The Tomb of Zeus

by Barbara Cleverly

  “And the people?” said Letty, smiling at the slim brown boys who, in their impatience to parade strangers through their village, were tugging at bridles and whacking at the donkeys' rears.

  “You must decide,” replied Aristidis.

  The audience was mainly female, Letty thought, as they clattered up to the village square. Heads bobbed shyly out of sight behind windows; some, bolder, peered round doors. One or two even gathered on the edges of rooftop terraces to wave a greeting.

  At last Aristidis called a halt halfway up one of the sloping roads out of the square. “And here we must leave you, Miss Laetitia, in the care of the fourth and most vital member of your team!”

  An elderly woman was hurrying, arms open in welcome, down the cobbled path towards them.

  “And here she is! My mother,” Aristidis told them. “Maria. Your…what would be the word, William? Watchdog?”

  “Chaperone,” supplied Gunning. “Without which you could not possibly run your operation. Aristidis does not exaggerate his mother's importance, Letty! But she's also your hostess. You are to stay here in Maria's house. I will be lodging with Aristidis and his wife and children at the other end of the village. Very proper. The sexes are rigidly separated on the island. Unmarried people simply do not go about together unchaperoned. The villagers will find our relationship difficult enough to understand as it is.” He leaned towards her and said confidentially, “I must ask you, Letty, to avoid showing me any public signs of affection or intimacy for the duration of our stay. They would be shocked by any such demonstration.”

  “You know, William,” she drawled, “I find more and more to admire in Cretans. I now add good taste to the list. And here's one Cretan I shall certainly like,” she said, watching Maria greet her son.

  The small, straight, black-clad figure waited with quiet dignity for Letty to dismount and approach. Her face, Letty thought, had all the colour and texture of a polished walnut shell. Her large dark eyes, which retained an unquenched beauty, were not merry and insouciant like her son's but watchful. It was a face that showed calm after a good deal of tumult, even suffering perhaps, and Letty reflected that this woman, who must be now over sixty, had lived and raised her family through a calamitous time on the island.

  “Miss Laetitia, you are welcome to my house and to my village. My grandsons will take your things inside, and if you will come with me I'll show you to your room.” She spoke slowly and listened, encouraging, to every halting syllable as Letty replied, using her small store of polite phrases.

  Suddenly the hesitantly delivered words in a strange language were insufficient to express Letty's gratitude for the warmth of the welcome, no adequate response to the eager curiosity. Impulsively, she reached out her arms and hugged Maria, planting a kiss on each wrinkled cheek. A burst of laughter and a reciprocal hug greeted the gesture. Unexpectedly, Maria turned to Gunning and said, “You did not tell us how beautiful your new English mistress was, William. Now I understand why you were not so unhappy to leave the city and Mr. Russell's employ!”

  Gunning replied in equally fast Greek. “She is indeed lovely, Maria. And I warn you—my new English mistress understands what you say though she does not yet speak the language with much fluency But a week or two swapping gossip with you and she'll be yat-tering at the washing trough with all the other women before we know it.”

  Again, Letty was surprised by the ease with which Gunning had adapted to his surroundings. She was impressed too by the open affection and intimacy he seemed to receive. Things were easier for a man in this most masculine of societies, she decided. But survival here could only stand her in good stead when she returned to England.

  After a hasty good-bye from Gunning and a reminder that she was to present herself at the site at four o'clock, the party clattered off, leaving her alone with Maria.

  Letty followed her host through a gateway and into a courtyard, its paths lined with pots of basil, mint, and rosemary. The centre was filled with a medley of lush-leaved trees, lemon and orange, their golden fruit gleaming amongst the dark foliage, and, skirting these, rows of salad crops, most unknown to Laetitia. The small space spoke of meticulous husbandry; every square inch was producing something useful or lovely.

