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“
But why did Demitris kill him? The other man’s son, I
mean?”

“
He was paid to, of course. That’s all I know and that’s all I
want to know. I don’t like to get involved in politics.” She threw
out her arms. “Demitris never misses. He isn’t rich and famous for
nothing. I just wish he’d killed the father as well. None of this
would have happened if he’d finished the bastard.” She put a hand
to her hair. “He’s strict about that, though. No contract, no
killing.”

“
It’s a terrible story.” Layla thought of the
warlord’s son, screaming in pain from his necrotic wound. The idea
that Alcander’s illness was some sort of punishment for his
father’s action was laughable, yet she could not shake it.
It
insisted
, as a line from
a song might insist, or the final, fateful words of a farewell
letter. “I’d like to come and see Alcander again though. Would that
be all right?”

“
You can visit whenever you like,” said Nashe Crawe. “He never
sees anyone, just me and the girls. People are afraid to come near
him. It’s terrible for someone so young to be so alone.” She
gasped, deep in her throat, and Layla realised she was on the verge
of tears. “But you will make a picture for him? One of your
tapestries? That is all I ask. It doesn’t matter what it is, just
so long as it is for him and for him alone.”

“
I’ll do it,” Layla said. “But I don’t want any more money. I
want it to be a present for Alcander.”

Nashe Crawe
clasped her hands together as if she were praying. The next moment
she was on her knees in the grass, hugging Layla fiercely around
the waist.

“
Thank you,” she gasped. “I don’t know how to thank you.” She
made a small choking sound, and Layla could feel her whole body
shaking.

“
Mrs Crawe,” she said. “Please don’t. There’s no need.” She
took a step backwards, trying to disentangle herself from the
woman’s grasp. At that moment the passage door flew open and two
children emerged. One was carrying a large glass pitcher, filled to
the brim with a cloudy yellow liquid Layla guessed was lemonade.
The other child, skipping beside her, carried a tin tray. On it
stood two glass beakers and a plate of slightly squashed-looking
fairy cakes.

“
We made them
all ourselves
,” said the child. She set the tray down on the
grass.

“
We know you did, Selena. You’re both very clever,” said Nashe
Crawe. She struggled swiftly to her feet. “These are my girls,” she
said. She reached out her arms, drawing the younger child to her
and ruffling her hair. The girl was very young, six years old
perhaps, but it was already clear she would become a fairer,
sunnier version of her mother. The older girl looked more like
Alcander. She had a tiny cross-shaped birthmark below her left
eye.

Layla drank a
glass of lemonade and ate a cake and then said she had to be
going.

“
Show Layla to the door, would you, Selena,” said Nashe Crawe.
The child did so, running ahead of her along the corridors like a
playful animal. As Layla stepped out on to the drive the girl
snatched at her hand.

“
Are you in love with our brother?” she said.

“
I like Alcander very much,” said Layla. “I hope he gets
better soon.”

“
Mummy says there’s a monster after him. I’m scared it will
eat him up.”

“
It’ll have to catch him first.” She touched the girl’s
upturned button nose with the tip of one finger. “And we’re going
to make sure it doesn’t. We’re better than monsters, aren’t
we?”

It was almost
dark by the time she got home. She boarded the wrong bus by
mistake, travelling miles out of her way as a result. She arrived
back at her flat to find a note from John Caribe pushed under the
door, inviting her to meet him for a drink at one of the bars he
frequented. She tore the note in half and dropped it into the waste
bin under the sink.

The bookshop attached to the city museum stocked
several collections of poetry
by Panteleimon. Layla bought a
Selected Poems
, which seemed to contain works from his period of
exile as well as verses written while he was still a student in
Atoll City. On the whole she preferred the
Lyrics
, as Alcander Xenakis had predicted she would.
These early poems seemed daring to her, full of monsters and murder
and political intrigue as well as the riveting colours and harsh
textures of the Aegean. She admired especially a long narrative
sequence called
The Pirates
,
about a renegade trireme captain and his feud with a
battle-hardened mercenary from Carthage. Both the captain and the
soldier were blinded by their own ambition and so alike in many
respects that they were more like brothers than enemies, although
neither of them seemed prepared to recognise it.

The poem
coursed with a black humour that was absent from the later poems.
Certain scenes provoked such vivid images in Layla’s mind that it
was like recalling moments from a film. She read the poem
obsessively, learning whole sections by heart. At some point she
became aware that
The Pirates
would form the basis for the panorama she had promised to
weave for Alcander Xenakis.

She thought
about Alcander a great deal. She knew there had been something
between them, a spark of mutual attraction that seemed to transcend
all obstacles. The thought of touching his diseased skin was
repugnant, and yet at the same time Layla felt a strong desire to
be with him again as soon as she could.

She spent a
lot of time on online forums, trying to discover the exact nature
of Alcander’s sickness, but her findings were too general to be
much use. If the best doctors in Atoll City had proved unable to
help him, how could she?

Thanick Acampos
would know what to do
, she thought. The idea resonated within her as a
constant refrain. She wished she’d asked Nashe Crawe for the old
woman’s address when she had the chance. She thought about emailing
her, but she did not want Nashe Crawe to pry into her business. She
could not forget what Nashe Crawe had said, that Thanick Acampos
claimed she had known Layla as a child. Layla scoured her mind for
memories but there was nothing, just an aching blankness, and the
sense of having forgotten something that was not there to be
remembered in the first place.

