Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

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.