Earth and Air

by Peter Dickinson

  And then to drink his share. Or rather to make it seem as if he had, by practising the glamour the goddess had shown him. It was something like what she had said about the way the gods are embodied, the light streaming in to the central point of the lamp, as it were a willed belief, intense enough to rouse echoes of itself in the minds of others, and then beamed in with them to a central point—a mug, for instance—so that the mug appears to be brim full when it has only a dribble of wine in the bottom. A dozen such dribbles in an evening aren’t enough to get a grown man drunk, though Yanni had been apparently reeling by the time he left the tavern each night. He was confident now that he could make it happen again, new-moon night or not.)

  It was the new-moon night nearest midwinter, and had been dark for three hours by the time Yanni walked down the hill. Pitch dark now, all stars hidden behind heavy, slow-moving cloud. He carried a lantern, because it would have seemed strange not to do so on such a night. Scops went with him, not riding on his shoulder but slipping invisibly from tree to tree through the olives, or moving further from the track to swoop low across a patch of scrubland or a vineyard, then calling softly when she returned to the track to reassure him that she was still there.

  In the pocket of his pouch he carried the odd-shaped piece of wood that the goddess had told him he would need. He had spent some time searching the hillside for exactly the right branch, and had eventually cut it from a wild olive, shaped and smoothed it, and, lying on the kitchen table, with Euphanie’s help practised what he planned to do with it.

  His palms were sweaty with tension. He felt scared but not terrified. He believed he could face what was coming, and cope with it, provided he kept his wits. And he wouldn’t be alone. Scops was already with him, and the goddess would be there, she had told him, and she would bring helpers, each in themselves as near-powerless as she was, but together, perhaps, worth something.

  A noise on the path ahead of him, coming from round the next bend. It paused and came again, more prolonged. Footsteps crossing a patch of loose gravel. Several people climbing the path. He drew aside, tucked his lantern under his cloak and waited. He had been half expecting this.

  “See you Tuesday, Yanni?” someone had called when he’d been leaving the tavern last week.

  “They’ll be shut here, won’t they? It’s a new-moon night again,” he’d answered. (He’d been wondering how they were going to manage this.)

  “Oh, we’ll meet at my place,” Kosta had said. “Usual time.”

  “Long way to walk down on a new-moon night, lad,” Stavros had suggested.

  “No, I’ll be all right,” he’d said confidently. “See you at Kosta’s, then.”

  Despite that, they couldn’t have been sure he’d not have changed his mind, or been persuaded to by his sister, so now they were coming to unpersuade him, and if necessary to take him by force, and perhaps Euphanie as well.

  They rounded the bend, dim shapes in the light of their lanterns, climbing in silence. He couldn’t tell them apart until they were almost level with him.

  “Stavros?” he called softly.

  They stopped dead. Stavros clutched at Dmitri’s arm as they turned to face him.

  “It’s me, Yanni,” he said easily. “I didn’t mean to make you jump—I was just being careful. New-moon night, you know.”

  They relaxed, but there was still a gruffness in Stavros’s voice as he answered.

  “Good lad. That’s why we thought we’d come and see you down. Now you’ve saved us the climb. Back we go, lads.”

  They were all as tense as he was, Yanni realised as they descended the hill, and no wonder. They must understand that they were already trapped in a hideous labyrinth, and tonight they were going to descend a whole level further into its darkness. In their hearts they must be yet more afraid than he was. They didn’t have even the ghost of a goddess to help them, only a real and terrible master they must obey.

  By island standards Kosta was a wealthy man. He was a boat builder, with three paid hands to help him—Dmitri was one of them—and himself owned two fishing boats. He lived in a house larger than most, a little above the town up a different track from the one that led to Crow Castle. The rest of the men were already there in the kitchen, with Kosta’s two bustling sisters bringing them little plates of the usual island snacks to add relish to the wine. Apart from that, the meeting was outwardly no different from any other at the tavern, teasing talk, and small bets on the backgammon, and memories of times past. Inwardly, though, it was utterly different. The air stank with tension and dread, and excited expectation, until Thanassi said “Time you were getting home, Yanni, lad.”

