Beneath the Cypress Tree

by Margaret Pemberton

  And when it came to trying to imagine what it would be like being married to Christos – supposing Christos should ever ask her to marry him – her imagination simply wouldn’t stretch that far. For one thing, Christos would never take the same understanding attitude towards her career that Sam had taken. He would probably be happy for her to continue working as an archaeologist, but only if the digs in question were on Crete. Anywhere else, even mainland Greece, would be out of the question. If one thing had become obvious to her during her time on Crete, it was that Cretan wives didn’t have a life of their own. They looked after the family’s animals, made cheese, dug fields, tended crops, marketed home-made produce, bred children, led hard lives and were at the beck and call of their menfolk.

  She came to a halt and pushed her mane of Titian hair back over her shoulders. Even daydreaming about jettisoning all that she had going for her, in order to join the ranks of Crete’s womenfolk, was insanity. What on earth was she doing, even contemplating such thoughts?

  Jilting Sam and marrying Christos was a scenario that was never, never going to happen. She was a level-headed, down-to-earth Yorkshire girl. Rational behaviour was in her blood and bones, and just because she’d discovered within herself a capacity for lust that was giving her wakeful nights and troubled days, it didn’t mean she had to give in to it – and she wasn’t going to give in to it.

  From further up the track came the sound of someone coming down it at a fast pace. Her heart began drumming in her chest. It could only be a member of the team, but which one? What if it were Christos? She remained standing still, half in desperate hope, half in sickening apprehension.

  When the figure rounded a bend in the track and became visible, Ella sagged, her reaction again one of opposites – this time relief and disappointment, for it wasn’t Christos. It was Lewis.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, coming to a halt in front of her. ‘You’re just the person I wanted to speak with.’ He took off his jacket, slinging it over his shoulder, holding it by his thumb. ‘During the winter Yanni found another cave within a stone’s throw of the summit. Although we’ve found nothing but animal bones in the cave he’s been camping in, I’m wondering if the cave he’s found will prove to be a sacred one.’

  He didn’t have to explain to her what the relevance of such a find would be. The palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia were all in alignment with a sacred cave or peak sanctuary. If the small palace of Kalamata had also been built in alignment with a sacred cave, it would be further proof that, though much smaller than the other three palaces, Lewis was quite justified in believing that what they’d found at Kalamata was, indeed, a Neo-palatial palace.

  His hair had fallen low across his forehead and he pushed it back with his free hand. ‘It’s certainly worth checking out, and I want you and Christos to climb up to it tomorrow.’

  At the prospect of a whole day high on the mountain alone with Christos, alarm flooded through Ella. ‘Perhaps Adonis would be a better choice,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Or Nico.’

  ‘Nico doesn’t have the experience for anything other than digging under direction, and Adonis is supervising the erection of the tents. Besides, you and Christos work well together, and you’ll both know what to look for. Neither Nico nor Adonis would.’

  ‘But . . .’ Desperately she tried to think of another objection, but couldn’t.

  ‘Thanks a lot, Ella. I’ve already spoken to Christos. You’ll have a steep climb in front of you, but Yanni says it doesn’t need mountaineering skills. Sacred caves are always accessible. They had to be, in order for worshippers to reach them.’

  He shot her one of his rare smiles and, without waiting for any comment from her, set off once again, covering the rough ground in fast, easy strides.

  Ella watched him with a troubled heart, certain that all the Fates of Greek mythology were conspiring against her.

  ‘And so there it is,’ she said late that evening as she sat at one of the cafeneion’s outside tables with Kate, ‘a whole day tomorrow with Christos. Believe me, it’s the very last thing I need.’

  Kate topped up their glasses with Agata’s home-made wine, so dark a red it was almost black. ‘Are you sure you should still be sticking to an Easter wedding date, when the man dominating all your waking thoughts – and I dare say your dreams at night as well – isn’t Sam, but Christos?’

  ‘Of course I should be sticking to the arranged wedding date! I wish now that I’d agreed to an even earlier date. Only when I’m married to Sam will I feel safe.’

