The Lost Temple (11 page)

“Bang.”

Reed gave Grant a severe look over the rim of his spectacles. “Are you familiar with this story, Mr. Grant?”

“Lucky guess. In my experience, when everything’s going so swimmingly, that’s when it’s time to load your gun.”

“In this case,
bang
is the literal truth. A vast volcanic eruption on the island of Thera—or what used to be Thera. Now it’s a ring of islets round a very large hole in the sea. It blew its top—must have shaken the earth to its core. You can imagine what followed: earthquakes; tidal waves sloshing around the Mediterranean like a bathtub; ash covering the islands like snow. All the Minoan cities were destroyed. Civilization collapsed.”

“But that wasn’t the end of the Minoans,” Marina objected. “They were devastated, but they weren’t wiped off the map.”

“Indeed not.” Reed paused as a steward put four cups of steaming coffee on to the table. “Once the dust had settled, so to speak, they picked themselves up and tried to carry on. But now there’s a new complication. Suddenly, Minoan culture starts popping up all over mainland Greece.”

“Maybe it got washed up by the tidal waves,” Grant suggested. Reed ignored him.

“At the great centers in Greece—Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos—Minoan art and pottery become increasingly influential. Meanwhile, on Crete we start to find all sorts of exotic foreign objects. New types of swords and spears, chariots—weapons the peaceful old Minoans never had any use for.”

Muir sipped his coffee. “Sounds to me as if the Greeks took advantage of the disaster to get one over on the Minoans.”

“Or perhaps it was the other way round,” Marina countered. “Perhaps the Minoans started making colonies in Greece.”

“Un-bloody-likely.” Muir rolled his eyes. “The tanks
come one way and lorries carrying the loot go back the other. Never changes.”

“Scholars debate this,” said Reed smoothly. “The evidence is inconclusive. Personally, I find myself agreeing with Mr. Muir. Crete was ravaged by the volcano just as the mainland Greeks were hitting their stride. It would be reasonable to expect that the Minoan survivors naturally fell into the Mycenaean orbit.”

“Just like us and the fucking Yanks. One country’s misfortune . . .”

Grant cleared his throat. “Who are the Mycenaeans?”

“Greeks,” said Marina. “From the great age of heroes.”

“Pre-Greeks,” Reed corrected her. “The era that the Greek myths hark back to and that Homer describes. The civilization of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus and Achilles. If you believe the legends. Historically speaking, they were probably a culture of warriors and pirates, a loose federation of semi-independent city states who paid allegiance to a high king whose capital was Mycenae. They flourished in the later stages of the second millennium
BC
—then, suddenly, around 1200 . . .” Reed gave Grant a pointed stare. “
Bang
. Everything was lost and Greece lapsed into a dark age that lasted five hundred years. Invaders moved in—the true ancestors of the modern Greeks, most likely. They looked at the remains the Mycenaeans left behind—the vast walls, the finely worked treasures, the intricate arms and armor . . . In the darkness of their own existence, they couldn’t conceive of men ever creating such things, so they invented myths to explain them. The massive stone foundations could only have been laid by Cyclops and giants; magical craftsmen must have wrought the jewellery; only heroes descended from gods could have wielded those swords. Like all barbarians, rather than rise to the challenge of civilization, they explained away its achievements in order to excuse the poverty of their own.”

“Though afterward those people laid the foundation for all your Western civilization,” said Marina tartly. She seemed to have taken Reed’s sermon as a personal affront. “Philosophy,
democracy, mathematics, literature. And as for the myths, there’s another theory about those.”

Muir groaned. “There’s always another fucking theory with you people.”

“The time we stop proposing theories is the time the barbarians take over,” said Reed firmly.

It earned him a more sympathetic look from Marina. “What if the myths weren’t written by the invaders?” she said. “What if they were the stories the Mycenaeans wrote themselves, remembered down the generations?”

“It seems unlikely,” said Reed. “The myths are so convoluted and contradictory—even the Greeks struggled to make sense of them when they tried to write them down.”

“What about Homer?”

“Homer was a poet.” Reed’s tone, normally mild, suddenly took on unexpected strength. “Myth was the yarn he used to weave his creation, but the result is pure . . . poetry.”

Muir yawned. “Is this relevant?”

Reed muttered something under his breath about barbarians, while Marina drank her coffee and made a sour face.

