by Tobias Hill
–Ben?
Eleschen was holding out a gun to him. The bores were wavering too close to his face, the mouths a dark figure-of-eight. Two hollow black infinities.
–There aren’t enough to go round, now. We didn’t plan for you. Eberhard thought you should have one.
He nodded, took the gun. –Is it loaded?
–Not until we hear them. There’s no hurry.
He shut his mouth tight again to stop his teeth from chattering. Eleschen was still talking, dreamily envious.
–Eberhard says you can really shoot. I’ve never been much good at it.
–What’ll you do, then?
–Mind Sylvia. That’s okay. The Spartans hunted with dogs. Dogs and nets and spears.
–Is that what we’re doing? Being Spartans?
–Well, there are worse things to be.
Silence again. Eberhard still quiet. Then Natsuko’s soft voice at his shoulder. –Don’t you think so, Ben?
–I don’t know.
–Do you love Greece?
–Of course I do, he said, and Eleschen laughed almost soundlessly.
–Then it’s easy! There wouldn’t be a Greece at all if there hadn’t been Spartans. Greece needs its heroes, do you see?
–I know that, he began to say, not knowing if he meant to agree, only halfway persuaded; and then the howling began.
It was an alien cry, neither canine nor lupine. It was unlike any sound he had ever heard an animal make. His skin crawled. The pheal rose and fell like a siren, eerie and silver and unearthly. It seemed to come from everywhere, from all around and overhead, as if the moon itself was screaming.
Time leapt. He struggled to his feet, the others exclaiming and scrambling around him. Jason was running back towards them, a fresh cigarette rolling away into cinders. Max was turning this way and that, his face raised urgently to the light. And then,
–The dog! The dog!
He looked down at Sylvia. Her hackles were up, her lips rolled back, her teeth bared to the black-flecked gums. She looked like a different animal, larger and wilder, lycanthropic, the moon transforming her. She was making no sound at all, not only no answering cry but nothing, as if she meant to give no warning to the thing howling off in the dark. The whole of her–eyes and ears and trunk–was magnetised, fixed on the North Pole of the eastern hills.
Someone put his gun in his hands. He found himself loading it. Beside him Max was doing the same, breaching weapon after weapon, dropping a shell, fumbling for more. Then they were running, all of them, in a straggling line.
When had they planned how to hunt? They had not decided anything. In arguing about the dog they had forgotten that most essential thing. And yet he saw that as they ran–down the hill, over the scree, across the dusty, musky thyme–they left their first panic behind.
They shambled the first hundred yards, falling over themselves, out of breath, out of sheer luck missing the pits; but then, gaining a second wind, they found their pace and their places. Eberhard and Max were leading them, drawing them into a shallow crescent of guns, though it was Eleschen who was furthest ahead, her stolen dog leading them on across dry stones, wet sighing ground, towards the inner dark of the trees.
Moonlight strobed them through the branches. He lost sight of Eberhard, then Max. He could still see Jason to his left and Natsuko off to the right, her gun much too long for her and held out straight in front, the way that riflemen bore arms in old paintings of old wars.
The howling came again, much closer. He stopped and realised all at once that all of them had done the same, that he had been the last to catch whatever it was that had passed between them. He scrabbled for the torch at his belt and saw, not far ahead, the flash of moonlight from an armband. The others were still going on, but slowly now, and quietly, though he could hear them here and there. The snap of twigs underfoot. The dice-click of stones. The stealthy hiss of someone pressing through the brush.
Afterwards he could never tell how it was that he lost them. One minute he could still hear them, the next there was no sound at all beyond that of his own progress. He stopped, groped for the torch again, listened for a painstaking stretch, then caught his breath and snapped it on, pointing the beam down at his feet.
The forest leaped up around him, the trees and rocks larger, uplit. The undergrowth was impenetrable, the sky entirely out of sight. A sense of loss washed over him. He had been one of them, whatever Natsuko had said. He had felt part of them for–what? A minute? It felt more; was less–and already he had failed them.
