My Brother Michael (20 page)

‘I suppose he’s all of forty,’ I agreed. ‘And just how old are you, Niko?’

‘I am seventeen.’

I said mendaciously: ‘Really? I’d have thought you were much older than that.’

He flashed me his delighted smile. ‘Would you? Would you really? And how old are you, beautiful miss?’

‘Niko! Don’t you know the rules better than that? I’m twenty-five.’

‘So old? But you do not look like twenty-five,’ he said generously. ‘It is a good age to be, not? See, this bit is rough. Take my hand, miss.’

I laughed. ‘I am not as old as all that, Niko. And I’m truly not a bit tired. Just hot.’

It was indeed very hot. As we climbed steadily north-west the sun beat down on the right, throwing shadows
sharp and hard as graphite along the white rock. The track where we walked was only by courtesy a track. It was not steep, cutting at a slant along the great flank of the mountain, but it was very rough, and some of the stones were sharp. We had long since left any trees behind, and the mountainside, unpunctuated now by pine or cypresses, stretched one great wing of burning white from the high hard blue sky down to the dry watercourse deep on our left. Beyond the tortured path of this dead stream, the rock rose again, this time violently blocked in with cobalt shadow. High above, so that to glance at them hurt the eyes, three birds hung, circling slowly and with moveless wings, like some mobile toy on invisible threads. I thought I could hear their faint, sweet mewing. Nothing else broke the silence except the scrape and clink of our feet, and the sound of our breathing.

The track ran straight up to what looked like a wall of fallen rocks and rubble, and there stopped, obliterated. Stephanos, in front, had halted, and turned to speak to Simon, who was just behind him. He said something, gesturing towards the barricade of rock.

It looked like a landslip, a great torrent of red and ochreous earth frozen even as it poured down the steep wing of the mountain. It was spiked with broken rock and great white slabs of fallen limestone. Further down the mountainside it fanned out like the delta of a red river. Enormous blocks of stone had hurtled down with it, flung carelessly, as by the hand of an angry god, to dam the narrow gash of the watercourse.

Stephanos had turned aside to climb rather painfully up the steep hill-face beside the landslide.

‘Is this where we leave the track?’ I asked.

Simon turned. ‘No. That’s still with us. This stuff’s just lying across it. If we follow Stephanos up a little there’s a place where it’s safer to cross.’

‘It must have been quite a storm,’ I said, surveying the torrent of rocks in front, and the gigantic flung boulders far below us.

‘Not storm. Earthquake,’ said Simon, then laughed at my expression. ‘Yes, one forgets, doesn’t one? I told you this was a savage country. And this, I believe, is a baddish area. They’ve had quite a history of tremors hereabouts. The miracle is that any of the old shrines and temples have a single pillar left standing. Can you manage?’

‘Yes, thanks. Don’t help me, Simon. I’ve got to keep my end up with Niko.’

‘Of course – and mine, too, I think … That’s it. We cross here. It seems stable enough, but watch yourself.’

We made our way slowly across the detritus of the earthquake. From higher up I could see where a whole slice of the mountain-cliff above us had been torn away and thrown down. It had splintered into great white spearheads, against which the smaller fragments were piled in the drift of dark red earth. We scrambled down this uncomfortable ramp towards the path which had shaken itself clear of the debris.

‘I suppose the Earth-Shaker turned over in his sleep,’ I said, ‘and not so very long ago, either, by the look of it. The cracks look fairly fresh, don’t they?’

Stephanos must have understood the drift of what I was saying. He had turned to wait for us on the track, and now spoke to Simon. ‘What does he say?’ I asked.

‘He says that there were two or three small shocks – this, by the way, is a small shock – about twelve years ago. A little further on the mountain has been shifted about much more drastically. He says that only someone who was out on this part of Parnassus almost daily would still know his way about, once he had left the track. He also says that the place we are making for is almost completely changed since he found Michael there. It was just an open space at the foot of a low cliff, and now it’s closed in by fallen rock into a kind of corrie, or hollow.’

Stephanos nodded as he finished. He gave me a look from under his magnificent white brows. He asked Simon a question.

‘Are you tired?’ asked Simon.

