The Lost Sisterhood (34 page)

“Aha!” Mr. Telemakhos turned his back on the bustling harbor and nodded at the coastline across the strait, less than a mile away. “Where are we now?”

“Turkey?” suggested Nick.

“And over there?”

“Also Turkey.”

“Yes-yes-yes.” Mr. Telemakhos looked a little irritated. “But in the big, overall scheme of things?”

“This is the famous Hellespont,” I explained to Nick, my teeth chattering in the brisk November wind that was funneled down the Sea of Marmara all the way—I imagined—from the Russian steppes. “The juncture of two continents. Here, Europe kisses the Orient.”

Nick looked from one coast to the other, hands in his pockets. “More of an air kiss, wouldn’t you say?”

“Take a leap of the imagination,” I countered. “And sink yourself into the romance. Lord Byron did. Swam across, like so many others.”

“Hero and Leander!” exclaimed Mr. Telemakhos, with as much headshaking
tristesse
as had they been his relatives. “She was a priestess of Aphrodite, who lived in a tower over there. Fell in love with Leander, who, unfortunately, lived over here. So, back and forth he swam, until … well, he drowned.” Mr. Telemakhos shrugged, already thinking of something else. “Who is going to wake her up?”

“Why is it always,” muttered Nick, as Mr. Telemakhos began nervously circling Rebecca’s curled shape, “the man who must do the swimming?”

“Apparently,” I said, inadvertently quoting my mother from one of her many failed attempts at talking my father into a seaside weekend, “it does wonders for the circulation.”

“Don’t worry, North Sea woman”—Nick took my frigid hands and rubbed them with his own—”there is nothing wrong with my circulation.”

I
WAS STILL MILDLY
flustered by this unexpected intimacy when we were picked up by Dr. Özlem, an old friend of Mr. Telemakhos and curator of a nearby museum. Although they greeted each other with similar joyous abandon, I saw right away that Dr. Özlem brought a soothing touch of yin to the relentless yang of our effusive captain.

Slight of build, and weighed down—I guessed—by a lifelong record of thankless labors, Dr. Özlem welcomed us all with hunched handshakes and wary eyes. We had barely piled into his dusty old Volkswagen minibus before he looked at us in the rearview mirror and sighed with slack-faced despondency. “You want to see the bracelets?” he said, in a tone that suggested we were on our way to a family funeral. “Okay, I will show you.”

The Amazon bracelets were on display in a glass case on the main floor of the museum run by Dr. Özlem—a humble set of barracks dedicated to archaeological finds in the Çanakkale region. “There,” he said, nodding dismissively at the two coiling bronze jackals, which, at first glance, appeared to be perfectly identical to my own. “Nice work, no?”

Rebecca was the first to break the baffled silence. “Are you saying these are fakes?” she asked. “Reproductions?”

Dr. Özlem stuck out his chin. “I’m afraid so.”

“But—” I had a hard time getting my head around the fact that two Amazon bracelet replicas were sitting in a random glass cabinet in Turkey. “How?”

“They were found here at Troy over a hundred years ago,” explained
Dr. Özlem, “but in those days, archaeology was primitive, and we don’t know what layer they were in. One was found in a tomb near the ancient coastline; the other was buried in the ruins of the royal palace.” He looked down at the tile floor, which clearly hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. “The past is layered beneath us, as you know, with the most recent times on top and the distant past at the bottom. Now, when our dear Heinrich Schliemann began looking for Homer’s Troy in the late nineteenth century, he was sure it must be near the bottom, and he did not care too much about the layers he dug through to get there. So you see”—Dr. Özlem straightened to take a deep, cathartic breath of air, then exhaled very slowly, possibly at the recommendation of his doctor—”things have been a bit of a muddle here ever since.”

Looking discreetly around, I saw what he meant. The layout of the room made no sense to me; in one cabinet sat items from several different time periods, and a row of pedestals displayed busts that had almost no features left, and —understandably—did not even have tags of identification.

“I know,” sighed Dr. Özlem, following my gaze. “But only a few of our cabinets have locks on them, so we have to put safety above chronology.”

“We generally refer to Troy as having nine layers,” interjected Rebecca, mostly to Nick. “Schliemann was convinced the Trojan War took place in the very early, deep layer called Troy 2, but nowadays there is a tendency to regard the much later Troy 7a as
the
Troy. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, quite a bit of Troy 7a ended up in Schliemann’s junk pile. He did find gold, though”—she made a grimace of reluctant appreciation—”and that did a lot to encourage funding for further excavations.”

