by Kai Meyer
The wolf’s breathing became more irregular. His trembling died down.
The small white car was not built for a surface like this, but somehow Fundling managed to reach the village. He stopped close to the crashed helicopter and opened the driver’s door.
Rosa called to him and waved, although he probably couldn’t see her in the dark. However, he heard her, turned the car, and drove in their direction over the bumpy ground. When the headlights caught them, Alessandro was just changing back into human form. He put on his shirt and jeans and slipped into his shoes while Fundling brought the car to a halt.
Rosa pressed the pistol into Alessandro’s hand and hurried over to Fundling, to help him climb out with his crutches. He smiled, stroked her tousled hair, and limped toward Alessandro. They didn’t exchange any words, but to Rosa they looked like brothers who understood each other without a lot of talking.
Incomprehensible sounds came from the wolf’s throat. He raised his head again, and this time kept it in the air long enough to see Fundling. A growl came from his throat.
The convoy of journalists was winding its way down the slope. The burning helicopter was their only point of reference; they couldn’t possibly see what was farther out in the darkness.
“There’s something else you must do,” said Fundling.
She looked inquiringly at him.
“Make a journey,” he said. “And a sacrifice.”
She shook her head blankly. The wolf was still growling, although he could barely move now.
Alessandro was aiming the pistol at the wolf. “Because of what you said up there just now?”
“They are here.” Fundling nodded. “And they’re waiting to see what you will do.”
“What we—”
“You broke their laws. All the people up on the dam broke their laws.”
Rosa stared at Alessandro, and then at Fundling again. “But that’s—” She interrupted herself when she realized that they could both feel it as well. Glances trained on them from the darkness. As if other beings were nearby.
“Can you talk to them?” she asked hesitantly.
Fundling shook his head. “They have punished the Arcadians once already, and I think they will do it again. But just as some rituals break their laws”—and he looked up at the wall of the dam—“there are others that can make up for the wrong that was done.”
“Wrong?” cried Rosa indignantly. “That bastard forced us into it!” But as she spoke she looked at Alessandro, as if asking forgiveness. How could something that brought them closer together ever really be wrong?
“They’ve sunk cities in the sea, they’ve annihilated entire kingdoms,” replied Fundling. “Do you think that every single human being who died deserved it? Heaven knows how many children. None of them ever built a bridge, or a temple, or committed any crime. So there must be another reason for them to give you two a chance.”
Something was moving around them. As if the darkness were becoming denser in some mysterious way, and even more impenetrable. Then she realized that it had nothing to do with light or dark. The wide-open space of the valley suddenly seemed to have physical weight. There were no words to express it, only sensations that laid themselves on her chest and took her breath away.
The Hungry Man’s growling grew louder, and now she recognized that it had never expressed aggression, only panicked terror. He scraped his hind legs in the dirt as if, even in death, he wanted to run away.
Alessandro too seemed to feel the change. He came closer, putting his arm around Rosa. “What do you mean by a sacrifice?” he asked.
Fundling limped to his car, opened the passenger door, and took something off the seat. Moonlight shone on sharp metal.
“You’ll have to move fast.”
Then he told them what they had to do.
CRETE
THEY COVERED THE LAST few miles even faster. Alessandro drove the car around hairpin turns without any guardrails, past precipitous drops between bleak rocky slopes. Nothing grew here except for low bushes, and a few trees with their tops lashed by the wind until they bowed, as if now and then one of the gods still went this way to Mount Ida.
Rosa was in the passenger seat, a map of Crete on her lap. The roads and symbols blurred before her eyes. It wasn’t hot yet here, so early in the year. All the same, it felt like an oven inside the car.
She had drawn her knees up and braced her feet against the glove compartment. A blue and white electric cooler stood on the rubber mat in front of her feet. Her legs would have fitted into the space, but when her calves touched the plastic of the box she felt a slight vibration that she very much disliked.
Common sense should have told her that the sounds she heard were only the electric cooling system; a cable led from the cooler to the cigarette lighter beside the hand brake. But she had left common sense behind more than forty hours ago, in a dark valley back in Sicily, and nothing, absolutely nothing of what they were doing, could be understood by rational standards.
During the long crossing, five hundred miles across the open Mediterranean, they had gone over it all again and again. They had found no explanations. Yet they both believed that Fundling had told the truth—because they had felt the real presence of something around them in that valley. Something that showed itself only in crowds of human beings, not in that wide, empty void.
Their breakneck drive through the mountains had been the last stage of a race against—what, exactly? Time? Their powers of imagination? Or was it, after all, against the anger of something conjured up by the Hungry Man with their unwilling help?
They had collected cash, new passports, credit cards for secret accounts, and half a dozen secure cell phones from Alessandro’s hiding place in Syracuse. Then they had made contact with the captain of the Gaia.
Within three hours the yacht had been with them. The authorities had released the ship ages ago; she had been cruising off the Sicilian coast under another name and with forged papers. It was true that the police still wanted to see Rosa and Alessandro, but as witnesses, not murderers, which had considerably decreased the urgency and extent of the search for them. So ultimately Stefania’s statement, maybe even Lorenzo’s, had helped them after all.
