Earth and Air Page 16

  “Pretty good, kid,” said Kosta. “That makes you one of us, now.”

  The others laughed, but with a note in their laughter that suggested there was more than one meaning to the joke. Otherwise he learnt no more.

  On the first of those evenings nobody followed him. Scops met him just outside the town as before, and sat on his shoulder the whole way home. On the second Tuesday there was no sign of Scops until she drifted out of the dark when he was already well started on the climb, and then nestled close against his head. Just before the track bent sharply back on itself to tackle a steeper stretch she bit his lobe in warning and at once slipped away. Yanni climbed on, suddenly tense. A tall cypress stood in the crook of the corner, with an olive close against its further side. Between the two trees was a pitch-black cavern.

  Yanni stopped, knelt, and probed with a finger into the back of his boot, as if easing out a pebble that had slipped in there. The change of angle brought into view a patch of starlit hillside beyond the trees. Silhouetted against it was the shape of a man. He couldn’t tell who it was, but Thanassi had left the tavern early.

  He rose and climbed on. The man didn’t try to follow him, and Scops rejoined him further up the slope.

  “See you Tuesday,” he said as he left after the third evening.

  “Make it Thursday,” said Kosta. “Tuesday’s a new-moon night. Tavern’s closed.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said.

  Nobody left home on new-moon night, if it could be helped, certainly not just to go to the tavern. So they might as well close.

  He wasn’t followed home. And still he had learnt nothing new, worth knowing.

  He started to sleep badly, falling off almost before he lay down but then waking only two or three hours later and lying through the small hours, tense with the inner certainty that events were moving towards some climax while he had no way of knowing what it would be or when it would happen. New-moon night came, and he woke as usual. No, even earlier than usual. Something had woken him. It came again, a scratching at his shutter and a gentle prrp, prrp. This had never happened before, not at his bedroom window or this hour. He rose and opened the shutter and Scops was there. She didn’t greet him as usual, but simply turned herself round and sat peering out at the night. Nor did she respond to his touch, but instead half spread her wings and leaned forward as if to launch herself out, then stopped the movement and turned her head to look at him.

  “You want me to come out?” he whispered. “On a new-moon night? And it’s almost midnight.”

  “Prrp,” she said.

  Well, why not? He wasn’t going to sleep, and as for it being new-moon night, if Scops was there . . .

  He rose, found his clothes by touch, dressed, picked up his boots, and went to the back door. There he hesitated whether to tell Euphanie what he was doing, but no sound came from her room and he decided against it. Perhaps he’d only be ten minutes or so . . .

  Still on stockinged feet he climbed the path. Scops was waiting for him on the gatepost. Carefully he undid the chain, and knelt to put on his boots. Scops slipped onto his shoulder as he rose.

  “Where to now?” he asked.

  She told him simply by gazing down the track, which had the effect of casting a beam of owl light along it, so he headed as if for the harbour. But halfway there she turned her gaze aside and directed him into a goat track that led him up an outlying spur of the central mountain of the island. Twice she left him to stand in the dark while she prospected for paths through the scrub along which he would be able to walk. They crossed the ridge and headed down beside a remnant of the old forest that had once covered the island, but had been felled to build the galleys of the Romans. They followed a stream downhill, turned aside yet again for short climb, crossed a lesser ridge and halted.

  Ahead, black as the pupil of an eye, lay the sea. Nearer, with a few lights showing round the harbour, the crinkled shoreline of the island. Nearer still, immediately down the plunging slope, the House of the Wise One, invisible in its own natural bowl from anywhere but the hillside where he stood.

