by Tobias Hill
–And is Jason right too?
–Is she kleptomanic? No! At least, not so far as I know.
–Then why steal–he started, and Eberhard turned, his face easing, a plate in each hand.
–I think you know why. I’ll take these. There’s wine in the fridge. Bring that and the water, if you could.
They ate on the balcony, silent until the plates were cleared, the lights coming on bit by bit below, illumination spreading from the cafés to the streets.
–I do know what you are, Ben said, and the rattan creaked precariously, Eberhard leaning to pour the wine.
–Do you? What am I, then?
–You’re playing a game. It’s just a game. Isn’t it?
He felt a tremor of relief when Sauer shook his head.
–It’s not a game. On the contrary. What we do here is in earnest. You should understand that too.
–I’m trying to.
–I know you are. You’re doing very well. Much better than I had expected. Even Max has been impressed.
–Was it some kind of test? The hunt? he asked, but Eberhard shook his head, shrugging the question off.
–I saw you once, you know. By the Oxford canal. You were on a bicycle.
–I didn’t know you’d noticed, he said, and then, because it seemed impossible not to go on, You were crying.
–Yes, I was.
A bat flicked through the dark. He thought of Metamorphosis. The eggs tinctured with blood, monstrous, red as a warning. He reached for the glass Eberhard was offering and drank off half of it straight, glad of the wine’s astringency, his stomach gripped by nausea.
–Are you alright?
–I’m fine. Did you…had you lost someone, then?
–Lost? No, no. My family are alive and well. Well fed, well heeled, well set. Counting their hoards like Nibelungen in Berlin, London and New York. No, there are no losses there. Not fatal ones, at least.
–Why were you crying, then?
–For Sparta.
–But, he began, and didn’t know what else to say; and said, But you were in Oxford.
–But Oxford is alive and well. Or at least it thinks it is. No one need shed tears for Oxford. That place is happy with its lot. Are you happy, Ben? he asked, and Ben answered without thinking.
–Happier than I’ve ever been.
–I’m so glad, he said, and raised his glass. –To happiness?
–To happiness.
Dig Sermons was their name for them. Missy called them other things–Halftime Talks; Team Dialogue– but more and more, that last fortnight, the lunchtime meetings had become less dialogue and more soliloquy. The ten of them would sit listening, or appearing to listen, or not even stretching to that, like children at the back of class texting gossip between their knees. Natsuko would be eating already, Jason eyeing up Eleschen, Themeus picking his teeth, Elias nudging him, Max and Giorgios brooding, and Missy’s eyes would seek out Ben’s, appealing always for his help, entreating and impeaching him, angry and sad, her voice speaking only to itself.
–Okay! The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and I love you all, but my feet are wet and I hear my spare socks calling to me like Ligea and Leucosia. Gather round, citizens. What’s in the news this morning?
Friday. A cobalt sky. The pits like so many open graves. Bees crashing through the cyclamen.
–Hello? Calling Planet Spartacus, is anyone receiving me? What’s happening underground? What do we got? Pigsties, potsherds, palaces? Come on guys, talk to me.
Jason beside him on the Menelaion steps, cigarette in lax fingers, kneecaps poking through his jeans, skinny as a glam rockstar, whispering down Natsuko’s neck. –What’s that?
–Stop tickling.
–If you tell me what that is.
–Fermented soybeans.
–Like beer?
–Beer is bad. This is good. Power breakfast. Want to try?
–You couldn’t pay me. I’ve seen spew looked better than that. That’s frightening, you eating that–
–Jason! How’s the fishing today?
–What?
–No bites? No catches? No buried treasure? Where are you on, my man?
–Bronze Trench.
–So when I came by earlier it looked like you were doing something. Is your work on a need-to-know basis only, or can you share with us?
Chrystos grimacing, raising his hand before Jason found a counterpunch. Missy turning on him like a rat on veal.
–Chrystos!
–We found more infill to the west. Jason was working with me.
–Great. That’s the Late Helladic fill?
–It goes down through three levels now. The pebble paving and two clay floors.
–Thanks, Chrystos. Now that might not seem like much, but a pit context is always worth following up. You all know digging’s hard work. You know no one ever dug for nothing. Still…the consensus today seems to be that things are slow. Anyone disagree?
Nothing. The gyre of a skylark. Max opening a newspaper.
–It’s slow. I take the heat for that. The new pits didn’t pan out so good. What I want to say today is this: it’s been worth all the work so far. Already we’ve found some fantastic stuff. A new shaft grave. A burial. Six thousand small finds and counting. That’s more than we were hoping for, and I don’t think we’re done here yet. Another month, maybe three weeks, we’ll up sticks and move down the hill and see what Orthia has in store for us. But until then I need you all–
–What is that? Eleschen said, and before Missy could bridle (her face was flushed, Ben saw, and sweating) Max was getting to his feet, head bent, one hand raised in admonition. Only then did he hear the whining.
It came and went, in just the way that a child would cry and falter and cry again as it began to forget the origins of its unhappiness. Its source was still some way off, but getting closer, or at least louder.
