Earth and Air (7 page)

He spent the evening writing his Sunday letter to his mother. She lived in Athens, with her new family. He didn't blame her, or even miss her most of the time. She had a little shop selling smart, expensive clothes to rich women. That was what she'd been doing when she'd met his father, who'd worked for the government in the Foreign Ministry. Athens was where she belonged.

Steff didn't remember his father. When he was still a baby some terrorists had tried to set off a bomb under the Foreign Minister's car, but they'd got the wrong car, the one Steff's father had been in, so he didn't remember him at all. He'd no idea what he had thought about things. But he'd been a Deniakis, so Steff was pretty sure he'd felt much the same as he himself did, that he belonged on the farm.

Though he'd spent most of his first five years in Athens, his earliest memory was of sitting on a doorstep holding a squirming puppy he'd been given to cuddle and watching chickens scrattling in the sunlit dust. And then of a shattering, uncharacteristic tantrum he'd thrown on being taken out to the car to go back to Athens. He'd had a stepfather by then, Philip, and a stepsister soon after. Everyone had done their best to make him feel part of this new family, but he hadn't been interested. Time in Athens was just time to be got through somehow. Two or three months there were nothing like as real for him as a few days on the farm, being let help with the animals, harvesting fallen olives, tagging round after his cousins.

By the time he was six his mother was driving him up there at the start of the school holidays, and fetching him when they were over. It had been his idea that he should live there most of the time, going to the little school in the town. She'd come up to see him for a few days at a time, fetch him to Athens for Christmas, take him on the family summer holiday. He got along all right with his steps, and was fond of his mother. She took trouble and was fun to be with. He guessed that she felt much the same as he did, a bit guilty about not minding more.

So he was surprised now to find how much he wanted to tell her about Ridiki. He'd always put something about her in his weekly letters, and she always asked, but this time everything seemed to come pouring out—what had happened, how he'd searched for her, found her, buried her, his misery and despair and utter loneliness. And the dream—Ridiki glancing over her shoulder and vanishing, and him not even being able to say good-bye. He had said good-bye to her once, in the real world, at her graveside. But if he was ever going to let go of her completely he had to do it again in the dream world where she had gone. He mustn't keep anything. He would take her collar, and the shepherd's pipes he'd used to train her, and find somewhere inside the cave to hide them, where they'd never be found, and call his good-byes into the darkness, and go. Then it would be over.

All this he wrote down, hardly pausing to think or rest. He fetched his supper up to his room and wrote steadily on. It was as if his mother was the one person in all the world he needed to tell. Nobody else would do. When he'd finished he hid the letter, unsealed, in his clothes-chest, got everything ready that he'd need for the morning, and went to bed, willing himself to wake when the cocks crew.

Of course he woke several times before that, certain he must have missed their calls, but he didn't when at last they came. He stole down the stairs, put on the clothes that he'd hidden beneath them with his satchel, and left. Hero, the old watchdog, rose growling at his approach, but recognised Steff's voice when he called her name, and lay back down. It was still more dark than light when he set out towards the monastery, making the best speed he could through the dewy dawn air.

He reached the ridge around noon. The last several miles he had sweated up goat paths under a blazing sun. But so far so good. He had started to explore these hillsides as soon as he'd been old enough to follow his cousins around, so he'd found his way without trouble among the fields and vineyards and olive groves on the lower slopes, the rough pastures above them where he, with Nikos's help, had taught Ridiki the business of shepherding, and then, above those, up between the dense patches of scrub that was the only stuff that would grow there.

He stopped to eat and rest in the last of their shade, looking west over the heat-hazed distances of the coastal hills. The main mass of Sunion rose on his right. It wasn't enormous, but it was a true mountain, steep, and for half the year capped with snow that fed the fields and pastures of the valleys below. Even on this southern side the last white streaks had melted from its gullies only a few weeks back. The ridge on which he was sitting climbed towards that peak. Its crest, only fifty paces above him, had been a frontier between the homeland and enemy territory in the long, imaginary history his cousins had constructed for their wars and adventures; and in the real, everyday world that was almost true. The legal ownership of these uncultiva
t
able uplands might be vague, but despite that the ridge was an ancient boundary, well understood by all, between Deniakis and their neighbours and dependants and those of Mentathos. Even in their wildest feats of daring, Paulo, Steff's elder cousin, had never let any of them set foot beyond it. Now he had no choice.

An unpleasant thought came to him. He should have considered it before he ever set out. If Mentathos didn't want anyone going into the mine to look for silver, he had probably barricaded the entrance. Well, it was too late now. Having come this far he might as well see the thing through. With a gloomy sigh he rose to his feet and started up the ridge.

He was now on a spur of the main mountain. On its eastern side it fell away even more steeply than on the side he had climbed, flanking a deep and narrow valley with the next spur beyond. At the bottom a river tumbled over a series of rapids with the remains of an old rail track running beside it.

For a while he scrambled up the ridge, mainly on the Deniakis side of the actual crest, and only when the going became too difficult, moving a few paces over onto Mentathos land. Out there he felt exposed and vulnerable, almost on the skyline in this forbidden territory. The bleak, bare valley below seemed full of hidden watchers. He reached his goal with astonishing suddenness.

There was no mistaking it. This was Tartaros. There had to be a story about such a place. It was exactly as Aunt Nix had described it.

He had found his way blocked both sides of the ridge by an immense gash slicing into the spur, clean through the crest and into the southern slope, as if the mountain had been split apart by a single, unimaginably powerful stroke. Craning over the edge he saw that the two opposing cliffs reached almost down to the level of the valley floor. There were places where it seemed obvious that one cliff must once have fitted snugly against the other. And there, at the bottom of the opposite cliff and some way to his right, lay the entrance of Tartaros. It was simply a dark hole in the vertical rock. The rail track he had seen in the valley turned up into the cleft and turned again into the opening. He could see no sign of a barrier. That settled it. He would go on.

