Earth and Air Page 14

  As if that was not enough of a problem, one of the party, a birdwatcher, scanning the cliffs through binoculars at a time when the slant evening light picked out every detail of the surface, saw a strange carving on a stretch of sheer rock face. It was the outline of a man, five times life size—or rather of a god, for the iconography was clear, the brimmed helmet, the wand of healing, the winged boots. Mercury, or possibly Hermes, if the thing had been of Greek origin. Even the conventional half-smile of the god was discernible with good glasses. But the image had been carved with a technique unknown in the classical world, as far as anyone in the party could remember, every detail gouged into the rock with four parallel lines, as if carved with a four-pointed tool.

  The inscription was on a surface at a different angle, not lit by the revealing light of sunset, and so was not noticed until later, by a young woman scanning the rock around the carving for some sign of how it might have got there. The two words, being in Latin, cleared up the question whether the work was Greek or Roman, but otherwise added further dimensions to the riddle. They were carved in yard-high letters using the same four-line technique as in the image of the god and read simply:

  MEMENTO VARRONEM

  Remember Varro.

  Scops

  TIME: a dozen or so centuries ago, when there was still a Christian Emperor in Byzantium.

  PLACE: One of the several hundred little islands that were part of his Empire, though it is doubtful whether he had ever given this one a thought.

  ACTION: A young man is throwing up.

  Yanni was drunk, bewildered, miserable, lost in the pitch-black dark, shuddering and gasping. All he knew was that he was leaning forward, propping himself against the square edge of something stone, having just vomited everything out of his stomach in one reeking gush into the gap between his legs and the something.

  A blinding glare. Immediately on top of it a deafening blast of sound. Lightning and thunder, he woozily recognised.

  Two senses blasted away. Now there were only the taste and stink of his own vomit, and the touch of the stone something.

  And a memory. In that instant of glare, the stone surface, flat as a table. On it a small, round, fluffy ball.

  He straightened a little and gently swept a quivering hand across the top of the something. There. Even more gently, he eased his trembling fingers round the soft ball and picked it up. It squirmed slightly in his grasp but didn’t struggle. Through the diminishing fuzz of his deafness he heard a faint cheeping. Yes, he thought that was what he’d seen. A baby bird.

  He straightened fully and cupped it carefully between both hands. It squirmed again. By feel he was able to tell what it wanted, so he loosened his grasp, allowing it to work its head between his thumbs. Once there it was still.

  Carefully he established control over his balance and looked around. He had come to this place groping through the blind, pitch dark, but now to his surprise, though the cloud cover was dense and low and the thin moon must have long set, there seemed to be enough light for him to recognise where he was. The shapes were strangely fuzzy. He assumed that must be something to do with the wine—he’d never been drunk before—but there was no mistaking the tall pillars either side of him and the lintel above. This was the House of the Wise One. The thing he’d been leaning against while he vomited was the Bloodstone. And on a new-moon night, almost!

  In a panic like that of nightmares he stumbled out between the pillars and down through the olive trees. Even under the unthinned olives—nobody tended or harvested the trees that had belonged once to the Wise One—there was enough light for him not to bump into their trunks. With a sigh of relief he turned up the path. As he did so it started to rain, a few huge drops, and then the longed-for downpour. The air filled with the smell of water on parched ground, more glorious even than the smell of fresh-baked bread. Carefully he shifted his grip until he could hold the bird one-handed and tuck it up under his smock, out of the wet. Hunching his body over it for further protection he hurried up the path. The night was now pitch dark again, but his legs knew the way. He wondered how, even drunk, they could have strayed from it.

  The rain sluiced down. For himself he didn’t mind the drenching. His body was almost like part of the hillside, welcoming wetness. Besides, combined with the sudden bout of panic, the rain seemed to have cleared the fumes out of his head and now he could remember the horrible day, feeling from first light as if the island had a curse on it—heavy, dense air, sunless but oven-hot under the low clouds, tense with thunder that never did more than rumble overhead, while, as if to embody the curse, dark columns of desperately needed rain could be seen falling uselessly far out at sea, or sometimes coming nearer but then sidling past the steep fields and vineyards and tinder-dry scrubland, all dying from the unseasonal spring drought.

  In that heat and oppression Yanni and his sister Euphanie had worked all morning in their terraced vineyard, Yanni checking over and repairing the trellises that supported the vines while Euphanie trained and tied in the fresh spring growth that would carry the grapes, and thinned out the unwanted shoots. They had rested unresting through the midday torpor, and returned to work. By the time Yanni had finished in the trellises and joined his sister, the thundery tension had given her one of her headaches, so sour that she could barely see for the pain of it. Despite that, she had kept getting further and further ahead along her own row, and then coming back to find what was holding him up.

  “What on earth is the problem now? Oh, Mother of God, Yanni, what have you been up to? There must have been a better lead growth. Don’t tell me . . . Yes, here. Your knife slipped, I suppose. And then you’ve left three side shoots almost on top of each other. Where’ve you put your brain? Why does it always seem to be somewhere else when I need you to give me a hand?”

