The Tomb of Zeus (26 page)

“Which has proved useful at times of war, certainly, but has more often these past years been a source of embarrassment.” Aristidis gave a smile of boyish mischief.

They had reached the building and, talking calmly to disguise her excitement, Letty took a moment to absorb the changed perspective. She stood with her back to the vestige of a doorway, looking towards the east. “And in Minoan times, the times of our temple, from this open doorway, you'd be looking straight down the colonnade. Far enough away so as not to pollute the holy space, near enough to keep a spirit eye on processions and ceremonies. Check the priests were offering up the right colour of bull…that sort of thing…In its unassuming way, it offers a commanding position.”

Aristidis began to clamber over his despised property, slapping it with his hands, seeing it with fresh eyes. “Look at the lintel! It's been carved out of the living rock! So heavy that was probably the only way they could get it up there. Then it's been propped by these two massive flanking stones. All masonry straight out of the hillside, you'll notice. Four yards—would you say?—in diameter…circular layers of stone courses, not all that well dressed. One might have assumed—one did!—that it was the work of unskilled shepherds. What have you seen?”

“We'll see it more clearly in slanting light…this evening? But I could swear there's an indentation, a straight line running across the field from here to the temple complex.”

“Dromos!”
he exclaimed.
“Dromos—
the pathway. A long disused pathway. We farmers have always approached—well, as you see, by this path here on the opposite side.”

They stood grinning at each other in deep satisfaction. “Will you go and tell Mr. Gunning?” said Aristidis.

“No,” said Letty. “I'm sure he'd rather hear the news from you. But—tell him to drop everything and send a digging party over at once. We've got hours of today left and it's a very small building.”

When he left her alone, Letty turned to the dilapidated stone hut and addressed herself to Zeus. “Well, hail, King of the Gods! If you're in there, mate, let me tell you—you're about to see the light of day again! And—may I ask you not to start hurling thunderbolts about and quaking the earth in a fit of pique? You know what you're like!”

She swallowed, suddenly hearing her words replayed and shuddering at their unfeeling flippancy. Her lèse-majesté. The gods didn't take that lightly! She risked being turned into a laurel bush or even worse—something small and disgusting. Gunning might yet come along and, all unknowing, uproot her or put a foot on her. And he'd never have the satisfaction of knowing. Letty reined in her unruly fantasies. She thought she would never have been able to explain to anyone but Phoebe the ancient compulsion that made her run back to the lunch basket and ferret about in it until she found what she was looking for. She returned and stood awkwardly in front of the hut.

A spoken formula was called for. Her mind skittered over the word “prayer,” discarded it, and settled on “sentiment.” Knowing nothing suitable, she dredged up an imperfect memory of a translation she'd worked on at school. The closing lines of
Medea.
“Six out of ten. Rather too free an interpretation of the text.” It would have to do.

“Olympian Zeus, all powerful!
Controller of Man's destiny!
What we mortals expect to happen, rarely comes to pass,
And it is the unexpected that lies in the hands of the gods.

“Greetings, er…Sir…and please accept a small gift. It's all I could find, but perhaps not unwelcome after all these years.”

Finding a fissure in the rocks just before the entrance, she stood astride it and held out her hands. From her left, she poured out the remains of a bottle of red Arkhanais wine and with her right, she upturned a jar of honey, watching until the last drop had slipped down into the ground.

A libation. Well, it couldn't do any harm. And he might be glad of the sustenance.

The diggers were organised to work in pairs, one digging, one shovelling, the numbers restricted by the small space available inside the beehive. All were eager to find something substantial before they went off to their homes. Aristidis had lined them up and called for volunteers to work an hour or two overtime until the last of the light. Every man had stepped forward. Four—keen young men with no farms or flocks to run—had offered to return the next morning. Catching Aristidis's look of pride in his team, Letty understood that there was more than the prospect of a few extra piastres to be reckoned with. The men desperately wanted an opportunity to outsmart Theodore Russell. This would undoubtedly please Aristidis, their respected Kapitan, but they had pride of their own to be restored. And there was something more, which she recognised from the gleam in their eyes, from their concentration and the lapse of habitual banter, as a deep concern for the job in hand. They would have worked through the night without the lure of piastres. Their enthusiasm matched her own.

