Carver's Quest (42 page)

‘Ah, you have been able to join us, Adam,’ the professor said, running his hand through what little remained of his hair. ‘We were just beginning to feel a little anxiety for
your welfare.’

‘Andros will have dealt with our attackers, I assume,’ Rallis said, with perfect confidence in the ability of his servant to have done so.

‘Achilles killing the Paionians by the Scamander River could not have presented a more terrifying spectacle than your giant, Rallis.’

‘He is a gentle man for the most part but he is a dangerous one to annoy.’

As the lawyer spoke, there were sounds behind him. Crouching to use a door that seemed designed for men half his size, Andros emerged onto the street. He smiled and nodded his great head at his
master.

‘Shall we make our way to the Angleterre,’ Rallis asked, ‘now that our little party is complete again? I have yet to partake of my mid-morning coffee and I doubt that any of us
will be welcome again in the Oraia Ellas in the near future.’

Q
uint stared morosely at the mule. The mule stared back. Quint had a wealth of bitter and unhappy memories of mules from his first journey through
Macedonia. He had an unpleasant feeling that one more was about to be added to them. In the early morning sunshine, the mule had uncomplainingly allowed him to load it with an assortment of packs
and panniers but, once loaded, it had refused point blank to move forward. No kind of cajolement or threat could make it budge an inch. Now, as Quint watched, a long jet of yellow liquid hissed
into the ground between the mule’s back legs. It trickled down the slight slope on which the beast was standing and formed two neat pools around Quint’s boots. He swore beneath his
breath and looked across to where another mule was tethered. Beyond that equally obstinate animal, he could see the three horses on which the gentlemen of the party rode.

A dozen yards away, Adam emerged from the blankets in which he had wrapped himself the previous night. He had spent the hours of darkness turning from side to side in the hope that he might
chance upon the one posture in which sharp stones did not make their presence felt. He had failed to find it. He had ended by gazing up at the stars. He had wondered whether there were any other
creatures up there somewhere in the heavens looking down on the earth and, if there were, whether they were as uncomfortable as he was. He had finally drifted into a fitful doze an hour before
sunrise. Now, barely two hours later, a new day was upon him. He yawned and, rising to his feet, trudged towards the small stream beside which they had set up their encampment.

The giant Greek, Andros, as impassive as a cigar-store Indian, was already standing by the water. He was gazing to the north-east in the direction in which they would have to travel that day. He
turned as Adam approached.

‘
Kakos dromos
,’ he said briefly and then walked away.

‘A bad road, eh?’ Adam said to himself. ‘Well, we have little choice but to follow it.’

In the distance, about a quarter of a mile away, he could see Rallis and Fields, the other two members of their little party. The professor, as so often, appeared to be delivering a lecture.
Adam could hear the sound of his voice but could not distinguish what he was saying. The lawyer was listening, his head politely inclined towards that of his companion. Adam crouched down by the
stream and cupped his hands in it. He poured the water over his head and allowed it to course through his hair and down on to his chest. Refreshed, he stood up and made his way back towards the
camp. Quint was still struggling to instil obedience in the mule.

‘This bleedin’ beast is aimin’ to be the death of me,’ he said as Adam approached.

‘You must learn to have faith in the poor creature. It is behaving so wilfully because it is aware that you do not trust it.’

The animal lashed out a back leg and both men leapt sideways to avoid it.

‘That mule has a sly look in its eye,’ Quint said flatly. ‘It ain’t a mule a man
can
trust. And what’s more, it’s a mule as pisses pretty much where
the ’ell it wants.’

‘Mules are intended by nature to be intractable beasts,’ Adam said complacently. ‘The best one can do is cajole them in the direction you wish them to go. There is no point in
trying to coerce them, Quint. And there is certainly no point in endeavouring to control their habits of urination.’

‘That’s what you say. But you ain’t the one who’s spent the last half-hour wading about in mule piss.’

‘You have my sympathies, Quint.’ Adam yawned and stretched his arms. He did not seem unduly concerned by his servant’s troubles. ‘However, I cannot think seriously of
anything until I have partaken of breakfast. Where is the bread? And the smoked meat?’

‘On that mule’s back,’ the servant said, with noticeable satisfaction. ‘The rest of us ate ours an ’our gone. While you was still snoring like an
’og.’

‘Well, the victuals and viands must be unpacked. I shall have to breakfast alone.’

‘Ain’t no time. The professor wants to be on the move. That’s why I’m lockin’ ’orns with this bleedin’ mule.’

Fields and Rallis had returned to the camp and were saddling their horses. The lawyer’s servant, who had ambled with giant strides beside the horses the previous day, was awaiting his
master’s orders to set off once more. Adam looked to where he had left his tangled bedding in order to walk down to the stream. It was no longer there. While he was washing, Quint had folded
the bag and blankets and strapped them to one of the mules. Both of these beasts, even the most troublesome of the pair, now appeared anxious to move.

‘Come, Adam,’ the professor shouted, already on horseback. ‘We have many miles to go before noon.’

The young man sighed. There was no help for it. Breakfastless, he mounted his own horse and the expedition headed off towards the north-east.

They had left Athens a week earlier. On the first day, they had travelled by the newly finished railway line from the Greek capital to its port of Piraeus. There they had taken a boat. Sailing
southwards, they had rounded the tip of Attica and turned north. With the island of Euboea rising mountainously to starboard, they had continued to sail towards Chalcis, the port on the narrow
strait of Euripus. Negotiating the waters around the port, they had emerged into a huge bay with a distant view of Mount Pelion. ‘Where Achilles was taught by Chiron,’ the professor had
been eager to tell the others. ‘We are approaching the land of centaurs and lapiths.’

