David Gibbins
Testament
Acknowledgments
I’m very grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA; to my editors, Sherise Hobbs at Headline in London and Peter Wolverton at Thomas Dunne Books in New York; to my former editor Martin Fletcher and to Ann Verrinder Gibbins and Jane Selley for their continuing excellent work on my books; to the rest of the teams at Headline and at Thomas Dunne Books, including Beth Eynon, Christina Demosthenous, Emily Gowers, and Emma Stein; to Alison Bonomi and Ajda Vucicevic at LBA; to Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Jenny Robson, Simone Smith, and Alice Natali at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; and to my many foreign publishers and translators.
As with my other novels in this series, much of the diving and archaeology that I’ve written about here is based on my own experiences. My brother Alan has been my companion on many wreck dives in recent years, and his photo of me underwater can be seen in the design cover of this book. Mark Milburn dived with me in Gunwalloe Cove in Cornwall when we discovered the wreck of the Grip, and since then we’ve found much older wrecks in those waters. My excavations at Carthage were carried out under the auspices of the Carthage Museum and were funded by the British Academy, the Cambridge University Faculty of Classics, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I’m very grateful to the staff of the National Archives at Kew and the archivist of the Clan Line for assisting with my research on convoys off West Africa. I owe much to my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, for having talked to me about his wartime experiences as a Merchant Navy officer. My research on the Abyssinia campaign benefited from assistance I received at the Royal Engineers Library in Chatham, the Cambridge University Library, and the India Office Collections of the British Library, and I’m also grateful to Heidelberg University Library for allowing me to see the original tenth-century manuscript of the Periplus of Hanno. Lastly, I owe a special thanks to my daughter for suggesting that we visit Bletchley Park, and for freediving with me off Cornwall just as Rebecca does with Jack in this novel.
Map
Epigraph
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying… they shall make an ark of acacia wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof. And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round about… And thou shalt make staves of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold… The staves shall be in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it. And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee…
…we sailed along with all speed, being stricken by fear. After a journey of four days, we saw the land at night covered with flames. And in the midst there was one lofty fire, greater than the rest, which seemed to touch the stars. By day this was seen to be a very high mountain, called Chariot of the Gods.
Thence, sailing along by the fiery torrents for three days, we came to a bay, called Horn of the South. In the recess of this bay there was an island… full of savage men… they had hairy bodies, and the interpreters called them Gorillae. When we pursued them we were unable to take any of the men; for they all escaped, climbing the steep places and defending themselves with stones; but we took three of the women… we killed them and flayed them, and brought their skins to Carthage.
For we did not voyage further, provisions failing us…
Prologue
The man with the braided beard lurched forward, his hands on his knees, panting hard. Even his breathing seemed cracked, desiccated, like the hard crust of salt on the foreshore around him, as if the skin of the earth were burning and peeling away with his own. The sun had nearly reached its zenith, and it was as hot as the very furnace of Ba’al Hammon in Carthage, at the place of sacrifice where he and his crew had made offerings a lifetime ago at the start of their voyage. For a moment he wondered whether he was back there still, whether the torment of the past weeks had been nothing more than a nightmare inflicted on him by the gods, a punishment for sailing to lands so far beyond the Pillars of Hercules that even the gods themselves held no sway.
He shut his eyes, feeling them smart with the dryness, seeing the white blotches of blindness that had begun to appear over the last few days. He opened them again, blinking hard against the light that reflected off the cracked mosaic of salt around his feet. This was no nightmare, but it was far beyond any reality he had ever experienced before. He turned around, staggering, and shielded his eyes with one hand against the glare, seeing the distant form of his ship where it had heeled over and held fast in the shallows, and in the other direction the hazy forms of his four companions, two of them struggling with their burden as they made their way across the salt flats toward the mountains. The heat shimmer on the flats had made him think of the mirages he had seen as a boy in the desert south of Carthage, and had given him a spark of hope that he might one day make it back there alive. He tried licking his lips, but his tongue was like sandstone. He had to reach the foothills and find water soon, or die.
He staggered forward again, shouldering the sack that contained their meager remaining provisions: a few dried fish, handfuls of wild grain collected during their last foray ashore, some nuts and roots. The other ships of the fleet seemed a distant memory now, ships full of grain and amphorae of olive oil and wine to stock the outposts they had established along the desert shore beyond the Pillars of Hercules, seeking the place the Greeks called Chrysesephon, the Land of Gold. They had found it, a beach where the native traders brought them nuggets of river gold as big as a man’s fist, gold they were willing to trade for textiles dyed with the royal purple of Tire. But instead of turning back then, their coffers filled, he had ordered the remaining ships to carry on, past burning mountains crowned with rivers of red, past rivers teeming with fish with teeth like lions’, along a desolate sandy shore strewn with the skeletons of whales where the other three ships had all been driven to destruction in a terrible storm, sweeping the men shrieking and yelling into the pounding surf to join the rotting carcasses that lined the shore as far as the eye could see.
His was the only ship to make the southern cape, the very extremity of Africa, a stormy, rocky pinnacle pounded by the surf where they had erected a pillar with a bronze plaque dedicated to Ba’al Hammon before turning northeast and sailing up the far shore. He had wept there, thinking of his brother Himilco. Three years earlier they had stood together at the Pillars of Hercules, drinking wine and eating olives, planning the greatest trading expeditions ever undertaken. Himilco would sail north to the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles, with elephant ivory and textiles and olive oil. If he could find the source of the tin the Greek middlemen brought to Massalia, then they could bypass the overland route through Gaul and ship it directly to the Mediterranean, monopolizing the trade. If he himself, Hanno, could sail south and find Chrysesephon, they would be doubly blessed, and great fortune and fame would be theirs.