by Linda Talbot
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Thodorou
Sophie tries hard to like the Patrakis family. But she is daily diminished by their silent accusation.
Undoubtedly this is because she has married their son Andreas, the most eligible man in the village. They had hoped he would take to their dull daughter, Katina, who still sits sullenly at home.
Sophie had instantly loved the wild slopes of western Crete. And Andreas. Like many from the village he takes seasonal jobs - olive picking in the winter, cooking and waiting on tourist tables in the summer.
Sophie paints; walking the long beach of Platanias, transfixed by the waves assaulting the sand, to be greedily withdrawn as though by the huge hand of Poseidon, the surly personification of the sea.
Local people tell her the sea can be as placid as a pond. She does not believe them. Yet she loves the wild water. She tries to trap it on canvas but cannot convey the wilfulness, elementally contained yet repeatedly straining for release.
And she looks long at Thodorou, the island of St Theodora, said in myth to have been a beast that would have eaten Crete. Poseidon turned it to stone. Now the roughness of the waves might be his prolonged fury and resolve to keep the island captive.
Sophie has confronted the beast, rocking close in a small boat to the great cave that might have been its watchful eye but was probably used for Minoan rituals three thousand years ago.
She has glimpsed the elusive kri-kri, the wild goat unique to Crete, camouflaged in the brown vegetation and she has absorbed the silence of the slopes that might have been the beast's hot flanks.
Katina sits motionless outside her house. She does little to help, being clumsy, with a cast in one eye that is disconcerting when Sophie tries to start a conversation in halting Greek.
Katina lifts her nose with a gesture of barely perceptible disdain and if Andreas comes out of the house, she looks pointedly at him over Sophie's shoulder.
Katina has known Andreas since childhood and in her simple way, had believed he would take her into his home. Eventually Sophie stops trying to communicate with her. She leaves the house early; wistful at abandoning the cool vine and overflowing flowers. She loves the beach and the quiet roads winding through orange trees to sun-struck villages. But there are days when she yearns for her home; to sit silently among the flowers and look down on Thodorou, considering the island in perspective.
Why does it obsess her? According to the light, its position seems to shift. She speaks of this to Andreas. He laughs yet seems briefly ill at ease. He sees the island every day from where he works. And at night he dreams. It is as though the island has infiltrated his consciousness during the day to appear as a living entity at night. It is simply because Sophie has talked of it, he tells himself, or he would not have given Thodorou another thought.
Yet in his dreams it breathes and expands; a symbol of those who have invaded Crete, from the Dorians and Romans to the Venetians, Turks and Nazis. The island has been vandalised, her people systematically persecuted.
Now the Turks are reviving animosities, disputing the ownership of islands, such as arid Gavdos off Crete's south coast. Andreas had served in the army and is aware of the Turks’ military means.
By the time he returns from the restaurant Katina is in bed but Sophie comes home each day to her silent accusation as she sits motionless; her eyes fixed on some point out to sea. Sophie realises she is gazing at Thodorou, crouched like a beast in the waves.
At night Andreas and Sophie hear Katina moaning in her shallow sleep. Why don't her parents find her a husband? One day Katina disappears. Her crooked black chair stands empty. The wind gusts suddenly and it topples into the dust.
Simultaneously, as Sophie looks out to sea, a great wave rears, hangs its huge white head in suspension for several seconds, then smashes on shore. Thodorou shimmers in a strange light.
Katina walks into the wind. Her face stings with tears. The shadow of a man lengthens and spreads across the sand; a shape with the girth of a god.
She looks over her shoulder to see who could have cast it. The beach is empty. She walks towards the water and stands motionless as the waves pull tightly into themselves to crash at her feet. Foam flows over her white skin. It is ice cold.
She lifts her skirt and steps forward. The next wave washes up to her shoulders. She gasps and moves to meet its successor. She lets the rapacious water lift and throw her off her feet. She is blinded and gagged by the rushing salt. It swirls in her chest, her guts, filling every part of her unused body. For the first time she is possessed.
