A Darker God (6 page)

A fly buzzed languorously and irritatingly in the quiet room. Merriman swatted it and walked over to the tall window to dispose of it. Always such a battle to get to the fresh air on the Continent! Impatiently, he dragged back the fine net curtains and opened the two glass panes, then threw back the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony. The temperature was still bearable but in an hour’s time it would be oppressive. For a moment, he longed for the cool silence of the London Library Reading Room. June. He wondered what the temperature was like over there and decided that the English were probably only just thinking about discarding their winter vests.

Better get started before his brain began to simmer.

Delaying one last moment before turning to his task, he leaned over the wrought-iron rail to enjoy the lunchtime bustle in the square below. Customers were beginning to drift in to the café tables, calling out orders for their thick black Greek coffee, lighting up their Turkish cigarettes, and opening their newspapers. They were men, all of them, clutching and fidgeting with their strings of worry beads. For a moment, Andrew thought of joining them, escaping into an inconsequential but involving discussion of the latest scandal or a lively argument about the coming elections. He was well known and always welcome down there. It had become his refuge.

He was unable to duck back inside fast enough to avoid being seen and greeted by a man he knew—a visiting and very distinguished Italian professor on his way up the hill to the British School of Archaeology, where he was giving a series of lectures to students and staff. Andrew should have been up there waiting eagerly in the front row of the audience, not lounging about on his balcony. Ouch! This breath of air was
going to cost him dear. There’d be fences to mend. The two men acknowledged each other, exclaiming in Greek and Italian—
“Kathigitis! Professore!”
—with a show of joyful astonishment, and the Italian went on towards Lykkabettos swinging his walking cane.

Andrew’s eye was caught by another middle-aged man who, like him, was observing the flamboyant Italian greeting the ladies with exquisite politeness as he passed. The stranger was loitering in the shade of a plane tree, and as Andrew watched, he finished his cigarette, stamped the stub into the grille under his feet, and looked about him. Becoming conscious that he was under scrutiny, he raised his eyes and saw the professor. The men held each other’s gaze for a moment, then the one below tipped his boater and walked off. Andrew, who had tensed with foreboding at the encounter, breathed out, calming himself.

For a moment he’d thought he knew the man. He cursed himself for all kinds of idiot when he realised that, of course, he almost certainly did. The gaily beribboned straw boater worn at a rakish angle proclaimed the fellow below to be one of the increasing flock of taxi drivers who haunted the square. They seemed to have adopted the raffish headgear as their uniform this year. Professor and Lady Merriman had no doubt used the man’s services frequently. Perhaps he’d hurried forward on spotting Andrew in the anticipation of a summoning whistle from the balcony. Entrepreneurs, the Greeks, Andrew thought, approving. Greeks didn’t sit about scowling and truculent like Londoners. They came after their customers with a polite phrase or two. But Andrew disapproved of the excessive use of these motor vehicles by his rich and lazy neighbours. The spluttering cabs polluted the air with fumes and noise. He himself took pride in walking everywhere in this accessible city, when not encumbered by Maud. A lithe and energetic man, he spent the digging season working in the trenches
and his physique was still, in early middle age, more like that of a Greek hoplite than a deskbound academic. Perhaps he wouldn’t be picked for the front line of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae any longer, but he could certainly skirmish to good effect on the back row if called on, he thought.

But now, his desk was calling him. He could delay no longer.

With the ritual gestures of a priest tending an altar, he approached the resplendent gramophone he’d had shipped out at great expense and lifted the lid. He changed the needle, then selected an electric recording from his collection and slipped it from its cover. He waited to hear the first bewitching notes of Alexander Borodin’s piece of lush romanticism,
In the Steppes of Central Asia
. Written to celebrate the accession of Tsar Alexander
III
of Russia. Alexanders! How they haunted him! In came the flutes and the horns, and Merriman was instantly transported, travelling the endless desert sands. He listened as the caravan conjured up by the composer drew near, entranced him with its exotic lyricism, passed by, and then disappeared into the heat haze. With a sigh of satisfaction, he put the recording on again and went to his desk.

