The Mask of Troy Read online

  Schliemann nodded. ‘Brokers in a commodity far more precious than gold. You are correct, Mr Gladstone. The question of the tin is a vexing one. It was the rarest of commodities, and its sources were few. And I perceive that your thoughts, Mr Hoar, bend on a convergent path to mine. The Phoenicians did provide the Greeks with their alphabet, but much earlier than we had thought. I believe it was traders of the Bronze Age who first brought the alphabet to these shores. I believe the scribes of Agamemnon were the first to use the alphabet to write Greek.’

  ‘You believe they spoke Greek?’ Gladstone exclaimed. ‘You truly believe the Mycenaeans spoke Greek?’

  ‘I believe that the language of Homer was the language of Agamemnon.’

  ‘Mr Schliemann, I stand corrected again. My mind is in a perfect hurricane of astonishment.’

  ‘Scholars will ridicule me for the idea, those same scholars who mocked my quest for Troy. But I am sure of it.’

  Bismarck pointed at Schliemann’s right fist. ‘And your other hand? What treasure have you concealed there?’

  Schliemann held out the hand, then hesitated. ‘This, gentlemen, is truly why you are here.’ His voice was tense with excitement. ‘I knew I had to return to Troy. I believe, Mr Gladstone, that urgency, that feverish urgency, to have been the cause of my past illness. A mounting anxiety, with physical symptoms. Now that I am back here again, those symptoms have lifted. Two months ago, when we returned, we found this. To be precise, Sophia found it. She picked it from the spoil heap left beside the great trench we had dug through the site in 1871. I remembered seeing many of these, dozens, hundreds, but ignoring them in my thirst to dig deeper. I had been driven by a lust for gold, yes, but more than that, by a passion to prove that I was right, to find the Troy of Priam. And I was right. Yet in my enthusiasm I failed to see a greater truth that was staring at me. A truth that became my obsession in the years that followed, that vexed me day and night, that nearly overwhelmed me. Not whether Troy fell, but how. How mankind was toppled so quickly from brilliant civilization to the deepest well of barbarism. I talk not of Helen of Troy, not of the sophistry of poets, not of war caused by love and jealousy and rage, but of hard truth, the truth of power and bloodlust and the force of arms. A truth revealed not in gold and bronze, but in this.’

  He opened his hand to reveal a shapeless lump about two inches across, discoloured with red and brown oxidation. Gladstone peered closely at it, bringing up his monocle again. ‘Mmm. Ferrous concretion, unless I am mistaken.’

  Schliemann nodded, then held the lump between his thumb and forefinger. ‘This, gentlemen, is another arrowhead. But not an arrowhead made of bronze. An arrowhead made of iron.’

  ‘Of the age that followed the fall of Troy, you mean?’ Hoar murmured. ‘Some great battle of the Dark Ages, unknown to history, fought in the ruins of Troy?’

  Schliemann shook his head emphatically. ‘These arrowheads were all found in the destruction layer of the seventh citadel. Homeric Troy. They were found intermingled with bronze arrowheads. After Sophia recognized this lump for what it was, we re-examined a section of the rampart we had exposed all those years ago. We found two bronze arrowheads and three of these iron ones, embedded at different places in the outer wall.’

  ‘Arrows fired by an attacker,’ Gladstone murmured.

  ‘You follow my train of thought, Mr Gladstone.’

  Bismarck thumped his stick down. ‘Superior technology,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is what you have discovered, Herr Schliemann, yes? Superior technology.’

  ‘He who possessed iron in the age of bronze possessed the advantage,’ Gladstone said.

  ‘As he who possesses the Maxim gun in the age of the musket is tempted to war,’ Hoar murmured.

  ‘An advantage not in the quality of weapons, but in their quantity,’ Schliemann continued. ‘We are speaking of the very cusp of the age of iron, when the technology was in its infancy. The quality of this iron, the edge, the strength, may not have been greater than the best bronze. But that is not the point, gentlemen. The point was made by Mr Gladstone. Tin is exceedingly rare. It was worth its weight in gold. But iron ore is found virtually everywhere. Once you have mastered the technology, you have an unlimited raw material. And if you are the first to master the technology, before it becomes widespread, then for a few years, for a few decades perhaps, you reign supreme. You are king of kings. You are god.’

  ‘Agamemnon,’ Gladstone breathed. ‘You speak of Agamemnon.’