  ‘I don’t follow your logic, Ella, and neither does Daphne.’

  ‘Daphne,’ Ella said with great feeling, ‘is hopeless. Her only advice has been that I should have a full-on affair with Christos before the wedding. She says: that way, he’ll be past history by the time I marry Sam, and no longer a torment.’

  ‘She may be right.’

  ‘Really? And is that what you would do?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘And it’s not what I’m going to do, either. How could I keep my having had a love affair with Christos a secret from Sam? Especially when it would have been a love affair that had taken place in the run-up to our marriage? I would have to tell him. There’s no way I could not tell him. To not tell him would mean our life together would be built on deceit, and I couldn’t do that. Not to Sam. And if I have to tell him I’ve been unfaithful to him, he’ll be so devastated there will probably be no marriage at all. He’ll most likely call the whole thing off, and who could blame him?’

  She took a sip of her wine and then pushed the glass away from her, saying fiercely, ‘If I give in to temptation where Christos is concerned, then one way or another my marriage to Sam will be off. And I don’t want that. It would break my mum and dad’s hearts. It would break Sam’s heart.’ She rose to her feet. ‘Sorry, Kate. I’m going to bed. I need a decent night’s sleep, if I’m to climb higher tomorrow than I’ve ever done previously.’

  Kate tilted her head to one side, watching as Ella walked off in the direction of the steps leading to the cafeneion’s living quarters. Although Ella seemed unaware of it, there had been a rather huge omission, when she had listed the people whose hearts would be broken if her marriage to Sam was called off. Intentionally or unintentionally, she had never said that her heart, too, would be broken.

  They met outside the cafeneion just after dawn.

  ‘It’s going to be a long day,’ Christos said, without shooting her his usual brilliant grin.

  Ella adjusted the straps of her rucksack more comfortably on her shoulders. Christos’s moods were always mercurial, and as they crossed the scrubby ground of the village square she did so certain that he wouldn’t be out of sorts for long.

  It was so early there were very few of Kalamata’s villagers up and about, and their booted feet crunched loudly on the cobbles as they walked up the steep street leading out of the village.

  By the time they were on the wooded mountain track, Ella – who in the past had often welcomed a break from Christos’s teasing chit-chat, in order to remind herself that it was Sam whose company she was supposed to be so happy in, not Christos’s – no longer wanted time in which to think. Thinking was dangerous. It could all too easily lead to a very wrong decision.

  ‘Do you think Lewis is right, and that the cave Yanni has found will prove to be a sacred cave or a peak sanctuary?’ she asked as, half an hour later, they skirted the Little Palace plateau and began the climb to the summit.

  ‘But of course!’ He didn’t break stride. ‘Every royal palace has either one or the other. And when we find whichever it is, and dig and find the offerings that have been left there, then the mystery of the Little Palace having only one royal megaron will be solved.’

  ‘I’m not sure how votive offerings will solve that mystery,’ she said, and found that Christos had stepped in front of her and she was talking to the back of his neck.

  The back of his neck was an extremely
attractive part of Christos’s very attractive anatomy, because it was where his shock of blue-black hair curled the thickest, the curls so tight that she itched to hook her fingers into them. She fought the thought away, furious at her inability to be physically indifferent to him.

  He came to a sudden halt and swung around. ‘And I do not want to talk about votive offerings,’ he said explosively, unable to keep quiet any longer about what it was that had been tormenting him for days. ‘I want to talk about your method wedding!’

  They were on a flank of a mountain thick with shale, and as she came to an answering halt, Ella slipped. Christos’s arm shot out to steady her and, regaining her balance, she wrenched her arm away from his hold and said between clenched teeth, ‘And it’s a Methodist wedding, Christos. Not a method wedding!’

  ‘And how many best men will there be?’

  ‘One. There is only ever one best man at a Methodist wedding, or at a Protestant, Anglican or Roman Catholic wedding too, come to that.’

  ‘At a Cretan wedding there are nearly always two best men. Sometimes, as when Angelos married, there are more. How long is a Methodist wedding ceremony?’

