The Lost Temple (15 page)

“I suppose we can try.”

Picking their way over the loose stones, they worked their way toward the summit. From the ridge it had looked like a normal hilltop, but as they edged round its shape changed. The far side seemed to drop precipitously—then, as they came a little further, they saw that there was no far side at all. The whole face had been hollowed out under the summit, so that the hill swept over like a wave poised to break. The cavern underneath must have been at least a hundred feet high. Nestled inside, almost hidden in its shadow, was a tiny whitewashed courtyard with a church against its far wall.

“Sacred places,” murmured Reed.

Marina nodded. “It’s almost as if nature made it for this. A giant rock womb—or a furnace.”

“Even looks a bit like a volcano, if you squint,” Grant conceded.

“And look.” Marina pointed to the gatepost. On a mosaic in the wall, blue tiled letters spelled out AΓIA ΠANAΓIA on a golden background.

“
Ayia Panayia,
” Reed elaborated. “A title of the Virgin Mary. It means ‘All Holy.’ It emphasizes her aspect as God’s partner in the conception of Jesus. If you’re inclined to think heretically, you can derive it back from the ancient cults of an all-powerful, all-fertile goddess who herself gives birth to gods.” Reed saw Marina’s appalled look. “From an anthropological point of view, of course.”

They passed through the open gate into the small compound. The air went suddenly cold as they came under the shadow of the hill, and the noise around them deadened. The only sound was the splash of water, pouring from a spout in
the wall shaped like a serpent’s head into a marble basin. Grant sniffed it and smelled the familiar odor of rotten eggs. “Sulfur.”

But Reed and Marina didn’t hear—they were already at the church door. They tried the handle and the door swung open. Grant followed them in.

It was a simple church: a low, oblong room with plain walls, slit windows and a barrelled roof. Skeletal bundles of dried flowers quietly disintegrated in the corners, and a few red glass jars clustered on the step by the altar, though the candles they held had long since burned out. At the back of the church a single icon of the Virgin Mary stood facing toward them, her legs apart and her hands held up as if in blessing. The infant Jesus peered out at them from a golden circle in her stomach.

“If you think there’s something familiar about that pose, you’re entirely correct.” Reed pulled out Pemberton’s battered journal and turned to an early page. An ink sketch leaped out: a wasp-waisted woman with long skirts, bared breasts and a snake writhing along her outstretched arms. “The Minoan mother-goddess.”

“She’s got better tits than the Virgin Mary,” said Grant. He didn’t look at Marina, though in the corner of his eye he saw her cross herself.

“And look at the Christ figure. He seems to be inside her—in her womb.” Reed made a half-turn, taking in the whole church. “Are you familiar with the Hindu concept of the
avataram
? Aspects of the gods’ incarnations change, but the underlying truths are eternal.”

Marina frowned. “If you’re going to dismiss two thousand years of Christian teaching, could you at least do it outside?”

“New religions are terrible magpies—they love to build on the foundations of the faiths they’ve barged out of the way. Both theologically and physically.”

“Are you proposing we demolish this church?”

“No. But we do need to do what the archaeologists do.”

“What’s that?” asked Grant.

“Get to the bottom of things.”

Reed paced the length of the room, staring at the heavy stones paving the floor. Three yards back from the altar, he suddenly went down on one knee and started scrabbling at something. Marina and Grant crouched beside him. An iron ring was set flush into the floor. Reed pried it up and tugged. Nothing moved.

He turned and looked apologetically at Grant. “Would you mind?”

Grant planted one foot on either side of the stone, crouched and heaved. The cracks around it were thick with dirt—it must have lain shut for years—but it slowly yielded to his pressure. A crack opened and Marina slid the blade of the shovel inside. Together they heaved and levered the stone away until they had opened a hole wide enough to climb through. A dark chasm loomed below.

“I wonder what’s down there?”

Grant took one of the glass candle holders and dropped it through. It thudded against something hard, but didn’t break. Reassured, Grant swung his legs through the hole and lowered himself down. He had only reached shoulder height when his feet touched solid ground: his head was still sticking up through the church floor and he had to wriggle down to see underneath. He struck a match.