“So,” said Nick, “layer 7a was Homer’s Troy?”

Rebecca’s eyes lit up. “Don’t get me started.”

“Yes,” I urged. “Get her started. Please.”

“The thing is”—Rebecca glanced at Dr. Özlem with timid deference—”we’ve all gravitated to 7a because it seems to be the least implausible theory. But I promise you, no one would put their head on the block over it. Would they?” Seeing Dr. Özlem’s little nod and smile,
she went on, with more conviction, “If we are looking for a Troy that was truly spectacular, with tall walls worthy of Homer’s descriptions, then Troy 6 absolutely dwarfs the competition. But the problem is that everyone has been looking for a Troy that was destroyed by war …
also
in the interest of remaining true to Homer. And that seems to have been the case with layer 7a. However, in my humble opinion, the actual settlement of Troy 7a was only a sad remnant of the spectacular city that once was—hardly worthy of a ten-year siege. Furthermore, Troy 7a was probably destroyed around 1190
B.C.E.,
which, in many people’s opinion, is far too late. How could the Greeks sail off to war with a thousand ships when they themselves were in the process of being eradicated? It doesn’t make sense. In fact, the picture that emerges is that those were the final days of civilization as they knew it; illiterate brutes were sweeping across the Mediterranean coasts in waves of destruction, and the whole region was thrown into a dark age that lasted for several hundred years until the Greeks basically reinvented the alphabet around 800
B.C.E.”

I clapped my hands. “See? Bex has it all figured out.”

“Hardly.” Rebecca shrugged a nervous apology at Dr. Özlem. “I am just guessing, like everyone else.”

“So,” said Nick, “if it wasn’t layer 7a, which was it?”

“Aha!” Rebecca held up a finger, eyes gleaming. “Now, as I said, if you look at the actual layout of the city, Troy 6 stands out as the most impressive of them all. This is where the tall walls are, and where the citizens lived in a fair amount of comfort. Furthermore, Troy 6 was destroyed about a hundred years before Troy 7a, namely around 1275
B.C.E.,
which makes far more sense to me. The
only
problem is that we believe Troy 6 was ruined by an earthquake, not by war. But suppose it was not actually an earthquake—” She flushed charmingly as she neared the climax of her theory. “Suppose it was a battering ram. Or, should I say, battering
horse
?” She pressed a hand to her mouth as if to contain her own exuberance, and looked eagerly around at us all, waiting for someone to get it.

“I see,” said Nick, nodding slowly. “You think the famous Trojan Horse was actually a giant battering ram?”

“Think about it!” Rebecca went on, in another rush of enthusiasm. “It
can’t
just have been a big, hollow horse made of wood. What Trojan would be so unbelievably daft as to think, ‘Aloha! What a nice parting present from those bloody Greeks’ and open the city gate to pull it into town? Seriously?”

“I like it,” nodded Mr. Telemakhos. “But I always like crazy theories. What do you say, Murat? Could it have been an enormous battering ram rather than an earthquake that brought down Troy 6?”

“I will have to think about it.” Dr. Özlem drew up his shoulders a bit. “After more than a century of digging, we have many theories, and I have heard them all.” He turned his head to stare out the window, which was grimy with dust and condensation. “Sometimes I wish this was all still just a farmer’s field. Why are we so eager to turn a beautiful myth into reality? I don’t understand.”

Only when he left us to have a word with one of his employees, who had left a glass case unlocked, did Mr. Telemakhos get a chance to explain the circumstances that had so soured his old friend’s relationship with archaeology.

“He spent twenty years writing to people all over Europe, trying to have all the Trojan artifacts returned to the area and put into this newly dedicated museum.” Mr. Telemakhos gestured at the modest building complex surrounding us. “And he was quite successful. Many things were sent here, among them these two bracelets. But unfortunately, only a few months after the museum opened, it was discovered that some of the most valuable artifacts had been removed and replaced with fakes … and suspicion fell on Özlem. For eight years he struggled to clear himself, always in danger of going to jail. Local authorities dropped the case against him only when he became ill, three years ago. Still today, he has enemies who call him a thief, and most of the valuable objects that were left in these buildings have been sent to other museums, where they have better alarm systems.” Mr. Telemakhos leaned closer, anxious that his old friend should not overhear him. “I fear they are going to close the museum. That would be his hemlock.”

