by Tobias Hill
He hauled himself out of the pit and made his way through the outlying pines. Jason raised a hand. He was dressed for the beach, Ben realised, and now lay in the shade, spreadeagled on a bed of needles, not indolently but bonelessly, more like a corpse than a sunbather.
–The soldier returns from war.
Ben lowered himself down next to him. –Don’t call me that.
–It’s what you are. You’ve got the guts. Not everyone does. I saw what you did to that jackal.
He lay back and closed his eyes. The smell of the pines was overpowering. He could feel the pulse of blood in his hands, could hear a song thrush overhead. Eleschen murmuring: Max muttering.
–Listen to the cicadas!
–I hear.
–They sound like they never get tired. Like the sea never gets tired. Remember Gythion, before we sailed? The sun came out and you said you always liked the seaside. You looked so handsome. Can we go back there one day?
–No.
–I liked it there. I liked things better then.
–Things are fine now.
–I know. I’m not saying…I just liked it. The cicadas reminded me, is all. They make it feel like summer.
–The gypsies don’t like them. They say it is bad luck, when the cicadas come too soon.
–Don’t say that. Why are you saying that?
Jason nudged him in the ribs. He was grinning sideways, eyes blacked out behind sunglasses. –Natural born killer, you are. We need people like you. You’ve even started to dig like one. You deserve a medal, mate. The Order of the Shovelmonkeys.
–Shut up, he said, softly, but Jason wasn’t listening, was raising his hand again in a salute.
–To Greece we give our shining blades. Aren’t you hungry? The cheese is alright. There’s wine too, if you’re up to it.
He looked up at the others. Eberhard was asleep, as far as he could tell, shirtsleeves rolled up, scalp sun-pinked. Natsuko was tearing heels off a cottage loaf, like those he had taken to the man in the pit. Her face was streaked with grime. Eleschen was wearily spilling wine into three mismatched glasses: she held out one as he watched and Eberhard opened an eye and reached out to accept it in ophidian slow motion.
From where they lay the pits were out of sight: the dig felt far away. And how would they have looked, from that remove? Like tourists who had found an idyllic picnic spot. Like London workers, drinking too much on the annual office outing. Festive, too, languidly foreshadowing the festivals that would soon begin in earnest all around them–the week would be a short one, with no work from Friday to Monday. A watcher might have envied them, might have thought them beautiful, or fortunate, or desirable, might have wished that he could sit down in their company. But only from a distance.
Max was reading the papers. His head was bent into shadow. Of his face Ben could see nothing but the jut of his brows and the pearlescent grey shine of his teeth. His grin, as he turned the pages, was a rictus, fixed and menacing as that of a gargoyle.
Natsuko had explained the newspapers. On the yacht at Laurium they had left instructions for the release of three men from a prison outside Athens. With their names had been the conditions for the sending of two messages. One was to appear in acknowledgement of their terms, one when the terms had been discharged. Each message would appear in the form of a personal advertisement, to be printed every day for a week in four national newspapers. The first message had appeared hastily, only a day after they had taken Kiron Makronides. After the second came, and Max heard from the men themselves, then Kiron would be freed. But the second message had never come. They had been waiting for two months. Easter was the deadline they had given, and Saturday the last day on which the newspapers would come before it was all over.
Who are they? he had asked, The men?
Just men, she’d said, Good men, and kissed him, stopping the questions up in him. Crawling up over him, her hair falling across his face.
Eberhard brought him food. He ate what there was in silence. He was surprised to find himself, not loathing them–though he did sometimes loathe them now–but thinking of how hard it must have been for them to work as they had those last months. The days at the dig with the nights still pending. The evenings of waiting, of planning and patience, and every three days the long dark climb to the cave.
Eleschen woke him. Somehow he had fallen asleep with his head in her lap. She looked very lovely, smiling down at him.
–Ben?
–Where am I?
