'Boys!' gasped Marianne, recollecting even as she spoke the unusual strength of the women who had carried her and the hard muscles of the one who had walked at her side earlier that evening. 'But what are you doing with them?'
'Making soldiers for Greece,' the Princess answered grimly. 'Some are the sons of men who have been killed, whom I have brought here to prevent their forcible enlistment as janissaries. Others were carried off by the pirates who haunt the islands, for unfortunately we also suffer from an accursed plague of traitors and renegades working on their own account, like Ali. I or my agents purchased them in the markets of Smyrna or Karpathos. In my house they are themselves again, forgetting the shame but not the hatred. I train them for war, in the caves of the island, as the warriors of Sparta were once trained, or the athletes of Olympia. And then, when they are ready, Yorgo or his brother Stavros takes them wherever good fighters are needed… and brings me others. I am never short. The Turks are never tired of executions, nor do the traders tire of profit.'
Marianne stared wide-eyed, overwhelmed by feelings of mingled pity and horror at this fresh revelation of the infamous traffic in human flesh. She was staggered by the woman's daring. There was a Turkish post only a few furlongs away from the refuge she had created! For the first time, she felt a genuine rush of friendship towards her and she smiled warmly, how warmly even she herself was not aware.
'I cannot help admiring you,' she said, with sincerity, 'and if I can help you I will do so gladly, although I do not see how. As this man has said, my mission from the Emperor is to the Sultana, to try and recreate the ties of friendship which have lapsed…'
'But he also gives shelter to thinking men of our nation. One of our greatest writers, Korais, who has devoted himself with all his might to our rebirth, lives in France, at Montpellier; and our poet Rhigas was put to death by the Turks because he wanted to meet Bonaparte and win his support for us.'
Here the man addressed as Theodoras interrupted. He had evidently had more than enough of history lessons and was eager to get down to immediate practicalities.
'Napoleon wants the war between Turkey and Russia to continue,' he said abruptly. Tell us why? We, too, wish it to continue, naturally, until the Porte is defeated, but we should like to know your Emperor's reasons.'
'I do not really know them myself,' Marianne answered, after only the faintest of hesitations. In fact, it did not seem to her that she had any right to reveal Napoleon's plans, especially when these were still secret. 'I think he is chiefly anxious to remove the Sultan from the English influence.'
Theodoros nodded. He studied Marianne as though he meant to pierce her very soul, and then, apparently satisfied, he turned to the abbot.
'Tell her everything, father. She seems to be honest, and I'm willing to put it to the test. If she should betray me, she'll not live long enough to boast of it. Our friends will see to that.'
'I've not the least intention of betraying anyone!' Marianne broke in hotly. 'I'm tired of this everlasting suspicion! Say what you want and have done with it!'
The priest's hands moved pacifically.
'Some night soon, you will leave here in Yorgo's boat. This man,' he indicated the giant, 'will go with you. He is one of our chief people and a good leader of men. Because of that, five years ago, the Turks drove him from his home in the Morea and he has been forced to live in hiding, never staying long in one place. He moves constantly about the Archipelago, always on the run but still free, breathing fire into lukewarm hearts to ignite the torch of revolt and, with his courage and faith, doing all he can to help those who need his help. Today it is in Crete that he is needed, only he could do no good there, whereas there is much that he could do on the Bosphorus. Last night, at the same time as he brought you here, Yorgos brought a monk from the monastery of Arkadios in Crete. There is bloodshed there and the cries of the oppressed rise to heaven. The pasha's janissaries will plunder, burn, torture and impale on the slightest suspicion. This must stop, and Theodoros thinks that he has the means to stop it. But to do so, he must go to Constantinople, which for him is equivalent to throwing himself into the jaws of the wolf. With you, he has a chance not only to get in but also of getting out again alive. No one would think to question a great lady of France travelling with a servant. He will be that servant.'
'He? My servant?'
