You did not finish — or you did, but we were interrupted,' I said. It seemed a very long time ago.
'I told you they locked me up?' I nodded. 'They kept me locked away for two years,' she went on. 'Two endless years, in a plain white room with no glass in the window.'
You didn't ... it must have seemed a lifetime,' I said, taking her hand.
'And I was only a child, really, at least at the beginning.'
'How did you - you know, how did you manage?' I asked carefully.
'There was a kind priest. Father Jago,' she said. 'He was a good man, for a Frank - no, by any measure. He did not try to cram his doctrines down my gullet. Instead he bought me flowers for my window-ledge, and found my belongings where they had been thrown in the cellars, so I could hang my tapestries. And he bought me my books. He was amazed, quite amazed, that a woman could read, and we spent hours together. He gave me hope.'
'So you were not very lonely?' I asked.
'I have never been so alone,' she said. 'Jago would read with me — Virgil, Aristotle, even Augustine — and I would see my home. Bees would come to sup at my flowers, and I would mourn, for they would never taste the rosemary or the lavender of our palace gardens. The mind plays cruel games.'
'Terrible games,' I agreed.
'Petroc, can I tell you something?' I nodded absently, looking up at the peaceful river of the Milky Way.
'Do you remember when we . . . back in Bordeaux? The first time?' I nodded again, and kissed her hand.
'It was not the first time. Not for me,' she said. I dropped her hand.
'Really?' I said, my voice reedy with surprise.
'No. You are shocked,' she insisted. I paused, considering. Then I picked up her hand again.
'I have no right to be shocked by anything,' I said. 'The greatest shock I ever had was discovering that you desired me. I have never judged you, Anna.'
'That is not true,' she protested. 'The day after Bordeaux, you acted as if I were Eve and Salome rolled into one.'
'No, no!' I shook my head furiously. 'No, it was the blood! I was sickened to my very soul by what I had done. And you had blood on your hands - I mean just that: your hands were all bloody, and I did not want more blood on me. That was all, Anna! I swear it!'
'I thought that you were revolted by me, by who - what - I was, what we had done. No, listen! In Trondheim, I was so lonely that I took one of my guards for a lover. He was a boy - big, blond, a peasant - and I was a girl. We did it exactly twice, then he boasted to his mates, there was a fight, and he lost the use of his arm. The whole castle found out. They put me in the cells, Patch! They would have tortured me were it not for my imperial blood.' She spat the words out distainfully. 'Then they decreed I should go to the stake. To burn. They would have done it, but Jago, my old priest, saved me. That was how I ended up in Greenland.' What about the guard?'
'Oh, I'm sure they killed him,' she replied. There was mockery in her voice, but it did not conceal the pain.
'Anna, you are neither Eve nor Salome. You did not kill that boy. Yes, there are many who would say otherwise - your husband, for one, and those pious murderers who administer the noose and the pyre as if those were Christ's sacrament. It is they who are damned, Anna. I judge them, not you.'
'Oh, what nonsense, Petroc!' she cried. I hushed her with my finger.
'Listen to me,' I said. 'That morning, after the fight, I was recoiling from what I had done to that man, not from what we had . . . There has never been anything finer than that in my mean little life. What you did in Trondheim, whose affair is it but yours? My God, Anna, how long were you in Gardar - two years? Well then, you have even done your penance as it is written down by the Church itself. But do not ask absolution of me. In my sight you are spotless. You are as pure as the whitest lily, my love.'
'Do you really mean all that?' she asked, quietly.
With all my heart.'
'Then you are a fool,' she said. Her words were harsh, but her lips on mine were not.
The saint who watches over lovers and fools - and over foolish lovers most of all - was guarding us that night, for no one saw us, or if they did, chose not to make it their business. We were not so reckless again, but that night had battered down every last vestige of the reserve that had come between us for so long. If we were not so bold, then at least we spent our idle hours, be they night or day, together. And if my terrible rage was not quenched, it was tempered, and I saw, at last, that although I had come to know death, I had also found out life's store of sweetness, and how to share it with another.