  Maria slowed, acknowledging her guest's interest. “Kastelli is known as the village of gardens. We are fortunately placed here. We have good soil, and water in abundance. It runs down from the snowfields on the mountains and most houses have their own spring or well.” She pointed to a fountain where the carved head of a god—another Dionysos, Laetitia guessed—shook his wet stone locks and opened wide his laughing mouth to spout a clear jet of cold meltwater into a basin. By the door to the house stood a bench shaded by an overhanging jasmine tree. It was covered in woven cushions, each, it seemed, the preserve of a scrawny ginger cat, blinking with suspicion at the stranger.

  They entered the cool interior. Letty's senses, already seduced by a hundred different sounds and scents on the journey, were teased with a fresh palette. She wrinkled her nose in appreciation of a savoury smell from her childhood. Something delicious was simmering on the cooking range.

  “Hare?” she wanted to ask. “Could that be hare, stewing in the pot?” But her vocabulary was not up to it and the best she could do was “rabbit.” It seemed to work. Maria tilted her chin in the emphatic Greek “no” and gave her the word for “hare.” Letty repeated and learned it. She understood the next piece of information, which was that the dish would be produced at supper time. Lunch would be on the table in half an hour. Maria hoped Laetitia liked cheese and salads? Today she had prepared some spanakopita, because no one disliked the spinach-and-goat-cheese pastries.

  Letty settled in the place indicated at a polished wood table covered with embroidered mats and received the welcoming glass of cold water and a saucer of sweetmeats. As she sipped, she looked about her. Pride of place was accorded, largely because of its uncompromising demands on space, to a loom where a length of tough and colourful peasant cloth was stretched, halfway through its production. The rest of the furnishings were sparse: four chairs, a decorated bridal chest, divans along two walls providing seating or sleeping places, racks of pottery, and a large and lovingly polished sideboard. Along its length, a lace runner accommodated a cargo of silver-framed family photographs.

  “May I look?” Letty asked politely when she had finished her drink.

  “Certainly. You will see faces that you recognise already, I think,” Maria said, waving her towards the sideboard.

  “Oh, yes.” Laetitia started on the right with the most recent exhibits. “I know Aristidis. And this must be his wife…”

  “Dafni,” supplied Maria.

  “And his two daughters and two sons—and I've seen them before. Two minutes ago! They were carrying my baggage in.”

  “The best grandsons an old woman could wish for!” Maria smiled happily. “Nikolas and Stephanos.”

  “And Aristidis's father?” Letty asked delicately. She had assumed Maria to be a widow but had noticed that widows, in any country, never seemed to resent an enquiry about their lost husbands.

  The smile faded a little and took on an element of pride. “Here he is,” said Maria, picking up a posed studio portrait of a handsome bearded man. “Ioannis. My son looks much like him, don't you think?”

  “He does indeed.”

  Aristidis's father was in traditional dress and, apart from the old-fashioned fez he wore, where Aristidis favoured the piratical black kerchief knotted over his brow, she could have been looking at the same individual. The illusion was strengthened by the fact that the age of the man in the photograph appeared to be the same as that of Aristidis in the present.

  “Ioannis was thirty-six when he died,” Maria said. “Four years younger than my son is now. It hardly seems possible! Aristidis was only a child when his father died. But he has never forgotten him.”

  Good manners and lack of Greek discouraged Letty from indulging her curiosity further, b
ut she had reckoned without the Cretan love of giving and receiving news and stories. Maria, correctly interpreting her guest's continued interest in the portrait in her hands, explained further: “My husband died in 1898. At the end of August. Many hundreds of us died that summer.”

  Letty made a silent calculation. “The rebellion against the Turks? Was he caught up in that?”

  “Yes. The rebellion. Ioannis was killed. A most unjust death.” The dark eyes filled with tears but her chin went up. “My husband was palikare! A fine strong man. A fighter for freedom. My sons—all palikares. My grandsons also if their country should ever call on them to fight will be palikares.”

  Letty thought she was getting the flavour of the Cretan word.

