Some resonant chord in Halvorsen’s Nordic soul is struck by the revelation that there will be a Ragnarok after all, a Götterdämmerung: that all gods must have their twilight, even the supernal beings of humanity’s final epoch. He is saddened and exalted by it all at once. They were beings of a magnificence and power beyond comprehension, a race of glorious heroes, demigods and more than demigods, and yet they fell, even they. Will fall. It is the myth of myths, the ultimate saga. Odin and Thor and Heimdall and Tyr and all the rest of the Aesir will die in the Fimbulwinter of the world, when Fenrir the Wolf breaks his chains and the Midgard Serpent rises and the fire-demons of Muspelheim come riding forth upon the world. So it has been, over and over, and so it must and will be, to the end of time, even into the days of the great Mandalas yet to come.
“Why come here, though?” Halvorsen asks. “We’re only smelly primitives, hardly more than apes. We live in ignoble times. Why not just stay where you are, up there in the grand and glorious final act of the human drama, and wait for the curtain to come down?”
—The curtain has already come down, and it happens that I have lived on beyond it. Where is the nobility in that? I want to close the circle; I want to return to the starting point. Come: take my body. Explore my world, which to you will be full of wonders beyond belief. There will be much for you to study here: our immense past is your immeasurable future. Spend a million years, two million, as long as you like, roaming the ruins of Costa Stambool. And let me take your place in your own era.
“It won’t be a fair trade,” Halvorsen warns again. “You won’t be getting as good as you give.”
—Let me be the judge of that.
“No. Listen to me. I need to have you realize what you’d be getting. Not only are we mortal—do you really understand what that means, to be mortal?—but I’m not even an especially good specimen of my race. I’m getting to be old, as old goes among us, and I feel very tired and my leg, if you know what a leg is, was badly damaged in an accident last year and I can barely hobble around. Besides which, I’ve painted myself into a corner professionally and I’m about to become a laughing stock. You’d be walking into a miserable situation. The way I feel now, even the end of the world would be preferable to the mess I’m in.”
—Is this a refusal of my offer, or an acceptance?
Halvorsen is baffled for a moment by that. Then he understands, and he begins to laugh.
But of course he is aware that the game he is playing with himself, out there along the borders of sanity, is a dangerous one; and he is glad when sleep at last frees him of these fantastical colloquies. When morning comes, he knows, he must rid his mind of all such nonsense and turn his full attention to the trench on the hill. And either find in it the things that he hopes will be there, or else abandon this site at last, confess his defeat, and make his choice between letting himself be pensioned off and humbly petitioning the Turks to allow him to hunt for traces of extreme Anatolian antiquity someplace else. But he ought not to go on diverting himself with these wishful and fundamentally unhealthy dreams of an escape to the Fifth Mandala.
And eventually morning comes, bringing the usual blast of dry heat, the usual clouds of little black flies, and the usual breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, processed cheese, canned sardines, and powdered coffee. Morning also brings, a couple of hours later, the Department of Antiquities’ new superintendent of excavations for this district, Selim Erbek: Selim Bey, as Halvorsen calls him, since in Turkey it’s always a good idea to bestow formal honorific titles on anyone who holds any sort of power over you.
Not that Selim Bey seems particularly intimidating. He is very young, thirty at most, a slender man, almost slight, with sleek black hair. He is clean-shaven except for a narrow mustache and is wearing khaki slacks and a thin green shirt already stained with sweat. And—Halvorsen finds this very strange—Selim Bey’s demeanor, right from the start, is extraordinarily diffident, almost withdrawn. His voice is almost inaudible and he can barely bring himself to make contact with Halvorsen. The contrast with Hikmet Pasha, his big-bellied, swaggering predecessor, could not be more marked.
Halvorsen offers him breakfast. Selim Bey shakes him off.
“May we speak?” he asks softly, almost timidly.
What the hell is this? Halvorsen wonders. “Of course,” he says.
“The two of us, only. Man to man, apart from the others.”
Of his assistants, only Jane Sparmann is within hearing range. Does Selim Bey want privacy, or is he simply uncomfortable around women? Halvorsen shrugs and signals to Jane that she should return to her dig. Selim Bey smiles faintly, a quick crinkling of the corner of his mouth. This is all quite odd, Halvorsen thinks.
He says, “Shall we begin with a tour of the site?”
“You may show me later. We must have our talk first,” says Selim Bey.
“Yes. Certainly.”
The slender little man gestures from the shoreline to the top of the hill. “You have not found, I take it, any additional Neolithic artifacts here, is that correct?”
“Not as yet, no. I’ve only recently begun trenching along the original find site—the proto-Hittite wall up there needed a careful excavation first, you see—and although the work thus far hasn’t been especially rewarding, there’s every reason to expect that—”
“No,” says Selim Bey. “There is no reason to expect anything.”
“Sorry. I don’t follow what you’re saying.”
Selim Bey shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His gaze rests on Halvorsen’s left cheekbone. His prominent adam’s-apple moves up and down like an adolescent’s. He seems about to burst into tears.
He says, after a little while, “I must tell you that the previous superintendent of excavations, Hikmet Bey, did not in fact resign. Hikmet Bey was dismissed.”
“Ah?”
“There were many reasons for this,” says Selim Bey quietly, digging the tip of his boot into the sand as an embarrassed child might do. “His behavior toward his superiors on certain occasions—his failure to file certain reports in a timely way—his excessive drinking—even his handling, I am sorry to say, of his official financial responsibilities. It is a very unfortunate story and I regret to be telling you of such deplorable things. He needs help, that man. We must all hope that he finds it.”
“Of course,” says Halvorsen piously. “The poor man.” He has to choke back laughter. The fat old tyrant, unseated at last! Caught with his hand in the till, no doubt. Pocketing the fees that the tourists pay to get into the museum at Bodrum and pissing the money away on raki and little boys.
“The reason I tell you this,” Selim Bey says, “is that examination of Hikmet Bey’s records, such as they were, brought forth certain revelations that it is necessary to share with you, Dr. Halvorsen. They concern the Neolithic artifacts that were found at this site after the great storms of some winters ago.”
“Yes?” Halvorsen says. He feels some pressure in his chest.
“A small clay bull’s head, a double-axe amulet, a female figurine, all in the Catal Huyuk style.”
“Yes? Yes?”
“I deeply regret to say, Dr. Halvorsen, that it appears that these were authentic Catal Huyuk artifacts, which Hikmet Bey obtained at their proper site many hundreds of kilometers from here through illegitimate channels and planted on this hill so that they would be discovered here by a shepherd boy and eventually brought to your attention.”