Beneath the Cypress Tree

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Is that where the meat we ate tonight came from?’

  ‘Yes. It was good meat. Good meat it was. Without my sheep, our diet in the cave would not be so good. The billy-goats are always on the lookout for high plateaus where sheep are grazed. When they first seized our island they supplemented their rations with livestock stolen from villages and, now that the villages have no livestock left, they go further afield to steal a sheep.’

  Negotiating a mountainside in the dark – and with a string of mules – wasn’t easy and Kate breathed a huge sigh of relief when they reached their destination. Immediately brushwood was unloaded from the backs of the mules and signal fires were built.

  ‘But don’t anticipate the plane coming in at the arranged time,’ Lewis said to her as he stacked juniper branches into a pyre, ‘or even appearing at all. Three months ago Sholto and his men came up here nine nights running, before the drop took place.’

  Kate looked across to where, in the darkness, Sholto was talking with Nikoleta. They appeared to be getting on extremely well. As Nikoleta had given him medical treatment for a bullet wound, it was no surprise that they had something to talk about, but knowing from Daphne Sholto’s reputation with women, Kate hoped he wasn’t making a nuisance of himself.

  The thought had barely flashed through her mind when Nikoleta gave a smothered laugh. In a moment of déjà vu, Kate was once again on Villa Ariadne’s terrace, listening to the sound of Nikoleta’s smothered laughter as, in darkness seven years ago, she met Lewis in the Villa’s Edwardian garden.

  There came the unmistakable drone of an aircraft and, as men ran to light the fires, Kate knew one thing with certainty: if Sholto was again in Lothario-mode, Nikoleta was not finding it objectionable.

  The plane flew in low, waggled its wing tips in greeting and, as it passed overhead, disgorged a stream of parachutes. As heavy packages and canisters landed, Kate sprinted with everyone else to retrieve them. The plane circled and came in again, streaming more parachutes in its wake, and then did a third run before, with another friendly waggle of its wing tips, it turned south, flying off in darkness towards British-held Egypt.

  It was a most successful drop. As arms and ammunition were borne triumphantly back to the Mount Ida cave on the backs of the mules, Lewis slid an arm around Kate’s shoulders and hugged her tight. ‘Only two ’chutes missed the site,’ he said as Nico and Adonis, striding close behind them, began singing a rude song about Hitler. ‘They fell into a ravine. Georgio and Christos are coming back in the morning to retrieve them.’

  Pericles came up to them. ‘Are we dividing the drop between our two groups immediately we get back to the cave, Lewis? Or are we doing it in the morning?’

  ‘In the morning. By the time we get back to the cave we’re going to be in need of a few hours’ sleep.’

  ‘And once we get our share of the drop back to Kalamata, who is going to be in charge of distributing some of it to Kapetan Tyrakis?’

  ‘I am – and I’ll be doing it with you and Christos.’

  Pericles nodded, happy that a Kapetan like Antonio Tyrakis would be aware of how important a part he played in Lewis’s group.

  As Pericles settled into an easy stride beside them, Kate knew that her one-to-one conversation with Lewis had come to an abrupt end. For Cretans, conversation was always communal – and usually noisily so. That two people might enjoy talking to each other without anyone else taking part in what they were saying was something that simply never occurred to them.

  For two people deeply in love, other kinds of privacy were just as hard to come by, especially under the conditions in which she and Lewis were living. Lewis was absent from Kalamata far more often than he was in his hideout high above the village. Even though there were now a handful of other SOE officers on the island, keeping in touch with resistance groups under the leadership of local Kapetans – and, more importantly, control of them – was becoming an increasingly full-time occupation. The Cretans wanted to hit back at the Germans in any and every way they could; but actions such as ambushing a German patrol and slaughtering it, something the Cretans were extremely good at, led without exception to horrifically bloody reprisals, and it was the innocent who suffered. Men and boys who had not taken part in the ambush were rounded up and executed in front of wives and mothers; villages were burned to the ground. The satisfaction that a handful of German deaths gave was not, in Lewis and Sholto’s judgement – and that of Xan and other SOE officers – worth the price that had to be paid. It was intelligence that was important, and worthwhile sabotage, such as fixing limpet mines to German ships in Suda Bay or blowing up aircraft on the new airfield the Germans had built at Tymbaki.

