Earth and Air

Scops

TIME: a dozen or so centuries ago, when there was still a Christian Emperor in Byzantium.

PLACE: One of the several hundred little islands that were part of his Empire, though it is doubtful whether he had ever given this one a thought.

ACTION: A young man is throwing up.

Yanni was drunk, bewildered, miserable, lost in the pitch-black dark, shuddering and gasping. All he knew was that he was leaning forward, propping himself against the square edge of something stone, having just vomited everything out of his stomach in one reeking gush into the gap between his legs and the something.

A blinding glare. Immediately on top of it a deafening blast of sound. Lightning and thunder, he woozily recognised.

Two senses blasted away. Now there were only the taste and stink of his own vomit, and the touch of the stone something.

And a memory. In that instant of glare, the stone surface, flat as a table. On it a small, round, fluffy ball.

He straightened a little and gently swept a quivering hand across the top of the something. There. Even more gently, he eased his trembling fingers round the soft ball and picked it up. It squirmed slightly in his grasp but didn’t struggle. Through the diminishing fuzz of his deafness he heard a faint cheeping. Yes, he thought that was what he’d seen. A baby bird.

He straightened fully and cupped it carefully between both hands. It squirmed again. By feel he was able to tell what it wanted, so he loosened his grasp, allowing it to work its head between his thumbs. Once there it was still.

Carefully he established control over his balance and looked around. He had come to this place groping through the blind, pitch dark, but now to his surprise, though the cloud cover was dense and low and the thin moon must have long set, there seemed to be enough light for him to recognise where he was. The shapes were strangely fuzzy. He assumed that must be something to do with the wine—he’d never been drunk before—but there was no mistaking the tall pillars either side of him and the lintel above. This was the House of the Wise One. The thing he’d been leaning against while he vomited was the Bloodstone. And on a new-moon night, almost!

In a panic like that of nightmares he stumbled out between the pillars and down through the olive trees. Even under the unthinned olives—nobody tended or harvested the trees that had belonged once to the Wise One—there was enough light for him not to bump into their trunks. With a sigh of relief he turned up the path. As he did so it started to rain, a few huge drops, and then the longed-for downpour. The air filled with the smell of water on parched ground, more glorious even than the smell of fresh-baked bread. Carefully he shifted his grip until he could hold the bird one-handed and tuck it up under his smock, out of the wet. Hunching his body over it for further protection he hurried up the path. The night was now pitch dark again, but his legs knew the way. He wondered how, even drunk, they could have strayed from it.

The rain sluiced down. For himself he didn’t mind the drenching. His body was almost like part of the hillside, welcoming wetness. Besides, combined with the sudden bout of panic, the rain seemed to have cleared the fumes out of his head and now he could remember the horrible day, feeling from first light as if the island had a curse on it—heavy, dense air, sunless but oven-hot under the low clouds, tense with thunder that never did more than rumble overhead, while, as if to embody the curse, dark columns of desperately needed rain could be seen falling uselessly far out at sea, or sometimes coming nearer but then sidling past the steep fields and vineyards and tinder-dry scrubland, all dying from the unseasonal spring drought.

In that heat and oppression Yanni and his sister Euphanie had worked all morning in their terraced vineyard, Yanni checking over and repairing the trellises that supported the vines while Euphanie trained and tied in the fresh spring growth that would carry the grapes, and thinned out the unwanted shoots. They had rested unresting through the midday torpor, and returned to work. By the time Yanni had finished in the trellises and joined his sister, the thundery tension had given her one of her headaches, so sour that she could barely see for the pain of it. Despite that, she had kept getting further and further ahead along her own row, and then coming back to find what was holding him up.

“What on earth is the problem now? Oh, Mother of God, Yanni, what have you been up to? There must have been a better lead growth. Don’t tell me . . . Yes, here. Your knife slipped, I suppose. And then you’ve left three side shoots almost on top of each other. Where’ve you put your brain? Why does it always seem to be somewhere else when I need you to give me a hand?”

And in the end, “Yanni, I simply can’t stand this any longer! Go home! Go down to the tavern and tell the others what a stupid, useless great baby you are. Men are the most useless of the Good Lord’s inventions, and you’re the most useless of men! Or will be, if you ever grow up enough to be a man! Go on! There’s money in the pot. Take enough for one mug, if you can count that far! Oh, go away! I’m sick of the sight of you!”

So, weeping with shame and anger and frustration, he had done what she had told him and taken the money and gone down to the tavern, and had had a horrible time there too. Usually the men just ignored him, but to night . . .

He pulled himself together and refused to think about it.

As he reached the cottage the door opened. Euphanie stood in the doorway, black against the lamp glow, about to toss something out into the dark. She halted the action and peered.

“Yanni? Are you all right? You must be soaked. Get inside. What happened to you?”

“All right now. Only wet. I went to the tavern. The men don’t really want me there, you know. Mostly they ignore me, but to-night they decided to get me drunk. I didn’t realise. I thought they were just being friendly at last. Then they threw me out for not standing my round. I’d told them I couldn’t, but . . .”

“Bastards! Always trying to beat each other. I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to learn somehow how to deal with them. It’s so much easier for women . . . Anyway, I shouldn’t have talked to you like that, whatever sort of a mess you were making. I’m sorry.”

“It was your head. How’s it feel now?”

“Much better. Gone. Like magic. The moment the first drops fell. What’ve you got there?”

“Look.”

He brought his hand out, moved to the lamp and cradled the fluffy scrap of life between his palms. It gaped up at them, blinking, apparently unalarmed. Euphanie craned over and studied it.

“A little scops owl, I think,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“In the House of the Wise One.”

“You went there! And on a new-moon night, almost! Are you crazy?”

“I don’t know how I got there. I was drunk, remember. I’d no idea where I was. It was blind dark and I just finished throwing up and there was a flash of lightning and I saw this bird. It was only afterwards that I realised I was in the House, and I’d been leaning on the Bloodstone to throw up. Look, it’s hungry, what do owls eat?”

“Mice and voles and beetles and things,” she muttered, not thinking about it. “They swallow them when they’re hunting and cough them up for the babies when they get back to the nest.”

And then, after a pause, and more slowly, but still in a hushed voice, “Yanni, the owl, the scops owl, is the Wise One’s own bird. I think she brought you to her House. I think you were meant to find it. And look.”

She showed him the thing she had been about to throw into the dark when he had come home. It was a dead mouse, one the cat must have brought in, as it often did.

