The Mask of Troy

2

P rofessor James Dillen shifted on the foam mat and stretched out his right arm, relieving the persistent ache that had been developing in his elbow all morning. He was thrilled to be here, but he was beginning to realize that archaeology came at a price. All those years he had spent in libraries and his study in Cambridge had given him the patience he now needed, but not the particular set of physical attributes required to kneel all day in a trench under the withering Mediterranean sun, working away with a trowel and a brush. He pushed himself upright, feeling a jab of pins and needles in his leg, and peered over the ancient stone revetment in front of him, relishing the afternoon breeze that was now sweeping across from the Dardanelles. The keening of the wind through the trees that flanked the ancient mound sounded like the wailing of mourners, and seemed to eclipse any residue of the clash of arms and the bellowing of heroes that had once resonated from the plain below.

He slipped awkwardly on his elbow, and jerked his head back to avoid scraping it against the solidified black mass on one side of the trench. He came to rest with his nose against the mass. He smelled an acrid odour, and moved his head, sniffing. It was there, definitely. He could hardly believe it. He could smell the fires of Troy. He pushed back and stared at the mass, a conglomeration of ash and carbonized material that rose up the ancient wall to where it had been eroded away. When Maurice Hiebermeyer had inspected his work the afternoon before, he had said the mass was not the result of a general conflagration, the destruction debris seen elsewhere on the site. Instead it was an astonishing discovery, a deliberate fire, the remains of a massive signal beacon on top of the citadel. An astonishing discovery. Dillen had been thrilled. This morning he had arrived before dawn, and had watched the red glow from the sun rise up the mound as if it were burning again, and imagined flames roaring high, swathed in smoke. He had opened his mind to words, as he always did, imagining how the ancients would have described it. The Greek word ’??’??? kept coming into his head: the word for torch, for flame. It was also a woman’s name. ’??’???. Helen. An extraordinary thought coursed through his mind. Had he discovered the truth behind the legend of Helen of Troy? Had Helen, Helen of the flaming hair, Helen of myth, been not a woman, the woman of ravishing beauty whose abduction caused the war, but instead a great burning beacon above Troy, a fire that drew the Greek army forward, that signalled the destruction of Troy and the annihilation of the Bronze Age world?

He picked up a potsherd that had fallen from the scorched mound, a thick black sherd, charred, and sniffed it. He could smell it there, too. He could smell Helen of Troy. He shook his head in amazement. He pushed the sherd into his shorts pocket. Something to show Jack. He sat up, squinted against the sun and stared west, over the flat plain of the river Scamander towards Besik Bay, the harbour of ancient Troy. Somewhere beyond lay the island of Tenedos, and Seaquest II, with Jack on board. Two nights before, in Jack’s cabin, they had drunk whisky together, sharing their greatest dreams about what they might find here. Once, years ago, they had been teacher and pupil, separated by a generation that had seen archaeology advance by leaps and bounds, with dazzling results. When Dillen had been a student, underwater exploration had been in its infancy, and most who wished to study the ancient world had come to it through languages, through ancient Greek and Latin. Language was Dillen’s passion, and he had excelled at it, specializing in the early development of Greek. But through Jack he had come to have a vicarious second life, and he had revelled in his former student’s discoveries. He had yearned to join Jack in the field, and Jack had known exactly where and when, a project that would fuse their passions. To excavate at Troy. It had seemed a pipe dream, and then Dillen had made the extraordinary discovery in an ancient text that had brought them here. That night in Jack’s cabin they had been like two treasure-hunters together, copies of Homer’s Iliad opened out in front of them, poring over well-thumbed passages. For Jack, it was a fabulous treasure he believed had been lost at sea. For Dillen, it was another extraordinary artefact mentioned by Homer, something that had once existed in this huge mound of rubble and earth beneath him. Something that might still be here. That night he had felt as if they were a secret society of true believers, like Heinrich Schliemann and his closest supporters, fuelled by a belief that might now be given another dazzling burst of reality, as powerful as the one that Schliemann had released when he came here and first revealed the splendours of Troy to a stunned world.

