‘Fine,’ smiled Karin. ‘You lay off Nathan’s kids, I’ll forget the army kind of thing. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
‘Then what do we talk about?’
‘How about this Homeric Question of yours,’ said Iain. ‘Surely it can’t get any safer than that.’
II
The drive to Nicosia was gruelling. Zehra Inzanoğlu kept so far to the left-hand lane that her passenger-side wheels sporadically left the tarmac altogether and she’d bump her way over mud and loose chippings for a second or two before correcting herself, sometimes too sharply. Cars, minivans and lorries sped past in a blur of headlights, tooting resentfully at her slow crawl. She tried once to change up to third gear, but metallic harpies screeched at her from beneath the bonnet and she veered dangerously from her lane and almost side-swiped an overtaking bus whose indignant blare unnerved her all the more and turned Katerina stiff as a shop mannequin in the seat beside her.
Zehra had intended to drive straight to the Professor’s house and thrash it out with him that night, but she was simply too shattered by the time they reached Nicosia’s outskirts. She therefore followed signs to her son’s neighbourhood instead then had Katerina direct her in. His apartment block was run-down and ugly, its car park a patch of deeply rutted earth. The lift wouldn’t answer repeated summons so they trudged wearily upwards with their bags instead. Zehra’s spirits sank as they climbed. How could anyone choose to live in a city? Lift doors opened and closed continuously above her. She could hear men whispering. Something wasn’t right. She called out. Footsteps came scampering down towards them; two youths in leather jackets with collars up, cans of spray-paint in their hands, their laughter now echoing up from beneath.
A red plastic chair was lodged between the lift doors on her son’s floor, stopping them from closing. The landing lights were poor, the red spray-paint moist and dripping. Instantly, Zehra was swept back forty years. Then, the slurs had been aimed at her father, not her son; and in Greek, not Turkish. Yet the message was the same. And an immense gloom settled upon her, a sense of troubles not her own, yet which threatened to snare her even so.
III
‘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