The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  He sat up in the bed, and shook the woman.

  ‘Lemonia! Lemonia! Wake up!’

  He put his feet to the floor, and slid out a drawer in the bedside table, shifting the items in there – a paperback book, aspirin, peppermint tablets for dyspepsia – to uncover a black velvet pouch tied with a tasselled cord. He closed the drawer, and laid the velvet bag beside him on the bed.

  ‘Lemonia!’ He shook her again, and the woman, still with her back to him, turned her head.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. Her voice was sleep-filled and slow. ‘What time is it?’

  The pounding at the door came again.

  ‘Someone’s here,’ he whispered. ‘Stay here. Don’t come out of the bedroom.’

  He wore nothing but underpants; taking a silk robe from behind the door, he slipped it on as he made his way as silently as he was able to the salone. He carried the velvet pouch with him. The window on to the courtyard was open, a little; he stood at the gap, and listened. There was nothing to hear but the sounds of early morning: the cockerels crowing in the house yards below, the rustling leaves of a fig tree in the lightest of sea breezes.

  He called out, ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me, Dmitris.’ The voice was a young man’s. ‘Nikitas Floros’s Dmitris.’

  Uncle Vasso closed his eyes, and let out a breath.

  He went barefoot to the house door, and hampered by the stiffness of his scarred hands, unfastened its complicated locks and slid back the bolts. In the courtyard the air was blessed with a little coolness, though the stones were still warm from yesterday’s heat. He called through the closed courtyard door.

  ‘What do you want, this time of the morning?’

  ‘It’s Pedro. Can you come?’

  ‘What, now? What time is it?’

  ‘Just after five. Please, Uncle, come. I need your help.’

  Uncle Vasso hesitated.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll come. Go down and wait for me.’

  He heard the boy go.

  In the bedroom, Lemonia sat anxiously on the bed, clutching her knees.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘No one. Only the Floros lad. I’m going down there. You’d better go home anyway, or you’ll be seen. It’s after five.’

  He pulled on baggy trousers and a T-shirt, and slipped his feet into leather pantofles. With the velvet pouch in his pocket, he went outside. He followed the path he knew the boy had taken, down the side of the villa to a short run of steps, before the path turned to pass the houses lower down the hillside. Behind one of the smallest houses was a shed where the door stood open.

  Inside the shed, the boy crouched by the head of a donkey, which lay on its side on a straw-scattered floor, its eyes wide, its breathing fast and shallow; there was foam around its grey muzzle, and flecks of blood in the foam. The place stank of urine, and even at that hour, a torment of flies crawled over the animal’s eyes. The boy was stroking the donkey’s sweat-darkened neck, and as Uncle Vasso approached, the animal twisted its head to look at him, and thrashed its legs in an effort to stand; but it had no strength, and dropped back limp to the floor.

  Uncle Vasso stood over donkey and boy.

  ‘We should have done this yesterday,’ he said.

  The boy looked up at him. His eyes were full of tears.

  ‘He might have pulled through,’ he said. ‘He might still, if we could get him up.’

  Uncle Vasso shook his head.

  ‘That’s your sentimentality. You’re thinking like a woman. The beast’s finished, done. And he’s in pain. You let him suffer unnecessarily.’

  ‘I wanted to give him a chance!’ said the boy. He brushed away tears. ‘He’s been mine since a foal. My grandpa gave him to me.’ He stroked the animal’s neck again, and bent down to kiss its ear.

  ‘So he’s had his chance, and he’s made nothing of it,’ said Uncle Vasso. ‘And if you’re honest, you gave him a chance, as you call it, to spare yourself pain. I can’t help him, and neither can you. His time is done.’

  He turned his back on the boy. Pulling the velvet bag from his pocket, he loosened the cord at the neck and took out an old Stechkin 9mm. The donkey struggled and thrashed and then lay still. The quickness of his breathing filled the stall.

  ‘Everyone’s the same on this damned island,’ said Uncle Vasso. ‘No one wants to do what must be done. You’d better take yourself outside, son.’

  In desperation, the boy looked up at him.

  ‘I want to say goodbye.’

