The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  The fat man frowned.

  A crewman in white uniform appeared from the galley. Dark and balding, he had the lascivious mouth of a satyr, and a mischief-lover’s eyes. He gave a short bow.

  ‘Kyrie, excuse me,’ he said. ‘Lunch is ready.’

  The crewman led the way to a table on the awning-covered rear deck.

  As the fat man followed, he asked, ‘Is everything in order with Aphrodite, Enrico? Because it seems to me we’re losing power.’ His Greek was beautifully enunciated, the perfect Greek of TV newscasters, each word a separate entity and given equal importance within his speech.

  ‘We have a little problem with the starboard engine,’ said Enrico, pulling out a chair. ‘Ilias has shut it down.’

  ‘What problem?’

  The fat man sat; with a waiter’s flourish, Enrico spread a napkin over his lap.

  ‘The same problem as last week,’ said Enrico, pouring the fat man a glass of chilled wine. ‘The boy’s idle; he didn’t fix it properly, and now it’s failed again. He should have stripped it right down to the filters, but he botched it instead. So now we’re back to running on one engine. Regretfully, that’s likely to make us somewhat late.’

  The fat man looked around them, at the hazy blue islands which lay to the north, and to the west.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘the Fates whisper the suggestion of a change of plan. And who are we to disagree? We’ll make a detour, and put in somewhere where Ilias can make a proper repair.’

  He looked at each island in turn, considering, and up at the sun, establishing bearings.

  ‘There,’ he said, at last, indicating the most distant of the westerly landmasses. ‘Tell Ilias to change course. And tell him to make a decent job this time, and to do it quickly, because if we lose that engine a third time, I shall not forgive him so easily.’

  By late afternoon, the tamarisk trees were casting shade on the guardhouse terrace. At the top of its pole, the national flag’s blue and white lines stirred in the lightest of breezes. Under the tamarisks’ feathered branches, the National Service conscripts were relaxing, stripped down to their undershirts or tanned torsos, with camouflage trousers the only gesture to uniform discipline. Gounaris and Lillis had not troubled to shave that morning; Skafidis’s beard was some days into its growth.

  They had made themselves comfortable, as best they might. Skafidis had created a hammock from a bedsheet, its corners tied with rope between two tree-trunks, and lay in it with his cap over his face, his booted feet crossed at the ankles. When Gounaris dragged his mattress from the bunkhouse, the captain had not bothered to object, so Gounaris lay parallel to Skafidis, on the ground. Kastellanos and Lillis were playing tavli, the click of counters and the rattling of dice percussion to the rhythm of cicadas.

  The captain sat alone at the unsteady table, and read his newspaper. A transistor radio played music from a Turkish station, the only one they could reliably receive; the announcer’s talk was gibberish to the captain’s ears.

  The solitary boat moored on the bay – a run-down commercial vessel with the scrapings of careless dockings along the hull – had kept its distance. Now the ragged crew (whose raucousness had disturbed the peace all afternoon) were cramped thigh to thigh around a table too small for all six. A bottle was brought to the table; a round of drinks was poured. A pack of cards was found, and the first hand dealt.

  For an hour, the crew drank, and played. The more they drank, the louder they became, with shouts of victory and dismay, with taunts and challenges. The soldiers were indifferent; the game of tavli was won, and another begun. Gounaris and Skafidis dozed. The captain read the sports news.

  ‘Malaka! Poustis! Poustis!’

  The captain removed his mirrored sunglasses, and squinted into the blue glare, towards the boat. It was not the insulting words that caught his attention – they were commonplace to him – but the rage behind them. A fist slammed down on the table; a glass clattered to the deck, spilling liquid into the laps of two men, who jumped up and themselves began to shout.

  ‘Gounaris,’ said the captain, ‘go and get me the binoculars.’

  On his mattress, the conscript didn’t move.

  ‘Gounaris, do you hear me?’ said the captain, louder.

  Lillis turned round from the tavli board, and prodded Gounaris with his toe.

  ‘The captain wants you, malaka,’ he said. ‘Get up.’

