Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  And so it was decided. The Boatman would be fed and nursed in the cave while I was considered safe to travel with Spenser across rough terrain towards the high ground of the Lasithi plateau.

  Without sentiment or goodbyes, and feeling rather like a convict stripped of my rights, I followed the portly Spenser out of the cave and down off the overhang to where a mule was waiting for us, loaded with gear.

  I looked back once to the firelight before we descended, to see Perry lying in his kit in the shadows beyond, Tassos and Dimitris standing to watch us go, the solemn defiance of their faces appearing and disappearing in the rhythm of the flames. Beside the fire, Adrasteia knelt with the makeshift coffee pot, her shawl wrapped tight again, her back to our departure. At the last moment she turned, to offer me some skerrick of dignity. By her gaze I knew she did not wonder how the young soldier she had found so enthusiastic and green could have hardened so quickly. She seemed only to be considering the possibilities of what species of hybrid monster I would now become.

  With a hard swallow I stepped off the outcrop and into darkness. And with that swallow, as well as the faintest boyish blush for the sensuality she’d awoken, and an indistinguishable nod of acceptance that I would never attain her brand of sacrificial purpose, I followed Spenser down the scree of the path into the holly oaks, where we added my kit to the pale donkey’s burden, and set off.

  XIX

  I cycled through the gate at Wait-a-While and headed for the Currie post office the very next morning. I had a tail wind, the roadside pheasants browsing healthily as I followed the old telephone line through Pegarah. I found Lascelles at work beside his father: blotting, franking, sorting, stamping, the two of them visored behind the leather and cedar counter. Kenneth Lascelles was smaller and thinner than his son, with a scientific-looking beard grown without a moustache, and also a widower’s non-conversational air. He was the backbone of the post office in Currie, his son John its bleeding heart and inquiring mind, its avid community glue.

  Seeing me enter, my hat sparkling from the light shower I’d ridden through, the slim brown parcel brought out from beneath my coat and under my arm, Lascelles the younger hailed me at the door with a satisfaction built squarely on the privilege of information.

  ‘Wesley,’ he cried, as if we were partners in an enterprise. ‘Any progress with the tooth?’

  The healing of my toothache had been a collaboration between the two of us after our discussions in the hotel, but I could not acknowledge it. However, the tone of his question was all by the way of being neighbourly – as if there’s any other, less intimate relationship to be had on such an island as this – and I couldn’t quite ignore it.

  ‘Better, thanks,’ I replied, but in a voice held back, like a man who has to sing later in the evening and who’s just discovered a tickle at the back of his throat. ‘Could I have a word, please?’

  Lascelles’ grey eyes widened like the lakes after spring rains. He beckoned me with mittened fingers and a thimbled thumb to a table and two chairs where typically the islanders could address their mail, or even compose a letter while they were there. In this instance, however, Lascelles was ushering me as if into an office of consultation.

  We sat down at the seats as my mind briefly strove to best judge the delicacies of my request. There was, of course, nothing at all unusual in sending correspondence of a business nature to other residents on King, but to send a personal letter, or in this case a package, to someone who at that very moment was likely to be across the road weighing nails in the co-op, was obviously a matter of some discretion. I had considered the possibilities for bullshitting, such as how I didn’t want to interrupt Miss Fermoy during her duties, and how, with my tooth and all, the long ride north to her father’s farm was out of the question. In the end, I had considered the first lie to be preposterous, given the culture of informality here on King, and having already ridden across the island and answered Lascelles’ question as to the condition of my tooth, I had buggered up the second possibility as well. But this is where the worthy earnestness of a serious joiner such as Lascelles comes into its own, and I knew his desire to help me, and other returned soldiers like me, his sentimental loyalty to the theoretical privations of war and the difficulties of resettlement, would see me right. In short – and now that he is of course my passed-away friend I can say this – it was only to the credit of Lascelles’ sympathetic nature that I had complete faith in his ability to help me send the package.