Easier said than done. Some of the rocks that composed the plunging slope were as large as a house, and he had to find ways either down or round them. And then, when he had almost reached the bottom, a secondary cliff forced him some way back along the valley before he could at last scramble down to the river.

He started warily up the rail track. The sleepers were mostly rotten and the rails were thick with rust, but in one place a swarm of flies buzzed around a pile of recent mule droppings—yesterday's, or the day's before, he thought. Alarming, but only half his mind was on the obvious dangers of what he was doing. The other half was trying to decide if what he was now seeing was at all like any of the shifting landscapes of his dream. Had one of them had a rail track running beside a river? Surely he would have remembered that, but no.

He came to the cleft and turned into it, left. It had been right in the dream, hadn't it? And of course no rail track. He'd been following Ridiki along a goat track. And those last dreadful moments, when he'd been toiling after her up the slope as she danced ahead . . . Here only a mild gradient led to the dark entrance of Tartaros.

He reached it and his heart sank. What he was looking at was no deeper than the cave on the way to Crow's Castle. Its back wall was formed by a solid-looking timber barrier. The rail track ran on through it beneath double doors with a heavy padlock hanging across the join.

Well, it would have to do. He would find somewhere to hide or bury the collar and pipes, and then call his second farewell through a crack in the door. Gloomily he entered the cave. It wasn't very promising. A natural cave might have had projections and fissures, but this had been shaped with stonecutters' tools to an even surface. A small cairn then, piled into one of the far corners . . .

Without any hope at all he checked the lock, and everything changed. It was locked sure enough, but only into one of the pair of shackles, one in each door, through which it was meant to run. Somebody must have deliberately left it like that, closing the door either from inside or outside in such a way that it looked from any distance as if it were properly fastened. For instance, they might have lost the key inside the mine. Or they might be inside now. Someone had been here not long ago. Those mule droppings . . .
And the lock looked fairly new. Nothing like as old as the rails.

It didn't make any difference. He was still going to do what he'd come for. With a thumping heart he eased the door open, first just a crack, and then far enough for him to slip through.

Darkness. Silence, apart from the drumming of his own blood. No. From somewhere ahead the rustle of moving water. He waited, listening, before closing the door and taking his hand torch out of his satchel. Shading the light with his left hand, he switched it on. Cautiously he allowed a crack of light to seep between his fingers.

The rails stretched away into the dimness along a tunnel whose walls were partly natural, partly shaped with tools. Only a few paces along, low in the right-hand wall, he made out what he was looking for, a vertical crack in the rock, as wide as his clenched fist at the bottom and tapering to a point at about knee height. Having checked, and found it was deep enough, he laid the collar and pipes ready, collected some fragments of rock to seal them in with, knelt beside the crack, and picked up the collar, and straightened.

No need to shout. If Ridiki could hear him, it would not be with earthly ears, and suppose whoever had left the door unlocked was somewhere ahead down there, he would be nearer the source of the water-noises, which should be enough to mask a quiet call from the distance.

“Good-bye, Eurydice. Good-bye, Ridiki. Be happy where you are.”

He was answered twice, first by the echo and then, drowning that out, by the bark of a dog, a sharp, triple yelp, a pause, and then the same again. And again. The alert call that every Deniakis dog was trained to give to attract its master's attention to something he might need to be aware of. It could have been Ridiki. (No, for course it couldn't. She was dead.) Out on the open hillside he would have known her voice from that of any other dog in Greece, but the echoing distances of the place muffled and changed it.

The call died away into uncertainty, as if the dog wasn't sure it was doing the right thing. Steff found he had sprung to his feet, tense with mixed terror and excitement. The pipes were still on the floor where he had left them. He stuffed the collar in his pocket and picked them up, but continued to stand there, strangely dazed. Whatever the risk, it was impossible to turn away. To do so would haunt him for the rest of his days. He had to be sure. Shielding the torch so that it lit only the patch of floor immediately in front of his feet, he stole on. The daze continued. He felt as if he carried some kind of shadow of himself inside himself, its hand inside the hands that held the pipes and torch, its heart beating to the beat of his heart, its feet walking with shadow feet inside his feet of flesh and bone but making a separate soft footfall.

And everything around him shared the same doubleness. In the world of flesh and bone this was simply an empty, worked-out silver mine that before that had been a deep cave. But, mine or cave, in the shadow world it was and always had been an entrance to the underworld. Along it, and all around him, invisible, imperceptible, flooded the souls of the freshly dead. And ahead of him there was a dog of flesh and bone who was also, somehow, the dog Cerberus, the dreadful three-headed guardian of that realm. And a nameless stream the shadow of whose waters was the River Styx. And, waiting for him on its further shore, Eurydice. Ridiki.

The daze faded abruptly. He was aware of some other change, but couldn't locate it. He stopped and stood listening. No, not a sound, a light, a faint orange glow from around a so-far unperceived bend in the tunnel. He moved on, step by cautious step. Even more slowly he edged round the bend. The water sounds became noticeably louder, telling him that they were made by something more than a trickle, more than a small stream. The source of light appeared, an ordinary oil lantern standing on a ledge carved into the opposite wall. Just beyond it, the dog.

A dog of the Deniakis breed, all right, though larger than most, almost twice the size of Ridiki, but very much her colouring. Its collar was fastened by a light chain to a shackle in the wall, and it was lying across the near side of the tunnel, with its head turned away from him, ears half pricked, motionless. He knew that pose only too well. It was waiting for the return of its master.