Dillen looked at his watch. It was nearly three p.m., the official end of the digging day, when Hiebermeyer normally came round for his inspection. Hiebermeyer had been one of Dillen’s star students, a close friend of Jack’s, and seemed to take a certain pleasure in inspecting his old professor’s carefully laid-out tools and notebooks, scrutinizing them like a barracks-room sergeant. Dillen smiled to himself, remembering his first encounter with Hiebermeyer, a generously proportioned youth with sagging shorts, little round glasses, a tousle of unwashed red hair, and an unquenchable enthusiasm for all things Egyptian. Maurice had changed little in the years since, apart from losing his hair and acquiring a wife, the least likely event anyone could have imagined. Jack said that Aysha’s insistence that Maurice broaden his horizons was the only reason Hiebermeyer could be dragged away from his mummies and pyramids to work at Troy. But Dillen knew that Maurice secretly loved being back in the field with his friend Jack, and that his grumbles about shipwrecks and treasure-hunting were just part of their banter, something that had begun when they first met at boarding school in England and had mapped out their futures together.

Dillen lay down on his front again, propped up on his elbows, his face close to the ancient masonry. His trench had begun as something of a sideline, a room in an aristocratic house on top of the citadel that had escaped Schliemann’s great gouge through the site a hundred and thirty years before, and Hiebermeyer’s attention was focused on the extraordinary tunnel he had revealed just inside the south-west corner of the citadel. This morning Hiebermeyer had made some kind of breakthrough, and it would probably be a while before the inspection. Dillen decided to carry on for another half-hour. He stared at the exposed wall. It was separated by a narrow gap from the massive rampart of the late Bronze Age citadel, high up on the mound, some thirty metres above the surrounding plain. His excavation had revealed wall plaster and the remains of a painted fresco, an extremely rare find at Troy. He had finished brushing off the fresco that morning, and it was now shrouded by a plastic sheet.

All that remained to be dug out was a small area of impacted debris against the lower few centimetres of the wall. It had turned out to be an extraordinarily interesting deposit, and Dillen had devoted painstaking hours to it. He had just been photographing his prize finds: three bronze arrowheads, stuck into the ground, angled in the orientation of the arrows as they had come hurtling in from over the outer rampart wall. They were two types, one leaf-shaped with a slight mid-rib and a long tang, the other triangular with a pronounced rib and long barbs. He stared at the arrowheads, then back at the carbonized remains of the beacon fire. Words flowed back into his mind again, a fragment of the Trojan epic cycle: Earth, being weighted down by the multitude of people, there being no piety among humankind, asked Zeus to be relieved of the burden, and he destroyed the race of heroes and fanned the flames of the Trojan War. Dillen thought hard. This was what archaeology revealed. This was why it was worthwhile. The poem was wrong. These arrowheads were not thunderbolts of Zeus, nor the trident of Poseidon. They were weapons wrought by mortals. It was not gods who had destroyed Troy; it was men.

‘James! Professor! Where are you?’ The voice came from somewhere down in the trench dug by Schliemann, on the narrow path they had cleared up the side. Dillen sat back up and peered over the wall. He had recognized the American accent. ‘Jeremy? Is that you?’

‘Coming up.’ A tall young man with a shock of blond hair and glasses came into view, wearing a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. ‘Only just arrived,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Maurice sent me straight up here. Wanted me out of the way, I think. Said you had something to show me.’

‘It’s good to see you, Jeremy. I meant to say how much I enjoyed your paper on the Hereford Mappa Mundi library at the conference last month. Marvellous stuff. What is it now, three years since you discovered it?’

‘Three and a half.’ Jeremy stepped over the wall and sat down, taking a long swig from a water bottle and shaking Dillen’s outstretched hand. ‘And then a year later, the Roman library at Herculaneum, and the reason we’re here. Which reminds me. I’ve got some more lines of the ancient text for you to translate.’ He wiped his mouth and put down the bottle. ‘And I’ve got some great news.’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘Our benefactor. Ephram Jacobovich. He’s made another ton of money, with the transition to wi-fi. Always one step ahead of the game. So much for the recession. The reason I couldn’t come out here earlier was that Maria and I were having a meeting with him. We didn’t even need to make a case. Jack had prepped him completely. We get all the research funding we need for the Herculaneum library, enough to buy in the top specialists from around the world. Which is good, because I’ve decided I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in a manuscripts room staring at ancient texts under a microscope.’

‘But you’re brilliant at it. And you love it.’

