Cassius Brown And The Daedalus Key

Chapter 1 The Wrong Drawer The object was in the right drawer. It was the label that had wandered so far from the truth that Cassius wondered whether somebody had been having a joke. He had been shown three trays of miscellaneous bronze since arriving at the museum, each more confidently identified than the last. A hook that might have been a medical instrument. A door fitting entered as part of a ceremonial helmet. An unremarkable little weight whose catalogue offered the rather grand description of a votive emblem. He understood how it happened. Collections accumulated labels as ships accumulated barnacles, and the older ones were often treated with the greatest respect for no reason other than their age. The item before him was described as a decorative mount, Hellenistic, probably from a piece of furniture. It was roughly the length of his thumb, a dark green crescent of bronze with one squared end and an uneven broken edge at the other. Its upper surface bore lines so fine he had initially mistaken them for scratches. Under the low magnification of the examining lamp they resolved themselves into a pattern of passages that forked and turned back towards one another. 'A labyrinth,' the curator said. 'That is what caught your attention in the photographs, I imagine.' 'Among other things.' Cassius shifted the lamp, careful not to touch the tray. 'Although I'd be cautious about putting a name to it just yet.' 'You have travelled from England to tell me to be cautious?' 'It is one of our most successful exports.' She gave a brief smile. She had the practiced manner of somebody who had spent much of her professional life watching visiting academics discover something interesting and then discover that they couldn't borrow it. Since he had arrived she had dealt with a missing key, a telephone call about a school group, and a visitor who had come to the wrong museum and was quite insistent about it. Cassius liked her considerably more than he had expected to like anybody responsible for a morning of paperwork. The examining room belonged to a wing behind the public galleries of the regional archaeological museum in Syracuse. Beyond the partly open door there was the occasional scrape of a trolley, and at intervals the distant thud of a fire door closing. On the table stood his laptop, the object register and the large, unwieldy file the curator had assembled from the museum's archives. Someone had put a jug of water beside an Italian biscuit tin. The water was warm; the biscuits had gone soft. He had accepted both. 'It came through an old private bequest,' she said, drawing the register closer. 'Or from the portion that reached us eventually. There was some dispute with the family. You can imagine.' 'I can usually manage to imagine a family dispute over an inheritance.' 'The legal dispute is quite clear. The history of the object is less clear. It has been called a decorative mount since at least the nineteen-thirties. An earlier inventory describes it as a fragment of worked bronze. That is all.' Cassius studied the square end. It had been finished so neatly that the break beside it seemed almost offensive. Along one edge, a shallow channel ran parallel to the engraved lines. In the photographs forwarded to York, it had appeared to be part of the ornamentation. Here, as he moved the light across it, he could see the channel was remarkably regular. The metal beside it was smoother than the surrounding surface, particularly towards the squared end. Cassius tipped the lamp a little farther towards the edge. 'When was it last cleaned? The surface inside the channel is much smoother than the bronze around it.' 'Not in my lifetime, and I've been here long enough for that to count as an achievement.' The curator leaned across to consult the condition report, then caught herself before putting a hand on the tray. 'You sound pleased about it.' 'Very. Polishing it might have removed the thing we're trying to understand.' He moved the light back where it had been. 'Would you look at the edge with me?' She brought her chair round the table rather than leaning across the object. After studying the channel through the lens, she asked whether the brighter strip was evidence of polishing or simply a difference in corrosion. 'Possibly either,' Cassius said. 'I'm more interested in its even width. Somebody went to a good deal of trouble to finish a surface that appears to have spent its life pressed against something else.' 'Wood, perhaps? Or a leather backing?' She indicated the squared end with one finger, keeping it above the tray. 'That would suit a furniture fitting.' 'Both are possible, or another piece of metal,' Cassius said. 'I wouldn't want to choose between them until we have better measurements.' The curator returned to her chair. 'This is why I wrote to you. There are three descriptions in three files, and each makes the previous one sound more authoritative.' 'Furniture mount is a respectable guess.' 'You do not think it is furniture.' 'I think if I had a table decorated with something like this, I'd want to know why the pattern vanished beneath the part nobody could see.' He pointed with the blunt end of a pencil, held well clear of the object. One engraved line ran towards the fractured edge and stopped abruptly. Another curved around a small pierced opening near the squared end, then disappeared under a patch of corrosion. The incisions had a depth and consistency he found interesting. He was less certain about the word labyrinth. There were representations of labyrinths throughout the ancient Mediterranean, many of them quite unlike the maze of garden hedges people pictured today. This pattern contained too few surviving turns to prove anything. Someone had seen the possibility and written the attractive word into a catalogue; later scholars had repeated it. 'Could the lines have continued onto another part?' the curator asked. 'If the break is ancient, yes. They may have continued round this very piece. It depends how much is missing.' She turned to a page marked with a yellow slip. 'A previous visitor suggested the fragment was part of a circular ornament, perhaps a lid. He never published anything.' 'A circular ornament isn't unreasonable.' Cassius examined the shallow curve of the surviving outer edge. 'Did your earlier visitor give any reason beyond the shape?' 'He observed that it was curved.' The curator turned the folder towards him, open at the note. She had evidently been over this argument before. 