  And so it went. Without drumming up any dodgy details I hinted that I was carrying material I knew to be of great interest to Leonie Fermoy. I also implied that my condition of mind – what with all I’d been through (see my po-faced hangdog expression!) – didn’t allow me to just bowl in and hand her the material in person, but that given her assistance to me when I was camped on the aerodrome road in my first weeks on the island I would like to show my gratitude.

  Lascelles was predictably eager to help, above and beyond the fact that I was merely asking him to exercise his postal duty of making sure an item of mail arrived at its destination. He was a little unexpectedly solicitous though, as if by us sitting at the table talking in gated tones, we were, in some way or another, working as a team once again to attend to my problems. And, as with the tooth, it would be fair to say that we were, though once again, I refused to acknowledge it. Not for an instant. This assisting of soldiers was Lascelles’ passion and to take its good with its bad I kept up a painstaking politeness, with hints even of camaraderie, as he agreed to make sure that Leonie received the package with her other mail.

  ‘It goes without saying, Wes,’ Lascelles assured me with reinforced sibilance, ‘that the postmaster and his son must remain the souls of discretion. And so it shall be.’

  I handed over the brown paper package with a weak smile, said my thanks, and watched as Lascelles briefly assessed it in his hands. Heavier than a letter, but obviously consisting of only paper material.

  I stood up, he followed, we shook hands. I tipped my hat, and made for the door. Stepping out onto the street, I couldn’t help but smile more fully at how keen Lascelles himself would be to read the contents of the package I had entrusted to his care.

  XX

  When our battalion had first arrived for training in the desert at Gaza we’d been talked down to by the British. They’d told us we were stuck out there in that merciless heat because of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ misbehaviour in the first war. Apparently their whoring and drinking was the reason we weren’t stationed in the far more convenient surrounds of Cairo. No mention of the sacrifices our old blokes had made, or of how many, like two of my father’s brothers, not to mention my mother’s sixteen-year-old brother Neil, had died like pawns on the Pommy chessboard; no, just a ticking off and a warning not to get up to the same tricks. Well, nice to meet you too, we all thought. And so, after now being forced to surrender Crete, and with my brother sunk by the hallowed British navy, my immediate challenge was to work out how I could ever kowtow as assistant wireless operator to this Oxbridge Theseus! By rights, Spenser had every reason to feel a little toey in my company.

  As it turned out, it was Spenser who gave me my first good belly laugh since the day the Jerry brollies rained down.

  We’d travelled to the plateau by night. Spenser, who’d been up there in the days before the war, was confident he knew the way. Though he had good cause to be suspicious of me, especially given the state Perry was in when we left him, I could have reassured him. I had decided that if I was to find out the truth about the sinking of the Imperial then Spenser and his wireless could potentially be the way. If, for instance, we managed to establish contact with Cairo, as Spenser seemed to believe we would from a high peak called Karfi above the plateau, then perhaps some answers could be sought. Such were the conditions of tension – grief, in its pomp, is a Lord with attendant wizards, anger being always a prime mover amongst them but especially so when
injustice is at the source of the tragedy – that what might appear an unlikely prospect in an ordinary circumstance seemed then like the proverbial hawser rope flung over the gunwale of a ship for the grasp of a drowning man. And it was I who was drowning, on those drystone paths of the Cretan night, drowning every step of the way with our Baby.

  In truth, it was the donkey who became my confidante during those days and nights when we travelled the kalderini. Careful as I was to keep Spenser a few steps ahead, it was the donkey, on a firm tether behind, who gave serious and steady counsel to my mutterings.