‘No, thanks.’

Simon smiled. ‘Don’t exhaust yourself keeping Britain’s end up, will you?’

‘I’m not. It’s only the heat.’

There was a flash of shocking pink socks beside me as Niko dropped off the rubble to land as neatly as a goat. He dragged a water-bottle out of a large pocket and unscrewed the top. ‘Have a drink, miss.’

I drank thankfully. The bottle smelt ammoniac, like a nice donkey, but the water was good and still reasonably cool.

‘Greek peasant women,’ said Niko, watching me with that limpid look of his, ‘can go for hours over the roughest country without food or drink.’

‘So,’ I said, stoppering the bottle and handing it back to him, ‘can camels. Thank you, Niko, that was wonderful.’

‘It was a pleasure, beautiful miss.’ Niko turned to Simon and held out the bottle. His look and gesture expressed, somehow, the most tender solicitude.

Simon, smiling, shook his head.

‘Good,’ said Stephanos, and turned to go on. He and Simon forged ahead once more, and Niko and I took up our positions in the rear.

It must have been getting on for noon when we neared the corrie.

We left the track some way beyond the fall of rock and turned, in Stephanos’ unfaltering wake, up into a markless desert of rock and dry earth. Sometimes we trudged upwards through sienna-coloured dust strewn cruelly with small boulders, and sometimes we walked more easily across great serrated flanges of the white and living rock. The sun was at its height and the heat was intense. The air wavered with it till the whole vast sweep of rock seemed to pulsate. If it hadn’t been for the cool breeze that blew steadily at that height, it would have been insupportable.

By the time we were two-thirds of the way to the corrie, and had done most of the climbing, I had got my second wind, and was walking fairly easily. I was, I felt, upholding British Womanhood not too badly.

‘The Greek peasant women,’ said Niko, beside me, ‘used to carry great loads of wood and grapes and things across here. Regularly.’

‘If you tell me one more thing about Greek peasant
women,’ I said, ‘I shall scream and lie down and refuse to move another step. Besides, I don’t believe you.’

He grinned. ‘It is not true.’ he conceded. ‘I think that you are very wonderful.’

‘Why, Niko, that’s nice of you!’

‘And very beautiful, too,’ said Niko. ‘Would you like an apple?’

And he fished an apple out of his pocket and handed it to me with very much the air of a Paris presenting the prize to Aphrodite. His look of intense and dazzled admiration was, one felt, one that had been tried before and found to work.

It still worked. My morale soared. I laughed and took the apple and thanked him, and then a diversion was created because neither he nor Stephanos would allow me to eat it without peeling it, and Niko wanted to peel it for me and Stephanos had the knife, so, being Greeks, they plunged into a passionate discussion about this while Simon peeled the apple and then handed it to me.

‘For the fairest,’ he said.

‘There’s not,’ I said, ‘a lot of competition. But thank you all the same.’

Soon after that we reached our destination.

T
HE
corrie did not lie at any great height. Arachova itself is almost three thousand feet above sea level, and we had climbed no more than eight or nine hundred feet in all since we had left the village. We were still only in the foothills of the vast highland of Parnassus, but we might have been lost, a million miles from anywhere. Since the village had dwindled out of sight we had seen no living creature except the lizards, and the vultures that circled and cried so sweetly, high in the dazzling air.

The place wasn’t, properly speaking, a corrie. It was a hollow scooped out of a line of low cliffs that topped a steep, mile-long ridge like the crest along a horse’s neck. From a distance the cliff looked fairly uniform, but on approach it could be seen that it had been split and torn into ragged bays and promontories where half a hundred winter torrents had gouged their headlong way down the mountainside.

Here and there lay evidence of a swifter and more wholesale violence. Earthquakes had wrested great chunks from the crag, quarrying back into the limestone face, throwing the enormous debris down, so that for hundreds of feet below the jagged cliffs, a loose and sometimes dangerous scree valanced the sloping hillside.

As we neared the edge of this Stephanos turned aside, into a short steep detour that took us out above the level of the clifftop, and we approached the line of crags at a long slant that brought us eventually to the edge.

The old man stopped then, leaning on his crook, and waited for us to come up with him.

