The Lost Temple (43 page)

A nasty thought crossed Grant’s mind. “You don’t think they’re about to set off . . .”

“
Ivan
?
Bistro poidyon!
”

A pale figure had appeared at the main entrance, standing over the door Grant had kicked in. He had a tommy-gun in his hands but it wasn’t raised. He stood there for a moment, staring at them stupidly—and, stupidly, they stared back. Then he turned and ran.

“
Nein!
” Belzig, who was nearest, dropped the helmet and ran through the door into the passage beyond. Grant heard feet clatter up the stone stairs, then angry shouts and a shot.

“No—wait.”

Grant threw himself to the side of the room a split second before the explosion. From outside, a deep, booming roar shook the dome of the temple; it rolled down the passage and burst into the room like an ocean wave. The bronze door was
torn off its hinges and flung across the chamber; the lamp fell over and went out. Darkness swallowed the room. A great cloud of dust and debris blew in through the door, billowing out to fill the high vault. Jackson, who had been standing in front of the door, was snatched up by the blast and hurled against the back wall in a blizzard of stone. Rocks rained down; Grant covered his head with his hands, while Marina hid herself under the shield. Only Reed, safe in the side chamber, was spared.

Grant didn’t hear the noise subside—his ears were still ringing—but he knew the worst was over when the floor stopped shaking. He peered through his fingers, then looked up. Dust and smoke still choked the room, but at least the rocks had stopped falling.

He got to his feet and staggered over to Marina, trying not to twist his ankle on the debris strewn across the floor. By the entrance, a pool of water was spreading across the floor. “Are you OK?”

She couldn’t hear him—he couldn’t hear himself—but she understood. She nodded, then felt her leg and winced. “Maybe not so good.”

“We need to get out of here.” Grant found the tommy gun on the floor where Marina had dropped it. Its barrel was bent like a paperclip. He kicked it aside and ran to the entrance, splashing through the shallow puddle that had formed round it. It was a testament to the ancient builders’ skill that the vast door frame remained intact. The lintel alone must have weighed a hundred tons.

Grant peered round the corner and blinked. The top of the staircase had been blown open: it was no longer a tunnel but a deep trench open to the sky. The roof had fallen in, and huge slabs of rock now formed a steep ramp up to the world above. Water slopped over the edge and trickled down the slope, a new stream flowing between the cracked boulders and rubble into the temple. Somewhere underneath it all, he supposed, was Belzig.

He waited a moment, watching for movement. He saw none—but then, he couldn’t see much. Billowing clouds of
dust still filled the air, diffusing the sun into a muddy half-light. He would have to risk it. But not without protection.

He ran back to where Marina lay and ripped the coverings off the shield. Leaned up against the wall, to the side of the door, it had been well protected from the blast. He spun it round. The leather strap, if it had ever had one, had rotted away long ago, but there were two brass rings sticking out of the back. He slid his arm through them and lifted.

The weight was immense. Grant wondered how any man could ever have carried it into battle and still managed to wield a sword or a spear. Perhaps, he admitted, Achilles had been worth his reputation. But it was better than being shot. He walked back to the doorway, resting the shield against his thigh, and checked the passage again. Still nothing but smoke and dust. He edged through the door and began to climb, picking his way over the rubble. It was slow, awkward work: keeping the shield in front of his body as he dragged himself up the broken slope. The rocks grew larger; the cracks between them widened. But the dust was thinning, the light getting brighter. He scrambled up the final incline, his feet slipping and sliding on the wet stone, and staggered into the light.

The first thing he saw was the bodies. Whether it had been a stray bullet or whether the Russians had panicked when they saw Belzig trying to escape, the charges must have gone off too soon. Two Russian soldiers lay sprawled on the ground like abandoned toys, bloodied and battered. Dust gathered in the creases of their uniforms.

He heard a sound behind him and spun round, bringing up the shield to cover his chest. That saved his life. The shield shuddered with the impact, and Grant’s body with it; dirt and corrosion flaked away to reveal gold and bronze underneath. But it didn’t break.

