MYKENE

    

    He had walked nearly a mile uphill by now and could see the ruins of the fortified city high above in the distance, a splash of honey-colored rock against the lush green mountains. The town lay behind him-the restaurants and bars named Agamemnon and Menelaos and Klitimnistra, the tourist shops and hotels, the teenage boys in designer-jean jackets roaring by on mopeds, revving them like hogs-he was glad to leave them behind.

    Beside the road he passed two crypt sites where excavation had begun. Cypress trees grew in the valley along with century plants and frail red poppies. The sun was not too hot. The silence admitted only the wind. He could see it blowing the skirts of tourist women and snatching at sun visors as he approached the ruins.

    To his right a herd of goats and sheep milled through the long wild grass. He stopped and watched for a while until the herdsman pulled off his cap and stared at him. He gazed across the field at the man.

    He read him.

    The man was open.

    It was easy.

    Flashes of anger under tight control. Anger and moral outrage.

    He saw why. The images were vivid. Three days ago a group of boys, tourists, had stood here drunk and pelted the man’s flock with garbage. Cans, bottles, and a half-eaten feta cheese sandwich. He saw it exactly as the man had then, startled, rushing toward them, waving his cap and shouting. He saw them laugh and point and run away.

    He felt the man's outrage, his pain and anger.

    One goat still walked with a limp. One of the boys had hit him squarely on the shin with a beer bottle. Chase picked out the goat easily from the flock. There. The young one. The man’s favorite, directly in front of him.

    Now the man was wary.

    Chase walked away.

    The road was steep. His breath came hard now. Forty-five years and too many cigarettes and too much single-malt whiskey. He liked the exertion, though. A man his size needed work or else he got soft. Lately he’d gotten much too little. The belly was flat and his shoulders thick as ever but the legs had weakened some. I’ll have to work on that, he thought, when I get back.

    If I do.

    It struck him like a snake, the second time that day.

    I could die here.

    To hell with that, he thought. Just keep going.

    To his left lay a narrow dirt road marked by a wooden sign that read TREASURY OF ATRAEUS.

    There was a buzzing in his head like an angry swarm of insects. His hands trembled.

    Yes, he thought. Right here.

    He wiped his forehead. Mild as the day was he was overdressed for the weather. Already the grey suit jacket looked wilted. The rich leather shoes were covered with dust.

    Elaine warned you, he thought. Before you left for the airport. But you were in a hurry.

    You’re not prepared for this, he thought.

    Of course you’re not.

    It always happened this way. He was always unprepared to one degree or another. Like the shepherd before, simply reading the man.

    Or being called here.

    He’d been sitting in a conference room in New York across from his board of directors when suddenly, inexplicably, Mykene had spoken to him.

    Shouted was more like it, he thought. The headache was instant, blinding.

    I have to go see Tasos, he’d told Elaine. Check on the export deal.

    She knew him well by now, knew his gift and knew enough not to question him, though it was as clear to her as to him that the deal could be checked by phone in a matter of moments. That was the excuse, made for her benefit, so she wouldn’t worry. His wife understood that.

    So far he’d not even phoned Tasos. Couldn’t have if he’d wanted to.

    He barely remembered stepping off the plane or the cab to the bus station or buying his ticket or the journey here.

    Mykene had him now. He gave himself over.

    It had happened to him before but never quite like this.

    He'd be visiting a place and suddenly it would simply reach out to him. Always a place of some antiquity. Something alive and ancient touching him. It was always deeply moving. And each touch was dangerous. Each had changed him somehow. Thus far, he felt, for the better.

    This was different.

    This had been more in the nature of marching orders. Get your ass to Greece, Chase. He felt some strong firm hand pulling the strings.

    He knew better than to resist.

    He obeyed.

    And now he blinked into the sunlight, unprepared again, and wished for dark glasses.

    Back home there were a few thousand people depending on him in one way or another in companies with names like Laserlab and Ampcomp and JTC Imports. To them this was absolute foolishness, irresponsible as hell.

    It didn’t matter.

    And he wasn’t exactly a kid anymore, burrowing through the ruins of Tenochtitlan in the blazing Mexican sun.

    That didn’t matter either.

    He had the feeling he’d never done anything so important in his life. If he was a little old for it, so be it.

    He’d learned to trust these things. There wasn’t much to do but trust them.

    He climbed the road through a copse of trees. There was a chain-link gate and an admissions shack and a small dark man wearing sunglasses inside it. He handed the man seventy drachmas and received a ticket. He kept climbing.

    The trail veered off left and when he rounded the comer he found himself at the base of the dromos, a passageway about twelve feet wide and a hundred feet long, cut into the mountain, flanked with stones and fitted with mortar. Huge stones. Cyclopean. The term was right. An immense hand here. He started walking.