  ‘Troy was felled not by a trick of Odysseus, not by a wooden horse,’ Hoar murmured. ‘But by another kind of cunning. By the cunning of Hephaestus. By the cunning of the forge.’

  ‘Perfectly put, Mr Hoar,’ Schliemann said.

  ‘Herr Schliemann? You have a theory?’ Bismarck asked, stomping his cane again. The three men looked at Schliemann expectantly. He pocketed the arrowheads, and took a deep breath. ‘The twenty years since I first set foot on the mound of Troy have been a whirlwind for me. Some would say that I have been restless, unable to concentrate. Within two years of arriving here I announced the discovery of the treasure of King Priam. Then I went to Mycenae, and found the Mask of Agamemnon. Then I travelled around Greece, searching for the other great Bronze Age palaces, at Tiryns, at Ithaka, at Orchomenos. I went to Sicily, on the path of those western Phoenicians, the tin traders. Then I went to Egypt. I told them I was searching for the tomb of Alexander the Great, in Alexandria. The world thought I was on the hunt for yet more gold. Heinrich Schliemann, self-made millionaire, who made his fortune on the back of the California gold rush, had seen the lustre of gold at Troy and Mycenae and had fallen bewitched again, lured by Mammon. My critics shouted with glee. They were vindicated. I was no archaeologist, I was a treasure-hunter. But they were wrong.’

  ‘They were wrong,’ Gladstone murmured, ‘because you were not in search of gold. You were in search of bronze and iron.’

  Schliemann clapped his hands. ‘Mr Gladstone!’ he declared. ‘You do understand me.’ He stared at them intensely, then pointed down the passageway. ‘The very last place where Sophia and I dug all those years ago was right here, where we stand now. We found something extraordinary, something we knew would take weeks more, months more, to dig out. We sealed it up, intending to return. I went to Mycenae seeking confirmation, and seeking a key. And I found it, gentlemen. I found it. We uncovered the shaft graves, the Mask of Agamemnon. But we also found another tomb, the great beehive-shaped structure I called the Treasury of Atreus. I was elated. I went to the other palaces, and I found more of them, more so-called tombs. And then to Egypt. Beneath Alexandria I found not the steps down to the tomb of Alexander, but something infinitely older. And then in a blinding flash I knew what the pyramids were for. Tombs, gentlemen, royal tombs to be sure, like the tombs of the Mycenaeans, but something else. The pyramids were erected at the beginning of the Bronze Age, with the explosion of power and wealth that bronze created. The Bronze Age, gentlemen. Structures meant to safeguard the treasures not just of the dead, but of the living as well.’

  ‘The Treasury of Atreus,’ Hoar murmured, the shadow of a smile on his face. ‘I believe, Mr Schliemann, you have surpassed yourself. You have kept this trail you are on a secret, yet like any good explorer you have left clues, a safeguard, perhaps, against calamity, that some future-day archaeologist might follow. Clues in the names.’

  ‘You chose not to call it the Tomb of Atreus,’ Bismarck exclaimed. ‘You chose to call it the Treasury of Atreus.’

  ‘And not a treasury of gold,’ Gladstone rejoined. ‘But a treasury of bronze.’

  ‘Herr Bismarck asked if I had a theory,’ Schliemann said. ‘So here it is. The advent of bronze technology, two thousand years before the fall of Troy, was the most revolutionary advance in human history. For the first time, people had good agricultural tools, ploughshares and sickles. They had tools for carpentry, and for masonry. And they had superior weapons.’ He delved in his pockets, and produced a clear flint arrowhead in one
hand, and a leaf-shaped metal one in the other. ‘Stone points, like this one we found in the oldest Troy layer, little different from chipped tools made by their ancestors of the Stone Age, gave way to bronze weapons like this one. But there was a rub. The tin needed to make bronze was always in short supply. It was hugely prized. The power of chieftains rested on it. The smiths - the bronze-workers - were kept within the walls of palaces, of citadels. Supplies of tin and bronze were closely guarded. Great vaults were built, places that doubled as the burial ground of kings. Vaults such as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. Vaults such as the one that I believe lies before you down this passageway, gentlemen, dug into the limestone deep beneath the citadel of Troy.’

  ‘You have brought us to see the treasury!’ Gladstone exclaimed.