Marianne stared incredulously at the ferocious-looking giant, with his fiercely curling whiskers and his picturesque garb, thinking that nothing could be less like the conventional Parisian idea of a respectable butler or servant of a great household.
Melina smiled. 'He won't look quite like that,' she said with amusement. 'And he shall be an Italian servant of yours, since he speaks no French. All that we ask of you is to take him with you and get him into Constantinople in your company. You will be staying at the French embassy, I imagine?'
Remembering what General Arrighi had told her about the repeated appeals for help on the part of the ambassador, Comte de Latour-Maubourg, Marianne could not doubt for an instant that she would be warmly welcomed.
'I can't think of anywhere else,' she admitted, 'that I could go.'
'Excellent. No one would think of looking for Theodoras in the French embassy. He will remain there for a little while and then, one day, he will simply vanish and you can forget all about him.'
Marianne frowned. Her mission to the Sultana was delicate and complicated enough already; she did not see how she could afford to risk bringing worse trouble on herself by taking under her protection a proscribed rebel leader who was probably quite well known, since he dared not enter Constantinople openly. It was enough to wreck her entire mission and to ensure that she herself spent the rest of her life, assuming she was allowed to live, in meditating on her indiscretion on the mouldy straw of a Turkish gaol.
'Is it essential', she asked, after a moment's thought, 'that he goes there himself? Would it not be possible for me to do his work for him, somehow?'
The giant's sharp, white teeth showed in a ferocious grin and his hand stroked the chased silver handle of his knife.
'No,' he said, with a curl of his lip, 'you cannot do my work for me. You are nothing but a foreign woman and I do not trust you enough. But you have the choice of refusal, if you wish. After all, no one knows that you are here…'
Beyond a doubt, if she refused, this brute was capable of slitting her throat on the spot, church or no church. Moreover, she had a real desire to accomplish her mission and to escape from this rat hole so that she could find the brig again, with the piratical doctor and, more than all else, Jason and her friends. If it were fated that, after the joy of rendering a signal service to Napoleon, the only happiness left to her in this world was to see John Leighton hanged, then she did not mean to let slip even the smallest chance of bringing it about; and no such chance existed on Santorini.
'Very well,' she said at last. 'I agree.'
Princess Koriatis exclaimed delightedly but Theodoros was not yet satisfied. He damped his big hairy hand round Marianne's wrist and drew her close to the iconostasis.
'You are a Christian, yes?'
'Certainly I am, but—'
'But your Church is not ours, I know that. But God is the same for all his children, in whatever fashion they pray to him. So, you will swear, here, before these holy images, to perform faithfully everything that is asked of you in order to assist me to enter Constantinople and to stay there. Swear!'
Unhesitatingly Marianne stretched out her hand toward the images, their silver mountings glinting with points of gold in the flickering lamplight.
'I swear,' she said firmly. 'I will do it to the best of my ability. But—' She let fall her hand and turned slowly to look at the woman who called herself Sappho. 'I want you to know that it is not for your sake, or because I am afraid of you. I will do it for her, because she has helped me and I should be ashamed to fail her now.'
'Your reasons do not matter. But may you be damned to all eternity if you break your
word! Now, father, I think we may go.'
'Not yet. We still have something to do. Come with me.'
They followed the abbot's black robe out of the chapel and through the white stairways and passages until they emerged at last on the topmost terrace of the monastery. Under the rising moon, it looked as white as a field of new-fallen snow. At that elevation the wind blew incessantly and Marianne shivered in her thin clothes, but the prospect before her was an amazing one.