‘But there’s a problem. Costas taught me to dive.’

‘Ah.’ Dillen smiled. ‘Your excellent friend Costas.’ He paused. ‘So how is Maria?’

‘Once the funding’s in place, she’s taking a sabbatical in Mexico. She’s got family there. Did you know she was about to be married? I probably shouldn’t tell you. Some professor she met at a conference. It was a bit of a whirlwind. But then when it came to it, she bailed.’

‘It’s because she really wants Jack,’ Dillen murmured.

‘And Jack wants her. But he also wants Katya. And neither of them are women you want to mess with.’

‘Bit of a problem for Jack.’

‘After the last time they nearly hitched up, Maria said Jack was like one of those famous British sea captains of the Napoleonic period, just like one of his revered Howard ancestors. She said it must be in his blood. Brilliant at sea, commanding ships and leading men, but completely useless on land, at managing his affairs, so to speak. Always doing a runner back to his ship.’

‘She told you that?’

‘I’m her protege, remember? I may be fifteen years younger than her, but she tells me everything.’

Dillen smiled. ‘So tell me about your flight here. Good view?’

‘Fantastic,’ Jeremy replied. ‘The Lynx helicopter picked me up at Istanbul airport and we flew right over the Sea of Marmara and down the Dardanelles, along the Gallipoli peninsula and then south over the strait towards Troy. You would have heard us, about mid-morning. The pilot’s a military history buff and gave me a running commentary on the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. Then as we flew over the plain of Troy it was like we were war-gaming Homer. Brilliant. After that we flew west and dropped down on Seaquest II for lunch, before coming here.’

‘What’s the mood on board?’

‘Optimistic. Very optimistic. I didn’t see Jack because he was in the chamber decompressing after a dive, but everyone was upbeat. You know they found a Byzantine shipwreck? Not what Jack wanted, but encouraging. The crew thinks he’s on to something else, he’s seen something more down there he’s not letting on about. He thinks he keeps these things secret, but the crew can tell. Those Napoleonic-period captains Maria talked about? Seaquest II ’s crew have the same kind of faith in Jack that those naval crews had in their captains. They also know him a lot better than he thinks. They even call him Lucky Jack.’

‘He’s been called that as long as I’ve known him.’ Dillen smiled. ‘I was too young to serve in the Second World War, but the schoolmaster who taught me Greek had fought through North Africa and Europe with the SAS. He told me that in a tight unit, a soldier can always tell when their leader’s on to something, a kind of sixth sense, like a hunter knowing his dog has sensed prey before the dog has made a move.’

‘Jack was in the navy, of course.’

‘As a diver, special forces. But it was only a short-service commission, at the end of his undergraduate degree. He always wanted to be an archaeologist, but he had a strong feeling for keeping up his family tradition in the navy. Howards were there all the way, from the Spanish Armada to the Napoleonic Wars and beyond.’

‘Military training has stood him in good stead,’ Jeremy said.

‘He’s a scholar and an adventurer, not a warrior. Too much of a maverick for peacetime soldiering, that’s what my old teacher Hugh said about Jack. Wouldn’t be any good at taking orders from people he doesn’t respect. He’s his own boss. But he’s got a hard edge, and I wouldn’t want to put him in a corner. Or threaten anyone dear to him. I’ve always felt that. And when he makes a decision, he’ll stick to it.’

‘You might want to hear Maria’s views on that.’ Jeremy squatted down, picked up a small sherd of blackened pottery and rubbed a finger over the burnished surface, then looked round him. ‘So you think this room’s late Bronze Age, the time of the Trojan War?’

Dillen nodded enthusiastically, and knelt down beside Jeremy. ‘It’s very similar to houses built just inside the eastern rampart of Troy VII, Homeric Troy. But I think this one was grander. The view over the plain would have been magnificent. It may even have been part of the palace. That’s my pet theory. The only surviving part of the palace that once capped the citadel. What do you think?’

‘King Priam’s palace,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘That’s a hell of a shout line. Distinguished Homeric scholar joins old student’s dig and three days later discovers the lost palace of King Priam of Troy. Maybe this was the very room where his son Paris kept Helen after abducting her from Greece. Maybe we’re standing right in the crucible of the whole legend.’