    The mountain sloped down gently around him, speckled with brown and green grasses, the tall narrow entrance to the tomb like a great forty-foot dagger-thrust into the heart of it, cruel and magnificent too, big enough to thwart the sense of distance. He could see why the ancient Greeks had shaped their gods as men. Who could say which had built this place?

    Agamamnon’s tomb, Schliemann had believed.

    Agamemnon.

    The king who led the Greeks to Troy. Heir to the curse of the House of Atreaus, which began somewhere in unrecorded time with brother feeding brother the flesh of his own children. King to a rough Bronze Age people sixteen centuries before Christ whose gods and goddesses were of earth and harvest-not pacific sky gods of Olympus.

    Agamemnon. Murderer of his daughter. Killed by his wife and queen.

    The male, generative principle. Sacrificed to the female, reproductive principle.

    It happened again and again all over the world whenever the earth was starved and needy. There probably was such a man, thought Chase, and truth behind the story. A man sacrificed, like many kings before him when they grew too old-their judgement questionable or their power spent-to the goddess earth, to replenish it and begin the process anew.

    These were the Myceneans, the people who had built this place.

    A gust of wind cuffed his thin brown hair and he pushed it back over his forehead, wiped a line of sweat off the stubble at his chin.

    The tomb was still vigorous, still magnetic. Even standing out here he felt it

    He stood at the entrance and looked in. It was empty. He’d beaten the tourists here. They would still be at the fortified city on the mountain.

    Good.

    He felt excited, receptive, almost passive. Open to whatever was inside, the adrenalin gently flowing. Exactly as it should be.

    Go on, he thought.

    He stepped inside.

    At first footfall the tholos began to sing to him.

    Physically sing.

    He heard the droning of bees-from where? He could see none. Mud daubers probably, in the niches between the stones. And then the chattering of birds, dozens of birds, sparrows, growing louder and louder as he moved inward, scolding him from their nests and swooping through the circular beehive chamber constructed in such a way that with each footfall the entire room seemed to shudder with short staccato tremblings of echo. He walked to the center of the chamber.

    He stood gazing at the walls blackened by shepherds’ fires, at the great stones of the base cut smaller and smaller as they ascended the wall until they were only brick size, set in concentric circles at the top. Soon the birds subsided. The air inside was cool and still. The single bright shaft of sunlight from the entrance washed him with gold.

    He emptied himself, lay open.

    Not quite, he thought.

    He felt a sense of past but not of power. The power was elsewhere. But near. Very near.

    There.

    To the right was a doorway maybe six and a half feet high-a smaller, man-sized version of the gigantic entranceway he’d just come through. He was sure he was right.

    This place.

    The sparrows protested again as he crossed the floor and stood in the doorway, its massive lintel only inches from the top of his head. He looked inside.

    Perhaps this morning there had been some spill of light into the chamber but not now.

    He peered blindly into a deep rich darkness.

    His eyes would not adjust. He felt the dark like a physical shock.

    He raised an arm, held it straight in front of him.

    From the elbow on it disappeared entirely.

    He strained to see, then closed his eyes and a moment later opened them. There was nothing. Fingers, wrist, forearm-all completely gone. Something shivered across his spine.

    He raised the other arm and started forward.

    It was not like night. It was not like closing his eyes. It was not like both together.

    It was deeper than that, much deeper, like the bottom of a pit that had never seen the light. He could feel his pupils dilating rapidly, trying to accommodate to this impossible environment.

    He inched along, working forward in a direct line from the doorway. The air was much cooler here and damp. But there was no musty smell-just the smell of earth, of something clean and hard. He felt sure he was in nothing man had made now. It was a cave-a natural chamber deep in the belly of the mountain. He was wary of breaks and pitfalls. He scuffled forward groping like a blind man. He was a blind man. Oedipus. Ten feet. Twenty. Twenty-five.

    Still there was only darkness. He did not look back.

    He could hear nothing but the sound of his feet on the rough pitted floor, that and his own breathing. Even the birds were silent.

    He wondered if he was alone.

    Then finally his hands found the cool sweating stone.

    Its touch was electric. He felt something race inside him-a strong, wonderful presence here. So strong he almost spoke to it-yes, I hear you. Yes.

    He turned his back to the wall and stared toward the entrance, its honey glow, the muscles of his back relaxing, relieved to finally see again. He felt the scrape of rough stone across his shoulders.

    And then he froze there.

    He shook his head in disbelief.

    He’d been walking through the dark. Swimming through it.

    Yet ten feet back on either side, spaced evenly apart and resting on slabs of stone, a pair of candles stood burning. Birthday candles. Very small, illuminating only a tiny space of floor.

    But burning.