Earth and Air (6 page)

“Horned viper,” said Papa Alexi, when he showed him. “Got her on the tongue, see? Vicious bite he's got. Much worse than the common one. Kill a strong man. Bad luck, Steff, very bad luck. Nice dog.”

He carried her on and laid her down beside the fig tree, covering her body with the old sack she used to sleep on in the corner by the mule shed. He tied the fig branches out of his way, fetched a crowbar and spade, and sweated the rest of the afternoon away prodding and scooping and chopping through roots, picking out the larger rocks from the spoil and setting them aside. When the farm woke and people started to come and go, some of them asked what he was up to. He just grunted and worked on.

By sunset the hole was as deep as the reach of his arm. He changed her everyday collar for her smart red Sunday one with the brass studs, wrapped her in the sack and lowered her into the grave. Gently he covered her with the larger rocks he'd kept, fitting them together according to their shapes and then ramming earth between them in a double layer, proof against any possible scavenger.

Finally he filled in the hole and spread what was left of the spoil back under the fig. The stars were bright by the time he fetched a small flask of oil from the barrel in the larder and poured it slowly over her grave.

“Good-bye, Ridiki,” he said. “Good-bye.”

He scattered the remaining handful of earth over the grave, let the fig branches back to hide and shelter it, and turned away.

The evening meal was long over, but he couldn't have eaten. He sat until almost midnight on the boulder beside the vegetable patch with her old collar spread between his hands and his thumbs endlessly caressing the wrinkled leather. The constellations wheeled westward and the lights of the fishing-boats moved quietly around Thasos. When he was sure that there'd be no one about to speak to him he coiled the collar tightly in on itself, put it in his shirt pocket, went up to his cot in the loft over the storeroom and lay down, knowing he wouldn't sleep.

But he did, and dreamed. He was following Ridiki along a track at the bottom of an unfamiliar valley, narrow and rocky. She was trotting ahead with the curious prancing gait her bent leg gave her, her whole attitude full of amused interest, ears pricked up and cupped forward, tail waving above her back, as if she expected something new and fascinating to appear round the next corner, some odour she could nose into, some little rustler she could pounce on in a tussock beside the path—pure Ridiki, Ridiki electric with life.

The track turned, climbed steeply. Ridiki danced up it. He scrambled panting after her. The cave seemed to appear out of nowhere. She trotted weightless towards it, while he toiled up, heavier and heavier. At the entrance she paused and looked back at him over her shoulder. He tried to call to her to wait, but no breath would come. She turned away and danced into the dark. When he reached the cave the darkness seemed to begin like a wall at the entrance. He called again and again. Not a whisper of an echo returned. He had to go; he couldn't remember why.

“I'm coming back,” he told himself. “I'll make sure I remember the way.”

But as he trudged sick-hearted along the valley everything kept shifting and changing. A twisted tree beside the track was no longer there when he looked back to fix its shape in his mind, and the whole landscape beyond where it should have been was utterly unlike any he had seen before.

At first light the two cocks crowed, as always, in raucous competition. He had grown used to sleeping through the racket almost since he'd first come to live on the farm, but this morning he shot fully awake and lay in the dim light of early dawn knowing he'd never see Ridiki again.

He willed himself not to be seen moping. It was a Saturday, and he had his regular tasks to do. Mucking out the mule shed wasn't too bad, but there was a haunting absence at his feet as he sat in the doorway cleaning and oiling the harness.

“Sorry about that dog of yours,” said Nikos as he passed. “Nice little beast, spite of that gammy leg, and clever as they come. How old was she, now?”

“Five.”

“Bad luck. Atalanta will be whelping any day now. Have a word with your uncle, shall I?”

I don't want another dog! I want Ridiki!

He suppressed the scream. It was a kind offer. Nikos was his uncle's shepherd, and his uncle listened to what he said, which he didn't with most people.

“They'll all be spoken for,” he said. “He only let me keep Ridiki because Rania had dropped a skillet on her leg.”

