The Lost Temple (21 page)

“Pemberton had his opinions. I disagreed. I don’t think a committee of poets could have come up with those poems. I think it would have needed a single mind, a single vision, to create something with such cohesive brilliance. But there’s no doubt that the poet—or poets: I’m not saying that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were necessarily written by the same chap—had a lot to work with. A treasury of myths, genealogies, folk tales, memories and traditions. Some of the elements in the poems are almost uncannily accurate—rivers that Homer could never have seen because they’d silted up by his day; types of arms and armor that had been out of use for half a millennium when he wrote. You’ve seen the boar’s tusk helmet that Schliemann excavated at Mycenae? Perfectly described by Homer.”

He must have noticed her attention wandering; he shook his head and straightened his tie. “I’m sorry. The point is, with regard to the
Odyssey
, that the poet had a number of different traditions to draw on.”

“Well, he seems to have used them all—and mixed them up completely. In some parts of the
Odyssey
Odysseus seems
to be sailing around the Western Mediterranean; in other parts he’s somewhere near Egypt; and books ten to twelve are filled with symbolic elements—clashing rocks, sirens, the islands of the sun—which are usually associated with the Black Sea region. Which is ridiculous! How can he expect us to believe that Odysseus—the cleverest of the Greeks, after all—would sail east into the Black Sea if he was trying to get home to Ithaca?” She sounded personally affronted by the idea.

“That’s probably why Homer is so vague about it. After all, it’s not as though he’s got no sense of geography. He can be as precise as the Ordnance Survey when he wants to. He’s stuck all these different stories together and he’s trying to paper over the cracks.”

Marina sighed. “As if we needed someone to make things more obscure . . .”

They both looked up as the door banged open. Muir strode in. “Any progress?”

Reed scratched a bushy eyebrow. “Marina and I were just discussing the many facets of Homer.”

“Jesus Christ.” Muir sank into a wooden chair. “Can’t I leave you to get on with things? You’re not going to find the answers in fucking poetry. Not unless Homer wrote a long-lost sequel explaining where this shield was buried. Preferably with a map.”

He pushed back his chair and rested his injured leg on the table. “I cabled London about our friend Dr. Belzig—the German archaeologist—to see if he was known to us. Turned out they’ve got a file on him as fat as your cock. He was a paid-up member of the master race—one of Hitler’s pet boffins, sent out to prove their crackpot theories. Did some work on the Cairo excavations in 1938, sniffed around Sparta the following year, then took himself to Cephalonia in the autumn of 1940. Spent the war on Crete. Numerous allegations of him using slave labor on his excavations there—locals compared him unfavorably to the Gestapo.” He glanced at Marina. “As you know. Shame we didn’t get our hands on him.”

“What happened?”

“Saw the writing on the wall in 1944 and fled to Berlin.
Perhaps he thought his beloved Führer would save him. Wrongly, it turned out—just meant that the Russians nabbed him instead of us. London says he was last heard of heading east on a very crowded train to Siberia.”

“Do you think he told the Russians about the tablets?”

“If they thought to ask him. Based on recent events, I’d say they probably did. Which is why I’d be grateful if you stopped playing around with poetry and concentrated on translating that fucking tablet.”

He glared at Reed—a wasted effort. All through the conversation Reed had been staring at the page in front of him as if hypnotized by it. Now he blinked twice and looked up, a puzzled smile on his face. “I’m sorry?” He paused, mistaking Muir’s silence for a sign that a question had been asked. “I was just wondering if this library had a
Chrestomathy
.”

Grant stared down the barrel of the gun. One eye squinted back, just about all he could see of a face almost completely buried in a thick black beard. In his flat cap, serge trousers and woollen waistcoat, he reminded Grant of the gamekeepers who had patrolled the woods on the local estate during his childhood. Now, once again, he’d been caught poaching.

“
Pios einai
?” the man growled. Then, in heavily accented German: “
Wer sind Sie
?”

“Grant.” Moving very slowly and smiling all the way, he holstered the Webley. The rifle followed every movement. In Greek, he said, “We are looking for the . . .” He paused. What were they looking for? Watching the man with the gun, he could see that every second’s delay only made him twitchier. “. . . the diggings.”

