by Paul Preuss
But he already knew where to look.
He reached the shepherd’s hut through a cold mist, in a flurry of snowflakes that gave him pause. He had promised his grandmother to come down the mountain at the first snowfall—but these feeble flakes would never reach the valley floor; it wasn’t snowing down there. He squatted inside the soot-blackened hut beside a fire of sticks, huddled in his wool cape, carving hard slivers from a block of cheese with his great-grandfather’s knife.
Vampires and neraïdes, demons and witches, saints and angels had inhabited the overlapping worlds of his childhood, but in the books he had borrowed from Siganos and other schoolmasters, other worlds had acquired substance, populated by heroes ancient and modern—Perikles and Alexander and Venizelos—and gods, pagan and Christian—Apollo and Hermes and Christ. Among them was the tale of Theseus of Athens, who had come to Crete to slay a bull-man at Knossos. In the villages of Dikti it was said that the English, who had been digging in the ruins of Knossos long before Manolis was born, had uncovered the Minotaur’s lair.
When Theseus was a little boy he lived in the Peloponnese, and there his father had secretly married his mother and left a treasure for him under a great stone. Only his mother knew where the stone was, and she had lived long enough to see Theseus lift it. If Manolis’s mother had lived, she would have told him where to find his father’s treasure; it would have been in a place she knew well.
Impatient, Manolis put down the hard rind of cheese, left the fire, and pushed aside the dirty rug that hung over the entrance to the hut. Snow swirled erratically; he felt its sting on his face more than he saw it in the bright mist.
He walked a few steps to the stone trough at the edge of the cliff. There was only a damp stain in its bottom. Katerina had told him that this trough was once always full of water that overflowed and spilled into the forest below. But since the earthquake that killed his mother there had been only a trickle in it; now they had to water their animals half a mile away. Where had the water gone?
Manolis walked uphill along the stone channel that fed the trough, back to the fissure that had been a spring, a black crevice in the crust of frozen snow that lay over the rocks. Already shivering with cold, he peered inside.
He went back into the hut and gobbled the last of the cheese and put on every piece of clothing he had with him—wool trousers over his wool drawers, a goat’s-wool sweater over his tattered cotton shirt, his wool cape over all. Then he gathered up the sticks he hadn’t burned and knotted them into bundles with scraps of wool cord. He found a handful of matches and stuffed everything into his sakouli.
Moments later he squeezed his way into the crevice. Except where his own shadow blocked it, diffuse daylight illuminated the rock face ahead of him. There water trickled over a spongy mat of algae and dripped into the catch basin of his great-grandfather’s stone channel.
When he held his breath and kept very still, he could hear a rush of water deeper in the earth below.
He sat back on his heels and studied the rock face. It was a chunk of limestone that had fallen from the ceiling of the narrow passage where once the spring had issued, blocking it off. The water he could see was oozing down the front of the fallen block; the water he could hear was flowing beneath it.
There was a black space between the fallen block and the wall, and other black spaces among the jumbled rocks on the floor of the passage. If he could move one of those rocks, he could look further inside. He put his back and shoulders into lifting what appeared to be the smallest block; it was slick with mud and algae, but he got his hands around one sharp corner and heaved, pushing back and forth—
—until suddenly it came loose and tumbled away, out of his hands, bouncing and echoing into an invisible crevasse. With it the earth gave way beneath him, and he plummeted after.
He hit on his bottom and struggled to get his feet under him while sliding down a muddy slope in the darkness amidst a tumble of stones—slowly at first, though he couldn’t quite stop himself because the mud was as slippery as grease. Then faster, plowing through the mud. Then his feet were out from under him—panic suddenly rising—and he was falling free, and he screamed.
He crashed into an invisible floor, which knocked the scream out of him. He screeched, struggling to get his breath back, until finally he got some air into his lungs. In the blackness he groped in his bag for a bundle of sticks and a match. Everything was wet and slimy, but he found his matches and struck one. When the fire bloomed in his hand, when his eyes adjusted to the glare, he looked around.
His ragged breath caught fast in his windpipe. He was sitting in a boneyard. Skeletons lay everywhere on the muddy rocks, big skulls and little skulls, leg bones and arm bones, high-arching rib cages and deep pelvises gleaming bright in the flicker of the torch. But all were streaked and grotesquely shadowed with black fungus.
Manolis didn’t hear himself whimpering as he held the flaring torch over his head and peered into the gloom. Overhead, water dripped from veils of stone to fall upon stalagmites as big as tree trunks growing from the greenish mud. He could make out the slope he’d slid down. A stream of water poured swiftly down it. He was not in hell, then; he was not in hell. He could get out of this place.
The torchlight revealed artifacts scattered among the bones, lying where they had fallen from the necks and waists and hands that once supported them. Belt buckles glittered in the mud beside vertebrae; mingled with the skulls and arm bones were necklaces and earrings of carnelian and blackened silver, and green copper bracelets and loops of amber worry beads on corroded chains, and finger rings and bits of rotted cloth, and ancient weapons—sabers and pistols and long guns from the last century.