Simon stood beside him, looking down.

‘This is the place?’

‘This is the place.’

It could have been a quarry hacked out of the cliff-face during countless patient years. It had probably taken five seconds of earthquake for the Earth-Shaker to tear that semicircular scar back into the cliff and fling the wreckage down before it in still formidable walls of jagged rock. The result of the earthquake’s action was to make a roughly circular hollow, a sort of irregular crater some seventy yards across, which was walled to the north by the living cliff on which we stood, and shut in almost completely for the rest of its diameter by the vast sections of tumbled rock.

The centre of the crater floor was clear, but the encircling walls were piled in the now familiar way with red dust and rock-debris. In spring, I thought, it would
probably be beautiful, for it was sheltered, and I could see the dead remains of some scrubby plants and bushes where the melting snows and then the rain must have fed some alpine vegetation. Below us clung the lovely green of a little juniper, and just beside my feet the rock held two thick bushes that looked like holly, but which bore, incongruously, acorns with enormous cups as prickly as seaurchins.

To the right, on the west side of the corrie, was what appeared to be the only way out. This was a break in the wall of rock, towards which the smooth crater floor lifted in a rocky ramp. From the height where we stood I thought I could see, beyond and below this ‘gate’, the ghost of an old track, leading westwards to vanish round the spur of the mountain.

Stephanos caught the direction of my glance. ‘That is the way he went.’

He spoke in Greek, of course, and Simon translated for me, at the time in snatches, and more fully later; but once again I shall put the old man’s words down directly, as they came.

‘That is the way he went, down the old track towards Amphissa. It comes out above the disused quarry near the Amphissa road, behind the olive-groves.’ He fell silent for a moment or two, looking down at the hollow beneath our feet. No one spoke. The sun beat on the backs of our necks, and I felt suddenly, very tired.

Then the old man spoke again, slowly, reminiscently. ‘I came to the head of the cliff just at this point. It was different then, you understand … here, where we stand, there was a pinnacle of rock, like a cat’s
tooth. It disappeared in the earthquake, but then it was a landmark that even an Athenian could not have missed. And below the cliff, then, there was no hollow, as you see it now, walled and gated like a fortress. There was only the cliff, and below us some big rocks lying, and a space of clean stone. It was there that I saw them, Michael and Angelos. And the place is not covered. I marked it, and I know. It was there.’ The crook pointed. Almost in the centre of the dazzling floor of smooth stone, a little pile of stones, a cairn, threw a small triangular shadow. ‘I put those there later,’ said Stephanos, ‘after the earthquake had moved the cliff, and the place was altered beyond recognition.’ There was another pause of silence, then he glanced sideways at me. ‘We will go down now … Will you tell the lady to be very careful,
Kyrie
Simon? The path is steep, and made only for goats but it is the quickest way.’

As Simon transmitted the warning, I saw that there was indeed a path down into the corrie. It left the cliff-top just beside us, between the two bushes of holly-oak, and wound steeply down past more mats of holly and the dusty ghosts of thistles, into the bottom of the hollow. It was down this way that the dog must have raced to attack Angelos, and then Stephanos himself, to run to Michael’s side as he lay dying in the sun …

The sun was so high that almost the whole of the corrie bottom was shadowless. But where the cliff-path debouched on to the level, a wing of rock cast a comforting angle of blue shade. I stooped there, and sat down with my back against the warm stone. Stephanos
moved forward without pausing, and Simon followed him. Niko flung himself down beside me on the dusty ground. I hoped he wouldn’t speak, and he didn’t. He broke off a piece of a dead thistle and began scratching patterns in the dust. He wasn’t paying much attention to his drawing; his intent gaze never left the other men.

Stephanos led Simon across the floor of the corrie, and stopped beside the little cairn. He was pointing down at it and talking, rapidly now. His hand moved and gestured, then came back to the same spot. Almost I could see the dying man lying there in the baking sun, the shepherd coming to the cliff-top where a fang of rock stuck up like a cat’s tooth, the dog dashing down that snaking path, the murderer turning to bolt out of the ‘gate’ and down the track towards Amphissa and the sea.