Grant looked over the shield’s rim. Kurchosov was standing a few yards away, beside one of the monolithic statues. The explosion must have surprised him too: his uniform was torn, his face smeared with dirt and blood. His eyepatch had been ripped away to reveal the scar beneath: a puckered
contortion of skin that twisted together into a knot where the eye should have been. He looked dazed.

Grant lifted the Webley and shot him through the eye. The .455 caliber bullet went straight in. Afterward, Grant could have sworn he heard the hiss of hot lead sizzling on the eyeball for a fraction of a second. A geyser of blood erupted from the socket, and the rock walls around them echoed with a hideous roar. Grant shot him twice more and the noise stopped.

Beyond the corpse, at the base of the statue, something moved. Grant looked up, just in time to see a shadow disappearing behind it.
Muir
. He crouched down behind the shield, glad to rest its weight on the ground, and aimed the Webley at the pillar. The barrel fanned from side to side as he wondered whether Muir would come right or left.

“Give up,” he called. After so much noise, his voice sounded stark in the misty silence. “Kurchosov’s dead.”

No answer. Grant slipped his left arm out of the shield’s loops. Balancing it against his knee, he picked up a small rock and threw it toward the pillar. It skittered across the rubble and came to rest at the foot of the statue. Still there was no response.

“Muir?”

Something grated on the stone behind him. He turned; the shield overbalanced and fell on the ground with a resounding clang. He lifted the Webley—and stopped himself just in time. It was Jackson—but not the Jackson who had breezed into the hotel in Athens in his white tennis shoes, all sunshine and pomade. His hair was wild, his clothes torn. His face, under the blood and bruises, was pale as a ghost. He clambered out of the hole and stared numbly at the gun pointing at him.

“Shit.” The voice was dead, past caring. “Not you too.”

“I thought you were Muir. He’s . . .”

Grant’s head whipped round as he heard rapid footsteps beyond the pillar. He sprang to his feet. Through the haze of dust he saw a dim figure sprinting away. He loosed a shot—then, when the figure kept going, he started to run.

The air cleared as he descended the valley. Now he could see Muir plainly, his coat-tails flapping behind him and his wiry arms jerking spasmodically as he scuttled toward the top of the cliff and the waterfall. He still had a gun. Grant saw him start to turn and immediately fired the Webley. It was a wild shot: he had little chance of hitting him while running at full tilt, but it changed Muir’s mind. He put his head back down and carried on.

But he could not go far. He came to the top of the cliff and stopped. Grant slowed to a walk. Muir turned. If he’d raised his pistol even an inch, Grant would have shot him right there. Instead, Muir held it away from his body and let it drop over the edge of the cliff. The two men stood there for a moment, face to face, breathing hard.

“Mind if I smoke?”

Grant nodded.

Muir reached into his jacket and carefully took out the ivory cigarette case. He snapped it open. When he’d lit the cigarette, he threw the match into the stream. The current caught it and propelled it over the waterfall. Muir watched it go. “You’ve chosen the wrong side,” he said without bitterness. “You’ll see. The Yanks’ll ruin everything.”

“I didn’t choose any side. You chose me.”

Muir took a long drag on his cigarette. The smoke seemed to inflate him somehow: he stood up taller, lifted his chin. “I suppose they’ll hang me when we get back.”

Grant shrugged. “We’re not at war—not officially.”

“Better if we were. Then they might shoot me. At least I’d die with a fucking cigarette . . .”

“
You Red traitor asshole son-of-a-bitch
.”

A blur of movement rushed past Grant and flew at Muir. Muir lifted his fists to defend himself but it was only a gesture, without strength. Jackson’s momentum carried him straight into Muir’s body. They wrestled for a moment on the edge of the cliff; then, locked together, they fell.

Grant rushed to the edge and looked down. He was just in time to see the splash—then nothing. The black water closed over them. A few minutes later he saw their corpses bob to
the surface by the spout where the pool poured into the stream. The bodies teetered for a moment on the lip of the weir, then vanished.

Grant turned back. As he did, he felt his foot kick something. It slithered across the damp rock and came to rest on a patch of moss. Muir’s cigarette case. The dull ivory stared at him like an eyeball on the black moss, white as death.