  Even when Lewis was in his headquarters in the sacred cave, nights couldn’t be spent together, for the team and other members of his resistance group were always there as well. Neither, if he was to retain a shred of respect with his men, was it possible for him to spend the night with Kate in the house they had lived in together before the occupation – and where she still lived.

  A wry smile touched the corners of Kate’s mouth. However much Sholto might want to make headway in his relationship with Nikoleta, the chances of his doing so were slim. He was going to have to live in agonized frustration, as she and Lewis were living. In Sholto’s case, it would be a frustration that was all to the good, for although in Cretan society Nikoleta had got away with having her name linked to Lewis’s, she certainly wouldn’t get away with having it linked to Sholto’s. And Daphne’s reaction, if word was to reach her that Nikoleta was Sholto’s latest fling, would not be nice. It would not be nice at all.

  That night she and Nikoleta shared a blanketed brushwood bed several yards away from the men’s beds and it gave Kate an opportunity for reminding Nikoleta of her friend Daphne’s existence. ‘She must miss Sholto,’ she said, ‘and I expect Sholto would like to be recalled to Cairo, so that he and Daphne can be together again.’

  Nikoleta was lying on her back, her arms behind her head. ‘Sholto is a pallikari,’ she said dismissively. ‘A pallikari is a brave and fearless freedom-fighter. In medieval days they fought the Turks and freed Crete from Turkish enslavement. Now pallikariá like Sholto fight to free Crete from Nazi enslavement and, as such, they do not have time for thoughts of wives and children.’ And with that she rolled over and away from Kate, the subject determinedly closed.

  When Kate woke next morning, Georgio and Christos had already left to retrieve the parachutes and canisters that had fallen in the ravine. Nick Virtue was making porridge and, not having any oats to make it with, was doing so out of a concoction of spelt flour and sheep’s milk.

  ‘We’re not heading straight back to Kalamata, Kate,’ Lewis said to her, sticking a long Cretan knife down the folds of his waist sash. ‘Kit is due back this morning from his meeting with Xan, and I’m going to hang on until he can give me a first-hand report about it. Meanwhile I’m going to divvy up last night’s haul with Sholto.’

  It was a task that was going to take some time and, with Nikoleta nowhere to be seen and as she was beginning to find the cave claustrophobic, Kate went outside and found herself a convenient-sized boulder to sit on. The sun was already sizzling hot and she raised her face to it, closing her eyes, her happiness in her personal life – and in her certainty that an Allied invasion was imminent – bone-deep.

  It was a moment that would be seared in her memory forever.

  It was the Cretans, with their finely attuned sense of hearing, who first heard the long, painful cries. Yanni, who had been reloading a mule a few feet away from Kate, stopped what he was doing. ‘Holy Virgin!’ he said, eyes widening. ‘What is that?’

  Angelos, Dimitri, Adonis and Nico all ran out of the cave, with Lewis, Sholto and Pericles hard on their heels. Kate rose to her feet, filled with a nameless dread as, shielding her eyes from the sun, she looked across the scree in the direction that the cries were coming from. It was the direction they had taken the previous evening when g
oing to the drop zone; the direction that Christos and Georgiou had taken earlier that morning – and that at any moment they were expected to be returning from.

  The scree was still bare, but it was skirted by a thick belt of cypress and pine and, as the anguished cries grew louder and nearer, the entire team, including Lewis, began sprinting in the direction of the trees.

  Sholto and his partisans stood tensely at the cave entrance, rifles at the ready.

  As Lewis and the team neared the trees, Kate clenched her hands into fists, terrified as to what was going to emerge from them.

  Howling with grief, Georgio appeared, leading one of the two mules he and Christos had set off with just hours earlier – and the load on the mule’s back wasn’t rifles or ammunition.

  It was Christos.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Ella was in the cafeneion’s kitchen, baking Christopsomo bread, just as she had baked it every Christmas Eve for the last seven years. This time, though, she wasn’t baking with a heart full of joy and happy anticipation. This time, as she kneaded the dough, she was doing so with a heart so broken she couldn’t even begin to envisage the day when it might begin to heal.

