by Paul Preuss
Manolis said nothing; his eyes betrayed his disappointment.
“I’m planning to be back, you know. I’m making arrangements to excavate a cave in Lasithi, near Tzermiado. The home of Zeus’s parents, they say—Rhea and ghastly old Kronos, Father Time, who ate his children. You know of it?”
Manolis shook his head.
“It’s just a small cave, but more interesting than its myth. What I’ve seen on the surface there is older than what you’ve shown me here. I’m bringing my wife, she’s an excellent excavator, and we’re going to do a proper job. So you see…” He broke off. “As for this place—until I can give it a proper inspection, can it be our secret?”
“Everyone who knew about it is dead,” Manolis said.
Pendlebury took the remark as agreement. “Right then. It’s getting late. How do we get down from here?”
“From here we go down to Christos,” Manolis said without evident emotion. “Unless you want to stay on the mountain tonight.”
“If I had a full bottle of wine, camping on the mountain would suit me better. Alas, you must lead us to civilization.”
11
In the fog, among the pines, after an hour of precipitous descent that crammed their toes into their shoes, Pendlebury called out, “Look here, Androulakis…this mist…can’t see past one’s nose…well, I’m becoming bored. What are we going to do about it?”
From a Greek this would have been a challenge to a contest—a shooting match or a game of dice, given the time, or perhaps a poetry match to see who could make up the bloodiest or most sentimental mantinada. From an Englishman, Manolis didn’t know what to expect besides the obvious, that they were already in a footrace.
“Come, come,” Pendlebury insisted. “You were recommended to me as quite an extraordinary specimen. I anticipated meeting you. Aside from some potsherds any goatherd could have stumbled upon, you haven’t shown me a thing.”
Manolis took the insult as part of the game and tried to sound cheerful. “What were you expecting to be shown, kyrie?”
“Something adept, something original. Some spark,” said Pendlebury in a demanding tone. “What are you good at?”
Manolis was fairly certain that cheesemaking was not the answer Pendlebury wanted. “Only a little English,” he ventured, “peu français, klein Deutsch, ligo Ellenika…” He winced. “Sygnomi, excuse me, not Greek, only Cretan.”
“A little sarcasm while we’re at it?”
“I’m said to be good at mathematics, kyrie.” If Manolis played this right, perhaps he could trick the man into a riddling game. “Perhaps you would like to test me.”
For long seconds they trudged through the pine forest over rocks that crumbled and fell away downhill faster than they could walk. Neither the loose rocks nor their footfalls echoed in the insulating mist. “Well, how am I going to test you?” Pendlebury said at last. “Numbers don’t interest me much, never have.”
“Mathematics isn’t only numbers. There is geometry; there is logic.” Meaning, even an Englishman should be capable of logic. “I read this puzzle in a book: a bear walks one mile south, then one mile west, then one mile north, and ends up where she started.”
“Am I supposed to tell you where she started?” Pendlebury demanded grumpily.
“No, kyrie, tell me what color is the bear.”
Pendlebury charged down the narrow path with vigor, pushed through thick pine branches, and leaped over a stream just above where it became a waterfall. He turned a fierce grin on Manolis. “The bear is white!” he cried.
“Truly, she is white.” Manolis suppressed his glee.
“Yes, of course. If one goes south from the North Pole, goes west, then goes north again, one returns to the North Pole. Thus a polar bear!”
“Congratulations, kyrie. I suppose I will have to try again.”
They plummeted down the forested slope, their heavy shoes scuffing up pine needles and mud, the long-legged Pendlebury still determined to outdistance the boy, and the boy determined not to be outdistanced.
“Now tell me this, kyrie: a man, not a bear, walks one mile south, then one mile west, then one mile north”—his words rushed out like the stream that tumbled past them—“and ends up where he started, and he didn’t start from the North Pole.”
“Impossible!” Pendlebury shouted back.
“No, geometry.”
