The Fire Seekers Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Richard Farr

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13 (hardcover): 9781477847732

  ISBN-10 (hardcover): 1477847731

  ISBN-13 (paperback): 9781477825662

  ISBN-10 (paperback): 1477825665

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907841

  Cover design by Will Staehle

  Book design by Paul Barrett

  For Aidan and Declan

  A father may be forgiven, perhaps, for wishing upon his sons the richest, most dazzling, most extravagant success of all—a life well lived.

  So, like, no pressure or anything.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  The Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia

  PROLOGUE DISK MEMORY

  PART I: PATAGONIA

  CHAPTER 1 GIFTS

  CHAPTER 2 ROCKFALL

  CHAPTER 3 BABILANI

  CHAPTER 4 A BODY IS A BODY

  CHAPTER 5 INTO THE PLAIN OF SHINAR

  CHAPTER 6 THE ANSWERING SILENCE

  CHAPTER 7 KNOW IT IS TRUE

  PART II: THE AKKADIAN VERSION

  CHAPTER 8 BEYOND THE MERELY HUMAN

  CHAPTER 9 GRIEVING IS A PROCESS

  CHAPTER 10 MAY YOU JOIN THEM

  CHAPTER 11 GOAT ROCKS

  CHAPTER 12 ARCHITECTS

  CHAPTER 13 I HAVE FOUND IT

  CHAPTER 14 THE AKKADIAN VERSION

  CHAPTER 15 HORROR MOVIE

  PART III: HOME OF THE GODS

  CHAPTER 16 ETERNAL CITY

  CHAPTER 17 ANTIKYTHERA

  CHAPTER 18 DEVIL IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA

  CHAPTER 19 CROSSING TO KYTHERA

  CHAPTER 20 THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

  CHAPTER 21 LITTLE ARARAT

  CHAPTER 22 HOME OF THE GODS

  CHAPTER 23 IN THE ARMY OF THE TEN THOUSAND

  EPILOGUE SEEING IN THE DARK

  THANKS

  FROM THE AUTHOR: SOME NOTES ON FACT AND FICTION

  SOME DATES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Then the Architects put forth their hands, and touched our mouths, and said to us, behold, we have put our words in your mouths.”

  —From the so-called Akkadian Version, circa 2500 BCE.

  (Compare Jeremiah 1:9)

  “If this is real, then everything we thought we knew about human civilization—the origin of cities, religion, language itself—it’s just frost on the windowpane.”

  —Morag Chen

  “Nearly all crazy theories are false. That’s the easy part. The hard part is that there are no interesting theories except the crazy ones that turn out to be true.”

  —Professor Derek Partridge

  The Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia

  PROLOGUE

  DISK MEMORY

  I’m conscious of the light.

  Conscious of the strong, pale-yellow sunlight that’s flooding down through high windows into the big white room. Conscious also of the rare artifacts that surround me on every side: pitchers and bowls, a fresco of vaulting acrobats, a bronze bull’s head so real it makes my skin crawl, a statue of a bare-breasted goddess holding snakes.

  Conscious also of my father, arms crossed, watching me.

  One of the world’s leading experts on ancient languages: I say that, you’ll know what to expect, won’t you—gray beard, jacket and tie, thick glasses, plenty of dithering and muttering? But you’ve seen too many movies. In this seven-year-old memory, Professor William Hayden Calder is thirty-nine, looks younger. He’s wearing faded jeans, red flip-flops, a T-shirt that reads “Contains Human Organs.” Ray-Bans are perched in his glossy black hair. He looks like a much younger, leading-man kind of movie star.