  Maria sighed and looked with pride at a large framed print on the wall. Letty recognised the features of Venizélos, leader of the independence movement, politician, prime minister first of Crete—his home country—then of Greece itself. His handsome but somber features did not look out of place in the family lineup. He could have been anyone's uncle. The eyes twinkled behind the scholar's eyeglasses, the balding head was well shaped, the beard and moustache were greying at the edges. On an English wall he would have been thought the epitome of Victorian respectability.

  “Eleuthérios Venizélos,” said Letty. “My father took me to hear him speak when he came to England seven years ago. He came over to accept an honorary doctorate.” Though not an immediately attractive prospect for a sixteen-year-old girl, Letty had told herself that anyone given a Christian name which meant “Freedom” probably deserved a sympathetic hearing. She pronounced again “Eleuthérios,” enjoying the sound of the light syllables dancing on her tongue.

  “My sons would fight to the death for eleuthérios,” pronounced Maria. Letty was left wondering whether she meant the politician or the ideal and decided there was probably little distinction.

  The most recent photograph, the least posed and obviously snapped by an amateur, showed three men standing with a show of pride for the camera, arm in arm on the edge of a trench. An archaeological dig was going on in the background. On the left Aristidis, on the right William Gunning, and between the two, Theodore Russell.

  “Ah,” said Letty, laughing and eager to use her new vocabulary, “three palikares in a row!”

  Maria gave her a swift sideways look. “Two,” she corrected. “Would you like to come up to your room, Laetitia? The staircase is over here and you have the whole of the floor over the living room. When the weather turns hot you can go onto the terrace and catch the cool air coming down from the mountain.”

  Letty made at once for the ladder. Maria followed her to the roof, happy to comment on the wide views and name the features of the landscape from the tiny offshore island of Dia, just visible to the north, through the flat, olive-covered plain of the Kastron Letty had crossed that morning to the herringbone pattern of the vineyards surrounding the village and, dominating the scene and drawing the gaze, Mount Juktas.

  “The Holy Mountain,” said Maria.

  Letty was silent, overawed and dismayed by the huge bulk. Brutal in its grey limestone, unsoftened by any green vegetation, the mountain beetled its brows at her. She could make out one or two zigzagging goat paths straggling up its flanks and guessed that where the goats might just be tolerated, a strange, soft city girl would be easily shrugged off. Looking beyond Juktas to the gleaming snow slopes of the far higher mountain of Ida to the west, she chose a defiant response. “Well, holy—I couldn't possibly say—but— mountain? It looks much more like a hill to me. And a rather ugly one at that.”

  Maria smiled. “When you're halfway to the top, you'll ask yourself whether it is a hill or a mountain you're climbing,” she said simply. “For us who are born in its shadow it is holy. It gives us water, pasture, a sense of place, and, in the past, protection. In times of trouble our ancestors would make for the caves on the summit, and the defences they had built up around the shoulders of the mountain would be the place of their last stand against the Invaders from the Sea. Aristidis has found these walls. Kyrie Evans has explored the summit. He found a sanctuary on the northern peak, there, do you see? A hilltop shrine he said had been lost. Not lost to the boys of our village! Some of the lads made quite a lot of money by selling Evans their collections of rings and seal stones. Many of them they'd found up there.”

  “Offerings to the gods? I've seen some of them in the museum,” said Letty.

  “Evans did not acquire the best,” said Maria with a trace of triumph. “The women of the village wear these stones around their necks as a charm—you will see many. They bear pretty carvings—usually of animals. We call them ‘milk stones’ because they increase the flow of milk when a woman is nursing. And, of course, no amount of piastres or persuasion is going to tempt a woman to give up her milk stone!”

  “Do you have one such?” Letty asked.

  “Indeed, I did have one,” said Maria. “But I handed it on to my daughter-in-law when Aristidis married. It was a very special stone-she will show you—red with a fine carving of a mother goat and her kid.” She laughed. “Very appropriate! And very effective! It was found by my great-grandfather up there on the mountain and has been passed down in the family.” She confided, “Every woman should have one around her neck…for good fortune. Who knows? Perhaps you will be granted such a find if Juktas is in a generous mood?”