  She had been in the kitchen baking, on the day Kate had told her that the love of her life was dead. Until that moment it had been just an ordinary day. In anticipation of Christos returning from Mount Ida with Lewis’s share of the arms drop, Ella had been baking his favourite kourabiedes cakes.

  Kostas Alfred had been rolling tablespoons of dough into small balls with the heel of a hand when the presentiment of something being very, very wrong had overwhelmed her. Even before she’d heard the cafeneion’s outside door open, she’d known that bad news was about to come; and the instant Kate had stepped into the kitchen and Ella had seen the expression on her face, she had known what the bad news was.

  She had screamed, terrifying Kostas Alfred, who had been making a dimple in one of the dough balls; and sending Tinker, who had been beneath the table, into a frenzy of barking.

  ‘Where is he?’ she had demanded hysterically, trying to push past Kate to the door. ‘What happened, Kate? WHAT HAPPENED?’

  Agata had hurtled into the room, scooped up a shrieking Kostas Alfred and, shooing the still-barking Tinker in front of her and sensing the news about to be broken, had left it with the same speed with which she’d entered.

  And, holding Ella in her arms, Kate had told her.

  She’d told her of how Christos and Georgio had returned to the drop site and retrieved two parachute loads that had fallen into a ravine. She’d told her of how, just as they were about to set off back to the cave with their loaded mule, Georgio had seen a cluster of his sheep heading towards the corrie at the far end of the ravine, and of how Georgio had gone back into the ravine in order to herd them back on to the plateau.

  ‘And then,’ Kate had said unsteadily, ‘Christos saw a small party of Germans making their way towards the corrie. It was obvious they were intent on stealing the sheep and hadn’t yet seen Georgio. Christos knew that when they did see him, he would be cornered, so he began firing towards them and leading them off away from the mule and the guns; away from Georgio.’

  Later, Georgio had told Kate of how, on hearing the firing, he had raced out of the corrie to come to Christos’s aid; of how his additional firing had convinced the Germans there were more Cretans in the ravine than they could deal with and how they’d speedily exited it; and of how he had found Christos dying from gunshot wounds.

  ‘And the last words he spoke,’ Georgio had said, his face contorted with grief, his voice thick with it, was, ‘Tell my little Yorkshire girl she must be brave and strong. Tell her I love her. That I’ve always loved her, and that I die loving her.’

  Ella stared down at the Christopsomo bread she had been kneading, tears falling in a flood she couldn’t stop. How could it be Christmas and Christos not spending it with her? How could he not be about to breeze in through the door and whirl her around in his arms and throw Alice Ariadne high in the air, making her squeal with delight, and tell Kostas Alfred what a big strong boy he was? How could the loving, laughter-filled, tempestuous, so-very-satisfying life they had lived together be so finally and irrevocably over?

  Numbly she put the dough to one side to rise.

  For the sake of Kostas Alfred and Alice Ariadne, she had to live through each and every day, but it was hard; so hard that if it hadn’t been for Kate she didn’t know where the strength she was finding would have come from.

  Lewis, too, had been exquisitely kind and supportive to her. From the moment she had arrived at Kalamata as a member of the dig-team, they’d had a good working relationship; a relationship that had quickly turned into friendship. Now he talked with her about the way the war was going and how it was affecting Crete, with the same frankness with which he talked with Kate – and had once talked with Christos.

  In the few days between Christmas and New Year he called in to see her at the cafeneion en route to a meeting with a Réthymnon Kapetan. After he’d had a game of ball with Kostas Alfred and had agreed with her that Alice Ariadne’s hair – which was as red as her own – showed little signs of ever turning dark, they’d sat outside in the pale winter sunshine and he’d said grimly, ‘The war may be going well for the Allies in general, Ella, but that we’ve invaded Europe via Sicily is having a disastrous effect on the unity of resistance groups here in Crete.’