He was standing on a beaten earth floor, in a low chamber whose dimensions seemed to be the same as the church’s. All around him stone pillars sprouted out of the ground to support the church floor. Some were intact, still crowned with ornate capitals, but others had obviously snapped at some point in the past and been cemented back together, or repaired with crude fieldstones. Strands of straw scattered the ground and a few tools lay resting against the far wall. Grant could make out a masonry trowel, a bucket, a rake and a scythe. Otherwise, it was empty.

“Is there anything down there?” Reed peered in, his face almost completely blocking the light from above. At the same time Grant felt the heat of the flame burning toward his fingers. He dropped the match and was suddenly in darkness.

“Nothing except some gardening tools. There’s a scythe—does that symbolize something? Death?” Grant thought of the weathervane on top of the pavilion at Lord’s. “Time?”

“The caretaker probably uses it for cutting the grass.” Reed disappeared and the blue-tinged daylight filtered back in.

“We’ll have to start digging.”

They fetched the donkey. Muir came too. Grant hung the lanterns between the supporting pillars, while Marina drove a row of stakes into the ground about a yard back from the innermost wall. In the flickering lamplight they crouched on the earth floor under the altar and stared at the walls.

“The church is Byzantine,” Marina explained. “But these foundations are Hellenistic—about 200
BC
, when a lot of the mystery cults flourished.” She pointed at the crudely cut stones mortared together. A few of them seemed to be missing and layers of flat bricks filled the gaps. “You can see where they were repaired when the church was built. But it’s possible that the site goes back considerably further than that.”

She indicated the line she had staked out. “This is the north wall of the church. But I think there’s evidence that the sanctuary was reorientated during the Christian period so that its altar would face east.” She swept her arm round, pointing out each of the walls in turn. “Do you notice anything about the south wall?”

Grant stared, trying to probe the shadowy recesses where pillars blocked the lamplight. “The stones look smaller—and they’re not as well put together.”

“Exactly.” Marina looked pleased. “This was probably added later to partition the existing foundations into something small enough to support the church. It’s likely the courtyard gives a more accurate outline of the original temple’s dimensions. In which case the sanctuary would have been somewhere near here.”

“Then let’s get started.”

It was slow, aching labor. Unable to stand upright, they
had to stoop low and attack the packed earth with short, ungainly jabs. After a while, once the ground was broken, they evolved a system whereby Marina, Reed and Muir filled the bucket with soil, which Grant then hauled away and tipped out on the hillside. The air in the cellar, stuffy to begin with, grew stifling. Marina knotted the tails of her blouse together round her midriff, while Grant stripped off his shirt and worked bare-chested. Even Reed removed his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

Grant was just taking out another bucket of earth when something caught his eye at the foot of the hill across the valley.

“What’s that?”

“What?” Reed was lying in the grass, resting while Muir spelled him. He was staring right at it, though he didn’t seem to have noticed. Grant could never quite be sure what he was seeing.

“There.” It came again—a series of sparkling flashes, winking at them from the edge of a ridge, near a blackened pine tree. Grant tried to count them, wondering if it could be some sort of message. But to whom?

“It might be a scrap of cigarette foil, or a piece of broken glass,” Reed suggested.

“Or someone watching us.” Grant pulled on his shirt and buckled the Webley round his waist. He made his way down the slope, picking a cautious path through the tangled scrub and loose stones. He had to watch his footing carefully; when he looked up he couldn’t see the flashes any more.

He crossed a small stream at the foot of the hill and began climbing up the far side. As he got closer to the ridge he slowed. He could see the black branches of the burned pine tree poking over the escarpment above. A breeze stirred—and among the wildflowers and grasses he smelled a wisp of tobacco smoke. Someone must be there. But he heard nothing.

He crept to his left, edging his way round the ridge to try to get round the back. A butterfly flitted across his path; the bushes around him buzzed with the sounds of bees and flies.
Anywhere else, it would have been a perfect day to lie back in the grass with a cold beer and a girl. He gripped the Webley tighter.

