Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

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.