‘Maybe we are,’ Dillen said quietly. ‘In more ways than you might imagine. You’ll be amazed. I’ve got some incredible stuff to show you. A few more radical theories. But first things first.’

‘Go on.’

‘The house is built in typical Troy fashion, a socle of stone with the upper storey made of flat sun-dried mud brick. A few courses of brick survive, over there, baked red by the fire that left that charred mass. Maurice thinks that’s the remains of a beacon fire. Can you believe it? A beacon fire from the Trojan War. Now look over there. You can see the beam slots in the stone below the bricks that once held the cross-timbers for the floor above. We’re in a basement room, dug into the mass of compacted mud brick that makes up the citadel mound. The earth beyond the bricks contains detritus from the earlier phases of the city, stretching back to the beginning of the Bronze Age two thousand years before.’

‘Phenomenal,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘So what makes you sure this house is late Bronze Age?’ He held up the sherd. ‘Pottery?’

Dillen pursed his lips. ‘We’ve found a few Mycenaean sherds, painted fine-ware. And radiocarbon dating of a charred reed mat has come up with the right time frame. But the main evidence is structural. Did you have a chance to look at the outer wall of the house as you came up? It slopes slightly inward, from bottom to top, probably to give stability against earthquakes. And the wall’s divided by vertical offsets every five metres or so, made of rectangular hewn masonry, each offset providing a strengthened base for a timber frame in the wall of the house above.’ Dillen slapped his hands in excitement. ‘It’s exactly the same technique as the rampart outside, the city wall of Troy VII, the citadel at the time of the destruction, about 1200 BC. The time of the Trojan War.’

Jeremy stared at the unexcavated deposit on the edge of the wall, and took a few steps over. ‘This must be what Maurice wanted me to see. Arrowheads. Beautifully excavated, and still in situ. Has anything like this ever been found at Troy before?’

‘Not in situ, embedded like that.’ Dillen lay back down on his mat, propped on his elbows. ‘Maurice said you were the man for this?’

‘It’s my hobby. Archery.’ Jeremy got down on his knees and elbows and edged close, until his face was only a few inches away, then reached out and gently touched one of the arrowheads. ‘Fascinating. There’s a small collection like these on display in the British Museum, in the same case as the artefacts they have from Schliemann’s excavation at Troy. A few miserable pots, frankly. Most of it went to Germany, of course. But it makes you wonder what Schliemann really did find down there.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of Schliemann’s trench. ‘Anyway, Jack and I met up for lunch in the BM a few days before he came out here, and we had a quick look at the Mycenaean stuff. What you’ve found here is fantastic, where scientific excavation really comes into play. This is what Schliemann could so easily have missed, hacking down aggressively with picks and shovels, going for the treasure. You see what I mean? You’ve got two completely different shapes of arrowhead, in exactly the same context. These were shot by archers standing side by side, at the same time on the same day. If you’d seen these individually in a museum collection, or hauled out of the spoil heap from an excavation like Schliemann’s, you’d be thinking mainly in terms of typology, a time sequence, evolution, maybe that nastier barbed one being a more effective later type. What you’ve got here shows you’d be completely wrong.’

Dillen stared hard. ‘Here’s a thought, then. The Mycenaean Greeks were not like the Egyptians, or the Hittites. They were never a single kingdom, and if we’re to believe Homer, they were only ever united for this famous expedition, under a single paramount leader.’

‘You mean Homer’s king of kings. Agamemnon.’

Dillen nodded. ‘Each of the Mycenaean palaces we know about – Mycenae itself, Athens, Pylos, Thebes, the others – was a kingdom unto itself, controlling its own fiefdom like a feudal barony. The clay tablet archives from those places show that the armaments industry, bronze-making, was tightly controlled by each palace, but not centralized across the Mycenaean world. There was no Enfield factory, no Springfield arsenal, but instead lots of smaller arsenals, controlled by individual palaces but under no central armaments directive, all keeping up with each other broadly in technology but with small differences. Some of the differences could even have been deliberate, to give the weapons of a particular kingdom a clear identity.’

‘I’m thinking of the ship list in Homer’s Iliad,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘All the different kingdoms sending ships and men, rallying to the cause.’

‘And then all of them standing shoulder to shoulder on the beach, men of Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, a hundred other kingdoms, showering the walls of Troy with arrows.’

