outline of low sandy cliffs flecked with spray. They were over there, Dillen, Hiebermeyer, the others, at fabled Troy, where the tendrils of fact and legend seemed forever to dance around each other, sometimes drawn close by a new discovery, by a fresh wave of belief, but then as quickly blown apart by doubt and uncertainty. Jack knew that history was sometimes best left that way, where the reality of events was unclear even to those who witnessed them. But Troy seemed to demand more than that. There had been a darkness here, a truth about the human condition that had lured people for generations, since archaeology was in its infancy. Jack remembered one of the first things Dillen had taught him. History was about individuals, about individual people making decisions. The cold facts of history, the artefacts that Jack cherished, were his key to getting into their minds. And he knew it was not gods who had set the Trojan War in motion, it was men. One man above all others.
For weeks now Jack had been putting himself in the mind of Heinrich Schliemann, poring over his publications, visiting his home in Athens, exploring the ruins of Mycenae, the site of Schliemann’s other great triumph. But always he had felt the presence of another, a towering, shadowy figure whose steps Schliemann had tried to follow, a giant among men from the age of heroes. It was at Mycenae that Jack had first tried to go there, standing alone in the ruins of the Bronze Age palace, on the edge of the grave circle where Schliemann had found the famous mask, staring out towards the sea where the king of kings had set off at the head of a thousand ships. Broad-shouldered Agamemnon, cattle-stealer, earth-smiter, sacker of cities, who knows war in all its bloody ways. What had Agamemnon seen? What had he done? What had made him come here, to Troy, to set in motion the war to end all wars, the war that would obliterate civilization, that would reduce men to their most base condition?
Sunlight streamed through the door as the ship changed position, obscuring his view of the shoreline. If Dillen had been there and not taken him down a notch, Rebecca would have done. She was out there too, learning the tricks of the trade from Hiebermeyer. Jack had missed seeing her at the briefing. It was now nearly two years since her mother had died, since he had taken over responsibility for her, but already those years when she had been brought up apart from him were receding into the background. He tried to keep her mother close in their memory, and there was much that reminded him of Elizabeth too, the dark eyes, the vivacity, the determination. But there was a Howard in Rebecca as well. Dillen said he had seen the same light in her eyes, the same drive. Jack hoped she had a dose of the Howard luck. Maybe together they could crack this place.
‘Okay, Jack.’ Costas reappeared at the door, and shut it behind him. ‘We’ve got fifteen minutes before the divemaster wants us in the equipment bay.’ He walked back to the front row of seats and sat down, a glint in his eye, then jerked his thumb towards the picture on the screen. ‘So what’s this really all about? You can tell me. Your old buddy Costas. Everyone else has gone. What’s the scoop, man? What’s the treasure?’
Jack pretended to look affronted. ‘The treasure’s in the ideas. In the revelations about the past. The lessons for the future.’
‘As if.’
‘Where did you learn to say that?’
‘Your cool daughter. It’s what she says when I tell her that one day you’re going to put up your fins, and pass all this on to her.’
‘She’s only seventeen, you know. And our greatest discoveries lie ahead of us.’
‘Let’s talk about the here and now, Jack. Come on. The treasure.’
‘Okay.’ Jack paused. ‘You remember those lumps of charcoal – as you called them – we found all those years ago on the beach near Troy? The ancient ship’s timbers? Well, I’ve always wanted to find more, to prove that Bronze Age galleys were built using the same edge-joined mortice-and-tenon technique as the galleys of the Greeks and Romans. That would help prove the reliability of Homer, too. If we can push the technology of Homer’s age, about the eighth century BC, back four centuries or so to the likely date of the Trojan War, then that makes it all the more likely that the history of the war was real too, that it wasn’t being made up by the bard. The more threads we have like that, the more the truth is locked down. So that’s what I want. A wreck with enough hull to prove it’s a galley, not a merchantman, and a nice big section of joined planking. And some keel, too. Icing on the cake.’
‘Jack.’
‘What?’
