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She did
not know why the word
safety
kept returning to her with such insistence but it did. She
could not help thinking of Livia Sol, who went mad in the end,
tortured or so it was said by her own visions. But as the
temperature dipped in the late afternoon, and the gusty breeze
brought the reek of lobster pots and shark entrails from the
fishing rigs tethered in the harbour at Piraeus she returned to her
apartment and to her work on
The Night Hounds
with renewed intensity. There was something in the
obsessive struggle between the seaman Atlas Tyburn and Telos
Mavrommatis the assassin that reminded her of the vendetta between
Alcander’s father Demitris and the nameless warlord whose son he
had killed. She supposed she had known this from the beginning,
that it was this knowledge that had determined her choice of
The Pirates
as the subject for Alcander’s
panorama.

Whatever the
truth of the matter, Layla did not waste time dwelling on it. The
work had reached the stage where it was in and of itself the
inspiration, and it occupied her thoughts to the exclusion of
everything else.

It was the
character of the hound master Aegesth who preoccupied her the most.
He appeared in Panteleimon’s poem only briefly, but his role was
significant, and Layla had placed him in the foreground of the
action. He was a slim, mercurial youth, lithe and whip-backed as
one of his own hounds, and Layla knew he was really a stand-in for
Alcander. For his naked flesh she chose a moon-coloured silk of the
finest grade available. She worked his form with care, and as the
days progressed the youth came increasingly to life beneath her
fingers. There were nights when she did not lay down her work until
the sea had begun to reflect the first light of dawn.

For the first
part of the day she was barely awake, and once she fell asleep on
the bus to work, passing right through Bethsheba where the factory
was and ending up at the terminus out by the skyway. She was woken
by a crowd of schoolchildren, storming their way on to the bus like
a swarm of bees. Her head was still stuffed with sleep. She used
her mobile to call in sick, then returned to her apartment and
slumped down on the bed. Her dreams were noisy and uneasy with the
barking of dogs.

She woke after
sunset, hungry and restless with the same kind of sexual longing
that had followed her separation from John Caribe. She wolfed down
the remains of a takeaway paella she had bought for her supper the
evening before and then took a taxi to a bar she had heard of, in
the cellar of one of the hotels just south of Amberville,
frequented mostly by actors in search of work and successful
businesswomen in their mid- to late fifties. It did not take her
long to find what she was looking for. The boy was pale and skinny,
his fair hair pulled back from his forehead and twisted into
dreadlocks. They agreed on a price, then he led her through a
curtained archway to a green-tiled corridor with a number of
smaller archways leading off. The booth he brought her to was stark
but clean, reminding her of the room at the Hotel Europa. When the
boy took off his shirt Layla saw that his back was striped with old
scars, the flesh raised and corrugated in places like a section of
torn packing material. She pressed her lips to the hardened scar
tissue, tasting salt, then lifted herself astride him, thinking
that she did not have to ask him how he came by the scars, she did
not have to ask him anything. As her flesh parted she thought of
Alcander, and came at once.

It was gone
one by the time she got home. She felt filled with an immense
darkness, a starry vacuum in which power and despair seemed evenly
matched. They circled each other warily, like fighting dogs. She
did not think she would be able to sleep, but she was unconscious
less than a minute after getting into bed. She was awoken by her
mobile phone; Nashe Crawe’s name was flashing on the display
screen. Layla felt a flicker of dread, suddenly certain that what
she had done with the boy the night before had pitched Alcander
into terminal decline.

“
I need you to come,” Nashe Crawe said. She sounded
breathless, strident, as if she had been calling Layla’s number for
a long time without getting a reply. “It’s a miracle.”

“
Mrs Crawe,” Layla said. She still felt groggy. “Are you all
right? What are you talking about?”

“
It’s Alcander,” she said. “His arms and face are clear of the
sores – completely clear. There were some scabs but they just
brushed off. The blisters on his legs are drying up, too. Even the
big ones.” There was a catch in her voice, as if she was on the
brink of hysterical laughter. “His skin is renewing itself. He’s –
beautiful.”