Jeremy bent down again until his face was nearly touching the deposit, staring, murmuring numbers to himself. He then shuffled back and put the thumb and forefinger of his left hand in front of the arrows, measuring them up. He kept his hand exactly where it was, fumbled in his shorts pocket with his other hand and pulled out a compass, holding it flat and squinting along it. He rolled away and jumped up to his feet, then peered over the rampart wall at the plain of Troy before the citadel, a flat alluvial landscape of fruit trees and vegetable plantations extending towards the distant shoreline of the Dardanelles. He sighted the compass, then looked at Dillen, grinning. ‘As Jack would say, I’ll be damned.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well, the angle of impact shows that these arrows were shot at pretty well maximum trajectory. When Jack and Costas were here fifteen years ago doing their famous excavation on the ancient beach line, they found a charred fragment of an archer’s bow. Well, Costas found it, to be exact. As he’ll never cease telling you. He showed it to me, and I made a replica. I’ve shot it using arrows with bronze heads based on those British Museum examples. The compass bearing on these arrowheads points almost exactly to the place where the heli pilot showed me the remains of their trench, about two hundred and forty degrees from here, almost a kilometre away. It’s a long shot, but plausible for a Bronze Age bow with a really strong following wind, the kind the pilot said you sometimes get from the north-west coming off the sea, a real storm wind. Maybe there was one of those on the day of the assault when these arrows were fired.’

‘What’s the dating evidence for this type of arrowhead?’

Jeremy pursed his lips. ‘Late Bronze Age, definitely, but that could mean anywhere between about 1500 BC, when bronze took over from obsidian for arrowheads, and about 1000 BC, when iron took over from bronze. But even that latter date’s contentious. Scholars used to think references to iron in the Iliad were anachronisms, showing that Homer was writing about his own world in the Iron Age, around the eighth century BC. But iron arrowheads have now been found at Troy too. It’s possible that there was corroded iron in Schliemann’s excavation that he just didn’t see when he hacked his way down. Another black mark against treasure-hunting.’

‘It sounds like Troy,’ Dillen said. ‘Just when you think you’re there, that grey shroud of uncertainty settles over the whole thing again.’

‘But it’s still fantastically exciting,’ Jeremy said. ‘It’s this room that gives those arrows a date. If it’s Troy VII, then that’s Homeric Troy. The arrows were fired together from the beach line. They’re different types, from different places. These aren’t just raiders. There’s an army out there. A big, besieging army, from many different places. A Mycenaean army. It all adds up. You just need a tiny dose of faith.’

Dillen rocked back on his haunches and smiled. ‘Sometimes, you know, when I’m up here alone at night, I think I can hear music, very distant, like the backbeat to an epic,’ he said. ‘It seems to be telling me all I need to know, as if all this scientific detail, the proof, is just confirmation.’

Jeremy grinned, then pointed to a shrouded form in the corner of the trench. ‘I was wondering when you were going to bring music up. Looks like you have a hobby of your own.’

Dillen looked over. ‘Oh, that.’ He got up, stretched, walked over, and picked the object up. ‘It’s a lyre, a hand-harp, meant to be a replica of a Bronze Age lyre. I made it myself, over the last few months. It’s based on all the literary and artistic evidence I could muster, and a few archaeological discoveries.’ He carefully removed the cover, revealing a tortoiseshell soundbox with two raised arms curving outward and forward from it, with a crossbar at the top and strings leading down from it to another bar on the shell, forming a bridge. ‘The different notes come from the thickness of the strings, which are made of animal gut. All the ancient poets, the bards, used a lyre. I realized I could never hope to understand Homer without trying it.’

‘Will you play?’

Dillen replaced the cover. ‘Maybe when the digging’s over. Rebecca’s been badgering me to put Homer to music. I’m not sure if she knows quite what I mean. Sometimes I think the music is meant just to be in my head.’

‘Oh, I think she knows. When we’re together she often refers to things you’ve said. You and she seem to be on much the same wavelength.’ Jeremy cocked an ear. ‘Speaking of Rebecca, I forgot to say. I can hear someone approaching. She wanted me to warn you so you’d know she wasn’t Hiebermeyer and wouldn’t get into a panic about tidying up. I’m sure that’s her coming up the path now.’