  It was something Ella already knew from village gossip, but hearing Lewis admit it was infinitely more dispiriting. She warmed her hands around a mug of dandelion tea – the only kind still available. ‘It’s understandable that people would be both disappointed and angry, Lewis. Everything pointed to the landing taking place here. The entire island was ready to rise up in wholehearted support of it. The realization that instead Crete was being used as a decoy to deceive Hitler has come as a betrayal. Even to me it has come as a betrayal.’

  Lewis sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Trust me, Ella, when I tell you that every British officer on Crete was similarly deceived. That it was Sicily used for the landing came as a huge surprise. And the problem we have now is in keeping powerful chieftains who, before the occupation, were always at each other’s throats from being at each other’s throats again.’

  ‘Because of politics? Because of so many Kapetans being Communists?’

  He nodded. Politics and Cretans were indivisible. He’d never yet met one Cretan who wasn’t a passionate supporter of one party or another. That some of his Kapetans – and the men they led – were Communist had never been a problem. And then had come the realization that Allied troops were not going to use Crete as a springboard for the invasion of Europe and, in doing so, liberate Crete. And from then on, the problems had been massive.

  ‘If the Allies will not liberate us, then they must give us the weapons for us to liberate ourselves,’ Antonio Tyrakis had said to him angrily. ‘And that means far more weapons than we have so far received.’

  The same kind of reaction had come from every other Kapetan that Lewis had dealings with, both Communist and non-Communist. It was a major problem, but it wasn’t the greatest one. The greatest problem was that although Communist and non-Communist resistance groups had previously worked well together, now, with liberation no longer a possibility until the war finally ended, they no longer did so.

  The meeting he was en route to at Réthymnon was to try and make a powerful Kapetan who was a member of ELAS – the Communist National Liberation Front – and another equally powerful Kapetan who was a member of EOK – the non-Communist National Organization of Crete – bury their differences and continue working together. Unless they and others like them did so, Crete’s resistance movement would fall apart in bloody infighting.

  He voiced his thoughts to Ella and her pale skin paled even further. She pushed her mug of tea away, rose to her feet and went indoors for two glasses of raki. When she came out with the raki, she said, ‘Infighting is a possibility
too ghastly to even think about, Lewis. There must be some way the Communists can be persuaded to work in harmony with everyone else.’

  ‘I and every other SOE officer on Crete are struggling to find it. What you have to realize, Ella, is that the Communists have an agenda over and above freeing Crete from Nazi occupation. They’re looking to when the war has been won and, when it is, they want Crete – and the rest of Greece – Communist; not royalist and democratic. Xan Fielding has managed to set up a non-aggression pact between EOK and ELAS Kapetans in the western half of the island, and so far it’s holding. Here, however, Antonio Tyrakis is not only demanding more arms than I’m able to give him; he’s refusing to accept my suggestions as to how he should distribute and use them. The same goes for the Kapetan I’m going to meet in Réthymnon. Trying to reason with hot-headed Cretan chieftains, who think nothing of carrying out vendettas that last for generations, isn’t easy.’

  Ella, knowing how hot-headed Christos had been, could well believe it. Changing the subject, she said, ‘Do you see much of Kit and Nick Virtue, now they’re no longer with Sholto?’

  ‘I don’t see as much of Kit. The White Mountains are Xan Fielding’s area and I don’t have much call to be there. Nick didn’t move with him, as there is already a Signals sergeant at Nipos; and so, yes, whenever I meet up with Sholto, I also get a few words with Nick.’

  Ella hesitated for a moment and then said cautiously, ‘It’s a shame the Nipos operator couldn’t have moved to Mount Ida.’

  Lewis quirked an eyebrow, ‘You mean so that Nick could have gone with Kit?’

  She held his eyes steadily. ‘Yes. It must be so frustrating for them to be separated, when it would have been so easy for the new operator to have taken over at Mount Ida and for Nick to have gone with Kit to Nipos.’

  Lewis’s mouth crooked into a smile. ‘You’re very sharp, Ella. When did you guess?’

  ‘When I saw how relaxed and happy they were in each other’s company. When I saw the difference that being with Nick had made to Kit. I find it’s always easy to tell when two people are in love, no matter how hard they try to hide it.’