She feels the watery hands lifting the sodden clothes from her flesh and close with precision round her waist. They drag her down through a kaleidoscope of fish, through shoals of creatures with a mix of man and shimmering scale, to a clear blue light illuminating beds of undulating growth.
The fronds of fern-like plants reach across the sand, scarlet flower heads glow in the midst of exploratory green feelers. Katina glimpses tritons swimming through the flowers.
She feels, but cannot see the masculine hands that bear her above the sea bed. An elegant hippocampus swims towards her, his green head extended. His eyes are lustful, his lip disdainfully curled. His mane flows with small fish.
Katina shudders; excited and appalled. Then she sees the horses; lofty white creatures with brazen hooves and manes shot with gold. As the huge hands release her the horses quieten and regard her with violet eyes. All are stallions.
They form a circle round her, stepping high like dutiful beasts of the circus ring, moving with one mind. The sea flowers open and close beneath their hooves.
They pause, turned inwards, each white head solemnly confronting her. She smells their lust and sinks into the salt-soaked flowers. She closes her eyes. The lover who lies with her has the texture of a man yet still she is aware of the horses. The flesh that enters hers is neither man nor beast. As the liaison slows, she knows she has sated the appetite of a god.
Poseidon claimed to have created the horse. When Perspehone had turned into a mare to avoid men's lust, he had appeared as a stallion. They had created the nymph Despoena and the wild horse Arion.
Poseidon and his horses withdraw. They are one. Katina lies motionless; wary, overawed. Eventually she stirs and raises her head. Flowers float about her. Iridescent fish dart among their stamens and multi-coloured stems. Warm water washes her body.
But suddenly she sees in her mind, the sullen beast of Thodorou. The weathered flanks heave, displacing sea water which rises in response to lash the lower rocks. The great cave which is its eye, slowly opens, gazes balefully at her and shuts.
Katina's family stand at the water line, edging back as the waves encroach. Katina had been seen by a restaurateur, walking into the water.
More family and friends arrive as the sun slips behind the Rodhopos peninsula. Warmth is replaced by a chill wind. A woman screams; Maria from the village. The others run to where she stands, hands covering her face. On the water's edge Katina's naked body rolls with the rhythm of the waves.
Her parents run to her. Katina is wound with weed and red petals cling to her white skin. On her salt-encrusted abdomen they see the faint hoof print of a horse.
Sophie suffers the unspoken accusation of Katina's parents who deliberately leave the chair lying in the dust. Sophie averts her eyes as she passes the house and spends longer each day by the sea.
While watching the white crested waves she sometimes imagines the straining head of a horse. But as each wave breaks the illusion disperses in cold water at her feet.
July envelops her. She works early and in the evening, stretched from noon to four in the afternoon under a tamarisk tree. Then she walks to the water to bathe. Poseidon's crested progeny have calmed. He turns his face with brief placidity to the sun. Sophie floats with her eyes closed. She loses sense of time and place.
The sinewy arms that drag her beneath the surface are those of a woman. Sophie gasps and fights to rise and break through the
water. But the arms pull her down until the blue green shades of the sea spin senselessly.
Sophie opens her eyes to see Katina floating above her against the rugged rock. She has lost the substance of flesh. An eerie blue-grey film clings to her bones and in her face her dark eyes have grown; motionless pools of accusation.
Sophie is immobilised by the dead girl's will. Is she dead too?
The malice grows in Katina's eyes. Sophie has the sensation of being lifted with purposeful relish and borne through streaming water. Briefly, she glimpses half human beings with fins and scales.
She surfaces in blinding sunlight by the burnt flanks of Thodorou. The great cave gapes above. Katina's blue-grey arms seem to lengthen and envelop Sophie. She struggles against their vice-like grip. The ghost's feet do not touch the weathered rock. Her horrible head is flung back.