  Uncle Vasso was looking through the dirty window. High over the house roofs, swallows swooped and dived.

  He sighed.

  ‘He’s just a dumb animal, son,’ he said. ‘Go on. Go outside.’

  Head low in misery, the boy obeyed.

  Uncle Vasso slipped off the thumb-safety, and put the gun-barrel to the donkey’s forehead.

  The fat man heard a shot.

  He moved quickly to the open port-hole of his cabin. The air was fresh with the cold scent of the sea; as feeding fish rose, soft circles of ripples broke the water’s oil-smooth surface, splitting the reflections of moored boats.

  On the hillside where the shot had been fired, the walls of the Governor’s Villa were red in the early sunlight. For a few minutes, the fat man stayed by the port-hole to see if anything developed; but apart from the swooping of swallows, there was nothing to see.

  Nikitas Floros’s Dmitris crouched in the dirt by the shed wall, crying. Uncle Vasso stood beside him, and ruffled his black hair.

  ‘It’s done, son,’ he said. ‘He’s not in any more pain. Go home, wash your face, and when it gets to a decent hour, fetch someone to take him away.’

  The boy rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  Uncle Vasso searched the rear pocket of his trousers and found money, a few notes. He glanced at it, assessing how much there was, whether it was enough. He held the money out to the boy.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Buy yourself a new donkey.’

  But the boy didn’t move; he crouched, still crying, with his hands covering his eyes.

  Uncle Vasso placed the money by the boy’s feet, and left him.

  Four

  Captain Fanis woke suddenly, to a room already light and warming with the heat of the day. A bee knocked against the screens which covered his open windows; somewhere close by, a goat’s bell jangled.

  His watch showed 6.45. As he hauled himself from the bed, he cursed Kastellanos and the unsounded reveille. He found a clean undershirt in the wardrobe, and put on the pressed trousers from under his mattress, then went barefoot to the end of the terrace. He lobbed an empty water bottle, and hit Kastellanos on the nose. Kastellanos woke in shock, and fell out of the hammock.

  As he walked back towards the bunkhouse, the captain hid his smile, and shouted, ‘Get my coffee on the table in ten minutes, Kastellanos, or I’m putting you on report and cancelling your leave.’

  Lillis had left the soap-grey water he’d used to wash his underpants in a bucket. The captain grabbed the bucket as he passed, and took it with him to the bunkhouse, where he slammed open the door, and positioned himself ready to throw the water. The soldiers all knew the drill: the last one out of bed would get a soaking and a wet mattress which would have to be dragged outside to dry. In seconds, they were on their feet.

  The captain lowered the bucket.

  ‘You’re getting faster,’ he said. ‘Now get dressed and get moving. Gounaris, you’re on breakfast. Get in the kitchen and make sure Kastellanos has got my coffee on the boil. Lillis, go and tell our visitor that breakfast’s in twenty minutes. If he wants to eat, he’d better be there.’

  But as Captain Fanis sat down to wait for his coffee, Lillis came to find him.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

  The captain looked at him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. But he’s not in the stores. I checked the l
atrines, but he isn’t there either. I didn’t know where else to look. Maybe he went for a swim.’

  The captain looked at Lillis, and then up and down the deserted beach, and out across the empty bay. No one was there.

  ‘Kastellanos!’ he called through the kitchen window. ‘Have you seen our visitor?’

  ‘No, Captain.’

  The captain marched to the latrines, and kicked both doors. One resisted, and brought complaints from Gounaris. The second opened wide, revealing nothing but the wooden bench which covered the stinking bucket. He moved on to the stores, where the campbed had been slept in. No one was sleeping in it now.

  ‘All of you, form a patrol!’ he shouted, going to his room to fetch his boots. ‘We’ll be leaving here in exactly five minutes!’

  The captain led the soldiers away from the camp. Where the Jeep was parked, they didn’t take the port-bound track, but instead stayed on the footpath which led to the beach’s hinterland. The captain carried a stick, and knocked the ground ahead to alert snakes, prompting them to slither away before the soldiers grew too close.