For some time he stood unmoving, straining to make them out. He heard nothing but the trees, the susurration of the wind, the gallows creak of limbs and roots. It was as if they had vanished. As if they gone on into some place barred to him, like children in an old story, and he the lame boy left behind.
His face was cold. He reached up, wiping his cheeks, and realised that he had been crying, the act seeming so shameful that he cringed, as if he had wet himself.
He thought of going back. A part of him still wanted that. To not be lost, searching for them, but to accept what he was not. To get it over with and have his failure complete. But then he thought that they had run ahead again, that there had been a simple sign he had missed, and that they might still want him there. That as much as he needed them, they might still have need of him.
He raised the torch, scoured the trees, then put it out and went on. His hands were shaking. With the left he gripped the slick stock of the gun, the other arm raised like a shield against the clumps and beards of gorse that grew wherever the trees had failed. Twice he fell, the second time catching the gun against his knee, the barrels rammed into his guts. Then the woods began to thin, the moonlight stronger than before, and stepping out of the last pines he found himself in a burnt-earth clearing, and the jackal standing, watching him.
The night had become so bright that he could see it all in colour. The clearing was a blackened field, the trees at its edges partburned, as if lightning had struck and fire crept only so far from the epicentre. The jackal was pale in contrast. Something lay dead at its feet, a slick mess of pelt and viscera. The jackal had been nuzzling it: its muzzle was still dark and wet. It seemed like a wolf to him, but smaller, long and muscular: a lithe creature, built for speed. Its coat was old-gold and black with, on its chest, a bib of white, like a flaw of milk in dark honey. Its ears were long, pricked up. Its eyes gleamed yellow-white. Its face was weird and devilish. Its mouth was fixed in a crude smile.
His scalp ached. His hair was trying to stand on end.
Only as the creature began to move did he realise it had not seen him after all, had only sensed him through some less precise means. It went off at a neat, fast trot, leaving the kill behind, pausing once to sniff the air. It headed not towards him or away, but south, along the hills. At the wood’s edge, by a blackened spur of rock, it stopped and cocked a leg to piss, and yawned, as Eleschen’s dog had done. And remembering the dog, he remembered the gun.
He swung and pulled in one act. The trigger hardly made a sound, only a smothered click, but even as it came to him that he’d left the safety-catch on the jackal stopped, one foot still raised, posed in the moon’s limelight, and looked his way again, its face both sly and innocent.
The trees to the east crashed open. Someone–Eleschen, white-haired–burst out, the hunting dog with her, no longer silent but baying, an anarchic howling ululation. And all around the two of them came other figures, wild things staggering into the light.
The jackal froze. For half a beat he thought that it would double back through the mob of hunters. Then a shot went off and it had turned. Its mouth grinned as it came on. It loped towards him, swift and low. As it closed he heard it growl. Its eyes did not seem scared but fierce, as if it meant to run him down. As if it thought that he would flee, the hunter turned into prey, a quarry like any other, to be chased until it fell.
The gun lay slack in his hands. He shouldered it again. Sighted along
the double-bore. Readied the catch. Readied himself.
Just as he fired–it seemed to him–the creature leapt out of his way. The motion was so languid, so uncaringly graceful and unthinkingly beautiful, that he cried out, his voice caught between despair and admiration. And then the thing was flinching back, its length writhing and tumbling, its own voice rising above his own, purer and more articulate. Its scream going up and up, and the hills full of his own thunder.
Morning found them sprawled on chairs outside Afisou’s one taverna. They had been drinking for five hours, the owner grumbling at first, closing up as they arrived, begrudging even the first drink, then warming to Eberhard’s orders, the cash advanced for brandies by the glass and by the bottle, for bread, olives, cold meats and wine–the best wine that he could find, Asirtiko from the Cyclades, Black Laurel dark and sweet as chocolate, and four bottles of old Chablis, still sound, bought in better days and gathering dust ever since on the shelf above the beer-stained bar where the owner napped with the TV on while they saw out the night.
