My Brother Michael (21 page)

Then Stephanos turned heavily and trudged back to where we sat. He lowered himself down beside me with a sigh, then said something short to Niko, who got out a battered packet of cigarettes and handed him one. He gave his grandfather a light, then turned, with his brilliant smile, to offer a cigarette to me. We lit up in silence.

Simon was still standing in the centre of the corrie, but he wasn’t looking down at the cairn where his brother had died. He had turned, and that cool appraising stare of his was slowly raking the sides of the corrie … the tumbled wall of rock that hemmed us in … the great sections that had fallen outward from the crag, and now made the two sidewings of the corrie,
piled high in vast slabs and wedges against the old solid rock of the cliff … the hollow curve of a shallow cave exposed in the scooped segment of broken crag, a cave that had been deep before the front of the cliff had fallen away and left its recesses naked to the air …

My cigarette was mild and loosely packed and tasted slightly of goat; there was something about the beautiful Niko, I reflected, that harked back fairly consistently to the lower animals. I had half smoked it, and Niko’s was gone entirely, when Simon’s shadow fell beside us.

‘What about lunch?’ he asked.

The slight tension – of Stephanos’ making, not Simon’s – was broken, and we chatted over lunch as if it had been a normal picnic. My tiredness was rapidly dissolving, with the rest in the pleasant shade, and the solid excellence of the food we had bought in Arachova. We had rolls – a little dry after their progress in Niko’s rucksack – with generous pieces of cold lamb sandwiched in; cheese in thick juicy slices; a paper full of olives that felt as if they were warm from the tree but were really warm from Niko; a hard-boiled egg; a very solid and very sweet chunk of some sort of cake made with fresh cherries; and a large handful of grapes, also warm and slightly tired-looking, but tasting ambrosially of the sun.

I noticed that Simon, as he ate, still looked about him, his eyes returning time after time, thoughtfully, to the recently-torn cliff behind us: ‘This was done in the earthquake you spoke of, soon after the war?’

Stephanos said, through a mouthful of cake: ‘That is
so. There were three or four shocks that year. It was 1946. The villages were not affected, but a lot of rock was moved up here.’ He jerked his head towards the cliff. ‘This is not the only place of its kind. All along this ridge there are places where the tremors, and then the weather, have taken bites out of the hill. What the earthquake starts, the ice and snow don’t take many winters to finish. There are three, four, five hollows, much like this one, where very little trace of the original cliff-face remains. Only the goat-track that we came down on … see? There the cliff itself has not been moved, but you see the rocks piled against it as high as a ruined church. Oh yes, I told you,
Kyrie
Simon, that a man who was not always out on the hill would soon miss his landmarks.’

‘The pinnacle, for instance, that used to stand above the cliff?’

‘I told you about that? Yes, I did, I remember. It was not so very high, but it served as a landmark for kilometres around. It was what guided me to Michael on that day. He knew of a cave here, he said, near the Cat’s Tooth, and he meant to lie up in it until the German drive was over. I came up bringing him food, and to try and make him come back to Arachova where his wound might be cared for. But this I have spoken of already.’

Simon’s eyes were on the shallow apse of the exposed cave. They were narrowed slightly, as if against the sun, and his face gave nothing away. ‘A cave? That one? It would be deep enough before half of it fell in.’

Stephanos lifted his heavy shoulders. ‘I do not know
if that was the one or not. Possibly. But you must understand that the cliff is full of caves … some parts of Parnassus are a honeycomb of such places where an army could hide in safety.’

Simon had taken out cigarettes. ‘Camilla? I think I’d like to take a quick look around, all the same. Cigarette? Catch, Niko …’ He got slowly to his feet, and stood looking down at the old man sitting heavily in the shade. ‘And you carried Michael from here to Delphi?’

Stephanos smiled ‘It was fourteen years ago, and I was younger. And the way to Delphi is much shorter than the way we came … but steep, you understand, because Arachova lies nearly four hundred metres higher than Delphi. That is a big start on a climb like this, so we came by Arachova today.’

‘I still think it was … well, quite a feat. And now I’m going to poke around for a bit. I want a good look at that cave. It looks as if there’s another small opening at the back of it. Will you come, or are you resting?’

‘I will come.’

‘Niko?’

