So when Xan and Delaney began lagging, Costa remained true to the xenía code. For as long as he could. He slowed his pace and carried their supplies, and he even bit his tongue when Xan weirdly insisted on bolting out of Akendria the same day they got there. But take a bullet for them? Forget it. Xenía says you have to be hospitable; it doesn’t say you have to be an idiot. When the young Brit and the aging Aussie sergeant sank down and refused to get up, Costa tore into them.
“Delaney and I would have willingly succumbed but for Costa’s example and exhortation,” Xan would admit. The relentless Costa dragged his two charges to their feet and got them moving again. By dawn he’d harried them as far as the southern foothills of Mount Ida. There, at last, they could hole up in a little village and get some rest before pushing on that night.
Except … something didn’t feel right. Something about the valley was making Costa uneasy. It just seemed … wrong. He hunted up a local and discovered his suspicions were correct: Germans were ransacking the villages in search of a local guerrilla. Costa had to get Xan and Delaney out of sight before the sun came up, so he led them into the cliffs and found a snug spot between some brush-covered rocks. They burrowed in while Costa slipped off for provisions, soon returning with goatskins of wine, a pot of cold beans, and some friends in the Resistance. By the time he got back, Xan was already out cold. While the other men ate and whispered, Xan slept through the day on the cold, wet stone, too exhausted to eat.
Turning himself into John Pendlebury was turning out to be a lot tougher than Xan had expected. Of course, Pendlebury had an advantage: he’d been practicing the art of becoming John Pendlebury his entire life.
When Pendlebury was two years old, his parents left him one evening in the care of friends. When they returned, one of his eyeballs was punctured. Maybe the boy poked himself with a pen, maybe he was scratched by a thorn—no one saw it happen or could ever figure it out, not even his father, a surgical professor and house surgeon at St. George’s Hospital. Pendlebury didn’t seem to mind at all; he liked to dress up the glass replacement with a monocle, or pluck it out when going on a hike and leave it behind on his desk as a way of saying he’d be gone awhile.
His taste for masquerade followed him to Cambridge, where he became an excellent high jumper, despite poncing around between jumps in a white cloak. Although he was the university’s preeminent archeology student, Pendlebury liked to “play the buffoon,” according to a friend’s recollection. He’d scrawl endless doodles of knights in armor in his notebooks, and he founded a drinking club he called Ye Joyouse Companie of Seynt Pol, a sort of boozing fantasy league for make-believe Merry Men. He and Lawrence of Arabia loved the same favorite book, which is an even odder coincidence because it’s so awful. The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay is the story of Richard the Lionheart, except told with more stabbings, straining bosoms, and wild-eyed killers than a Mexican telenovela. Lawrence read it nine times before he graduated Oxford, while Pendlebury was always raving about it to his friends. When a classmate dropped by before returning to Australia, Pendlebury “pounced on his Richard Yea and Nay, by Maurice Hewlett, which he gave me with instructions to think of him when I read it. This was a much bigger gesture than it appeared, for this grubby little book was, to John, a symbol of heroism and romance.”
Wrong! That’s what his friends didn’t get. To Pendlebury, those mace-and-maiden tales weren’t symbols; they were real voices from the past with important lessons to teach. Chivalry and the art of the hero were the fading lights of a train he’d just missed, and Pendlebury was obsessed with finding a way to catch up. Yea-and-Nay was his inspiration, and soon after he graduated Cambridge, he found his path.
Pendlebury spent his twenty-fourth birthday as a visiting student at the British School in Athens, and it was there that a strange book with a blue-and-gold cover came into his hands: The Palace of Minos. Inside, he found a thrilling proposition: was he willing to believe that all those myths he’d loved as a boy—King Minos and the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne, the Iliad and the Odyssey—were based on real people, real places, real events? Could he accept that they weren’t just make-believe, but a snarled thread of history that, once untangled, led back to a time when heroes roamed the earth? Because if he could, fantastic new discoveries awaited him.
And they began on the island of Crete.
Pendlebury was so electrified, he left Athens within days of reading The Palace of Minos and went in search of its author, Arthur Evans, the eccentric adventurer and antiquities collector. Evans claimed he’d found hard proof that the legend of King Minos—son of Zeus, stepfather of the monstrous half man, half bull who ate fourteen of Athens’s best-looking teenagers every year—was based on a true story. Evans said he’d located not only Minos’s lost kingdom and the Minotaur’s fabled Labyrinth but also the remains of a fabulous Minoan culture that dominated the Mediterranean two thousand years before the pyramids were built.
Was it a hoax? If so, Evans was going all out. To believe his story, you had to believe he’d found the birthplace of, well, everything. This lost world he described was so old, it was already dying by the time the Egyptians began making words out of dog and bird drawings. Science, literature, politics, advanced math, philosophy, sports, theater—according to Evans, it all sprang from Crete, that craggy little cinder in the sea. It also meant that this nearsighted amateur, a fiery, squinting little man who strode about London smacking carriages with a hiking staff he called “Prodger” and set entire teams of diggers to work because he’d caught a whiff of fennel, had stumbled across a new chapter of human history nearly as long as the span from the birth of Julius Caesar to the death of Steve Jobs.
Pendlebury’s excitement grew as he got off the boat in Crete. Just walking along the waterfront was like seeing Evans’s book come to life. In the frescoes Evans described, Minoan women were curiously graceful and attractive, “gaily dressed in the height of fashion, with elegantly coiffured hair, engaged apparently in gay chit-chat,” as Evans put it, while Minoan men had the sinewy physiques of aerial acrobats. “They were quite unlike the classical Greeks, unlike the Egyptians, unlike the Babylonians, unlike any ancient people whose painted or sculpted representations had survived from the ancient past,” archeological researcher Leonard Cottrell would note. There’s something very right, Evans reflected, about a culture that portrays itself with such sass and strength.
And here they were, alive and well and strolling the streets. “I know of no sight finer than a well-dressed Cretan peasant, and with the dress goes a swing and a lightness of foot which always sets me thinking of the slim athletes of Minoan days,” Pendlebury would write. From the port of Heraklion, Pendlebury made his way three miles south to Knossos, Evans’s spectacular six-acre restoration of an ancient Minoan city. Inside the great palace, Evans had found marvels of sophisticated design: a plumbing system, chess games, four-story architecture, locking doors, a trademark registry, a system of weights and measures, and an astronomical calendar. But deep belowground were hints of darker arts: sinister catacombs with mysterious piles of children’s bones.