From that height it was possible to see the whole of Santorini: a long crescent-shape of accumulated lava and volcanic slag, dotted with straggling white villages. Its deep bay was almost entirely enclosed by a chain of rocky islands that marked the rim of the old crater, now sunk beneath the waves. From Palaia Kaimeni, one of the two largest of these, Marianne could see a faint drift of smoke, and the wind brought a tang of sulphur to her nostrils. At the site of the monastery itself, the ground fell away sharply in a dizzy precipice dropping straight down, two thousand feet or so, into the black waters of the sea. Not a tree was visible in the cold moonlight. It was an apocalyptic landscape, a waste of stone to which man clung only by some miracle of stubbornness, in peril of his life. Those wisps of smoke looked ominous to Marianne, and she stared at them fearfully. The greater part of her life had been spent amid the green English countryside, a far cry from this scorched land.
The volcano is breathing,' Melina said, hugging her arms across her chest as though to keep herself from shivering. 'Last night, I heard him grumble. Pray God, he does not wake.'
But the abbot Daniel was not listening. He had walked on to the far end of the roof, where there was a small pigeon house. With Theodoros' help, he took out a large pigeon, fastened something to one leg, then let it go. The bird circled for a moment above the monastery and then flew off in a north-westerly direction.
'Where is he going?' Marianne asked, her eyes still on the vanishing white speck.
Melina tucked her arm comfortably through her new friend's and drew her back to the steps.
'To find a vessel worthier of the French Emperor's ambassadress than Yorgo's fishing boat,' she said. 'Yorgo will take you no farther than Naxos. Come, now. We must go in. It is past midnight and soon the bell will ring for the first of the night offices. We must not be seen here.'
The two women bade farewell to the higoumenos and followed the fat monk back to the monastery door. Theodoros, with a brief good night, had vanished into the depths of the building where he had been living for some days past. The night was much brighter now and on the long terrace with the cistern, even the smallest details stood out with chiselled clarity in a bleached universe.
As they stepped outside, under the porch with the belfry, the echoes wakened in the monastery, solemnly calling the monks to prayer. Muttering a hasty blessing, the fat monk swung the iron door to, and Marianne and her companion hurried away down the steep path to the villa.
The return journey was accompanied much more speedily than the outward one, and they passed the guard post without trouble. The fire was dying down and only two guards remained, sleeping up against their long-barrelled guns. The women's light tread was in no more danger of waking them than the faint rustle of the undergrowth. A few minutes later, Melina shut the door of the old chapel behind them and lighted the lamp.
They stood for a moment, looking at one another without speaking, as if they were really seeing one another for the first time. Then, very slowly, the Greek princess moved closer to her new friend and kissed her on the brow.
'I want to thank you,' she said simply. 'I know what it must have cost you to agree to take Theodoros with you, and I want you to know that, even if you had refused, I should not have let him kill you.'
'He may still do so when we are far away from here,' Marianne muttered, unable to repress a certain resentment against the giant.
'Of course not. First of all, he needs you – and then he has a strict sense of honour. He is rough, violent and passionate but, from the moment that you are travelling companions, he will die for you if you are in danger. That is the law of the mountain klephts.'
'Klephts?'
The mountaineers of Olympus, Pindus and Taygetos. They live by brigandage, of course, but they are really much more like your Corsican bandits than ordinary robbers. Theodoros, like his father Constantine before him, was their chieftain. There is no more valiant fighter for Greek freedom… As for you, you are one of us now. The service you are rendering gives you the right to ask aid and protection from any one of us. Go to sleep now, and peace be with you.'
Peace? In spite of all her heroic efforts, Marianne did not find it again that night. What lay before her was not conducive to peace of mind; in fact she had never found herself in a worse mess. For the first time since leaving Paris, she began to long for her quiet, comfortable house in the rue de Lille, the roses in her garden, and her cousin Adelaide's sardonic, reassuring presence: Adelaide who must be waiting there quietly, dividing her time between the gossip of the neighbourhood, the services at the church of St Thomas Aquinas, and her interminable little snacks, for the letter which would summon her to America, to join Marianne and her old friend Jolival… A letter that would never come. Unless the threads of destiny were to sort themselves out at last, which did not look like happening!