They reach the cold mouth of the cave. Katina bears Sophie inside. The sea echoes; distant evidence of a lost world. The cave is alive with disconcerting sounds. Bats? Or indefinable beings bred of water, rock and incalculable time?
Katina releases Sophie onto the rough ground. Sophie feels the potency of the past, motivated by the beliefs of a people immersed in the natural world. Their goddess had been a stern demander of sacrifice. Her presence possesses the cave. Sophie sees Katina's unearthly face above her; the blue-grey matter flooding from her bones. She loses consciousness.
The Turks are again disputing the ownership of islands. Greek defences are on high alert.
Andreas is distraught. He watches the war planes and walks the shore, searching for clues to Sophie's disappearance. The police search too but she has vanished without trace. Sand and sea dance only with the diamonds of the sun.
Andreas is transfixed. The great curling crests of the god's defiance are poised, as though for effect, before their futile fall. Then they withdraw, to curve, pause and plunge again.
Suddenly Andreas is in the water. Compelled, he walks steadily into the oncoming waves. The swirling water draws him down through the flowing weed and flowers.
Golden fronds undulate from behind a rock. He reaches and touches one. It has the harsh texture of a horse's mane. Suddenly it swirls and turns into a woman's face. It is faintly familiar with a slight sheen as though polished by the sea. She moves from behind the rock and Andreas sees her body. Her long neck and trunk are those of a white horse. Her two front legs are also equine with brazen hooves. But behind she thrashes the great tail of a fish.
Fearfully she retreats as Andreas fights to master his amazement and murmur reassurance. "Who are you?" His voice is remote.
"Lepinaea", she replies.
Andreas looks closely at the creature's face. She has Katina's accusing eyes. With sudden intuition, he knows she is Katina's daughter. But who is her father?
As though in response the water surges and washes coldly over him. He senses horses. Poseidon.
Andreas assumes he is dreaming. He will wake, go to work and return to find Sophie in her usual place under the vine. Even Katina might perhaps be motionless on her black chair.
But he feels the insistent water and smells the strangely perfumed sea flowers and a trace of salt-soaked horses.
Lepinaea swims, paddling her forelegs and swinging her tail. Her mane flows like liquid gold. They surface. Thodorou soars above them; ragged with coarse vegetation, rustling with kri-kri.
Then Andreas sees the cave. "The eye", he thinks. It gazes at him; bottomless and black. Lepinaea scrambles and squirms up the rock. Andreas follows, scaling the rough face with uncanny ease. They near the cave. A dankness defying the summer air, envelops them.
Lepinaea crawls in. Andreas follows. Disturbed bats swoop in the gloom. They have grown to great size. They fly to the far end of the cave and hang in a cloak-like colony.
Andreas pauses while his eyes grow used to the dark. Then, apprehensively, he looks around. The cave ripples with great shelves of rock that seem sealed in time, retaining a primitive trace of the past.
Then he sees Sophie. She lies, bound thickly with weed, in a corner of the cave. Lepinaea stands over her, bending her equine head in curiosity. Andreas stumbles over the rock-strewn ground.
Sophie has subtly changed. Her face is semi-transparent, as though the blood has been carefully drained. Patches of white skin are perceptible through the weed.
The cave shudders. The bats mass and swoop. A rumble under Andreas's feet rises to a roar. Lepinaea cowers in a corner. A shadow shifts over Sophie's face.
Andreas, losing balance, reaches for a rocky wall. His hand slides over a strange substance, like the aqueous humour of an eye. He stumbles to the cave's mouth. The rocks of Thodorou undulate and pulse. The vegetation is hardening into scales. The island is alive.
Lepinaea crawls from the cave. Now a filmy surface is covering its mouth. Slowly, a distortion with the shape and weight of a massive eyelid, lowers. Andreas knows he is being watched. Then, gathering a strength, long unused, the island heaves.