Manolis stood up and stepped cautiously among the skeletons, whispering to himself. Not prayers. Logarithms. The most comforting thing that came to his mind.
All these people must have died at once. The skeletons of infants lay in the bony arms of what had been their mothers or grandmothers or aunts or sisters; rusted guns lay in the grip of fleshless fingers, cocked but not fired. Mildewed scraps of rugs, piles of black sticks that were collapsed chairs, rotten wooden chests which had burst to expose crockery and kitchen utensils—these testified that the cave had been used as a hiding place more than once. On a closer look, some of the bones were not human at all; they were the familiar bones of sheep and goats, brought into the cave as food or to hide them from the enemy. Up in the apses and crannies of the cave roof lay more bones, the remains of those who had tried to escape sudden doom.
Had Manolis’s great-grandfather, when he built the channel from the spring, known of this slaughter? He would have been a boy in ’66, a young man in ’78, a grown man in ’89 and ’96; each time the Cretans had risen against the Turks, the fighting in the mountains around Lasithi had been fierce. He must have known this place. Where else could he have acquired the leather-bound books that were now his daughter’s, if not by looting the dead?
And Katerina, had she known of this place too? But she would not have kept such a momentous secret: if she had known of this place, they would not have been so poor.
He went quickly from one skeleton to another, taking a bracelet, a silver belt buckle, a wedding necklace of coins, a loop of amber worry beads on a chain, things that could be discreetly sold for a bit of food or clothing, things that would please his grandmother, things he wanted for himself, stuffing his sakouli until his torch crumbled into sparks.
He lit another torch from the last of his kindling and searched for a way out. If he stayed close to the falling stream, he could find his way back up in the dark, though he would be soaking wet when he reached the surface—which meant he might freeze before he got down the mountain. There was a rougher, drier path up the wall to the right. Hard going in the dark, but staying dry was worth it.
The torch burned fast as he started up the slope, and it was guttering by the time he reached a massive cross section of fallen stalactite that blocked the path. The only passage wa
s a narrow ledge beside a yawning gap in the floor. The torch sucked itself out. Panic battered him; in daylight he no longer believed in vampires, but here…in the darkness he felt the presence of the unburied, their bones cleansing and reknitting, red flesh growing on slick white skeletons.
As he groped in the darkness, inching upward on all fours and feeling for purchase in the clay, his hand came upon sharp flakes of what felt like broken pottery. Hardly thinking, he scooped them up and stuffed them into his sakouli.
A quarter of an hour later he came out of the mountainside into sunlight. The mist had retreated to the forest below, leaving cold blue sky to arch over the world. His heart lifted.
His hands were dirty and he was covered with mud outside, but inside his layers of wool he was still dry. He laid out his treasures on a flat rock, rings and earrings and bracelets and necklaces, lapis and amber and carnelian stones afire in the sunshine, tarnished silver settings testifying to their purity by their blackness. And beside the jewelry, a few shards of pottery.
He picked them up. They were almost weightless, delicately made and intricately painted, black and red on pale gray. On one piece were zigzag red and black branches that Manolis recognized as thorny spurge, on another, broken in the middle, half a lively fish. Manolis had kicked his way through countless broken pots in his treks across the mountains; in some places sherds were as common as acorns in an oak wood, but those were mostly rough pink scraps that could have come as easily from a flowerpot broken yesterday as from an ancient vessel.
Not these. He stared at the painted fragments in his fingers; he’d never seen anything that called to him so immediately from the distant past of his daydreams…
“They were scraps of typical Middle Minoan pottery, styles common in Central and East Crete,” Minakis said calmly, as if trying to soothe Anne-Marie’s visible agitation. “Of course I didn’t know that then; I’d barely heard of Minoans.”
The unexpected revelation made her dizzy. Minoan pottery? Was this cave the source of the artifacts she had come to find? It was a question she couldn’t ask. “What about all those people?”
Minakis’s gaze shifted to the sea beyond her. “It must have been 1866, the worst of the uprisings. When Turkish soldiers threatened the villages, caves were good places to hide and easy to defend if necessary: anybody coming in was blind and a plain target against the sky. But eventually the Turks figured out how to attack without risk. They built brushfires outside the entrances that sucked out all the air. They did that at Melidoni, at Milatos. On Dikti too.”
“A whole village just…snuffed out?”
“Who was left to look for them? My great-grandfather was probably the first to find them, when he built the trough.”
“What did they say in Ayia Kyriaki? When you told them what you’d found?”
“Told them?” He peered at her with an expression of friendly curiosity. “I told no one. As for all those rotten skeletons…once I had persuaded myself there were no vampires in the cave, it seemed a fit enough burial place. I wasn’t a religious boy.”
She started to speak but reconsidered. Perhaps he was baiting her, laying some intricate snare. The way he claimed to have found the Minoan sherds…that part of his story was hardly convincing. Lightly she asked, “Did you ever go back?”
“Not for a long time. Until two years ago, I thought I had taken everything worth taking.” His expression was cool, relentless. The worn amber beads clicked through his fingers. “Would you like to go there with me?”
With her surprise came fear, shaking her heart like a low-voltage current; she laughed to cover her confusion. “Oh yes I would. But I owe my husband a vacation.”