  Without trying to hide his unwillingness, Gounaris rose and went slowly to the guardhouse. When he brought out the binoculars, he didn’t hand them directly to the captain, but put them to his own eyes to survey the boat.

  ‘There’s trouble,’ said the young man, smiling. ‘Looks like a fight to me.’

  ‘Give me those.’

  The soldier handed the captain the binoculars.

  But even with the view magnified through the lenses, what was happening on the boat was hard to say. Not all the words being shouted were in Greek, and, whilst all the men were on their feet, some were smiling. There was pushing, and pointing, but all might still be good-humoured, and the shouting might have been no more than banter.

  Yet the focus seemed to be all on one man, who was holding up both hands, head down and submissive as a kicked dog. The odds were stacked against him, five on to one. As he lowered his arms, one of the five shoved him in the chest, and knocked him back against the rail; when he objected, the man who had assaulted him stepped up close so they were nose to nose.

  No possibility of a peaceable outcome seemed to remain. The conscripts left their dozing and their tavli and wandered over to the captain, Lillis in his fraying espadrilles, Skafidis’s black boots dusty and unlaced. The captain focused on the boat’s stern and studied the unfamiliar flag, then handed the binoculars to the conscripts, who passed them amongst themselves, anticipating entertainment; but the two men on the boat finally gave each other space, and it seemed their quarrel would come to nothing.

  The captain put on his sunglasses, and picked up his newspaper.

  The man up against the deck-rail laughed, mocking and loud.

  The man who had shoved him, punched him in the face.

  The man who had been hit swore, and touched his nose and mouth. He looked at the blood on his fingers, and yelled at his assailant.

  The assailant grabbed the bloodied hand. The punched man tried to break away, but the assailant pulled him forward, and two others laid hands on him too; another kicked his feet away, and the sixth caught him under the armpits as he went down. Five were on to one, and the job was easy. They heaved him up, and pitched him into the sea.

  There was a splash, and the victim sank. Within a moment, he was back at the surface, blowing water from his nose and his mouth, shaking seawater from his hair.

  His crew-mates stood at the deck-rail, laughing; he seemed to take the humiliation in good part, and trod water whilst they joked at his expense, until, bored, they turned away, the man who had hit him sliding his palms across each other: finito.

  The five crew still aboard went to work, one at the prow untying ropes, another in the wheelhouse preparing to start the engine. The man in the water called up to them, pointing to a ladder lying against the deck-rails, and when the crew ignored him, swam to the stern. He reached for a trailing rope-end to haul himself aboard, but the rope was out of his reach. In frustration, he slapped the boat’s hull. He shouted up half-laughing to the crew, but they, treating him as invisible, only smirked and winked amongst themselves. The engine fired, and the anchor-winch started up, covering his pleading with its noise.

  The boat began to move, and he swam away a fast few metres to be clear of the propeller. As the distance between man and boat increased, there was no more laughing. The wheel-man opened the throttle, and the boat picked up speed, leaving an arrow of white wake in which the man in the water bobbed up and down. From the rear deck, three crewmen waved their arms over their heads in unkind farewell.

  The swim to the beach was not lengthy, but the man took his
time, swimming on his back in nonchalant style, glancing round from time to time in hope of the joke being over, of the boat having made a turn to pick him up; but by the time he reached the beach, the boat from which he’d been thrown was out of sight.

  He sat for a while at the water’s edge, drying slowly in the last afternoon sun, skimming flat stones across the water, looking out at the horizon for the boat’s return, until the sky’s blue faded, and shifted to the pink of sunset.

  Eventually, he stood, and shoeless and wincing on the stones’ sharp edges, made his way towards the soldiers at the guardhouse.

  The soldiers were dispersing to various duties. The captain was still sitting at the table, and watched the man pick his way across the beach.

  When he judged him to be within earshot, the captain spoke.

  ‘Kali spera sas,’ he said. ‘You’re trespassing on military property.’

