The Moonspinners (34 page)

I took a breath, and turned away from the rock-ridge, bearing steadily seawards, towards the dim outline of the headland, the point where I thought the caique might be lying. I swam fast. It might take me ten minutes to come within distance of a soft hail. And in about ten minutes he would up anchor, and go . . .

I had travelled, I suppose, not more than thirty yards, when I was brought up sharply in my course by a new sound, not of the sea; the sound – unmistakable, and near – of metal on wood. A boat's sound. But this came, not from ahead of me, but from the right, further out to sea.

I stopped, treading water again, conscious now of the fast beating of my heart. A line of foam ran past me. The sea hummed. I was inside its great, roaring shell, rocked to and fro in an echoing confusion of din like the noises in a hollow cave. Under my body, fathoms down, throbbed the organ pipes of the sea.

Another moment of deep fear, loneliness, and confusion swept over me with a cold splash like spray. But I dared not hesitate. If this were not he, I might be too late. I must try a hail now . . . But, if it were not he . . .

Then I saw it, unmistakably, and near. A boat, a dim shape, dark against darkness, the froth running white from her slowly dipping oars. No light; no sound, save for the rattle of rowlocks that had caught my ear. She was seaward of me, standing across the bay towards the outer fangs of the rock-ridge. Lambis was coming in after all, without the signal; no doubt to reconnoitre the ridge before finally turning for the open sea, and Athens.

I put my head down, made a diving turn, and went at my fastest crawl back towards the ridge. My hand touched rock, I surfaced, clung, and turned, with my body held against the stack by the lifting water.

I had crossed the boat's course with plenty to spare; she was still slightly to seaward of me, but closing in, bearing for shore. And now she was level with me, looming between me and the stars. I shook the water out of my eyes, tightened my grip on the rock, and hailed her.

It came very breathlessly: ‘Ahoy there! Sailor!'

Silence. She bore on her way. The wind must have caught my voice and eddied it away in the rush and lap of the water. She was passing, soon to be lost again in the darkness. I could feel her wash lifting me against the rock.

I let myself go with it, hauling on my hand-grip as I did so. The wash carried me back, and up, against my rock stack; a crevice gave me another handhold, then a slippery foothold. I reared myself up out of the water, and let it hold me there, spread by it against the rock, where my body would show paler. I dared not leave the rock, for fear of being run down. I called again, not caring how loudly, and heard how this time the rock caught the cry, and echoed it uncannily across the black water.

‘Ahoy! Ahoy!
Náfti!
'

The jerking clack of wood on wood, and she came up as sharply as a checked horse. Then the high prow slanted, swung, and she had veered head on to me.

I gave a little sobbing breath of relief. It was over. And of course it was Mark. I had had time, now, to realize that no other boat would have put into this bay, along this perilous ridge, in this unlighted and stealthy silence. Only a few minutes more, and Frances and I would both be safely aboard, and that would be that . . .

He was looming right over me. The faint line of frost under the bows seemed to brush my thighs. Then he swung broadside again, within feet of me, and the oars bit water. The boat halted, slid a little, backed water. I heard an exclamation, half of surprise, half of what sounded like fear.

I called softly: ‘It's all right. It's me, Nicola. I was swimming out.'

There was silence. Feet away, the boat loomed.

‘Mark—' I said.

Then, suddenly, a light flashed on; an enormous, blinding light; a pharos of a light. Straight above my head twin massive lamps were suspended in nothing. The beams, converging in a glaring ring, stabbed down on to the water, on to me. I was blinded, pinned down, held, dazzled and helpless to move or think, in that appalling light.

I believe I cried out, cowering back against the rock, and, at the same moment, I heard him shout. It was a rough voice, and it spoke in Greek, but there was no time for this to register with me. Fear stabbed through at a purely instinctive level, and already, before he had moved, I had dived away into the dark beyond the floodlit pool.

I heard an oar strike rock as he thrust against it, and the nose of the boat turned with me. The light followed. I had seen, in that sharp, immediate flash of terror, what this was: it was a light-boat, too small (but the dark had hidden this) for an inter-island caique; too furtive – surely – for one of the
gri-gri
. And I thought I knew whose light-boat.