Yanni loved and admired his sister. She was five years older than he was, and since their mother had died seven years ago she had looked after him, as well as doing most of the work on their smallholding, far up the mountain called Crow Castle. He had no memory of his father, who had left the island soon after Yanni was born, telling only a few friends that he was going—but not his wife, because she might have talked him out of it. She was a strong woman, and had managed almost as well (better, some people said) without him. Euphanie was of the same sort, whereas Yanni himself, he guessed, was more like his father. His one determination in an otherwise unfocussed existence was that he would somehow learn to be different.

He waited till Euphanie had lined a small bowl with bits of rag and then settled the owl into it. Determined, this once, to do something right, he sharpened a knife and with still-trembling fingers skinned and gutted the mouse, filleted out the larger bones and chopped up what was left. Not good enough, he decided. He didn’t think he could actually swallow and regurgitate the food, but he spooned some of it into his mouth, chewed it up bones and all, spat the mess into his palm, took a morsel between finger and thumb and eased it into the gaping beak. The owl simply looked at him, waiting, so with the tip of his little finger he poked the mess as far as he could down the gullet. Now the owl closed its eyes and its beak and with a look of extraordinary blissful smugness gulped the mess down and gaped again. When it had eaten all his first chewings he repeated the process. Euphanie, normally fastidious about everything they ate, watched without protest.

“Do you think it will live?” he asked her.

“If the Wise One sent it,” she said, broodingly. “Yanni, Nana Procephalos kept an owl.”

“Lots of people do.”

“Not any longer. Not since . . . Yanni, don’t tell anyone you’ve got it. If they find out, don’t tell them where you found it. Say the cat brought it in.”

Yanni was scared. Scared by what she said. Scared by her tone.

“I . . . I could take it back.”

“Not now we’ve got it . . . seeing how it came.”

While he finished feeding the owl Euphanie reheated the supper she’d prepared. It was well after their normal bedtime when they sat down to eat. Yanni chewed without noticing the food. He was thinking about Nana Procephalos, and what had been done to her.

Until a summer ago the island priest had been a cheery, easy-going old man, who had understood the islanders well and been much loved by them. But then, just as he was about to celebrate Eucharist, a dreadful thing had happened. Helped by a visiting priest he had tottered up the steps of the church and turned to bless his parishioners, who were waiting to follow him into the service, that being the custom of the island. At that moment, in front of everyone, he had had some kind of a seizure. His body had convulsed, he had thrown up his arms and given a strange bellowing cry. His face had contorted and gone almost black, and he would have tumbled forward down the steps if the other priest hadn’t caught him and lowered him to the ground.

Everyone had watched in horrified silence while the priest had knelt by his side, feeling his pulse, and at last looked up and pronounced the old man dead.

“I will conduct a shortened version of the Eucharist,” he had announced, “and we will pray for the good man’s soul. After that I will write to the bishop telling him what has happened, and then, if you wish, I will remain on the island until a new priest is appointed.”

So it had all been done, until letters arrived from the bishop confirming the visiting priest in his post on a more permanent basis, apparently as much to his surprise as everyone else’s.

His name was Papa Archangelos. He was quite a change, not yet forty, but still a stern, imposing figure, forceful and determined. People wondered why he should have accepted a job in such a backwater. Perhaps the bishop felt that the island needed to be shaken out of its torpor. But he had thrown himself into the task. Within a few months he had visited every household on the island, saying he wanted to get to know his flock, and them him. There was far more of the former than the latter. He asked many questions in a quiet, confiding voice, and listened so sympathetically that even the suspicious islanders tended to tell him secrets that they had long hidden from their neighbours. They learnt almost nothing about him in return, except that he had grown tired of the city and longed for the sea, and the peace to write a great medical book that he had in his head.

He had come late to the remoteness of Crow Castle, but didn’t seem to have wearied of his task. He had grieved for Euphanie and Yanni over the loss of both parents, and promised to see if he could confirm the rumour of their father’s death. He had praised Euphanie for her courage in running the smallholding, and caring for Yanni like a mother, when she herself was hardly out of her childhood. He wondered how they would manage, so far from help, should one of them fall ill, told Euphanie some remedies for common ailments, and asked her for any herbal lore she had learnt from her mother before she died. For his book, he had said. Euphanie had told him the few things she knew, and added that really for that he should talk to Nana Procephalos.

“So I hear,” he had said, smiling. “But she is strangely secretive.”

They had stood at the gate and watched him stride away down the hill.

“Too good to be true,” Euphanie had muttered.

“I didn’t like him either,” Yanni had answered. “I don’t know why.”

“We’d better start going to church every Sunday from now on. In case he notices we’re not there. . . I wish I hadn’t told him about Nana.”

“It sounds as if a lot of other people did too.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Three months later a special court, sent by the bishop from the mainland, had found Nana Procephalos guilty of witchcraft and sentenced her to death by stoning. The evidence seemed incontrovertible. Spies, also from the mainland, had kept watch on her, followed her one new-moon night, and caught her in the House of the Wise One, in the act of sacrificing a black cockerel on the Bloodstone. So by order of the bishop she died in that place, under a hail of rocks.

Papa Archangelos had let it be known, in his sermon before the stoning, that those who refused to attend it would lay themselves open to suspicion of sympathy with witchcraft. A few of the islanders had contrived excuses, Euphanie among them, saying that Yanni was ill and she had to nurse him. But most had gone. Some of the men had joined in the stoning, whooping as the rocks went home. For several weeks after they continued to boast in the tavern of what they’d done.

Now the islanders learnt that rumours had reached the bishop of witchcraft being rife on the island, and that Papa Archangelos had been originally sent to investigate, and then confirmed in his post to destroy this nest of evil. Too late the islanders began to regret some of the things they had told him. But all, like Euphanie and Yanni, became regular churchgoers, and those who had failed to attend the stoning became very careful of what they said and did.

So from the very beginning Yanni and Euphanie did their best to see that there was no trace of the owl’s presence. Islanders tended not to name their domestic animals. The cat was simply “the cat.” But in case they were at some point overheard they decided to name the owl, and since they didn’t know whether it was male or female, for the time being they called it Scops, a name that somehow stuck after she’d laid her first egg. That was much later.