–Right here, silly. You dropped off. You were talking in your sleep, and you looked so uncomfortable…Feeling better now?
He sat up. His mouth tasted of cheap wine. Bitter lees. –What time is it?
–Late. It doesn’t matter really. No one cares about this now. Sleep some more–
He stood stiffly, Eleschen standing beside him, embarrassed, dusting off her clothes. They were walking back towards the Pigsty in awkward silence when they heard Jason’s yell.
He ran the last yards to the pit. The others were already there, so packed together that at first he couldn’t see what they clustered around. When he looked up again he saw Chrystos and someone else, up on the skyline by the chapel, and somehow the thought that they might have witnessed what his friends had found before Ben had himself was awful, grossly unfair. He jumped down, pushed his way between Eberhard and Max, and saw it.
For a moment he thought it was only a jar. It was cheap ware, wide-mouthed, made for the kitchen, not the table. The clay had been fired almost black along one flank. In hacking through the roots Jason had broken it open. Inside, in the shadows cast by the pit and the huddle of those around it, Ben could make out a human skull. It hung inverted from a coiled train of vertebra, the cranium white and delicate as an egg, and no larger than the circumference of his fist.
In the end there were fourteen of them.
Those were the last days of the dig, although they didn’t know it yet. For that brief space they worked together again. There was room for only four at first, abreast and back to back, in the southernmost pit where the jars lay, but the going was hard and they worked turnabout, Missy with Max, Chrystos with Ben, Max with Chrystos, the others lingering to watch, or carrying the finds away.
He wondered how it would have been if they had found the jars before the dig had come apart. It would have seemed exciting, then, he thought; a cause for celebration. Instead they worked almost in silence. The sinewy roots and fragile clay made the labour tortuous, and the knowledge of what the jars held stilled them, instilled a dullness in them, a snappish intensity. Even with Chrystos beside him, it never seemed to Ben that anything had been forgotten or put right, or that their renewed collaboration could mend their differences, or make them friends again, as they had been, in the beginning.
Each evening they parked the cars by the Pigsty and worked with the motors running, the fumes and clamour of the engines drifting down into the pits through the crossed star of the headlights. Elias found the fourteenth jar on Wednesday, after dark, but after that there were no more, or no more that they ever came upon, and towards sunset on Thursday they began to drift away, their goodbyes and happy Easters half-hearted at best, Elias and Themeus going first, then Missy and the brothers, so that the six of them were the last to leave, Therapne stark and beautiful as it had ever been in the dusk behind them.
Eleschen and Natsuko had examined the first eight jars by then. Seven held a single form, the eighth a pair. Those last were the worst. Their skulls were enlarged, lantern-jawed. Their foreheads were humped and crenellated, more like those of horned animals than human infants. Four of the others were deformed in the same way as Laco had been, their heads pitifully small. Three were poly-dactylic, or syndactylic, or both, their digits mutiplied and fused. The last and least of those seemed perfect, as Eleschen laid it out, Max the first to find its only flaw, a pockmarked nub of bone. The vestige of a third thumb.
They stopped at the HellaSpar for wine. By the time they reached Eberhard�
��s there had already been an argument, into the aftermath of which they wandered like unwelcome strangers. Max sat out on the balcony in ferocious isolation. Eberhard’s composure was brittle as he admitted them.
–What happened here, then? Jason said, too loudly, much too avidly, as Eberhard took the wine.
–Nothing this won’t heal.
–Sure? I mean we can piss off, drive round the block, if we’re interrupting–
–Do be quiet, Eberhard said, and for a long time Jason was.
–Well. Would anyone like to eat?
There were some eggs, four smoked trout, a dark bread, and a green leaf Eberhard had found in the market but which nobody recognised, and which remained bitter even after it was boiled. Max came in and sat with them, though he ate nothing and none of them could manage much when it came to it. Afterwards they brought in the ramshackle wicker chairs and drank in the sitting room. By then the wine had softened them.