  And in the end, “Yanni, I simply can’t stand this any longer! Go home! Go down to the tavern and tell the others what a stupid, useless great baby you are. Men are the most useless of the Good Lord’s inventions, and you’re the most useless of men! Or will be, if you ever grow up enough to be a man! Go on! There’s money in the pot. Take enough for one mug, if you can count that far! Oh, go away! I’m sick of the sight of you!”

  So, weeping with shame and anger and frustration, he had done what she had told him and taken the money and gone down to the tavern, and had had a horrible time there too. Usually the men just ignored him, but to night . . .

  He pulled himself together and refused to think about it.

  As he reached the cottage the door opened. Euphanie stood in the doorway, black against the lamp glow, about to toss something out into the dark. She halted the action and peered.

  “Yanni? Are you all right? You must be soaked. Get inside. What happened to you?”

  “All right now. Only wet. I went to the tavern. The men don’t really want me there, you know. Mostly they ignore me, but to-night they decided to get me drunk. I didn’t realise. I thought they were just being friendly at last. Then they threw me out for not standing my round. I’d told them I couldn’t, but . . .”

  “Bastards! Always trying to beat each other. I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to learn somehow how to deal with them. It’s so much easier for women . . . Anyway, I shouldn’t have talked to you like that, whatever sort of a mess you were making. I’m sorry.”

  “It was your head. How’s it feel now?”

  “Much better. Gone. Like magic. The moment the first drops fell. What’ve you got there?”

  “Look.”

  He brought his hand out, moved to the lamp and cradled the fluffy scrap of life between his palms. It gaped up at them, blinking, apparently unalarmed. Euphanie craned over and studied it.

  “A little scops owl, I think,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the House of the Wise One.”

  “You went there! And on a new-moon night, almost! Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t know how I got there. I was drunk, remember. I’d no ide
a where I was. It was blind dark and I just finished throwing up and there was a flash of lightning and I saw this bird. It was only afterwards that I realised I was in the House, and I’d been leaning on the Bloodstone to throw up. Look, it’s hungry, what do owls eat?”

  “Mice and voles and beetles and things,” she muttered, not thinking about it. “They swallow them when they’re hunting and cough them up for the babies when they get back to the nest.”

  And then, after a pause, and more slowly, but still in a hushed voice, “Yanni, the owl, the scops owl, is the Wise One’s own bird. I think she brought you to her House. I think you were meant to find it. And look.”

  She showed him the thing she had been about to throw into the dark when he had come home. It was a dead mouse, one the cat must have brought in, as it often did.

  Yanni loved and admired his sister. She was five years older than he was, and since their mother had died seven years ago she had looked after him, as well as doing most of the work on their smallholding, far up the mountain called Crow Castle. He had no memory of his father, who had left the island soon after Yanni was born, telling only a few friends that he was going—but not his wife, because she might have talked him out of it. She was a strong woman, and had managed almost as well (better, some people said) without him. Euphanie was of the same sort, whereas Yanni himself, he guessed, was more like his father. His one determination in an otherwise unfocussed existence was that he would somehow learn to be different.

  He waited till Euphanie had lined a small bowl with bits of rag and then settled the owl into it. Determined, this once, to do something right, he sharpened a knife and with still-trembling fingers skinned and gutted the mouse, filleted out the larger bones and chopped up what was left. Not good enough, he decided. He didn’t think he could actually swallow and regurgitate the food, but he spooned some of it into his mouth, chewed it up bones and all, spat the mess into his palm, took a morsel between finger and thumb and eased it into the gaping beak. The owl simply looked at him, waiting, so with the tip of his little finger he poked the mess as far as he could down the gullet. Now the owl closed its eyes and its beak and with a look of extraordinary blissful smugness gulped the mess down and gaped again. When it had eaten all his first chewings he repeated the process. Euphanie, normally fastidious about everything they ate, watched without protest.

  “Do you think it will live?” he asked her.

  “If the Wise One sent it,” she said, broodingly. “Yanni, Nana Procephalos kept an owl.”

  “Lots of people do.”

  “Not any longer. Not since . . . Yanni, don’t tell anyone you’ve got it. If they find out, don’t tell them where you found it. Say the cat brought it in.”

  Yanni was scared. Scared by what she said. Scared by her tone.

  “I . . . I could take it back.”

  “Not now we’ve got it . . . seeing how it came.”

  While he finished feeding the owl Euphanie reheated the supper she’d prepared. It was well after their normal bedtime when they sat down to eat. Yanni chewed without noticing the food. He was thinking about Nana Procephalos, and what had been done to her.

  Until a summer ago the island priest had been a cheery, easy-going old man, who had understood the islanders well and been much loved by them. But then, just as he was about to celebrate Eucharist, a dreadful thing had happened. Helped by a visiting priest he had tottered up the steps of the church and turned to bless his parishioners, who were waiting to follow him into the service, that being the custom of the island. At that moment, in front of everyone, he had had some kind of a seizure. His body had convulsed, he had thrown up his arms and given a strange bellowing cry. His face had contorted and gone almost black, and he would have tumbled forward down the steps if the other priest hadn’t caught him and lowered him to the ground.