I turned to Nick, who stood right behind me with his arms crossed, looking suitably grave. “Treasures stolen by us evil Westerners,” I said
to him. “Returned to their homeland, only to be then lost forever. Tell me again, is that really what you want?”

“Oh, they are not lost forever,” said Dr. Özlem, rejoining us and carrying a tray of small teacups. “We know where they are. Mint tea, my friends? I’m afraid we have no chairs.”

“Have you ever thought of applying to the Aqrab Foundation?” asked Nick, taking a cup.

Dr. Özlem waved the empty tray in the air. “Oh, no. They are bullies. When they give money, they want to throw their weight around, telling you what to do.” He shuddered. “I don’t like to be told what to do. Not by bullies.”

Nick didn’t look particularly insulted at the accusation; his wry smile suggested he had heard it before. “Maybe that’s what you need,” he said, swirling the teacup, which looked absurdly small in his hand. “A few bullies on your team.”

More hunched than ever, Dr. Özlem glared at Nick as if he had not really noticed him before and was now wondering whether yet another plague was about to be unleashed on him. “Maybe. But I’m an old man—”

“Excuse me,” I said, anxious to save Dr. Özlem and bring us back on topic, “but how do you know these bracelets
are
indeed fakes?”

Dr. Özlem put aside the tray and unlocked the glass cabinet. “There,” he said, handing me one of the coiled jackals. “Normally, it takes an expert to tell, but look at the inside, under the head. What do you see?”

I stepped closer to the window and inspected the bronze. “Nothing.”

“Precisely.” Dr. Özlem held out his hand, waiting for me to give him back the bracelet. “In the originals, there were tiny engravings. Three small symbols in that one, two in the other.”

I was so excited, I couldn’t let go of the jackal. “What kind of symbols?”

Dr. Özlem looked at Mr. Telemakhos, nodding as if they had planned the moment beforehand. “There you go. Now do your magic trick.”

Mr. Telemakhos turned to the cloudy window and drew two symbols in the moisture with his finger. They were both familiar to me—were both from Granny’s Amazon alphabet—but the word itself was new. “This was inscribed in the first bracelet,” he said.

Flabbergasted, I stared at the two symbols. Here finally, it seemed, was the proof that the bracelets and the symbols were indeed linked. Did all the jackals have these engravings? Did mine? It had never occurred to me to check. “Two syllables,” I said, breathless with excitement. “The owner’s name? It
must
be.”

“It gets better.” Mr. Telemakhos drew another three symbols, then turned to me expectantly. “This was the name inscribed in the other bracelet—”

Nick beat us to it. “Our three-syllable priestess queen,” he said, sounding strangely disappointed. “Myrina. She really did make it to Troy.”

“This is incredible!” I felt like taking Nick by the shoulders and shaking him. “We really
have
been on their trail.”

“Yes,” he said, with regret. “And this is where it ends. Poor Myrina, who came so far to die.”

W
E ALL WALKED THE
ruins of Troy in the sunset, marveling at the idea that this remote hill surrounded by grain fields, with its confusing rudiments of ancient masonry, had once been a beacon of civilization.

Perhaps in an attempt to spare Dr. Özlem a lecture he had undoubtedly given hundreds of times, Rebecca took it upon herself to walk us through the ruins. “As you can see,” she explained, leading the way through a maze of ancient walls and foundations—some still surprisingly tall, “the city expanded over time, and the ramparts spread out accordingly, like rings in the water, to accommodate the growth.”

“So, which Troy is this exactly?” asked Nick, looking at the remains of a massive tower.

“Troy 6,” said Rebecca, hands on her hips in a posture of ownership. “
The
Troy, in my opinion. That was when this entire outer wall was built, together with several enormous buildings. Don’t you
agree”—she looked at me for support—”that these are the walls worthy of Homer’s Troy?”

“The problem,” said Dr. Özlem, “is that nothing significant was found in that layer. At least not to my knowledge.”

“Except a gigaton of brick,” muttered Nick, mostly to me.

“It is possible,” Dr. Özlem went on, ripping a few weeds from one of the walls and absentmindedly stuffing them in his jacket pocket, “the Greeks came many times. And who knows, maybe the earthquake was what helped them take Troy in the end.” He looked at Rebecca, slowly but surely cheered by the opportunity to speculate. “Maybe you are right. Maybe it was Troy 6. It was certainly of great importance, strategically.”