As they descended the wooded slopes, slant daylight came intermittently through the blowing fog. Except for their own hard breathing and heavy footfalls they walked in silence, reaching gentler ground at last, where the grass was thick and the forest thin, the pines having been burned to make pasture.
“If you can persuade me of this man’s odd walk, lad, I’ll confess that you are a geometer. So far as I can imagine, there is no place between the poles and the equator that one can walk this way for a mile and turn at right angles and walk that way the same distance”—Pendlebury swung his walking stick wildly as he indicated these turns—“and then turn right again and walk that way the same distance, and not end up someplace different from where he started.”
“I’ll explain it,” Manolis said fiercely. “The man isn’t anywhere near the North Pole. He’s close to the South Pole, and he walks toward it until he is sixteen-hundredths of a mile from the pole. Then he turns right and walks a mile, always going due west, and then”—he laughed—“and then, you see, he has made a perfect circle around the South Pole!”
Pendlebury glared, speechless.
“So, when he turns right again, he goes north, back to where he started,” Manolis concluded triumphantly.
“You’ll have to draw me a diagram,” Pendlebury said. They went on in silence through the dissipating mist. “Anyway, you said geometry, and you brought in numbers. Sixteen-hundredths of a mile,” he said with disgust. “How many feet is that?”
“A little less than eight hundred and forty-five feet—actually the man would have to turn right at eight hundred and forty feet and four inches,” Manolis said, after a brief pause. “The point is, kyrie, that a circle of that radius has a circumference of one mile. Approximately.”
“Approximately? Hah!”
“One mile less approximately half an inch.”
Twisted masses of limestone emerged from the thinning mist; the sun shone brighter in a sky that was bluer every moment. They walked briskly across the lush meadows, green springtime fields that would turn to tinder in the dry days of summer.
“Do you know what a polar bear looks like, Androulakis?” Pendlebury demanded grumpily.
“There are no bears on Crete, kyrie.”
“You’ve been to the North Pole? The South Pole?”
“Nowhere but these mountains.”
“What about your family? Any polar explorers among them?”
“My grandmother is dead. She owned some almond trees in Limnakaros, but she gave them away. My grandfather died fighting the Turks. My mother died when I was born, in that hut on the ridge—there was an earthquake and the hut fell on us. My father was an Englishman.”
Hearing this flat recitation, Pendlebury, no longer bored and no longer playing games, dropped his challenging tone. “Your name isn’t English, lad. There aren’t many English boys with your looks.”
“Their marriage was a secret.”
Pendlebury didn’t question this improbable explanation. “What became of your father?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping that you…that you could help me find out.”
Pendlebury must have caught something in the boy’s tone, for he slowed his pace so that they didn’t have to shout at each other. “Not likely I would know, unless he was an archaeologist.”
“He was a soldier.”
“Good for him, then.” He glanced at Manolis. “I’m sure I seem ancient to you, lad, if not to myself. I’m thirty-one, and I imagine your father must be rather older. You would have been six or seven years old before I ever set foot on Crete. It’s not likely I met him.”
Manolis said nothing, but walked along the path without seeing it, lost in thought. So Pendlebury, according to himself, could not be his father; theirs was only a chance meeting after all, to be enjoyed while it lasted, for whatever knowledge or pleasure one could extract from it.
Pendlebury too was quiet, concentrating on the path, which suddenly pitched down again and narrowed to a single cobbled lane that dropped into a sheer crevice in the mountain. The path clung precariously to the cliff; a waterfall was audible long before they could see its silvery plume across the mist-filled gorge.
The watery music was interrupted by an insect buzz and splat against the cliff wall a foot from Manolis’s head. He tackled Pendlebury from behind and threw him facedown on the cobbled path as the rock dust fell and the echoing blast reached them; in the same motion he rolled sideways, unslinging his shotgun, breaking the breech, shoving in a shell, snapping it closed.
Pendlebury started to sit up. “What the devil…?”