  Has the ego to match too. He made a name for himself early. Still a grad student, supposedly writing a thesis on the languages of pre-biblical Mesopotamia, when he took a “vacation” from his real research, made a bet with a pal, and in three weeks of all-nighters deciphered Rongorongo, the bizarre puzzle-script of Rapa Nui. Didn’t win him a lot of friends among all the Polynesia specialists who had thrown their whole careers at the problem. Did net him a first job at Harvard; did result in a famous paper suggesting that most of the population of that isolated island disappeared mysteriously just before the Europeans showed up. Soon afterward he was the subject—I’d say victim, only he loved it—of a fannish profile in National Geographic:

  Professor William Calder is perhaps the best known of the extremely rare “Babblers.” Hyperpolyglots (to use the technical term) can speak perhaps eight to ten languages fluently, but Calder is a rarity even among them. He is said to be master of nearly twenty modern languages, and moving seamlessly from Finnish to Flemish to Farsi on demand is something of a professional party trick. But he is, more importantly, the world’s leading authority on the languages of the ancient Near East.

  Ooh.

  So yeah, unquestionably a freak. Unquestionably the go-to guy if you have an itch to scratch about the past tense in Old Elamite. But truly famous? Nah. He’s head of linguistics at the University of Washington now (that’s the you-dub, by the way, if you don’t want to sound like a tourist next time you’re in Seattle). A bit of a wheeler-dealer, an organizer of international conferences on the origin and extinction of languages, a man who’s followed around campus by a flock of influence-horny junior profs and research assistants. Definitely an alpha chimp in his small patch of the academic jungle. But it’ll be years yet—with his own research going nowhere—before he’s infected, almost accidentally, by the terrible virus called fame.

  We’re in Heraklion, on the island of Crete, the dead center of the eastern Mediterranean. And this morning we have one of the world’s great archaeology museums all to ourselves. No tourists yet, no fat pink people dragging their sticky, whining ankle-biters, because on Mondays the doors don’t open to the point-and-shoot crowd until noon. You would like us to make the collection available to you on Monday morning, Professor? Certainly. A pleasure! An honor and a pleasure to assist you in any way. Bow, scrape, grovel. All we have for company is a young, prematurely bald custodian in an ill-fitting khaki uniform, who lurks discreetly in the farthest corner of the room.

  Dad shifts, rubs his ear, looks at me again. He’s trying to be patient, thinks I’m a bit slow. He thinks most of the human race is a bit slow. He’s waiting for my reaction to one particular object, which stands upright in its U-shaped metal frame, separated from the end of my nose by an inch of bulletproof glass.

  Ought to say something—but hey, this is the first week of my first trip to Crete, and I’m only ten, so a reddish circle of clay that looks like a bad attempt at a salad plate can’t compete with a bare-breasted goddess. And even she can’t compete with the thought that maybe, when we’re done here, we’ll stroll down to the waterfront for ice cream.

  I look at him, look back at the salad plate, savor the coolness I feel as the tip of my nose brushes the glass. The sign says, Δίσκος της Φαιστοὔ. He’s already force-fed me enough Greek for that to spell itself out, letter by letter, in my mind.

  Diskos tēs Phaistou.

  The Phaistos Disk.

  “It’s been here for mor
e than a hundred years, Daniel. All alone. Attracting crackpot theories the way a windshield attracts bugs.”

  “Why d’you say alone?”

  “Because it’s an orphan. Because nobody knows what it is, or where it’s from. And because nothing else remotely like it has ever been found.”

  He kneels down, traces with his fingertip the swirl of little symbols on its surface: a human head with a kind of spiky headdress, a forked stick, a standing woman, an ambiguous shape that reminds me of an animal skin or a snow-angel.

  Supposed to feel excited here. Trying.

  “See? Thirty groups of symbols on this side. Thirty-one on the other. In a spiral, like I said.”

  “Found right here?”

  “A site on the south side of the island. The Greeks showed up here around three thousand years ago, but before that Crete was run by the Minoans—a whole civilization that we didn’t even know existed until 1900, when a guy called Arthur Evans dug them up. Then a few years later an Italian archaeologist, Luigi Pernier, found this at one of their palaces. Judging from the earth layer, it’s thirty-six centuries old.”

  “That’s like, as old as Tutankhamun. Isn’t it?”