  We slept by day and around dark we’d load up the patient donkey again – the radio, the charging engine and battery (which weighed a ton) hidden in a wicker demijohn – and keep pushing in the direction of the plateau. As the moon shone above so too did the snail-gatherers’ lights below. Eventually, as we were finally approaching Karfi on the third night, Spenser became voluble with the memories of times he’d spent up there before the war. On and on we climbed, in pace with the donkey’s tread, and on and on Spenser went, patousia me patousia, as the Cretans say, puffing and sighing and rabbiting on about the incomparable garrigue we were traipsing through and the Bronze Age shards he swore our feet would be crunching down on even as we spoke. In my distress I had sworn myself to a silent kind of discipline in order to achieve my ends, I knuckled down, objected to nothing, made no sullen cracks as we travelled (except out the corner of my mouth to the mule), and I s’pose I behaved therefore like both the perfect audience and an exemplary Victorian batman.

  With the paths becoming narrow and increasingly remote as we climbed, and after some doubt as to whether we had in fact stayed on track at all, it took a further night and almost the whole next day, full of hair-breadth proximity to death or torture every time we passed by a small village or even a rubbly old house tucked into a groin or tangled crook in the path, before, to Spenser’s visible relief, we saw the high hulking outcrop of Karfi above us in the last hour of darkness. We were footsore, to say the least, and we could have camped right there below the high molars of grey stone, but like an excited child he wouldn’t hear of it. In the lowering gloom, we picked our way across a deceptively vast and steep upland swale, open to the weather on all sides but the south. It was a gruelling penultimate leg to what had been a haul and a half.

  As we made that final climb I watched the wheel of the night sky sliding slowly across the heavens above us, stars one by one falling into the distant sea. We reached the top barely an hour before dawn. On dew-wet stones, among a low prickly heath, the donkey and I watched with chagrin as the light rose. Gradually the apron of the coast to our north materialised in the distance below, also the terraced grey teeth of the morbid stone peak that encircled us. I absorbed the scale of the place, its enclosure and aspect, while Spenser, without a hint of tiredness, began to lecture me about the significance of the site.

  In their end-days the Minoans had retreated from the grand palaces such as Knossos to the high mountains, in order to escape the mainland invaders. Karfi was the site of Pendlebury’s greatest discovery, and Spenser had been there as well. The high ground had been a ritual site in the very last days of a great civilisation, it was literally strewn with epiphanies, and day after day the small group of archaeologists had raced each other from the village of Tzermiado up to the peak to continue the fun.

  A deadly cold wind seemed to rise on the light and bite at us where we stood. Spenser didn’t seem to notice, until the wind brewed into a sinister bank of muscled cloud inching monstrously across the air at eye level. The peak had been recommended for wireless communications, but it was hardly a practical campsite, and it was no place to prop. Once again we decided to pad on and brave the light, to continue through the morning.

  We wound down a tiny goat track on the other side of the peak in search of digs Spenser intended for us in a cave above Tzermiado. The remarkable patchwork of greens and tans of the Lasithi plateau spread out below us and to our right. Like the coast from the Karfi peak, the interior plateau was an arresting sight, but this time I took some pleasure from what I saw. It was like a giant’s football ground, ringed by grandstand mountains. At the foot and into the groins of these surrounding mountains nestled tiny white villages, and on the field itself, amongst the plateau’s patchwork crops, sailed hundreds of small windmills with white rotating sails. On the far side, looming up and beyond the arena, Spenser pointed out high drifts of snow still clinging to the shaley slopes of the Dikti range.

  Eventually we made it down onto the sunlit south-facing ridge where the village of Tzermiado was nestled within the enclosure of the plateau. Spenser halted and began to deliberate in eager whispers, as if to himself I might add, as to the possibility of us forgetting the cave and risking the village straightaway in an attempt to rustle up some of his old Cretan chums from the days of the dig. I sensed that even my mate the donkey was unimpressed by this when he let out a very loud and entirely cheesed-off sigh, with which I heartily concurred. It was not the first time during the previous nights and days when it seemed as if the donkey had kindly taken to speaking on my behalf.