‘You can’t kid me. Jack Howard doesn’t get a five-million-dollar special grant from IMU, talk about nothing else for months on end, book Seaquest II for an entire summer and assemble the biggest team of experts we’ve ever fielded, just to find a lump of soggy timbers. It just doesn’t happen.’
Jack sighed dramatically. ‘You really want to know.’
‘You bet.’
Jack jerked his thumb at the screen. ‘It’s the next image. I would have told the team, but I didn’t want someone talking and the press getting hold of it. This project’s already front-page news. We’d have every treasure-hunter and pirate in the world descending on this place.’
‘Go on.’
Jack took a deep breath. ‘Okay. In the Iliad, Achilles lends Patroclus his armour, but then Hector kills Patroclus and strips it off him as a trophy. So Achilles’ mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, goes to Hephaestos, god of the forge, and has him fashion new armour for Achilles. The centrepiece was a magnificent shield, covered with images. Homer devotes almost two hundred lines to it. It’s the first time in literature that an object is described in that way, as a work of art. The shield beguiled later classical authors, from Hesiod to Virgil, as well as modern writers. W.H. Auden wrote a poem about it.’
Costas cleared his throat. ‘You mean this? Auden’s talking about the images Hephaestus is creating on the shield, watched by Thetis. Instead of beautiful cities and flourishing fields, he creates “an artificial wilderness, and a sky like lead”.’
Jack stared at him, stunned. ‘You never cease to amaze me.’
‘My English teacher at school in New York. Dead Poets Society, and all that. It must have sunk in while I was doodling submarines. I liked the “ships on untamed seas” bit.’
‘You were a member of the poetry society at school? You? ’
Costas fidgeted. ‘Never underestimate an engineer.’
‘Does your inseparable buddy Jeremy know this?’ Jack flipped open his phone. ‘He’s over there at Troy now. This is breaking news.’
Costas clamped a hand over Jack’s. ‘Does the world know that the famous marine archaeologist Jack Howard gets seasick?’
Jack stared at the phone, sighed and snapped it shut. ‘Touche. Just no more secrets.’
‘It wasn’t a secret. It was a hidden depth.’
Jack grinned, looked at his watch, and carried on. ‘You’d be surprised by Jeremy’s reaction. But back to Auden. He’d gone as an observer to the Sino-Japanese war in 1938, and worked for the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany in 1945. He’d seen the reality of war. For him, it was an all-encompassing horror that obliterated everything around it, that neutered images of life, of light and colour. A painting of Auden’s poem would be monotone, grey, with none of the gold and silver in Homer’s description. Imagine those black and white photographs of bombed-out cities of Germany, or images of the death camps, all colour sucked out of them.’
‘So what do you think the shield might have looked like?’ Costas asked.
Jack tapped the laptop keyboard. Lanowski’s bathymetric map on the screen transformed into the image of a magnificent circular shield, gold and silver, its surface divided into concentric circles densely populated with figural scenes. Costas whistled. ‘Now that’s more like it. That’s what I call treasure.’
‘Here it is according to the Italian artist Angelo Monticelli,’ Jack said. ‘He followed Homer’s description by showing a figure of divinity in the centre, then five concentric circles – zoomorphic representations of the constellations, then those two registers showing vignettes of people in city and pastoral scenes, some playing music. The figures look classical, too late for the Bronze Age. But Monticelli finished this about 1820, before anyone knew what Mycenaean art looked like. Many people still thought Homer’s world was entirely mythical. It was more than half a century before Schliemann was to discover Troy and Mycenae.’
‘Do you think Schliemann knew of this image?’
‘As a boy in Germany he’d been fascinated by a picture in Georg Ludwig Jerrer’s Universal History for Children, showing Aeneus rescuing his father Anchises from burning Troy. Schliemann knew the lure of treasure. He’d made his fortune in America on the back of the California gold rush, in the early 1850s. But it wasn’t greed that propelled him to Troy and Mycenae, it was a fascination with the power and meaning of artefacts, the people behind them. That’s why the image of the shield would have fascinated him. It’s why I’ve always felt I understood