And no danger from their families threatened them now, either. Those who had betrayed Alessandro and caused the upheaval among the Carnevares had disappeared without a trace since their flight from the dam. It was the same with Rosa’s distant cousins and all the others who had taken part in the Hungry Man’s ritual. Either they had fled rather than face the TV images of what happened on the dam when they aired the next morning, or else what had been down there in the valley had caught up with them.
A return to being heads of their families was certainly out of the question for both Rosa and Alessandro, at least for now. But those who had remained loyal to Alessandro, like the captain of the Gaia, could now move freely again without fearing for their lives. Rosa had had her doubts about the captain, but Alessandro trusted him without reservation. And rightly, as it turned out when the Gaia reached the harbor of Heraklion on Crete without any trouble.
From there they had hired a car and driven south, past Thylissos, uninhabited chains of hills, and olive groves that were almost painfully reminiscent of Sicily. They followed a deep ravine into the Ida range, racing along narrow, winding roads toward Anogia. The slopes and valleys became bleaker; gray rock dominated this mountainous world. Sheep and goats crossed the road at their leisure; several times Alessandro had to brake sharply to avoid hitting one. Once the cooler fell over. Rosa cursed fluently, and then, reluctantly, righted it again with her fingertips.
The first sight of the Nida Plateau far up in the mountains, quite close to their destination, was a surprise. In the middle of colorless mountaintops, a fertile plain opened out, with a few herds of cattle grazing on it. Some tracks intersected, looking lost, on the wide expanse of the plateau.
It was getting dark when they reached the end of the asphalt road ou
tside a dilapidated building, a taverna with its shutters closed. They had met only two cars going the other way in the past hour. The taverna was dark—it was probably open only in the summer—but there was a parking lot outside it, and a notice for hikers pointing the way up a gravel path. There were no people or other vehicles anywhere in sight.
They parked the car and got out. The sound of goat bells came from somewhere far off, and the cry of a bird of prey. Soon after that, a hawk hunting mice flew over them.
Alessandro took the bag with their equipment out of the trunk, and Rosa unplugged the cooler. Its plastic was still vibrating when they set off, with batteries to supply the power now. Rosa shuddered whenever her leg touched the box as they walked.
Only a little later they passed a small chapel near some graves. They left those behind, too, and kept on climbing up. They stopped only once, and looked back. From here they had a fantastic view over the plateau. The last daylight was glowing in shades of carmine streaked with gold above the distant limestone mountains on the other side of Nida.
They could have enjoyed their view of the plain in the evening light, if they hadn’t had to cover such a vast distance. They didn’t know if anything was following them, and might even be quite close. Rosa wished she were anywhere else, someplace full of people—Times Square, the crowded concourse of Grand Central Station, a football stadium. Crowds made the watchers visible; this wilderness camouflaged them with its void.
After twenty minutes they reached a grotto at the foot of a gray massif of rock. The Ideon Andron, the Ideon Cave, lay behind an opening in the rock that was much wider than it was high, as if the mountain were gradually weighing the entrance down. The track of an old freight railroad, partly overgrown by weeds, ended at the edge of a steeply falling precipice.
There was no one in sight. No barriers, no one on guard duty. They were alone in front of the great chasm in the rock, Rosa holding the cooler, Alessandro with the bag in which they had two strong flashlights and some other utensils.
Rosa seldom felt awestruck, but she did feel respect and awe at the sight of this place. She was no longer ashamed of believing in something that only recently she would have dismissed as a legend.
Climb down into the cave, Fundling had said. Only you two, don’t take anyone else with you.
A narrow flight of steps led down the slope inside the entrance. They were carrying their flashlights now, letting the beams wander over the steps and walls of the grotto. Pigeons who had built their nests in the rock fluttered around the roof of the cave.
Decrepit wooden planks, the remains of old excavations, lay on the uneven floor of the grotto. When they stepped on them, the creaking echoed back from the limestone walls. They preferred to make their way over the rocky floor itself.
It’s said that Zeus spent his childhood in this cave. Fundling had seen Rosa’s skeptical look, but only responded with a smile. His father, the Titan Kronos, feared that his children might usurp his power. So he ate them alive—all but his youngest son. Zeus was still a baby when his mother hid him from Kronos in the Ideon Cave.
The Ideon Andron consisted of one large and two smaller caverns, leading into one another. To Rosa, it looked like any other grotto—until Alessandro stopped, turned around, and glanced past her back at the entrance.
“He was right,” he whispered. “Can you feel it?”
Not it; them. Rosa sensed their presence with as much certainty as if she had heard footsteps or seen moving shadows behind her. In fact she saw and heard nothing; yet all the same she knew that they were no longer alone.
Zeus lived in the grotto for many years, Fundling had said as he drove them out of the Giuliana valley in his car. His mother gave him guards to protect him, the Curetes. Demons or spirits, who knows which? They were his bodyguards and servants. Later, he often summoned them to carry out tasks for him.