  The glow of a small fire lit the space between the pillars, and grotesque shapes, small with distance, were moving around it. But for the owl light he couldn’t have known they were there except when they passed directly between him and the fire. He stared. A sudden chill had wrapped him round, though the night was warm for October. Demons, woken by the New Moon to dance in the House of the Wise One? They were animal-headed, as demons might be, though the heads seemed large for the bodies, and they stood on their hind legs and the bodies were human or part-human. Not animals, then. Humans . . .? A shape, a known shape, strutted past the flames. Stavros, with the head of a horse covering the upper part of his face and a horse-tail swinging behind. And the one with the limp must be Thanassi, and the skinny one old Dmitri. Yanni numbered the others off. They were all there, and at least four more, two of whom looked as if they might be women.

  A white goat was tethered to a pillar at the end of the temple opposite the Bloodstone. It paid no attention to the dancers, but stood with its head bowed, as if it had fallen asleep.

  At first the dancers simply circled the fire with slow, prancing steps, but soon they began to dance more vigorously, leaping and stamping their feet, and throwing their masked heads violently back and forth. He could hear faint whoops and cries.

  The dance went on for a long while. The pace quickened and quickened. They should have been utterly exhausted by now, but they didn’t seem to tire. And then, suddenly, they halted and turned towards the far end of the temple, where the goat was tethered. A gap opened on that side of the circle.

  Out of the darkness beyond the pillars paced a new figure, naked apart from a short leather skirt. The mask was that of a bull and, unlike those of the dancers, covered the whole head. The body was a man’s body, but half again as tall as any of the dancers. Flesh and hide were the colour of polished brass, and glinted like brass in the light of the fire. In his right hand the newcomer carried a flat dish with a few small objects on it. The dancers greeted him with a wild yodelling call, so loud that it carried clearly up to where Yanni and Scops watched. They crowded round him with upraised arms, and then fell back. There was a long pause. Nobody moved. When at last the Bull-man stepped forward, the others restarted their dance, slowly circling him and moving with him as he paced up to the fire.

  Here he halted again, took something from the dish, and with a sower’s gesture sprinkled it onto the fire, which instantly flared up into a white blaze, that died almost as quickly away. When it was gone the whole space between the pillars was filled with a dull red glow that didn’t fade like the flames, but persisted, unchanged. Compared with the owl light of the dark beyond, Yanni could now see everything within the temple as clearly as he might have done in an early dusk. He watched the Bull-man pace round the fire and on up the temple towards the Bloodstone, the dancers moving with him, circling faster and faster, dancing themselves into a renewed frenzy, their repeated calls echoing up the hillside. The Bull-man reached and rounded the Bloodstone. He laid the dish down on it, turned to face the fire and stood still.

  Two of the dancers, the ones Yanni thought were Dmitri and Thanassi, broke from the wheeling circle, pranced back down the temple, unleashed the goat, tipped it, unresisting, onto its side, lifted it by its legs, ran back up the temple and swung it up onto the Bloodstone, where they stretched it out and held it down. It made no effort at all to struggle or free itself.

  The Bull-man picked up a flask from the dish and with a steady, ritual movement poured something into a bowl. He put the flask back on the dish and picked up what looked like a knife or dagger, paused again, and raised his head and arms towards the stars. The blade of his dagger glinted orange in the red light.

  He opened his great bull mouth. The dancers reeled back. A moment later Yanni heard the thunder of his bellow, shaking the hillside. He seemed to have grown even larger, now twice the size of any of the dancers.
Yanni stared at him openmouthed. He had seen the huge muscles of the neck flex. He had seen the mouth open. And that roar could not have come from any human lungs. The creature’s head was no mask. It was his own.

  The dagger flashed down. The dancers screamed again. The Bull-man laid the dagger aside, lifted the goat’s head by one horn and held it clear of the slab, and with his other hand took the cup and held it so that the blood streamed into the bowl. The bowl steamed. He dropped the goat’s head, gripped the bowl by its stem and raised it towards the sky. The screams grew louder, shriller. He lowered the bowl to his mouth and drank. Still screaming the dancers rushed forward. He flung what was left in the bowl over them, and they fought to lick it from each other’s bodies until he tossed the dead goat among them, and then climbed onto the Bloodstone and towered over them while they scrabbled to and fro, a mass of bloody limbs and bodies, fighting like a pack of starving dogs to tear the carcass to pieces with their bare hands and then gnawing at the tatters they had managed to wrench from it, skin, offal and all.