  ‘Yassas, Captain.’ The man wore nothing but a pair of shorts, and though no longer young, looked as if he had once been very fit, with good tone still in his muscles. ‘I apologise, but it’s not my fault I’m here. You saw my friends’ stupid joke. And it’s getting dark, so I’m assuming the joke won’t be over tonight. So I must ask you for assistance. Can you offer me a lift to . . .’ he cast his eyes along the empty beach. ‘Well, somewhere civilised? And could I borrow some shoes, and a shirt? I’m so sorry to have to ask. My friends are idiots. They take things too far, as you’ve seen.’

  The captain studied him.

  ‘That’s a nasty cut you have there,’ he said, looking at the man’s split and swollen lip. ‘Do your friends often treat you that way?’

  ‘They drink too much.’ He touched the bump on his lip and the scab of dried blood on the cut. ‘Sometimes they get carried away.’

  ‘We should introduce ourselves,’ said the captain. He held out his hand without moving in his chair, so the man had to step forward to take it. ‘They call me Andreadis, Captain Fanis Andreadis. I’m in charge of this unit. What shall we call you?’

  Before the man gave his answer there was the slightest hesitation.

  ‘Chiotis,’ he said. ‘Manolis Chiotis.’

  ‘Ah, Chiotis! One of my favourite singers! You’re not related to him, I suppose?’

  Manolis waved his hand to dismiss the suggestion.

  ‘Well, Kyrie Chiotis,’ said the captain. ‘I can’t take you anywhere tonight. We’re on short army rations, and we don’t have fuel to make unscheduled trips to the port. But I can lend you a shirt and some shoes, and you’re welcome to eat with us, of course. Though you’ve come at a bad time, where food’s concerned. I’m afraid it’s Skafidis’s turn to cook.’

  Lillis claimed that, in civilian life, he knew about engines, and his claim had earned him the job of engineer. As it grew dark, he went to the shed where the generator was housed, and persuaded the motor into life, so its throb became the dominant background noise, drowning out the sea’s soft splash along the beach. When the generator was running smoothly, Gounaris threw the power switch, lighting the guardhouse terrace with a string of dim bulbs which drew moths and other insects. Kastellanos found matches, and set anti-mosquito coils smoking under the windows.

  The soldiers had dressed down for dinner, all stripped to shorts and bare-chested, in heat which had hardly reduced since the late afternoon. Skafidis spread the trestle table with a plastic cloth holed with cigarette burns, and fastened it to the table-edge with aluminium clips.

  Captain Fanis sat at the head of the table, and offered the visitor the seat to his right. Gounaris carried out a Greek salad and a basket of bread. Skafidis brought out plates of spaghetti with meat sauce and a bowl of grated hard cheese.

  ‘When I leave the army,’ said Lillis, ‘I’m never eating spaghetti again.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with spaghetti,’ said Kastellanos. ‘It’s only Skafidis’s spaghetti you’ll never want to eat again. You should try my mother’s spaghetti. She makes a meat sauce so good, you’d eat nothing but spaghetti for the rest of your life.’

  The young men ate, and talked, and laughed.

  The captain and Manolis ate too, but for a while said nothing. The sea before them disappeared into blackness; the sky was lit by a million stars, the magical incandescence of the Milky Way.

  ‘So, friend.’ The captain turned at last to Manolis. ‘Tell me how you come to be here.’

  The soldiers laughed at some joke, and one of them demanded the passing of bread. Lillis called out for a game of poker when dinner was finished.

  ‘Your men are going to play cards,’ said Manolis. ‘You should tell them to be careful. It was a game of cards which landed me here with you. Look, I really need to get out of here. I’m a businessman, and there are calls I need to make. Surely you have VHF? I could get in touch with someone that way, save you the trouble of taking me to the port.’

  ‘This is the Greek army, my friend, the very dregs of it,’ said the captain. ‘VHF kaput. You should relax, look on this as a holiday at government expense. Tomorrow at the earliest, you’ll be leaving here.’

  Manolis wound spaghetti around his fork.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe here’s as safe as anywhere.’

  ‘Safe?’ The captain looked at him sharply. ‘Are you in some kind of trouble, friend?’

  ‘Trouble? No, no trouble. Why should I be?’

  ‘Because your arrival here was unorthodox. And you haven’t yet said who your friends are. Hardly an act of friendship, was it, to abandon you that way?’