Poseidon instantly responds, rising with enormous white-crested waves, to smash in Thodorou's path. Andreas clings to the beast's scales but the sea soars and breaks over them. They slip under his hands. He falls and is caught on a protruding ledge.
Lepinaea scrambles up the beast's great flank. She vanishes over the top where vegetation has not yet turned to scales. Andreas dares not move. Now he feels the beast shift slowly towards the shore.
The wind whistles. He looks up and thinks he sees Katina's face; a mournful movement in a wisp of cloud. It flurries in the wind as though restlessly seeking someone. Lepinaea?
Andreas flattens himself against the rock. He thinks of Sophie, trapped in the essence of Thodorou's eye.
The sky darkens. The white waves curve into the heads of huge horses; Poseidon's steeds straining to reach shore. In their frothing manes, fish and strange hybrids teem, swept haplessly in on the tide. The water recedes, leaving them like flotsam on the beach.
People gather on shore; dumbstruck by the island's transformation. They gaze from the horses hurled onto the sand to the heaving body of the beast. Its malevolent eye is charged with the colours of the spectrum.
Thodorou pauses, spent by the effort of metamorphosis. Night creeps cautiously. The island subsides; a vague bulk that might have reverted to rock and ragged vegetation.
Slowly, the people disperse. Andreas feels for a fresh hand hold. The scales remain but they are dry and he is able to sink his fingers into their ridges. Painfully he hauls himself up onto what had once been a goat path.
Where are the kri-kri? The island is ink black. Faint scrapings might be the harassed hooves of the terrified goats. Where is Lepinaea?
The moon appears from behind a cloud, flooding land and sea. The beast's black scales are caked with salt near the water that still heaves the stark white heads of horses against Thodorou. They have multiplied; some hitting the beast and breaking into harmless foam, others, against nature, retreating and tossing dementedly.
Then, stark against the moon, Andreas sees the head of Lepinaea, her mane rising in the night like a river of gold. He scrambles to her among the remnants of vegetation. She tosses her head, turning the woman's face towards him. Katina's pain and apprehension light her eye. She slithers on her golden hooves and thrashes the ground with her tail. Andreas reaches for her, feels the scales of her tail slide through his hand.
A blow falls on the back of his neck. Katina stands over him; a large stone in her hands. She is still outraged that he chose Sophie. Now he is assaulting her daughter. She is about to strike him again but he grasps her arm, deflecting the blow. She drops the stone on Lepinaea. The creature cries out with a woman's voice.
Blood streams from her head, matting her golden mane. Her head lolls, the woman's face exposed and sealed in shock. Her body pulsates. She struggles to raise her great tail. But it falls back motionless.
A roar of water. The sea sweeps over them, dragging them through the scraggy growth. They slither on the
beast's scales, soaked now by the sea. Andreas holds Lepinaea. Katina undulates strangely under the moon above the surface of the island.
Andreas feels Lepinaea slipping from his grasp. She slides - blue, white and glinting gold - down the scales into her father's depths.
Katina has vanished. Andreas crouches, clinging to the beast's back. Dawn slowly lights the eastern sky. Poseidon rages, his horses heaving in congestion.
Intermittently they break over Andreas. His hands are raw with clutching the beast's scales. His head is steeped in shadows.
Thodorou draws in a deep breath. On exhaling, the beast shifts, defying the sea's restraint. But Poseidon persists, dragging down the lower part of the island. Thodorou groans. Andreas cannot move. The horses, unleashed, lash his legs. Still the beast advances.
Andreas hears Katina scream. The sound is half human, yet unearthly and seems to come from several directions simultaneously. Andreas cranes but cannot see her. Then she drops past him.
Poseidon, enraged that Katina has injured his daughter, draws her to the blackness of his lower depths. Then, taking the towering shape of a man, he draws his horse whip and lashes her. She feels the pain through her ghostly frame. She cowers and collapses. Fish and hybrids explore her quivering form, passing to and fro through her bloodless being.