“Double overtime for any man who stays on—whether he digs or not,” she announced boldly.

Aristidis, whose first impulse as overseer was prudently to question this, hesitated, then nodded, a victim also of the general fever.

Gunning's hands, Letty noticed, were tense with the effort of restraining himself from snatching the spade from the diggers. And Letty herself was unable to keep still and detached, moving around, supervising more closely than necessary the sieving of
every shovelful of soil that came out of the little building that Aristidis had firmly renamed a
“tholos.”
A tomb.

The wind dropped and children's voices raised in the excitement of a game floated up from the valley. The slanting sun was throwing a gauzy veil of copper-gold over the whole headland, and the sea was a perfect mirror of the azure sky when the moment came.

A
conical structure sixteen feet high and twelve at its base had been revealed by the efforts of men working around the exterior and excavating down to its foundation layer of three-foot-long limestone blocks. The pairs working inside, whose area of operation was more constricted and consequently more back-breaking, relieved each other frequently and settled freshly to throw the dirt and detritus of centuries into a wheelbarrow in front of the entrance. The floor level dropped steadily but little of interest was revealed. Spiro's grandfather's spectacles saw the light of day again to much merriment; three tobacco tins and a packet of postcards from Port Said followed, but nothing of archaeological importance.

Not until, to joyful exclamations, reddish pottery sherds came to light, alongside a handful of dull faience beads. Aristidis pounced on these and, shaking his head in disappointment, pronounced them—Roman.

“Roman?” Letty asked without thinking. “What would
Romans
be doing up here?”

She resented their presence. Pushing their eagle noses into everything…Roman—a word to stir the blood at any other time and in any other place. But on a Minoan peak sanctuary? No! Here, Roman traces were an aberration, a distraction. The thought was instantly squashed by the imagined reproving and scientific voice of Andrew Merriman. “Open mind, Letty! Open mind!”

“Who knows?” Aristidis shrugged. “Perhaps it was Saint Paul having a picnic? Come to make certain that if there
had
been a Zeus, he was well and truly buried? No—it was tomb robbers, I believe. Undoubtedly these are their traces. I think this building must have been the subject of robbery from the very earliest days. I must ask you to prepare yourselves for disappointment. I expect it all started with the Minoans themselves. Any grave goods would have been noted at the time of the burial, as with the Egyptian Pharaohs, and quietly removed when everyone was looking the other way.”

One of the digging pair stuck his head out through the doorway. Through the layer of dirt, Letty recognised the bright eyes of Demetrios. “Kapitan! We're down to original floor level. Nothing under our feet now but bedrock. What do you want us to do?”

Before anyone could commit himself to calling a halt, there was a squeal from inside the beehive. The voice of the youngest digger was heard calling to Demetrios to help him and chattering excitedly with Gunning, who had squeezed in with his measuring tape. They listened by the doorway, peering into the gloom and seeing nothing when, after a moment, Demetrios's shaggy head reappeared, grinning. He held out an object in his right hand.

What had she expected? Gold necklace? Silver altar cup? Not this, at least. Brown with age, but recognisably—an upper leg bone.

Letty blinked to see the size of it. Two feet long and three inches in diameter, it was the leg of a giant or a god, she thought. Then, hastily pulling herself together, she tugged at Aristidis's sleeve. “Didn't you tell me one of these blokes is a butcher in his real life?”

He was there a second before her and already turning to call out: “Spiro! Come over here, lad, and cast an eye on this, will you?”

Spiro jumped to his feet, pleased to earn his piastres, and looked knowingly at the bone. “Horse,” he said, seizing hold of it. “Shall I chuck it away?”

Shouts and oaths from all around persuaded him to think again.