Something rustled in the trees. Grant tensed—how many more were there? From the corner of his eye he saw Jackson’s hand creeping toward his pocket. But the Greek had noticed it too. The gun swung round and the finger tightened on the trigger. Jackson let his hand drop back against his side.

The noise in the thicket grew louder. Something was moving behind the bushes. Grant tensed.

With a snuffle and a grunt, an enormous pig pushed through the branches, shuffled down the slope and began rootling around the base of one of the hillocks. Grant and Jackson stared in amazement.

“Eumaios,” said the Greek, pointing to the pig. “I bring him to eat acorns.”

“What’s he saying?” Jackson demanded. His arm was tensed, as if an invisible piece of elastic was drawing his hand toward his gun.

“He’s just feeding his pig. Pigs,” Grant corrected himself, as four more trotted out of the forest and began combing the earth for treats. He smiled at the swineherd. “
Kali choiri
.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him he had nice pigs.”

The Greek lowered his gun. “
Kali
,” he agreed. “The acorns make the meat very sweet.”

“Someone else came to dig in this ground once. A German.” Grant looked him in the eye. “Was it here?”

The swineherd gave him a crooked look. “You are German?”

“English.”

“
Ela
.” He leaned the gun against the tree and reached into the canvas bag slung across his shoulder. His hand emerged with a loaf and a slice of cheese wrapped in cloth. He tore off a hunk of bread and offered it to Grant.

“
Epharisto
. Thank you.” Grant unclipped the canteen from his belt and offered the man a drink. Together, the three of them sat on the grassy bank and watched the pigs feeding among the heaped-up piles of earth.

“The German . . .”

“Belzig. His name was Belzig.”

Grant’s pulse quickened. He tried not to show it. “Did you know him?”

Again that suspicious look. “Did you?”

“No.” Grant weighed his options for a second and decided to go for it. “But we have something that belonged to him. Something he found here.”

The swineherd pried an acorn out of the ground and tossed it to the nearest pig, who snuffled it up enthusiastically. “Look at this,” he said, sweeping his arm across the clearing. “So much history buried underneath. We spend our lives to try to dig it out, but always the present buries it again.”

“What’s he saying?” Jackson asked plaintively.

“Did you dig here?”

The Greek nodded. “Yes. I work for Belzig. Not a Nazi,” he emphasized. He tapped the breech of his rifle. “I kill many. But before—before the war—I work for Belzig. I dig for him.”

“What did you find?”

“Rocks.” The swineherd pointed to the stone foundations poking out of the earth like teeth. “Old rocks.”

“Pottery?”

“Pots, yes.” He tore off another hunk of bread and chewed it noisily.

“And a tablet? A clay tablet, about . . .” Grant made the dimensions with his hands. “So big. With ancient writing on one side and painting on the other?”

The swineherd put down his bread and stared Grant hard in the face. “You have seen it?”

“A picture,” Grant prevaricated.

“
Ela
.” A faraway look came into his eyes. “We know it is special when we find it. Belzig’s face, it was like a wolf. He says that nothing like it is ever found. He says it is the secret map to hidden treasure. Hah.” He spat. “He should keep quiet. Socratis hear him.”

“Who’s Socratis?”

“My cousin. He works for Belzig also. One night he goes into Belzig’s tent and steals it. Belzig is very angry—he wants to shoot everyone. But he never finds Socratis.”

“What happened to Socratis?”

“I think he takes it to Athens to sell it. Is the war coming, we are very hungry. Stealing from Germans . . .” He shrugged. “They steal more from us.”

“Did Socratis ever come back?”

“No. My uncle say he joins
andartes
. Germans kills
him.” He tossed an acorn in his hand and gave a sad smile. “So, Belzig has revenge.”

“What about Belzig? Did he come back?”

“No. He takes away what he has found—maybe to Germany, I think. He never comes back to Cephalonia.”

Grant thought for a second. “And this piece he found. You’re sure there was only one? Not two?”

“Only one. And Socratis steals it.”

“What’s a fucking
Chrestomathy
? Sounds like a disease you don’t want to tell your wife you’ve got.”