One swift graceful wriggle, and Niko was on his feet and brushing dust from his trousers. ‘I come. I have very good eyesight, me. If there is anything to be seen, I will see it. I can see in the dark as well as any cat, so if there is an inner cave I shall guide you,
Kyrie
Simon.’

‘We’ll follow your socks,’ said Simon drily, and Niko grinned. The socks flashed across the corrie at a run, and were dimmed in the shadow of the cave’s recess. Stephanos was getting slowly to his feet. Simon looked down at me and raised his eyebrows.

I shook my head, so he and Stephanos left me, and went more slowly in the wake of the luminous socks. A buttress of shadow swallowed them.

I finished the cigarette and stubbed it out, then sat relaxed and still, enjoyed the shade and the silence and the bright dazzle of heat beyond my shadowed corner. The men were out of sight, either in the cave or somewhere beyond the piles of massive debris that buttressed the far side of the corrie. I couldn’t hear them now. The silence was intense, thick as the heat. I was part of it, sitting as still as a lizard on my stone.

Some movement, real or imagined, at the head of the cliff-path, caught my eye, and I turned to look wondering half-idly if Niko had found some way back to the cliff’s head while I had been sitting there half-asleep. But there was nothing there, only the sun hammering on the white rock. The shadows, purple and anthracite and red, seemed themselves to flicker with movement. Against the violent patterns of light and shade, the green of the holly-oaks and the cool curve of the juniper arching out from the face of the cliff were as refreshing as the sound of a spring. I remembered, suddenly, that as I had clambered down past them there had been other green things below us, hardly noticed in the hazards of that steep exhausted scramble down the cliff.

Where there was green there must certainly, in September, be water … cold water, not Niko’s tepid bottle that smelled of goat. The thought brought me eagerly to my feet. A shadow at the cliff-top flickered again, but I hardly noticed. My eyes were on the corner
below the slim bow of the juniper, where, like a mirage, showed a glimpse of vivid emerald …

I got up, skirting the corrie’s edge, picking my way between the enormous fallen blocks. I slid between two rough rocks that caught at my clothes, bent my head to pass under a wing of limestone that shored up the cliff like a flying buttress – and there was the grass. The colour was so startling, and so beautiful after the dazzling changes rung by sun and stone that I must have stood quite still, gazing at it, for a full minute. It flowed in a deep and vivid ribbon of green between two boulders streaked liberally with the red of water-borne iron. But there was no water now. There might be some spring, I thought, that was dependent on intermittent showers high on the peaks; perhaps, like snow on the desert’s face, the grass sprang up in the wake of a shower and faded with the next day’s sunset … It lay there, itself like a small pool of cool water, a green thought in a green shade, moist to the touch, and lending the corner of the corrie a freshness that the shadowed rock had not had.

I sat gratefully down, with my hands spread on the ground and the soft grass springing up between my fingers. Among the green were tiny flowers, bells of pale blue, like pigmy hare-bells. Some of these grew on the face of the cliff itself, and their seeds had, in the last decade, flown and rooted everywhere in the fallen debris of earthquake. Only here in this moist corner were they still in flower, but I could see fading clumps of seeding stems on all sides among the boulders. Other alpines had grown here, too; there was some
thing with a pale furry leaf and a thin dry flower-stem sticking out like a humming-bird’s tongue; a tuft of tendrils dried into hexagonal shapes till they looked like bunches of brown chicken-wire; a tiny plant of the a corned holly, rooting purposefully in a thin crack. Then with another shock of pleasure I saw one more flower that had not yet died of drought. In a cleft just above eye level there was a plant of cyclamen. The leaves, blue-green and veined palely, were held out in stiff formal curves on their red stems. The flowers were soft rose-pink, a dozen of them, and clung like a flight of moths to the dry cliff. Below the flowers, in the same cleft, grew the remains of another rock-plant, dead, fraying away to dust in the drought. Above it the cyclamen’s flowers looked pure and delicate and strong …

Something was fretting at the edge of my mind. I stared at the cyclamen, and found I was thinking of the Dutch painter and his donkey surrounded by the laughing village lads, and I wondered, without knowing why, what Nigel was doing now.

We went back by the shorter route.