Yanni looked after her. Normally slapdash and forgetful, he was as careful about her as Euphanie would have been. Her habits made his task easier. Until she fledged she lived in the bottom of a large earthenware jar at the back of a shelf in the barn with a bit of fishing net tossed carelessly over it in case the cat took an interest, though it showed no sign of doing so. In fact it played an active part in the task. Next time it brought a mouse in Euphanie rewarded it with a scrap of the fish she was cooking, and after that had happened a couple of times more it seemed to get the idea and kept up a steady flow of owl food.

Scops woke at dusk, shrilly demanding to be fed, and Yanni would cram chewed mouse into the gaping mouth until she turned her head away and with a quick, gulping shudder excreted neatly over the side of her nest into the bottom of the jar. Then he would move her, nest and all, into a smaller bowl which he carried into the house and set on the table beside him so that he could feed her chewings of what he was eating, his ears pricked for the rattle of the chain that fastened the gate at the top of the steep path. Every few evenings he practised the drill of whisking her into the old bread oven and piling against it the logs he kept ready beside it. In the end he could do this to a count of eight, whereas he always fastened the gate in such a way that even in daylight it took a count of fourteen to unwrap the chain and reach the door. The need never arose, but it was a way of reminding himself to be careful.

Scops spent the night in the oven with the door a crack ajar, and at first light was already calling for food. Never in his life had Yanni regularly risen so early. He fed her before he breakfasted and took her out to the barn when he and Euphanie set off for their day’s work.

In two weeks she had doubled her size, and the same two weeks later. By then she had learnt to scrabble out of her bowl and explore round the table while they ate. Already she was moulting her baby down and the quills of her first true feathers were poking through what was left. Her head could swivel through a complete circle in either direction, so that if she happened to be looking Yanni’s way when she stretched and flapped her skimpy wings, her large-eyed owl stare gave her an expression of utter bafflement that they hadn’t done their job and carried her into the air.

Mobility made the problem of her droppings much more difficult. Birds, Euphanie said, were untrainable, so Yanni watched her every instant she was loose, at first with a damp cloth ready to hand. Soon though he learnt the almost imperceptible signal and if he was quick enough could catch the splatter directly onto the cloth. He applied the same vigilance to all her leavings, the moulted feathers, the little pellets of mouse bones she would from time to time cough up, and so on.

“You are getting even more fussy than me,” said Euphanie, teasing.

“Going to church helps,” said Yanni, dead serious. “Seeing him again, week after week. He’s not going to give up.”

By now it was high summer. The spring rains had been kindly, almost healing the ravages of last year’s drought. Between the dew-sweet dawns and the dusty cool of the evenings the island seemed to drowse its days away, purring gently as it slept. But it was not at peace. Papa Archangelos was a disturbing priest. People didn’t know what to expect when they saw the tall black figure pacing towards them along one of the network of tracks that crisscrossed the island. True to his promise he knew everyone in his flock by now, not only their names but their hopes and troubles, and their place in the complex kinships that, rather like those connecting tracks, linked the community together. On meeting he would bless you, and ask a few friendly seeming questions, bringing himself up to date with your affairs since you had last met him, but as you parted you felt he had seen into your inmost heart. Few of the islanders went to formal confession, and those only once a year, travelling to a priest on another island to do so for greater secrecy. Papa Archangelos put no pressure on his flock to come to him. There was no need. He knew.

He was a wonderful preacher, using images of fishing and farming and housekeeping, things the islanders understood. He spoke of the Lord Jesus as if he had met him and talked with him face-to-face, walking the same earth they did and breathing the same air. But every now and then he spoke of a different Christ, the huge-eyed frowning judge whom they could just make out up in the smoky mosaics in the dome of the church, and to whom they would answer on the day of judgment for every ill deed, every sinful thought, every wicked dream in all their lives. At these times he seemed to grow taller as he spoke, and darker, the soft voice whispering though the breathless stillness until the air in the church felt midwinter cold. More than once someone listening had screamed, or shouted in terror, and rushed out into the sunlight. Yanni needed no other reminders to be careful to keep the existence of Scops a secret.

In fact the house where he lived with Euphanie was the last on a track that led nowhere useful, and Papa Archangelos didn’t return there till the grapes were ripe on the vines. By then Scops was flying, and no longer roosted in the jar on the shelf, but on a beam up in the barn, as a wild owl might well do. She slept most of the day, but when he returned with Euphanie from the fields in the evening she would wake at the rattle of the gate and as they reached the door of the house would drift down with her uncanny silent flight, noiseless as a falling leaf, and settle on his shoulder and nibble his ear while he teased the feathers at the back of her neck. Then she would go off and hunt, but not very seriously, knowing she would find food at the house when she returned.

One such evening Papa Archangelos was waiting for them at the gate.

Yanni’s heart lost a beat, and another. There was vomit in his throat. But his legs walked on, helpless.

Euphanie knew what to do.

“Take the corn into the barn,” she whispered. “Leave it there. Say hello to Scops, then come. He’ll be gone before she’s finished hunting.”

Papa Archangelos raised his hand in blessing as they approached and waited for Euphanie to open the gate. She handed her basket to Yanni, and led the way through. Yanni came last, turning aside with both baskets, and on round the corner of the house to the barn. As he reached for the latch Scops did her silent swoop to his shoulder and nibbled his ear. His panic eased.

“Stay clear till he’s gone,” he whispered. “We don’t want him to see you.”

She didn’t of course understand the words, but she seemed to sense his tension and slipped away to become part of the gathering dusk. Inside the house he found Papa Archangelos sitting at the table with a jar of wine, bread, and a dish of olives beside him, and Euphanie still standing, opposite. It wasn’t the custom of the island for a woman to sit if a man, not a member of the family, was in the room. Papa Archangelos waved Yanni to the other chair, as if this had been his house.

“I cannot stay long,” he said. “I have two things to tell you. The first is for you alone, and is sad news. You remember I told you I would try to find whether your father still lived. I have not been wholly successful, but a priest I know in Alexandria tells me there is very good reason to believe that your father died of the plague in that city four years ago. He was working in the docks there when the plague struck and was not among those recorded as having left, and was not seen again. I am sorry, my children. He may not have been a good father to you, but your father he was, nonetheless. Let us pray for his soul.”

He rose, so Yanni did the same and stood with his head bowed while the priest whispered three short prayers. In the silence that followed he could hear the throb of his own heart. Something was going to happen. Something . . .

“Thank you, Father,” said Euphanie, and Yanni managed to mumble his own thanks.

“The second thing,” said Papa Archangelos more briskly, “I am telling everyone on the island. Our blessed Emperor has ordered a census of all his peoples, and soon the census takers will be coming to this island. There is nothing to fear from them, provided you tell them the truth. The penalties for lying are very harsh. You understand.”