Thus we had passed the great Bay of Naples and the great smouldering peak of Vesuvius, of which I had read in Pliny, and then down past the flames of Stromboli and the smoke of Etna - I remember these sights more than any other, as they were the strangest and filled me with wondering dread. We passed Stromboli at night, and Anna's lips found mine for a moment as we stood at the rail and watched the flames from the mountaintop cast ghastly pink and orange shadows on the black cloud that lowered overhead.
Then, as we passed the Straits of Messina and left Italy at Cape Spartivento, setting off into the Ionian Sea - I loved to hear these names, and pestered Nizam all I could to learn them - I felt a change in Anna. She was quivering like a courser about to be slipped free, and grew silent, although she seemed to seek my presence more. But most days she spent in her station at the bows, wedged in the angle between the rail and the bowsprit, watching the dolphins and flying fish that kept us company and gazing endlessly at the blue distance which hid Greece. She had taken her place there early on the morning we reached the island, as soon as land showed itself as the merest sliver on the horizon. Now her hair was stiff with salt spray, and her eyes were distant and slightly fevered.
'Do you hear it?' she asked. 'The land is singing to us. That is the song of my home.'
We were making for a gap in the lower cliffs that seemed to ring the island. Smaller breaks in the rock gave onto little beaches, each with a grove of trees clinging to whatever level ground there was. But Nizam had pointed the Cormaran at a stone gateway, where the cliffs dipped down into tapering spits and finally broke, letting the sea flow in towards the base of the greater mountain. At the end of each arm of rock stood two small stone turrets from the top of which spun four triangles of pure white cloth. They were windmills, childlike compared to the creaking giants of home but strangely festive amid all this water and arid rock.
We passed close enough to the starboard spit to hear the swish of the mills and to see the rock drop sheer into the deeps, white stone gleaming through the air-clear water. Thick red weed grew there, with fat sea anemones and clusters of black, spiky orbs.
'Echinoos,' said Pavlos, licking his lips. "You would say "urchins".'
I told him we had no such barbaric creatures in Devon, and that I wasn't going to have them anywhere near my mouth. 'No, no: you are the barbarian here, Patch,' Anna reminded me. You will eat echinoos, I insist. They are sublime. They taste like . . . you'll see.' I huffed. But in truth I was strangely drawn to this place already. We had made only one other landfall in the Mediterranean Sea, at Pisa, a place of man's artistry and artifice, and the filth that always accompanies man had turned the water a sickly, opaque grey. We had skirted the arid coasts at a distance, close enough to smell the herb-laced breeze but too distant to make out details. Now it was close enough to touch, and I felt a sudden shiver of excitement. Then we were past the point, and the Bay of Limonohori opened before us.
It was a gigantic cove, a giant's stone basin tipped towards the sea, the lip just submerged, the walls rising on all sides until they fused with the mountain that towered high over everything. Straight ahead, a white village on a strip of white beach shimmered through the heat. Suddenly we were out of the wind and the air was still and hot and filled with the shrieks and rasps of unnumbered legions of insects. I smelled pine resin and thyme, and herbs that I could not name; stone dust, and a faint, pungent stink that was not unpleasant. The p
lace was soaked in scent and noise and dry heat, as if the bay were an alchemist's alembic and we had intruded on some miraculous operation.
As we moved on, I could see houses on either side of us, small whitewashed cubes with roofs of red pan tile standing out from the dark grey-green trees. On the beaches, men sat mending nets while their brightly painted boats skipped at anchor in the clear, silver-blue shallows. I waved - something not done aboard the Cormaran, but I could not help myself — and a few waved back. At my side the Greeks were visibly shaking with joy. They whispered back and forth, their hands drawing urgent signs in the air between them.
'Have you been here before?' I asked them.