The candles had guttered out. The sunrise crept across their remains. The owner shuffled out again with coffee, spoon sweets and tall glasses of Spartina. Natsuko was collecting wax, kneading figures out of it; a bow-legged family of dogs, women and men. Eleschen was basking, legs stretched out on the taverna steps. Eberhard and Max were playing chess as if each meant to prove the other drunk and himself sober. And Jason was still talking, had not stopped talking for a second since they had come down from the clearing in the woods, their heads full of moonlight and gunpowder.
–The dog was good. Good dog, yes you were! She was, though, wasn’t she? I mean we couldn’t have done it without her. The way she went after it. Like she was inside its head. Like one of those Yank missiles. Garage door at fifty K. You were wrong on that one, Max, weren’t you?
Max nursing coffee, tapping at the choice of knight or pawn. –The dog was good.
–Dead wrong on that you were. And Ben! How good was Ben? We were all wrong there.
–Jason, Eleschen said, slow-lipped. She had her sunglasses on and had rolled up her trousers and knotted her shirt, the sun on her belly and calves. –You’re embarrassing him.
–Embarrassing us, more like.
–Embarrassing yourself, at least…
He came up behind Ben’s chair, leaning over him like a London drunk, hugging him, his beard rough and his breath smelling of half-digested wine. –Kept his head, didn’t he, while all about were losing theirs? We almost didn’t ask you, you know. We thought you’d be the weakest link. It was my vote that tipped it. And now it turns out you’re our point man, our hotshot…it was a bloody hot shot. The way you took your time. Waited. What a killer you are. Didn’t you think so, Eb?
No answer. Sauer was sat back from the chess game, still awaiting his move, an empty glass in one hand, his chair turned to the cars and the road.
–Eb? Jason said again, and Eberhard started and wiped his face. The dawn was still no more than lukewarm. Even so he was sweating.
–It was well done.
–Is that how it always is, Ben said, Hunting?
–No. The intensity is in proportion to the ferocity of the game.
–Do you think the Spartans ever felt like this?
–Yes, I should think they did, Eberhard said, and Jason leaned over him again, off balance, voice barely coherent against his ear.
–We’re the real Spartans now.
–What if there are more jackals? Natsuko said. She was arranging her dogs and men in a circle, man dog, man dog, as carefully as if they were votive offerings.
–Then we hunt again, Max said, and Eleschen groaned.
–Oh come on! Once was enough, wasn’t it?
–What’s wrong with you? You loved it up there!
–Sure, but now I’m scratched all over. Except I suppose we’d have to go back, wouldn’t we? I’ll sure sleep better when they’re all gone.
A moment’s peace, the first in hours. He extricated himself from Jason, propped him up in the next chair, watched him fall asleep with his mouth wide open on his hands. The TV muttered and boomed inside. A cockerel crowed up at the top of the town.
–Why would we have to? he said, and Max glanced up and cocked his head, as if the question made no sense. –I’m not saying it wasn’t…it’s not that I didn’t like it. I just mean why hunt them all?
Nothing from Max in reply but a Cold War thousand-mile stare. He tried again. –You said we’d have to kill them all–
–I said that, actually, and I didn’t mean have to, Eleschen said. She sat up, pulling down her clothes, untangling her hair. –Oh look, I don’t know what I meant. I’m so tired I’m not thinking right. What time is it?
–Seven, Eberhard said. Time to go.
–Go where? he said, and Natsuko laughed.
–To work. Did you forget? Stanton will be missing you. She likes you.
–Good. I like her too, he said, and Natsuko leaned across to him, smiling, stretching like a cat.
–Not like me.
–No, not like you.
Eberhard went to settle up. Eleschen shook Jason awake. Max came over with the Volvo’s keys.
–You drive. We pick up the other car tonight.
–Is Eberhard–
–He’s fine. Just drunk. Like all of us, except you.
–I’m not sober–
–You’ll do, Max said, and met his eyes. His own, Ben saw, were small and grudging. –Jason was right.
He went and waited by the car. The others were still gathering themselves. The sun was creeping on up the hill between the last houses and olive groves. The cockerel crowed again. It sounded triumphant to him. He threw the keys up and they sang in the air in the seconds before he caught them.