  ‘Maybe I misled you, calling them friends. Our arrangement was purely business. The boat was a private charter, but the guy who chartered it – my associate – was being cheap. He’s always cheap. He sends me a rust-bucket which barely floats and a crew of Albanian cut-throats, and expects me to deliver what he wants. But in fairness I made my own problems. I played cards with them, and I got lucky. In the end I had too much luck for them to stomach. When I cleaned out the mate, he got mad, and when he couldn’t frighten me into giving his money back, he rallied the troops and they dumped me overboard.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ said Captain Fanis. ‘There aren’t many places on this God-forsaken island where you’d have got out of the sea and found yourself anywhere but trapped by cliffs and mountainsides. It’s not a place for a man without shoes.’

  ‘So what’s the name of this place where I’ve washed up?’ asked Manolis, putting the forkful of spaghetti in his mouth.

  ‘A forgotten outpost, and one of the last of Greece’s territories before you hit Asia. This unit protects the outermost regions of our country from invasion from marauding Turks. You have landed, my friend, on the island of Mithros.’

  Manolis coughed, as if choking on his food.

  ‘Careful there,’ said the captain. ‘Skafidis likes to lay traps for us in his cooking. Overdoses of chilli, or chicken with all the guts left in. Whole peppercorns are a favourite with him. Maybe you found one of those.’

  Manolis took a drink of water.

  ‘I’d no idea we were so far south,’ he said. ‘Those idiots told me we were somewhere off Astypalea. They read nautical charts worse than they play cards.’

  ‘Do you know our island? Have you been to Mithros before?’

  Manolis scratched his ear.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t know the place at all.’

  ‘Well, now you know our small corner of it, Camp Kolona,’ said the captain. ‘Established fifteen years ago, by order of the military powers that be. I’ve been posted here since the day that flag was first hoisted to the top of that pole. But it wouldn’t have been surprising if you’d been here before. The tourists come in droves, all hoping to find our famous missing bull. You’ve heard of the bull of Mithros, no doubt?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, yes.’

  ‘If you don’t know the story, it’s worth hearing.’ Captain Fanis poured himself more water, and offered the jug to Manolis, who held out his glass to be fi
lled. ‘They say it was only luck it was ever found at all. Whoever hid it – who knows how long ago? – hid it well, so it only came to light when builders went to work in one of the old harbour houses. I could take you there now and point out the place they say it was found, in a box, in a cavity under the floor. So big, no more.’ He held his forefingers about six inches apart. ‘Just a small thing, not much bigger than your fist, all ebony and gold. An object so beautiful, they say it lit a fire in all who touched it. From all over the island they came to see it, and many went away wanting it to be theirs. Those who’d had it in their hands all said how hard it was to give it back. It created a lust in them, to keep it for themselves. Then it was stolen. Within days of being found, it was gone. Pouf! Vanished. Before the experts got here from Athens with their photographing and cataloguing, it disappeared. And from that day to this, its whereabouts is a mystery. Is that the story as you know it?’

  ‘That’s about it,’ said Manolis. ‘The lost bull of Mithros, a tale lacking a happy ending.’

  ‘You should buy a memento of it, whilst you’re here. There are some excellent souvenir shops in the harbour. I’ll point you to one where they know me. If you mention my name, they’ll give you a good discount.’

  ‘I don’t have time to play the tourist,’ said Manolis. ‘Listen, is there really no way of getting me out of here tonight? What about that?’ Manolis pointed to a Jeep parked behind the guardhouse, at the place where a footpath to the beach became a rough road. ‘I’ll make it right with them, if one of your boys would drive me. I’m anxious to get out of here. There’s a woman I really need to call, and she’ll have my balls on a plate if I don’t phone.’

  ‘So you’re married, are you?’ asked the captain. ‘Only you don’t wear a ring.’

  ‘I’m not married any more,’ said Manolis. ‘Ten years of that misery was enough for me. No, the lady in question is someone else’s wife. I spent a long time warming her up, and if I’m not careful, she’ll go cold on me and all that effort’ll be wasted. I see you wear no ring yourself.’