  The tension wound up another notch, twanging taut. Yanni rose swaying, as if in response to the wine they supposed him to have drunk. Any moment now, he thought.

  “Nightcap to see you on your way?” said Kosta, also rising. “Settle the wine and give you sweet dreams? Brandy, everyone?”

  It would have been a slap in the face to refuse.

  “You won’t taste brandy like Kosta’s again,” said Dmitri, himself too drunk not to chuckle at the hideous joke.

  Kosta fetched a dozen small glass goblets and a stone bottle from a shelf. Yanni watched him fill one goblet and push it a little to the side, then fill the rest and not move them. He handed Yanni the first glass and the men passed the rest around among themselves. Yanni concentrated his will, the way the goddess had shown him.

  “Well, good luck,” he said.

  They echoed the toast, and watched him over their goblets as they drank. They saw a flesh-and-blood arm raise a solid glass goblet to his lips, and relaxed as they watched him drain it in three gulps.

  “Wow!” he gasped, and staggered against the table by the door, slipping the glamour-hidden goblet, still full of the drugged brandy, out of sight behind the fruit bowl that stood on it.

  “Bit much for a young head,” said Thanassi. “Maybe we better see him home after all.”

  They all rose together. Two of them took Yanni by the elbows and led him out through the door. Behind him he could hear a sudden bustle of activity. The masks and costumes, he thought, and timber they’d need for the fire, and so on. An owl called from a tree in the garden, prrp, prrp.

  How long, he wondered, before the drug would have taken hold? Better give it a few more minutes. But he was already supposed to be drunk, so he stumbled, and swayed against Thanassi, who roughly shoved him upright while Dmitri on the other side yanked him into place. Some of the men had lanterns, but once they were beyond the occasional lit windows of the town the night became very dark. In silence they started up the track to Crow Castle. Yanni let his head droop and his feet begin to drag. The men holding him grunted in satisfaction and shifted their grip so that they were now carrying some of his weight. With mild surprise he discovered that he wasn’t merely acting drunk and drugged. Unconsciously he had been using the goddess’s glamour actually to be those things, while still inside the half-stupefied young man who was climbing the track there was the true, hidden Yanni controlling the illusion, watching its effect and waiting to act.

  Twenty minutes above the town they stopped and closed up. Two of the lantern carriers went to the front and led the way into the half-overgrown track that Yanni, drunk, must have stumbled up that first dreadful night to find the baby Scops. Yes, he thought, all this must have been foreseen by the goddess. Though it wasn’t far, it was a stiff climb, and most of them were panting with the effort by the time they emerged from among the olives and saw, faint-lit by lantern light against the utter black beyond, the squat pillars of the House of the Wise One.

  The men put down what they’d been carrying. Yanni’s two minders switched their grip to let Stavros strip off his cloak, and he was able to slip his hand into the pouch and grasp his bit of olive branch and hold it against his wrist while they pulled the sleeve free. None of the three perceived it.

  By now he was giggling almost uncontrollably under the influence of the imaginary drug
. They stripped off the rest of his clothes and led him naked into the House. Stavros folded the cloak into a pad, and Dmitri settled him onto it and ran a cord under his arms and lashed him to a pillar.

  Dazedly he watched Iorgo and Constantine, already in their costumes, build and light the fire with a spill from one of the lanterns. The timber was bone dry and blazed up almost in an instant. The others came back, costumed and masked. There were several more than had been at Kosta’s. At least two of them were women.

  The masks changed them all. They were no longer people, nor animals either, but something else. They seemed to move differently, to hold themselves differently, from anything that belonged in the workaday world. The one who had been Nicos sounded a rattle of taps on the little drum hanging from a loop round his neck. The creatures stiffened and waited. The taps began again, became louder, steadied to a thumping double beat, and the creatures began to dance. At first they moved in slow, even steps, circling the fire, but soon the beat quickened to a jerky pulse, somebody double-stamped a foot, someone else whooped, and now they were circling faster, stamping on the ancient flagstones, jerking their heads back and forth, clapping out cross-rhythms, whooping and calling to summon their dark god, while their fantastic flame-cast shadows flickered across the line of pillars beyond them.