It appeared that the search of the cave had yielded nothing, and apparently Simon didn’t want to delay Stephanos and Niko by making a more prolonged investigation. We left the corrie by the gap in the west side, and scrambled down the steep slope below the scree.

We had nearly reached the bottom of the dry valley that lay below the ridge, when we came on the barely
visible track that I had glimpsed from the top of the crags. Even this was appallingly rough going. We made our careful way along it for some hundred yards or so, and then it forked. The right branch fell steeply away, curling out of sight almost at once round a spur of cliff. The left-hand branch turned downhill for Delphi. We took this, and in just over half the time the outward journey had taken we saw ahead of us the edge of the high land and, beyond it, the gap where the Pleistus valley cuts its way down to the sea.

Stephanos paused and spoke to Simon. The latter turned to me.

‘Stephanos has come back this way because he thinks you may be tired. This path will lead you straight down to Delphi. It comes out above the temple, and you can get down behind the Shining Ones, and then through the stadium. The drop down the cliff-top is steep, but there’s no danger if you take care. I’ll come down with you if you like, but you can’t possibly miss the way.’

I must have looked slightly surprised, because he added: ‘The car’s at Arachova – remember? I thought I’d go back along the top with Stephanos now, and collect it. But there’s no need to drag you the whole way.’

I said gratefully: ‘Oh, Simon – that car! I’d forgotten all about it. I don’t really see why you should have to shoulder all the responsibility for my bit of nonsense, but I must confess I’ll be awfully glad if you will! Don’t tell Niko, but I really am beginning to feel I’d like to be home.’

‘Well, it won’t take you long from here, and it’s all down-hill. No – look, dash it, I’ll come with you.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of letting you, if it means your trailing back later on to Arachova for the car. I can’t possibly get lost between here and Delphi, and I promise to be careful on the cliff-path.’ I turned to hold out a hand to Stephanos and thank him, then did the same to Niko. It was like Stephanos, I thought, virtually to ignore me all the time, and yet to lead the whole party some hour or so out of its way to show me the quick way home. The old man nodded gravely over my hand and turned away. Niko took it with a melting look from those beautiful eyes and said: ‘I will see you again, miss? You come to Arachova often?’

‘I hope so.’

‘And you will come to see the rugs in my sister’s shop? Is very good rugs, all colours. Local. Is also brooches and pots of the very best Greek style. For you they are cheap. I tell my sister you are my friend, yes?’

I laughed. ‘If I buy any rugs and pots I’ll come to your sister’s shop, Niko. That’s a promise. And now goodbye, and thank you.’

‘Goodbye, miss. Thank
you
, beautiful miss.’

The luminous socks plunged away along the path after Stephanos.

Simon grinned. ‘His grandfather’d have the hide off him if he could understand half he says. Is there such a thing as innocent depravity? Niko’s it if there is. A little of Athens superimposed on Arachova. It’s a fascinating mixture, isn’t it?’

‘When it’s as beautiful as Niko, yes … Simon, was it
true that you didn’t find anything in the cave? Or was there something that you didn’t want to talk about in front of the others? You didn’t see anything at all?’

‘Nothing. There was a small inner cave, but it was as blank as a scoured pot … I’ll tell you about it later on; I’d better be off after them now. I’ll be in to the Apollon for dinner and I’ll see you then. Afterwards we’ll get you installed at the studio. You’ll dine with me, of course?’

‘Why, thank you, I—’

‘Take care of yourself, then. See you at dinner.’ And with a lift of the hand he was gone in the wake of the shocking pink socks.

I stared after him for a few seconds, but he didn’t look back.

It occurred to me, with a slight sense of surprise, that this time yesterday I hadn’t even met him.

I turned and began to make my careful way down towards Delphi.

I
T
was late afternoon, and the sun was straight ahead of me when at length I came out on top of one of the great cliffs that stand above the shrine at Delphi. Far below me and to the right lay the temple precinct, its monuments and porticos and its Sacred Way looking small and very clean-cut in the sun, like the plaster models that you see in museums. The pillars of Apollo were foreshortened, and tiny as toys. Directly beneath me was the cleft of the Castalian Spring. The tangle of trees filled it like a dark waterfall. Already, beyond the tree-filled cleft, the Flamboyant cliff was taking the late afternoon sun like flame.