He sat down and took a new packet of pencils from his drawer. He sharpened one. He rolled back his sleeves and wiped his already damp palms on his handkerchief.

On the first page he wrote with a defiant tilt of the head:

The author dedicates this
Life and Death of Alexander of Macedon
to the Conqueror who is its subject and also to the Muse who is its inspiration.

In the centre of the following line he added, with a grin:
“Alexander. Laetitia.”

She wouldn’t like that. In fact, she’d hate it. It would alarm her. The colour would rise in her cheeks, her eyes would spark like flint. She’d flourish the word “hubris” about. And she’d be right. Professionally at least, the girl had always shown taste and a sense of proportion. There would be no persuading her to accept a dedication that bracketed her with a man she considered the world’s greatest megalomaniac. “Alexander! But he killed more men than the Kaiser! More than Napoleon! A power-crazed, egocentric, drunken butcher whose only redeeming features were a love of literature and horses” had been her diagnosis of the young god’s condition.

Alexander. He’d been the occasion of Merriman’s first quarrel with Laetitia. The least deferential of any of the students Andrew mentored, she’d seized with delighted vindication on the information that Alexander considered himself descended from the mysterious sloe-eyed young man-god from the East: Dionysus. “Well, that explains a lot! Remind me, Professor, of his attributes … God of Wine, Drama, and Revelry, was it? Your hero certainly emulated the god! Nightly debauches for weeks, culminating in his death. According to his secretary, the Lord of the World was actually in mid-gulp when he was struck down with whatever was to kill him days later. Ruptured liver is what I’m betting! And the uncontrolled outbreaks of orgiastic frenzy? It’s not recorded that he actually tore men and animals to shreds with his teeth like the followers of Dionysus, but he did stab his friend Black Cleitus in a drunken fit of rage. And I prefer not to think about the thousands of innocents he had crucified and tortured.” She had constantly advised: “Look elsewhere for a subject, Andrew. Alexander is irredeemable!”

And her opinion was unalterable. Ah, well, plenty of time
to change the dedication later. After he’d drawn out the pleasurable teasing.

He touched a letter pushed deep into his trouser pocket. Her latest news. She was doing some worthwhile work in Crete and managing to have a happy time with that ecclesiastical sheepdog of hers. William Gunning. Renegade priest. Extraordinary pair! A highly unsuitable relationship and Andrew wondered if he’d done the right thing in encouraging it. It was he who’d brought about their separation initially, for selfish reasons he’d disguised as concern for Laetitia and then, regretting his action, he’d engineered their reunion in Crete. He’d pushed them onstage together like cardboard characters in a child’s toy theatre. Playing God—he knew he enjoyed the role more than was good for him. But perhaps one action had cancelled out the other? And perhaps it was all up to Fate anyway. And it did seem to have turned out well in the end. Andrew liked to know his friends were happy. He particularly liked to know Letty was happy.

And, this morning, behind his locked door, he was going to have some fun with his writing.

The first two thirds of the book were ready in manuscript form and sitting with his publisher in London. He’d dealt with the life and career of his subject, Alexander of Macedon, and he’d done it well. It had taken years in time snatched from an active life but it had been meticulously researched. Started in the trenches of Macedonia during the Great War—1915, he remembered—some of his early pages of notes were difficult to read under the brown blotches of mud and blood. He could remember the exact moment when he’d had the idea. He’d taken a copy of Plutarch’s
Lives
to war with him in his backpack and, finding himself stationed amongst the silver-fir-clad slopes of the very mountains where Alexander was born and raised, he’d begun to reread the conqueror’s story. Stormed and retaken from the Ottoman by the Greek army only a few years previously,
this northern province beyond the shrugging shoulder of Mount Olympus was now accounted a part of Greece, though not many people nowadays were entirely convinced that this was a political certainty. According to Prime Minister Venizelos—there could be no doubt! It was now firmly in the territory of the New Greece. And, in Alexander’s day, the boy king himself showed no geographical confusion whatsoever! Alexander had had the confidence to write to his enemy Darius, King of the Persian Empire, a letter of intent—intent to invade Asia—and the reason Alexander gave was, just like the man himself, blunt:
“Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us much harm …”

Good point, Alexander! A telling sentence. It was clear from this that he regarded Macedonia as the prime province within Greece and not separate from it. And also that he took the sufferings meted out by the Persian invaders on two occasions to the string of Greek city-states as a personal insult. Alexander saw himself not, as many critics had claimed, as “a barbarian” but as a Hellene. A Greek speaker, a Greek thinker, and an avenger of Greece.