“From a crudely teleological perspective, all that need concern you is that the Mycenaeans—probably—came to Crete in the latter half of the second millennium
BC
. If they followed the usual practices of invading armies, we can perhaps assume that they carried off a number of treasures. Including, possibly, the baetyl—the meteorite. Certainly, some of the pottery we found in the cave shrine seems to be Mycenaean in origin.”

“That explains the picture on the tablet,” said Grant, glad to have something useful to say amid all the academic argument. “The waves,” he added, answering the quizzical looks he drew. “They’re in the foreground. It’s drawn as you’d see it from the deck of a ship. In fact . . .” He picked up the tablet and stared at it. The picture of the valley filled most of the space, but in the bottom right-hand corner—just by the jagged fracture where the tablet had been broken—he could make out a dark brown blob. He might have mistaken it for a stain or a smudge of earth, but the edges were too distinct.
He showed it to the others. “This could be the prow of a ship.”

“Or the tip of another pair of sacred horns,” said Marina doubtfully. “Or—anything. I told you, you can’t assume that ancient artists saw the world the same way you do.”

“We seem to have done all right so far.”

“Let’s hope your luck continues.” Muir tossed a cigarette butt over the ship’s side. “Anyway—the Mycenaeans came to Crete and did what invading armies usually do: knocked down the palaces, helped themselves to the women and looted the treasure. Then they took away our sacred meteorite—where? Why not Mycenae?”

“They could have—but I think not.” Reed glanced around. That late, most of the passengers had found space inside, but with Easter only three days away the ship was overladen with islanders travelling home. Dark lumps broke the line of the deck where men and women curled up to sleep, while further forward a group of conscripts knelt round a bollard playing cards for cigarettes. A graybearded Orthodox priest sat on a bench under a bare light bulb and spun a string of silver worry beads in his hand. Slap—against his knuckles; slap—against his palm. It was a timeless sound, as natural as the creak of the ship or the lapping of waves.

Reed leaned forward. “The Mycenaeans had nothing against the Minoan religion. The whole idea of a war of religion—fighting someone because he worships a different god, then giving him a choice of conversion or death when he loses—is a much more modern invention. Another innovation for which we have Christianity to thank. The ancients were far more broad-minded and acquisitive in their dealings with the gods. If you defeated an enemy, the only logical thing to do was to take away his relics and his holy objects and use them for yourself. No point letting divine power go to waste.”

Three long blasts from the ship’s horn underscored his words, as if the gods themselves bellowed out agreement. Grant looked over the rail. Across the water a red beacon
winked against the sea; ahead, a straggle of lights rose in the darkness. The flat deck began to come to life: men rubbing their eyes; women wrapping their shawls round them and stroking their children. Conscripts stuffed cigarettes and cards into their pockets. Only the priest sat still, forever whirling his beads.

“Here we are.” Muir drained the last of his coffee. “Lemnos.”

“According to Homer, when Zeus got tired of his wife’s meddling, he strung her up from Mount Olympus with a pair of anvils tied to her feet. Her son, Hephaestus, the smithing god, came to rescue her—so Zeus threw him out of heaven. He fell all day and landed, I imagine with something of a crunch, here on Lemnos.”

Reed waved his arm to embrace the island. They were sitting at a
kaphenion
on the waterfront, a shallow bay lined by the houses of the island’s capital, Myrina. Once it must have been bright and picturesque, but like everywhere else, the war had drained its color. Faded paint peeled off crumbling plaster; newspapers flapped over broken windows and gulls nested among the shattered roof tiles. Even the island seemed to have turned against its inhabitants: round the sweep of the bay, the line of houses was frequently broken by huge up-thrusts of exposed rock, as if a giant hand had reached out of the earth to crush the town in its fingers.

Grant sipped his coffee—mercifully they had Nescafé here, so he was spared the usual Greek mud—and kept silent. Like generations of students before him, he was quickly learning that the professor conducted his lectures on his own terms.

“Hephaestus was nursed back to life and set up his forge here with his two sons. Now—
they
are very interesting . . .”

Muir stifled a yawn.

“They were called the Kabyri. Demigods, or
daemons
as the Greeks called them: strange creatures who live in that murky space where folk tales, myths, religion and magic blur. In some way they’re not unlike the English ideas of
faeries—magical creatures with powers that fall short of full divinity.”

