that he had taken from the ancient pyre in his excavation trench at Troy. He glanced at Jack. The pottery will sing. He put it to his nose and inhaled deeply, smelling the fires of Troy. In his mind’s eye he saw another figure, sitting with a lyre on a rocky ridge above the battleground, watching the war-bent men of Mycenae surge forward, feeling the ground shake as the sceptre of their mighty king came crashing down. Homer. Agamemnon.

He saw Hugh slowly raise his right forearm, extend his finger like a pistol, and point it forward. Dillen knew that gesture, from the classroom all those years before. It meant go for it. He took a deep breath, then listened through the stillness, straining to hear the music that Rebecca had heard.

He looked down at the lines of ancient verse. It was all true. Homer had been there, had watched the fall of Troy. In the tenth year Agamemnon had stormed and raged, had crashed down his mighty sceptre, and his men had rained down a new horror, arrows of iron. The Trojan Horse had been a ship driven by the howling blackness of the sea against the walls of Troy, to disgorge Agamemnon’s iron-girt warriors to do their worst. And Helen of Troy was no woman, but a flaming pyre, a beacon that lit up the night sky, a fire that he himself had touched, had smelled.

Like the Turkish boy who had watched Schliemann and Sophia almost three thousand years later, Homer had watched Agamemnon steal down a passageway under Troy, had seen him shut for ever the great bronze doors of a chamber where once kings had met to keep hateful war at bay, to keep down the beast inside the man that was now unleashed in Agamemnon himself, tempted by new and yet more deadly weapons.

The age of bronze had become the age of iron. The age of heroes had become the age of men.

Dillen lifted the paper and began to read.

Author’s Note

I first visited Troy as an archaeology student in 1984, when the custodian allowed me to sleep under the eaves of the old excavation house next to the site. That night I wandered alone among the ruins, and knelt at the spot where Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the fabulous ‘Treasure of Priam’ in 1873. When I was there it had been almost half a century since the last excavations, and to visit Troy was to enter the world of Schliemann, to see the site as I imagined he had seen it for the last time in 1890 shortly before his death. I felt the same when I visited the site again while writing this novel, to view the results of renewed excavations: Schliemann’s personality remains embedded in Troy like another layer in the archaeology. Without Schliemann, there might have been no ‘Troy’ in the popular imagination; it was his unique vision, his belief in the truth of the Trojan War and in Homer, that gives the ruins such power today.

Schliemann again followed ancient sources when he went to Greece to excavate the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, stronghold of Agamemnon in Homer’s Iliad. The second century AD travel writer Pausanias wrote that Agamemnon had been buried inside the walls, and just within the massive stone ramparts Schliemann found the famous ‘grave circle’ with its shaft graves, containing a treasure that exceeded even his finds at Troy. Unlike the ‘Treasure of Priam’, which proved to be from the third millennium BC, centuries older than the likely date of the Trojan War – about 1200 BC – there was little doubt in Schliemann’s mind that the treasures from the Shaft Graves were Late Bronze Age, dating to the likely time of Agamemnon.

The excavations in 1876 were supervised on behalf of the Greek Government by Panagiotis Stamatakis, who was in frequent conflict with Schliemann over his methods. Schliemann’s book Mycenae (1878) conveys his excitement: he found a rock-cut grave, the first ‘sepulchre’, but was forced by heavy rain to abandon it without – he claims – reaching the burials, only returning to it several weeks later after having uncovered other shaft graves and a huge wealth of gold, confirming that he had indeed found the tombs of royalty. In late November he reached the bottom of the first grave and found the famous ‘Mask of Agamemnon’, lifting it and claiming to see a skull which crumbled away on exposure to air. In the same shaft were two other bodies, one bizarrely deformed. Schliemann telegrammed the King of Greece to announce the discovery, later rendered in perhaps the most thrilling catch-phrase in the annals of archaeology: ‘today I gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.’

Whether or not Schliemann dug secretly at Mycenae is unknown. The fictional account in the Prologue draws inspiration from Schliemann’s own account of excavating the Treasure of Priam at Troy three years earlier, when he claimed he saw gold, dismissed the workers and dug out the treasure himself, his wife Sophia by his side (Troy and its Remains, 1875). Schliemann felt compelled to defend himself against claims that he made a ‘traffic’ of treasures (Mycenae, p. 66). There is little doubt that he embellished aspects of his accounts, and that his excavation techniques sometimes did not meet the standards of the time. Schliemann’s own story mirrors the uncertainties and fascination of Troy itself. Like the flawed ancient heroes he worshipped, like Agamemnon himself, Schliemann is best seen as he saw those heroes, as a character shrouded in myth but bedded in a brilliant reality, one that shines through from those extraordinary days of discovery in the 1870s when his vision entranced the world.

