II

  Gaille tried instinctively to twist away from the German shepherd as it leapt at her face, but her ankle turned beneath her, and she fell hard onto her backside, screaming in terror and expecting the worst. But the dog unaccountably jerked to a sudden halt, as though some hidden hand had grabbed it by its scruff; its legs flew from under it and it fell sprawling onto its back, then it yelped and scrambled to its feet and came for her once more, riding up on its hind legs like a spooked horse, pawing the air in frustrated fury just a metre or so away, snarling and barking and showing her its fangs, while saliva frothed from its mouth and down its jowls, and its eyes glistened and raged. She scrambled on her palms and heels to a safer distance, her heart pounding wildly in her chest, still not quite sure how she’d got away with it.

  ‘It’s on a leash,’ muttered Iain, returning from wherever he’d fled.

  She squinted through the murky light and finally she saw it: a studded collar around the dog’s throat, a length of thin black cord attached to it that disappeared in the darkness. ‘Petitier must have left it here on guard,’ she said in a strained voice.

  ‘Dogs,’ said Iain bleakly. ‘I hate dogs.’

  ‘So I’d noticed,’ she said dryly. She made to get up, but pain lanced up her left leg and she promptly sat back down again. ‘My ankle,’ she winced. She took off her shoe, her sock. Her foot was blistered and dirty, but there was mercifully little sign of injury. She tried to stand again; again she winced and sat back down. It all felt slightly surreal, with the dog still raging impotently just a few metres away. ‘I twisted it when I fell.’

  Iain took off his pack, produced a first-aid kit and a roll of crepe bandage. He cut off a good length of it that he wrapped tightly around her ankle and then fixed in place with a couple of safety pins. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Better,’ she told him. ‘But what do we do now?’

  ‘You wait here. I’ll go explore.’

  Her heart-rate gradually resettled as she sat there. The dog was still barking and lunging at her with undiminished ferocity; it dismayed her deeply that any creature could wish her such palpable ill. But even this hellhound couldn’t sustain its fury forever, and finally it calmed a little, patrolling back and forth as close to her as its leash allowed, snarling and showing her its fangs.

  ‘Hey!’ called out Iain. ‘Up here.’

  She looked up, saw him silhouetted on the roof. ‘Good news, bad news,’ he said. ‘I can’t find a way in to the house, but the roof will do us for tonight. And there’s a gate at the bottom, so that we can keep that bloody dog out, even if it should get loose.’

  ‘What about your tent? Don’t you need to bang in pegs and things?’

  ‘It’s a pop-up,’ he told her. ‘Couldn’t be easier. One flap and it’s ready. Tell you what, I’ll come and give you a hand, then I’ll cook us up some pasta. God knows we’ve earned it. Everything else can wait till morning, when we’ve got some light to work with.’

  III

  Nadya caught up with her email and posted a couple of small items on her blog, because it didn’t pay to go dark, not even for a day. She’d intended to write an update on the suspicious death of a human rights lawyer, but her heart wasn’t in it, so she closed her laptop. A successful day, all in all—enough to justify yesterday’s deferred reward. She checked the mini-bar, but miniatures weren’t her style, so she put on some fresh clothes and went down to the lobby bar.

  It was empty, however, its lights dimmed, no obvious prospect of it opening soon. She went onto the front steps, looked around. A line of cars opposite, but no black Mercedes. She put on her shawl and dark-glasses for the anonymity, then headed into Plaka, intending to walk up an appetite. Or, more accurately, a thirst.

  The night was still young, huddles of gloom and shadow broken by the lights of cafés, restaurants and late-night shops; though not yet enough of them to create an atmosphere. A light drizzle started. She hunched her coat around herself and shrank into its folds, then gave a little shiver, even though it wasn’t that cold, despite the gusting wind. Memories. It had been a night much like this: except that she hadn’t been alone, of course, not when the evening had started.

  She came to a square, where a few groups of hardy tourists were taking al fresco dinners. She turned and went the other way, feeling her sharpest pang yet for a drink. The sight of families often did that to her.