  Schliemann held up his hand. ‘There is another rub. A most extraordinary one. Bronze tools, carefully controlled, doled out by the king, their use supervised, allowed the city-states of the Aegean to flourish. A brilliant civilization emerged. But I know the question you are asking yourselves, gentlemen. You are politicians. You have seen what men will do. At Gettysburg, at Sedan. Give them weapons, and they will make war. And in the Bronze Age Aegean, men did fight. We know about it from Homer. The clashes of arms, the bellows and taunts of the victor, the cries of the vanquished. But these are individual combats, not pitched battles. Why? Because there was never enough bronze to equip a city-state with an army large enough to take on another city, to lay siege to it and conquer it. And sheer force of numbers was never possible, huge numbers like the sweeping tides of men we know fought battles in the ancient Near East. The mountain-girt valleys of the Aegean did not have the population, the surplus manpower. Homer reveals it: individual kings in the Greek forces contributed all they had, but it was often merely a few ships, a few hundred men. He gives us a blood-soaked stage, true, but we watch his heroes just as Romans watched gladiators, or as the masses of our industrial age might view a sporting fixture. This was a world of peace, gentlemen, of peace that spawned a brilliant civilization, a civilization that grew so fast and so strong that it outstripped the ability of men to destroy it with the technology at their disposal.’

  ‘There is a weakness in your theory,’ Bismarck rumbled. ‘A weakness we all know from our own age. Men hungry for power will form alliances, often to prosecute war, not to prevent it. And surely that is what we see in Homer. Agamemnon leads a huge alliance of all the Greeks.’

  Schliemann paused. ‘When I studied at the Sorbonne before embarking on my great quest for Troy, I had a thirst to know what the living world might tell about my long-dead heroes. I travelled to the islands of the Pacific, and observed the native peoples. Where their own limitation of technology and manpower prevented them from defeating each other, they ritualized their standoffs, in an entente cordiale. They exchanged gifts, women, cemented friendships. They held secret ceremonies in which the chieftains would confer, at one place recognized by all as a paramount meeting place. And whenever power was unbalanced, when a new technology was introduced, gunpowder, for example, when one chieftain had a brief ascendancy before the others had the technology as well, his first objective would be to conquer that paramount place where power had always been maintained, a balance of power that had kept the peace.’

  ‘You speak in metaphor of Troy, I believe,’ Gladstone murmured. ‘You speak of Troy, and you speak of this chamber before us. Am I correct?’

  Schliemann stared hard at them. ‘Herr Bismarck spoke of an alliance. What of this? Agamemnon, already power-hungry in his own land, straining at the leashes that keep him in his citadel of Mycenae, learns of a new technology: the technology of iron. It is not yet perfected, but he sets his smiths to work. He knows he has no time to lose before others have it too. He gambles, and embarks on his path to war before the weapons are ready. He uses all his kinship ties and his strength and he summons an alliance, one that casts its net across the Mycenaean world. They are going to the place Agamemnon has gone to before in peace, as a broker of power, as a member of a council that kept war at bay. Yes, Mr Gladstone: they go to Troy. The alliance provides the manpower to lay siege to the citadel, but not yet the weapons. On the island of Tenedos, Agamemnon’s smiths work day and night, experimenting, testing. For nine years, if we are to believe Homer, his army fought in the traditional way, individual duels below the walls of Troy, Achilles and Hector, Patroclus and Diomedes. For nine years Agamemnon bided his time, while the forges hissed and burned, while the technology he had secretly acquired was honed and perfected. One day, let us surmise, in that ninth year, some master smith discovered a way to forge a metal that was no longer brittle, iron that could be stronger than bronze. Suddenly the stage was set. The world groaned. Agamemnon unleashed hell. A thousand iron arrows flew into the walls of Troy. Then ten thousand arrows. Then ten thousand more. Forges, gentlemen, forges on the island of Tenedos, forges that once had wrought the finery of heroes, helmets and breastplates and spears of the finest bronze, burned and blasted day and night to produce these new weapons, weapons that overwhelmed Troy like a tidal wave, that unleashed the bonds on what men could do.’

  ‘And all of this because a young Trojan prince kidnapped a Greek queen named Helen?’ Hoar said.

  ‘The spark of war,’ Schliemann said. ‘A spark created by Agamemnon, perhaps. A subterfuge. In a world where high-status women were part of the web of alliances, it could have been enough.’

  ‘Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,’ Bismarck grumbled.

  ‘What did you say?’ Gladstone demanded.

  ‘What I have said to the new kaiser, seemingly to no avail. I said to him that one day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans. That will be our Helen of Troy.’

  ‘You see?’ Schliemann exclaimed. ‘We speak of a coming war as if it is inevitable. That is why I have brought you here tonight, gentlemen.’

