The Mask of Troy

3

T here was a scrambling sound on the path, and Dillen and Jeremy turned to see a tall, slender girl appear, wearing hiking boots, shorts and a T-shirt with the IMU logo, her long dark hair boots, shorts and a T-shirt with the IMU logo, her long dark hair tied back under a baseball cap. She was carrying a suspended silver tray holding little glass cups filled with tea. She stepped into the trench, saying nothing, and solemnly handed one to Dillen, then another to Jeremy.

‘ Teshekkur ederin.’ Dillen smiled, holding up the glass and taking a sip, trying not to recoil from the powerful liquid. Rebecca bowed, put down the tray and took off her sunglasses. Dillen looked at her fondly. He had taught her mother as well as Jack, and Rebecca had inherited much from both of them, Jack’s long limbs and angular features, her mother’s dark beauty. A wave of sadness came over him when he thought of Elizabeth, but he put it from him and focused on the continuity he saw in Rebecca, the familiar eyes and vivacious manner. Rebecca had remarkable determination, but they all knew they had to work with her to overcome the pain of her mother’s death, to focus on the future and stave off a past that could engulf her. She squatted down, arms on her knees. ‘So, guys. How’s the bard?’ She spoke with an American accent from her upbringing and schooling before her mother had died, but with English idiom she had picked up from Jack and the IMU crew.

Jeremy looked at her, then glanced quizzically at Dillen. ‘Bard? Your lyre? I thought you didn’t play.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘No. I don’t mean Professor Dillen. I mean the bard. Over there. Maurice gave me a lightning tour when I arrived this morning, and it was there.’ She pointed at the excavated wall of the room behind them, covered by the plastic sheet.

‘Ah, yes.’ Dillen got up. ‘I haven’t shown Jeremy yet. We’ve been talking about my arrowheads.’ He reached over and carefully rolled up the plastic sheet, placing it on top of the masonry. Jeremy gasped. The image below was extraordinary, a life-sized fresco on white plaster, reminiscent of Bronze Age paintings from other sites around the Aegean. It showed a person in a white robe sitting on a rock, holding a lyre, as if in readiness for playing. The background and the skin of the player were dark; the rock was off-white, covered with swirling tendrils of green leaves, and above it was a stylized bank of clouds.

‘ Now I see,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘A lyre-player. It’s wonderful.’

‘It’s astonishing corroboration for my lyre,’ Dillen said. ‘I’ve only uncovered this painting in the last two days, but I finished my lyre several months ago. I think I got it right.’

Jeremy peered closely, shading his eyes. ‘Is that a man or a woman?’

‘Impossible to say,’ Dillen replied. ‘You might expect it to be a man, but that may just be wrong. There were doubtless men and women.’

‘So you think this is a bard, a poet?’

‘There’s only one other image of a lyre-player like this, from the Mycenaean palace of Pylos in Greece,’ Dillen replied. ‘I think it’s possible.’

‘Could there be an inscription?’ Jeremy said. ‘Still concealed below, where the arrows and earth cover the plinth?’

‘If there is, it’d probably be in Luwian or Hittite, the languages of Anatolia, or perhaps in early Greek, the language of Mycenaean Linear B. I know Rebecca’s just done an essay on that for school.’

‘Linear B was the syllabic script of the Greeks before they adopted the Phoenician alphabet,’ Rebecca said. ‘The Mycenaeans borrowed it from the Minoans. Trouble was, it was basically designed for palace records: numbers of sheep, bronze-workers, and so on. It would have been an awkward script for recording anything else. And almost all the Linear B finds have been on baked clay tablets. Maybe we just haven’t found others yet, but it doesn’t seem to have been used for inscriptions on stone or walls.’

Dillen nodded. ‘Another problem is, there doesn’t seem to be a Linear B word for bard, for poet. Maybe we’re missing something, mis-translating another word, but it just doesn’t seem to be there. So even if there were an inscription here, it might be unreadable.’

Rebecca took a swig from her water bottle. ‘While I’m here, Dad mentioned this fragment of ancient text you found referring to a shipwreck during the Trojan War, a ship of Agamemnon. What he and Costas are searching for now. I really need to be got up to speed. I only came in on the flight before Jeremy. I was in school two days ago and I shouldn’t even be here now. We have an art trip in France beginning in a couple of days’ time. Bottom line is, apart from Maurice’s twenty-minute tour and Dad on the phone, when he was mostly telling me off for getting a flight here without telling him, I have just about no idea what’s happening.’ She took another swig. ‘Well?’