  ‘Thirty minutes, perhaps a bit less.’

  ‘Ba!’ Christos was even more unimpressed. ‘A Cretan wedding is an hour, sometimes—’

  ‘Sometimes longer,’ Ella finished for him, not hiding how unwelcome the conversation was to her. ‘Do you think we could talk about something other than wedding ceremonies?’

  ‘But why?’ Beneath winged eyebrows, his near-black eyes flashed with emotions she didn’t want to recognize. ‘You are to be married soon. You have chosen your wedding dress, yes?’

  She had. When she’d been home at Christmas, she and her mother had gone shopping in Bradford and had chosen a dream of a dress. It was ankle-length and made of white silk chiffon, with crocheted lace detail on the bodice and a full foot of the same lace above the hem.

  ‘Yes,’ she snapped back at him. ‘Though what my wedding dress has to do with you, Christos, I really don’t know.’

  There were thick clusters of yellow and white anemones growing amongst the shale and Ella tried to concentrate on them.

  Christos didn’t let her do so.

  ‘You know why!’ he said abruptly, coming to a sudden halt and swinging her round to face him. ‘You know it is not the right thing for you to do! You say that after you have married you are coming back to Crete. Back to the dig. But will you? And if you do come back, for how long will you be back? Will you be here next year? No, of course you will not! And will you be happy away from Crete? Away from all the friends you have made in the village? Away from Andre and Agata? Away from Eleni and Kostas? Away from me?’

  She pushed past him, walking as fast as she could over the steep ground.

  He was beside her almost instantly. ‘You can run away from me, Ella, but not from yourself.’

  ‘You talk rubbish, Christos Kourakis. Do you know that? We should be talking about how we’re supposed to find this cave – and why isn’t Yanni with us? He would have been able to take us straight to it.’

  ‘Yanni gave me enough directions to make his presence unnecessary.’

  ‘And what are the directions? Second to the right and straight on till morning?’

  ‘Oriste? And you say I talk rubbish? What kind of rubbish talk is that?’

  Ashamed at having descended into the kind of sarcasm he couldn’t possibly understand, she said, ‘It’s Peter Pan talk. It was the directions Peter gave for flying to Neverland.’

  The expression on Christos’s face was one of utter bewilderment.

  ‘Peter Pan is a book,’ she said, as the volatile atmosphere between them eased and, despite their mutual intentions, they found themselves sliding back into their usual camaraderie. ‘It’s about a little boy who doesn’t want to grow up and who lives in a magical place called Neverland.’

  ‘Okay. I understand. The book is to the British what Homer’s Odyssey is to the Greeks.’

  ‘Not quite,’ she said, amused, even though she didn’t want to be. She came to a halt, looking westwards to where, in the far distance, dark clouds had begun obliterating the snow-covered peaks of Mount Ida. ‘It looks as though a storm is coming in,’ she said, her amusement dying fast. ‘Have we time to get back to the dig and shelter, before we get caught in it?’

  Since setting off from the upper plateau, all Christos’s thoughts had been centred on Ella’s forthcoming wedding and how he could dissuade her from going ahead with it. Now, for the first time, he noticed the drop in temperature and the change in the light. As he looked towards Mount Ida, there came the rumble of distant thunder. Grim-faced, he looked back the way they had come, and then upwards. If the landmarks Yanni had given him were correct, they were far nearer to the cave than they were to the plateau.

  ‘The cave is our best bet,’ he said, taking hold of her hand, ‘but we need to move fast. We have minutes – maybe only ten – until the storm reaches us.’

  Ella didn’t need any encouragement to move fast. The last thing she wanted was to be caught in a Cretan thunderstorm, high on an open mountainside.

  As the minutes ran out and the storm drew closer she saw, fifty yards or so ahead of them and just below the summit, a shelf of rock jutting out over giant boulders and half-obscured by bushes of spiny yellow broom.

  ‘Is the cave there? At the back of the shelf of rock?’ she gasped, as Christos continued hauling her after him at breakneck speed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said as lightning forked above their heads.