It was the
same as the feeling that came over her when she tried to remember
her mother. It was as if the old woman had rummaged around in her
life and altered her past. She tried to put the whole subject of
Thanick Acampos out of her mind, but one afternoon after work she
found herself taking a bus up to Amberville and calling on Macy
Persimmon. She had not been in touch with Macy since moving out of
her flat, and wasn’t sure how she would be received, but Macy
seemed delighted to see her. She came to the door wrapped in a
dressing gown and with a towel twisted around her head. Traces of
scarlet hair dye streaked her forehead.

“
Look at you,” she said. “I honestly can’t believe how much
you’ve changed.” She pressed both hands to her cheeks in an
exaggerated gesture of surprise. Her fingernails flashed and
glinted like little pink daggers.

“
Changed how?” Layla asked. Tendrils of Macy’s newly dyed hair
were escaping from beneath the towel. The red she had chosen for it
was warm, like a flame, and clashed extravagantly with the
blue-tinged fuchsia of her nail varnish. Layla couldn’t decide
whether this was intentional or not. She still found it hard to
understand what her father had seen in her.

“
Oh, you know.” Macy lowered her silvered eyelids, looking
embarrassed. “You were such a country mouse when you first arrived.
But now look at you. You look amazing.”

“
Thanks.” Layla did her best to smile. She felt
illogically annoyed, knowing it was the surface changes Macy was
referring to, the Wilding jeans, the vintage WaKo Gladstone bag she
had picked up for five drachmas in one of the thrift stores round
the back of the meat market. Macy would not know about the
commission from the Parnassus, the hours Layla spent in the city
museum studying the works of Crea Atoll and Livia Sol. And even if
she did, she wouldn’t care.
What does it matter?
Layla thought.
You don’t have to see her again after
today.
She did her best
to bite back her frustration.

“
Do you know if dad has any relatives here in the city?” she
asked. “Aunts or cousins, people like that?”

“
I don’t think so,” Macy said. “There’s his brother, but he’s
in Damascus, isn’t he? I’m not sure if there’s anyone else. It
never came up.”

“
I’m not talking about Uncle Robbin. Someone
older.”

“
I honestly don’t know, Layla. Why don’t you ask him yourself?
Don’t tell me you’ve fallen out with him or something?”

“
Not at all. I was just curious. I thought I saw someone I
recognised.”

“
Well, if you say so. You should call him anyway. He misses
you, you know.”

“
I think I will.” What Macy said shocked her a little. In her
weekly emails to her father she told him which books she was
reading and passed on brief snippets of gossip from the Minerva
because she knew he liked to hear these things, but his replies
were short and he never gave any indication that he was affected by
her absence. She didn’t like to think of her father unhappy, but
the truth was there were days when she didn’t think of him at
all.

“
I should go,” she said to Macy. She went home feeling
depressed, wondering what she had hoped for from Macy, why she had
wasted her time. She decided to spend the rest of the evening
selecting the colours for the new panorama. The feel of the silk
between her fingers restored her spirits as it always
did.

She had
decided to concentrate on one scene from
The Pirates
in particular, a sequence from the third canto
where the soldier Telos Mavrommatis captures a pack of night hounds
and drives them aboard Atlas Tyburn’s trireme the
Hesperion
. She
chose deep, sure colours, venetian red and yellow ochre and
Prussian green, colours that would capture the drenching heat and
burnished intensity of the Aegean summer.

She went to
bed late and slept badly. She could not stop thinking about the
night hounds, which with their sleek coats and long muzzles
reminded her of a lurcher her father had owned once, that swam out
to sea in pursuit of a moray and never came back.

She supposed
her preoccupation with drowning was inevitable, given her family
history. She washed and dressed, feeling muzzy-headed and somehow
unreal. Just as she was leaving for work her mobile rang. It was
Nashe Crawe, asking if she could come and see Alcander.

“
He’s been better this week,” she said. “Your visit did him
good, I know it did.”

For a moment
Layla imagined the packed, stuffy room almost with dread. Then she
told Nashe Crawe she would come over that afternoon after her
shift.

The house felt
different, less dark perhaps, although she supposed this was simply
because its darkness was less unexpected. Also, Nashe Crawe was
there to meet her.

“
I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “He hasn’t said much,
but I know Alcander’s excited about seeing you.”

Layla mumbled
some meaningless pleasantry. Once again she felt embarrassed for
Alcander, having his privacy invaded, his every action and reaction
observed and noted. When she was finally alone with him she thought
at first there was no change in him, that the improvement his
mother had mentioned was all in her head. But then she noticed the
way he was sitting, upright against the pillows rather than slumped
back against the headrest. Beside the daybed stood a wheeled
trolley of the kind used for serving meals in a hospital or a
convalescent home. On it was a laptop computer.

“
I’ve been working, just a little bit,” he said. He nodded
towards the laptop, touching the edge of the trolley with one
bandaged hand. Layla could see dark stains on the bandage, places
where mucus and perhaps also blood had seeped through. But the
lesions on his face looked slightly less red, or at least she
thought they did.

“
I’ve been reading
The Pirates
,” she said. “I think I’m falling in love with
Telos Mavrommatis.” She smiled, sitting down on a chair near the
window. She saw that the hologram projection had been reprogrammed
to show a lake ringed by tall conifers. A wooden landing stage
jutted out across the water. She found the change in the landscape
disconcerting, although she supposed Nashe Crawe rotated the
scenarios on a regular basis.

“
Seriously, do you like
The Pirates
?” Alcander asked. “Some people find his early
stuff a bit florid.”

“
I don’t know much about poetry. But this, I can’t explain
it.” She paused. “I like the way it makes me feel. As if I was a
part of the story. It reminded me of the vTV shows I used to love
when I was a kid, the ones with all the monsters and gladiators. I
hope you don’t mind me saying that. I’m getting it all wrong, I
expect.”