Jeremy glanced at her. ‘You haven’t heard it yet?’

‘Dad said to get Professor Dillen to tell me.’

‘You won’t believe it. It’s just about the greatest clue to treasure ever found,’ Jeremy said.

Dillen took a deep breath, his eyes gleaming. ‘It’s been a truly remarkable find. The most important of my entire career.’ He paused. ‘As well as the Iliad and the Odyssey, there’s a mass of fragments known as the Trojan epic cycle, poems that purport to fill the gaps in the story of the Trojan War. Most date from the Hellenistic and Roman period and are edited compilations of fragments, some perhaps genuine Homer, some by lesser poets attempting to emulate him. Some of the most famous stories of the Trojan War are known mainly this way, such as the Trojan Horse. One of those poems is called the Ilioupersis, “The Destruction of Troy”. Before now, only a few fragments of that survived, and only a few scholars thought it was by Homer.’

‘And now?’ Rebecca said.

‘And now we have the genuine Ilioupersis, a complete poem of very early date that may have been deliberately concealed, and is now revealed for the first time since the Dark Age that followed the Trojan War.’

‘It was found three months ago,’ Jeremy said to Rebecca. ‘Maria and I were back in Herculaneum to work on the final clearance of the ancient Roman library. The archaeological superintendency are now planning to shore it up and make the tunnel accessible to the general public, who’ll be able to look through a glass front right into the Emperor Claudius’ secret study itself.’

‘That was my mother’s job in the superintendency, to oversee the villa,’ Rebecca said quietly. ‘That’s the last time she and Dad spoke, when he saw her in the excavation, the day before the Mafia took her. Her own family. Her brothers and uncles.’

Dillen put a hand on hers. ‘You have a new family now.’

Rebecca gave him a fathomless look, and then stared intensely at Jeremy. ‘So it was you who actually found the text?’

‘Glued into the back of one of Claudius’ notebooks, a collection of material we think he’d been planning to use in his huge History of Rome, for a volume on the founding of the city. It was with material related to the Trojan hero Aeneas and the exodus of survivors from Troy, really fascinating stuff that seems to prove that Rome really was founded by Trojan warriors fleeing west. These pages, the Ilioupersis, were actually part of a very old text of Book 12 of the Odyssey. They were recycled, a palimpsest, evidently at a time when papyrus was scarce, before the classical era. Maria spotted the faded ink underneath the Odyssey text and we took the pages for an X-ray spectrometry scan, which revealed about three hundred lines. There’s little doubt it’s the entire poem, as it ends mid-page. The lab is refining the scan line by line, and as each few lines are finished I’m sending them to James for translation. I’ve got some more for him with me.’

Dillen pulled an iPod from his pocket, clicked it and then passed it to Rebecca. ‘That’s only a small fragment of it, but you can see the letters. They’re separately spaced, careful, a little awkward, as if the scribe is not entirely familiar with the symbols, at pains to get it right. You see the letter A? It’s sideways, toppled over. That’s what really excited me. It’s the Phoenician letter A, the way it looked in the earliest version of the alphabet adopted by the Greeks. Archaeologists have found a few potsherds from the Greek Dark Age scratched with letters like this, but no other actual script of Greek this early.’

‘So what’s the date of the text?’

‘The iambic hexameter is Homeric in form, and that makes it at least eighth century BC. But I’ve always argued that the hexameter is much older than that, as old as the early Bronze Age, from the time of the first epic bards. The bards continued to use it through to the dawn of the classical era, when people began to write it down. Add to that the Phoenician letters, and we may be looking at something incredibly early.’

‘Dad says you’ve always thought Homer was earlier than the eighth century.’

Dillen nodded. ‘I believe there was indeed a Homer who wrote down the Iliad and the Odyssey as we have them. I say a Homer, not the Homer. I see Homer not as one genius, but as one in a line of gifted poets – consistently, extraordinarily gifted – who shaped and transmitted the poems, a lineage that may have ended about the eighth century BC with the advent of wider literacy and the demise of the bardic tradition, so that those later poets who emulated Homer had none of that spark. I see the Homeric bards, the earlier ones, almost as shamans or seers, maybe as a family line, possibly both men and women, with an inherited poetic genius nurtured from childhood. There are plenty of parallels in the bardic traditions of other cultures.’