“Born clumsy,” said Nikos. “May be an extra, Steff. Atalanta's pretty gross. Let's see.”

“They'll be spoken for too.”

This was true. The Deniakis dogs were famous far beyond the parish. Steff's great-grandfather had been in the Free Greek Navy during the war against Hitler, stationed in an English port called Hull, and he'd spent his shore leaves helping on a farm in the hills above the town. There were sheep dogs there who worked to whistled commands, and he'd talked to the shepherd about how they were trained. When the war was over and he'd come to say good-bye the farmer had given him a puppy, which he'd managed to smuggle aboard his ship and home. Once out of the navy he'd successfully trained some of the puppies she'd born to the farm dogs, not to the lip-whistles the Yorkshire shepherds used but to the traditional five-reed pipe of the Greeks.

Now, forty years later, despite the variable shapes and sizes, the colouring had settled down to a yellowish tan with black blotches, and the working instinct stayed strongly in the breed. Steff's uncle could still sell as many pups as his bitches produced, all named after ancient Greeks, real or imaginary. They were very much working dogs, and Nikos used to train them on to sell ready for their work. But for Rania's clumsiness Ridiki would have gone that way, as the rest of the litter had.

All day that one moment of the dream—Ridiki vanishing into the dark, as sudden as a lamp going out—stayed like a shadow at the side of his mind. It didn't change. He had a feeling both of knowing the place and of never having been there before. But if he tried to fix anything outside the single instant, it was like grasping loose sand. The details trickled away before he could look at them.

He fetched his midday meal from the kitchen and ate it in the shade of the fig tree, and then, while the farm settled down to its regular afternoon stillness, went to look for Papa Alexi.

Papa Alexi was Steff's great-uncle, his grandfather's brother. Being a younger son he'd had to leave the farm, and look for a life elsewhere. He wasn't anyone's father, but people called him Papa because he'd trained as a priest, but he'd stopped doing that to fight in the Resistance, and then in the terrible civil wars that had followed. That was when he'd stopped believing what the priests had been teaching him, so he'd spent all his working life as a schoolmaster in Thessaloniki. He'd never married, but his sister, Aunt Nix, had housekept for him after her own husband had died. When he'd retired they'd both come back to live on the farm, in the old cottage where generations of other returning wanderers had come to end their days in the place where they'd been born.

The farm could afford to house them. There were other farms in the valley, as well as twenty or thirty peasant holdings, but Deniakis was much the largest, with Nikos and three other farmhands, and several women, on the payroll, working a large section of the fertile land along the river, orchards and vineyards, and a great stretch of the rough pasture above them running all the way up to the ridge.

Steff found Papa Alexi as usual under the vine, reading and drowsing and waking to read again. Today Aunt Nix was sitting opposite him with her cat on her lap and her lace-making kit beside her.

“You poor boy,” she said. “I know how it feels. It's no use anyone saying anything, is it?”

Steff shook his head. He didn't know how to begin. Papa Alexi marked his page with a vine leaf and closed the book.

“But you wanted something from us all the same?” he said.

“Well . . . are there any caves up in the mountains near here? Big ones, I mean. Not like that one on the way to Crow's Castle—you can see right to the back of that without going in.”

“Not that I know of,” said Papa Alexi.

“What about Tartaros?” said Aunt Nix. “That's a really big, deep cave, Steff. It's on the far side of Sunion.”

“Only it isn't a cave, it's an old mine,” said Papa Alexi. “Genuinely old. Alexander the Great paid his phalanxes with good Tartaros silver. There were seams of the pure metal to be mined in those days. You know perfectly well you persuaded me to go and look for silver there once.”

“Only you got cold feet when it came to crossing into Mentathos land. We were actually looking down at the entrance, Steff . . .”

“You wouldn't have been the one Dad thrashed. Anyway, you knew it was a mine, back then.”