  “Earlier.” He kneels down and peers at me, assessing the effect of this knowledge. “No big deal, though. Just a chunk of old pottery.”

  “No big deal,” I agree helpfully, my mind on chocolate versus vanilla.

  “Except for that damned inscription, which is nothing even remotely like Minoan.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I’d love to answer that question. Possibly early Greek. Or some other language the Minoans used. Or a form of Hittite.”

  “Hittite? The guys from central Turkey?”

  “Well done,” he says smugly.

  The theory here is that I know about the Hittites because I’ve been a good boy and read his surprise archaeo-detective best seller, The Great Vanishing. There’s a copy on the shelf in my bedroom at home. For Daniel. An enigma about the past, to carry with you into the enigma of the future. Groan. It describes the Bronze Age Collapse, a few years right around 1200 BCE when, to quote his intro, “something mysterious, swift, and extraordinarily violent visited the eastern Mediterranean.”

  I’m feeling a bit of a fraud. Truth is, I only ever speed-browsed the maps and the first twenty pages. But I know the stuff backward and forward anyway: I’ve endured hours of free lectures on the subject at the family dinner table. Fifty cities and half a dozen civilizations burned to the ground in a single human lifetime. Mass religious hysteria. Big, unexplained population declines across the region. About fifty theories about what happened too, but Dad says not one of them passes the smell test. It’s kind of funny: I’m getting Bs and Cs, which troubles my overachieving mother and horrifies the alpha chimp, but at this point I’ve already absorbed so much talk about the nuked cities of the Bronze Age apocalypse that I can walk around their ruins in my head. An enigma, sure—but as familiar to me as my own Seattle neighborhoods.

  Ice cream would be great right now. “So do you think it’s Hittite? Or Minoan?”

  “For all I know, it’s the lost language of Atlantis. Or a code that unlocks the fairy kingdom at the center of the earth. Or graffiti left behind by five-eyed aliens from the planet Thark, which is the one just to the left of Betelgeuse. I’d like to come up with something better than that. Undeciphered languages to me are like a padlocked candy store.”

  “Maybe the symbols aren’t a language at all,” I suggest.

  “Oh yes, people have tried to argue that too. It’s a star chart! It’s a game board! Everyone has a theory.”

  “Hieroglyphs?” The compulsory third-grade project on the Rosetta Stone is still fresh in my mind.

  “Yes. If it’s a language, then yes, certainly hieroglyphs. Too many different symbols for it to be an alphabet, and way too few for a language where each symbol is a separate concept, like Chinese. The third option is that most of the signs stand for syllables, like in Maya.”

  “Or Egyptian.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you don’t have a Rosetta Stone for this.”

  “No. Nothing to decode it with.”

  We thank the custodian, step out through the main door onto the steps, where the midday light is like a welder’s torch. A family sags impatiently under the thin shade of a tree. That’s when thinking about ice cream causes me to make my only contribution to unlocking the Phaistos enigma.

  For me, reading is like balancing between two trees on a slackline: lots of concentration, lots of effort, never lasts long. But dyslexia has a silver lining. It forces you to think hard about patterns. To be precise, what I’m thinking about—I don’t tell Dad this—are the spirals of alternating color that you get in a chocolate-vanilla soft serve.

  “Course, the pattern on the Disk’s not really a spiral.”

  “What do you mean?” he says sharply.

  “Well, part of it’s a spiral. But there’s a mistake on one side, isn’t there? And if you—”

  I try to explain by drawing loops in the air with my hands. At first he tries to dismiss it: as usual, I’ve not been listening; as usual, I have it all wrong; why can’t I concentrate? But something makes me insist. “There are two separate shapes, one inside the other.”

  He frowns, entertains perhaps a tiny suspicion that in my half-assed way I might be on to something, drags me back inside. “Sorry,” he says in Greek. “Five more minutes?”