His first thought was that it was Sylvia. The notion came to him that a door had been left unlocked and that somehow she had followed them, the way that dogs in stories did. There was a strain of fear in her voice, a wheedling apology, as if she knew she had done wrong and whined by way of confession.
–Sylvia? he called, and took a step up the ruins. The whining began to rise again in the trees beyond the chapel and the shepherds’ path, the place where, eight days before, Missy had found her burial. Eleschen was clambering up to him, pulling roughly at his sleeve.
–Someone’s been teaching her new tricks, he began to say, but looked down at her halfway through and saw that something was wrong.
The whining stopped. As it cut out there was a last ejection of sound, a noise lying somewhere between a dog’s bark and a big cat’s growl. And then the voice returned again, ascending, up and up, like smoke, and hanging there, like smoke, reaching some perfect awful pitch, not animal and not human but sad and mad and heartbreaking.
He turned his face away from it. Max was already running, helterskelter up the slope past the chapel and on down, falling once on the infirm ground before he reached and crossed the shepherds’ path. Natsuko was crouching, her hands over her ears, Chrystos bending over her. Jason and Eberhard were by the sheds–Jason looked to have dragged them there–inaudibly arguing. Eleschen was gazing at the trees, her hand still on his arm, her cheeks and lips white as her hair; the skin around her eyes blue-white, as if she had been drained of blood.
–What was that? Missy was saying at his back, What was it? Excuse me, will someone please tell me what that was?
–Tsakal, one of the Greeks answered, and then cried out excitedly. He looked round and saw Themeus, arm raised past him at the woods, and turning back he saw it there, beyond the trees, watching them.
It was not his jackal: not his jackal. It shook him that that surprised him. This animal was like the first–the same famished, infernal grin–but smaller and less beautiful, its coat patchy and rabbit-grey. It was misshapen, too, its head too small, its legs too thin to hold up its dist
ended form.
A crash echoed back from the woods. The jackal ran up the rise beyond and stopped to look back again. It stepped over the top and was gone before Max came out of the pines. They watched him scramble after it, making hard work of the higher ground, going no further than the ridge, standing there for a long while before he came trudging back, waving their questions away, snatching up his trowel like a sword, hunkering down by the Skull Room.
He didn’t see the others that night. Eberhard drove him down to town with Max still as a carving in the front and Eleschen in the back beside him with her arms folded tight across her chest and her face pinched, as if she felt a draught, though she leaned towards her door and kept her face to her window. The only talk on the way was an interminable argument in which Max asked Eberhard not to hum and Eberhard said he had not been humming, and Max insisted that he had and hummed the tune to prove it, and Eberhard calmly stated that, be that as it may, he never hummed, that he found humming distasteful, though he would sometimes whistle or sing…and so on past Afisou and down as far as the HellaSpar by the track to the Ortheion, where the gypsies offered their girls and loitered for coins they saved for cigarettes and country wine. It was odd too, he knew, for Natsuko and Eleschen not to go home together, and he wondered if they had argued themselves, but couldn’t screw up the courage to ask.
Eberhard dropped him by the hotel and drove off as Ben turned to ask what they would be doing later. As he reversed the Delux he was already talking to those still in the car, his mouth twisted into a snarl. The look on his face was one of angry alarm, and Ben looked down the street to see what had startled him; but there was no traffic at all, the road empty except for trees, the orange trees and corpulent palms, and the kiosk vendor selling phonecards to a black man on a mobile phone, his rarity as striking as that of a Nubian in Imperial Rome.
He lasted two hours alone in his room–pacing and reading newspapers (Protests against NATO Troops, Kidnap Family in Plea, and More Bombings Expected in Madrid, as if bombs were now forecast, like rain)–then rang Natsuko’s mobile, and getting only her recorded message (the voice too high and kittenish, a parody of her own) he put on his muddy boots again and went out, first to Eberhard’s, then on to the cathedral square and up to Thermopylae Street. He found no one in, or no one who would answer him, and when he walked back by Eberhard’s he saw no sign of Sauer’s car.
He stood in the town plaza, by the lit plate glass of Mister Donut, looking up at the sky through the trees. Somewhere a band was practising, the sound of brass warming the air. It was almost Independence Day. The weather had turned colder again. The stars were overcast, the moon a lowbeam through fog, and part of him was sorry while another part was glad.
Chrystos found him the next afternoon. He was working back to back with Jason in the cramped shaft of East Midden, both of them with trench shovels, not talking much and not at all about what had happened last night, Jason’s curses and jabbing elbows being answers enough.
He had hit raw rubble for a third time, was yanking out rocks like bad teeth, twisting the shovel blade, when he felt a shadow fall across him, and looking up at the pit mouth, blinking into the sun, he saw Chrystos peering in.
–You missed an easy bit. Just there.
–I’m saving it for later, he said, and stopping to catch his breath heard Chrystos chuckle down at him, the pit walls hollowing out the sound.
–Like the best meat. I wanted to talk.
–What about?
–The jackal you killed.
He heard the scramble of dirt behind him, as if Jason were not getting up but falling. East Midden was deep but not long. They would be stood close together.