The present-day excavations at Troy in this novel are fictitious and unrelated to the renewed programme of investigations carried out at Troy since the 1980s. Those investigations have shed remarkable new light on Troy and its environs, and suggest how much remains to be discovered. The Bronze Age beachline in the Plain of Troy has been conjectured, as well as the likely location of the harbour for sailing ships at Besik Bay, on the Aegean coast opposite the island of Tenedos (Bozcaade). The overlapping shipwrecks in this novel are fictional, but are based on my experiences diving on shipwrecks in the Aegean ranging in date from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. The shell-first construction technique of the galley is seen in a late Bronze Age merchantman excavated off south-west Turkey, and in Egyptian boats. The 1915 wreck is based on the famous Turkish minelayer Nusret, a full-scale replica of which can be seen at the Canakkale naval museum. Unexploded mines and other ordnance from the 1915 Gallipoli campaign still litter the sea bed in the Dardanelles and have frequently been destroyed by Turkish navy disposal teams.

At Troy, I have imagined the fictional house excavation taking place close to the northern wall of the late Bronze Age citadel where structures may remain buried. The features of the house are based on other late Bronze Age buildings at Troy, including the sloping walls. Photographs of these structures can be seen on my website www.davidgibbins.com. The remains of the beacon pyre are fictional, though there is much destruction debris and evidence of burning. The wall-painting of the lyre-player is inspired by an actual fresco of a lyre-player found at the Mycenaean palace of Pylos in Greece, though without an inscription; as yet no inscription has been found to suggest a date for Homer as early as the late Bronze Age.

The passageway and chamber beneath Troy in this novel are also fictional. However, an extraordinary discovery in the 1990s was a water chamber and a complex of tunnels, totalling about 160 metres in length, beyond the south-western edge of the citadel. The idea of a large round chamber derives from the ‘beehive’ or ‘tholos’ tombs of the Aegean Bronze Age, the most spectacular of which is the structure at Mycenae that Schliemann dubbed the ‘Treasury of Atreus’. My idea that structures such as these may have been used as arsenals is consistent with the highly centralized control over bronze-working evidenced in the Mycenaean Linear B archives, and the known example of a strongroom used to store ingots in the Minoan Palace of Zakros on Crete.

Bronze arrowheads have been found at Troy, and the Mycenaean arrowheads described in chapter 3 can be seen in the British Museum. Iron-making spread across Anatolia and the Aegean in the final quarter of the second millenium BC, first producing high-status blades and eventually spearheads and arrowheads. The spread has been thought of as a slow process because of the expertise needed, but a perspicacious ruler could have seen the potential and seized on the technology to gain ascendancy in a long-standing conflict, potentially tipping the balance in a siege such as that described by Homer at Troy.

The story of the Trojan Horse does not appear in the Iliad, and is only mentioned three times in the Odyssey, in such a way that the reader was clearly expected to be familiar with it. The story that has come down to us is traditionally ascribed to the Ilioupersis – the ‘Fall of Troy’ – by Arctinus, thought by some to have been a pupil of Homer. Only a few lines of that Ilioupersis survive among the so-called ‘Trojan cycle’ of epic fragments, though it is possible that the Roman poet Virgil had access to more when he created Book 2 of the Aeneid – the account of the Fall of Troy that is the main basis for the story of the Trojan Horse in modern imagination, despite being written over a thousand years after the events it purports to describe. The fictional Ilioupersis in this novel fills the gap in Homer’s work; the fictional context of its discovery, a buried library at Herculaneum, forms part of my novel The Last Gospel. The idea that the horse should be understood less literally intrigued Homeric scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the possibility that it was a siege-tower or a ship, or an allegorical manifestation of Poseidon, horse-god as well as god of earthquakes and the sea; as we understand better the natural cataclysm that may have accompanied the Fall of Troy, these ideas may acquire renewed currency.