‘The Trojan War took place about 1200 BC,’ Jeremy said, staring pensively at the arrows. ‘Civilization out here pretty well collapses. Invaders sweep down from the north. It’s a dark age, a time of destruction and hopelessness unparalleled in history. But then small communities hidden away in mountain refuges begin to rebuild. Iron technology takes over. The survivors pull away from the brink, and the classical age dawns. So where does this poem fit in to all that?’

Dillen replied quietly. ‘All of my instinct puts this text no later than 1000 BC. It may even be a century earlier. I can barely believe I’m suggesting it, but this text could have been written by a bard who actually witnessed the fall of Troy, who actually saw those arrows being fired, who felt the heat of that beacon fire burning into the night sky, above these very ramparts where we are now.’

Rebecca whistled, then looked at the bronze arrowheads embedded in the trench, and at the solidified mass of ash. ‘That’s awesome. Seriously awesome.’

‘And that,’ Jeremy announced, ‘is also a triumph of textual scholarship, because our radiocarbon result for the papyrus has just come through.’ He had been quickly checking his BlackBerry, and passed it to Dillen, who read the screen and broke into a smile. Jeremy turned to Rebecca. ‘The problem was getting a sample of the papyrus that wasn’t impregnated with later ink and glue from when it was reused, but the IMU dating lab seem to have done it.’

Dillen handed back the BlackBerry. His voice was quavering. ‘Eleven fifty BC, plus or minus seventy-five years. I knew it. I just knew I was reading poetry written in the Bronze Age.’

‘That’s so cool,’ Rebecca said, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘Remember when you were my age, dreaming of finding something like that.’

Dillen looked at her, his eyes welling up. ‘I’m always that age. It’s what I told your dad. Never give up on those dreams.’

‘And one day they may come true,’ Rebecca said, leaning over and kissing him gently on the forehead.

‘One question,’ Jeremy said, putting away his BlackBerry. ‘The Ilioupersis. The destruction of Troy. That’s the biggest event in the whole Trojan epic cycle. Why do we only now have this text? Why is the destruction only hinted at in the Iliad and the Odyssey?’

Dillen took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, then put them back on again, swallowed hard and looked at Jeremy. ‘The Trojan cycle represents the end of the bardic tradition,’ he said. ‘It’s art mirroring history, myth mirroring reality. Before the Trojan War, the Bronze Age was a world of heroes and demigods, a world ruled by the gods, always fickle, often cruel, where contests between men were the contests of heroes, not the wholesale carnage of war. Epic poetry grew up around those contests: violent, bloody for sure, but noble and thrilling, part of everyday life. They existed in a world of peace and stability that allowed civilization to flourish, that didn’t eclipse it. But then something happened. Something calamitous, which overturned that world. The ambition of one man, perhaps, one king. The age of heroes and gods gave way to the age of men. Duels between heroes gave way to total war.’

‘And nobody wanted to hear about that,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Not a good fireside story.’

Dillen stared at the fresco. ‘People seated at the feet of a bard want to hear an uplifting story. They want to hear about noble deeds, about chivalry, about violence and cruelty to be sure, but not about apocalypse. So the Iliad is about the time before darkness swept over the plain of Ilion, when the war was still a contest of heroes: Achilles and Hector, Ajax and Telemachus. But Homer knew of coming darkness. He knew what men could do. He hints at it, in the Iliad. And the audience knew. They had been part of it, the survivors, their parents, their grandparents. It was an unspoken truth, a common experience of all humanity, like the Holocaust.’

‘Maybe the truth was just too awful to contemplate,’ Rebecca said. ‘Maybe Homer was a seer, just as you said. Maybe he gazed over the Dardanelles and somehow saw the future horrors of war, that mankind would go to the brink again.’

Jeremy looked hard at Dillen. ‘So maybe when the Ilioupersis was written down, it was a private expression by a poet who knew he had to tell himself the truth. He puts it away, but then – almost by accident – it survives.’

‘How much more do you have to translate?’ Rebecca asked.

‘I’ve translated twenty-five out of three hundred and twelve lines. Another couple of weeks. Depending on the distractions of archaeology.’

‘Maybe then you’ll play that lyre,’ Jeremy said.

‘Speaking of archaeology,’ Rebecca said, looking at Dillen quizzically. ‘We know Dad wants to find something fabulous underwater. Some treasure from the Trojan War. What do you want to find?’