A moment later, I was proved right. Noise ripped the night open, as the motor started. No, this wasn't one of the harmless
gri-gri
that the caique had towed out to sea; this was a boat with an outboard. Like Stratos'.

Stratos' own. I heard him shout: ‘
You? I knew it! And Josef?
' He was standing there now, brilliantly lit beside the lanterns, and the six-pronged trident flashed as he drove it down, straight at me.

19

It was that fatal and perfidious bark . . .

MILTON
:
Lycidas

No time to think, certainly no time to cry out through the choking swirl of water; impossible to shout to him, ask what he was doing, what danger I could be to him, now that the others were safely away . . .

The harpoon went by me with a hiss; bubbles ripped back from the blades in a sparkling comet's-tail. I twisted aside, kicking my way frantically out of the merciless light.

The spear reached the bottom of its run, jerked the rope tight; then he hauled it back, as the boat swerved after me. The rope touched me as he dragged it up; the small graze, even through the rip of the water, touched the skin with terror, like a burn. I had a glimpse of him, towering beside the lanterns, hauling in the glittering coils of rope with rapid, practised hands. Momentarily, he had had to let the tiller swing, and the light swerved away. Dark water swirled in the shadow of the boat, hiding me. I jack-knifed away again, towards the deep, black water. But
Psyche
came up to the tiller with a jerk, and turned with me, as if locked to my wake by radar . . .

For a split, crazy second, I thought of diving under her; then I knew it would be a dive to certain death: if the screw didn't get me, I would be a sitter for Stratos and the light as I came up. As it was, this could only have one end, and that a quick one . . . He needn't even risk another miss with the spear; another half-minute of this dreadful, uneven hunt, and I should be done, gasping on the surface, ready to be spitted . . .

Full in the glare, I turned to face the spear, and threw an arm up towards him. I was trying, I think, to get my breath to shout; to gain a little time in which his crazy anger might be checked, reasoned with. But even as I turned, he swung his spear-arm up again. The long shaft gleamed golden, the barbed blades glittered; the light beat me down, hammered me into the water, held me there, like a moth frying on a flame. His other hand was on the tiller. If the spear missed this time, the boat, swinging on that radar beam, would run me down, and plough me back into the sea.

I gulped air, watching for the first flash of metal as his muscles tensed for the throw. The flash came: I turned and dived for the darkness. Nothing followed, no blades, no rope; he must have missed. I held myself under as long as I could, thrusting down and away, steeply, into deep water . . .

The moment came when I had to turn upwards. I was rising towards the light . . . it was everywhere . . . the sea paled to a luminous green, to a wavering of blue and gold, barred with the ripples of the boat's passage, blocked with the formidable shadow of her keel.

The turquoise and gold thinned, lightened, fizzed with sparks as the foam ran from her screw . . .

Just before I broke surface I saw him, a shadow towering above a shadow, tall on the thwarts, huge, distorted, wavering like a pillar of cloud. He was up there, waiting, the spear still poised. I don't pretend I saw anything except the moving shadows above the light, but I knew, as surely as if the sea were clear glass, that he still had the spear. He hadn't thrown it before, it had been a feint. He would get me now, as, gasping and exhausted, I surfaced for the last time.

Then something touched me, drove at my outstretched hand, breaking my dive, and sending me sprawling untidily to the surface. The boat rocked past, her bow-wave piling. The spear drove down at the same moment, a flash among the million flashing and glittering points of light; stars, water drops, splashing foam, the dazzle of my water-filled eyes. There was a crack, a dreadful jarring, a curse. The world swam, and flashed, and was extinquished, as the massive shape of blackness surged up between me and the light. I hadn't even known what had knocked me to the surface, but the animal in me was already clinging, gasping and sobbing for air, to solid rock. That last, long dive had taken me into the wake of one of the stacks of the rock ridge. The spear, striking prematurely, had hit it, and the prow of Stratos' boat, following me too closely, had taken it with a jarring graze, and was even now, roughly headed off by the rock, swerving fast away.

The moment's respite, the solid rock of my own element, were enough. My mind cleared of its helpless terror as the air poured into my body, and I saw that I was safe, as long as I kept among the rocks.