  Everyone had watched in horrified silence while the priest had knelt by his side, feeling his pulse, and at last looked up and pronounced the old man dead.

  “I will conduct a shortened version of the Eucharist,” he had announced, “and we will pray for the good man’s soul. After that I will write to the bishop telling him what has happened, and then, if you wish, I will remain on the island until a new priest is appointed.”

  So it had all been done, until letters arrived from the bishop confirming the visiting priest in his post on a more permanent basis, apparently as much to his surprise as everyone else’s.

  His name was Papa Archangelos. He was quite a change, not yet forty, but still a stern, imposing figure, forceful and determined. People wondered why he should have accepted a job in such a backwater. Perhaps the bishop felt that the island needed to be shaken out of its torpor. But he had thrown himself into the task. Within a few months he had visited every household on the island, saying he wanted to get to know his flock, and them him. There was far more of the former than the latter. He asked many questions in a quiet, confiding voice, and listened so sympathetically that even the suspicious islanders tended to tell him secrets that they had long hidden from their neighbours. They learnt almost nothing about him in return, except that he had grown tired of the city and longed for the sea, and the peace to write a great medical book that he had in his head.

  He had come late to the remoteness of Crow Castle, but didn’t seem to have wearied of his task. He had grieved for Euphanie and Yanni over the loss of both parents, and promised to see if he could confirm the rumour of their father’s death. He had praised Euphanie for her courage in running the smallholding, and caring for Yanni like a mother, when she herself was hardly out of her childhood. He wondered how they would manage, so far from help, should one of them fall ill, told Euphanie some remedies for common ailments, and asked her for any herbal lore she had learnt from her mother before she died. For his book, he had said. Euphanie had told him the few things she knew, and added that really for that he should talk to Nana Procephalos.

  “So I hear,” he had said, smiling. “But she is strangely secretive.”

  They had stood at the gate and watched him stride away down the hill.

  “Too good to be true,” Euphanie had muttered.

  “I didn’t like him either,” Yanni had answered. “I don’t know why.”

  “We’d better start going to church every Sunday from now on. In case he notices we’re not there. . . I wish I hadn’t told him about Nana.”

  “It sounds as if a lot of other people did too.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Three months later a special court, sent by the bishop from the mainland, had found Nana Procephalos guilty of witchcraft and sentenced her to death by stoning. The evidence seemed incontrovertible. Spies, also from the mainland, had kept watch on her, followed her one new-moon night, and caught her in the House of the Wise One, in the act of sacrificing a black cockerel on the Bloodstone. So by order of the bishop she died in that place, under a hail of rocks.

  Papa Archangelos had let it be known, in his sermon before the stoning, that those who refused to attend it would lay themselves open to suspicion of sympathy with witchcraft. A few of the islanders had contrived excuses, Euphanie among them, saying that Yanni was ill and she had to nurse him. But most had gone. Some of the men had joined in the stoning, whooping as the rocks went home. For several weeks after they continued to boast in the tavern of what they’d done.

  Now the islanders learnt that rumours had reached the bishop of witchcraft being rife on the island, and that Papa Archangelos had been originally sent to investigate, and then confirmed in his post to destroy this nest of evil. Too late the islanders began to regret some of the things they had told him. But all, like Euphanie and Yanni, became regular churchgoers, and those who had failed to attend the stoning became very careful of what they said and did.

  So from the very beginning Yanni and Euphanie did their best to see that there was no trace of the owl’s presence. Islanders tended not to name their domestic animals. The cat was simply “the cat.” But in case they wer
e at some point overheard they decided to name the owl, and since they didn’t know whether it was male or female, for the time being they called it Scops, a name that somehow stuck after she’d laid her first egg. That was much later.

  Yanni looked after her. Normally slapdash and forgetful, he was as careful about her as Euphanie would have been. Her habits made his task easier. Until she fledged she lived in the bottom of a large earthenware jar at the back of a shelf in the barn with a bit of fishing net tossed carelessly over it in case the cat took an interest, though it showed no sign of doing so. In fact it played an active part in the task. Next time it brought a mouse in Euphanie rewarded it with a scrap of the fish she was cooking, and after that had happened a couple of times more it seemed to get the idea and kept up a steady flow of owl food.

  Scops woke at dusk, shrilly demanding to be fed, and Yanni would cram chewed mouse into the gaping mouth until she turned her head away and with a quick, gulping shudder excreted neatly over the side of her nest into the bottom of the jar. Then he would move her, nest and all, into a smaller bowl which he carried into the house and set on the table beside him so that he could feed her chewings of what he was eating, his ears pricked for the rattle of the chain that fastened the gate at the top of the steep path. Every few evenings he practised the drill of whisking her into the old bread oven and piling against it the logs he kept ready beside it. In the end he could do this to a count of eight, whereas he always fastened the gate in such a way that even in daylight it took a count of fourteen to unwrap the chain and reach the door. The need never arose, but it was a way of reminding himself to be careful.