In ancient tradition the Trojan palladion (Latin palladium) was a small wooden statue of the god Pallas, equated by the Greeks with the goddess Athene. It was supposedly rescued from Troy and kept in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, and then removed to Constantinople by the emperor Constantine the Great and buried under his column there. The story is full of uncertainty; some in antiquity believed the palladion remained concealed at Troy and was only discovered there in the first century BC (Appian, Mithridates 53, following Servius). The idea that there were two palladions, a ‘public’ palladion and something hidden, derives from an account by Dionysius of Halicarnassos, writing in the first century BC: ‘Arctinus says that a single palladion was given by Zeus to Dardanos, and that this remained in Ilion (Troy) while the city was being taken, concealed in an inner sanctum; an exact replica had been made of it and placed in a public area to deceive any who had designs on it, and it was this that the Achaeans (Greeks) schemed against and took’ (Roman Antiquities 1.69.3, trans M.L. West in Greek Epic Fragments, Harvard University Press 2003, 151). The tradition that Dardanos – the legendary founder of Troy – received the palladion from Zeus, that it had thus ‘fallen from heaven’, has led to the fascinating theory that the original palladion was meteoritic, consistent with the veneration of meteorites by other early cultures.

The shape that such an object could have taken, worked perhaps by early metallurgists into a powerful symbol, is a matter for conjecture. At Troy, Schliemann discovered many pottery items decorated with incised swastikas, a symbol well-known from India where it was seen as auspicious or generative – the Sanskrit word swastika means ‘to be well’. The Troy finds were among the earliest swastikas known, and fuelled an association between these symbols and the theory of an ‘Aryan’ race which came to obsess German nationalists. On the Trojan pottery, both the right-facing swastika and the left-facing version – known in Sanskrit as the sauwastika – are seen, with neither clearly more prevalent. However, the most extraordinary find of a swastika from Troy, incised on the vulva of a female idol, is left-facing, and left-facing swastikas can be seen on the wrought-iron gates of Schliemann’s house in Athens, among other emblems derived from Troy. And Schliemann did not only find them at Troy: digging into the first sepulchre at Mycenae, in the same grave where he was to find the Mask of Agamemnon, he discovered several small golden disks decorated with the reverse swastika – just as he had seen on pottery at Troy (Mycenae, p. 152). The swastika is visible in reverse through Nazi flags, but it was the right-facing version that had become the symbol of Nazi Germany by the early 1930s.

The Nazi camp in this novel is fictional, as are all the characters portrayed therein. However, the details are based closely on descriptions and photographs of the much larger camp at Bergen-Belsen in the immediate aftermath of its liberation by British troops on 15 April 1945. I have not intentionally used the words of eyewitnesses, though I have tried to convey the language of British soldiers and medical staff at the time. Of huge importance has been the Imperial War Museum, London, for its archive of Belsen and other Holocaust material, and for publications that continue to provide insights, for example into the emergency medical provisions in the first days after liberation and the special care of children. The fictional experiences of the ‘girl with the harp’ draw on actual accounts, including selection at Auschwitz to join the camp orchestra. The archives allow one to move from the sheer enormity of the holocaust to the individual, not only the survivors and liberators but also the perpetrators. Among the shocking revelations in 1945 at Belsen was the role of the female SS auxiliaries. Numbers of SS guards were shot by a British SAS patrol that entered Belsen shortly before liberation, and in the days that followed British troops killed others who tried to escape. Three of the female guards as well as the camp commandant and six others were sentenced to death at the Belsen trial and hanged on 13 December 1945.

The camp at Belsen was liberated by elements of the British 11th Armoured Division, VIII Corps, 2nd Army, who with Canadian 1st Army formed the left hook of the Allied advance into Germany. In February 1945 the British and Canadians fought their last major battle in and around the Reichswald forest, experiencing conditions comparable to the American battles in the Hurtgen Forest over the previous months. The casualty toll of these battles is the backdrop to the insistence in my novel that a battle be avoided in the fictional forest beside the camp, at all costs. Even in April 1945 there were pockets of German resistance that were able to stall the Allied advance for days, not only remnant Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht but also fresh units such as the 2nd Marine-Infanterie-Division (remustered Kriegsmarine sailors) as well as Hitler-Jugende and the Volkssturm, the boys and old men who were Hitler’s last reserve. German officers interviewed after the war were derisive of the slow pace of the Allied advance along a wide front, and felt the war could have been won months earlier using spearhead ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics similar to those the Germans had used in 1940. There is little doubt that one factor behind Allied decision-making was the need to discover Nazi scientific secrets and technology before it was destroyed, or used against them. The activities of covert units such as 30AU – 30 Commando Assault (later ‘Advance’) Unit, the brainchild of Commander Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels – are still shrouded in secrecy, and there can be no certainty how successful the Allies were in revealing the Nazis’ most deadly secrets, particularly biological and chemical weapons.