This time the splat came closer to Pendlebury’s head than Manolis’s; he ducked. “You’re not going to fire that thing?” Pendlebury whispered breathlessly, incredulous. “Those paper shells are old enough to be your grandfather’s.”
“They were my great-grandfather’s,” said Manolis, taking aim.
“But you don’t want to hit anything.”
“Why not?”
“Acts have consequences, Androulakis. You can’t just shoot somebody on a whim. Somebody you can’t even see.”
“I see him. I know him. It wouldn’t bother me much if I killed him.”
“Listen to me, you’re a boy. This…incident…it isn’t your whole life.”
“All right. I’ll just drop that pine branch on his head.” Manolis squeezed the trigger, and the great gun roared.
“What happened?” Pendlebury said, having prudently rolled away from the explosion.
“Listen now.”
A thin, scared voice echoed in the canyon, calling, “You can’t even shoot.”
Manolis, plucking out the spent shell and shoving in another, called back in his loud, clear mountain voice, “I’ll drop some more greens on your head, if you are brave enough to stay where you are, Little Parsley.” Taking aim, he fired again.
When the echoes died away, the voice that came back was thinner and more distant and more frightened yet. “You can’t hit anything. Don’t ever come back, you devil’s spawn.”
A final splat of shot hit the cliff wall high behind them, nowhere close, followed by a distant echoing blast. After a long pause, Pendlebury asked in a nonchalant drawl, “What do you call this sort of path?” His face was still close to the pavement.
“Kaderimi,” Manolis replied.
“A Turkish word, I think, but these paved paths were here a long time before the Turks.” Apparently the Englishman liked to give lectures, even under fire with an audience of one. Perhaps it was a comfort to him. “Roman citizens may have walked where we’re walking now.”
“I wish I had lived when they did,” Manolis said. He sat up.
Pendlebury sat up after him. “Do you imagine that life was better then?”
“Yes. No priests to grab everything.”
Pendlebury laughed. “No Christian priests. Christians, Romans, ancient Egyptians, any variety one can name, priests will grab what they can. Occasionally to good purpose, one must admit.” He nodded across the gorge. “Think he’s gone now?”
“Long gone, kyrie. He’s a coward.”
“So, Androulakis, you mentioned your grandmother and her father, both dead, and your mother, also dead, and your father, who seems to have vanished. Do you have any living relatives?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you live?”
“Since this morning, nowhere.”
“I’m serious, lad.”
“I lived in my grandmother’s house, but the priest took it. This is what I own.” He patted his gun and his sakouli.
“I see.” Pendlebury stirred uneasily. “We’d better get on. We don’t want to be walking in the dark.” He got to his feet. “You understand you’re in my employ until we reach Vianos.”
Manolis, who thought this a strange thing for the man to say, stood up and plucked the smoking shell from his gun. “I’ll take you to Vianos. Not for money.”
Pendlebury didn’t answer; he turned away and launched himself recklessly down the narrow paved path overhanging the gorge. Within a few steps he was almost running, eager to assert his immortality.
They emerged from the gorge long after the sun had passed the pine-crested cliffs. The sky to the southwest was clear and soft, hung with a handful of planets and bright stars, and everywhere there was the sound of falling water, and the night air was full of the perfume of apple and cherry blossoms. Beneath them the village of Christos clung steeply to the precipice; warm light spilled from open doors and windows, and bursts of laughter and the sawing of a lyra floated on the evening air.
“I know the schoolmaster here,” Manolis said. “I think he will give us a place to sleep tonight.”
Anne-Marie caught herself sitting braced in her chair and forced herself to relax. Young Manolis had, after all, escaped alive; the man he had become sat across from her, his dark eyes watching her in veiled amusement.
“What would have happened to you if this Pendlebury hadn’t appeared when he did?” she asked. “As if on schedule.”