Crouching amongst the crags and the glens of those northern fastnesses where the only creatures about him apart from the military whose presence scarred the land were sheep and eagles, Andrew had had a vision of the young highland soldier more than two thousand years in the past. Raised in a tough school, a warrior among warriors, loved by his loyal kinsmen, the prince had been driven by ambition—and probably by rivalry with his father, Philip—to conquer the world. They said his favourite line from Homer was
“Ever to be best and stand far above all others.”
They said his mother Olympias was descended from the hero Achilles, who had so plagued and defied King Agamemnon, his war lord. And Alexander had grown up intending to rival Achilles in glory. Like his ancestor, the boy king had chosen to trade the chance of a long
and dull life for a brief but glorious one which would ensure his eternal fame. His choice certainly made for a gripping biography.

Andrew’s research was incomparable, his style modern, flowing, and involving. And now at last he’d come to it: the nub of the book, the point, the culmination of the last ten years of effort. Ten years he’d spent off and on exploring the desert sands, not in the hope of making a sensational discovery in the style of archaeologists like Schliemann or Howard Carter, but always with fingers crossed and—bizarrely—half hoping for a nil return. He’d been bent on eliminating possibilities, dutifully pursuing trails into the dust, laying the foundations for his coup. Such was the tenacity generated by an idée fixe. But he was conscious of the weaknesses, the traps that opened up at the feet of men who sought to make the facts fit their theory. Dangerous self-deceit, he knew. Self-deceit could be his undoing.

He’d had considerable success. It was hard to stick a spade into the sands of Egypt without success of some sort and he’d made the most of his, using his skill and his scientific background to shape the young discipline of archaeology. He couldn’t rival Howard Carter’s astonishing discovery in the Valley of the Kings, but Andrew knew he had on his side three attributes Carter could never boast: an aristocratic background, an impeccable education, and a “good war.” His scholarship and his independence were trusted by the Academic Establishment—as far as those prima donnas trusted anyone. Andrew Merriman was the man governments chose to consult when problems arose and they needed to quote advice from an impeccable source who had the world’s approval.

They would read his final chapters and swallow the hook.

Andrew sighed with anticipation. His time was coming! He could pull it off!

And he wouldn’t have recourse to ancient curses, dogs
howling in the night, unexpected deaths, and suchlike vulgar attention-grabbing devices! The King Tut Music Hall obsession had entertained the world but he would manage his show much more skilfully. With the understanding of a director for his audience, he would present to the world a mummy of a splendour that would push the insignificant young Pharaoh of Egypt to the back pages. A golden mummy. The embalmed remains of the Son of Zeus. Or so Alexander of Macedonia had thought himself. And oracles, soothsayers, priests, and kings had hurried to support his pretensions. The world had prostrated itself at the feet of its young conqueror. And would again!

The Death of a God. (Who murdered Alexander?) And his Entombment. (Where Do His Remains Lie?) Hard not to scatter the capital letters about. Andrew thought he knew the answers to both questions. And his readers, from the most eminent classical scholars to the man on the London omnibus, would—carried along by the impeccable prose and irrefutable facts of the body of the book—accept in its entirety the astonishing conclusion.

And now for the
bonne bouche!
The finger-tingling climax of his writing. For inspiration, Andrew propped the drawing of Alexander’s magnificent golden funeral carriage up in front of his inkstand and stared at it. A hypnotic image.

Borodin’s caravan swayed out of sight in time with Andrew’s vision. A flute gave one last plaintive flourish. The bells on the golden sepulchre fell silent. The professor smiled with satisfaction. A moving temple, fit for a god. Time for it to make its glittering appearance in his pages!