  Yanni felt his own body beginning to tremble, tense with the urge to rise and join the frenzy. No, he told it, not yet, wait.

  The dance went on and on, fiercer, wilder, madder. Rapt in their ecstasy the dancers could not tire. And yet, in an instant, in response to no sign or call, they halted, motionless apart from their heaving lungs.

  In that silence the Bull-man stalked into the temple.

  He stopped barely a yard from where Yanni was lashed. He was no masked man. He was huge. His shoulders were above the upstretched arms of any of the dancers who came whooping and crowding round him, and then fell back into a ring, silent apart from faint eager whimperings, a pack of dogs waiting to be fed. The firelight rippled across the brass of his body. The shadows in its folds and clefts were black as the new-moon night. He stank of animal essences. The pillars of the temple seemed to pulse and waver with his presence, as if Yanni had been seeing them through rising air.

  Everything had changed with his coming. The glamour that had protected Yanni so easily this far with its solid-seeming illusions, giving him an almost contemptuous confidence in his ability to outwit the men, seemed to weaken and thin to a gauzy veil. If the god had glanced down at him it would have melted away. But he would not.

  “The power flows into him in the instant of the victim’s death,” the goddess had said. “To look at the victim before that would be to anticipate that moment, and so dilute its power.”

  The god paid no more heed to the dancers than he did to Yanni, but stood gazing out above their heads while they waited imploring. At last he took a heavy pace forward, and another, and another. The drum rattled. The dancers reformed their ring and began slowly to circle their god, the circle moving with him as he paced up the temple and stood outlined against the fire. Now they ringed both fire and god.

  With a sweep of his arm the god strewed a handful of dark grains onto the flames, and a white blaze flared, too brilliant to look at, and died as quickly away, leaving the space enclosed by the pillars filled with a smoky red glow that seemed to come not from the fire but from the stones of the temple themselves. The air within that space reeked with a heady odour, sickly sweet, dazing the senses.

  Yanni concentrated his will and forced it away, at the same time freeing both body and mind from his own illusion of drugged torpor, and became fully alert, himself. He felt the glamour the goddess had given him return, though weakened. Perhaps it would still do, he thought. Provided the brass god did not look at him until the moment came.

  As before, the drumbeat quickened, the dancers spun faster and faster, stamping, prancing more and more wildly, whooping and calling, flinging heads and arms, thrashing themselves into a mindless, ferocious ecstasy, an agony of lust for the blood of the coming sacrifice.

  The god reached the Bloodstone, stalked round it, turned, laid his dish in front of him and waited, massive, impassive, his great beast eyes glinting orange in the red glare as he stared out over the line of pillars at the darkness beyond. Thanassi and Dmitri broke from the spinning circle and raced back down the temple. Dmitri knelt, gripped Yanni by the ankles and pinned them to the floor. Thanassi untied the rope and reached for his wrists.

  Yanni was ready for him, gripping in his right hand the stub of side-branch of the olive he’d cut, so that the short length of the main branch lay directly above his wrist. Though weakened, the illusion held, just, and made it seem to Thanassi that he took hold of the wrist itself, real not simply to his eyesight but to his touch as well, real skin, real flesh and bone against his palm and fingers. Yanni clung to the side-branch as they lifted him and raced back past the fire. The ring of dancers opened to let them pass, and they swung him up onto the Bloodstone and spread-eagled him in front of their god.

  The god had not moved. This was the moment of extreme danger. Though the god might not look at Yanni directly, the illusory wrist that Thanassi held must lie near the edge of his vision, and surely, if he should glance this way . . .