Psyche
turned again, wheeling for my side of the stack. I dropped back into the sea, and plunged round into the darkness at the other side.

I reached out for a handhold, to rest again until she could come around.

Something caught at me then, holding me back from the rock; something under the water . . . It was thin and whippy as a snake, and it wrapped round my legs, dragging me down like the weight roped to the feet of a man condemned to die by drowning.

I fought it, with the new strength born of instinctive terror. I had forgotten the other danger; the light and the spear were of the upper air, this horror came from the world below. This was the swimmer's nightmare, the very stuff of horror; the weed, the tentacle, the rope of a net . . . It held me fast, pulled me down, choking. And now the light was coming back.

My flailing hand met rock again; clung, with the thing dragging at my knees. I was done; I knew it. The light was coming.

Then it vanished, switched off. The sudden darkness, printed with its image still, roared and dazzled. But the roaring was real, the night suddenly shaking with a confused uproar of engines, a medley of shouting, the sharp crack of a backfiring motor – and then I saw other lights, small and dim and moving wildly across the water. The darkened light-boat hung between me and the stars, as if hesitating, then, suddenly, her motor was gunned, and the jet of white foam that shot from her stern almost dragged me off my rock. Her wake arrowed away, to be lost under the dark. In its place, came, gently, a biggish shadow, with riding-lights steady at mast and prow.

Someone said: ‘Hang on, sweetheart,' and someone else said, in Greek: ‘God protect us, the sea lady,' and Colin's voice said breathlessly: ‘She's hurt.'

Then a boat-hook ground into the rock beside me, and the boat swung in gently. Hands reached, grabbed. The side of the caique dipped, and I managed to grab it and was dragged half inboard, to hang gasping and slack over the side until the hands gripped again and lifted me in, and whatever it was that had twined round my legs and tried to drown me, came too.

I was down in the well of the caique, hunched on the thick rope matting, gasping and shivering and sick. Vaguely I was aware of Mark's voice and hands; something dry and rough rubbed me smartly into warmth, something sharp and aromatic was forced down my throat, while the caique swung and ground against the rock, and Mark cursed steadily under his breath in a way I hadn't thought he was capable of. Then came the dry roughness of a tweed coat round my bare shoulders, and another mouthful of the heady Greek brandy, and I was sitting up, with Mark's sound arm around me, feeling the warmth of his body comforting my own, and clutching his coat to my nakedness with numbed and flaccid fingers.

‘Stay quiet; it's all right, just stay quiet.' It was the voice he had used to comfort Colin.

I shook, clinging to him. ‘The spear,' I said, ‘the weeds.'

‘I know. It's all right now. He's gone.' Reassurance seemed to flow from him in tangible waves. ‘It's all finished; you're quite safe. Now relax.'

‘It was because of Josef's knife. I took it out of Lambis' pocket in the church, when we held him up. I forgot it. It was in my pocket. They saw it. H – he must have come after us.'

A moment or so, while he assessed this. ‘I see. But it still doesn't explain why he—'

‘
Mark!
' A shadow that I recognized as Colin dropped down to squat beside us.

‘What?'

‘This stuff that came up with her. It isn't weeds, it's rope.'

‘Rope?' I shivered again, uncontrollably, and the protecting arm tightened. ‘You mean a – a
net
?'

‘No. It's a length of rope, with a float, and a sort of lobster pot at the other end.'

The
scháros
pots; of course. It seemed like a memory from another life.

I said: ‘He has pots laid along there. I forgot. That was all it was, then. It felt horrible, like weed.'

‘Chuck it back in,' said Mark.

‘But there's something inside.' Colin sounded suddenly excited. ‘Not fish. A sort of package.'

Mark let me go. ‘Send a light down, Lambis.' He got down on his knees beside Colin. The wicker pot lay between them, a dark stain of water spreading from it. Gingerly Mark thrust his fingers in, and brought out a package, which he laid on the boards. Colin leaned close, Lambis, from his place beside the engine, peered in over their shoulders. The three faces were grave, absorbed, tense with a curiosity that was just about to break into excitement. The caique throbbed softly, swinging away from the rocks in a long, gentle drift seawards. We had all completely forgotten Frances.