  They both turned to the forbidding grey mass shouldering the village and Letty shivered. Maria covered her hand with hers and spoke softly, “Take heart, Laetitia. The mountain was holy before ever the warrior Greeks arrived from the mainland bringing their aggressive young god with them. Zeus was born; he lived and ruled with thunderbolts to maintain his capricious authority; he died. But the king of the gods had a mother, and perhaps she outlived him? Perhaps her gentler spirit survives somewhere in a fold of these hills?”

  Letty smiled, not quite sure that she had been able to follow all that was said, but grateful for the older woman's understanding.

  “But the best thing for recovering one's spirits is a good meal,” said Maria, reverting to practicalities and conclusively winning Letty's heart. “Come to the kitchen. We will have our lunch and then rest. And when your men arrive to take you off again you will spring around like a goat on those rocky slopes.”

  Too wound up to waste any time sleeping, Letty passed an hour reading through her notes and the flimsy copies of Gunning's typed documents. The preparations must have been embarked on weeks before, and had been thoroughly done. She would have expected no less. He had researched the history of the site and set out a summary of all the known previous archaeological forays into the area. Objects claimed to have been found locally were listed with their provenance and present location.

  The digging team was identified, the specialities of each man noted; the local conditions and resources were set out right down to the names of six village girls who were willing to act as pot-washers if called on. Equipment was itemised from donkeys to paper clips. She smiled to see that the measuring stick was reported to have been freshly painted. Only Gunning, the photographer, would have thought of that! Bleakly, Letty wondered what there remained for her to do. Apart from financing the whole expedition, it seemed—very little. The hilltop vantage point called, evidently. She almost checked her list for: 1) Lace gloves: 2) Parasol: Director, for the use of.

  She leafed through the file looking for a location map but found none. She looked again. Surely the meticulous Gunning would not have missed such a fundamental item? She taxed him with this the moment he rode up with Aristidis to escort her to the mountain.

  “Don't worry! We have one!” he told her cheerfully, taking an envelope from his pocket. “It's all very hush-hush! Theodore is careful in the extreme about the security of sites. And rightly so! You don't want word to get out—a good deal of premature amateur tomb-robbing goes on. Aristidis and I have looked it over and we think we know where we're going. There's a very clear marker for our pat
ch—a range of dilapidated goat sheds in one corner. That will come in useful as the site and finds office, perhaps. Depends on its condition.”

  He passed her the map, eager to be off. “It'll take half an hour to reach it.” Checking the sun, he added, “And as it's on the northern slope, we should get a good two hours of useful angled light.”

  They stood in a row silently surveying the designated site, passing the map from one to the other, turning it this way and that, no one quite ready to be to be the first to speak out. Letty narrowed her eyes and surveyed once again the one-hundred-yard-long tract of land ahead of them, every dry hummock outlined by the late afternoon sun. The thin soil was almost bare of vegetation. Very little would struggle to grow on such hard-packed terrain.

  “Tell me, William,” she asked, breaking the awkward silence, “did you have a hand in drawing this up?”

  He replied thoughtfully. “Well, no. You have seen that Theo rather prides himself on his expertise with maps. And the initial exploration of the site was all his. I was not consulted.”

  “And your family owns this land, Aristidis?” she said, turning to him.

  “Yes, we do,” he said. “All that you can see on this slope.” A wide gesture embraced the spur of hill on which they stood. “Unproductive as you see, untouched for generations. Animals graze here occasionally, but that's the extent of it. The goat sheds are at present unoccupied and have a stout roof.” He pointed with slight embarrassment to the unlovely constructions that sprawled higgledy-piggledy down the slope. They were in varying states of repair, from the one or two which appeared weatherproof and useable to the last insignificant outlier, apparently no more than a mass of crumbling masonry, half buried under the soil.