Only later did he wonder what happened to the jackal. His memories of the night’s end were haphazard, everything after the kill confused by exhaustion and adrenaline. It was Natsuko who told him that Max had driven out of town that night and thrown the body in the river.
He didn’t like that. It seemed wrong to him, disrespectful. The animal dragged under, the plush dark fur plastered thin. The buckshot weighing it down, the rot bearing it up, the spring floods filling its lungs, the rocks breaking its teeth and bones. But it wasn’t an animal by then, of course, and he could think of nothing better for it; and Natsuko was in his arms, and he had other things to think about.
Thursday he ate at Eberhard’s. His apartment was on the main plaza, next to a lurid Mister Donut–a place like a Hopper painting gone wrong–on the top floor of the long-defunct Hotel Panhellenica. The elegant ruined facade–the peeling yellow plaster and the tall grey-weathered wooden shutters–reminded him of the girls’ lodgings but, inside the old hotel was grander, the rooms still with a few fittings, oak and mahogany and green brass, great spinnakers of net curtain, and an ironwork balcony with a marble table like a butcher’s slab and perilous rattan chairs.
–You brought more books.
–They came last week. That’s all of them now. I had nowhere else for them.
He worked his way along the shelves while Sauer changed out of work clothes and carried off the food they’d bought.
–Nowhere at college?
–Not any more. I don’t plan to go back. Do you?
–I’m not sure yet. I thought you liked it there. You seemed made for it.
–I found it stifling. Too many old minds. How hungry are you, Ben?
Latin, the Golden and the Silver. Three shelves of German, two of Italian. A section of musical scores, then Russian and a phalanx of Greek, Ancient and Koine and modern, eight rows high, that turned the corner of one wall and went on, spine to spine, almost to the door. Thucydides in blood-red calfskin.
–Starving.
–Good! My mother used to say that hunger is the best cook. With luck it will make up for me.
He wandered down the corridor, past an array of luggage (stacked cargo boxes, a doctor’s bag, three ancien
t age-cracked leather suitcases) into a windowless kitchen. An extractor fan had been fitted at some point, its aperture a rough hole bashed dead-centre in the exterior wall, its blades long since congealed solid with grime. The kitchen units were more recent additions, their flawless whites as out of place in the old room as Eberhard was at the stove. He was making an omelette of sorts, cracking eggs one-handed straight into the pan, his face frowning with absorption, the apron bound over his shirt patterned with roses and robins.
–You look a right mess. So does that.
–Thank you. You get the smallest egg.
–How did you end up here?
–In Sparta? Oh, we used to come. Often, for holidays. The English always want islands. The Germans lack that obsession. I will let you into a little secret: we get the best end of the bargain.
–I meant the dig.
–That was Max. He recommended us. He gave our names to Dr Stanton, and so…here we all are.
–You knew the others?
–In a way. All of them, in a way, Eberhard said, and nodded at the new bread. –Can we make use of that, do you think?
He found a knife, cut up the loaf, filled a green-glazed jug with water. The room was clouded with the smell and haze of eggs and hot oil.
–In a way?
–We corresponded. I mean over the internet. We met, the five of us, on a site suited to our mutual interests. I’m sure you know the kind of thing.
–Did you ever meet them?
–Max, once, years ago. The others never, until now.
–Why does Eleschen steal things?
Eberhard glanced up at him, still frowning, half a mind on the eggs. –What kind of things?
–Sylvia. Clothes too, I think.
He wiped a forearm across his glasses, raised the pan, slid the omelette onto a plate, turned off the hob and began to cut. Without the hiss and spit of the oil the kitchen was abruptly quiet.
–How did you know about the clothes?
–The lice, he said, and Sauer laughed.
–The lice, of course. That’s perceptive of you. She was out with Natsuko one night. This wasn’t long after you arrived. She jumped over a garden wall and took some things off a washing line. Natsuko claims to have been very shocked and not an accomplice at all. It was blankets, not clothes, I think. Their rooms being so cold, you see. But otherwise you’re quite right.