Among these units the ‘Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives’ men have been the subject of much interest, not least because their work highlights treasures stolen by the Nazis that remain missing. Among the most extraordinary discoveries in 1945 were caches of art treasures stored in salt mines at Merkers in Germany and Altaussee in Austria, the latter rigged by the local Nazi Gauleiter with 500 kilogram bombs – a particularly fanatical interpretation of Hitler’s so-called ‘Nero Decree’, the order for the destruction of the infrastructure of the Reich. These discoveries inspired my idea that the famous Wieliczka salt mine in Poland could have been used for similar purposes, especially as it is known that one of the deep chambers was converted by the Nazis to an aircraft engine assembly facility employing slave labour. The underwater tunnels beyond the accessible mine in this novel are fictitious, but based on my own experiences diving in submerged mineshafts.

One of the greatest lost masterpieces remains Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, stolen by the Nazis from the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow. Schliemann’s ‘Treasure of Priam’, given by him to the Imperial Museum, Berlin, was stored during the war in the Zoo Flakturm, a vast concrete bunker built on the site of Berlin Zoo. The treasure disappeared in 1945 and was thought lost, but re-emerged in 1993 in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The possibility remains that other artefacts may have been secretly despatched by Schliemann for safekeeping in Germany or elsewhere, and that these may one day be discovered along with other treasures stolen by the Nazis.

An inspiration for the fictional meeting of the three statesmen in 1890 at Troy was my acquisition of a copy of Schliemann’s book Mycenae originally from the library of Senator George Frisbie Hoar (1826-1904), one of the great American politicians and men of letters of the nineteenth century, as well as an ardent antiquarian. In his autobiography Hoar describes visiting England and the House of Commons, where he admired the oratory of the Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). Friendship with Gladstone was a factor in Schliemann’s fame; Gladstone arranged for Schliemann to speak at the Society of Antiquaries in London, and wrote the long preface to his book Mycenae. As well as his literary passion for Homer, Gladstone had a particular fascination with early metallurgy and discoursed with Schliemann on the subject. He was solicitous of Schliemann’s health, and Schliemann himself finally seemed to acknowledge his own mortality in his final letter to another supporter, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Bismarck had united Germany but would have been concerned at the new significance of the swastika, and the dark forces of nationalism it was beginning to represent; his famous premonition that the next European war would be sparked by an incident in the Balkans proved horrifyingly correct. These were men who saw archaeology through the prism of the nineteenth-century ‘march of progress’, for whom learning from the past was more than just a cliche. I have imagined them fearful of the future, but sharing with Schliemann a self-confidence and idealism that could have allowed them to stand together one night and imagine how they might prevent a repeat of ‘the first hideous crime of civilized man’, the fall of Troy.

The quote at the beginning of the book is based on a clay tablet (RS 34.165) found at Ugarit in Syria, detailing the leadup to a battle between the Hittites and the Assyrians in the late thirteenth century BC; the lower quote is from Alexander Pope’s The Iliad of Homer (London, 1806). The poems by W.H. Auden mentioned in the novel are in The Shield of Achilles (London, Faber amp; Faber, 1955). In chapter 18, George Hoar’s declamation on war foreshadows his speech in the US Senate in 1902, arguing against war in the Philippines (Jennings, B.W. and Halsey, F.W., eds, The World’s Famous Orations. America III (1861-1905), New York, 1906). The cover illustration is based on the Mask of Agamemnon from Mycenae, now on display in the National Archaeological Museum at Athens. The illustrations in the text are a fourth century BC silver coin of the Greek island of Ios, legendary birthplace of Homer, showing the poet and the Greek letters OMEROU; a reverse swastika based on the decorations on Schliemann’s house in Athens; and the bookplate of George Hoar in his copy of Schliemann’s Mycenae. Other images of sites and artefacts in this novel, including a tour of Troy, Dillen’s blackened potsherd, the books by Schliemann and Pope, shipwreck photographs and Jack’s Webley revolver, are found on my website www.davidgibbins.com.