Myths and legends, of course. But wasn’t it the same with her, and every Arcadian who had the power to shift shape? Sigismondis had tried to find a scientific reason for these mysteries. Leonardo Mori had traced them through libraries and old manuscripts. But in the end no one had been able to come up with anything but assumptions, hypotheses—and yet more myths.
Once again she shone her flashlight over the rocky walls. Darkness didn’t scare her, because what had entered the grotto with them far outdid any other menace.
The great domed cavern was the most impressive part of the grotto, tall as the interior of a church. They went through it, and entered one of the chambers opening off to one side. According to Fundling, this had been a temple of Zeus long ago, and his worshippers had celebrated their rites here.
The Lamias were here once before, he had said. Back when they overthrew Lycaon and killed him.
She put the cooler down. Where the beam of her flashlight didn’t reach, there was impenetrable black. Even the entrance stood out in the darkness only as a patch of gray.
The chamber in the rock was spacious and empty, yet it seemed to Rosa as if it were full to bursting with life. All at once she felt hemmed in, surrounded, as if someone were leaning over her shoulder.
“This should be the right place,” said Alessandro.
They stood there, undecidedly, and looked at the cooler, hearing the quiet hum of the refrigeration system.
“Oh, fuck,” said Rosa. “What the hell.” And she crouched down, put her shaking hands on the catches, and lifted the lid. As she raised it, the thought occurred to her that the smell might have been worse.
“Come on,” he said gently. “I’ll do the rest.”
“Wait.” She picked up the other bag and took out some candles, as well as a couple of brass bowls the size of side plates, and divided herbs and aromatics from little paper bags between them. Myrrh, bay, thyme, sage. She arranged the bowls and the candles in a small circle on the floor, and set light to the herbs and the wicks of the candle with matches. The aroma was so strong that it made her eyes stream.
“Okay,” she said. “Now.”
Alessandro reached into the box, took out what had been lying in it, and laid it in the center of the circle. Up to this point Fundling had told them exactly what to do, every single step of the way.
And then go, he had said. Go, and don’t turn around. No matter what happens, if anything does happen, don’t look back.
They stood, picked up the bag and the box, and watched the smoke rising in the flames of the candles. Already the center of the circle was almost invisible in it.
As they turned and slowly walked away, with their bags, the inexplicable sense of confinement in the cave seemed to give way a little.
Don’t turn around.
They left the ancient temple of Zeus and went back through the main cave.
Don’t look back.
As they reached the steps on the slope, the way out to the red evening light, they stopped. Rosa breathed deeply and felt the fresh air driving the fumes of the herbs and aromatics out of her lungs.
Alessandro took her hand, and they climbed up together.
They stepped out into the open air. They smiled at each other.
They didn’t look back.
ONE DAY
THE SEA WAS THE world, from the beginning to the end.
In the middle of all the blue there was a white dot, the Gaia and the foam behind in her wake. The Gaia, on course for Portugal.
“Sicily is somewhere over there.” Alessandro pointed to starboard over the rolling, white-capped sea.
Rosa nodded over the rail to port. “And Lampedusa over there.” Both islands were invisible beyond the horizon. Invisible in their past.
She had looked at charts of the Mediterranean and its coasts in the captain’s cabin. Her instincts told her that they would spend a great deal of time out here, that their home was no longer any island, but the sea. The whole wide south.
Iole was waiting for them in Sintra, in her uncle’s care at the house of the strange Signora Institoris. Sarcasmo was with her, and Raffae
la Falchi. Cristina di Santis had gone underground to appropriate as much as possible of the Alcantara fortune and divert it to Rosa’s new accounts. In the current leaderless chaos of the clans, she was not likely to find that difficult.
As for Fundling, he had disappeared again, on the trail of his father and Leonardo’s research. They would see him again sometime. He had survived death—he probably had more surprises in store.
“A thousand kilometers to the Straits of Gibraltar,” said Alessandro. “And then along the coast for a way.”
“Plenty of time.”
“There’s never enough time.”
She smiled. “There is now.”
They were sitting on the top deck of the white yacht, on a leather couch, sharing a thin throw. The sky above them was cloudless, the sun shone down, and its warmth let them know that they were closer to the coast of Africa than to Europe.
Rosa’s bare legs showed under the hem of the throw. She was sure she would never feel freezing again; she had used up all her ability to shiver. In the cave, and after that on the way back to the light. And he was here to keep her warm.
They had gone the same way that the Lamias had once taken, after overthrowing the king of Arcadia. Had Zeus accepted their sacrifice at that time? How could she be sure, when she didn’t know what her ancestors had asked for? If their wish had been for him to lift his curse on all the Arcadians, then it hadn’t been granted. For the next generation, too, had been born with the stain of metamorphosis on them, and so on through hundreds of other generations to the present day.
How would they ever know for certain whether they were free of it? Maybe they had been forgiven for taking part in the ritual that the Hungry Man had forced them to share. But how about the law that they broke every day, with every breath they took? If panther and snake were forbidden to love each other, then wasn’t everything they did an offense against the law of the gods?
Go fuck yourselves, gods.