The Turks are arming. Talks have collapsed. History hesitates on the brink of repetition. Old memories are revived at protest meetings. The possibility of re-conquest is unthinkable.
Military exercises sully the skies. People prepare pathetically to defend themselves; hiding goats and valuables as though still in the eighteenth century.
Andreas dives from Thodorou but is beaten back by the turbulent horses. He is thrown onto the brittle scales that move now with increasing articulation. He devises a means of riding their rhythm, stretched full length and shifting periodically to a fresh position.
Finally he reaches the massive eye. It is wide open, watching him with malice; its enormous pupil reflecting the blue, green and crested white of the surging sea.
Andreas crawls apprehensively towards it. It remains implacable. He reaches and touches its surface. His fingers are partly absorbed. He tries unsuccessfully to withdraw them. Slowly the great lid lowers, trapping his hand. He is consumed by pain and cries out, the small sound drowned by the sea.
Eventually the lid lifts to reveal the mouth of the cave through the thinning film. Andreas withdraws his hand and sees the eye dim, until only the craggy cave entrance remains.
Tentatively he steps inside. The bats circle his head. A curious sticky substance lies on the floor and walls. He picks his way to where Sophie lies. He kneels beside her. He hears Katina's voice urging him to revive Sophie with immortal ichor. Suddenly he knows patriarchal violation can be halted by the defiance of a mortal woman emboldened by the gods.
The cowed ghost of Katina who had coveted Andreas, now urges him to revive the woman she had jealously assaulted. How else can Crete be saved?
Andreas knows the ichor of immortality replaces blood in the veins of the gods. Lepinaea is not wholly immortal but Poseidon has endowed her with a measure of the magic.
Where is she? Andreas kisses Sophie's pallid forehead and leaves the cave. As the bats swoop to re-settle, the film grows again across the rocky mouth. The pupil gazes dourly.
Andreas looks at the horses hurled at the sliding scales. He takes a deep breath and dives. The water closes over his head. Blue-green streams are shot with churning sand and swirling hybrids that now outnumber fish.
A tiny creature with a woman's head and a body of grey water weed somersaults past, fixing Andreas with wide eyes. A fish with the genitalia of man moves with dignity through glowing coral. Andreas swims with no need for oxygen. Peace permeates the depths.
Lepinaea lies on a thick bed of water weed and shells. The blow had stunned but not killed her. She stirs and opens her eyes. Andreas reaches a tentative hand to her head. She turns her equine profile to him. He smoothes her salt-encrusted hair. She flinches. He grasps her golden forelock.
She curls her great tail round her forelegs. Andreas runs his hand along her neck and back and feels her lightly shiver. He turns her head to find the woman's face and slowly caresses its outline. Then he repeats the gesture on that of the horse, fingering the strong bones. Lepinaea nuzzles him with her equine nose but he seeks her woman's lips. As he kisses her she whinnies deep in her throat.
Gently he eases her onto her side. Then she rolls onto her back. She lays her tail flat along the ground and tucks her front legs into her chest. Her head is thrown back, her mane spread like a sunburst.
Andreas lowers onto her and she whinnies softly. Her body seems to expand, absorbing him until he is overwhelmed by the unity of woman, horse and fish. His senses swim in a coursing current that renews desire the moment it is satisfied.
He opens her lips, extending his tongue. He feels the saliva and tastes the strange flavoured ichor with which it mingles. He gulps, holding the liquid in his mouth, and withdraws.
He claws through the water until confronting the horses. He clings to a thrashing neck and is borne towards Thodorou. The horse heaves and shakes, trying to dislodge him but Andreas rides the frenzied foam. He must not swallow. Thrown against the creaking scales, he grasps one and pulls himself onto the advancing beast.