Reed’s face remained open and courteous. Only a small twitch at the corner of his mouth hinted at his disgust. “It’s a book—or was. It only survives in fragments now.”

“More fucking fragments. How are they going to help?”

Reed gave a thin, tested smile. “It may just give you what you want.”

“A dictionary of Linear B?”

“The long-lost sequel to Homer.”

Reed hauled himself out of his chair, rubbed his ink-stained hands on his trousers and pulled a long drawer out of the card catalogue. He flicked through the yellowed index cards, muttering to himself. “Here we are.” He looked around at the stacked shelves, a man at a station trying to pick out a face in the crowd. His gaze gradually rose higher, until it came to rest on the topmost shelf of a bookcase that must have been twice his height.

“I’ll get it.” Marina wheeled over a ladder. It creaked and wobbled alarmingly as she climbed. Reed stood on the bottom rung to brace it, while Muir tried to look up her dress.

“If it’s the long-lost sequel, why’s it in the card catalogue? Don’t tell me no one’s thought to look there for the last two thousand years?”

Reed ignored him—so completely that Muir began to wonder if he’d actually spoken out loud. Stretching precariously on the top rung, Marina prised out a thick hard-bound book. A cloud of dust rose off the shelf; she sneezed, lost her
balance and flailed around desperately. That didn’t help. The ladder swayed like a pendulum, creaking so loudly Reed was sure it must collapse in splinters. With a small shriek, Marina let go of the book and grabbed on to the frame.

The book dropped like a stone and landed in Reed’s arms with a thud. He winced, set it aside and held the ladder until Marina had got down safely. She tugged down her dress, which had risen up over her slip in the commotion.

Reed laid the book on the table and cracked open the cover. Two dead flies fell out of the title page.

“Maybe it hasn’t been borrowed for two thousand years,” quipped Muir.

“The
Chrestomathy
is a literary anthology: a sort of classical
Reader’s Digest
. It was put together by a scholar named Proclus—about whom we know almost nothing—around the fifth century AD.”

As Reed turned the pages, the others saw that it was no ordinary book. It was more like a scrapbook, made up entirely of small squares of typed paper cut out with scissors and pasted on to the blank pages. Often they had peeled away and been stuck back down with tape. It seemed to be a work in progress: many of the clippings had been scored out or amended in ink, or had new excerpts painted over them. Some were no longer than single sentences; others ran to complete paragraphs. All were in Greek.

“This is a collection of the fragments that survive.” Reed ran his finger down the page.

“Fragments—you mean scraps of parchment or paper or whatever they were written on?”

Reed shook his head. “Very occasionally. Far more often they’re small pieces of the text that come down to us through quotations in other works that have survived more or less intact. Think of Shakespeare. Even if we didn’t have complete texts of any of his plays, we could still reconstruct them—partially—from all the subsequent scholars who’ve quoted them. Some of the quotations would overlap, in which case you could piece them together; for others you could guess
their approximate position in the play by knowing something about its plot. Time and history try their best to erase our human endeavors, but they’re hard to get rid of completely. They endure, like pottery shards embedded in the soil. Here we are.”

His finger came to rest on a long excerpt that almost filled the page. “The
Aethiopis
, by Arctinus of Miletus.”

“I thought you said it was by this fellow Proclus,” said Muir.

“Proclus wrote the
Chrestomathy
,” Reed explained patiently. “But he was only summarising other authors—in this case, Arctinus of Miletus. Later, some of the scribes who copied out the
Iliad
added excerpts from Proclus as supplementary material.”

“It’s so tenacious,” Marina marvelled. “Almost like a virus, copying itself from one host to the next until it finds one that survives.”

“Never mind that,” barked Muir. “What does it say?”

“We should call the cops.”

Grant stared at Jackson. They were walking back down the hill, their boots crunching on the twigs and acorns.

“His cousin stole this thing, right? So he probably knows more than he’s saying. The way I figure it, we get the local boys in blue to bring him in for questioning. They’re probably chumps, but who cares? Maybe they can soften him up a little. Either way, it puts him just where we want him.” He caught Grant’s incredulous gaze. “What? I read your file. I know what you did in the war. The girl, too. Is that shit true? She must’ve been some piece of work.”