  All the time the monstrous figure on the Bloodstone seemed to grow huger.

  Yanni watched for a moment, disgust and terror swirling inside him, and turned away.

  “Let’s go home,” he muttered.

  He barely noticed how he got to the gate. His legs carried him. Scops showed him the way. He let himself in, woke Euphanie, and sitting in the dark at the end of her bed with Scops still on his shoulder, told her what he had seen. After a little while she climbed out of the sheets, wrapped a blanket round herself and sat beside him, cradling him and he her against the terrors of the dark while he finished his story. She carried her clothes into the kitchen, lit both lamps, and dressed while he sat staring at the tabletop. Every now and then he would remember some detail and mutter it to her. But again and again he returned to the behaviour of the goat, its torpor, the way it didn’t struggle or try to escape.

  “Goats aren’t like that!” he said

  “They’d drugged it?” Euphanie suggested.

  “I suppose so.”

  Neither wanted—neither dared—to go back to their rooms and lie in the dark, alone, so to get themselves through the small hours Yanni scrubbed the floor and cleaned the stove and Euphanie went through all her cupboards, sorting out her stores, reminding herself of what she had and what she still needed to lay in for the winter. Together they cleared the shelves and cleaned all they had, down to the smallest egg-cup. By dawn the kitchen was spotless.

  This was just as well, because soon after sunrise they heard the rattle of the gate. Scops flew up onto a beam and tucked herself out of sight, and with a sick feeling and a thundering heart Yanni opened to door to see who had come.

  Three men and a woman, none of them islanders, stood on the track. Two of the men were some sort of servants, carrying bundles of rolled parchment. The third, by his dress, was an official. He took a roll from one of the others, opened it and came down the path, running a finger down a list and stopping at a line.

  “The Philippes holding?” he asked. “The previous census, twenty-two years ago, listed one man, one woman, and one infant daughter.”

  “Oh . . .well . . . my father and mother are dead,” said Yanni, stammering with relief. “The baby must have been my sister. I was born after the census. I’m Yanni Philippes.”

  “Excellent. I will record the household details later. But now, while the day is still cool, I will go round your holding and recheck the boundaries, and you can tell me of any changes in the nature of the holding since the previous census.”

  “My sister had better do that,” said Yanni. “She knows much more about it than I do.”

  The official frowned—Yanni was a man, and therefore legally the master of the household—but nodded and turned to the two servants to sort out the rolls he would need. The woman came drifting past them, unnoticed.

  “May I come in?” she said in a soft voice. “I like to travel, so I come with my brother on these tours, but now I am tired from the climb and would like to rest.”

  Yanni stood aside to let her pass. Euphanie had been listening just inside. The woman acknowledged her curtsey with a smiling nod. She was short and plump, grey-haired, and wore a soft grey travelling cloak clasped at the neck with an ivory brooch carved with the head of a woman who had a tangle of writhing serpents instead of hair.

  “You must go with my brother,” she told Euphanie. “Check the clerks’ work, every line. Sometimes they have been known to cheat, and acquire land for themselves.”

  Euphanie curtseyed again and left. As soon as the door closed behind her, Scops glided down and settled on the visitor’s wrist. The visitor seemed to change, but not in any way Yanni could have put words to. Her eyes were very strange, both grey and green, not a mixture of those two colours nor one flecked with the other, but a clear soft grey and a soft olive green, both at the same time. The kitchen throbbed with her presence.

  Realising whose presence that was, Yanni fell to his knees.

  “Help us, please help us!” he gasped.

  “That is why I have come,” said the woman. “May I sit here? And you in your own chair. But first, if you will, bring me some water, and a corner of your sister’s last baking, and a little of your oil. Don’t be afraid of me, Yanni. I have very little power. What you are looking at is no more than the ghost of a god, lingering on in a place where she was once loved and feared. My thanks.”