'I have,' said Pavlos. His face fell for a moment. 'They were not so pleased to see me then. It was when I sailed with . . . when I was with the pirates. I think we raided every village on these islands, but we didn't see the people. They would hide in the mountains, and besides, they had nothing to steal. But Venice is strong now, and the pirates are all dead or fat and old. Or respectable—' and he dug Panayoti in the ribs.
'They don't seem to be afraid of us at all.'
'Because we bring trade, not ruin. In any case, this time our brand of piracy will be more - what shall I say? - delicate.'
'He means that we aren't going to land, collar the first old man we see and tell him we've come to pinch their Saint Tula.' It was Gilles. 'The Captain is very, very good at his work.'
The truth, of course, was that we were here to steal these people's most precious possession. Tula's body was the beating heart of Limonohori and of Koskino itself. Although I did not believe that - nor did any of us -1 had not forgotten that I had once been one of the faithful, the credulous. I missed it, that feeling of certainty. When you lose faith you never quite fill the emptiness left behind. And so I was not yet so estranged from my past to wave away the import of what we had come here to do.
But then I thought, as the cypresses and those strangely gnarled, grey-leaved trees slipped by, if no one knows that Tula has gone, has she really left? It is faith that has the true power, not the object, and provided we left their faith intact, maybe we would have done no great wrong. I spat over the side. Well, I had solved that problem, I thought, bitterly.
I am a little ashamed to report that these dark thoughts slipped away as soon as I heard the rattle and hiss of the anchor cable and felt the Cormaran stall beneath my feet. We were perhaps four rods' length from shore, but the cable paid out twenty fathoms before the anchor struck. It was deep below us, and the sun's rays, very low now, made darts of speckled gold that dived and vanished. The village was there before us, a scatter of houses and a strange little church, with a merry chaos of painted boats at anchor in the shallows and drawn up onto the glaring white pebbles. A crowd was gathering at the edge of the water. They certainly were not afraid of the Cormaran, I thought, as I watched men wade out to their boats and begin to row out to us. They rowed standing up and facing forward, pushing their whole bodies into the task, sunburned men with curly black hair and beards, wearing simple tunics as white as the stones of the beach.
Pavlos, with Elia and Panayoti at his heels, was clambering into the gig. Anna made to follow, but Gilles held her back gently. 'Not yet, Vassileia,' he murmured. We will do this properly, with a little style.' Meanwhile the three Greeks were rowing madly towards the villagers. They met in open water, and the villager in the lead boat grabbed the gunwales of the gig and pulled it alongside him. I saw Pavlos put out his hand and felt a certain relief when it was taken warmly. There was much hand waving in the Greek style, and then the flotilla pulled towards us again.
'So they trust us for now,' said the Captain behind us. 'That is good.'
The village headman had ordered a feast in our honour, and despite the short notice, pigs and goats were already sizzling on their spits by the time Anna and I waded ashore. Trestles had been set up in the square beneath two great trees whose bark was smooth and peeling, showing the creamy skin of the trunk beneath.
'Platanos,' Anna told me. 'I don't know what you call them in your country. Here every village has one in the square for shade. Often they are older than the village itself. And those other trees you are gawping at are lemons. Limoni - how this place got its name.'
She sat beside me at the head of the table - that is to say, she sat at the head of the table, the Captain on one side, myself on the other. It seemed unfair to me that Gilles or another, more senior crewman should be placed below me, but Gilles himself insisted, waving away my protests. Anna, he explained, had been presented to the village as Eleni, the daughter of a Macedonian duke. She was being married off to a Flemish lord living in Venice - myself, as it turned out - who had come to fetch his bride and carry her back to the Serenissima. The Lady Eleni had heard of the shrine of Saint Tula from her old nursemaid, and had come to make an offering and pray for many sons. That had overjoyed the folk of Limonohori. They loved their saint, they told us, and everyone who came to visit her was sent by God to bring joy to the island. But of course, few had come while the pirates (may their intestines be chewed by wild pigs) had held sway. Now pilgrims were coming again, thanks be to the Frankish lords, but never often enough.