Oxford. Trinity Term 1947

Homer never intended that the shield of Achilles should be considered as an actual, literal object. The shield, as described in the
Iliad
, is meant as a metaphor for the world—a flat disc, made by a god, surrounded by the Ocean river, in whose compass lie all the stars, sun and moon; war and peace, commerce and agriculture; work and leisure; gods, men and animals.”

The undergraduate looked up nervously. He’d padded this paragraph out a bit in a slightly desperate attempt to eat up tutorial time. So far, his tutor didn’t seem to have noticed. It didn’t occur to him that his tutor might be quite as eager as he was to let the tutorial slip by painlessly.

“But, in reality, this glittering artifact is forged from words, not metal. Clearly, the poet expects his readers to suspend their disbelief during the
ecphrasis
. Such a cumbersome weapon would have been wholly impractical on the field of battle. For all its poetic depth and power to dazzle, we must—with regret—dismiss the shield as fiction, a triumph of Homer’s imagination, written at a time when the technical practice of Bronze Age warfare was merely legend.”

Reed stared out of the window. Outside in Turl Street, women in summer dresses flirted with men in blazers and flannel trousers. Behind the college walls, croquet balls knocked each other on the immaculate lawns. Reed was oblivious to it. In his mind’s eye he was at the top of a cliff,
straining on a rope with Grant as they tried to lower the shield without dropping it in the pool. He was tripping his way back down the overgrown stream, splashing through the shallows as he tried to support Marina with her broken leg. He was back in the lagoon, scrambling into the seaplane, praying no more Russians would come.

He realized his student was waiting to continue, deferring his essay to whatever great thoughts Reed’s distant stare portended. Sometimes, he decided, there were distinct advantages to having a reputation for abstract brilliance. He smiled. “Go on.”

“What is significant is the fact that Homer gives the shield to Achilles. He seems to be saying that Achilles grasps the entire world in his hand. When he fights, it is the world itself which shivers under the blows.

“In this age of atom bombs and a National Health Service, the unbridled violence and haughty elitism that Achilles embodies may fail to rouse our sympathies.” The undergraduate glanced up, wondering whether this was too daringly relevant, if his ethereal professor had ever heard of either atom bombs or a National Health Service. “Odysseus, the man who prizes wit over strength, who suffers for ten years to return home and save his family, seems a more realistic hero in this country, in this century.

“But, I suggest, if we are to build a better world, it is Achilles who offers the parable of salvation. True, he spends much of the
Iliad
governed by rage, heedless of the destruction it wreaks on those around him: his fellow warriors, his friends, even his most intimate companion Patroclus. But the poem is the story of his
humanizing
, his journey away from unthinking anger into an understanding of his responsibilities to the world.

“In metaphorical terms, we all exist on the shield of Achilles. When the warriors gird themselves for battle we tremble. If we are to survive the new perils of the modern age, we must hope that the destructive rages which drive men can be tempered by reason, by engagement and most of all by compassion.”

He shuffled his essay back together and put the papers down.

From his wing-back chair, the professor looked as if he might be asleep. “Tell me,” he said at last, “do you believe in Homer?”

The undergraduate looked alarmed. He hadn’t prepared for that question. “Well, erm, Mr. Schliemann’s finds in Turkey obviously pose some questions. And Mycenae.” He thought desperately—and, to his surprise, found an answer. “I don’t believe it actually matters.”

A white eyebrow rose in surprise. “No?”

“The poetry is what matters. That’s real. It’s survived intact for two and a half thousand years, much longer than anything made of metal or wood. And . . .” He tried to think of something to expand his point. He was saved by a knock at the door.

“Beg your pardon, Professor. There’s a gentleman in the lodge to see you. Says he’s come from London.”

Reed didn’t appear surprised; he’d expected this ever since he got back to Oxford. There was no point delaying the inevitable.

“Would you mind coming back in an hour?” he said apologetically. “I shan’t be long.”

Hardly able to believe his luck, the undergraduate picked up his essay and darted out of the room. A few moments later the porter showed in his visitor, a young man in a blue suit who sat forward on the sofa and held his hat.