Dillen narrowed his eyes. ‘Well…’ He sat back, took out his pipe and tobacco, then saw Rebecca’s disapproving look and thought better of it. Instead he pointed the stem of the pipe at the painting. ‘Something more than images. I want to find words. Inscriptions. I want to find something in Greek, in Linear B. Something from the conquerors of this place.’

‘ Agamemnon was here,’ Jeremy murmured.

‘Mmm.’ Dillen put the pipe in the corner of his mouth and dry-sucked it, folding his arms over his chest and staring at the painting.

‘No,’ Rebecca said, shaking her head. ‘I mean, what do you really want to find? Dad said you had a session the other night in his cabin on Seaquest II. Drank whisky like a pair of old pirates. He said you both came up with your dream find. He’s going to tell me his after he comes up from the dive today. He said I could probably cajole yours out of you, because you’ll do anything for me.’

‘He said that?’ Dillen murmured, his eyes twinkling.

‘Go on,’ Jeremy said.

Dillen sucked for a moment, then took out the pipe and gave them a penetrating look. ‘All right. Just between us. There is one object, an artefact that’s beguiled me since I first read Homer as a schoolboy. It was the most sacred object of ancient Troy, held in a temple to the god Pallas, who the Greeks identified with their goddess Athene. Homer called it the palladion.’

‘The palladion!’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘I remember that. Didn’t Odysseus and Diomedes steal it, after they snuck into the city through an underground passageway and Helen told them where to find it?’

Dillen nodded. ‘That’s the story. As long as the palladion remained within the walls, Troy wouldn’t fall. After stealing it, they took the wooden horse filled with warriors into Troy, and the rest is history.’

‘Or myth,’ Rebecca said.

‘So what happened to the palladion?’ Jeremy asked.

‘A thousand years after the fall of Troy, the Roman poet Virgil imagined the Trojan prince Aeneas bringing the palladion to Rome. For the Romans, that became a central part of their foundation myth. For them the palladion was a small wooden statue of Pallas, and was hidden away somewhere in Rome. Then, in the late Roman period, rumour was that it was secretly taken to the new capital city, Constantinople, along with so many of the old treasures of Rome, and buried under the column of Constantine in the forum.’

‘So isn’t that where we should be looking for it?’ Jeremy said.

‘A wooden statue doesn’t sound, um, very exciting,’ Rebecca said. ‘I mean, you know, treasure-wise.’

‘Do you believe any of this?’ Jeremy asked.

Dillen clasped his pipe bowl in one hand, and leaned forward. ‘Well, we do know that statues of gods in the Aegean Bronze Age could be wooden, quite crude. People still venerated inanimate objects, and had only just begun to anthropomorphize their gods. The Romans are unlikely to have known that. If they were making up the story of the palladion, they’re far more likely to have imagined an impressive statue of stone, of marble. That would have been an instant giveaway. So I can believe the story.’

‘But?’ Jeremy said.

‘ But,’ Dillen replied. ‘Even if there was a wooden statue, I don’t believe that it was the palladion. Rebecca’s right. A wooden statue’s hardly treasure. Odysseus and Diomedes may have snatched a statue from the temple, but the true palladion is most likely to have been concealed by the Trojans. And there’s a tantalizing snippet of evidence. One of those epic fragments says the palladion had “fallen from heaven”, a gift to Dardanos, founder of Troy. That could be metaphorical, meaning an extraordinary treasure, a gift of the gods. Or it could be literal.’

‘I’ve got it.’ Rebecca clapped her hands. ‘ Fallen from heave n. A meteorite.’

Dillen looked at her. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a meteorite has been venerated.’

‘So this is what you think we might find here?’ Rebecca said quietly. ‘That’s so cool.’

‘Just guesswork. But the idea that the most sacred object from ancient Troy, the richest city in the Bronze Age world, should have been a little wooden statue doesn’t ring true. If a thousand years later the Romans had the true palladion, it would have been an extraordinary object, something people came to gawp at, an object that would resonate through history, like the golden menorah they took from the Jewish temple.’

‘So Odysseus and Diomedes made their way into Troy by a secret passage,’ Jeremy mused. ‘Maybe the palladion’s what Maurice is really after, at the end of the tunnel he’s found.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘He wants to find a hieroglyphic inscription. Not Agamemnon was here, but Rameses was here. He says he wants to prove that Egypt truly was the superpower of the ancient world. He says that’s the only reason he ever leaves Egypt to come on these digs with Dad.’