  As Spenser was weighing it all up, I suggested as politely as I could that given it was a few years since he’d last been in Tzermiado, and given that presumably quite a bit had changed since, perhaps it was best we stayed on high ground above the village and kept our noses pointed for the cave. That way, I cautioned, with the help of his local knowledge, we could make a reccy and decide how thick the Italians – who had occupied the plateau – were on the ground.

  But no, all het up by his return to Karfi in the dawn, Spenser was busting to go and ‘knock on the doors of my old chums’. Doggedly then, in a level voice, with my still painfully burnt hand resting for moral support against the muscled neck of the donkey, I persisted, until thankfully he saw the sense in what I was saying. We resumed our path along the ridge in silence, in search of the cave that was to become our new abode.

  *

  The Trapeza cave above Tzermiado, as archaeologically significant as it may have been, was, like the peak at Karfi, no great shakes as a campsite. Scrabbling down through holly oaks, I followed Spenser onto a small level area in front of a narrow diagonal cleft sprouting with parsley in the southern face of the ridge above the town. It was a good job on his behalf to find the opening: so small and also well camouflaged by the foliage.

  The first thing I noticed, even while we were still in the entrance corridor, was how chilled the cave was. As we stepped even further in it was damp as well, completely miserable. Spenser explained, rather belatedly, that he and his friends had never actually felt the need to sleep in such auspicious digs, preferring to avail themselves of beds in the village where they were kept warm under goat-hair blankets, with coffee and yoghurt and plates of cherries ready for them when they woke. Pendlebury had slept in the cave once, but only once, preferring to get his romance by walking alone to various monasteries in the surrounding mountains, where he would spend the night, or several nights, only to come marching back through the windmills and the crops, renewed and refreshed for further excavations.

  It made sense to me now why Spenser was so keen to make contact with the local people. Such was the prospect of the domestic comforts ahead of us. I watched by torchlight as he himself grew instantly depressed in the murk of the cave’s second chamber and it must have been disheartening for him to have to face the freezing temperature, the mineral darkness, the lack of potable water (it became a regular chore for one of us over the following weeks to sneak round the edge of Tzermiado to where a mountain stream issued in a jetting staccato from a cleft), and the taut monosyllabic strine of his only companion, Private Wesley Cress of the Second AIF, unhappy, disturbed even, guilty also, and in grief. Added to this was the fact that I shared with him a scant knowledge at best of operating the only military equipment by which the two of us could put ourselves to any useful purpose.

  Yet op
erate it we did. And in quite a collaboration. Every night, and with a degree of relief to be in the open air, we would traipse back up the ridge in the darkness to the peak at Karfi where, despite, or perhaps consistent with his boyish qualities, Spenser proved quite electronically minded after all. With our mutual tidbits of knowledge – he from the SOE training ground in Palestine, me from the lessons in the demountables at Ingleburn and also my dad’s crystal set in the bellows-shed by the lake – together we managed, as Theseus and Takis (the name he insisted I adopt for the purposes of our official communications), to contact Cairo from that eerie windblown saddle on only our third night of trying.

  Of course the unobstructed altitude was a great help once we’d got the gear to fire, and with the antennae hoisted towards the starlight, we were able to pass on our position and eventually to receive information as to our best course of action. Cairo seemed cheered by Theseus’ descriptions of the fortress topography of Lasithi, the way the plateau was sunken within its stadium of hills; they also considered it an advantage that it was under Italian rather than German occupation.

  Lasithi was also close to one or two smaller plateaux which the nobs in Cairo seemed to think were remote enough to be untroubled even by Eyetie jurisdiction. It transpired, therefore, that they wanted to drop ammo and supplies at night by parachute to one of these smaller plateaux. This, it was decided, would require Theseus and Takis to establish fast and trustworthy contact with villagers, and have bullseyes built from bonfires on the plateaux on level ground, which Cairo stressed should not be less than fifty acres in extent. Meanwhile they would direct other Francs-tireurs, as Spenser now took to calling any leftover dregs like myself on the island, to find their way to us to access these supplies, and we would proceed from there.