Layla rubbed
at her eyes with the back of her hand. She felt nauseous and hungry
at the same time. “How is he in himself?”

“
Sleeping, mostly. It’s as if his body is using all his energy
to heal itself. But each time he wakes he seems stronger. He’s
eating well, too.” She broke off, starting to weep. “I knew you
could do it.”

Layla pressed
the phone to her ear, listening to the woman’s choked crying. On
the other side of the room the night hounds, tawny as cougars,
frolicked and span around the figure of their master Aegesth. They
were shadowy as devils, the canvas worked in such a way that when
you first glanced at it the dogs appeared to be nothing more than a
swirling drift of autumn leaves.

She remembered
the boy from the night before, taut as a bowstring above her, her
fingers digging into the lattice of scars on his back.

“
It wasn’t me,” she said to Nashe Crawe. “I didn’t do
anything.”

“
You shouldn’t deny it, you know. If the gods favour you with
a gift you should feel blessed.”

Layla fell
silent. She wanted to put the phone down and take a shower, but
Nashe Crawe was still talking, telling her she had been trying to
get through to her husband all morning but no one seemed to know
where he was. It was eleven o’clock already. Layla could not
remember the last time she had slept so late.

“
You will come?” Nashe Crawe was saying. “Alcander will be
wanting to see you.”

“
I can’t,” Layla said. “Not until I’ve finished the
tapestry.”

Nashe Crawe
started to say something else, to protest maybe, but Layla
disconnected the call before she could finish. She felt stark fear,
of a kind she had never before experienced, and the knowledge that
she could never enter the glass house again.

She did not
want to confront the evidence of what had to be impossible.

She ran her
fingers briefly over the tapestry, the weft lines taut as wires.
Dimly she sensed their feedback, faint and silvery as harp music
behind a closed door.

There was only
Aegesth, the hound master. The love she had felt for Alcander
seemed like a dream.

She took a bus
to the city centre and then walked through the maze of backstreets
until she came to the dusty, flagged walkway that led to the lower,
shabbier end of Athenaeum Street. There was a smell of overflowing
dustbins and baking asphalt. Layla slipped along an access passage
that ran between two of the houses then made her way along the lane
overlooking the gardens. There was no one about. The last house in
the road was enormous and very well kept. Its gleaming brickwork
cast back the sunlight like a thrown discus, yet an aura of uncanny
stillness surrounded it. Layla felt certain that in spite of the
way it looked the house was empty and had been empty for years. Its
back gates were padlocked shut

Layla stood in
the shadow of its wall and listened to the cicadas, gradually
adjusting her breathing to their steady rhythm. Eventually her
heart rate began to subside.

It seemed to
her that she had two choices: either she could accept what people
said about her, or she could not. Nashe Crawe had called her gift a
blessing, but if she allowed herself to believe that it would mean
that in a sense the pictures, the colours, the feelings she
experienced when she created her tapestries had never been hers. It
would mean that everything she ever did, everything she had ever
done, was predetermined. That she was not an artist, but an empty
vessel, a convenient channel of communication between her own world
and a realm she herself could merely glimpse through the
panoramas.

She had always
thought of her work as her passport to freedom. But if what Nashe
Crawe believed was true then it was merely the badge of her
servitude. Crea Atoll had accepted her calling and it had brought
her adulation for a time. But in the end the tide had turned, as it
had turned for Layla’s mother, as it turned for everyone, and where
had the gods been then?

Surely it was
better to be like Livia Sol, who had refused to accept the
patronage of any religion, even when the rest of the world declared
her insane? Or like Panteleimon, who insisted on his personal
freedom, even when it led him to exile and ruin?