  She’d only been at the paper three weeks, head-hunted from her style magazine by a proprietor keen to sex things up. Albert had returned from a gruelling month in Samegrelo, where he’d been covering the civil war, only to learn that his in-depth account of Gamsakhurdia’s suicide was being slashed to make more room for her feature on swimwear. He and the editor had gone at it like blacksmiths. ‘Sure,’ he’d yelled. ‘Why the fuck not? Our country is falling to fucking shit around us, so let’s write about bikinis.’

  She’d been mortified and angry; but mostly angry. She’d gone to his desk intending to read his copy and pick it apart, so that she could feel better about herself. It had only taken two paragraphs for her to be caught up by his story instead. She never read about war if she could help it, it was too depressing, so it had all been new to her. She’d been shocked to learn the depth of horrors going on in her own country, what Georgians were doing to other Georgians. When she’d finished, she’d sensed someone standing at her shoulder.

  ‘So you’re the one?’ he’d grunted. ‘The one who writes about bikinis?’

  She’d turned to face him, expecting to have her head bitten off, feeling deserving of it too. But he’d noticed her eyes glistening, and had softened. It was impossible for any man to be angry at a beautiful woman who wept at what he’d written—or so he’d told her, at least, reaching over her for his cigarettes the following morning. Hero worship on her side, lust on his: not a great recipe for wedding cake. Yet despite the difference in their ages, they’d made something durable and even precious out of it.

  He’d never been afraid to ask the questions others had balked at, or to write candidly about the crimes of brutal men, so they’d both always known a day of reckoning might come. A man in a tugged-down baseball cap and with a scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth had been waiting in ambush when they came home together from work. He’d waited until they were just inside before charging out of the shadows and barging Albert onto his back, then slamming the door shut, with the three of them inside.

  Typically, Albert’s first thought had been to get up and fight, while yelling at her to run. The man had stabbed Albert twice, first in the gut, then through his heart. He’d wiped the blade on Albert’s sleeve, rummaged calmly through his pockets for his wallet, then stood and advanced upon her. She’d wanted to scream, but somehow it had caught in her throat. She’d backed against the wall instead. He’d pressed the blade against her throat with one hand while running the other down over her breast and belly to her crotch, which he’d cupped in the strangest way, as though testing a fruit for freshness. And though his face had mostly been hidden by his scarf and cap, his ice-blue eyes had burned unforgettably into her.

  The police hadn’t believed it had been a hit. Tbilisi was a violent place, they’d told her; muggings and burglaries happened all the time. The miscarriage had happened a week later; she hadn’t even realised she was pregnant. Perhaps not surprisingly, fashion had held little interest for her since then. When the newspaper had declined to put proper resources into investigating Albert’s murder, she’d thrown in her job and turned freelance so that she’d have the time to do it herself. She’d got nowhere with his murder, but she’d discovered plenty else while she’d been looking. Much of it had been too hot for any paper to publish, which was why she’d started her own blog.

  Her grip on her coat had loosened, even though the drizzle had now turned into rain that the strengthening wind was spraying in her face. A few umbrellas went up, bucking and rearing like wilful horses, forcing her to shy her eyes away from their sharp spokes. Music blared from a bar ahead, an anonymous place with low lighting, frosted glass and booths set at odd angles around the wall. A place where drinkers could be alone with their vice. A tall waiter in a garish bow-tie greeted her at the door and ushered her into its shadows. ‘Vodka,’ she told him, for wine wasn’t going to cut it tonight. He nodded sympathetically before he went, as though he could read her life, and knew it would be the first of many.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I

  It proved to be a gorgeous Cretan evening, the skies clear, the air lightly scented with lavender and honeysuckle. Iain and Gaille sat amid the debris of their noodles and tomato sauce and gazed up at the extraordinary canopy of stars, while grey-green geckoes made sudden short darts over the pale walls, and crickets chirped in the surrounding fields. ‘Nights like these,’ murmured Gaille.