“Grab a basket and stand by to receive more of the same,” shouted Gunning from inside. “Bones. Collected together on something I can only describe as a sort of pottery serving dish of medieval proportions…”

“Where, man?” Aristidis yelled back. “Exactly where? It's important now! Mark where you find them! Is the plate decorated?”

Gunning came to the lintel and peered out. “The wall opposite the entrance, backing onto the rock face,” he said. “There's a pile of—what did you decide—horse?—bones on a platter in the centre right up against the rear wall. Decorated—yes! Geometric: spirals, wavy lines, rosettes, that sort of thing. Nothing out of the ordinary.” And then…“Christos is just getting it out…and there's a further one piled up also, in a sort of niche built into the rock. Obviously an offering any tomb robber can well resist! Not attractive! But—interesting. Wouldn't you say—interesting?”

Aristidis could contain himself no longer. He pushed himself into the hut, flinging out the diggers and Gunning in swift succession, and came out a minute or two later, holding bones in each hand.

Spiro did his bit. He enjoyed the limelight for a little longer this time, selecting a piece and turning it this way and that before pronouncing: “Jawbone. And what a jaw! Cow? No! Much too massive. More like an ox or a bull,” he said, turning them this way and that. “Yes, bull, that's what this was. Big old feller! But what's he doing down there in bits?”

“I'll tell you what!” said Aristidis. “Marking a grave. Animal sacrifices. Two animals. A bull and a horse mark the spot. And they would only have been offered up to a personage of the highest importance—someone of the royal blood. Or a god! It may have been well and truly robbed in ancient times, scoured clean, you might say, but I think we've found it! The so-called Tomb of Zeus!”

His positive tone sounded unconvincing, even to Letty's ears. They had made a find of some archaeological importance, they knew that—burials of any sort were a rare discovery on the island-but their expectations had run higher. Looking around at the drooping shoulders and the hastily averted faces, Letty wondered crossly whether this might not just be a further piece of calculated tormenting by Theodore, and decided she was being unfair. Not even he could have predicted this emptiness following on such a surge of hope. Could he? She reined in her thoughts. She recognised in herself the quality Gunning had objected to—an over-readiness to blame him for everything based on very little but her instinctive dislike.

Gunning was looking anxiously at the sky. “We've missed something!” he declared. “I'm sure of it. Hard to explain…it's something architectural that's nagging at me…something to do with proportions. Hang on a minute, will you?” He began to encircle the tomb from the outside and then put his head inside again, measuring with his eye.

“Look, Aristidis, I'm just going to burble out loud and you must tell me to shut up when it becomes unbearable! Those bones were still piled neatly—they hadn't been moved. Not worth the effort even if any intruders had noted them. They were centrally placed on the rear wall. Round the back, on the outside and in a position corresponding to the place of the bones, the diggers have taken all the earth covering off. And there's a sort of slab that you could take as being just a natural piece of limestone. But—take a look and see what you think—I think it's been dressed. It's a crude little building but this stone has had some attention from the mason, you'd say…”

He spoke into the air as Aristidis and Letty scampered off to have a look. They returned a moment later, bursting with comment yet politely leaving Gunning to finish his interrupted sentence.

“And it all leads me to wonder whether we might be contemplating a bit of Minoan cleverness? They must have learned a few tricks from the Egyptians after all, with their close cultural contacts. Could even have been the other way around, I suppose?” he finished, flirting with a further will-o'-the-wisp idea. “I think there may be a side chamber, carved out of the rock. This kouskoura's not very resistant…carves easily. If there is, wouldn't you guess that's where the burial proper was located? And the odds are that it's undisturbed.”

The men murmured quietly to each other, gripping their spades, ready for the next onslaught. But: “There goes the last of the useable light,” said Aristidis, coming to a decision. “If we hang on any longer, it'll be dark before we get back to the village and I'll have your wives to reckon with! I agree with all that you have to say, William. However—we'll just have to test the strength of our theory by the morning light. If you have no objection, I think I'll double the guard tonight?”

