the citadel.
‘Where’s Maurice?’ Jeremy said hoarsely, still staring at the wall.
‘Having his Schliemann moment,’ Dillen replied, oblivious to their discovery, stopping to glance at a pair of crows flying overhead. ‘Digging all by himself at the end of the passageway. Jack went straight from the helicopter to find him. Did you see when he passed you, Jack’s got his trusty old khaki bag with him, and it’s got a big bulge in it? He says he’s got something incredible to show me. All he said is that an hour ago it was on the sea bed. He says it has to be the right place, the right time. I told him two can play at that game. I’ve got something to show him. We’ve got a rendezvous at my excavation up on the walls after supper. Showdown time.’
‘Maurice needs to come and see this. And Jack. Like right now.’
‘See what?’
‘Be careful, James,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’re being watched.’
Dillen gave her a startled glance. ‘What do you mean?’
‘In front of Jeremy.’
Dillen followed their gaze towards the wall of rubble, perplexed. He stood back, then caught his breath. ‘Good Lord.’
A huge sculpted eye was staring out at them. It was almond-shaped, like the eye of an eagle. Jeremy snapped out of his trance and reached up to pull away a lump of compacted earth beside the eye, and suddenly the entire remaining conglomerate fell away, revealing a massive stone face. They stared in astonishment. The face was about two metres high and a metre across, and was topped by a conical helmet, cracked and broken off at the top. ‘This has got to be the image of a king,’ Jeremy exclaimed.
‘Which one?’ Rebecca said with bated breath.
‘Not a Greek one,’ Dillen murmured, staring. ‘This is an eastern king, with that conical helmet, those eyes. The Mycenaean Greek kings, kings like Agamemnon, were mortals, first among men. We don’t even have any statues of them. But this one is different. He’s a god-king, larger than life, in the eastern fashion.’ He stared more closely. ‘All-powerful, perhaps once a warrior, but this is the image of a benign king, I’d say. Not someone who flayed his enemies alive. Someone who was confident in peace, at least when this statue was made.’
‘What about Agamemnon’s adversary?’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Priam, King of Troy?’
Dillen’s voice was tense with excitement. ‘It’s possible. Just possible. Priam is one of the few characters in the Iliad who might be known from other contemporary records. The clay tablets of the Hittites – the powerful empire to the east of Troy – mention a Piyamaradu operating in this area. That name could easily be rendered as Priam. The Hittites saw Piyamaradu as a renegade, establishing his own independent kingdom, aligning himself more with the Ahhiyawa, the Achaeans, the Hittite term for the Mycenaeans. To me, this all fits very convincingly. Homer’s Priam is powerful, an old warrior, but he’s a king of peace, not a king of war. He’d enjoyed good relations with the Mycenaeans before Agamemnon came along. He’d found a way of breaking away from the warlike tradition of the Hittites and becoming part of the great civilization of the Aegean; his sons had even become heroes, champions, in the Greek tradition. Somehow I can see all that in this face.’ Dillen stared pensively at the statue. ‘But we’d need an inscription to be sure. And some way of dating this sculpture with certainty to about the later thirteenth century BC.’
Rebecca gently brushed the huge stone nose, waited a moment for the dust to settle, and then peered closely. ‘I can tell you one thing. In my lightning tour this morning, Maurice gave me a five-minute tutorial about building materials. Said it was the first thing you have to know about when you look at a new site. This isn’t the local limestone, the stuff used in the city walls. Look at the surface. It’s granite. I’ve seen that in the British Museum. All those statues of the pharaohs. That has to be Egyptian granite.’
Dillen peered closely. ‘Good Lord. You’re absolutely right. Egyptian red granite, at Troy.’
‘So how on earth does that get here?’ Jeremy asked.
‘We know the Egyptians shipped obelisks and huge stone blocks down the Nile,’ Dillen replied, thinking hard. ‘So why not overseas too? The Egyptians traded with Troy. For a people who had built the pyramids, offloading a few blocks of granite at Besik Bay and dragging them a couple of kilometres over the plain of Troy would not have been a big problem.’