“Yes, Father, of course,” said Euphanie, though he had spoken to Yanni.

They waited for him to go, but he stood gazing down at Yanni. Unable to meet his gaze Yanni looked away and found himself watching the fingers of the priest’s right hand as they slowly turned the broad silver ring on the middle finger of his left. He was trapped, hypnotised, by the steady, repetitive movement. Something was going to happen. Something was . . .

“What troubles you, my son?” said the soft voice. “Your father’s death?”

“Er, no . . . No . . . I don’t . . . don’t remember him at all . . . It’s all right . . .”

“But there is something?”

Something? Yes, something . . . Yanni must tell him . . . something . . .

“It was my fault, Father,” said Euphanie. “I made him go down to the tavern to be with the men there. I thought somehow he must learn to be among men, not having a father to help him, you see. They didn’t want him there. At first they cut him out but then one night they deliberately got him drunk and then threw him out—because he couldn’t stand his round, they said, though he’d told him he couldn’t. Now he hasn’t got any self-confidence at all.”

Yanni had almost fainted with relief as she’d begun to speak. In another few seconds he would have told Papa Archangelos about Scops. But now it was all right. The pressure was gone. Papa Archangelos stood looking down at him, nodding. The reflected lamp light put an orange glint into the dark eyes.

“Yes,” he purred. “It can be hard for a young man without a father, and no friends of his own age. But your sister is right, Yanni. You must learn to deal with men. Go to the tavern again. Kosta, I expect, was it, and Thanassi and their cronies? These are not bad men, Yanni, just thoughtless. I will speak to them. It will be all right. And I will see you in church, no doubt. Till then, my friends.”

“You’ve got to go now,” said Euphanie, “or he’ll think there was something else after all. I’m sorry. It was the best I could think of, before you blurted out about Scops. That’s what he wanted.”

“Kosta isn’t a good man,” said Yanni. “Nor’s Thanassi. I’ve heard them talking about what they did to Nana. I don’t think some of the others liked it either, but they didn’t want to say so. All right, I’ll go.”

“Sorry about last time, kid,” said Kosta, squeezing him by the elbow in greeting. “It was just a bit of fun, right? And everyone’s got to get blind drunk once in his life, find out what it’s like. After that, the trick is to know what you can hold and stop there.”

“I still can’t stand my round,” said Yanni.

“Never mind that for now,” said Thanassi. “When we’re old dodderers and you’re earning good money, then it’ll be your turn.”

And the others were as friendly. They made a place for him at their table where he could watch the backgammon, two games being played simultaneously with the rest of the men watching and placing small bets. Kyril, in his ear, explained the intricate skills of the simple-seeming game. He’d brought enough money for a couple of mugs of wine and placed some of it as a bet on Dmitri and doubled his stake when he won. Everyone laughed.

“That rate you’ll be standing your round after all,” said someone.

“I’ll start now,” said Yanni and poured his winnings back into their communal jug. They laughed, with him, not at him, though he had a slight feeling that Stavros had deliberately allowed Dmitri to win. And when he rose to go they made no effort to stop him, but waved cheery hands and told him to come back soon.

“You’re all right, kid,” said Kosta—the same Kosta who had chortled about how he had smashed Nana Procephalos’s nose in with a well-aimed rock. How could they be one person? How could even the magical voice of Papa Archangelos have persuaded the old Kosta to change into the new one? He was still thinking about this as he passed the last house along the harbour and turned up the steep track between the olive groves.

With the faintest of whispers Scops settled onto his shoulder and nibbled gently at his ear. He almost laughed aloud in astonishment. She was still a young bird, and he’d never seen her so far from the house before. He must have been twenty paces further on before he realised that the night had grown suddenly less dark. It wasn’t that the moon had come out—it was already bright in a clear sky, half full and setting toward the west—but the darkness itself had somehow paled, so that he could see details of the track some distance ahead, and what had been shadowy blank shapes, merely darker than the darkness of night, became solid and fully visible. It was very strange. He hadn’t had anything like this happen to him before . . .

Yes he had! That horrible night in the spring, when the men had made him drunk and he’d thrown up on the Bloodstone—that had been pitch dark until he’d started down through the olives with the baby owl cupped between his hands and her head poking out—then it had become almost as light as this, though there had been no moon. Only everything had still seemed much fuzzier than now . . . Yes, of course, because Scops had only had baby eyes and could tell light from dark but couldn’t yet see things properly . . . And when it had started to rain and he’d tucked her under his smock, then it had gone dark again, because he’d been seeing things through her eyes and she couldn’t see anything in there. He must be doing the same now.

He experimented, and found that he had to be looking in the same direction as Scops for the effect to work. If he turned his head suddenly to his right all he saw was dark until Scops turned her head that way too. The area to his left that was hidden from Scops by his head remained in a triangle of darkness that moved beside him up the track as he climbed.

He didn’t have much time to wonder at the strangeness of this. He was just starting on the steepest part of the track when Scops nibbled , or rather pecked, at his ear. Not an owl kiss but a definite peck. The track ahead went dark. Startled, he turned his head and could just make out that Scops had swivelled hers right round and was watching back the way they had come. He slowed his pace and looked back over his shoulder until he could see by owl light what she was seeing.

A man, about fifty paces behind, coming up the track.

Well, why not? Several other families used the lower reaches of this track, and it was not that late. He passed one turning, and then another. The man took neither of them. Well, there was a way to find out. In the shadow of a tree he stopped for a piss he didn’t need and looked back, turning his head only far enough to be able to see out of the corner of his eyes, in case the pallor of his face betrayed that that was what he was doing. The man came on another dozen paces, stepping sideways out of one patch of moon shadow into another on the far side of the track. His footfall was noiseless, despite the stony ground. Yanni didn’t need the brief interval of moonlight to tell who the burly, pot-bellied figure was.

Stavros. And he had been wearing rope-soled shoes in the tavern. Most of the men wore boots. He was a fisherman, and lived in a shack close to the harbour. There wasn’t even a woman up this way he might be visiting. Without owl sight, could he have seen Scops at that distance, perched on Yanni’s shoulder? Yanni didn’t think so, not even in moonlight. Deliberately he rattled a few pebbles as he moved on. Stavros continued to follow.