“Take your vacation on Crete. Both of you.”
She smiled as slowly as she could manage, struggling to calm her erratic heartbeat. “We will, I promise. But first I have to sell your life story for a pot of money. You promised to tell me how you got your unusual name.”
“You ask with such depth of feeling.” He let his beads wrap themselves around his finger and closed his fist, silencing them. “But as you wish.”
10
On a winter night when Manolis was fourteen years old he came home to find Katerina sitting on the ground in front of the phourno in the courtyard. The bread inside the oven was baked harder than shepherd’s bread, and the ashes were still warm, but she was cold.
He could give no voice to his anguish. He only sat on the ground beside her a while, rocking her body in his arms. Then he picked her up and took her into the house and arranged her on her bed, crossing her bony hands over her breast.
Manolis was a tall boy and very thin, all hard muscle and fine bone, with a face much like his grandmother’s, too stark for good looks. Katerina had dominated his world. Besides the schoolmaster who had left for Athens so many years ago, she was the only one he had ever cared to please. How would it be to live here now, in a place populated exclusively by his enemies, where there was no one to love, to care about, to talk to and tease? He sat for a long time, hardly moving more than she did. At last he went for the priest.
They buried Katerina the next day. Besides Manolis, the only people at the funeral were Kriaris and his wife and son, who were there to insure against any appearance of irregularity. The priest hurried through the service, singing in a thin, unpersuasive voice, to which his lumpish son sang the responses in a disconcertingly sweet tenor. When her body had been interred under the same slab that covered Sophia, Papa Kriaris beckoned Manolis into his house next to the chapel. It was not a comforting gesture.
Kriaris went to a table in the corner of the good room and took a folded sheet of paper from the drawer. “You read well, child, and your grandmother could write well. Read this. It’s her will and testament.”
Manolis took the paper. He recognized Katerina’s hand, the inked letters angular on the page. At first he read eagerly, grateful to learn anything of his grandmother’s thoughts. But within a few lines he learned that Katerina had found him to be an impious and cruel boy—words he had never heard her use—and that she had determined that he cared only for himself and nothing for her, and that in her fear of not having a living in her old age she had determined to repudiate him, turning for protection to her priestly brother-in-law, to whom she had already ceded a portion of her inheritance and to whom she herewith ceded all her other possessions, namely her house and all its furnishings, her flocks of animals, and her remaining parcels of land.
Manolis looked up to see Kriaris eyeing him damply, a dribble of spit creeping into his beard.
“Did you make her write this?”
“That is an evil suggestion.”
“When was I cruel to her? When was I impious?”
“Are you going to argue? You have no hope. In her own hand she has written out the grounds for disinheritance.”
“Why did she write these lies?”
“Call them what you want.”
Manolis saw his aunt Eleni standing in the shadows behind the arch, signaling to him, a finger to her lips, pointing at the door with her other hand.
Manolis coldly ignored her silent request. “Have you read this, Aunt Eleni?” he demanded, holding up the paper. “I loved my grandmother more than anyone. You know it. And she loved me.”
Eleni frowned. She stepped into the room and looked hard at her husband, and some signal crossed between them.
“Don’t take it too hard, boy,” Kriaris said gruffly. “You have time. There’s time to work things out between us.” He turned to his wife, but she had left the room. Kriaris looked back at Manolis, his expression venomous. “Forty days, until the memorial service. After that you must be gone from the house.”
Eleni accosted Manolis as he crossed the courtyard. “Katerina did not betray you, child, she saved your life. My husband has been your protector since you were born.”
“That’s crazy,” Manolis said, walking fast.
Eleni ran to keep up with him. “She promised him the land.
You were a newborn, hardly a day old. She made him promise to keep you alive.”
“If I’m alive, it’s no thanks to a priest.”
“Do you think Louloudakis would not have slaughtered you like a lamb, if not for my husband? Because of him, the schoolteacher was allowed to teach you after school. Because my son protected you, Louloudakis’s sons left you in peace.”
“I would have gone to school with the others, if your husband had been a real priest. Old man Louloudakis would not have chased off the schoolteacher and closed down the school, if your husband had been a real priest.” Manolis choked; tears streamed down his thin cheeks. “And as for Little Parsley, he is lucky I chose not to kill him as he once tried to kill me. I would not have missed.”
All along the street the old men and the women in black watched with undisguised satisfaction as they passed. When they reached Katerina’s gate Manolis pushed it open, but Eleni stayed behind in the street. “You are still a child. You must listen to what I’m telling you,” she cried.
Manolis turned, his hand on the gate. He saw the anguish in Eleni’s face, the same deep lines as in his grandmother’s face, drawn there by the days of her life. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Leave Ayia Kyriaki while you can,” she whispered. “My husband can no longer protect you.”
His tears dried on his face as took in her words. “Let me thank you, Aunt Eleni. You have done all you could for me. Go back to your husband and reassure him that I know how innocent and kind and noble all your family have been to me.”
She gasped at the force of his bitter sarcasm, at the hatred in his red-rimmed eyes. She crossed herself and rushed away.