“Of course I did. But that doesn't mean it can't have been a perfectly good cave long before it was ever a mine. Nanna Tasoula told me it used to be one of the entrances to the underworld. There was this nymph Zeus had his eye on, only his brother Dis got to her first and made off with her, but before he could get back into the underworld through one of his regular entrances Zeus threw a thunderbolt at him. Only he missed and split the mountain apart and made an opening and Dis escaped down there. That's why it's called Tartaros. Nanna Tasoula was full of interesting stories like that, Steff.”

“And you believe in all of them,” said Papa Alexi. “You know quite well it was a mine.”

They wrangled on, deliberately trying to keep Steff amused, he guessed. He tried to pay attention in a dazed kind of way. All he knew was that he had to go and look at the cave, if only to get rid of the dream. It couldn't be helped that it was on Mentathos land. There'd always been bad blood between Deniakis and Mentathos, and it had been worse since the troubles after the war, when some of the young men had fought on opposite sides, and terrible things had been done. Papa Alexi made the point himself.

“Don't you go trying it, Steff,” he said. “It's not only Mentathos being a hard man, which he is, and he'd be pretty rough with you if you were found. He'd make serious trouble with your uncle. His father sold the mineral rights to a mining company. They came, and cleaned out any silver there was to be had. On top of that they've still got the rights, fifty-odd years. No wonder he's touchy about it. Last thing he needs is anyone finding silver again.”

“Steff just wants to look,” said Aunt Nix. “It's to do with your dream, isn't it, Steff? Tartaros. I bet you that's where it came from, your dream. Eurydice, after all. You remember the story, Steff . . .”

He barely listened.

Of course he knew the story, because of the name, though he hadn't thought about it till now. Ridiki had already been named when he'd got her, so in his mind that's who she was, and nothing to do with the old Greek nymph she was named from. But that didn't stop Aunt Nix telling him again what a great musician Orpheus had been in the days when Apollo and Athene and the other gods still walked the earth; and how he'd invented the lyre, and the wild beasts would come out of the woods to listen enchanted to his playing; and how when his wife Eurydice had died of a snakebite he'd made his way to the gates of the underworld and with his music charmed his way past their terrible guardian, the three-head dog Cerberus, and then coaxed Charon, the surly ferryman who takes dead souls across the river Styx into Tartaros, the underworld itself; and how at last he'd stood before the throne of the god Dis, the iron-hearted lord of the dead, the one living man in all that million-peopled realm, and drawn from his lyre sounds full of sunlight, and the sap of plants and trees, and the pulse of animal hearts, and the airs of summer.

“Then Dis's heart had softened just the weeniest bit,” said Aunt Nix, “and he told Orpheus that he'd got to go back where he belonged, but Eurydice could follow him provided he didn't look back to make sure she was there until he stood in the sunlight, or she'd have to go back down to the underworld and he'd never see her again. So back Orpheus went, across the Styx, past the three snarling heads of Cerberus, until he saw the daylight clear ahead of him. But then he couldn't bear it any more, not knowing whether Eurydice was really there behind him, and he looked back over his shoulder to check, and there she was, plain as plain, but he wasn't yet out in the sunlight, and so as he turned to embrace her she gave a despairing cry and faded away into the darkness and he never saw her again.”

“I really don't think . . .” said Uncle Alexi.

“Nonsense,” said Aunt Nix. “Steff only wants to look. He can do that from above. Like we did, Lexi. You go up the track toward the monastery and turn right at the old sheepfold, and then . . .”

Steff listened with care to her directions.

“Really, this isn't a good idea,” said Papa Alexi when she'd finished.

“Please,” said Steff. “It's not just I want to. I . . . I've got to.”

Papa Alexi looked at him and sighed.

“All right,” he said. “Start early. It's a long way, and it'll be hot. Take enough water. There's a stream a little after you turn off at the sheepfold—you can refill your bottle there. You probably won't be back till after dark. Scratch on my shutter when you're home.”