For some reason Yanni wasn’t really scared. Tense and wary, but with a belief in himself that he wouldn’t have had a few months ago. It might only have been the wine, he realised, but in his heart he believed it was something to do with Scops, with the fact that through her he could see in the dark, and perhaps there were other powers he didn’t know about yet. And in a way it was a relief to have his doubts about the men in the tavern confirmed, to know that their sudden amazing friendliness wasn’t a change of heart, and to guess now that what Papa Archangelos had said to them had had little to do with being nice to fatherless young men. Both were part of some plan. With the help of Scops he would find out what it was, and perhaps outwit them all.

Before they were home Scops slipped away into the night, and he walked the last stretch in the human dark. When he closed the gate he fixed the chain so that it would rattle at a touch, and as soon as he was in through the door put his finger to his lips. Euphanie stared at him. They waited tense. The chain rattled briefly, and stilled as if someone had clamped a hand over it.

“No, it was all right,” he said, in slightly too loud a voice. “They were much nicer than last time, and I sat with them and watched them play backgammon. In fact I won a mug of wine on a bet, but I put it back in the jug as part of standing my round. I had a good time. What’s for supper? I’m hungry.”

“Well, you’re going to need to set the table before you can eat,” she said, with the same exaggerated audibility. “Anyway, it’ll be twenty minutes till it’s ready.”

“Then I may as well take the trash out.”

He left with the bucket by the back door and carried it along the top terrace. As he slung its contents down the slope a horrible thought came to him. Perhaps he’d understood the whole episode wrong. Perhaps it wasn’t him that Stavros was interested in, but Euphanie—a lone young woman living with her weakling brother far from any other dwelling—a brother who now thought he could trust these friends . . .

He turned to hurry back to the house, but Scops whispered down onto his shoulder. Now, by owl light, he could see Stavros standing in the shadow of the lemon tree, with his ear pressed to the kitchen shutter.

Scops slipped away almost at once. Yanni walked back with the heavy iron bucket hanging loose in his hand ready to be swung as a weapon against an attacker, and passed within six feet of the intruder, who made no move. Once in he bolted both doors, something they never normally troubled with, and he and Euphanie then discussed tomorrow’s tasks in the intervals of eating, until they heard the scratch of Scops’s beak on the shutter by which Stavros had been standing, and the soft prrp, prrp of her call, and knew that the watcher had left. He let the owl in and she sat on his shoulder while in a low voice he told Euphanie everything that had happened.

“This is the priest’s doing,” she said. “Who can we turn to? Mother of God, who can we trust?”

“Nobody. Only ourselves. And Scops.”

“What can we do?”

“Watch, listen. Bolt the doors at night, and when I go to the tavern.”

“You’re going again?”

“It’s the only way we can find anything out. They’ll start asking me to do something soon, to join them in something, I don’t know what. We’ll know a bit more then.”

She nodded, frowning. It was strange that he should be the one taking the lead, and that he should accept it, but that was how it seemed to be at the moment, for both of them.

The moon grew to its full, and waned. Yanni went each Tuesday to the tavern. The men were as friendly as before, and one of them played a board of backgammon with him, giving him odds of two free tiles, and then only one, as he learnt the game. To his surprise he found himself understanding its mathematical subtleties far better than he would have a few months back, when that kind of thing merely had the effect of making his mind go blank. Indeed on the third evening he beat Dmitri fair and square, without needing to use his free tile.

“Pretty good, kid,” said Kosta. “That makes you one of us, now.”

The others laughed, but with a note in their laughter that suggested there was more than one meaning to the joke. Otherwise he learnt no more.

On the first of those evenings nobody followed him. Scops met him just outside the town as before, and sat on his shoulder the whole way home. On the second Tuesday there was no sign of Scops until she drifted out of the dark when he was already well started on the climb, and then nestled close against his head. Just before the track bent sharply back on itself to tackle a steeper stretch she bit his lobe in warning and at once slipped away. Yanni climbed on, suddenly tense. A tall cypress stood in the crook of the corner, with an olive close against its further side. Between the two trees was a pitch-black cavern.

Yanni stopped, knelt, and probed with a finger into the back of his boot, as if easing out a pebble that had slipped in there. The change of angle brought into view a patch of starlit hillside beyond the trees. Silhouetted against it was the shape of a man. He couldn’t tell who it was, but Thanassi had left the tavern early.

He rose and climbed on. The man didn’t try to follow him, and Scops rejoined him further up the slope.

“See you Tuesday,” he said as he left after the third evening.

“Make it Thursday,” said Kosta. “Tuesday’s a new-moon night. Tavern’s closed.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” he said.

Nobody left home on new-moon night, if it could be helped, certainly not just to go to the tavern. So they might as well close.

He wasn’t followed home. And still he had learnt nothing new, worth knowing.

He started to sleep badly, falling off almost before he lay down but then waking only two or three hours later and lying through the small hours, tense with the inner certainty that events were moving towards some climax while he had no way of knowing what it would be or when it would happen. New-moon night came, and he woke as usual. No, even earlier than usual. Something had woken him. It came again, a scratching at his shutter and a gentle prrp, prrp. This had never happened before, not at his bedroom window or this hour. He rose and opened the shutter and Scops was there. She didn’t greet him as usual, but simply turned herself round and sat peering out at the night. Nor did she respond to his touch, but instead half spread her wings and leaned forward as if to launch herself out, then stopped the movement and turned her head to look at him.

“You want me to come out?” he whispered. “On a new-moon night? And it’s almost midnight.”

“Prrp,” she said.

Well, why not? He wasn’t going to sleep, and as for it being new-moon night, if Scops was there . . .

He rose, found his clothes by touch, dressed, picked up his boots, and went to the back door. There he hesitated whether to tell Euphanie what he was doing, but no sound came from her room and he decided against it. Perhaps he’d only be ten minutes or so . . .

Still on stockinged feet he climbed the path. Scops was waiting for him on the gatepost. Carefully he undid the chain, and knelt to put on his boots. Scops slipped onto his shoulder as he rose.

“Where to now?” he asked.

She told him simply by gazing down the track, which had the effect of casting a beam of owl light along it, so he headed as if for the harbour. But halfway there she turned her gaze aside and directed him into a goat track that led him up an outlying spur of the central mountain of the island. Twice she left him to stand in the dark while she prospected for paths through the scrub along which he would be able to walk. They crossed the ridge and headed down beside a remnant of the old forest that had once covered the island, but had been felled to build the galleys of the Romans. They followed a stream downhill, turned aside yet again for short climb, crossed a lesser ridge and halted.

