these men still make history? Or had he deceived himself? Had his passion, his yearning for more and more discoveries, his endless delay in returning to Troy, year after year, made him push this day too far ahead? Had he left it too late? He shook away the thought, and raised his hand. ‘Godspeed to you all. Until we meet again here, a year from now.’
Schliemann returned on the path past the point where he had met Bismarck, following the line of little candles, now spluttering and dying. Night winds at Troy were always disturbing, and he half imagined the rustling he heard was not the wind in the grass but the advancing Greeks parting their way through wheat on the plain below, and the sound of bare feet pattering over the smooth adobe of the streets and walls, the trembling sounds of that final night before the storm, a night when each breath could be heard. He reached the ramp up the western wall of the citadel, on the edge of the great trench they had dug through the site. He looked up at the stars and saw Orion, the hunter, his favourite. Far above him, close below Orion, he saw black birds flying silently, heading north.
He looked towards the grassy knoll on the northern edge of the citadel, and felt a rush of warmth. Sophia was still there, framed by the night sky, the wind blowing back her veil and revealing the golden belt, the bracelets, the headband, glistening in the starlight. But was it Sophia, or was he imagining another, Helen of Troy? Schliemann closed his eyes for a moment, feeling dizzy, a sound like the sea coming and going in his head. He opened his eyes and saw that Sophia had lifted up a tallow torch and lit it, sending wisps of smoke curling in the wind towards him. The flames suddenly erupted, illuminating her red dress, and for a moment it looked as though they would devour her, as if she herself would become a torch, a leaping, twisting beacon of fire, a signal into the night. Was that how it had all begun? And was the Trojan Horse real, or was it some dark force of the sea, raging, tossing its mane, turning to fire and bloody murder as it swept death towards the citadel, breaking over the beacon, carrying all before it?
He knew Homer off by heart. He thought he knew about the Trojan War. A war fought for beauteous Helen, and the wealth she brought. But had it been? He closed his eyes, and tried to conjure it, melding fragmentary images as they came to him. The sea, the colour of widow’s tears, steel-blue. Grooms beside beached ships, whispering to tethered horses not to fear the sea, then kissing and releasing them. Harpies flying overhead, bronze and iron messengers of death. He looked at his hand, calloused as he imagined Agamemnon’s might have been: the hand of Agamemnon, people-devouring king, battle-wise, lion-maned, he who knew war in all its bloody ways. The ringing in his ears became shouts, bellows, roars. Blood was everywhere, pounding in his head, cloying in his nostrils, its iron taste filling his mouth. Dark blood spurting from wounds cleaved by champions. Blood swept up from the plain and falling like a rainstorm, staining the ground black. Blood lapping against Scamander’s shore, drenching the beach, drowning the plain below the battlements, seeping up over them. Sophia, blood-red beacon, dripping fire.
Schliemann gasped as if coming up for air, leaning against the stone ramp. Perhaps Gladstone had been right. He was letting the past consume him. He looked up and saw Sophia turn and walk towards him, holding the burning torch. He pushed himself back up, and waved at her. He remembered how close he had felt to her that night years before, in the shaft grave in the far-off citadel of Agamemnon. He remembered the thrill of that moment, but also the fear, a tremulous, paralysing fear, just before he had lifted the golden mask. A fear that had been his greatest weakness, the fear of making a discovery that would cap his career but dim the light of his passion and infect the memory of all that had gone before, the exhilaration that had fuelled him. He feared a discovery that might diminish his yearning for more, and diminish the supreme fulfilment he had found with Sophia.
And there had been the other, deeper fear, a fear of what he might reveal, an awful truth about the human condition, about war. Those terrible images of blood, those dreams that always came to him up here, were more than just a vivid imagining of Homer. He remembered what Bismarck had said. Coming events cast their shadows before. Schliemann had finally realized why those images so unnerved him. It was as if the tide of the future were rolling back, and he was seeing the river Scamander not drenched in ancient blood, in the blood of heroes, but in fresh, red blood, in the blood of the children of today. It was not the past he was seeing. It was the future.
Sophia reached him, and they embraced. He held her tight, taking the torch and holding it away from them, the flame flickering in the breeze. All grim thoughts left him, and he experienced a supreme contentment. Their children were waiting. He felt a burst of the familiar adrenalin. Tomorrow he and Sophia would be here again, in the tunnel, at the crack of dawn, alone in secret with their trowels and shovels, just as they had been so many times before, knowing they were on the cusp of another discovery that they would one day reveal to an astonished world. What they found here could change history. He could hardly wait. There was no time to lose.
19
A t first all Jack could see underwater was a green haze, obscuring the forms of Costas and the other three divers in front of him. He sank to the bottom of the pool, only a few metres below the surface, and angled the headlamps on either side of his helmet, locking them in place once they had reached a convergence point about five metres in front of him. He had never seen water of this hue before. Green usually meant organic matter, algae, that would reflect the light from underwater torches, like using full-beam car headlights in a snowstorm. But here there was no reflection, just haze. He remembered what Wladislaw had said about the copper inclusions that caused the colour, evidently particles of very small size.
He could hear the suck and exhaust of the three Russians, all of them breathing hard on their regulators. The rebreathers he and Costas were wearing only needed to be vented of excess gas build-up every ten minutes or so, so were effectively closed systems most of the time that produced no exhaust. Through the intercom he could hear Costas’ breathing, calm, slow, reassuring. He knew his own breathing would conform to the same rate, a sign of a good buddy pairing. Only he and Costas would be able to talk to each other. Ben had not mentioned this to the phone contact when the arrangements had been made. The three Russians had been too concerned with understanding their own equipment, and they had evidently been briefed that he and Costas would have specialized gear. And each of them had just drunk a third of a litre of neat vodka. They were probably too drunk to care.
He feathered his buoyancy control, injecting air into his e-suit, then looked around and saw a dark smudge where the tunnel descended. He looked at Costas. ‘You read me?’
‘Loud and clear.’
‘Let’s move. They can follow, if they’re able.’
‘One of them’s breathing like a steam engine. No way he’ll last.’
‘Shouldn’t drink and dive.’
‘You getting the map on your screen?’
‘Roger that.’ Jack peered at the lattice of red lines visible in three dimensions inside his helmet, to the left of his visor. ‘Looks like we’ve got about fifty metres ahead where the railway track continues to a vertical shaft. The shaft drops way down, about eighty metres. Then at the bottom there’s another stretch of tunnel angling down at about thirty degrees, evidently the line of the natural fissure. Looks like our target area’s going to be a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty metres below water level.’
‘My computer gives us about twenty-five minutes no-stop time. If the Russians stick to plan, they’ll go no deeper than eighty metres. That means part-way up that shaft.’
‘You ready?’ Jack said.
‘We’re heading into a sump, completely submerged for a bit and then surfacing again near the head of that shaft. The railway tunnel must have collapsed at some point. I’ll go first.’
‘I’m behind you.’
They ignored the other three and swam down into the gloom, their headlamps reflecting off the walls of green halite, which had been hacked away to widen the tunnel. After about ten metres the salt gave way to bare rock, cracked and jumbled in front of them. ‘Looks like someone got a little ambitious with the pick,’ Costas murmured. ‘Remember what Wlady said, that the miners tried not to dig out all the halite to keep the walls from collapsing.’ He swam down, pulling himself along the rusted metal rails of the track. Jack could see a way ahead,
