City of the Lost. Will Adams

can’t tell you.’ He looked uncomfortable for the first time. ‘Please trust me.’

      She shook her head, but only because she was unhappy. ‘I hate this,’ she said. ‘I want it to be over.’

      ‘It won’t be much longer,’ he said. ‘A few months at the very most and then we’ll be together forever, with everything we’ve worked for. Our nation will be free again. And your father too, don’t forget.’ He checked his watch again. ‘But right now I have to go.’ He softened the message with a smile. ‘You may have heard that a bomb went off today.’

      ‘Call me tomorrow,’ she said.

      ‘If I can.’

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘Call me tomorrow.’

      He nodded seriously. ‘As you wish.’

      She reached out and touched his cheek upon her screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ she said.

      He nodded and touched his own screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf.’

      II

      Somehow, during the course of their meal, sharing a room with Karin had become an issue for Iain to manage. They fell into a slightly awkward silence on their way back to the hotel. Their footsteps synchronized on the pavement, that heel-and-toe cadence that sounds weirdly like heartbeats. The receptionist gave a curious frown as she wished them good night, and the lift seemed a bit more cramped than it had while coming down earlier.

      He let Karin into the room ahead of him, the better to follow her cues. She invited him to use the bathroom first. He did so. When it came to her turn, he heard the toilet flushing, the running of a tap, the vigorous brushing of her teeth. She came out wearing his olive T-shirt, its hem hanging loose around her thighs like some skimpy miniskirt. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Never looks like that on me.’

      ‘The lights,’ she said.

      He switched them off. She slipped beneath her duvet. The room was on the hotel’s top floor and had a sloped skylight in place of a window. The weak moonlight and the white net curtain that drooped across it meant that all he could see was various gradations of darkness. He turned onto his side to face her, propped himself up on an elbow. ‘So you were telling me about earthquakes,’ he said. ‘How they don’t cause fires like you’d expect.’

      ‘Wasn’t I boring you?’

      ‘Are you kidding? I’ll never get to sleep until I know.’

      He heard her laughter, then rustling as she too turned onto her side. Strange to think that they were facing each other a few feet apart, yet blind. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘These places were mostly built of stone. Their citadels, at least. Even if an oil lamp tipped over, there was nothing to catch fire, certainly not enough to spread. Sometimes a conquering army would want to burn a city as punishment, or to send out a message, but actually it was a real production. They had to cut down nearby forests and drag the trees into the city then spread them around the houses before it would catch. A lot of work, especially when you consider a city was a valuable thing. Even if you didn’t want to live there yourself, you could squeeze the citizens for tribute. So why burn it? Yet we have numerous examples.’

      ‘A game of tit for tat?’ he suggested. ‘Only it got out of hand.’

      ‘That’s one theory,’ she agreed. ‘But these places are scattered all over the place, so it’s hard to fit them to a pattern. Usually, in history, you can build a narrative that makes some kind of sense. It may be wrong, but it helps you think about it until something better comes along. Not with this. And, even if it did, it still wouldn’t explain how brutal the Dark Ages were. Everything collapsed. Cities were abandoned, and not only the burned ones. There was a massive depopulation. In some places, the lack of archaeological remains suggest that populations fell by ninety per cent or more. Ninety per cent! And this lasted twenty generations, give or take. Think about that: How much do you know about your family twenty generations ago? Especially as this wasn’t normal, settled life, but nomadic scavenging and hard-scrabble farming under constant threat of raiders stealing your winter stores. Yet somehow, at the end of it, Homer managed to depict the Trojan War almost as though he’d been there.’

      ‘I thought you said the Trojan War may not even have happened.’

      ‘Yes. But the world in which it was set existed. He knows the names of Mycenaean kingdoms that no longer existed. He depicts their armour and weaponry, their ships, tactics, gods, rituals, terrain and burial customs. He’s not perfect, sure, and there’s plenty of later stuff mixed in, but he’s still far more accurate than he had any right to be. How?’

      The room was as dark as before, yet suddenly he glimpsed something like movement in the darkness, almost as if Karin were reaching out her hand to him across the narrow aisle. He reached out, curious, to check; but it proved a mirage. Nothing but empty space. ‘And that’s the Homeric Question?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the Homeric Question.’

       EIGHT

      I

      Iain slept poorly that night. It had been a while since he’d shared a bedroom, and he found himself vaguely unsettled by Karin’s proximity, her breathing, the occasional rustle of her bedclothes. But his restlessness had other causes too. Twinges in his ribs each time he shifted reminded him of the battering he’d taken from the rest-room door. Unhappy thoughts of Mustafa and the day’s other victims interwoven with older memories of similar scenes in different places. And, underlying it all, the fear of oversleeping, of being late for Layla. It was almost a relief, therefore, when it neared time for him to get up. He turned off his alarm-clock in anticipation so that Karin could sleep on. He rose, washed and dressed as quietly as he could, then wrote her a note to assure her she was welcome to stay on as long as it took to sort herself out.

      The sky was milky with dawn, the roads so empty that he reached Hatay Airport in barely twenty minutes. The terminal seemed disconcertingly normal, as though yesterday’s carnage had never happened. Layla was on the first flight in. He met her by the gate. Her eyes were raw from weeping and she cried again when she saw him waiting. He put his arms around her and murmured what small comforts he could think of until she’d composed herself again.

      They were silent on the drive in. Layla was lost in private thoughts and he couldn’t think of anything to say. The hospital was an ugly green block on Antioch’s western fringe. He parked in an adjacent street and led her inside. They asked directions to the morgue, an unmarked low grey building standing all by itself. Layla took his arm to stop him before they went in. ‘Was yesterday anything to do with you?’ she asked. ‘With your work, I mean?’

      ‘They’re saying it was Cypriots.’

      ‘I know what they’re saying. That’s not what I’m asking.’

      Iain sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Not for certain.’

      ‘It’s possible, then?’

      ‘Yes. It’s possible.’

      ‘Find out. I need to know.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Thank you.’ She opened the morgue door then stood there blocking him for a few moments, her head down, as if debating with herself whether to speak or not. ‘When we were on the phone yesterday,’ she said, at last, ‘suddenly you weren’t there any more.’

      ‘I lost coverage. The masts were overloaded.’

      ‘Yes. I thought that was it. But you didn’t call back. I waited and waited and you didn’t call back.’

      ‘I told you,’ said Iain. ‘I’d lost coverage.’