Ahead, black as the pupil of an eye, lay the sea. Nearer, with a few lights showing round the harbour, the crinkled shoreline of the island. Nearer still, immediately down the plunging slope, the House of the Wise One, invisible in its own natural bowl from anywhere but the hillside where he stood.

The glow of a small fire lit the space between the pillars, and grotesque shapes, small with distance, were moving around it. But for the owl light he couldn’t have known they were there except when they passed directly between him and the fire. He stared. A sudden chill had wrapped him round, though the night was warm for October. Demons, woken by the New Moon to dance in the House of the Wise One? They were animal-headed, as demons might be, though the heads seemed large for the bodies, and they stood on their hind legs and the bodies were human or part-human. Not animals, then. Humans . . .? A shape, a known shape, strutted past the flames. Stavros, with the head of a horse covering the upper part of his face and a horse-tail swinging behind. And the one with the limp must be Thanassi, and the skinny one old Dmitri. Yanni numbered the others off. They were all there, and at least four more, two of whom looked as if they might be women.

A white goat was tethered to a pillar at the end of the temple opposite the Bloodstone. It paid no attention to the dancers, but stood with its head bowed, as if it had fallen asleep.

At first the dancers simply circled the fire with slow, prancing steps, but soon they began to dance more vigorously, leaping and stamping their feet, and throwing their masked heads violently back and forth. He could hear faint whoops and cries.

The dance went on for a long while. The pace quickened and quickened. They should have been utterly exhausted by now, but they didn’t seem to tire. And then, suddenly, they halted and turned towards the far end of the temple, where the goat was tethered. A gap opened on that side of the circle.

Out of the darkness beyond the pillars paced a new figure, naked apart from a short leather skirt. The mask was that of a bull and, unlike those of the dancers, covered the whole head. The body was a man’s body, but half again as tall as any of the dancers. Flesh and hide were the colour of polished brass, and glinted like brass in the light of the fire. In his right hand the newcomer carried a flat dish with a few small objects on it. The dancers greeted him with a wild yodelling call, so loud that it carried clearly up to where Yanni and Scops watched. They crowded round him with upraised arms, and then fell back. There was a long pause. Nobody moved. When at last the Bull-man stepped forward, the others restarted their dance, slowly circling him and moving with him as he paced up to the fire.

Here he halted again, took something from the dish, and with a sower’s gesture sprinkled it onto the fire, which instantly flared up into a white blaze, that died almost as quickly away. When it was gone the whole space between the pillars was filled with a dull red glow that didn’t fade like the flames, but persisted, unchanged. Compared with the owl light of the dark beyond, Yanni could now see everything within the temple as clearly as he might have done in an early dusk. He watched the Bull-man pace round the fire and on up the temple towards the Bloodstone, the dancers moving with him, circling faster and faster, dancing themselves into a renewed frenzy, their repeated calls echoing up the hillside. The Bull-man reached and rounded the Bloodstone. He laid the dish down on it, turned to face the fire and stood still.

Two of the dancers, the ones Yanni thought were Dmitri and Thanassi, broke from the wheeling circle, pranced back down the temple, unleashed the goat, tipped it, unresisting, onto its side, lifted it by its legs, ran back up the temple and swung it up onto the Bloodstone, where they stretched it out and held it down. It made no effort at all to struggle or free itself.

The Bull-man picked up a flask from the dish and with a steady, ritual movement poured something into a bowl. He put the flask back on the dish and picked up what looked like a knife or dagger, paused again, and raised his head and arms towards the stars. The blade of his dagger glinted orange in the red light.

He opened his great bull mouth. The dancers reeled back. A moment later Yanni heard the thunder of his bellow, shaking the hillside. He seemed to have grown even larger, now twice the size of any of the dancers. Yanni stared at him openmouthed. He had seen the huge muscles of the neck flex. He had seen the mouth open. And that roar could not have come from any human lungs. The creature’s head was no mask. It was his own.

The dagger flashed down. The dancers screamed again. The Bull-man laid the dagger aside, lifted the goat’s head by one horn and held it clear of the slab, and with his other hand took the cup and held it so that the blood streamed into the bowl. The bowl steamed. He dropped the goat’s head, gripped the bowl by its stem and raised it towards the sky. The screams grew louder, shriller. He lowered the bowl to his mouth and drank. Still screaming the dancers rushed forward. He flung what was left in the bowl over them, and they fought to lick it from each other’s bodies until he tossed the dead goat among them, and then climbed onto the Bloodstone and towered over them while they scrabbled to and fro, a mass of bloody limbs and bodies, fighting like a pack of starving dogs to tear the carcass to pieces with their bare hands and then gnawing at the tatters they had managed to wrench from it, skin, offal and all.

All the time the monstrous figure on the Bloodstone seemed to grow huger.

Yanni watched for a moment, disgust and terror swirling inside him, and turned away.

“Let’s go home,” he muttered.

He barely noticed how he got to the gate. His legs carried him. Scops showed him the way. He let himself in, woke Euphanie, and sitting in the dark at the end of her bed with Scops still on his shoulder, told her what he had seen. After a little while she climbed out of the sheets, wrapped a blanket round herself and sat beside him, cradling him and he her against the terrors of the dark while he finished his story. She carried her clothes into the kitchen, lit both lamps, and dressed while he sat staring at the tabletop. Every now and then he would remember some detail and mutter it to her. But again and again he returned to the behaviour of the goat, its torpor, the way it didn’t struggle or try to escape.

“Goats aren’t like that!” he said

“They’d drugged it?” Euphanie suggested.

“I suppose so.”

Neither wanted—neither dared—to go back to their rooms and lie in the dark, alone, so to get themselves through the small hours Yanni scrubbed the floor and cleaned the stove and Euphanie went through all her cupboards, sorting out her stores, reminding herself of what she had and what she still needed to lay in for the winter. Together they cleared the shelves and cleaned all they had, down to the smallest egg-cup. By dawn the kitchen was spotless.

This was just as well, because soon after sunrise they heard the rattle of the gate. Scops flew up onto a beam and tucked herself out of sight, and with a sick feeling and a thundering heart Yanni opened to door to see who had come.

Three men and a woman, none of them islanders, stood on the track. Two of the men were some sort of servants, carrying bundles of rolled parchment. The third, by his dress, was an official. He took a roll from one of the others, opened it and came down the path, running a finger down a list and stopping at a line.