  ‘They bring the past closer, don’t they?’ agreed Iain. ‘One of our archaeologists went to live up in the Lasithi Plateau after he retired. I heard rumours he was a bit poorly over the new year, so I headed up there to make sure he was okay. He was fine, thank goodness. But then a snowstorm hit like you wouldn’t believe. It comes down fast there. Anyway, I was snowed in for the best part of a week. Fantastic stroke of luck. He tells the most extraordinary stories. More to the point, he has a telescope on his roof. We caught this amazing meteorite shower. Can you imagine what that would have been like for the Minoans? Or imagine if a meteorite actually struck! I mean, this place here, it looks almost like a vast impact crater, right?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it. But yes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was, but you never know. Of course, if Petitier has found something here, that might be the reason. The Minoans considered iron sacred because back then it pretty much only came from meteorites.’ He stretched out his leg; his foot brushed Gaille’s ankle. She pulled away, not sure whether it had been deliberate. ‘There was this dig in Anemospilia,’ he continued. ‘They found the body of a young man sacrificed to appease the gods; though it can’t have done much good, because the roof collapsed mid-ceremony and killed the priest too, as well as a couple of other attendants. He was wearing an iron ring. The priest, I mean, not the poor bastard he sacrificed.’ He shook his head in amusement. ‘Everyone thinks the Minoans were so civilised because they worshipped goddesses and decorated their palaces with charming frescoes of birds and lilies. Not so much. We’ve found a pit of children’s bones at Knossos, and it’s pretty clear from the knife-marks that they’d been butchered in just the way you’d butcher livestock for your pot.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘They were no worse than anyone else, mind. Everyone was at it. They’re a lot more like the surrounding cultures than we tend to think. That’s actually the main premise of my book.’

  ‘You mean The Pelasgian and Minoan Aegean: A New Paradigm?’

  ‘That’s the baby,’ laughed Iain. He found a couple of stones lying loose on the roof, began to juggle them in his right hand. ‘You see, we’ve got all these overlapping accounts of the people who lived in the pre-Mycenaean Aegean. The Greeks called them Pelasgians. Sir Arthur Evans called them Minoans. Were they the same or different? And do they have any connection with the Philistines, or the Sea People, or the Hyksos, and so on? And, more broadly, was the Mediterranean a series of isolated cultures with minimal links between them, or was it—as I believe and argue—far more fluid and homogeneous than most academics now allow.’

  ‘Despite the archaeological record?’

  ‘On the contrary. Because of it. There’s a ton of evidence to support my view. And where there are differences, they’re only the ones you might expect. Take Crete and Egypt, for example. Superficially, their religions and cultures look very different. Superficially, one couldn’t have derived from, or even taken much from, the other. But we forget how much our religions are defined by our environments. I mean, imagine you live on the…’ He dropped one of his juggling stones, muttered a soft curse, picked it up again. ‘Imagine you live on the side of an active volcano. Don’t you think you’d worship different gods from someone who lives in the flood-plain of a river like the Nile that inundates once a year?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gaille.

  ‘Egyptian priests put an awful lot of effort into calculating the annual rising of Sirius, because Sirius predicted the inundation, the natural start of the Egyptian year. But there was no reason for the Minoans to start their year with Sirius, or even to treat it as a particularly significant star. Yet they did. And Sirius didn’t just make it to Crete: it became an integral part of Greek religion via the Eleusinian Mysteries.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I’m just saying, what if some enterprising Egyptians had come here, to set up a trading post, say? Crete is the hub of the Mediterranean, after all. They’d surely have brought their religion and mythology with them, because that’s what people do; but how long would it have taken them to trade their river and sun gods for earthquake gods and volcano gods?’ Two bats appeared as dark shadows above the roof, swirling and swooping in pursuit of flies, before vanishing as quickly as they’d come. ‘Mount Thera was active long before its final blast,’ continued Iain. ‘The experts agree that it had regular minor eruptions. It surely had to be a major factor in Minoan cosmology. So how about this for an idea: when Persephone was abducted by Hades in the Eleusinian Mysteries, there was a blinding light and a noise like the earth being split open. Does that remind you of anything at all?’