He called the men together, a bone-weary but still spirited crowd, to go over in a few words their achievements and set out his hopes and expectations for the next day's dig. Eager now to get back to their own firesides to tell their tales and recover for whatever tomorrow might bring, they made their way back to the goat sheds to clean equipment and leave all ready.

Dutifully, Letty stayed behind with Gunning, who'd settled down at his drawing board, insisting on bringing his records of the last few hours' excavations up to date without delay. The light had been too difficult for supporting photographs and he was anxious to produce an adequate set of sketches. In the end, she had snatched the pencil from his hand and called a halt.

“William! I am not paying
you
overtime, you know. You may stop work now.”

“Whatever makes you think I'm working for
you?
” he said coldly, pausing to snatch back his pencil and sharpen it. “Pass me those lamps, would you, Letty? You're off now, are you? You'll have to step out a bit to catch up with Aristidis. Here, take my flashlight. There's still a bit of juice left in it.”

She sighed with resignation. Then she set off by herself in the twilight to follow the well-known path back down to the village, hearing the merry shouts and conversation of the men half a mile ahead and lower down the hillside.

Laetitia was distracted from her path by the stunning beauty of the headland. She had never lingered there after sunset but found herself lured past the temple remains and on, almost to the edge of the precipice, tracing the deepest indigo of the eastern sky, through an arc over her head and on to the bronze glimmer that still outlined the rim of the western sea. In the distance she could make out the lights of Herakleion and closer, in the valley bottom, lamps were being lit in the village houses. A chorus of women's voices was raised, musical calls summoning children inside, shouts announcing that supper was ready, fetching in men from the gardens, reassuring, ordinary, and ancient. Somewhere on the hill behind her a goat bell tinkled and from the olive groves below was answered by the
coo-coo-vay
of the Little Owl of Athena.

And then the nightingales came onstage. Two of them, calling to each other, as far as she could work out. From this height it sounded like an inspired duet, improvised on the wing over a lemon orchard, a love-lure, liquid and enchanting. The purity pierced through her, bringing shivers and tears and she stumbled, whispering, through a few lines of Keats's ode to the bird:

“The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn…”

“Bloody birds! Shatter your eardrums! Disputing territory, I shouldn't wonder,” said Gunning's voice in her ear. “Probably just as well we can't understand what they're saying to each other!”

“Well, I love them! The nightingale's song is so pure it could quench your thirst!”

“I wish you'd come away from the edge, Letty, you make me nervous.”

He grabbed her by the arm and tugged her some feet away over to a slab of rock still warm from the sun and, with a cursory “May I?” he sat down beside her.

So far things were working out as she'd planned, but she remembered that with William Gunning nothing was ever predictable. Any other man of her acquaintance who'd caught her interest would be moving smoothly to whisper in her ear, hold her hand, drape his jacket around her shoulders, and, under cover of it, pass a tentative arm around her waist. It would all lead, at the very least, to a kiss. And here was the man who'd occupied her waking thoughts for the past year hauling her about and subjecting her to a rant against nightingales. Perhaps if she could just keep quiet for long enough he would explain himself. Even confess that he'd got fond of her.

The unexpected hug the other day had settled two questions. Firstly—her own feelings, about which she had remained confused. She had wrapped her arms around him and held him gladly, not wanting to be separated from him. A fragile thing on which to base your hopes, when your head told you with certainty and frequency that this was a man quite unsuitable for the involvement you had in mind. He was much older than she was—fifteen years, perhaps? He had no money or prospect of ever having any as far as she knew. His past was littered with incidents too dreadful to confide, apparently, and he was still in the throes of an unresolved conflict and conversation with the God he had repudiated on the battlefield.

He was not a man you could boast about to your friends and family. Her more worldly friends, concerned and puzzled, had delicately suggested a reason for his reticence. “Er, had you thought, my dear, that he may well be a man's man? They do exist, you know…the kind who only seek out male company…overgrown schoolboys, regimental types who never marry. They don't all have the self-knowledge of an Oscar Wilde and some go to the grave never even realising…”

The hug had been close enough and long enough for Letty to establish that this was not one of Gunning's problems, and had given her hope.