Aircraft roar overhead as he struggles up the wet flanks, fighting not to swallow but feeling the precious ichor seeping slowly down his throat. He edges along the scales towards the beast's head. Its eye is closed, as though with the effort of moving to shore.
But as Andreas approaches, the lid lifts and he sees the pupil pulsating in the clear morning light. He thrusts his head through the filmy substance. It is repulsed. The ichor is running down his throat. Again he pushes at the throbbing eye. This time it relents and he falls into the cave.
Sophie lies in the same position. Andreas takes her head in his hands. He presses his lips hard on hers, transferring what is left of the ichor. He withdraws. Sophie does not stir. Then she shivers. She opens her eyes and faintly smiles, her lips still moist with traces of immortality.
Slowly she sits up. Andreas takes her arms and helps her stand. They move to the cave's mouth. The eye lid is closed. They sway with the movement of the beast. They push at the liquid eye. It moves yet remains impenetrable. Now the inner eye of the cave is growing damp. Water wells from its tear duct. Andreas and Sophie claw at the eye and the lid lifts as the water flows with increasing pressure. They are borne on the tear and washed into the sea. Thodorou is gasping, its breath issuing in great clouds.
Like fog they drift across the land. Within them, enemy aircraft drone. Computers fail to find their targets. The pilots circle helplessly and eventually turn for home. The beast is preserving Crete.
The tears welled because Thodorou had been part of the island. The beast is not invading, as myth affirmed, but striving to be reunited with Crete. It had lived through former invasions and weeps now in contemplation of another. Yet its breath continues to thicken and rise. Eventually it clears. Thodorou pauses. The beast cannot quite reach shore. Its strength is spent.
Andreas and Sophie watch the straining scales slow and gradually revert to vegetation and rock. The sound of aircraft returns. Sophie grasps a rock and, transformed by the ichor in her veins, springs like a kri-kri through the scrub.
She gains the island's highest point, spreads her arms and throws back her head. She shines and appears to grow; her bare arms shimmering, her face radiating light. It grows more intense, charged with the heightened colours of the spectrum. The sky absorbs the overwhelming light. Andreas covers his face with his hands. The pilots, blinded, again turn back.
Sophie stands; a simple woman draped in weed, her hair awry, her pallid flesh thick with salt. Andreas climbs to her and helps her descend.
The horses calm, leaving in their wake random flecks of foam. Andreas and Sophie dive into them and swim to shore.
As they stan
d looking at Thodorou, now so much closer to Crete, Lepinaea rises from the water. Her mane lies like polished gold on the sea. She turns her woman's face towards the shore. On her back she bears Katina's ghost. Now Lepinaea, having relinquished some of her ichor, will one day die too. She pauses, then starts to swim away from Thodorou. Her blue and gold tail thrash the water until blending with the swell.
Thodorou drowses in the sun. The great cave gapes, reverting to a cavernous rock.
Andreas and Sophie move from the village - ill at ease with Katina's parents. They find a house on the Rodhopos peninsula with a room where Sophie can paint and which looks towards Thodorou.
The island, ambiguous still with the contours of an unclassifiable beast, monopolises her canvas. The great eye materialises. It has lost malevolence and is vulnerable, devoid of defensiveness.
The Greek and Turkish governments begin to talk. A compromise is struck and hostilities cease.
The strange fish and teeming hybrids vanish from the Cretan Sea. Poseidon blusters and subsides, responding to the pale moon spilling pools of light on Thodorou.
But sometimes, during the day, as Andreas gazes at the island, he imagines it shifts, almost imperceptibly, moving even closer to the shore and, as he peers into the sun, its cave once more fleetingly resembles a lazy, lidded eye.
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Monogamy
In The Odyssey Circe turns Odysseus’s sailors into pigs. But with Hermes’ help and “moly” - a white flower with a black root, he was protected from Circe’s magic and agreed to stay with her on condition she restored his men to their former selves.