Muir covered his eyes. “Please tell me we haven’t come to chase fucking pixies.”

As a man who had spent most of his life in the international flotsam of diamond prospectors, special operations agents and bandits, Grant usually didn’t notice swearing any more than comments about the weather. But somehow, in Reed’s presence, he found himself embarrassed by it—like a schoolboy ambushed on the playground by his mother. It didn’t seem to bother Reed, who simply rolled his eyes as if he were dealing with a particularly stupid pupil.

“In this case your unimaginative language is unusually apt. The Kabyri were the center of a mystery cult that lasted for centuries.”

“What was the mystery?”

Reed gave a weary sigh. “Obviously it’s a mystery. Only members of the cult knew their secrets and they had to undergo all sorts of initiatory rites before they found out. In all probability it began as a sort of guild, a way of passing on the skills of the smithing fraternity. Much like the Freemasons, I shouldn’t wonder. Over time, though, it became a broader cult with all the usual mystery preoccupations: death and the underworld; life and fertility—which no doubt led to certain sexualized rituals. In art the Kabyri are often depicted with implausibly outsized genitalia. Hence your, erm, fornicating pixies.”

“It seems a bit of leap,” said Grant. “From a Working Men’s Club for blacksmiths to the local cathouse.”

“Not at all.” Reed leaned forward, his coffee forgotten. “Smithing was one of the most esoteric skills of the ancient world, much more magic than science. The furnace wasn’t just a fireplace where you controlled a chemical reaction. It was a portal, the host of a sacred process whereby simple rock ore was transmuted into the essential tools of life. Using it without adequate preparation would be like walking into a church and just gobbling down the communion bread and wine before it’s been consecrated. There would be rituals
to prepare the tools, to purify the smith, to summon up the alchemical powers from the gods. And in their eyes one of the closest parallels was with procreation.”

“Going at it hammer and tongs?”

“The sacred union of the elements of life, wrapped in the mysteries of the womb, mirrored the fusion of copper and tin in the crucible. Remember, this was the Bronze Age—they hadn’t yet discovered ironworking. Heat, sweat, blood—and of course, an ever-present risk of death. In legend, Hephaestus married Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to symbolize the union. Even today a lot of primitive cultures use worked metal as a fertility charm.”

For once, Grant looked interested. “They have the same idea in Africa. In Rhodesia we found furnaces decorated with pictures of a woman giving birth.”

“Life-giving creation,” Reed agreed. “Metal tools were the foundation of all agriculture and civilization. The man who knew the magic of metalworking wasn’t just a technician or a craftsman—he was a priest, a shaman who could commune with the gods. No wonder he kept himself wrapped in ritual and mystery.” With his eyes wide, his thatch of white hair blown awry in the harbor breeze, Reed’s demure donnishness had all but vanished. Instead, it seemed he might himself be a shaman, his blue eyes staring into an ancient, magical past to commune with its ghosts.

“Fascinating,” said Muir. He lit a cigarette. “But what about the bloody meteorite?”

For a moment Reed seemed not to have heard him. Then, abruptly, he shook himself, looked around in mild surprise and smoothed down his hair. “Well, obviously they’d have brought it here.”

“Obviously.”

“The meteorite would have been almost pure metal. Where else to bring it but the sanctuary of the Kabyri?”

Muir’s eyes narrowed. “Please tell me there’s more to go on than that.”

Reed pulled out his handkerchief, then unwrapped it to reveal a triangular fragment of pottery inside. Its yellow glaze
was chipped and cracked, but the decoration was clear enough. Framed by burning tapers against a background of stars two figures stood out in red. One was tall and bearded, the other short and clean-shaven, but each carried a hammer in one hand and a cup in the other. As Reed had warned them, each had an enormous penis dangling between his legs. “Meet the brothers Kabyri,” said Reed. “Pleasant little chaps.”

“Why are they holding cups?” asked Grant.

“Probably pouring sacred offerings—though in Greek literature the Kabyri are notorious drunks.” Reed handed the fragment to Marina. “This came from the cave shrine in the Valley of the Dead—but it isn’t Minoan. This is a Mycenaean piece and I’d wager enough claret to sozzle the Kabyri that it was brought there by the men who took the baetyl away.”