“I suppose if space-time were configured differently, Little Parsley would have killed me. Or I would have killed one of the Louloudakises and become a fugitive. Or anything else you care to imagine. But there is only one world, the one we live in. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying ‘Even God cannot change the past.’”
“But why would an English archaeologist take an interest in a homeless Greek villager?”
“Pendlebury’s interest in me was because he was a curiosity seeker and I was a curiosity, an unschooled shepherd boy with a reputation for speaking foreign languages, rather like a talking dog—it wasn’t that I did it well, it was that I did it at all. When we got to the schoolmaster’s house in Christos that night, Pendlebury was of course the center of attention, but he kept prodding the poor man and his wife to talk about me, about how many books I’d read, how many languages I spoke—and then he said that while I might be famous for my erudition there in Christos, in Lasithi I was famous for my riddles. ‘Have you heard the one about the bear who walked one mile south…’”
“Was he mocking them? Or you?”
Minakis lifted his chin twice: no and no again. “Pendlebury loved us Greeks, the people of Crete most of all. He knew just how far to go with his bragging and boasting and teasing—just as far as we would go—and we loved him for it in return. He wasn’t a sentimental man, though. He was a romantic in the true sense, and something about his meeting me on Easter morning struck him as an act of fate. As apparently it strikes you.”
“What would you call it, if not an act of fate?”
“I regard everything that happens in the immensity of space-time as a species of fate.” He settled his thoughtful gaze upon her. “Perhaps you will come to agree with me. But in Pendlebury’s case, I think he kept me around to see what would happen next.”
She smiled and opened her hands, surrendering, asking without speaking, What happened next?
Minakis laughed. “The schoolmaster and his wife offered us their bed, but we insisted upon sleeping under the house with the goats. I remember being awakened to a sound I took for a windmill, but it was only Pendlebury doing his jumping jacks.
“‘Kalimera, Androulakis,’ he called cheerily. He was wearing only underclothes, and I was surprised to see how smooth and brown his legs were, more like a swimmer’s than a hiker’s. ‘Join me, why don’t you? Warms the blood, limbers the muscles, tones the appetite marvelously.’
“Well, I didn’t join him, but neither could I go back to sleep. Five minutes later I lifted my face from my pillow of fragrant burlap to find Pendlebury s
eated on a wine keg, studying me with his bright stare and lacing up his walking shoes.
“‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘about those potsherds of yours. How long have they been in your possession?’
“‘A few years.’
“‘Years! Good heavens, lad! Don’t you know the law says you must immediately report any antiquities you find to the authorities?’
“He was talking about potsherds. It was such an absurdity that I sat up, wide awake at last. ‘You’re joking.’
“‘Deadly serious. Look here, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me to the museum in Candia. I am determined to stay on good terms with the ephor of Crete—a very excitable fellow, name’s Marinatos. I’ll do what I can for you. Nevertheless you’d better be prepared to throw yourself on his mercy.’
“Pendlebury seemed mightily pleased with himself, making a citizen’s arrest in a country of which he was not a citizen. But I had no objection. For one thing, I’d never been to Kastro, which foreigners called Candia. For another, I’d never seen a museum.
“‘You’ll give yourself up without a struggle, then? Right…Oh.’ Pendlebury winced as if a complication had just occurred to him. ‘One wrinkle. I’d planned to spend a day or two investigating the coast south of Vianos. I’m afraid I’ll have to keep you with me. Since you’re under duress there’s no question of my not paying for your time.’
“I managed to produce a frown at the prospect of earning money for nothing, and told Pendlebury to do what his conscience required of him.
“We pried ourselves away from the schoolmaster and his wife, who loaded our sakoulis with boiled red eggs and sugary bread and withered oranges, and soon we were racing each other across the wooded slopes toward Vianos, first one of us in front, then the other, leaping the occasional boulder or fallen tree with hardly a break in stride. I felt a swelling ecstasy unlike anything I had known since I was a little boy, unlike anything since those wild and childish days when my ignorance gave me the illusion of freedom…”
12
