Earth and Air (21 page)

“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.

And then to drink his share. Or rather to make it seem as if he had, by practising the glamour the goddess had shown him. It was something like what she had said about the way the gods are embodied, the light streaming in to the central point of the lamp, as it were a willed belief, intense enough to rouse echoes of itself in the minds of others, and then beamed in with them to a central point—a mug, for instance—so that the mug appears to be brim full when it has only a dribble of wine in the bottom. A dozen such dribbles in an evening aren't enough to get a grown man drunk, though Yanni had been apparently reeling by the time he left the tavern each night. He was confident now that he could make it happen again, new-moon night or not.)

It was the new-moon night nearest midwinter, and had been dark for three hours by the time Yanni walked down the hill. Pitch dark now, all stars hidden behind heavy, slow-moving cloud. He carried a lantern, because it would have seemed strange not to do so on such a night. Scops went with him, not riding on his shoulder but slipping invisibly from tree to tree through the olives, or moving further from the track to swoop low across a patch of scrubland or a vineyard, then calling softly when she returned to the track to reassure him that she was still there.

In the pocket of his pouch he carried the odd-shaped piece of wood that the goddess had told him he would need. He had spent some time searching the hillside for exactly the right branch, and had eventually cut it from a wild olive, shaped and smoothed it, and, lying on the kitchen table, with Euphanie's help practised what he planned to do with it.

His palms were sweaty with tension. He felt scared but not terrified. He believed he could face what was coming, and cope with it, provided he kept his wits. And he wouldn't be alone. Scops was already with him, and the goddess would be there, she had told him, and she would bring helpers, each in themselves as near-powerless as she was, but together, perhaps, worth something.

A noise on the path ahead of him, coming from round the next bend. It paused and came again, more prolonged. Footsteps crossing a patch of loose gravel. Several people climbing the path. He drew aside, tucked his lantern under his cloak and waited. He had been half expecting this.

“See you Tuesday, Yanni?” someone had called when he'd been leaving the tavern last week.

“They'll be shut here, won't they? It's a new-moon night again,” he'd answered. (He'd been wondering how they were going to manage this.)

“Oh, we'll meet at my place,” Kosta had said. “Usual time.”

“Long way to walk down on a new-moon night, lad,” Stavros had suggested.

“No, I'll be all right,” he'd said confidently. “See you at Kosta's, then.”

Despite that, they couldn't have been sure he'd not have changed his mind, or been persuaded to by his sister, so now they were coming to unpersuade him, and if necessary to take him by force, and perhaps Euphanie as well.

They rounded the bend, dim shapes in the light of their lanterns, climbing in silence. He couldn't tell them apart until they were almost level with him.

“Stavros?” he called softly.

They stopped dead. Stavros clutched at Dmitri's arm as they turned to face him.

“It's me, Yanni,” he said easily. “I didn't mean to make you jump—I was just being careful. New-moon night, you know.”

They relaxed, but there was still a gruffness in Stavros's voice as he answered.

“Good lad. That's why we thought we'd come and see you down. Now you've saved us the climb. Back we go, lads.”

They were all as tense as he was, Yanni realised as they descended the hill, and no wonder. They must understand that they were already trapped in a hideous labyrinth, and tonight they were going to descend a whole level further into its darkness. In their hearts they must be yet more afraid than he was. They didn't have even the ghost of a goddess to help them, only a real and terrible master they must obey.

By island standards Kosta was a wealthy man. He was a boat builder, with three paid hands to help him—Dmitri was one of them—and himself owned two fishing boats. He lived in a house larger than most, a little above the town up a different track from the one that led to Crow Castle. The rest of the men were already there in the kitchen, with Kosta's two bustling sisters bringing them little plates of the usual island snacks to add relish to the wine. Apart from that, the meeting was outwardly no different from any other at the tavern, teasing talk, and small bets on the backgammon, and memories of times past. Inwardly, though, it was utterly different. The air stank with tension and dread, and excited expectation, until Thanassi said “Time you were getting home, Yanni, lad.”

The tension wound up another notch, twanging taut. Yanni rose swaying, as if in response to the wine they supposed him to have drunk. Any moment now, he thought.

“Nightcap to see you on your way?” said Kosta, also rising. “Settle the wine and give you sweet dreams? Brandy, everyone?”

It would have been a slap in the face to refuse.

“You won't taste brandy like Kosta's again,” said Dmitri, himself too drunk not to chuckle at the hideous joke.

Kosta fetched a dozen small glass goblets and a stone bottle from a shelf. Yanni watched him fill one goblet and push it a little to the side, then fill the rest and not move them. He handed Yanni the first glass and the men passed the rest around among themselves. Yanni concentrated his will, the way the goddess had shown him.

“Well, good luck,” he said.

They echoed the toast, and watched him over their goblets as they drank. They saw a flesh-and-blood arm raise a solid glass goblet to his lips, and relaxed as they watched him drain it in three gulps.

“Wow!” he gasped, and staggered against the table by the door, slipping the glamour-hidden goblet, still full of the drugged brandy, out of sight behind the fruit bowl that stood on it.

“Bit much for a young head,” said Thanassi. “Maybe we better see him home after all.”

They all rose together. Two of them took Yanni by the elbows and led him out through the door. Behind him he could hear a sudden bustle of activity. The masks and costumes, he thought, and timber they'd need for the fire, and so on. An owl called from a tree in the garden,
prrp, prrp.

How long, he wondered, before the drug would have taken hold? Better give it a few more minutes. But he was already supposed to be drunk, so he stumbled, and swayed against Thanassi, who roughly shoved him upright while Dmitri on the other side yanked him into place. Some of the men had lanterns, but once they were beyond the occasional lit windows of the town the night became very dark. In silence they started up the track to Crow Castle. Yanni let his head droop and his feet begin to drag. The men holding him grunted in satisfaction and shifted their grip so that they were now carrying some of his weight. With mild surprise he discovered that he wasn't merely acting drunk and drugged. Unconsciously he had been using the goddess's glamour actually to be those things, while still inside the half-stupefied young man who was climbing the track there was the true, hidden Yanni controlling the illusion, watching its effect and waiting to act.

Twenty minutes above the town they stopped and closed up. Two of the lantern carriers went to the front and led the way into the half-overgrown track that Yanni, drunk, must have stumbled up that first dreadful night to find the baby Scops. Yes, he thought, all this must have been foreseen by the goddess. Though it wasn't far, it was a stiff climb, and most of them were panting with the effort by the time they emerged from among the olives and saw, faint-lit by lantern light against the utter black beyond, the squat pillars of the House of the Wise One.