‘What’s this, do you reckon?’ He sounded momentarily excited, as if he had chanced upon something new, but his voice soon fell. ‘It’s just another coin of some sort, ain’t it?’
‘We have found enough of those, have we not? And the villagers probably dig them up by the thousands when they plough.’ Adam took the dirt-encrusted object out of Quint’s hands and held it up to the light, angling it so that the sun would fall on its face. He brushed some of the soil from it. ‘It has a figure on it. Heracles, I think.’
‘He’s ’itting something,’ Quint said, standing and peering at the coin.
‘Heracles spent much of his career hitting things. It was his special skill.’
‘It’s a lion. ’E’s ’itting a lion.’
‘The Nemean lion. The first of his labours. Heracles was forced to club the lion to death when his arrows failed to kill it. He stunned it and then strangled it.’
Quint whistled. ‘’E must ’ave been stronger than the Great Sam-soni,’ he said, with a note of respect in his voice.
‘The Great Samsoni?’
‘Cove I saw in a circus once down Lambeth way. ’E lifted an ’orse above his ’ead.’
‘A horse? Are you sure, Quint?’
‘A small ’orse,’ Quint admitted.
‘Well, there are no records of Heracles juggling horses above his head. At least none of which I am aware. But lions he could slaughter with ease. Once the Nemean lion was dead, he used its own claws to strip it of its pelt.’
Adam pocketed the coin. For a moment, it seemed as if Quint might protest as his master took possession of an object he had found but he decided against it. Instead, he picked up the spade from where he had thrown it. The two men began to dig again.
Two weeks had passed since the night by the campfire when Professor Fields had revealed the theft of the Euphorion manuscript. Adam still felt very angry over the deception Fields had practised upon him. Indeed, in his darker moments, he regarded the professor’s behaviour as tantamount to a betrayal of their friendship. Yet he had reined in his feelings. He had deemed it politic not to take issue with Fields. He had not even informed him that he now knew of his apparent association with Creech. What, he told himself, were the choices before him? They were either going to find the treasure of which Euphorion had written or they were not. Either way, it would be best to wait upon developments. Fields clearly had some agenda of his own, and he would no doubt pursue it regardless of Adam’s opinions on the ethics of doing so. And the young man was still unsure of Rallis. Were the Greek lawyer’s revelations about Fields and Creech and their role in smuggling works of art out of the country entirely to be trusted? Adam remained unconvinced that his former tutor would involve himself in such basely mercantile transactions. The man was, first and foremost, a scholar. Although nothing, of course, was certain: the more he saw of Fields on this expedition, Adam had to admit, the more he felt that he did not really know the professor and never had done.
As for Quint’s involvement in the theft of the manuscript, this matter was at least more straightforward. Adam’s initial anger and outrage towards his manservant had soon dissipated. Quint had explained at great, even tedious, length that he had only done what he had done because he had thought it the best course of action. No servant, he had maintained with a look of injured innocence, had ever been more attentive to his master’s needs than he and look at the thanks he got. Adam had taken his protestations of good faith with a pinch of salt but he had come to accept Quint’s blunt arguments about the Euphorion manuscript: the theft of the book, however injurious to the monks of Agios Andreas and however ungrateful in the light of their hospitality, was a fait accompli.
They had made their way northwards by a circuitous route. In the first week, they had circled the city of Larissa, admiring from afar its minarets glittering in the noonday sun. They had moved on and, a day later, entered the Vale of Tempe. Cliffs had towered above them on either side of the ravine, surmounted by the ruins of two ancient fortresses which had once commanded the pass. For a further day they had journeyed through the valley. As they rode, Fields had explained what he had discovered in the pages of the volume he had stolen from Agios Andreas. On two occasions, he had even allowed Adam and Rallis to take the manuscript from him and read it themselves. The ancient Greek geographer had not only known that a treasure existed in the Macedonian hills. He had travelled in those same hills a few centuries after it had been buried there with the remains of the Macedonian kings. He had spoken to the peasants who lived there and listened to their legends of what lay beneath the tumuli in their native land. He had noted with remarkable precision the site which they claimed held the gold of the ancients.
‘How can we know that he was writing the truth?’ Adam had wanted to know, as the travellers had emerged from the Vale of Tempe and led the mules over a stone bridge across a meandering stream. ‘How can we know that his informants had any real idea of what was buried? Perhaps the treasure was dug up long ago and long since disappeared? Although can we even be certain that Philip was able to get his hands on gold?’
Fields had handed the reins of his mule to Quint and crouched by the little bridge, peering closely at its stones.
‘Probably a work of the ancient Macedonians,’ he had said, making no immediate response to Adam’s remarks. ‘We have just ridden over stones that were in place when Alexander departed for Asia.’
He had then risen to his feet. ‘There can be no doubt that the ancient rulers of this land had access to gold,’ he had continued. ‘There were rivers in Macedonia from which alluvial gold could be obtained. And Diodorus Siculus, for one, speaks about the mines Philip controlled. His mints were striking gold coins by the thousands, probably. The coins were even known as philippeioi.’
‘So the Macedonians had gold in plenty,’ Adam had acknowledged. ‘But we cannot know that it is buried where Euphorion says it is. The villagers were reporting their myths to him, not what we would recognise as their history.’
‘Perhaps,’ the professor had conceded. ‘As you say, we cannot know for certain. But it is a risk worth taking, is it not? To believe Euphorion? The worst that can happen is that we waste a few weeks of our life in fruitless digging. But, if the man was right, we will make the greatest discovery of the century. Layard and his exacavations at Nineveh will seem like little more than idle scrabblings in the dust of Mesopotamia.’
‘When the villagers learn we are digging,’ Rallis had said, ‘they will assume we are looking for treasure.’ The Athenian had seemed uncharacteristically anxious. ‘They will either chase us from the land or they will rob us of what we find.’
‘We have our papers,’ Fields had said. ‘I made certain of them before we left Athens. They will not dare touch us when we have a letter from a minister of the Porte.’
‘Maybe so.’ The Greek had looked unreassured. ‘Maybe not so. This is a long way from Constantinople.’
But the professor had proved correct. A week later, they had arrived at a site near Koutles. The ground was uncultivated and was covered in tumuli for hundreds of yards in all direction. Fields had pointed with confidence towards the largest of these and announced that this was the spot that Euphorion had identified as the place to dig.
‘His Greek is, for once, blessedly clear and correct on the point,’ Fields had said. ‘Many of the rest of his geographical descriptions are marred by the infelicities of his prose but of this one there can be no doubt. He writes quite unambiguously of the largest amongst a hundred mounds.’