At the port of Volos, nestling beneath the slopes of Pelion, they had disembarked in the clear light of early morning. Turkish officials had hurried to intercept them, apparently intent on
causing the maximum amount of inconvenience, but vigorous waving of the papers the professor possessed in front of the officials’ noses, in conjunction with the judicious use of baksheesh,
had limited the delay to a few hours. Just as he had promised back in Athens, Rallis had arranged for men to be waiting near Volos with mules and horses. Adam had briefly wondered how the
lawyer’s influence could make itself felt across the border with European Turkey, but the proof that it could was in front of his eyes. He had pushed the question to the back of his mind.
Within a few hours more, they had climbed clear of the town. They could look back to the bay where they had landed and see its blue waters dotted here and there with the white sails of fishing
boats. With the horses and baggage-laden mules, they had travelled nearly twenty miles on the first day before they had decided to make camp.

‘We are well beyond the frontiers of liberated Greece,’ Fields had said with great satisfaction.

Now, on the following morning, as Adam’s empty stomach rumbled and Quint continued to mutter about mules beneath his breath, they made their way further into Thessaly.

Both Adam and Rallis were wearing English shooting jackets and broad-brimmed wide-awake hats. Quint had a shapeless canvas cap thrust onto his head. The professor had purchased in Athens a large
white umbrella to shield him from the sun but he was finding it difficult to combine holding his reins in one hand and the umbrella in the other. He often rode bareheaded for an hour or more. Adam
worried about the effects the heat might have upon him, but Fields showed no signs that he was troubled by it. As time passed, the younger man found himself marvelling anew at the stamina and
endurance of the Cambridge scholar. At least twenty years older than any of his companions, the professor showed few signs that age was slowing him.

For more than an hour that morning they travelled through countryside where the roads were all but effaced. The fields had been left to return to an uncultivated state and the houses and
villages were deserted. They saw no one.

‘What has happened here?’ Adam asked, but neither the professor nor the Greek lawyer could give him a conclusive answer.

‘Perhaps the Turkish landlord has driven his peasantry from the land,’ Rallis suggested.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘The Turks are often cruel masters. That is why we Greeks wish to be free.’

‘I am not at all certain that that is the case, my dear Rallis,’ Fields said, prepared as ever for argument. ‘Not unnaturally, you believe that your fellow Greeks on this side
of the border are all yearning to join your new nation, but I remain unconvinced. As long as they pay their taxes and commit no open crime, I suspect that the Greek subjects of the Porte are as
happy with their government as those of their fellows who are ruled from Athens.’

For a moment, it seemed to Adam as if Rallis might dispute the professor’s statement but he remained silent.

The party stopped for lunch under the shade of a group of plane trees. Horses and mules drank from the stream which ran past it. With the exception of Fields, who settled himself at the foot of
one of the planes and opened a book, the men began to unload the saddlebags from the drinking beasts. After half a minute, Andros paused as he reached across the largest of the horses to unfasten
its saddle. The huge Greek spoke briefly to Rallis and pointed towards the horizon. Rallis, shading his eyes against the sun, looked in the direction his manservant was indicating.

‘We have visitors, gentlemen. There are men on horseback coming across the plain.’

Adam and Quint both turned from the saddlebags they had lifted to the ground and looked up across the sun-scorched landscape. The professor, either because he was oblivious to any danger the
visitors might present or because he had not heard the Greek’s words, continued to read his copy of Thucydides.

‘Who are they?’ Adam asked.

Rallis shrugged. ‘Who can say? I think we are many miles from any village.’

Adam stood and watched the small group of riders. The sharp eyes of Andros had been able to pick them out from the landscape before anyone else, but now they were clear to all the travellers.
Even Fields had lifted his eyes from his book and was following the horsemen as they approached in clouds of dust.

‘Are they brigands?’

‘I know no more than you, Adam,’ Rallis said. ‘We must hope not.’

‘Should we make a run for it?’

‘It would be pointless. We have only three horses for five men. And the mules could not move at a pace sufficient to escape. These men, whoever they are, will be with us in ten
minutes.’

Rallis’s judgement of time was a good one. Almost exactly ten minutes had passed when the riders, shouting and yelling to one another, pulled up their horses twenty yards from the trees.
There were ten in the party, all of them looking like a cross between a pantomime villain and a scarecrow. Each man carried a miniature arsenal of small arms at his waist, a
yataghan
and a
pair of pistols at the least thrust into his belt. All had long black hair which hung down to their shoulders in bedraggled tresses.

A man in a dirty white capote and breeches who appeared to be the leader spurred his horse forward and began to address Rallis in a loud and threatening voice. His followers crowded behind him,
bellowing approval of his words and occasionally brandishing their guns in their air.

‘What is the man saying?’ Fields asked impatiently. He had hauled himself to his feet as their visitors clattered into the camp and thrust his volume of Thucydides unwillingly into
his jacket pocket. ‘He speaks such a barbarous dialect I can barely catch a word in three.’

The leader, urged on by his comrades, continued to roar his threats at the travellers.

‘Oh, that the language of Homer and Pindar should descend to this!’ the professor remarked to no one in particular. ‘If I am not mistaken, he seems to be talking a great deal
about blood and death and the valour of his ancestors.’

‘He is certainly modelling his behaviour on that of a brigand chieftain in a Drury Lane melodrama,’ Adam remarked. ‘He could not have seen one in this desolate spot, could he?
Surely no company has come this far on tour?’

The brigand chief was now pointing at the professor and was directing his words at him. Fields looked at the Greek as if he was an exceptionally dim student he was obliged to tutor.