  The young man in the uniform, who’s probably doing overtime on his morning off so that they can accommodate the important visitor, looks at his watch, smoothes his nonexistent hair, offers a thin, polite smile. It cracks into a real one when Dad throws a second comment at him.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him never to have children, because they’re an unbelievable pain in the butt. Now show me what you mean.”

  Back at the Disk, I point to a place near the bottom edge where one line has a row of dots on it.

  “Like beads on a string,” he says. “There’s one on the other side too.”

  “Yes, but the spiral starts at the beads. If you count from there, it’s just eighteen groups. The other twelve, round the outside, they’re a separate ring.”

  He nods as I talk. And then says something I carry around with me for years, like a lucky charm or an emergency food ration. Something to get me through the day when I feel, as I mostly do feel, like a dumb jock crash-landed among the supernerds.

  “That’s clever, Daniel. Very observant. Could be significant.”

  That’s clever, Daniel.

  Very observant.

  Could be significant.

  I want to stop and write it down, so there’s no chance of forgetting it. Instead, I make an effort to stay focused, to keep sounding as interested as I’m supposed to be. “What about translating it then?”

  “Not a chance, with just this one Disk—the sample’s too short. Your mother wrote some clever software, we fed five hundred known languages through one of her company’s supercomputers, and it spat out a neat formula that predicts how much text you need, in an unknown language, before you can decipher it. Also tells you how many symbols to expect in total. According to her formula, forty-five symbols here, on this Disk, means that the language has fifty-five to seventy symbols total. And I’d have to find two, maybe three thousand characters, to have a chance of translating it. That’s the equivalent of a dozen Phaistos Disks.”

  “Perhaps there aren’t any more of them.”

  “Oh yes there are.”

  The custodian is looking at his watch, looking at us, his impatience no longer concealed. Dad ignores him, crouches down, and points to one particular sign: a walking man. “Want to know the absolutely coolest and best thing about the Disk? Look closely at the repeated signs. What do you see?”

  “All look the same to me.”

  “Not just the same, though. Identical.”

  “I suppose so.”

  �
��That’s because the Disk wasn’t written, wasn’t drawn. Someone carved each of these forty-five signs as a stamp, probably in wood or bone, then pressed the stamps into the wet clay. Know what that means?”

  “They were in a hurry?”

  “It means we’re looking at movable-type printing, invented by some forgotten mastermind three thousand years before our old friend Herr Gutenberg rediscovered the idea in Germany. Why did movable type transform early modern Europe? Because printing is mass production.”

  “So there have to be more Disks.”

  “Yes.” He smiles. He loves it when other people reach his conclusions.

  Yes, but.

  Down at the waterfront, we find a place with a table, an umbrella, a view out across the sail-littered harbor to the old Venetian fortress. He buys us both extra large strawberry ice creams—my least favorite flavor, but the only one they have left. And describes a little technical problem.

  “I’m a linguist, right? A well-known scholar, lots of friends in the Greek academic community, so the director of the museum says he would be delighted to assist me, oh, in any way! But the Greek authorities have spent decades stonewalling about one thing. I said thirty-six centuries for the Disk. But that’s based solely on the archaeology, on where it was found. The fact is, we have no hard scientific evidence, because they’ve never allowed a laboratory to get near it.”

  “Why’s that such a deal?”

  “If I’m going to dig up half the Mediterranean looking for more of those things, I’d like to put a rumor to rest. Some people say that old Luigi Pernier, who supposedly found the Disk at Phaistos, actually just faked it. You know, drank too much tsikoudia one night, decided to have a little practical joke. So I need to know: Is the Disk a lone messenger from an unknown civilization, three and a half thousand years ago? Or is it just an Italian pot-digger’s century-old hoax?”

  “Surely they want to find out too? At the museum?”

  “No, they don’t. The glazing is wrong, for a Minoan artifact, so there’s always been something fishy about it. I think they secretly believe the rumor. And if it’s a fake, bad for the tourist industry. They’d rather have an enigma.”