The Mask of Troy Read online

  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 heaven. 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 fi
re 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.

  4

  London, England

  The man in the greatcoat turned left off the busy street and strode into the forecourt of the British Museum, swiftly negotiating the milling groups of tourists and the puddles that had spread over the pavement like quicksilver. The drizzle that had enveloped London all morning was now a persistent rain, and he clicked open his umbrella. His phone buzzed and he stopped, holding the phone to his ear with one hand and his umbrella with the other, peering out under the brim at the imposing columns of the museum façade. He replied quickly, snapped the phone shut, checked his watch and remained still for a moment, glancing up at the pediment sculptures above the columns, at Sir Richard Westmacott’s allegorical figures depicting the rise of civilization, culminating in the central female holding a golden orb and sceptre.

  He curled his lip, and snorted. Even the gilding seemed dull in this weather. He was contemptuous of it, of the entire museum, a neoclassical folly of the first order. As a student he had been to the temple at Priene in Turkey that had inspired Sir John Soane’s design for the museum, and had seen with his own eyes the power of ancient architecture in its setting, the mastery of man over the elements. And at Linz in Austria he had traced the plan of the greatest museum ever devised, walked the streets with the blueprint in his head, populated the phantom galleries with all the works of art that had once been collected for the highest cause ever conceived. It was a museum to harness the power of the past, to radiate it, not to trap it like this one. A museum from the greatest architect of them all. A museum for the thousand-year Reich. The Führermuseum.

  He ran up the steps under the pediment, closed the umbrella and shook it, and then walked through the front door into the museum vestibule. He nodded at several familiar faces coming out of the museum, students and colleagues, faces he recognized from his lecture at the academy the evening before. It had been an exhilarating event, the culmination of a career that had seen him rise from star student to professor in less than a dozen years, and now recipient of the most prestigious medal of his profession. He had been recognized for his study of architecture in the cause of fascism. A warning from history, he had called it. He revelled in the irony. He had never made any secret of his own family’s past, his father a member of the Hitler Youth, his grandfather an SS officer. He had used it to explain his fascination with Nazi architecture, almost as if his research were an atonement, part of the upwelling of guilt in modern Germany he so despised. He had argued that the genius of Linz lay not with Hitler but with the architects commissioned to draw up the blueprint, to build the great scale model in the bunker in Berlin that had so captivated the Führer in his final days.

  But this was a lie. He knew where the true genius lay. It lay with the Führer himself, in the dream that had elevated Hitler above those who had betrayed him, those who had lost the war. The museum was his platform for apotheosis, for his ascent beyond earthly existence. Nothing had concerned the Führer more in his final hours, not even the Jewish question. The man knew the words of Hitler’s final will and testament by heart. It is my most sincere wish that this bequest be duly executed. He felt a thrill course through him. The time had come. And he would be the one to do it. The will of the Führer would be done.

  He entered the museum and veered left, past the cloakroom and into the ancient world galleries. He looked down the hall into the heart of the museum with its colossal Egyptian and Assyrian sculptures, pharaohs and god-kings and human-headed lions, and felt an upwelling of anger at this dislocated mass of fragments, at those who had ripped these pieces from the monuments and palaces that had given them meaning. He stopped before the doorway of the Bronze Age Greece gallery and gazed at the green limestone half-columns on either side, taken from the entrance to the Treasury of Atreus, the great circular tomb outside the citadel of Mycenae in Greece. He reached out and put the flat of his hand against the lefthand column, pressing against the carved zigzag motifs on the shaft. Here, at least, he felt a frisson from the past, as if the columns still retained an echo of their original purpose, guarding the treasure vault within.

  He let his hand drop and walked into the gallery, stopping for a moment in front of a case containing a dazzling collection of beaten gold jewellery and pr
ecious stones, amethyst from Egypt, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, a beautiful one-handled golden goblet. In the case beside it was a nondescript row of pots from Troy, one with a crude face in relief, another still retaining a label in Heinrich Schliemann’s own hand. Schliemann. The pots were the only artefacts in the exhibit from the fabled site. The man reflected on the fickle nature of discovery, on how so many of the great works in the museum had come to light not through scientific excavation but through chance finds, often shrouded in mystery. Schliemann had dug a great trench through the centre of the mound at Troy, and for years the whereabouts of his richest finds had been unknown. It was as if human nature - greed and deceit and ego - had added another layer to archaeology, a layer that needed to be excavated through the archives and museums and vaults of Europe, through understanding the psychology and motivations of men like Schliemann, before the truth could be revealed. That had been his task, for today. And now it was near completion. The greatest treasures would be uncovered, greater than any in this woefully sparse gallery.

  He glanced at his watch again, and walked to the case at the rear. He leaned over and stared at a large painted pottery bowl. The painting showed an ancient warship with a double row of oars; beside it were two crude figures with triangular bodies, a man grasping a woman as if leading her into the ship. He glanced at the label. It was from Thebes, in Greece, from the eighth century BC, about the time when Homer might have lived, four centuries after the fall of Troy. He looked at the pot again. He saw a reflection in the case, a presence behind him. So it begins. It was a man’s voice, quiet, a mellifluous tone with a hint of a French accent. ‘When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I went to a lecture by an eminent linguist, a Professor Dillen, about fact and myth in Homer. He used the image of this painting as a centrepiece for his argument. The pot dates from the time of Homer. But does it? Homer could have been earlier. And those figures. Are they Theseus and Ariadne, or Paris and Helen? And is that any old warship, or is it a galley of the Trojan War? Where is the truth? Can we ever find it?’