Thanick Acampos
,
she thought.
Who are you really?
She turned around to face the wall, then placed her foot in
a cleft left by a missing brick and heaved herself up. The thorn
trees had grown massively thick, covering the inside of the gates
and making entry to the garden impossible without the use of a
chain saw or a scythe. Only the orb spiders, the industrious
Johannas, seemed free to come and go as they pleased. Layla watched
one of them, a slim-bodied, delicate creature of a lighter brown
than the plump beauty she had observed earlier in the summer, as
she touched her toes to the rear of her abdomen and extruded a
silken thread, a live, liquid quicksilver that hardened to gleaming
transparency within a fraction of a second.

There was
something balletic in the spider’s movements, the same lithe
effortlessness that belied the hours of practice and rapacious
desire that brought all art into existence.

Layla felt
love rise in her, and a heartfelt admiration. She felt she would
die to protect this creature, to ensure its right to continue doing
what it did so well.

“
So you still think we’re all dead, then?”

Layla
was so badly startled it made her lose her grip on the wall. She
dropped to the ground, grazing her palms and painfully jolting her
knees. She thought at first it was the house’s owner that had
called to her; then she saw it was the old woman, Thanick Acampos.
She was incongruously dressed, in a dogtooth-pattern business suit
and sturdy black court shoes.
How can she stand it, in this heat?
Layla thought.
Those shoes must be
killing her.

She looked
like the ancient secretary to some particularly notorious gangland
boss.

“
I’ve looked for you everywhere,” Layla said.

“
I thought you didn’t believe in me,” said Thanick
Acampos.

“
I don’t want to talk about that. I’ve had it up to here with
all that god stuff. I want you to tell me about my
mother.”

“
Your mother drowned and she was terrified. But she called to
my cousin Calliope and Calliope came and lifted her out of the
water.”

“
That’s rubbish and you know it. Why won’t you tell me the
truth?”

“
Do you still call it rubbish now?” The old woman bent down as
if to adjust one of her stockings. Her outline seemed to shimmer,
and for a moment Layla thought she was about to disappear as she
had done before.

“
No you don’t,” Layla cried. “Not again.” She reached out and
seized the old woman by the sleeve, but the thickly woven material
was sopping wet, and when the old woman turned to look at her Layla
saw she was staring into the face of Romilly Perec. She looked
exactly as she did in the stash of old photographs at the back of
her father’s wardrobe, photos that had lain hidden so long Layla
suspected Idmon Vargas had forgotten they were there.

She was taller
than Layla and her skin paler, but she had the same coarse, unruly
hair and emerald eyes.

“
Tell me my name,” said Romilly Perec. She spoke in the dry,
perplexing voice of Thanick Acampos.

“
That’s vile,” Layla said. “Let her go!” She grabbed both her
arms, digging her fingers into the sodden fabric of her clothes and
pulling her forward. The woman’s eyes were shining with tears, and
Layla remembered the morning of her departure from Kardamyli, the
dawn stepping towards her across the sand in her pink suede
sandals.

“
You must tell me my name before I can release her, Layla
Vargas,” the woman said. “You should accept your gift with grace,
that’s all I ask. No gift is for free.” Her voice was different
now, younger, but still hard-edged with what seemed to Layla like
regret.

“
My gift is my own,” Layla said. “It has nothing to do with
you. I hate everything you stand for.”

“
Are you sure about that? According to you I don’t exist in
the first place.” She freed herself from Layla’s grasp and then
embraced her. Layla felt her mother’s lips brush her forehead and
then she seemed to turn to nothing in her arms. A gust of hot wind
blew back her hair.

“
Don’t go!” Layla cried. “I want to see you.”

“
Then say my name.” The woman reappeared, not as the old hag
or Romilly Perec but as an image from a black-and-white photograph:
Bella Lukic in the role of the goddess Athena. Then this image too
disappeared. In its place stood a woman in middle age. She was
quietly dressed, in a shift of blue cotton. Her hair, flecked
lightly with grey, was cut fashionably short. She exuded the same
kind of weary dignity you might expect to find in a soldier who has
fought heroically in many wars but who now deems war itself to be
futile. She was beautiful, but in a way that made Layla
afraid.