“The Philippes holding?” he asked. “The previous census, twenty-two years ago, listed one man, one woman, and one infant daughter.”

“Oh . . .well . . . my father and mother are dead,” said Yanni, stammering with relief. “The baby must have been my sister. I was born after the census. I’m Yanni Philippes.”

“Excellent. I will record the household details later. But now, while the day is still cool, I will go round your holding and recheck the boundaries, and you can tell me of any changes in the nature of the holding since the previous census.”

“My sister had better do that,” said Yanni. “She knows much more about it than I do.”

The official frowned—Yanni was a man, and therefore legally the master of the household—but nodded and turned to the two servants to sort out the rolls he would need. The woman came drifting past them, unnoticed.

“May I come in?” she said in a soft voice. “I like to travel, so I come with my brother on these tours, but now I am tired from the climb and would like to rest.”

Yanni stood aside to let her pass. Euphanie had been listening just inside. The woman acknowledged her curtsey with a smiling nod. She was short and plump, grey-haired, and wore a soft grey travelling cloak clasped at the neck with an ivory brooch carved with the head of a woman who had a tangle of writhing serpents instead of hair.

“You must go with my brother,” she told Euphanie. “Check the clerks’ work, every line. Sometimes they have been known to cheat, and acquire land for themselves.”

Euphanie curtseyed again and left. As soon as the door closed behind her, Scops glided down and settled on the visitor’s wrist. The visitor seemed to change, but not in any way Yanni could have put words to. Her eyes were very strange, both grey and green, not a mixture of those two colours nor one flecked with the other, but a clear soft grey and a soft olive green, both at the same time. The kitchen throbbed with her presence.

Realising whose presence that was, Yanni fell to his knees.

“Help us, please help us!” he gasped.

“That is why I have come,” said the woman. “May I sit here? And you in your own chair. But first, if you will, bring me some water, and a corner of your sister’s last baking, and a little of your oil. Don’t be afraid of me, Yanni. I have very little power. What you are looking at is no more than the ghost of a god, lingering on in a place where she was once loved and feared. My thanks.”

She passed her free hand over the loaf he had brought and broke off a corner, and laid two fingers briefly on the oil flask before pouring a little oil into the dish he had put in front of her. She dipped her bread into the oil, let it soak a few seconds, and ate, chewing like any ordinary woman. It was bad manners on the island not to share the food you offered to your guest, so hesitantly Yanni took a little for himself. The terrible night had left his mouth sour and dry. He wouldn’t have thought he could taste anything, but instantly his palate cleared, and he realised that he would never again eat bread so light, so flavourful, so crisp-crusted, so soft inside, nor oil so subtly sweet.

The goddess smiled.

“I still have a few small powers,” she said. “Now, about why I have come. I saw what you saw last night through the eyes of Scops, and I will tell you what it meant. There have always been forces, powers, energies—but there are no words for them because they do not participate in the dimensions of time and space, so that even the word ‘always’ is wrong for their mode of existence. But they pervade all universes, all the multiplicity of possible dimensions, and in all of those there is a pressure from these forces to be embodied into the realities of each place. Here in this world, the pressure works through the human imagination. It was people who long ago embodied me into the dimensions of here and now.

“Think of lamplight beaming out into the night from a lit window. Now think, if you can, of the light travelling the other way, beaming in from those shadowy spaces and gathering itself into the central lamp, creating a single intense brightness. That is how people create the gods. They take their faint perceptions of these ungraspable forces and beam them in to a single focus in the here and now, and the god becomes real, and full of the previously unrealised powers of the many, many people who have made it. I am the ghost of such a god, all that is left after people have withdrawn their imaginations from me, apart from a funny little superstition here and there. I can exist as a ghost on this island, partly because no islander would willingly harm a scops owl, though most of them do not know why this is so.

“But the forces from which I and my kind originate are mixed, negative and positive; and the people are mixed too, and embody these differences into darkness and light, joy and grief, hope and despair, love and cruelty. So that is how I and my kind were, mixtures. As I told you, even on this island I was both loved and feared. Now, somehow there has grown up among humans, especially around this inland sea, a longing for oneness, a single source of creation, a single explanation for all the different lesser explanations, a single god. And human reason told them that whereas gods of my kind can be balanced against each other, so that the whimsical caprice of one can be mitigated by the benevolence of another, a single god cannot. A god of my kind is a god as he or she might be. But a single god must be as a god ought to be, a god of light, and love, and justice. So your new god is embodied by the imaginations of reason to be these things.

“But where are the darker powers to go? People know in their hearts that they are still there, so they embody them by their own dark imaginings. This is what you saw beginning to happen last night, here on my island. I have no power to stop it. I am a puff of smoke in the wind compared to the solidity of this dark god. But you could, and only you, and I can tell you how and give you a few small glamours to help you. It will be very dangerous, and you may not succeed, but you are already in terrible danger. It is your choice, Yanni.”

There was only one possible answer.

“I . . . I . . . I’ll try.”

Twenty-seven days later, though he had gone to bed twanging with nerves, Yanni slept late—a little gift from the goddess, he guessed—and didn’t wake until the sun was well up. Euphanie was waiting for him in the kitchen, serious and pale.

“She came to me in my dream,” she said. “She told me what you are going to do tonight. Oh, Yanni!”

(Nobody on the island except themselves seemed to have met, or even seen, the census-taker’s sister, though the men in the tavern and the women in the market had talked animatedly about the census-taking, and their possible losses or gains from the re-evaluations that were going to result. Euphanie, indeed, had been one of the lucky ones. Following her visitor’s advice she had checked every detail in the rolls, and had discovered an error that meant she had been paying excess taxes since the previous census. Rather than face the hassle and litigation of suing for full repayment she had accepted a reasonable sum in settlement on the spot, which was how Yanni had been able to stand his round on his visits to the tavern this last month.

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.

And the god withdrew from the shape he had inhabited and slipped away.

The red light dimmed and died. By its last glimmer Yanni saw the owl rise on silent wings and vanish into the darkness of night.

Suddenly he was aware of his nakedness, and of the women with the lanterns beginning to move down the slope behind him. He scuttled up to the temple, found his clothes, hurried into the darkness beyond the firelight and started to put them on.

The night was full of voices, triumphant, questioning, angry. Somebody was calling his name.

“Yanni! Yanni! Where are you?”

“Euphanie! Here! Euphanie!”

Half-dressed he stumbled towards the light of the fire. She came rushing towards him out of the dark and flung her arms round him.