‘But this isn’t the image of a pharaoh,’ Jeremy said.
Dillen shook his head. ‘No. It’s Egyptian stone, and very probably an Egyptian sculptor. The Trojans didn’t do this kind of thing. There was no tradition of monumental sculpture here. So they import the stone, and they import the sculptor too. The details, the style of those eyes, look Egyptian. But this is a local king. I’ll stake my career on it. A king of Troy.’
‘And I think we may just be one step closer to who he was,’ Jeremy said, squatting down. ‘Check this out. The sculpture’s integral to the wall, not earlier or later. The limestone blocks of the wall have been shaped around it. And look at the cut of the blocks, the slope of the wall, those vertical offsets. It’s what excited Maurice so much about this passageway. It’s the same as your excavation on the citadel, James. It’s all contemporaneous. Exactly the same construction techniques as the ramparts of Troy VII. If ever there was a Troy of the Trojan War, then this is it. And if there ever was a King Priam, then that’s him. I just know it.’
‘ Whoa,’ Rebecca said slowly. ‘We need to tell Maurice about this. Big time.’
‘James!’ The shout came from down the passageway ahead, where the side walls were still largely concealed beneath earth and rubble. Rebecca and Jeremy glanced at each other, then followed Dillen back down the way he had come. Jack was squatting down panning a torch over the unexcavated face of rubble at the end of the passageway. He glanced up at Jeremy and Rebecca. ‘You two finished for the day?’
Jeremy cleared his throat. ‘You need to come and see what we’ve found. You and Maurice, together. Something sticking out of the wall.’
Jack shone his torch. ‘You mean like that?’
Rebecca and Jeremy knelt beside him and peered ahead. Where the sides of the passageway disappeared into the unexcavated mound, there was a freshly exposed face of earth and rubble, shored up with timber planks put in place by the excavation team. Jack aimed his torch at the base of the rubble. They could see a hole about a metre high, dug back into the jagged edges of the rubble. In the centre, virtually filling the hole, was a large, shiny protrusion, as if a boulder were wedged in. Jack kept his torch resolutely aimed below it. ‘You may not want to look too closely,’ he said.
The boulder had legs with scuffed desert books sticking out of the bottom. The boulder was in fact a familiar pair of khaki shorts streaked brown and stretched taut, flying somewhere well below half-mast.
‘Oh my God,’ Rebecca said, grinning. ‘I see what you mean.’
There was a rumbling noise from somewhere inside the tunnel, and then a pause. ‘ Sheisse,’ a distant voice exclaimed.
‘What is he doing?’ Rebecca demanded.
‘He thinks we’re only about five metres from the end of the passageway,’ Jack replied. ‘The ground- penetrating radar revealed a pocket of space against the left wall of the passageway, close to the end. It’s deeply buried, but the compacted rubble may have prevented soil from filling the gaps. He’s burrowed in to take a look.’
‘That sounds safe,’ Rebecca said, looking dubious.
‘Maurice has had pyramids fall on him and has crawled out unscathed.’ Jack cracked a smile, then aimed his beam at the top of the hole. ‘There’s a stone wedged above him that acts like a lintel. I told him to go no further than that.’
‘You mean you told him to keep his butt in view?’ Rebecca peered mischievously at Jack.
‘Not exactly the words I used, but yes.’
There was a sound of intense digging and scrabbling, intermingled with grunts and curses. Hiebermeyer’s rear end shifted several inches further into the hole, plugging it completely, accompanied by a discharge of dust that completely shrouded his legs. He suddenly went still. ‘My God.’ The words were muffled, but excited. ‘ Mein Gott.’
Jack knelt down and peered in, waving away the dust. ‘Maurice! What is it?’
‘Unbelievable.’ Hiebermeyer coughed violently, a rumble that sounded like a small earthquake. ‘I can see the wall. Only a few square centimetres. But there’s an inscription on it. I’m sure of it, Jack.’ He coughed loudly. ‘An inscription at Troy. The first one ever .’
The ground shook and there was a violent discharge of dust from the hole. Hiebermeyer’s body dropped