With a sudden roar a motor kicked into life on the ridge above. Forgetting caution, Grant ran the last few yards up the bank and looked down. A cloud of dust was slowly settling on the dirt track that wound away behind the next hill. Grant ran down it and round the corner—just in time to see the blur of a motorbike disappearing out of sight. He stared after it for a moment—but there was nothing he could do.

With a curse, he walked back to the hillside. A little hollow indented the slope, just behind the ridge that looked across to the hooded mountain top. A section of grass had been flattened there and half a dozen white tubes littered the ground. Grant picked one up and sniffed it, then squinted down the cardboard barrel. They were cigarette butts—but a good inch of the cigarette was hollow, as if the manufacturer had only been able to afford to fill half the tube with tobacco. Cheap tobacco at that, Grant thought, smelling it.

There was only one place Grant knew where they made such awful cigarettes. He’d smoked a few himself during his brief stint on the Eastern Front, as much for warmth as for the nicotine. The five men they’d sunk in the bay obviously hadn’t been the only Russians on the island.

“They’ve been watching us.”

“Damn.” Muir threw his cigarette butt into the marble basin. It hissed and fizzled out. “How long were they there for?”

Reed blinked. “I’m afraid I never noticed them.”

“Well, pay more fucking attention from now on.” He turned to Grant. “Do you think they’ll come back?”

“Maybe. After the other night, they’ll be careful about getting too close.”

“Let’s hope so.”

The day grew darker. Clouds rolled in from the west, brooding over the hooded hilltop. On one of his trips to empty the bucket, Grant saw the sun low between the clouds
and the sea, a furious crimson mess. The next time he emerged it was gone. Night fell, but the cellar remained in perpetual lamplit twilight. The trench against the wall was almost two feet deep now: when Grant came down the others looked like dwarves toiling in the bowels of the earth.

Work slowed. They had exposed the upper foundations and come down to a lower level, broad slabs laid without mortar. Now the ground was harder, filled with as much rubble as earth. They had to remove it piece by piece. Soon their hands were chafed raw, their nails split and their muscles in agony.

At nine o’clock they paused for supper. They sat in the courtyard, shivering slightly in the cool air, and ate the bread and cheese the hotel owner had given them that morning. There were no stars.

“How far down have we got?” asked Grant.

“Those ashlars—the big stones—are very old.” Marina had Reed’s jacket wrapped round her shoulders and her eyes were glazed. “We must be close.”

“If there’s anything to find,” Reed cautioned. His earlier exuberance had vanished, broken by the sheer effort of their labor. “It might be in another part of the temple—or this might be the wrong place altogether.”

“Only one way to be sure.” Grant took a last swig of water and picked up a spade. “I’ll dig.”

But his effort was short-lived. He had only been working for a quarter of an hour when he felt a jarring impact. He knelt in the trench, scraping away the soil with his fingers to try to find the edges of the rock he had hit. All he felt was stone. Soon, working with hands and spade, he had uncovered an unbroken rock surface that ran from one side of the trench to the other.

Marina unhooked one of the lanterns and lowered it into the hole. “Bedrock.” She swore under her breath. “This must have been the floor of the original temple. You can see the marks where they used chisels to level it.”

“At least we don’t have to dig any deeper.” Grant let the spade drop to the ground and rubbed his blistered hands together.
“It’s too late to get off the hill now. We’ll have to go back in the morning.”

Grant collected the equipment and passed it out to Reed. Marina ignored them. She stood waist deep in the trench and examined the ashlar wall, occasionally sweeping away the crust of earth with a small brush. When Grant had handed up the last of the tools, he turned. Marina was crouched beside the wall, her face inches from the stone as she traced something with her finger. But it was her face that really stopped him. It shone with a fierce concentration, and her dark eyes were wide with awe.

Grant’s weariness fell away in an instant. He scrambled across the low room and joined her in the trench. She didn’t say anything, but grabbed his hand and pressed it against the wall. Her skin was warm against his, the stone beneath it cold. She moved his hand down the wall in a slow, sinuous arc. “Do you feel it?”

He did—a curve of tiny ridges carved into the rock. He took his hand away and stared closely. Three thousand years had worn it down to almost nothing, little more than a shadow, but his hand had told him what to look for. He traced it again, a crescent moon turned on its side. A pair of bull’s horns.