The food was wonderful. Chargers of red earthenware piled high with the hacked-apart meat passed from hand to hand. There were bitter greens, little grilled fish, strange and rich stews of vegetables, some of which I recognised, some not. 'Melitzana,' Anna would explain. 'Bamyes; fasolyes.' I finally tasted a lemon, squeezing a half into my mouth and almost choking on the knife-like sourness while the villagers roared.
A boorish Frank, but at least he's trying, they seemed to think, and that was fine. Anna and I were at the very centre of a constant swirl of bustle and noise: we, the noble lovers, were the guests of honour. Every new dish came to us for a first taste, every speech - and there were many, each one more eloquent and wine-loosened than the last - began with a toast to us. I took a guilty joy in the thought that these poor people, so profligate with their hospitality, had no idea just how lowly one of us was, and how truly imperial the other. We did not have to play-act very much, there being small likelihood of anyone in Limonohori knowing much about the social life of Antwerp — not that I knew much more than them. I kept my chin up and my manner as lordly as I could under the determined siege of the strange pine-soaked wine. Anna, meanwhile, seemed to be in paradise. They brought her babies to bless, and I blanched at first when she spat on the little swaddled things until she explained that it warded off evil. She pinched children's cheeks and had her own pinched beet-red by an endless line of old women who would have loved to get their claws on my own jowls had they dared. Rank evidently had its advantages.
The wine flowed as if from a fountain. It was honey-coloured and tasted strongly of freshly cut pine wood, a flavour so unexpected that I forgot to be repelled. By the second cup I hardly noticed it, by the third I welcomed it, and then I ceased keeping count. How Will would have loved this, I thought: the wine, the laughter, the proud dark women. Gradually the rumpus of the party faded and I sat staring up at the glowing night sky, the most sublime, unearthly blue I had ever seen. Big bats flitted about up there, and the sharp edge of the mountain shone faintly, a silver thread below the stars.
Someone was nudging me. It was Anna, and she was drawing my attention to a big red bowl brimming with spiny black balls held by a grinning, toothless village woman. At last, the echinoos,' she said, picking one of the terrible things out with a light touch. She laid it on the table and with her knife jabbed vigorously at the centre, loosening the vicious spines and opening a hole in what I saw was a fragile, bony shell. She poured water into the hole and with a swirl and a flourish tipped the urchin's guts out onto the ground. Another flick of the knife, and there on its point was a bright orange slug.
'This is the bit you eat,' she said. 'Go on, then.'
'It's a slug,' I protested, my tongue suddenly thick with wine.
'No it isn't. It's the eggs. Go on �
�� the village is watching, my lord.'
Head reeling, I bent and licked the ghastly morsel from the steel. There was a burst of salty, fishy, bloody pleasure on my tongue. I took a long swallow of the pungent wine.
'So that's the secret of the echinoos’ I heard myself say, as the table rose up fast to meet me. 'They taste just like . . .'
I awoke the next morning to the realisation that every bat in Limonohori was roosting in my head. Many of them seemed to have relieved themselves in my mouth. I was back on the Cormaran, under the Captain's table, wrapped in the Egyptian carpet. It was early, and only Fafner saw me as I crawled to the water butt and ladled merciful, brackish water down my throat. After a few rough swallows I had the energy to pull myself up on the rail. Beneath me the sea was a dark mirror. The stars were just beginning to fade before the sun, still far below the horizon, and the trees and edges of the island were sharp purple outlines. My clothes felt clinging and stale, so without thinking I stripped and swung myself over the side. For a moment I was hanging in the lambent air and heard a single note of birdsong before the shock of the cold water swallowed me. I let myself sink, knowing I would not touch bottom, then opened my eyes to the sting of salt and looked up. The false sky of the surface trembled like disturbed quicksilver. I kicked and rose slowly, letting the air bubble from my mouth, more quicksilver streaming around me. The bats were leaving their roost in my skull.
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