'Well, that settles the mathematics.' Cassius took the folder and inspected the name of the earlier visitor. The author might have been right about the circle, but Cassius hoped the accompanying note would explain more than the curator had just described. Cassius read the earlier note, written in English on headed paper from a university whose department had since changed its name twice. Its author had considered the incised lines a decorative maze, perhaps associated with the myth of Theseus, and the opening near one end a place for a rivet. The argument stopped there. Another handwritten note, made much later, suggested the green patina was consistent with a marine find, without recording who had tested it or by what method. He put that page aside. It was tempting to build a story around such details; it was also how half the dubious antiquities in Europe had acquired their magnificent histories. The curator left him to work while she answered another call. Cassius settled into the slow, absorbing business of comparing the register to the object itself. His professional life at York divided fairly evenly between students who had not read the assigned material, colleagues who had read it and disagreed with him, and pieces of old evidence that contradicted stories everybody had become comfortable telling. Of the three, he preferred the old evidence. It was at least unlikely to ask for an extension. He had spent part of the train journey from Catania answering emails about next term's seminars. He was supposed to be back before a departmental meeting on Friday. The visit had originally been scheduled for a day and a half, which ought to have told him something about how uninteresting everyone expected the fragment to be. At noon the curator brought him a coffee in a small paper cup and told him the photographer could make another set of images before lunch. Cassius requested raking light from several directions and close views of the pierced opening and shallow channel. He asked for a scale in every image. The photographer, who had already been told the visitor was British, seemed gratified to find that he wasn't demanding the object be held against the sun. 'What would convince you?' the curator asked when the new images were on screen. 'That it's more than a decoration? I would want to know whether these surfaces were manufactured to move against something. There are places where the alloy appears worn, but photographs can be deceptive and so can my eyes. Someone who deals with ancient machinery would be better qualified.' 'Someone in Britain?' The curator moved her coffee away from the computer keyboard. 'Not necessarily. There's a Greek conservator I know who specialises in ancient mechanical objects. We were on a panel together a couple of years ago, and she spent forty minutes explaining why my interpretation of a bronze hinge was wrong.' 'Was it?' the curator asked, with a sympathy that did not sound entirely sincere. 'In a few technical particulars. I have tried to become a better person since.' Cassius retrieved the old conference programme while she considered whether to believe him. The name on the programme had been Dr Thalia Markou. Cassius remembered a precise delivery, a certain impatience with elaborate speculation, and the way she had taken a badly photographed fitting and made a roomful of historians understand why its rivets could not possibly have been arranged as the catalogue proposed. They had exchanged emails afterwards over an unrelated question about cast bearings. She had been helpful and unsentimental. He thought she might enjoy this. The curator inspected the latest images and asked if the museum could arrange a formal consultation. Cassius said he would enquire. She was pleased to hear that he did not intend to have the bronze flown halfway across Europe in a padded box for somebody to glance at under a microscope. They ate lunch in a staff room with an elderly refrigerator that made a continuous mechanical complaint. Somebody had left a bowl of mandarins on the table. The curator peeled one while she explained how the bequest had been absorbed into the museum's holdings after decades of legal argument. Cassius listened more closely when she reached the acquisition register. It recorded no excavated context. The collection had been privately assembled, and the oldest surviving paperwork described where objects were bought rather than where they had been found. He made a note to revisit that distinction. 'You'll probably tell me that makes it more interesting,' the curator said, setting a length of peel beside her plate. 'Less useful, actually. A documented findspot would save everyone a great deal of trouble.' Cassius took a section of mandarin and found it surprisingly sour. 'But I'm having a very good morning, if that helps.' 'It doesn't help my register.' She handed him the next folder, which was thick enough to suggest that the family's lawyers had been paid by the page. In the afternoon he looked at the bronze again without magnification. He tried to picture it as a fitting on a box or a carved piece of furniture. It could have been. The outer curve was tidy, the incised pattern attractive in its surviving portion, and a rivet through the little opening might once have held it in place. But the finished channel bothered him. So did a small ridge within the opening, where the metal appeared to have been formed to receive something cylindrical. If somebody had wanted a decorative rivet, there were simpler ways to make one. He measured the visible relationships with the museum's conservator supervising and wrote down everything that could be established without disturbing the fragile object. The remaining edge described part of a circle, although too small a portion survived to estimate its diameter with confidence. He stopped himself writing 'rotating disc' in the notebook. There was no disc, and the fragment had not visibly rotated anywhere in the course of his visit. By the time the staff began locking their offices, he had filled fourteen pages and answered very few of the questions he had brought with him. He copied the authorised photographs to his research folder, logged the catalogue references and thanked the curator for her patience. At the door the curator glanced at the tray waiting to be returned to storage. 'Do you think your mysterious furniture fitting is important?' 'Somebody made it with unusual care. I'd like to know what they were trying to achieve.' Cassius put his notebook into his bag, checking that he had the accession number written on the first page as well as the last. 'And the labyrinth?' she asked, holding the door while Cassius adjusted the strap of his bag. 'I haven't earned that word yet.' He smiled and thanked her again for the time she had given him. Outside, traffic threaded along the road towards the old town. Cassius stood beside the museum wall to send Thalia Markou an email before the accumulating messages from York could distract him. He attached four photographs, gave her the catalogue description and listed the specific surfaces that interested him. He resisted the urge to announce a discovery in the subject line. He wrote, I may have found a component of something more complicated than its owners think. If I'm wrong, you can enjoy telling me why. Then he walked towards the bus stop, already trying to remember whether his return flight could be changed without bankrupting the department.