  She passed her free hand over the loaf he had brought and broke off a corner, and laid two fingers briefly on the oil flask before pouring a little oil into the dish he had put in front of her. She dipped her bread into the oil, let it soak a few seconds, and ate, chewing like any ordinary woman. It was bad manners on the island not to share the food you offered to your guest, so hesitantly Yanni took a little for himself. The terrible night had left his mouth sour and dry. He wouldn’t have thought he could taste anything, but instantly his palate cleared, and he realised that he would never again eat bread so light, so flavourful, so crisp-crusted, so soft inside, nor oil so subtly sweet.

  The goddess smiled.

  “I still have a few small powers,” she said. “Now, about why I have come. I saw what you saw last night through the eyes of Scops, and I will tell you what it meant. There have always been forces, powers, energies—but there are no words for them because they do not participate in the dimensions of time and space, so that even the word ‘always’ is wrong for their mode of existence. But they pervade all universes, all the multiplicity of possible dimensions, and in all of those there is a pressure from these forces to be embodied into the realities of each place. Here in this world, the pressure works through the human imagination. It was people who long ago embodied me into the dimensions of here and now.

  “Think of lamplight beaming out into the night from a lit window. Now think, if you can, of the light travelling the other way, beaming in from those shadowy spaces and gathering itself into the central lamp, creating a single intense brightness. That is how people create the gods. They take their faint perceptions of these ungraspable forces and beam them in to a single focus in the here and now, and the god becomes real, and full of the previously unrealised powers of the many, many people who have made it. I am the ghost of such a god, all that is left after people have withdrawn their imaginations from me, apart from a funny little superstition here and there. I can exist as a ghost on this island, partly because no islander would willingly harm a scops owl, though most of them do not know why this is so.

  “But the forces from which I and my kind originate are mixed, negative and positive; and the people are mixed too, and embody these differences into darkness and light, joy and grief, hope and despair, love and cruelty. So that is how I and my kind were, mixtures. As I told you, even on this island I was both loved and feared. Now, somehow there has grown up among humans, especially around this inland sea, a longing for oneness, a single source of creation, a single explanation for all the different lesser explanations,
a single god. And human reason told them that whereas gods of my kind can be balanced against each other, so that the whimsical caprice of one can be mitigated by the benevolence of another, a single god cannot. A god of my kind is a god as he or she might be. But a single god must be as a god ought to be, a god of light, and love, and justice. So your new god is embodied by the imaginations of reason to be these things.

  “But where are the darker powers to go? People know in their hearts that they are still there, so they embody them by their own dark imaginings. This is what you saw beginning to happen last night, here on my island. I have no power to stop it. I am a puff of smoke in the wind compared to the solidity of this dark god. But you could, and only you, and I can tell you how and give you a few small glamours to help you. It will be very dangerous, and you may not succeed, but you are already in terrible danger. It is your choice, Yanni.”

  There was only one possible answer.

  “I . . . I . . . I’ll try.”

  Twenty-seven days later, though he had gone to bed twanging with nerves, Yanni slept late—a little gift from the goddess, he guessed—and didn’t wake until the sun was well up. Euphanie was waiting for him in the kitchen, serious and pale.

  “She came to me in my dream,” she said. “She told me what you are going to do tonight. Oh, Yanni!”

  (Nobody on the island except themselves seemed to have met, or even seen, the census-taker’s sister, though the men in the tavern and the women in the market had talked animatedly about the census-taking, and their possible losses or gains from the re-evaluations that were going to result. Euphanie, indeed, had been one of the lucky ones. Following her visitor’s advice she had checked every detail in the rolls, and had discovered an error that meant she had been paying excess taxes since the previous census. Rather than face the hassle and litigation of suing for full repayment she had accepted a reasonable sum in settlement on the spot, which was how Yanni had been able to stand his round on his visits to the tavern this last month.