–Why did they bury them like that? Natsuko said finally, quietly, as if the bodies in the jars were almost unmentionable. Max’s chair groaned as he answered.
–No one buries them. The father chooses to expose his child. He puts it in something. A jar. He takes it out of his house. If the child is healthy he leaves it for others to find. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with it. The father has no food for it. He doesn’t want another girl. Then maybe someone takes the baby. If no one wants it then it dies. But these babies are different. No one will ever want these ones. The father is ashamed of them. To him these ones are monsters. He puts them in the jars and takes them where no one will look for them. The old place down the hill where people throw their broken things. They go on throwing broken things. Soon no one knows the jars are there. But no one buries them.
–What do the bones say, Eberhard asked, too tired or grave to articulate it as a question, and Eleschen stirred, uncoiling in her armchair.
–It’s mercury. Just like before. The damage is so bad the mothers must have ingested it.
–Why would they do that?
–Fear, I guess, of something they thought was worse. Plague, or anyway disease. Mercury kills off some infections. I mean it kills all kinds of things. It looks like Laco died of something like that: the votives and the medicines we found with her point to it. I guess they thought they were protecting themselves.
For a while none of them stirred. Jason lit a cigarette, shelving off ash into his empty glass. Out in the square a woman laughed delightedly, the sound jarring, too loud and out of place. The streets were quiet otherwise. In a few hours it would be Good Friday, the day of mourning.
–What are we going to do? Natsuko said, and only when Eberhard answered did Ben understand they had moved on; that they were no longer speaking of the children in the jars.
–We begin again.
–How? Jason asked, just as Eleschen said–Where?
–With ease, and anywhere. There are hundreds of Kirons. They can’t hide them all from us. We see out the excavation and make things up with Dr Stanton–
–Bollocks to that.
–We may need her trust, and if not then her references. It won’t be so hard, Jason. She’s been crying out for our friendship.
–Let her cry, Max said. Why waste our time with her? We do not need another dig. Soon Greece will be full of tourists…
–I could be a tourist, Eleschen said.
–If that’s what we choose to do, then alright. In any case, we need to find fresh hunting grounds. We’ve kept our hands clean here. No one knows what we’ve done–
–Ben knows, Max said, and he answered automatically, out of nothing more than the desire to defend himself.
–And Kiron.
Their heads turned towards him, all at once, in the dark, Eleschen hissing.
–Max, stop laying into Ben, can’t you? He’s one of us now.
–Is he?
–Well, anyway, just leave him alone. And what’s this about Kiron?
–He knows our voices, Eberhard said, thoughtfully. –Ben also told me that he knows some of us are English. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not enough to distinguish us. We leave him well away from here, as planned, and no one will ever be the wiser–
Jason giggled abruptly. He held up his hands as they looked at him. –No, sorry.
–What’s wrong with you?
–Nothing, I’m just thinking out loud. Don’t mind me.
–I don’t see that there’s anything to laugh about.
–Depends on your sense of humour, Eb. Mine’s black and you don’t have one. No offence. It’s all turning to shit, that’s all.
–What is?
–All of it. Us. Those bastards up in Athens are going to call our bluff, and now we start digging up monsters.
–You’re being premature. We could still hear from them. And irrespective of whether we do or not, the jars have nothing to do with what we’ve accomplished–
–No?
Jason was shaking his head, shuffling upright out of his chair, lighting a new cigarette, and waving out the match, the movements all confused in the dimness, chaotic and ungainly.
–What do we think of Sparta, then, now we’ve found their accomplishments? I bet Helen was proud of them. How many are there down there, do you reckon? You’d think they might have guessed they were doing something wrong after the first dozen–
–Don’t be ridiculous. Medicines are poisonous, it’s in their nature. To judge between the dose that heals and that which harms is incredibly hard. People still misjudge that now. Look at the Victorians–
–Who cares about the Victorians? I didn’t come here because I look up to the Victorians. What I’m saying, all this time, here we were, worshipping at the feet of Sparta, following in the footsteps of Sparta–that is what we were doing–digging for the glorious accomplishments of Sparta. And here they are, and they’re horrors. Eh? So much for fucking Sparta!