  Heading for a neglected orchard of olives, citrus and quince, they crossed a tranche of barren earth which coated their boots in dust. At the mid-point of the empty land, they passed the camp well, walled round in stone and with its metal bucket standing on the wall. The bucket’s rope was long, extended with a length of yellow rope tied to the original blue as the water level had dropped.

  ‘You’ll be fetching water in a while, Kastellanos,’ said the captain.

  ‘I fetched it yesterday, Captain,’ said Kastellanos. ‘It’s Gounaris and Skafidis today.’

  ‘Not since you overslept, it’s not,’ said the captain. ‘You’ll take Gounaris’s place.’

  Gounaris grinned. Skafidis and Kastellanos scowled.

  As they walked through the coolness of the orchard, crickets fell silent and sprang from their feet; songbirds stopped their singing, and flew away. Here and there on the olive trunks – fat and twisted, centuries old – one-time owners had carved their initials, in letters now grown swollen and distorted; black rolls of harvest nets wound between the raised roots, and on the branches, the bitter, young olives were mossy green.

  ‘Why are we coming this way, Captain?’ asked Skafidis. ‘What would he be doing over here?’

  ‘He isn’t in his bed at the camp,’ said the captain, ‘and he left without saying goodbye. That’s not polite, is it, Skafidis? He’s a man in a hurry to leave us, and I’d like to know why. I don’t expect to find him over here, but then I didn’t expect him to vanish in the night, either. Most likely he’s headed in the direction of town. But if he hasn’t, that’s a long walk for us in the heat. So we’re ruling this option out first because it’s easiest for us.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘You have to use this sometimes, Skafidis. Logic and efficiency. Rules to live by.’

  They passed beyond the orchard boundary, and stopped by a campanile which formed the gateway to a church: tall and slender, with a pair of bells suspended in the arch beneath the ornate pinnacle, but of no depth, so it seemed from a sideways angle to be only its own façade. Its last coat of ox-blood render had been some years ago, and now the dark red of the pigment blended naturally with the buff of the building stone where it showed through. The campanile gate opened on to a stony field contained by walls shaded with myrtle and evergreen oak; the dried field-grass had been grazed down to the dirt by goats.

  ‘Gounaris, Lillis,’ said the captain, ‘go and check the church. Skafidis, Kastellanos, come with me.’

  Gounaris pushed at the church gate, which stuck, at first, on the irregular ground. He pushed harder, and, juddering, it opened, squealing on its unoiled iron hinges. Hands in pockets, Lillis ambled through, and followed Gounaris into the church field.

  The captain led the others away, down the path, which continued towards houses – a hamlet of twenty or so overgrown ruins. He swished his stick over a stand of barley-grass, provoking rustling as something hiding there slithered away.

  ‘Have a good look round,’ he said to the soldiers. ‘If he’s here, I want him found.’

  They went, between them, to every house. At one, the kitchen was no more than two paces across, with tiny window casements still painted a bold green, and thrown open to admit some long-blown-out breeze; the marks of sooty smoke flared over a great oven, with a stone bench adjacent where three members of a family might have huddled for winter warmth. The dropping wall-plaster carried the blooms of seeping damp, and algae grew on the cement between the stones, picking out the pattern they were laid in. The room behind was showered in the debris of the collapsed ceiling, which had exposed long supporting struts of pine, cross-laid with nailed-on planks. The neighbours’ house was grander, but its fate had been the same. The roof was part collapsed, creating holes where streaming sunbeams spotlighted symbols of status: wooden shelves against a wall, a staircase leading to an upper floor, and through holes in worm-eaten floorboards, the darkness of a cellar. The windows, here, cast the shadows they had always done, as if through polished glass, into what had been once a beautiful room, and was now rubble-strewn. Another house, of grander status still, had a stone staircase round its side, and an elegant stone arch leading to a veranda; but the staircase could not be climbed for the brush of summer-dead thistles, and the archway was obscured by invading trees.

  In the cobbled lanes between the houses, weeds had flourished and died back in the heat to crisp, pale stalks. At the longer-abandoned properties, nothing remained but walls to waist-height, with gardens reverted to meadows. Some had been used as goat-pens, and their floors were ankle-high in sharp-smelling excrement; many were daubed in paint with initials of ownership.