Dillen cast a glance at Jeremy, and they both grinned. ‘Your dad and Maurice go back a long way,’ Dillen said. ‘And don’t discount the lure of treasure. I can remember interviewing Maurice when he was applying for a place at the university. He’d brought along the catalogue from the Tutankhamun exhibition, the one that travelled the world in the 1970s. It had the famous golden mask of King Tut on the cover, and Maurice was almost weeping with excitement when he showed it to me. I knew then I had to offer him a place.’

‘Dad says every archaeologist worthy of the name secretly wants to find treasure,’ Rebecca said. ‘He told me they may spend their careers specializing in something as dry as bones, but unless they have that fire within them, they’ll never have the vision, the passion, to take their exploration that one step further, to make the big leap of imagination.’

‘Mmm.’ Dillen smiled. ‘Where have I heard that before? I seem to remember telling that to Jack and Maurice in their first tutorial with me. And who was it who told it to me? Sir Leonard Woolley, or was it Sir Mortimer Wheeler? And they’d been told it by Sir Arthur Evans. And he’d been told it by Heinrich Schliemann. It’s the thread that ties all the great archaeologists together. Not science, not techniques, but the passion, the drive. The yearning for discovery.’

‘And the willingness to take risks,’ Rebecca said.

Jeremy gestured at the jumble of overgrown ruins behind them. ‘The palladion. It could have been anywhere here?’

Dillen nodded. ‘The temple to Pallas would have been close to where we are now, though I fear it may have been where Schliemann put in his great trench. But temples often had repositories, underground strongrooms. That’s where something as sacred as the palladion might have been kept.’

‘Maybe the palladion is what Agamemnon was really after when he came here,’ Rebecca said. ‘Maybe that’s what the Trojan War was actually about. Not about women, about Helen of Troy, but about treasure.’

‘Maybe that’s what Schliemann was after too,’ Jeremy added. ‘And maybe he didn’t find it here, so he went in search of it at Mycenae, where Agamemnon might have taken it after looting and burning Troy.’

‘There’s nothing about the palladion in Schliemann’s notes,’ Dillen said. ‘Jack asked me to look at them before coming out here. But Schliemann was a man of powerful imagination, and capable of great secrecy when his ego would allow it. And he truly believed in the myths. Let’s imagine the palladion was what he was really after. He may never have confided his thoughts to paper. He may only have told his wife, Sophia, and maybe a few close friends. Schliemann was perfectly prepared to gamble his reputation with big announcements, but he was also shrewd, and this would have been an extraordinary treasure.’

An excited shout came up from below, a man’s voice with a German accent. ‘James. Rebecca. Jeremy. Come on down. James, bring your camera gear. We’ve found something wonderful.’

‘They’re nowhere near the end of the tunnel yet,’ Rebecca said. ‘I was just there. They were only finding rubble. What on earth could it be?’

‘Maybe Maurice has got his Egyptian inscription,’ Jeremy said, getting up quickly. ‘And I haven’t even seen this tunnel yet.’ He paused, looking at the wall painting of the bard with the musical instrument, and then at Dillen’s lyre in the corner of the trench. ‘You really did get your lyre right, you know. Exactly right. It’s uncanny. What you were saying earlier, about the bardic tradition? You said you felt as if you’d heard music up here. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so flippant about it. Maybe there really is a bit of Homer in you.’

Dillen looked at him, started to say something, and was suddenly speechless, overwhelmed. He stared down, blinking hard. In all his years of academic achievement, he had never had an accolade like that. He swallowed hard and spoke, his voice gruff. ‘I should tidy up. Herr Professor Doctor Hiebermeyer’s inspection, you know.’

‘Leave it,’ Jeremy said. ‘We won’t tell.’ Rebecca touched Jeremy’s hand and smiled at him, nodding her head towards Dillen, saying nothing. Jeremy went over and rolled the plastic cover back over the wall painting, while Rebecca helped Dillen to his feet. As he reached down to pick up his camera bag, a jolt of pain shot through his knee, and he winced. He leaned against Rebecca for a moment, feeling her warmth, her youth, letting the pain go, and remembered what he had been thinking before she and Jeremy had arrived. Archaeology did come at a price. But he was loving every minute of it.