  She was just about to say she didn’t think she was going to be able to climb the boulders, when her right foot gave way beneath her, twisting at a sickeningly ugly angle and pitching her forward onto her knees.

  Her cry of pain was almost, but not quite, drowned by the crash of thunder that followed the lightning.

  ‘Holy Virgin!’ As rain began knifing down on them in torrents, Christos dropped to his knees beside her. One look at her sheet-white face, and the way she was struggling not to follow her first shout with further cries of pain, was enough to tell him she couldn’t put weight on her foot, let alone walk.

  He readjusted his sakouli, the embroidered woollen knapsack Cretan men carried on their backs instead of a rucksack, and then, with rain saturating his hair and streaming down his face, swung her up into his arms.

  ‘You can’t . . . carry me . . . over the boulders.’ Her words came out in short, sharp gasps.

  ‘I won’t need to. The gaps between them make a passageway.’

  Ella’s head sagged against his chest, his shirt and sleeveless jacket as wet against her face as if they had been submerged in water.

  ‘If your arms were around my neck, it would make carrying you a little easier.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’ She did as he suggested and immediately sensed that although it was doing nothing for her peace of mind, she had lightened his load.

  Because of the way Christos was carrying her, she had no clear view of the boulders as they approached them, but she could certainly feel the rain stinging every inch of her exposed flesh. ‘Stair-rods,’ she said.

  ‘Stair-rods?’

  ‘Stair-rods. They’re brass rods that hold stair carpeting in place, and it’s a Yorkshire expression for rain like this – rain that lashes straight down with heavy force.’

  As she spoke, she winced.

  Aware of the pain she was in, and aware that until he could look at her ankle properly he still didn’t know how badly sprained, or perhaps even fractured, it was, he said, ‘In Crete we also have a name for rain like this, but it is not one we say in front of young women.’

  She knew that he was trying to make her laugh, but she was in too much pain to do so.

  For another ten minutes they continued on in silence and then he said, ‘We’ve reached the boulders, Ella, and Yanni is right. There’s a narrow gap leading up between them.’

  He entered it, the rain still sluicing down on them, the
ground rising steeply.

  ‘Will it bring us out at the side of the rock shelf or in front of it?’ she asked, anxiety for him obvious in her voice, for she could tell by his increased breathlessness that he wasn’t going to be able to continue carrying her for much longer.

  ‘The edge – and we’re nearly there.’

  There was another crack of thunder, this time directly overhead.

  ‘And the rain is still stair-pods,’ he added as, with a last manful effort, he stepped out onto the ledge.

  ‘Stair-rods,’ Ella said, and then forgot the pain she was in, for the shelf of rock wasn’t level, as they had supposed. Instead it sloped backwards into the cliff face, and at the bottom of the slope, and beyond a natural channel carrying rainwater away, there was the mouth of a cave.

  ‘Goodness!’ Still held in Christos’s arms, Ella stared at it, mesmerized. ‘Who would have dreamed what the boulders hid from sight?’

  ‘Not me,’ Christos said truthfully. In arms that felt as if they were breaking, he began carrying her down the slope. ‘Although if it proves to be a sacred cave, it wouldn’t always have been hidden from sight. It would once have been visible from the palace. The boulders and rock shelf will be the result of one of Crete’s many earthquakes.’

  The rain, although light in comparison to what it had been earlier, was still falling, with drops dripping from his hair into his eyes. He blinked them away as best he could and then, in vast relief, stepped across the channel of fast-running rainwater and into the shelter of the cave.

  Gently he lowered Ella to its sandy floor and, with her back supported by the cave wall and bending down on one knee beside her, said thickly, ‘Okay, Ella, agápi mou. Now let me see what you’ve done to your ankle.’

  Ella knew what the words agápi mou meant. They meant ‘my love’. She braced herself for an examination that she was sure was going to be agonizingly painful, but what she had forgotten was Christos’s reputation for having the gentlest, most careful hands in the world. Within seconds she realized his reputation didn’t apply only to the handling of artefacts lost for thousands of years, but to sprained ankles as well.