  ‘What would you have us do?’ Hoar asked.

  Schliemann pulled a little white book from his pocket. ‘In Homer, the gods appear to shape destiny, and men are mere pawns. But that is because, before Agamemnon, the world is presented as an unchanging one, and thus one in which men appear to have no power. I believe the truth was very different. Just as it was an individual, Agamemnon, who brought calamitous war, so it was individuals before him, generation after generation of kings, who kept the balance of power, kept the peace. They were not pawns. It was their free will to shape history. We know some of their names. Atreus, father of Agamemnon. Minos, King of Knossos. Priam, King of Troy, an old king at the time of the siege, who, let us surmise, had seen Agamemnon as a young prince, had nurtured him perhaps, but then had seen something in his eyes, that smouldering fire that makes a prince an Alexander or a Genghis Khan, that only needs an extra spark to ignite and raze all before it.’ He held up the book. ‘Thomas Carlyle, our great political theorist, on how history is shaped by individuals. I have been reading him this very day. I look to our world, gentlemen, and I see a world where the power of the individual is under threat, with calamitous consequences. It is the individual who has morality, not the crowd.’

  Hoar put up his hand. ‘I speak as a citizen of the United States of America, where individual freedom, the rights of the individual, is enshrined in the Constitution. I look to Europe, and I fear greatly for the future. Mass movements, volk movements, begin on a high ideal, on ideals of social justice, but they submerge the individual, and thus the voice of common morality.’

  Schliemann nodded. ‘We live at a time when the voice of the individual is needed as at no other time in history. We stand, gentlemen, we four, in front of history, able to shape it, able to throw off inevitability, to shake off those who would have us believe that fate is not ours to control, to show that men left to their own devices are not foredoomed to destruction and war.’

  ‘And we stand at a time of changing technology,’ Gladstone said. ‘That is your point. That is why that iron arrowhead is so important.
’

  ‘The age of bronze ended with Agamemnon. The age of iron is about to end for us. We live in terrifying times. Contemplate the changes in our own lifespans, gentlemen. From muskets to machine guns. From black powder to nitroglycerine. From ships of the line to ironclads. From muzzle-loading cannon to giant breech-loading guns, capable of lobbing a shell fifteen miles. Veritable doomsday weapons. And men will fly, gentlemen. With my own eyes I have seen the “monoplane” of Monsieur Félix du Temple. Powered flight is a certainty. Men will fly. There are fearsome possibilities, gentlemen. Fearsome possibilities. The modern alchemy of science will produce wonders, but also horrors. Human guile may reawaken the oldest nightmare of them all. I speak of the plague. The plague. It may be the black death, or cholera, or a new deadly smallpox, or some frightful dormant virulence. If some necromancer can harness disease as a weapon, then truly, Mr Gladstone, the Christian God will have forsaken us, all of the gods will have forsaken us, and we will find no redemption.’

  ‘Does anything give you hope?’ Hoar asked.

  ‘You three give me hope. In the Bronze Age, in the world of Homer, we are to believe it was the champions who were the heroes, Achilles and Hector and the others. But they were not the true heroes. The heroes were the kings, those who came before Agamemnon. Let us be modern-day kings. Let us be modern-day heroes. Let us ride above the tide of history. Let us prevent another rape of Troy.’

  ‘You spoke, Mr Schliemann, of finding a key,’ Hoar said. ‘You spoke metaphorically, I surmise?’

  Schliemann let out a shuddering sigh, suddenly exhausted. He had said it. He felt an indescribable sense of relief, but also huge urgency. The wheels were now truly in motion. He gave Hoar a tired smile. ‘My dear senator. I am an archaeologist, remember? When I speak of a key, I mean a key.’ He reached into his inside pocket, to the heavy object he had been carrying in the satchel, wrapped up by Sophia. He hesitated, then pointed with his other hand down the passageway. ‘When Sophia and I dug here in secret all those years ago, I found a way through to the end, inside a natural tunnel created where blocks had fallen down from the top of the walls, forming air spaces. I saw inscriptions along the sides of the walls. Inscriptions. I could not make them out, but they seemed to be Bronze Age, pictograms, linear symbols unrecognizable to me, even hieroglyphics. And at the end, far ahead of my reach, I shoved my lantern forward and saw it. A great bronze door, the door to the chamber that must lie beyond. In the centre of the door above a metal crossbar was an angular shaped depression in a circle. A keyhole, gentlemen. And this is the key.’