Читать книгу City of the Lost - Will Adams - Страница 23

‘The Homeric Question,’ said Karin doubtfully. ‘Are you sure?’

‘At least tell me what it is. Maybe I’ll be able to answer it for you. Or is that what you’re scared of? That I’ll put you out of a job.’

‘I’m out of a job already.’

‘Shit. Sorry. Yeah.’ He raised his empty tankard at a passing waiter to request refills. ‘But tell me anyway.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Karin. ‘For a start, it’s really a series of questions rather than a single one. Who was Homer? Where was he born? When? Where did he live? How old was he when he composed his various works? Which of the places he wrote about had he visited? Who and what were his sources? Was he a woman?’

Iain laughed. ‘Really?’

‘Really. And was there only one of her, or was it a family enterprise, passed down from parent to child?’ She sat forward in her chair as she got into her subject, her cadence quickening and her eyes brightening; and Iain could soon see exactly why Nathan had bid so fiercely for her services. Enthusiasm became harder to generate yourself as you grew older, but you could still warm yourself on the radiated enthusiasm of others. ‘Or maybe Homer was simply an honorific title, like “bard”,’ she said. ‘There are some reasons to think that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by different people, for example.’

‘Like what?’

‘Style. Vocabulary. Attitudes towards races. Homer praises the Phoenicians in the Iliad, for example, but then derides them in the Odyssey. And the Odyssey also pokes fun at the Iliad, which is odd if he wrote them both.’

‘Maybe he didn’t take himself too seriously,’ said Iain.

‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘There are all kinds of explanations. That’s why people like me argue about it. But there are other questions too. More to do with the general history of the era. The ones I studied for my thesis, and which Nathan was particularly interested in.’

‘And what are those?’

‘How his books were even possible. You see, the Trojan War, if it really happened, which is a big debate all in itself, took place towards the end of the Late Bronze Age. Somewhere around 1200 BC, give or take. Yet the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t composed until the Early Iron Age: 800 BC at the earliest, more likely nearer to 700 BC or even later.’ It wasn’t merely enthusiasm either; it was command, authority. Iain had always had a weakness for smart women confident in their expertise. Watching Karin now, he had a sudden, vivid flashback, waking up weak and dazed to find a tall woman of angular beauty standing beside his bed in a loose white medic’s coat, frowning down at him as she jotted notes upon a clipboard.

‘So we’ve got this gap of around four hundred years to explain,’ Karin was saying. ‘And not any old years. There was a terrible dark age between the Late Bronze and the Early Iron. Do you know about this?’

He’d collapsed, apparently. On a flight back from Pakistan. And, because he’d been delirious with some strange fever, and thus liable to say something indiscreet about his mission, they’d summoned a specialist in exotic diseases with an appropriate level of clearance. ‘Assume I know nothing,’ he told Karin. ‘You can’t go far wrong that way.’

‘Okay. Then this is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. During the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, the eastern Mediterranean was reasonably stable. Roughly speaking, Greece and the Aegean were ruled by a loose confederation of Mycenaean kings; the Hittites ran Turkey; the New Kingdom Pharaohs had Egypt and Israel; and the Assyrians ran Syria, Iraq and Iran. Then something terrible happened. The trouble is, we don’t know what. Archaeologists call it the Catastrophe, but mainly that’s because it sounds cool and what else can you call it? But, whatever it was, it scared the shit out of people.’

Her name had been Tisha Morgan. A professor of microbiology brought in from her London research institute to diagnose his condition, then cure him of it. Scrawny, Mustafa had called her. And maybe so. But what Iain had mostly noticed about her at the time was how fully she’d committed herself to his cause. It was why she’d gone into research, she’d later confided to him; because she’d been prone to get too attached to her wards, and therefore took it too hard when she lost them. ‘How can you tell?’

‘By excavating old cities like Tiryns and Mycenae,’ explained Karin. ‘They massively strengthened their fortifications. They built huge storerooms and dug deep wells or secret underground passages to nearby springs. All classic signs that they feared something bad. But it did them no good. They pretty much all got sacked and burned. And this wasn’t only in Greece. Same thing across the whole eastern Med, from the Hittites here in Turkey all the way down to Egypt. And no one knows what or who or why.’