  He did not. Through half-closed eyes Yanni watched him take up the flask and pour a dark liquid from it. The bowl was out of Yanni’s line of sight. With the same calm slowness the god set the flask back on the dish and started to raise arms and head towards the sky. In his right hand he now held the knife, its bronze blade shaped like a pointed leaf and incised with symbols. Now!

  Yanni let go of the olive branch and gently moved his own arm, invisible to Dmitri and Thanassi, down past his body. He found the edge of the dish by touch, reached further and found the stem of the goblet.

  He waited. The god grew taller, reaching up, yearning, demanding, summoning. The dancers moaned in their nightmare orgasm. The god opened his vast bull mouth and bellowed. The dancers reeled back and crouched down, hiding their faces. And the little illusion behind which Yanni had been sheltering crumpled away and fell to dust.

  The god did not stir as the reverberations of his thunder dwindled away over the harbour.

  Dmitri and Thanassi had fallen back with the others, letting go of the victim, but Thanassi had gathered his wits and was lurching back towards the Bloodstone when he realised that there was something unexpected in his grasp. He looked and saw the piece of olive wood. He gave a sudden astonished shout, an ordinary human cry, a crack in the surface of the ritual.

  The god glanced down.

  It was too soon. “Wait till he is about to strike,” the goddess had told Yanni, but the illusion was gone and that moment would not now come. He flung the contents of the goblet into the face of the god and instantly rolled himself aside, dropped, and scuttled away between the stunned and stricken dancers.

  Behind him the god screamed. Not in surprise or anger, but in agony, the unimaginable agony of a god.

  Yanni reached the darkness beyond the pillars and turned to look. The great brass beast still stood where he had been but something was happening to his face. It was melting, bubbling, falling in golden and burning dribbles onto the naked flesh below.

  But Yanni had been forced to act too soon. The god was stricken, but not destroyed. He mastered his pain. The scream stopped. He drew himself up and began to summon his power back into himself. The melting visage hardened and became a ghastly contortion of a face, with its two huge eyes glaring out of it.

  Again Yanni turned to run and again stopped. In front of him, all along the rim of the bowl ran a line of lights. Lanterns. Women’s voices began to call “Ulululul-leh. Ulululul-leh. Ulululul-leh”. Tall figures appeared on the slope in front of them, shadowy—Yanni could see the gleam of the lanterns through their bodies—an armoured man with a high plumed helmet and shield, a smiling naked woman, another woman, with a hunter’s bow in her hand and a quiver at her back, and more
. They raised their right hands in a gesture of command, of banishment.

  As if by owl sight Yanni could see what was happening, though it was not something he saw with his eyes; but the night seemed to be patterned with threads of power as with their residual memories of what their ancestors had once believed the women invoked the old gods back into momentary existence. The old gods gathered that power into themselves, shaped it to their purposes and passed it on, focussed on a single point, not where the new god stood beside the Bloodstone, but at somewhere in the pitch-black sky above him.

  From the temple the new god answered with a bellow, and he was a god with living power, while they were only ghosts of what they had been. For a moment their shapes thinned and wavered, and ripples of weakness ran along the threads of power, tangling its pattern. But the women’s calling continued unfaltering, the old gods regathered their strength and the pattern returned, centring itself into a single last illusion, so strong that it ceased to be an illusion and became for a little moment part of the reality of this world, solid as a boulder.

  Yanni turned back to the temple to see what it was, but there was nothing, only the blackness of the new-moon night where the threads all came together directly above the Bloodstone, on which the new god was now standing. He seemed even taller than before. His head topped the line of pillars. He too gazed skyward, raising his arms to the sky for a fresh outpouring of his strength.

  Out of that sky, sudden as lightning, fell a shape, a blackness, a piece of the night itself. With the neck-breaking thud of a hunting owl as it strikes its prey it hit the god full in the face. Immense wings, wide as the temple itself, beat violently. The god, caught utterly by surprise, tumbled from the Bloodstone, tripped on the prone body of a dancer, staggered and lay flat, while the hooked beak plunged down again and again at the head gripped between the savage talons.