'I'll make you pay for this, Jason Beaufort!' Marianne exclaimed suddenly, anger reviving in her at the memory. 'If you are still alive, I'll find you, wherever you are, and make you pay for all I've suffered on your account, through your stupid obstinacy! And now it's all your fault I'm mixed up in this insane business, putting to sea with a boatload of dangerous rebels…'
She was within an inch of echoing Antigone's anguished cry: 'I was made for love, not for hate.' Yet it did her good to be the old Marianne again, with her hopeless rages, her miseries, quarrels and follies, just as she had derived comfort from the thought of her home and her cousin, even if it was only the comfort of regret.
So much had happened to her already, she had suffered such a variety of experiences, that her present situation was not really so much worse than it had been on other occasions in the past. Even the fact that she was pregnant by a man she loathed had ceased to matter so very much. That was now the least of her problems. A slightly philosophical note began to creep into her angry thoughts.
'All I need now,' she thought, 'is to find myself becoming a brigand chief! But with Theodoras perhaps that won't be so very far off!'
In any case, the important thing for the moment was how they were to get to Constantinople, wretched place! She had lost all her papers, passports, credentials, of course; everything had gone that could prove her identity. However, she knew herself to be equal to persuading the ambassador, at least, to recognize her, and there was a small inner voice which whispered to her, stronger than all the reason and logic in the world, that at all costs, somehow, she had to reach the Ottoman capital, if she had to travel on a fishing boat, or even swim! And Marianne had always placed great faith in her inner voices.
CHAPTER TEN
The Island Where Time Stands Still
Yorgo's boat cast off, slid over the dark water in the shadow of the cliffs and put to sea. The white figure of Melina Koriatis, standing in the entrance to the little cave that served as a discreet landing stage, receded and her waving hand was lost in shadow. Soon, even the cave mouth itself had disappeared.
Marianne sighed and huddled in the big black cloak given her by her hostess, seeking what shelter she could find from the spray in the lee of the heavy canvas that was laced across from side to side of the vessel to protect the cargo, in this case jars of wine.
The fisherman's boat was a scaphos, one of those curious and rather badly-built Greek vessels that have nothing essentially Mediterranean about them, save their gaudy sails: a jib and a big gaff mainsail rigged up to a yard of inordinate length. She rode very low in the water, amply justifying the expanse of canvas, especially at times like the present when there was a heavy sea running
. It must have been blowing a gale somewhere, for the night was cold, and Marianne blessed the warm wool they had bundled her up in, over her tattered gown.
She had felt a little sad at parting from the woman called Sappho. She had liked the revolutionary princess with her strangeness and her courage, recognizing in her something akin to herself and to those other women she had known with the capacity to grasp life with both hands: women like her cousin Adelaide and her friend Fortunée Hamelin.
Their good-byes had been brief.
'We may meet again, perhaps,' Melina had said, shaking her hand with a firm grip, like a man's. 'But if our paths should not cross, then go with God.'
That was all, and then she had gone with them down the dark narrow staircase cut in the rock beneath the floor of the chapel in which Marianne had been housed.
The sight of Yorgo lifting up the heavy stone and sliding into the lightless hole with the ease of long practice had told Marianne all that she needed to know about how she had come to find a fish by her bed, but Melina had coolly furnished her with the details. It appeared that whenever Yorgo and his brother were landing contraband articles such as guns, powder, shot or similar items, they were in the habit of carrying it in their baskets, hidden under a batch of fresh fish, and bringing it up the steps under the chapel. These led down by means of a long and fairly gently sloping chimney cut in the rock to a cave, half-filled with water, where a fishing boat could tie up out of sight of anyone.
Running before a southerly wind that filled the sails and whipped up the sea, the scaphos made good speed along the east coast of Santorini, before heading straight out to sea. No one had said a word since they left the cave. The passengers sat apart from one another, as though in mutual distrust, and gave themselves up to the rhythm of the ship. Only Theodoros took his turn at the helm.
Marianne and the Rebels Page 30