He left soon after Jason’s outburst. Natsuko came with him. From the street they could still hear Max and Jason shouting, four floors up. As they crossed the empty square Natsuko took his arm and held on to it until they reached the hotel’s light.
–Monsters, he heard her whisper, hours later in the dark. Her breathing was deep and even. She might have been speaking in her sleep. When he bent over her face he saw that she had been crying.
It came to him, as he watched her, that what Jason had said was no more than they had all felt. He had done what he always did, had said what others would not, could not bear to lay out in words. But they had thought it, all the same. The same anger and dismay had gripped them all as they had unearthed the jars, bearing them up out of the ground: finding, after all they had done, not the glories, but the horrors.
They woke at the same moment, or so it seemed to them, their eyes opening to one another, as if they had not only slept but dreamed together, though neither of them could remember anything they might have dreamed.
It was late, but outside the streets were full of shuttered shops and unlit windows. The hotel felt funereal. They had missed breakfast and walked up to the cathedral square to eat with Eleschen and Sylvia, but found them gone, and the rooms stale and hollow with absence.
Natsuko cooked and he helped her. Out of nothing, in the tiny kitchen, she made enough for both of them and more, enough for four, then six, or eight, her face determined at first, then sweating and panicky in the dull stove-light. Grilled aubergines and stuffed courgettes and peppers with preserved bracken fronds, sliced Laconian oranges with honey and cinnamon, rice balls with seams and cores of pickled plum and salmon skin and ginger simmered in wine.
–Isn’t this enough? he asked, as she was pressing rice in her hands: when she glanced up at him, answerless, it looked as if she was praying.
Afterwards she dozed in her old narrow bed while he sat beside her on the pillow, leafing without much interest through Eleschen’s dog-eared books–Funerary Architecture of the Minoans; The Site of Giv’at ha-Oranim– or looking out of the d
usty window at the sunlit cathedral. Now and then women would enter, some with their arms full of flowers, their activity as mysterious to him as that of birds or insects. Natsuko woke again before noon, and they wrapped up the food and filled the fridge. The sight of the shelves stocked full and bright seemed to cheer her. She found her mobile, tried Eleschen’s, and wasn’t downcast when there was no answer.
–Let’s go away.
–Go where?
–I don’t mind. Just us. Can we?
He sat down beside her, lowering his voice in the empty apartment. He could not keep the excitement out of it. –Do you mean leave?
She thought about it; chewed her lip; shook her head.
–But would you? If I did?
–I don’t want to be here. Maybe, if you want to, we can go on our picnic now?
They packed a lunch and set out west, through the outskirts towards Mystras. Natsuko had been there only once, as he had, and the walk was longer than either of them expected, but she didn’t seem to mind, and he was glad, himself, simply to walk along beside her, the sun on their backs and Sparta falling behind them.
It was a beautiful day. The air was so clear that the mountains had stepped closer, leaning in, their highest peaks still white. He was smiling up at them, searching for the ruined city through the rising trees, as they reached the first of the Taygetos villages.
Three steps later he realised that Natsuko had stopped behind him. They were nearly at the village church. A group of boys were working at something in an empty lot beside the churchyard. Two were dragging branches down the road: a third was throwing the spokes of a broken chair onto a heap of wood that already rose above his head around the foot of a makeshift gibbet. A rag-man hung from the crossbeam.
–What’s that?
–The Judas. They burn it.
–When?
–Tomorrow night. Midnight is when Christ comes back from the dead.
The rag-man was headless. The tallest boy was on a stepladder, unsmiling, trussing up its many-fingered hands.
–What do they burn him for?
–For his betrayal.