“You’re all right! Oh, you’re all right! You did it!”

“I . . . I think so . . . But you . . . How . . .?”

“I couldn’t go to bed. She came to me in a waking dream. She said I must come. The same with the other women. She told us what to do. They’re catching the men now. I don’t know what they’ll do to them . . . Oh, Yanni! That . . . that thing!”

Still appalled by the vision, she was gazing beyond Yanni into the House of the Wise One to where the dark god had stood. He turned. Nobody had yet dared to pass between the pillars, and the temple was empty. The fire was dying, but by its faint light he could see something lying between beside the Bloodstone where the god had fallen. Surely . . . No, it was too small, a human shape. Pulling on the rest of his clothes he took her lantern and went to look.

The face was a tangled mess of beard and blood. Both eye sockets were bloody pits. The pale, naked torso was streaked with dark runnels where the molten flesh of the god’s visage had dribbled down it. On the middle finger of the left hand there was a wide silver ring.

Yes, of course, he thought. In his heart he had known it all along. He went back to Euphanie.

“Papa Archangelos,” he told her. “I suppose he chose me because he thought I’d be an easy victim. Like Nana. Let’s go home.”

“Where’s Scops?”

“I don’t know.”

Lamplight gleamed through the kitchen shutters. The census-taker’s sister was waiting for them, with Scops on her wrist. There was a meal on the table, cheese, olives, oil and bread, water and wine, and places set for three.

“All is well,” she told them. “We could not have done it without you, nor you without us, nor either without Scops. The dark god will return, but not to this island yet, and meanwhile my blessing is upon it, and upon you two, and yours, for as long as you live.

“We old gods have used our last power, and now we are going, and will not return. The glamour I gave you, Yanni, will go with me. You are better off without it. These things belong to the gods, and destroy mortals who use them too long. Papa Archangelos had been a man, remember, and might have been a great one. Tell no one what has happened apart from your own children.”

“I wouldn’t anyway. Papa Archangelos may be dead, but that won’t stop the church stoning people for witchcraft. And the women who came, they’ll all be too scared to do any more than whisper among themselves.”

“Good. But remember to tell your children, yours and your sister’s. And their children after.”

“All right. What about Scops?” he asked.

“Oh, she will stay, and mate and rear young, and die like any other owl. But my blessing is on her too. Go to Yanni, little one. No wait.”

She broke bread from the loaf, dipped it in water, and used it as a sponge to wipe a few traces of dark blood from Scops’s face-feathers, then raised her arm to kiss the bird farewell. Scops nibbled the tip of her nose affectionately and flipped herself across to Yanni’s shoulder.

Yanni turned his head to greet her. When he looked back the goddess was gone.

EPILOGUE

One late summer afternoon two old people, brother and sister, sat in front of the house where both of them had been born almost a hundred years before. Below them, terrace after terrace, stretched their vines and olive trees, and beyond that a placid sea, with two islands on the horizon, cloudy masses against the bright streaks of sunset. Around them sat, or strolled, or scampered, the enormous gathering of their joint family, sons and daughters and grandchildren, all with their husbands or wives, great-grandchildren, two by now also married, and one great-great-grandchild, the first of all the brood to descend from both brother and sister, for her parents were second cousins. That was why everyone had come to celebrate her naming day. Though several of the husbands and wives had died, none of the direct descendants was missing, for they were a long-lived family and those who had married had done so for love and stayed loving. Many had come from the island, more from other islands nearby, or the mainland, some from far-off cities. There were farmers and fishermen there of course, but also merchants and craftspeople—one of the grand-daughters was a famous weaver, whose work hung in palaces and cathedrals—a scholar or two, a judge and two other lawyers, priests, monks and a nun with special dispensations to leave their monasteries—all there for this day.

Now an owl floated out of nowhere, settled on the old man’s shoulder and sat blinking at the red sun. The light darkened. Voices became hushed and fell silent, as if a long-hidden knowledge had woken suddenly in the blood they all shared.

“Prrp, prrp,” said the owl, and the evening air filled with owls. Owls are territorial birds, and it is rare to see more than two together once they have left the nest for good, but for this evening they appeared to have forgotten their boundaries and eddied in silent swirls above the human gathering.

Now some came lower, and the children raised their arms as the owls swooped and turned among them, and ran in interweaving circles, as if birds and people were taking part in some game or dance whose rules none of them knew but all of them understood. The watching adults clapped out a rhythm and the owls called to and fro.

In the middle of the calling and clapping the owl on the old man’s shoulder, the fourteenth Scops of that name and line, called again, “Prrp, prrp,” so softly that one would have thought only the two old people could have heard, but one owl broke from the dance and flew towards them. The old man stretched out a shaky arm and the owl settled onto it, a bit clumsily, as she was one of this year’s hatch and had not been flying more than a week or two. The woman reached out and the young owl leaned luxuriatingly against her touch as her fingers gentled among her neck feathers.

“Well,” said the old woman. “They’re all here. Which of them are you going to choose?”

The owl flipped itself up onto the old man’s shoulder, scrabbled for a hold and then perched beside the older one, studying the crowd below. It slid away and was lost among the swirling owls. But in less than a minute the dance stilled. The children stood where they were and the birds swung away to perch among the olives, all but one, which hovered for a moment in a blur of soft wings and settled on the shoulder of a nine-year-old girl.

Instantly the bond formed, as the girl put up a hand to stroke the owl and the owl nibbled gently at the girl’s ear. The girl was island-born, Euphanie’s great-granddaughter, her father a fisherman, hitherto a shy and stammering child. But now, with apparently complete assurance, despite all those watching eyes, she turned and climbed the steps to where the old couple sat.

“Well done,” said Yanni. “Both of you. There isn’t much we can do for you, except pass on the blessing that was given to us. You have a lot to find out, but trust each other and do what seems right, and all will be well for the island.”

The girl was about to answer when she stiffened.

“Someone’s watching us,” she whispered.

The old couple glanced at each other. Yanni nodded.

“Yes,” said Euphanie quietly.

“Is she here?” whispered the child.

“Not quite,” said Euphanie. “Most of us here know the story. Many still believe it. Perhaps we are enough, gathered together like this, to bring an echo of her faintly back.”

“Us and the owls,” said Yanni. “We believe. They know.”

The girl nodded and asked the question that had been on her lips, speaking without any hint of a stammer.

“Shall I be able to see in the dark?”

“Perhaps, provided you believe,” said Euphanie.