  Gaille sat up a little straighter, intrigued by the idea. ‘You’re not suggesting that Eleusis is a celebration of Thera erupting?’

  ‘Why not? According to the myth, after Persephone was abducted, her mother Demeter cursed the earth and made it infertile. And this wasn’t some unusually long winter: it was a famine that clearly lasted years. But when Persephone was finally restored to Demeter, she made the earth richer than ever.’ He dropped one of his stones again, couldn’t find it this time, so tossed the other irritably away. ‘Volcanic ash is incredibly rich with nitrates. That’s why people live near volcanoes, even though they’re so dangerous. Visit Bali some time, if you don’t believe me. You’ll never have seen such greens. So each time Thera had one of its minor eruptions, it would have covered the surrounding islands with ash, devastating at least one year’s crops, maybe even two or three. But when the fields finally started producing again, the harvests would have been magnificent. Just like in the Eleusinian myth. Until the big one, at least.’

  ‘Can you imagine what that would have been like?’ smiled Gaille, leaning her head back against the stone parapet, its edge pressing like stress against her nape. ‘To have been in Crete when it went off?’

  ‘A front-row seat on the most spectacular event in human history,’ nodded Iain. ‘An explosion that would literally have shaken the world. One hundred cubic kilometres of rock raining down over the next few days. Tsunamis destroying your fleets and coasts. The sun blacked out for months. The seas thick with ash. And the survivors knowing that even if they won their personal battle against starvation, their empire was doomed. It took years for the Mycenaeans to take over, but surely that was only because they’d been ravaged by Thera as well.’

  ‘And traumatised. Think how much courage it would have taken to go back into the water after that.’

  ‘Exactly. The whole of eastern Mediterranean civilisation smashed apart by a single catastrophic event. And though we’ve managed to find a great number of the jigsaw pieces it left behind, we’re still not sure that they all belong to the same puzzle, or how to fit them together, basically because the picture on our box is wrong, because it’s been drawn by Greek specialists, and by Egyptian specialists, and by Asia Minor specialists, not by Mediterranean specialists. But throw that box away, start out with a new picture of Crete and Santorini at the hub of a great and sophisticated empire, then everything suddenly fits. And thanks to Plato, we already have a wonderful idea of how this new picture should look.’

  ‘The Atlantis Connection,’ suggested caille.

  ‘The Atlantis Connection,’ smiled Iain.

  II

  It was still too early for Knox to call it a night, so he played around on the Internet for a while. He forwarded the photos Gaille had sent to his email, opened them on his screen. Agia Georgio, her message had said, near the southern coast. He tracked it down on a map of Crete, then brought up Google Earth. The connection was light-speed compared to the treacle of Egypt. He zeroed in on the Mediterranean, Crete, its southern coast. He found the port of Hora Sfakion, the town of Anapoli, then Agia Georgio.

  Seen from above, the terrain looked mountainous and bleak, grey limestone covered in thin scrub, dotted with the green circles of trees. He zoomed in on remote buildings, but none of them matched Petitier’s house. He broadened his search, looking for that distinctive amphitheatre of rock. It was amazingly, disturbingly voyeuristic: nowhere was private any longer. At last he found a plausible candidate, zoomed in until he was certain: a house with two polythene greenhouses nearby.

  He stared at it a while, thinking fondly of Gaille, wondering how mad she still was at him, how much grovelling he’d have to do. The prospect made him smile. He wondered if she’d learn much about Petitier. If anyone could, she would. It bugged the hell out of him that so many people insisted on giving him all the credit for their Alexander and Akhenaten adventures, because the plain truth was that she deserved most of it.

  He closed Google Earth, ran a search on Roland Petitier instead, not expecting much other than a few news reports about his murder. He’d dropped out of sight twenty years before, after all, well before the Internet age. But to Knox’s surprise, he got a number of hits linking to the on-line index of one of the more obscure archaeological journals. Petitier, it seemed, had published an article in it, and it had evidently provoked quite a vibrant discussion. But it wasn’t Petitier’s name that most struck Knox, nor even the title of the piece, though that was intriguing too.