  Kastellanos stopped at a house where the outer walls still stood, where the wooden window-frames were square in place and the door was still in situ. He looked up at the floor above, at a window which had never had a frame, but had iron bars set solidly into the stonework.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said to the captain and Skafidis. ‘Why did they put bars on that window?’

  ‘Inbreeding,’ said Skafidis. ‘In places like this, half of them were mutants and the other half were mad. That’s what happens if you screw your sister. I bet that’s where they kept the family nutcases.’

  ‘They must have been violent nutcases, to be kept locked up behind bars,’ said Kastellanos. ‘I don’t like this place. Everywhere you go, you can feel them watching.’

  Skafidis laughed.

  ‘Who, malaka?’ he asked. ‘There’s nobody here. Listen!’ He put both hands to his mouth and called out, long and loud. His shout carried through the empty buildings, and when it died, left them in silence, to which all three found themselves listening, as if a response might come from amongst the derelict walls.

  ‘See?’ asked Skafidis after a few moments. ‘No spooks, malaka. No ghosts.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said the captain. ‘Wherever our friend’s got to, it isn’t here.’

  ‘Why are we looking for this guy anyway?’ asked Kastellanos, as he and Lillis headed along the track which led to the town. Foraging goats trotted away from them, scattering through the rocks and scrub.

  ‘Because we’re following orders,’ said Lillis.

  ‘He’s long gone by now,’ said Kastellanos. He kicked a stone, which skittered and bounced ahead of him, throwing up dust. ‘Reached the port and found a boat out.’

  ‘Who knows how far ahead he is?’ said Lillis. ‘You were on watch. You must have heard him go.’

  Kastellanos seemed uncertain.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘God help us,’ said Lillis. ‘The Turks might have had knives to our throats, and you’d still not have raised the alarm.’

  ‘Should I have stopped him going, then, if I’d seen him?’

  ‘Of course you should’ve! He’s a man with no papers off a foreign boat. We treat him as an illegal immigrant. He must have something to hide to have l
eft us the way he did.’

  ‘Maybe he couldn’t face any more of Skafidis’s catering,’ said Kastellanos. ‘And who can blame him for that?’

  They walked a couple of kilometres, and stopped to drink. Brown bees buzzed around the dried heads of oregano flowers. The sun beating on Lillis’s backpack had heated their water cans, and the water was too warm to give any refreshment. Lillis poured his remainder over his head, savouring the relative coolness of its wetness.

  ‘You’ll regret that,’ said Kastellanos, screwing the cap back on his can. ‘We might have to walk miles yet.’

  Lillis squinted along the track ahead of them.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  He pointed to where a solitary olive tree spread shade over the road. A figure was slumped against its trunk. When the soldiers were within shouting distance, the figure raised a hand.

  ‘It’s him,’ said Lillis. ‘We found him.’

  He set off at a jog. Kastellanos followed behind, at a more measured pace.

  As Lillis stood over him, Manolis gave a mocking salute.

  ‘Kali mera sas,’ he said. ‘And thank God you’re here. It’s hot, and I didn’t bring any water. I planned to walk my way into town, but . . .’ He held up the captain’s old sandal. ‘Kaput. A man with soft feet and one shoe can’t get far on this road.’ He showed them his bare foot. The sole was cut and bleeding. ‘If one of you has something I can wrap my foot in, I’d appreciate it. And it looks like I’ll be coming back with you to camp.’

  Kastellanos gave Manolis his boots, though they were two sizes too large. Kastellanos walked easily barefoot, the soles of his feet cured hard by weeks unshod in salt-water, and on rough rocks and cement.

  ‘Ask Lillis to show you his party trick,’ he said, when Manolis remarked on his grit. ‘He likes to impress girls by stubbing cigarettes out on his heels.’

  ‘And does that impress the ladies?’ Manolis asked Lillis. Manolis’s shadow fell over an aqua-tailed lizard, which scuttled into hiding in a boulder’s cleft.