It was around ten years after the destruction that she first begins to suspect that something was wrong with herself. The waves had changed much with the coastal communities. Countless numbers had been lost. It takes several years for the people to feel safe to return, and for the towns and villages along the shore to be rebuilt. This resurrection brings with it many new faces. There are few, if any, that knew her before, and of those, well, people had more pressing things on their minds.

  One day though, long after the wave, someone comments about her youthful looks. She doesn’t think much of it to begin with, but after a few more years other people notice, then she manages to purchase a bronze mirror and looks aghast at the youthful face staring back. She guesses she doesn’t look a day past twenty-five. At first she thinks it’s her diet but as time goes on she realises the truth: she’s not aging. Oh, she can get injured still. Cuts, bruises, grazes: they appear and heal normally, no different than anyone else. She can become ill, catch a malady, but recovers over time.

  She wonders at first if she’s been cursed by the Gods, never to die, never to be reunited with her family in the underworld. Did she offend them in the past? Had she been judged unworthy? Then she thinks: if she can still be injured, then presumably she could still be killed through violence.

  This scares her more. She starts hiding herself, moving around: island hopping. She leaves Crete and travels around the Mediterranean. Watching over the years as new civilisations rise, prosper for a time, then fall. The Mycenaeans, Athens, Sparta, Persia, Corinth and Rome. She sees them all crumble eventually into ruin.

  She forms the theory in her mind that she is a living witness to what was once her world: the land and its people. She wonders if any of these new nations she sees will have their recorders, their witnesses, and if she would ever find another like herself. She has not yet encountered anyone else though.

  So she turns to other pursuits. Difficult at first for a female, but gradually the world changes. She starts to consider that she has been blessed, rather than cursed, and feels a sense of duty and obligation. She hovers in the background. Meeting people, encouraging and inspiring them, providing financial assistance, sometimes, when she can afford to. Pushing them to accomplishments. Nothing so grand as the Sistine Chapel, or the Theory of Relativity. Just small things, for ordinary people.

  She is intrigued at the beginning of the 20th century, when Evans uncovers the lands of her youth, and the palace at Knossos. She realises that sometime in the past she has forgotten the faces of her children and husband. She has vague images in her mind, the colour of their hair, complexion of skin, but the details have faded. They are like blurred watercolour paintings in her mind. She makes a single visit to Evans’s excavation. However, painful feelings of loss reawaken, and she departs, vowing never to return.

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  World War comes, twice. The wars she had seen before in her past had seemed great, but this is something new, with death and destruction on a totally different scale. It frightens her and drives her into a black depression. She retreats and shuns the world around. Creeping further into solitude, her only connection with the outside world is a radio.

  The radio sits upon a sideboard, encased in polished walnut with a cream-coloured grill over the speaker. It plays out Dick Barton and Mrs Dale’s Diary, until one day the radio-waves it receives change her world. An architect, of all people, on the BBC, makes an announcement on the discovery he’s made. A discovery that re-ignites her interest with her past and reconnects her to the present world outside. The architect’s name is Michael Ventris and his discovery: the decoding of Minoan Linear B.

  The irony is that she can read neither Linear B nor Linear A herself to begin with. A fisherman’s wife, being able to read? Well, she could recognise a few inscriptions: numbers, and hieroglyphs. What she needed to be able to conduct trade at the market, to make sure she wasn’t being fleeced. It isn’t until the 1950’s, when Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, together, translate the majority of the surviving records, that she is able to first read the tablets from her homeland.

  With fresh vigour she snaps out of her melancholy and signs up to study Classical History, first at the University of London, before being accepted for a Doctorate at Cambridge.

  It isn’t very long before she becomes known and respected in the field, and that of course brings fresh problems. Ten years: that is always her deadline, with the emphasis on ‘Dead’. She hadn’t needed to be quite as careful in the past as now, but times are changing and so must she. Ten years is her time-frame for enrolling, as a slightly older student, completing a Bachelor’s degree, PhD, a couple of years of research, then, tragically, an accident.

  A car crash whilst driving abroad, sorry but the body is too mangled to view; drowning whilst surfing in California, body swept out to sea; lost hiking in the Australian outback, presumed eaten by dingoes.

  Much to her supervisors’ frustrations she declines to attend conferences and contributes the minimum to academic journals. Her contemporaries despair. “A waste of talent”, “Imposter Syndrome”, and “needs to come out of her shell” are phrases she occasionally learns are whispered about her in common rooms.

  She doesn’t mind though. The numerous University Authorities have to admit that her knowledge of the subject is exceptional, and the students she teaches have particularly high success rates at examination.

  In private, after lectures have finished for the day and the last students leave the library, she opens document wallets, spreads photographs of tablets, inscribed jewellery, and painted cups upon the tables, and, with never wavering enthusiasm, works upon her secret project.

  It takes her a little over three decades but eventually she accomplishes her task. She can now finally read the ancient language of her people. Now, she alone is the one person alive in the whole world who can not only read every written word of Linear A, but also knows how to speak it.