With Tisha’s help, he’d soon overcome his fever. Getting over her, however, had proved somewhat harder. After his discharge from hospital, he’d fought the urge to go see her, telling himself he was being stupid, that there was no way they could fit into each other’s lives, that there were plenty of other women out there. But he couldn’t shake the feeling and finally he’d succumbed. He’d visited her at her institute. They’d taken coffee together in a nearby café. The next day too. On both occasions, she’d mentioned her surgeon boyfriend about once every minute, in that half-conscious way people touch a lucky charm in times of stress. But it had done her little good. ‘You must have some idea,’ he said. ‘I mean, didn’t the Greeks invent history? Surely they had something to say about it?’

‘Not as much as you’d think,’ said Karin. ‘They kind of glossed over it, skipping straight from the age of heroes to the archaic age, despite the centuries in between. But then they weren’t very good with chronology. There are hints of a mysterious tribe called the Dorians invading from the north of Greece, setting off a cascade of displaced people in which each went pillaging the next. A lot of people think that the Trojan War was part of it. And maybe the Odyssey too. There’s a bit in there that seems to describe a famous battle fought by the Egyptians against invaders known as the Sea Peoples. Trouble is, there’s no real evidence of these Dorians, or of any new arrivals. The opposite, if anything.’

Their marriage had lasted three wonderful years. He’d become a father, which had changed him in ways he’d never have imagined possible. He’d been inside Iran when this idyll had abruptly ended, courtesy of an overworked truck driver on a damp and foggy night. The importance of his mission and the difficulty of exfiltration had persuaded his handler neither to inform him nor to pull him out early. It had been the correct tactical decision, the decision he’d probably have made himself had the roles been switched, yet it had been a betrayal all the same. And though he’d returned to active service afterwards, in an effort to slough off his encasing grief, his heart had never again been in it. He’d begun to cast a jaundiced eye not merely at the fine expressions of intent behind his missions, but at the consequences of them too. And he’d grown to hate the things he’d seen. His own bereavement, to put it crudely, had sapped his will to maim and kill. And so he’d quit.

‘You see, what’s so remarkable is how little changed. Three to four hundred years of absolute turmoil, yet the Greek world emerged from it still recognizably Greek. The Hittites were succeeded by neo-Hittites, the Phoenicians by more Phoenicians, the New Kingdom Pharaohs by Late Period Pharaohs, the Assyrians by neo-Assyrians. All still in the same places, worshipping the same gods, speaking much the same languages, crafting the same kinds of goods with the same materials and techniques. So maybe a terrible region-wide famine caused a bunch of local resource wars; except we can find precious little evidence for that either. Earthquakes, then, except that earthquakes simply don’t happen on that scale. They may take out an island or a province, but not the whole Mediterranean.’

Life after the army had proved hard for Iain. Without Tisha and Robbie to give him purpose, a dreadful lassitude had set in. He’d lain on his sofa, drinking beer, watching daytime TV, loathing himself for not having been there when his family had most needed him, sinking into the downward spiral that had claimed so many of his former comrades, half of whom now seemed to be Born Again, while the other half were drunks. A long, hard look in the mirror one hung-over morning had finally jolted him into action. He’d cut out the booze, got himself fit, sent his CV to anyone in the market for his particular skills, eventually joining Global Analysis. And time had done its usual healing. These past few months, in fact, he’d finally begun to feel better about the world. Like glimpses of blue sky on a dull day, an unfamiliar sensation would sometimes spread right through him, and he’d realize to his mild surprise that it was happiness. Yet, in one way, he hadn’t moved on at all. Despite the efforts of well-meaning friends to fix him up, the few dates he’d been on since Tisha had had all the spark of a wet match struck against a wet box; so that tonight was the first time in years that he’d felt even the possibility of flame. ‘How about a tsunami?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe,’ nodded Karin. ‘Except much of the destruction happened inland; and, afterwards, people settled on the coast, which you’d hardly do if you were scared of tidal waves. Besides, these cities were burned. I know you might expect earthquakes to knock over candles and oil lamps and so start fires, but actually it doesn’t work that way because—’ She broke off, however, looked around. They’d been talking so long that the restaurant was empty, except for staff leaning wearily against the walls, waiting to close up for the night. ‘We should go,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘We should.’