–It didn’t look dead last time I saw it, he said, and Chrystos smiled again. The light was odd on his face. It threw him into silhouette but lit up the lines around his eyes. It made him look kindly and old.
–Not the bitch. I mean the dog.
–The bitch? Jason said in his ear, but he could hear that he already understood just as well as he did himself.
–The bitch is carrying. She should not be out of her home. She must be very hungry. Very hungry to have come here, where people are, to find her mate. But she will not find her mate. Because her mate is dead.
–How do you know?
–Because she came.
–We didn’t kill it, Jason said, and Ben jumped at the harshness of his voice. The undertow of fear and anger. –We take rabbits, birds, that’s it.
–Sparta is a small place. Everyone talks to everyone. If someone else–
–Then no one did. Maybe a car hit it. They must just die sometimes.
–Sometimes.
–It wasn’t us. And what the fuck’s it got to do with you?
–Nothing. Your business is your own.
–What happens to her now? Ben said, If the other one is dead?
Chrystos put his hands on his knees, readying himself to rise. His eyes were still on Ben’s. Later it occurred to him that he hadn’t looked at Jason at all.
–You saw her. She cannot hunt and eats for many.
–Will she die, then?
–Yes, of course. If one is killed, then all are killed, he said, and drew back, and was gone.
He didn’t see the bitch again for five days, except in his sleep.
Sunday morning he dreamed of the den. It was a fissure in the rocks, half-filled with rubble and loose earth. Narthex and opuntia bracketed out the light, but he could hear the jackal, its breathing on his neck in the dark, its panting in his ear like Jason’s in the pit. Now and then there were other sounds, too, a whining and a dull, irregular, rasping grind, like a file drawn across a trowel, and after an unbearable time it came to him that he was hearing the creature eating itself.
He woke to the smell of chlorine. The shower was on, and Natsuko’s sneakers, T-shirt and jeans were heaped pink-white-blue on the floor. He hadn’t given her a key, but somehow she had found a way to let herself in that last week. He suspected the slicked-back boy, had wondered if he should be glad for himself or jealous of him.
She was naked when she came in, and he lay, pretending sleep, watching her moving around, making tea, drying herself, stealing his dressing gown, until finally she looked up and caught him.
–Bad man.
–Good man. Come here, I’ll show you.
–No. You’re too bad. Too lazy.
–Why, what time is it?
–You slept all morning. Like a cat.
He checked the clock and swore, although he’d had no reason not to sleep in; and then the dream came back to him, and he threw off the blankets, not wanting to return to the fissure and the grinding.
The kettle was reaching a boil. The noon light came in the window, slanting downwards through the vapour. Natsuko was gone again, back into the bathroom, singing.
–You sound happy. Where have you been?
–Swimming.
–Always swimming. You must have been a fish in a past life.
The hair dryer started up next door, on and off, bursts of noise drowning out fragments of her. –…dolphin. That’s why I like eating…not all morning. Also church.
He went and got the kettle. –Church?
–…sometimes. We go with Max. He believes very strongly. And the Greek ways are very precious.
–I didn’t know, he said, pouring. –I thought Japan was something else.
–Where I come from there are Christians.
–So you believe in God? he said, and felt her arms around him, still moist from the shower, luxuriating in him.
–It is important to believe in something.
–I dreamed of the jackal, he said, and held her hands where they were twining into his hair.
–To dream of killing is good luck.
Not that jackal, he thought, and said, Is that what your God tells you?
–No. But I have many gods.
–Lucky you. What’s bad luck, then?
–To dream of being killed,
she said, and drew him round to face her.
The next night it came to him again, one nightmare bleeding into the next.
He saw the first creature, drowning, its eyes flayed out by river grime. As if Natsuko had cursed him he dreamed of the killing itself, the hills, the woods and the clearing rendered in silence and slow motion. And finally he dreamed that he woke alone to find Stanton by his bed, her head that of a jackal, her eyes those of an old god, and her hands held out to him, to guide him through the underworld.
He woke to barking in the yards outside. He got up as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake Natsuko.
He was about to shut the window when he heard a sound further off, beyond that of the dogs and higher, pitched in falsetto. At first he half-convinced himself it was a siren, an emergency crew somewhere far off, going to or from some crime or accident.
Already, though, against his will, he recognised the jackal’s voice. That distant loneliness and wrath. The raw thread of it strung through the duller bayings and chitterings of the town animals.
–Is that her? Natsuko said, drowsy in the dark behind him, and he nodded, listening. –How close is she?
–Not very close, he said, and locked the window as he shut it.
Sometimes, when he kissed her, she would go utterly still. Motionless, like an animal. It was as if she was waiting for something. He didn’t think it was him.
Their sex, too, bewildered him. He would look into her face–her head back, her collarbones like wings–and see the pleasure that he gave her, and still he did not feel he had her. He possessed her and possessed nothing. Afterwards, sometimes, alone, he would remember that and know that one day it would enrage him.
She sat beside him in the bed, hair falling straight across her breasts, eating yoghurt and honey from the jar.
–What are you thinking? he asked, and she stopped to think, then to look down at him, her eyes dilated in the dark.
